The Best Movies of 2024

Luca Guadagnino’s top-spinning marvel of a movie tells the tale of three pretty young tennis pros: their friendships, their rivalries, their love matches, their games. It’s about everything that can happen between three people, but it’s not about anything more than that. It has no higher theme. Yet it’s the most searching love triangle movie since “Jules and Jim,” as well as the most sweeping and sophisticated piece of cinematic storytelling I saw all year. Guadagnino, in a bedazzling piece of directing, keeps the audience both immersed and off balance, tracing the karmic tension of romance and power as it plays out among his extraordinary actors: Mike Faist as the cool, diffident, upright Art, Josh O’Connor (in the best performance by a male actor this year) as the ardent bad boy Patrick, and Zendaya, asserting the raw magnetism of her chops in a way she never quite has on the big screen before, as the fierce and fearless Tashi, who comes between them. Justin Kuritzkes’ script is a sporty maze that Guadagnino elevates into dizzying eye-candy poetry, surveying the rules of attraction from every side of the court, revealing the unconscious surge of love’s push and pull.

Mohammad Rasoulof’s epic drama is a monumental vision of the corruption of Iran by a regime that maintains its hold through any means necessary, from coercion to homicide. The film’s power is that it shows us this oppression from the inside out, telling the story of what happens to a bourgeois family when the father, Iman (Missagh Zareh), gets the promotion that he and his wife, the upwardly mobile Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), have been dreaming of. Iman is appointed to be an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, which means that he must now rubber-stamp death sentences for protesters. He’s initially aghast, yet he’s trapped in the machinery of fascism. And that’s what he becomes at home — a tool of the regime — even as his teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), are drawn into the oceanic wave of feminist protest triggered, in September 2022, by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” unfolds with a Chekhovian precision, and a matter-of-fact moral terror. When Iman’s state-sanctioned gun goes missing, the mystery of what happened to it transforms the film into a staggering domestic thriller, one that anatomizes the void Iran’s theocracy has left in the hearts and minds of its people.

It’s not the first movie Jesse Eisenberg has written and directed, but it’s the one that announces his arrival as a major filmmaker. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins — once close, now distant — who come together to go on a group Holocaust tour of Poland. You could call “A Real Pain” the brainiest buddy comedy ever made. You could also call it a piercingly philosophical, raw-nerve inquiry into how an event as cataclysmic as the Holocaust reverberates through the identities of families. Did I mention that it’s also a scaldingly witty study of the kind of 21st-century personality disorder that can be possessed by the most winning personality in the room? That would be Benji, played by Culkin in a performance that’s a high-wire balancing act of charisma and annoyance, sensitivity and narcissism, verbal dexterity and mental illness. Eisenberg creates the kind of rippling spontaneous dialogue that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, and “My Dinner with Andre.” It’s the blessed sound of people saying exactly what they think, and that’s the kind of filmmaking the world needs now.

Nine years ago, “Inside Out” was a trippy revelation, a movie that anthropomorphized the primal map of human emotion (Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness) and, miraculously, did it within the candy-colored confines of a digitally animated kiddie ride. But since we’ve now spent an entire movie in that Pixar version of the brain, what could the sequel do for an encore? “Inside Out 2” adds vibrant and funny new emotions (Envy, Ennui, the scene-stealing Anxiety), as Riley (Kensington Tallman), now a 13-year-old high-school freshman, leaves her friends in the dust to cozy up to the cool kids on the hockey team. What makes this an even wilder adventure than the first “Inside Out” is that the film takes a deep dive into the metaphysical question that confronts teenagers in the social-media age: namely, when who you are takes a back seat to the desire to please others, then…who are you? The movie investigates this conundrum as perceptively as “Eighth Grade” did, with a visual enchantment and sly hilarity that, it’s a thrill to see, still define Pixar at its greatest.

Jeff Zimbalist’s extraordinary documentary about rooftoppers, who scale the tallest skyscrapers in the world and then climb onto the splindly curved spires that shoot out the tops of those buildings, is a vertigo-inducing spellbinder. But it’s also a profound story of love and trust and dread and transcendence in an age when romantic entanglement has become a daredevil sport. The film provides the kind of high on getting high that “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall” did, though this one conjures even more of a “Whoa” factor, as it follows two rooftoppers from Moscow, Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, who are drawn together by their impulse to elevate risk into a kind of controlled madness. By the time they’re scaling the Merdeka 188 in Kualua Lumpur, Malaysia (if they’re caught they’ll go to prison), all to stage a feat in which Vanya will stand atop a girder and hold Angela up to the sky, the film has elevated “Don’t try this at home” to a new level of awesome.

