1. Anora
Anora is many things at once, said Dana Stevens in Slate. A screwball comedy, a road movie, a romantic drama, and more, “it’s funny and sexy and raucous while also being startlingly wise and tender.” Mikey Madison delivers a star-making turn as a spirited young stripper from Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach who marries the son of a Russian oligarch after a three-day whirlwind. But after a few henchmen are sent in to break up the union, the ensuing plot turns are unexpected, and “if you can make it through Anora’s final five minutes without being deeply moved, you might want to take the Turing Test.”
2. Nickel Boys
The convention-defying new adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel is “among the most extraordinary films of this young century,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Almost every moment is seen from the perspective of its Black protagonist or the best friend he makes inside an abusive 1960s boys’ reform school, and the unusual approach proves “astoundingly effective” in conveying the relationship between how we see life’s events and what we conclude about them. One young man believes in the possibility of justice, the other does not. And only one survives.
3. Challengers
“It’d be too easy to call this a tale of repressed romance,” said David Sims in The Atlantic. Yes, the two male leads are more than best friends, tennis adversaries, and rival suitors of a female peer played by Zendaya. But even the kiss the young men share on a dare emerges primarily from “their intense competitiveness in every sphere of life.” Challengers turned out to be “the best kind of froth: well-acted, technically impressive, and unafraid to throw a few haymakers at the typical sports movie’s presentation of alpha masculinity.”
4. The Brutalist
“It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. However much Brady Corbet’s epic about a Hungarian-Jewish architect resembles the work of the great film auteurs of the 1970s, it stands on its own as “a bold, visionary, sweeping work of art.” The star, Adrien Brody, “hasn’t done work of this depth since The Pianist.” His character’s dream of achieving renown in postwar America is hijacked by a monstrous patron, rendering this film “a tragedy of both the intimate and the sociological kind.”
5. All We Imagine As Light
Payal Kapadia’s debut narrative feature “works like a poem,” and is “very nearly perfect” on those terms, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. It zooms in on the lives of three women in Mumbai who work at the same hospital. One is about to lose her home and the other two are unlikely roommates with separate romantic worries. But the plotting is muted. “Kapadia lets everything breathe and flow like life” while at the same time constructing a symphonic ode to a “heartbreaking” city.
6. I Saw the TV Glow
This hypnotic indie drama “has much on its mind,” said Jordan Raup in The Film Stage. Owen and Maddy are 1990s teens who share an obsession with a late-night sci-fi show, and the way it helps define them “will speak to anyone who has a deep bond with any artistic medium.” But I Saw the TV Glow also has rightly been called a horror movie—because neither friend is comfortable in their own skin, and “nothing is more terrifying than being trapped in a body you don’t desire and having no words to properly express the feeling.”
7. Dune: Part Two
“Denis Villeneuve isn’t one for lectures,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Though the second installment of his planned Dune trilogy is a sci-fi drama “steeped in modern unease about zealotry, propaganda, and environmental destruction,” the director “lets his images do the talking: the hostility of the desert, the starkness of one figure against the sky, the terror of hundreds of figures crowded in worship around a flawed man.” In this impressive sequel, Dune built toward an all-out holy war. “I clung tight and adored the ride.”
8. Hard Truths
“It’s a strange sensation, to end up loving a movie that makes you feel physically uncomfortable,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Pansy, the British-Caribbean protagonist of Mike Leigh’s latest drama, “practically vibrates with belligerence.” Nothing and nobody escapes her ire, including her husband, her adult son, and her cheerfully baffled sister. Gradually, Leigh unfurls Pansy’s backstory and, with the help of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s astonishing performance, reveals Pansy’s strengths. “That’s the magic of Leigh, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.”
9. A Real Pain
A select few actors “turn out to be born filmmakers,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. That seems to be the case with Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote, directed, and co-stars in this “ramble of a road movie” about two Jewish cousins on a Holocaust tour of their family’s native Poland. Kieran Culkin is “sensational” as the troublesome wild card of the pair, but while A Real Pain makes for an easy watch, “it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.”
10. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
“Don’t let the art-house aesthetics put you off: This is what a killer comedy looks like in 2024,” said Adam Nayman in The Ringer. Romanian director Radu Jude sends up the gig economy by casting Ilinca Manolache as an acerbic corporate gofer who’s running errands around Bucharest and periodically dropping profane rants on TikTok under a fake name. Manolache’s self-divided antihero “isn’t just hilarious; she’s an avatar for anybody and everybody whose spleen needs venting.”
