The best films of 2024 … you may not have seen

Drugstore June

I can’t really blame anyone for not seeing Drugstore June in theaters, considering that scattered, super-limited run lasted just a few weeks. (I caught it in a near-empty cinema, on a weekday-afternoon whim, the day after belatedly seeing the trailer online.) But now that it’s streaming on Hulu in the US, you can check out one of the least-discussed but funniest mainstream comedies in ages. Built around the standup persona of comedian Esther Povitsky, Drugstore June is very much a throwback to a time when any emerging comic figure might be awarded their own thinly conceived vehicle. It wasn’t a great trend – Drugstore June’s director, Nicholaus Goossen, made Grandma’s Boy, to cite one example among many – yet here, revived absent big-studio attention (or maybe just with extra love for the game), it produces an idiosyncratic townie detective comedy, with sheltered, self-centered, snacks-obsessed June (Povitsky) trying to figure out who trashed the pharmacy where she (barely) works. Unlike its many Sandler-crew predecessors, Drugstore June has a genuine sense of place, a playful sense of generational self-satire, and an original persona at its center. It’s all the more miraculous at a time when studios big and small don’t care much for making comedies. Jesse Hassenger

The Honorable Shyne

The Honorable Shyne raised the curtain with a bombshell trailer of the documentary subject reacting to the recent allegation that Diddy actually admitted responsibility for the New York nightclub shooting that cost the former Bad Boy breakout more than eight years in prison. People really got hung up on the pullquote – “He destroyed my life,” Shyne said. But had they watched the whole Hulu documentary, they would have seen that life contains multitudes: a latchkey immigration story, a tough guy phase, a carceral conversion to Orthodox Judaism that leads to him living in Israel and, finally, a political redemption in his home country of Belize. Marcus Clarke, the director, times the nearly two-hour film on the button, tarrying in Shyne’s past without making it all about that 1999 club shooting while also keeping an eye to Diddy’s downfall and the certain aftershocks. The net effect is a gorgeous parable of rugged individualism that belongs in the library of great American originals. They could’ve called it: The Book of Shyne. Andrew Lawrence

Exhibiting Forgiveness

In a strange, scrappy year for Oscar sure things, with a best actor category looking particularly undefined and anemic, it’s a criminal act that Exhibiting Forgiveness and star André Holland have flown so far under the radar. Premiering at Sundance to polite acclaim but receiving a blip of a release this fall, artist-turned-film-maker Titus Kaphar’s intimate and involving drama took hackneyed subject matter – fractured father-son trauma – and turned it into something real and, at times, rather radical. Kaphar pulls from his own life – Holland also playing a painter who has also struggled with his absent addict father – and tackles the grinding difficulties involved with knowing when and how to forgive. Holland is a total knockout, rarely afforded this much time as a lead, and there are scenes with him and his character’s parents (John Earl Jelks and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) that are so thrillingly and authentically well-performed that it feels as if we’re watching it live, sitting seat-edge in some small off-Broadway theatre. It’s a tough watch, especially for those of us who know a similar pain, but Kaphar’s unsentimental insights are worth sticking around for, someone who has been there himself telling the rest of us that we can survive it too. Benjamin Lee

Mothers’ Instinct

How does a handsomely mounted period drama featuring two of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars wind up sitting on the shelf for over a year, world-premiering in Lithuania, kicking around European cinemas for months before quietly opening on a small handful of American screens, then limping away with about $3m? Neither audiences nor distributor Neon knew what to make of this sumptuous genre layer cake, its sincere women’s-picture pathos topped with mannered psycho-thriller intrigue and iced with strokes of camp. Cinematographer-extraordinaire-turned-director Benoît Delhomme dares to take the heaving grief of 60s housewife Anne Hathaway seriously after her son dies on gal pal Jessica Chastain’s watch, which makes for a tricky tonal negotiation as mourning turns to Hitchcockeyed vengeance, complete with rear-projection driving scenes. But does Hathaway’s mommy-turned-murderess merely want to kill her negligent next-door neighbor, or could there also be a whiff of perverse attraction in the quiet moments pregnant with homoerotic tension? As is the case with all movies about the difference between brunettes and blondes, the answer here is an immaculately needlepointed “Yes!” Charles Bramesco

Girls Will Be Girls

Set at a conservative boarding school at the foothills of the Himalayas in the 1990s – the first sign that it will pick the same forbidden fruit as Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus – Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama turns a familiar good-girl-turned-bad premise into a particular tale of social mores and sexual awakening. The good girl here is Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), the first woman ever selected to serve as prefect at her school, and the bad boy is Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a worldly rebel who has her reconsidering the rules she’s been chosen to enforce. Girls Will Be Girls is a satisfying and culturally specific tale of star-crossed love, but it’s distinguished by the candor with which it grapples with Mira’s newly fired libido. A true scholar, she goes online to research sexual mechanics. Scott Tobias