I’m not sure I would quite say it’s a rock biopic as unconventional as its subject, but James Mangold’s drama about the early years of Bob Dylan moves in its own beautifully haphazard way, loping right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Most of the songs play out in their entirety, so that they literally become the story the movie is telling. And Timothée Chalamet is a revelation. He acts with an ornery sly quietude, rising to the challenge of capturing the prickly charisma of Dylan’s inchoate, anti-matter, read-between-the-lines personality. It’s a transfixing performance that’s true to Dylan and, just as important, true to the logic of movies. We stare at this young mystery man, who lights up a room when he sings, and we want to know what makes him tick. The film is delicately engineered so that all the points a conventional biopic would cover are there, yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical. Watching “A Complete Unknown,” Dylan’s journey into the light becomes ours.

The real sequel to “Joker.” After the artistic and commercial flameout of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” a number of forceful voices came to the defense of Todd Phillips’ top-heavy musical misfire. Quentin Tarantino and John Waters both said that they loved it. And the critics who bought into the whole “The movie fails on purpose!” meme seemed to find some deep-dish gratification in their utter delusion that Phillips was trying to piss off “the fans.” But why look so hard into the wreckage of “Folie à Deux” when a truly subversive and enthralling, truly scandalous and hilarious, true fucking Joker movie was right there in front of you for the tasting? Vera Drew, in her underground/midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation, plays the maniacal Joker of DC legend, who is also an outlaw parody of the Joker, who is also a discordantly sincere trans heroine who is using the Joker’s persona to present who she is to the world. The movie, made outside the system (without clearance rights), is an act of pure fan obsession set in a diabolically playful mutating media zone, one that toys with the notion that those who are driven to extremes of cosplay are truer to the spirit of comic books than anyone else.

Sex, as any shrink will tell you, is never just about sex. And Halina Reijn’s riveting drama about Romy (Nicole Kidman), a CEO who “has it all” (an e-commerce company she started; an adoring family; a husband she makes breathy love to — except that she then sneaks into the next room to masturbate to grubby porn), isn’t just the story of a corporate power woman who falls into a forbidden affair with a hunky office intern (Harris Dickinson). Had that story been told 20 years ago, it would have been a “cougar” fantasy. But Reijn’s shrewdly honest and enveloping drama about a sadomasochistic affair is really, beneath its kinks (which are plenty sexy and entertaining), a portrait of a society that’s overly in thrall to the god of control. That Romy is trashing every rule that governs relationships in the workplace is, for her, part of the turn-on. And the spark plug of Kidman’s indelible performance, which earns comparison to Diane Lane’s in “Unfaithful,” is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together.

The scariest horror movie of the year. It’s even scarier now than it was when the film came out last spring, since the subject of Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones’s chilling documentary — the network of ideological soldiers that the Christian Right has been putting in place for decades, all in anticipation of the moment when they could take power — now looks, for the first time, like a nightmare with the potential to come true. The Christian nationalists view Donald Trump as a holy wrecking ball, and the film relentlessly investigates their symbiotic alliance as well as the hidden roots, and hidden might, of this movement. In a renaissance era of nonfiction social-justice filmmaking, “Bad Faith” went further than any film I saw this year in uncovering the conspiratorial impulse toward injustice in America.

More than ever, film critics now make a point of favoring adventurous art over mainstream popcorn. Yet it’s funny how often the adventurousness falls within orthodox confines. When a movie comes along that’s genuinely adventurous, finding radical new ways to tweak and delight an audience, it often gets short shrift. And that’s just what happened with Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliantly executed theater-of-the-absurd Twilight Zone mind game. For two hours and 46 minutes, I watched it in a state of riveted amazement — and I promise that you will too. Each of the film’s three episodes, with the same cast members floating through them like figures out of a dream, is a puzzle the film hypnotically fills in, whether it’s Jesse Plemons as a dweeb whose boss (Willem Dafoe) makes quixotic demands that are a logical extension of corporate fascism; Plemons as a cop whose wife, played by Emma Stone, resurfaces as a subtly different person; or Stone as a distraught woman who has left her family to follow a kinky cult leader (Dafoe) in a tale that tracks our obsessive compulsion to belong. “Kinds of Kindness” wears its avant imagination lightly, yet it’s a puckishly unsettling vision of our brave new world of dominance and deception. Call it “Rich Things.”

