The 20 Best Movies of 2024

Poor things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Yorgos Lanthimos’ psychedelic, absurdist riff on the Frankenstein story features Emma Stone playing a mutant being assembled from the body of a woman who recently threw herself into a river and the brain of her own unborn child. Stone’s terrific and fearless performance as Bella sees the character progress from a toddler to a confident, spirited woman with an endless appetite for oysters, champagne, pasteis de nata and “furious jumping “. Grotesque, moving and the director’s best film to date.

All of us foreigners (Andrew Haigh)
A deeply sad story of love, family and identity, with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. This is the fifth feature from Andrew Haigh, who shows, writes our critic, “a kind of genius for the English euphemism about the most heartbreaking matters” in this film of his life. It’s certainly the only film this year to set one of its most heartbreaking sequences in Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre.

The taste of things (Tran Anh Hung)
This French film about a great tastemaker and his chef wife was roundly dismissed in its home country as food pornography mixed with rancid conservatism: just like the rare songbirds devoured in the film as an elite (now illegal) culinary delicacy , was derided as an elite (now illegal) culinary delicacy. outdated heirloom product for those who fetishize a long-dead version of France. While it’s undeniably retro and slow, our reviewer hailed it as “just lovely.”

Area of ​​interest (Jonathan Glazer)
To call Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching examination of the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family a disturbing watch is to understate its existential brutality. With hidden cameras and a minimal plot, Glazer documents the family’s semi-utopian existence beyond the camp wall, allowing only the horror of what happens on the other side to penetrate through sound and dreamy night vision sequences. By forcing the audience to adopt the perspective of the perpetrators – and confront the usual complicity – this is a Holocaust film like no other.

The civil war (Alex Garland)
Alex Garland’s fourth film imagines a dystopian future in which the US has been ravaged by internal conflict. A tyrannical president fraudulently expands his power by boasting of his greatness and his ability to always “win”. The White House is under attack. So familiar by now. Still, our reviewer writes that the film “isn’t quite the premonition of a Trumpian apocalypse it promises to be…but it’s Garland’s clearest and most visionary rendering of the world gone wrong yet.”

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About the dry grass (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
This Turkish film is over three hours long, set in one of the “darkest places ever”, filled with extended, naturalistic scenes so slow that they are sometimes boring, and is “deeply challenging to the viewer’s sense of self and purpose “. Our critic declared it a “masterpiece”. Say it’s your movie of the year and everyone will think you’re better than them.

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Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
This satire of the beauty industry, starring Demi Moore as an aging actress who goes to extreme lengths to maintain her youth and relevance, isn’t subtle or subversive. It is so grotesque that it sometimes aspires to camp. But it is extremely fun. The final bloody fight sequence sent our reviewer into hysterics.

apprentice (Ali Abbasi)
Donald Trump called this biopic of his early years in Manhattan “a cheap, smearing and politically disgusting piece of work done … to try to hurt the greatest political movement in the history of our country.” Which means the filmmakers and actor Sebastian Stan got something right.

Anori (Sean Baker)
So much darker and weirder than your stereotype Pretty woman Narratively, this sex worker meets oligarch heir story involves lap dances, car chases and a Las Vegas wedding, and is almost certainly the first feature film to open with a club remix of a Take That song. Director Sean Baker cements his status as an illustrator of chaotic, funny and deeply human stories from the fringes of society.

Conclave (Edward Berger)
bad girls in cassocks. This adaptation of Robert Harris’ religious thriller, starring Ralph Fiennes, follows sequestered cardinals as they elect the new Pope. There’s villainy, backstabbing, vaping and the most calculated act of photocopying since Queen George’s ‘Book of Burning’. What a joke.

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