The Grab

I am generally conspiracy theory averse – people and plots are usually not both complex and contained. And though it deals with a multinational, under-the-radar effort to buy up natural resources, so too, thankfully, is The Grab. The jaw-dropping documentary, a years long joint reporting effort between the Center for Investigative Reporting and Blackfish film-maker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, builds on the standard obscure, brain-melting elements of international intrigue – offshore accounts, shady private security companies, secret Chinese government documents literally marked “not for distribution in the United States”. But it avoids easy conspiratorial thinking at every turn, instead connecting the dots on the emerging story of the 21st century: efforts, both public and private, to hoard food and water resources imperiled by population growth and climate crisis. From drained aquifers in Arizona to stolen land in Zambia, imported cowboys in Russia to the purchase of a major food conglomerate by a Chinese government-backed company, The Grab has changed how I view news, how I think about daily needs – the start of a story so vast, diffuse and mind-boggling, on a scale difficult to comprehend and more difficult to sit with, that deserves more attention. Adrian Horton

The People’s Joker

Just when you think you have seen more than enough Batman movies, along comes a film so irreverent to intellectual property, and yet sincerely heartfelt that it cleanses your palate of an entire franchise-load of pomposity and merchandising tie-ins. That said, Vera Drew’s queer coming-of-age story mapped on to a sleazy, mixed-media reimagining of Gotham is so outlandish and ultimately charming, who wouldn’t want to buy the T-shirt? Drew plays Joker the Harlequin, a young trans woman and aspiring standup comedian from Smallville who comes to big, bad Gotham to make all her dreams come true, but there are villains in the city, not least among them the predatory Bruce Wayne. Characters from the DC universe, notably Nathan Faustyn as a chummy Penguin, appear in unfamiliar guises, and yet it all makes a certain kind of loopy sense once you leave the lore behind. As you might expect, The People’s Joker hit a few legal difficulties on its theatrical release, but it is available to stream now. Pamela Hutchinson

Rose’s War AKA Baltimore

Going by the name Rose’s War for its US release (presumably to avoid any confusion with Homicide: Life on the Street or the works of John Waters), the Baltimore in this coolly cerebral thriller from British-Irish duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (AKA Desperate Optimists) in fact refers to the remote settlement on the south-west tip of Ireland where heiress-turned-Irish republican Rose Dugdale holes up after masterminding a notorious (real-life) art theft in 1974. Molloy and Lawlor have been art-cinema stalwarts since the mid-00s with their quietly fascinating studies of identity and self-actualisation; it’s a bit of a mystery why they aren’t better known than they are. But this one, anchored by an impressive central performance from Imogen Poots, could amount to something of a breakthrough; charting Dugdale’s transition from deb to radical student to committed IRA soldier, it’s essentially a character study, that suggests Dugdale is as much acting a part as Doña Antonia Zárate, the subject of a Goya painting she so admires. A clever, thoughtful film, and one well worth seeking out. Andrew Pulver

Sugarcane

Sugarcane seemingly had everything needed to attract a significant audience – a fresh investigation breaking the story of horrific acts against Native American children, a deeper historical story of discrimination dating back centuries, top-rate on the ground reporting, two charismatic, compelling journalists to tell the story, and even Sundance’s blessing. It’s surprising then that this film has been so under-viewed. Sugarcane delves into the barbarity of the residential school programs in Canada and the US, which essentially attempted to strip Native American children of their culture, language and history while also exposing them to emotional and physical abuse. It was only in 1978 that Native American parents in the US had the legal right to refuse to place their children in these schools and Sugarcane makes clear the ongoing damage to the Native American community that exists to this day. This is an important documentary that provides essential facts about these wrongs, as well as providing a rich and valuable look into the emotional, familial and community toll exacted against Native Americans. With so many vulnerable groups currently at risk for similar treatment in a second Trump administration, this documentary is essential viewing. Veronica Esposito

Red Rooms

In his nerve-racking psychological thriller about a model curiously obsessed for reasons unknown with a gruesome serial killer’s high-profile trial, the French-Canadian director Pascal Plante tweaks Hitchcock for an antisocial world. As with Psycho and Rear Window, Red Rooms is all about who’s looking and where, and for the most part, the film keeps us firmly in the grips of Juliette Gariépy’s chilling stare. It’s a fixated look that makes you question whether her Kelly-Anne is up to something or simply dead inside. It’s also the perfect evocation of the hollow and soulless spaces the character inhabits – mentally and physically – and Plante scours. In a film that burrows deep – into what, I’m not so sure – his camera is often scanning, machine like, across the glass tower condos, sterile white courtrooms and the browser windows in which Kelly-Anne books gigs and bets crypto at virtual Texas Hold ‘Em tables, where no one is around to witness that killer poker face. It appear soulless, sure, but it’s also soul-shattering. Radheyan Simonpillai