These are the movies we’ve gotten excited about this year – and where you can watch them.
Can’t decide what to watch? Well, look no further—there’s bound to be something on this list of our fave movies so far this year, whether you’re watching for the first time, or revisiting a recent highlight.
This post will be updated each month with new recommendations for viewing both in cinemas and at home. And, for the avoidance of any confusion, these are titles we covered in 2024—as opposed to what a formal release year might say. Look, we just want you to watch some good stuff, OK?
Love Lies Bleeding
Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian star in this superb sophomore pic from Saint Maud director Rose Glass, an off the rails love story serving a slice of queer noir with plenty of extras—not least of all, an impressive collection of muscles. “This movie is a good goddamned time,” declares Eliza Janssen’s review: “Especially for the gals who’ve been waiting for a full-blown, gratuitous lesbian K.Stew role like this.”
Late Night With the Devil
A lost 1970s talk show broadcast provides the premise of this found footage horror (and 2023 film festival highlight). Alongside its wonderfully realised talk show setting and a great lead performance by star David Dastmalchian, Tony Stamp’s review praises both Late Night with the Devil‘s journey and destination: “Suffice to say this is a slow burn, but things get pretty gnarly by the end, and genre fans will leave satisfied”.
Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney stars in (and produces) this religious horror in which a devout young nun finds her own body being treated as a means to an end by controlling forces. As Steve Newall’s review notes, while Immaculate may be in the tradition of many other great horrors, it is no pastiche, and “offers plenty of gore, surprises, and gonzo plotting, wrapped up in a classical (yet not throwback) aesthetic.”
Road House
Jake Gyllenhaal and Doug Liman go back to first principles with this redux of the classic Patrick Swayze vehicle in a new version of Road House. It’s a movie where everyone understands the assignment, says Travis Johnson’s review: “Road House is a sledgehammer. It’s made for big swings. It makes an impact.”
Goodbye Julia
Two women from different parts of Sudan form an uneasy friendship against a backdrop of tragedy and racism in Goodbye Julia. As Liam Maguren’s review says: “This class act of a drama relishes in small details, concocting a compelling clash of classes that echoes loudly to the wider state of the country.”
Wicked Little Letters
Oscar winner Olivia Colman and Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley star in Wicked Little Letters, a comedic war-of-the-words British feature based on real events. As Fatima Sheriff’s review notes: “This small island seems to have a bottomless supply of fascinating tales to tell, with prestige casts lining up to play these icons uncovered from history”.
The Convert
A lay preacher finds himself caught in the crossfire of two warring tribes in 1830s New Zealand in Lee Tamahori’s The Convert. In some measures, arguably the most important measures, Liam Maguren’s review says the film hits its marks: “When The Convert reaches its inevitable musket-fuelled climax, it weaves a strong net of spectacle and sorrow”.
How to Have Sex
How to Have Sex
Winner of the top prize in the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes Film Festival, How to Have Sex follows three British teenage girls on a rites-of-passage holiday—drinking, clubbing and hooking up. An impressed Rory Doherty reviewed the film at Cannes in 2023: “The chemistry between the cast, both friends and romantic interests alike, crackles with adolescent excitement—but is also charged with constant anxiety knowing where the story is heading.”
Dune: Part Two
Director Denis Villeneuve returns to finish the sci-fi spectacle he started, reuniting with a stacked cast led by Timothée Chalamet—and with new faces including Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler and Léa Seydoux. As Matt Glasby says in a spoiler-lite review, the movie’s “a staggering achievement; a stirring piece of grown-up sci-fi delivering more spectacle than you’d see in several ordinary blockbusters stitched together.”
American Fiction
Playing an embittered literature professor, Jeffrey Wright makes American Fiction a troubling character study that rings true to boardrooms and classrooms everywhere. Luke Buckmaster’s review marks it as the peak of the actor’s career: ” I dare say that Wright, who received an Oscar nomination for the role, has never been better: he’s brilliant as this sharp, eviscerating character, blessed with a silver tongue and cursed with a foot stuck in his mouth.”
The Great Escaper
Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson star in The Great Escaper, based on the true story of a World War II veteran who snuck out of his care home to attend the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings. As Liam Maguren’s review says, the film is a strong entry in a popular genre that has no name: “Senior moviegoers will know what I’m talking about. Trailers and marketing materials for these films aggressively trumpet the same notion: you’re never too old to [blank].”