In my 2015 review of “Inside Out,” I predicted that the Pixar film would “forever change the way people think about the way people think.” Sure enough, Pete Docter’s model of how emotions operate gave a generation of kids the most useful framework for managing their feelings since Freud. Seems all but impossible to improve on that, right? Turns out, by following the path taken by “Toy Story” — whose sequels grew up alongside Andy, rather than simply rehashing what fans liked about the first movie — “Inside Out 2” is able to offer a richer, more mature window into the human mind. Bursting with color (and comedy), this appealing expansion picks up with puberty, as Riley is beset by a fresh set of emotions, led by Anxiety, who’s depicted as a frazzled control freak. If the film had merely shown kids how to cope with feelings of panic and worry — by telling Anxiety to go sit in a chair — that would be quite the achievement. But screenwriters Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve have come up with several more invaluable innovations, from a beautiful way to visualize one’s core identity to the scene where Riley is flooded by repressed memories. No wonder Pixar refers to its top storytellers as “the Brain Trust.”

Dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof was serving time in prison when he conceived of his most powerful film, a daring indictment of an oppressive regime that doubles as the year’s most enthralling thriller. Eschewing the polite, understated critiques his Iranian peers tend to weave into their work, Rasoulof is clearly furious, but constructively so, suggesting what happens when subjugated citizens reach their limit. Working in secret with a small cast (and sampling real footage of the Jina Revolution), he risked everything to dramatize the national struggle, as viewed at the level a single, seemingly comfortable family. The father works for the government, rubber-stamping unjust indictments. At home, he’s the only man in a household of women, and while his wife and two daughters are obliged to follow his rules, small acts of defiance echo the protests in the streets. It all builds to an explosive finale, in which this patriarchal system is shown to be unsustainable.

Like a stampede of wild horses, the Vandals Motorcycle Club travels as a pack. You can feel the rumble deep in your bones — low, macho and intimidating — long before the herd pulls into view, at which point, nervous bystanders tend to clear the streets, lest these rebels find cause to start a fight. Sure, they’re antiestablishment icons, but there’s a strict code of conduct that governs their actions … or at least there was, until culture took a turn and left these 20th-century cowboys in the dust. Steering by photographer Danny Lyon’s late-’60s book of black-and-white Midwestern biker portraits, director Jeff Nichols watches this social microcosm slowly implode upon itself, the way the gangster world did across the “Godfather” saga. If that comparison sounds lofty, think again: “The Bikeriders” resonates on multiple layers, interrogating American masculinity as Jodie Comer’s awestruck Kathy falls for one of these stallions. Observing the way Tom Hardy (offering a sensitive, helium-high take on Marlon Brando) and “Elvis” star Austin Butler (doing his best James Dean) treat their choppers, it’s hard to imagine how women fit into their gearhead love triangles: Woe be unto the wife who comes between a Vandal and his wheels.

No one would blame you for mistaking Sean Baker’s anarchic comedy — the first American film to win Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or since “The Tree of Life” — as a rowdy, “Uncut Gems”-esque fairy tale for our times. Even the title character, played by Mikey Madison, is convinced she’s living the 21st-century version of a Cinderella story: A third-generation Russian immigrant, she works at a Manhattan strip club, where she easily charms her prince, the oblivious son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of filthy rich oligarchs. She’s convinced this romance is real and clings to it even as the fantasy collapses around her. Through it all, Baker respects his sex-worker heroine, portraying her as more of an optimist than an opportunist (as the proposal scene makes clear). Still, there’s no world in which this couple could live happily ever after, making the film’s surprisingly intimate, down-to-earth ending all the more satisfying.

There’s a moment in the original “Star Wars” when Luke Skywalker looks out on the desert horizon of his home planet and sees two suns setting in the distance. It’s a simple detail, but one that says so much about how his world is at once just like ours and unknowably different. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” is the first sci-fi franchise to make us tingle in the same way, and this three-hour follow-up brings it all together. In the first blockbuster back after last year’s industry-stopping labor strikes, we were transported to another world as only Hollywood can. The film delivers a formidable new adversary in Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, blue Kool-Aid drinking tests of Timothée Chalamet’s chosen-oneness and the incredibly satisfying payoff of Paul Atreides’ sandworm-surfing lessons. Still, it’s the relatable human moments amid Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring vision that bring “Dune: Part Two” down to earth, so to speak. Frank Herbert purists are obsessed with telling you what’s missing, but the real feat here is how dramatically the film simplifies all that arcane plotting into clear story beats, making the mythology feel almost intuitive, the way witnessing a double sunset did half a century earlier.

