Scary times call for scary movies, and the emerging narrative of 2024 as the year of the horror film feels apt; from both a box office and sociological perspective, genre cinema has dominated the conversation. Last week brought the much-anticipated release of Longlegs, which seeks to reignite the ’90s serial killer genre, while the fall-winter slate has plenty of brand-name monsters waiting in the wings (including Beetlejuice, Nosferatu, and Xenomorphs). To paraphrase the title of my no. 3 movie, it seems that evil very much does exist. If the best movies of the year so far have anything in common, it’s that they’ve dealt with its presence head-on.
Honorable Mention: The People’s Joker
The best satire splits the difference between affection and contempt, and the debut of Vera Drew, the comedy writer turned DIY dynamo, is no different: It displays a love for superhero movies (and comic book culture) while skewering the process of homogenization that’s recently rendered them as anodyne and sexless multiplex fare. Not only is The People’s Joker’s patchwork imagery a marvel of fair-use parody, but it also makes for a pretty good off-brand Batman movie—one that imagines the caped crusader as a front for the forces of conservative, corporate repression, which bear down on our subversive, transgender hero while inspiring her to greater heights as a stand-up comedian. The sheer density of visual and verbal jokes in Drew’s film is impressive, and so is its pop cultural acuity; any movie that imagines Lorne Michaels as legitimately (as opposed to cozily) evil deserves credit for having its brains, heart, and courage in the right place.
10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
When I reviewed George Miller’s turbocharged prequel, I compared it unfavorably with Mad Max: Fury Road—the caveat being that the latter was (and remains) the 21st century’s most exhilarating action movie to date. With apologies to Ricky Bobby, there’s nothing wrong with competing for second place, and compared to the year’s other flawed dystopian blockbusters (Dune: Part Two, Civil War, A Quiet Place: Day One), Furiosa looks like a masterpiece. Its greatest virtue may be a genuinely complex performance by Chris Hemsworth as a surpassingly petty despot who can’t quite live up to his mythic self-image; the late sequence in which Dementus tries—and fails—to derive pleasure from torturing Anya Taylor-Joy’s eponymous hero tingles with a palpable (and tragic) sense of psychic damage. Miller loves carnage, but he also loves his characters, which is probably his secret weapon; in lieu of Manichaean comic book concepts of good and evil, Furiosa imagines a dystopia defined by desperation and despair. It’s a distinctly human-scaled epic.
9. The First Omen
The best-looking studio horror movie since The Empty Man is a coming-out party for its director, Arkasha Stevenson, who’s got an eye for images that you don’t so much see as feel at a gut level; the daringly visceral maternity ward set piece that nearly earned her debut an NC-17 rating is an instant watch-through-your-fingers classic. There’s also an extended homage to Andrzej Zulawski’s iconic Possession that vibrates with genuine reverence (and renders the proposed upcoming remake redundant). Stevenson is gifted, but she’s not a miracle worker: In the end, The First Omen reduces down to a franchise product (especially the closing scenes, which are beneath what precedes them). But even when coloring inside the lines of the franchise playbook, she’s got enough style and smarts to make one hope for even greater autonomy going forward.
8. La Chimera
The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher makes movies about isolated communities and buried secrets; her great theme so far is the difficult but necessary relationship between tradition and modernity. With this in mind, the shimmering and mysterious La Chimera feels like the purest distillation of her sensibility yet, plunking us down inside a community of mercenary grave robbers and juxtaposing their craft against the machinations of the art-world power brokers who end up selling the painstakingly procured artifacts to the highest bidder. (The difference is between those who get their hands dirty and those who don’t.) Clad in a wrinkled, white linen suit that externalizes his rumpled soul, Josh O’Connor is wonderful as an American interloper chasing not only money, but a memory; with apologies to the Challengers stans, this is the most magnetic he’s ever been on-screen.
7. Janet Planet
Easily the greatest movie ever (incidentally) named after an Outkast lyric, Janet Planet marks the directorial debut of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker, who duly transfers her mastery of understatement from stage to screen. Anyone looking for bold, declamatory moviemaking is in the wrong place; Baker’s story of a sixth grade girl clinging to the rituals of a swiftly vanishing childhood—and trying to stay in the orbit of her charismatic but capricious single mother—unfolds as a series of halting whispers and sly, sotto voce asides. It makes us lean in and rewards our attention through a proliferation of subtle details. The 11-year-old Lacey (Zoe Ziegler) is lonely and precocious; her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), is devoted but also somehow distant, caught between a hard-edged sense of independence and a series of men who, however unintentionally, serve as rivals for her daughter’s attention. Working in a static, muted style that perfectly suits Lacey’s summertime torpor, Baker trains her camera on small physical gestures and behaviors that add up to a persuasive portrait of evolving but enduring affection—a film in which comfort and melancholy become fused on a molecular level.