Spaceman
Spaceman (2024)
Without a silly voice or Kevin James in sight, Adam Sandler stars as a lonely astronaut in Johan Renck’s melancholic Spaceman. It’s a genuine and psychologically stirring voyage, says Luke Buckmaster’s review: “The heart of the film felt totally genuine, once the initial wackiness wears off and the experience finds its gentle introspective rhythms”.
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
This Is Me...Now: A Love Story
This narratively-driven, musically-slanted album movie depicting Jennifer Lopez’s path of self-healing and unwavering faith in fairytale endings is both very heartfelt and complete madness, according to Liam Maguren’s review: “We’re barely past a minute when biker Lopez appears riding with a nameless fella in a shiny CGI landscape while a remarkably unhinged news anchor played by Ben Affleck in a set of false teeth declares Love Is Dead!”
“This is not planet Earth. This is the J-Lo dimension.”
The Zone of Interest
Multiple Oscar nominee The Zone of Interest sees director Jonathan Glazer explore life over the wall from the mass exterminations of a Holocaust concentration camp. Everything the characters do, however mundane, doubles and redoubles in significance because of where and when they are doing it, says Matt Glasby’s review: “While Höss worries away at the business of mass extermination with his colleagues, Heddie tends her garden, perhaps the ultimate act of barbarism, especially as its soil is sown with ash from the furnaces.”
Orion and the Dark
Orion and the Dark
Surreal screenwriter Charlie Kaufman may seem an odd fit to adapt a children’s book about being afraid of the dark into an animated film—though you’d be right to feel there’s somewhat of a “but” coming… As Luke Buckmaster’s review notes, “this delightfully playful family film fits his oeuvre like a glove, sitting comfortably alongside the squirrely scribe’s other idiosyncratic scripts, with their cascading realities and meta-textual angstiness—from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich.”
The Iron Claw
The wrestling world’s tragic “Von Erich Curse” gets retold in subtle, melancholic detail by director Sean Durkin (The Nest), who assembles a great cast including Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons to bring the true story to life. “Visually the film is modest, with a spongey timeworn veneer, although it has one head-turning special effect: Efron,” says Luke Buckmaster’s review: “Here he’s something else: a human beefcake, strapping and sturdy as all get-out, with a body like Schwarzenegger circa Pumping Iron, and a lantern-jawed face banged up like an old catcher’s mitt”.
Priscilla
Based on Priscilla Beaulieu’s own memoir detailing her life with Elvis, Sofia Coppola’s latest sees Cailee Spaeny as the teen Priscilla, whose life changes unimaginably when she’s romanced by Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). Describing the film as her finest work in over fifteen years, Rory Doherty’s review observes: “Sofia Coppola sensitively reapproaches girlhood without sacrificing the emotional rawness behind a tremendously famous love story. Priscilla is intimate, revealing, and devastates with the lightest touch.”
Mean Girls
It’s Mean Girls but not as you know it. The new movie take on a 20-year-old classic is a musical—based on a Broadway musical, which is based on the 2004 film, which was itself based on a parenting book. The musical element proves essential in breathing new life into a familiar screenplay, says Rory Doherty’s review: “It’s why the song numbers, hyper-poppy and earworm-y as they may be, are the true highlights—it’s a fundamentally novel way of engaging with this story that doesn’t invoke comparisons with the original.”
The Beekeeper
A Jason Statham revenge-fueled action pic may not be what you expect to find on this list, but thankfully we have Luke Buckmaster’s review that highlights: “This is the kind of B̶ ̶m̶o̶v̶i̶e̶ bee movie for which the terms “guilty pleasure” and “so bad it’s good” were coined. I found The Beekeeper almost breathtakingly funny, laughing out loud heartily at least a dozen times, even if comedy gold wasn’t director David Ayer’s intention.”
Society of the Snow
Society of the Snow
The remarkable true survival story of a rugby team whose flight crashed on a glacier in the Andes (originally depicted three decades prior with 1993’s Alive) is retold by director J.A. Bayona (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power). The plot doesn’t pussyfoot around issues of death and cannibalism, according to Luke Buckmaster’s review: “Do the dead have a right to not be eaten? Do the living have a right to survive? Bayona understands his job is to raise these questions inside a credible dramatic space rather than propose any answers.”