You probably recognize Adam Pearson from “Under the Skin.” A condition called neurofibromatosis — which results in unusual tumors all over his face — has not prevented him from pursuing an acting career, which is also true for the character of Edward (played by Sebastian Stan, disguised beneath elaborate prosthetics), who’s convinced his appearance is what’s holding him back from greater success with work, romance and overall self-fulfillment. So Edward agrees to an experimental procedure, which renders him conventionally handsome, but no longer interesting to the people who’d paid attention to him before (namely, the playwright next door, played by Renate Reinsve). The lesser-seen of two radical sci-fi fables this year, both confronting issues of body image in the film industry, Aaron Schimberg’s grungy dark comedy shares a “be careful what you wish for” message with “The Substance,” but pushed all kinds of buttons about representation, identity and casting.

It’s a testament to how far onscreen portrayals of queer relationships have evolved that an attraction as thorny and complicated as “Femme” can exist. The psychological mindwarp, from debuting feature duo Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, feels as kinky-stylish as career-high Brian De Palma and as politically touchy as Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” as a Black drag artist (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) gets severely gay-bashed outside the club, then recognizes his assailant a few months later at a gay sauna. There are countless reasons for the still-traumatized survivor to run the other way, but instead, he strikes up a tense sexual relationship with the still-closeted stranger (an astonishing George MacKay, who’s made a habit of risky roles, navigating layers of performance). The ensuing power games prove gnarly and unpredictable, somewhere between those of “Slave Play” and the ones Nicole Kidman’s character finds herself exploring in “Babygirl” — except that here, there’s no safe word to fall back on.

Some movies offer escapism; others smash our faces against brutal realities infinitely harsher than any we might ever wish to escape. Director Agnieszka Holland has dedicated her career to illuminating what Mike Leigh (in his lighter, but also laudable drama) calls “hard truths,” and with this urgent, uncompromising exposé, she sheds light on a humanitarian crisis along the border between Poland and Belarus, where both sides refuse to accept Syrian refugees, forcing them back into the neighboring country with little regard for their well-being or survival. Holland invites us to identify with the people caught in this cruel purgatory, the sheer absurdity of which might be comic (à la Kafka or “Catch-22”) if real lives weren’t at stake. At a certain point, the focus shifts to the Polish locals, effectively shaming them into getting involved — and yet, not all tragedies can be so easily rectified, as the film makes distressingly clear.

Some of Pedro Almodóvar’s fans bemoan the fact his new movies aren’t nearly as in-your-face as those early, punk-subversive assaults on polite society. Frankly, I love the bracingly personal new dimension the Spanish director has dared to show us in recent years (as with “Pain & Glory,” which reveals so much of the chronic discomfort he experiences) and marvel that anyone might consider a film about assisted suicide to be any tamer than “¡Átame!” For his first English-language feature, Almodóvar casts monster talents Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as old pals bonded by a pact the former makes to accompany her cancer-diminished friend through the end. At times, it feels as if the atheist filmmaker has ripped open his ribcage and shown us his innermost anxieties about death, legacy and the fate of our planet. Frankly, we should all be so lucky as to go this elegantly into that good night.

If you’re old enough to read subtitles, then you belong to the target audience for this epic adventure saga. A massive blockbuster in its native France, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière’s big-budget feat managed to introduce an entirely new generation to one of the country’s great romantic antiheroes, Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney), but may be harder to find in the States, where it opens on Dec. 20. Directed by the same pair of screenwriters who adapted Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” the year before, this spectacular retelling has a completely different feel from that grimy-looking two-parter. “Count” embraces the sweep and showmanship of old-school Hollywood, whether Dantès is plotting his escape from an island prison or putting into motion his score-settling schemes. Like France’s answer to the American superhero phenomenon, the count’s lust for justice compels us for three pulse-quickening hours, before ultimately revealing how poisonous revenge is to all parties.

A dozen more for good measure: “All We Imagine as Light,” “Black Dog,” “Blitz,” “Challengers,” “Conclave,” “Daddio,” “Memoir of a Snail,” “Omni Loop,” “The Promised Land,” “The Substance,” “Sweet Dreams,” “Wicked”