6. I Saw the TV Glow
As its title suggests, Jane Schoenbrun’s analog-era period piece has its own special luminosity; its dark story of broken souls navigating dual teenage wastelands—one real, one televised, and each the other’s distorted mirror image—possesses a real and vibrant spark of humanity (which shines through even during a pitch-black climax). At once a sumptuous exercise in ’90s nostalgia and a cautionary tale about the dangers of succumbing to an ersatz past, I Saw the TV Glow has been stylized to within an inch of its life, but it still breathes thanks to its terrific cast (especially a hollow-eyed and heartbreaking Justice Smith) and even better soundtrack, which drenches Schoenbrun’s bleakly surreal images in synthy—as opposed to synthetic—melancholy. (Shout-out to Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed,” which channels the movie’s roiling emotions into a sweetly ethereal earworm that burrows deep into your brain.)
5. Hit Man
There’s an angle from which Hit Man looks like a love letter from Glen Powell to himself; one sure way for an emerging movie star to guarantee he receives a tour de force role is to cowrite the screenplay (and keep the best lines). At the same time, Powell has so much chemistry with Adria Arjona that the movie ultimately feels like a dual showcase; playing unlikely lovers who meet cute under false pretenses, they cruise through the loosely fact-based plot about undercover investigation and surveillance at the velocity of a vintage screwball comedy. As for director Richard Linklater, he’s in his comfort zone, making mainstream entertainment that’s significantly darker than it seems. He keeps things light and funny (and sexy) without compromising the material’s sardonic sociological subtext about a country where everybody believes they’re just one clandestine murder away from living the American Dream.
4. Last Summer
An intergenerational fling goes even worse than expected in Catherine Breillat’s scabrous drama, which staunchly refuses to choose sides as its characters’ lives collapse around them. Was it a bad idea for middle-aged lawyer Anne (Léa Drucker) to initiate a sexual relationship with her teenage stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher)? Of course. Is Théo trying to get back at his dad? Maybe. Are their clandestine hookups unequivocally a case of grooming or calculated predation? Not so fast. Can contemporary audiences deal with a movie that doesn’t make easy moral judgments for them? That’s the million-dollar question, and Breillat, whose entire career is a case study in thoughtful provocation, deserves credit not only for her craft (which has gotten more refined and precise with age), but also for her commitment to moral and dramatic ambiguity. Last Summer is compelling and confounding and likely to start arguments between viewers on their way out of the theater; here’s to Breillat’s commitment to keeping art provocative.
3. Evil Does Not Exist
That old line about not seeing the forest for the trees applies nicely to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film, which focuses on a rural community on the precipice of being turned into a corporate campsite; it’s a slippery slope between enjoying nature and disrupting it. A sort of eco-horror movie, Evil Does Not Exist is, at its core, an exercise in bad vibes—one awash in ominousness from its opening shots of tree branches swaying in an ill wind. (The haunting, electronic musical score is by Japanese composer Eiko Ishibashi.) As a follow-up to an unlikely (and unexpectedly beloved) Best Picture nominee (Drive My Car), a movie this oblique and uningratiating feels risky, but then nobody genuinely familiar with Hamaguchi’s work would take him as a careerist. Rather, he’s an adventurous, unpredictable artist who’s too unique to be pigeonholed one way or the other and who’s willing to leave his work open to interpretation. The final scenes here are especially tricky even as they feel aligned, at least spiritually, with the material that precedes them; like all great directors, Hamaguchi is confident enough to punctuate his movie with a question mark.
2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Romanian rabble-rouser Radu Jude’s riotous gig-economy satire is basically a road movie without a destination; it’s more like a Sisyphean loop. Circumnavigating her native Bucharest by van on a series of thankless errands, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an acerbic but exhausted corporate lackey, battles alienation and boredom; she also amuses herself by stopping every so often to bombard TikTok via a profane FaceApp-ed alter ego whose racist, xenophobic tirades may or may not be the externalization of her inner life. In a moment of global political polarization, Jude’s violently self-divided hero isn’t just hilarious—she’s an avatar for anybody and everybody whose spleen needs venting. (She’s also in good company: At one point, she pays a set visit to the notorious, two-fisted Uwe Boll, who deserves a nomination for Best Supporting Auteur.) Don’t let the art-house aesthetics and nearly three-hour running time put you off: This is what a killer comedy looks like in 2024.
1. The Beast
Technically, Bertrand Bonello should have two spots on this list, since his superlative 2022 experimental horror movie, Coma, just got a long-delayed theatrical release; consider it a conceptual companion piece to his big-budget Henry James adaptation, The Beast, which is, thematically speaking, a movie about nothing more (or less) than fear itself. Set in three very different time periods—roughly analogous to past, present, and future—and featuring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in multiple roles as star-crossed lovers, Bonello’s film explores cosmic ideas of free will and eternal recurrence without putting them in scare quotes. It’s wild, scary, and occasionally goofy, but never ironic. At its best, it (deliberately) evokes the surreal dreamscapes of David Lynch, especially the contemporary L.A. sequences, which are set at the intersection of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. And even when Bonello’s formal gimmicks or stunt-like maneuvers don’t work, the flaws are in good faith; above all, The Beast gives a sense of an artist burrowing deep inside his material (and his moment) and emerging with something vital. It’s fearless filmmaking.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.