The 2024 cinematic year experienced another surprise last month with the arrival of catchy franchises, from “Inside Out 2” to “A Quiet Place: Day One. “But there’s also a lot to celebrate when it comes to original releases, from Neon’s record-breaking “Longlegs” over the weekend of July 12 to, earlier in the year, other originals like “Civil War” in the bank for A24. “Thelma,” meanwhile, also defied all odds and achieved a rare success at the Sundance box office.
And while none of those videos make our list of the most productive videos of 2024 so far, which were rounded up from our glowing reviews from the past six months, they all point to a healthier film culture that some pictures paint.
The list below of 20 films is sure to evolve as the year progresses and the fall 2024 festivals approach, bringing a new crop of new films. Some of our favorites this year come from last year’s fall festivals, and after all, they hit theaters in recent months, from “The Beast” to “Janet Planet. “Others, such as “Los Retadores”, have been affected by movements whose effects the industry continues to feel.
Below, IndieWire selects the 20 most productive films of 2024 (so far). And you shouldn’t also check out IndieWire’s list of the best TVs of 2024 so far.
“Irrefutable evidence that each and every one of the wonderful art film directors must create their own “Cloud Atlas” before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s radical, romantic and dazzling “The Beast” shows that the French director expands – and in some cases questions – the central obsessions. of his past films into a sci-fi epic about the worry of falling in love.
Read the full IndieWire version by David Ehrlich.
“A smooth and shimmeringly charming film about how life can flow, then freeze, and then thaw into something entirely new, if you will, Anthony Chen’s “Breaking Ice” discovers hope in the coldest places. In this case, it is the small Chinese frontier city of Yanji, in the depths of its endless winter, when other people’s breath is as thick as the gray fumes coming out of factory chimneys, and the snow-capped peak of Changbai Mountain appears closer to it. More than a million more people There are many people who live there (many of them of Korean origin), but few seem to call it home. It’s as if they’ve been stuck there on their way somewhere else, and in the wake of a pandemic that has limited and put the economy at risk, they’re still waiting to be thawed. I’m still waiting for the heat they want to turn liquid again.
Read the full IndieWire via David Ehrlich.
“If, as Blanche Dubois once said, ‘the opposite of death is desire,’ then Luca Guadagnino will live forever, and his new film, a transcendent, sweaty tennis love triangle, so fired up by the festival heat that their sex scenes look like foreplay and their exchanges look like porn—it’s the wildest portrait of resurrection since “The Passion of the Christ. “
“This is, in fact, the most thrilling story ever lived in the concrete purgatory of New Rochelle, New York, where the three main characters of this film cross paths in the last match of a sordid US Open qualifier, sponsored through a local tire shop. . . They’ve been screwing others on and off the court for more than a decade until the “Challengers” unleash their first serve and yet, despite winning both one and both points in their preferred game, those long-limbed athletes have lost their desire to live at some point along the way. At this point, their thirst for others might be the only force on Earth strong enough to get back in the game. “
Read the full version of IndieWire by David Ehrlich.
“Animation has the power to make even the simplest feelings as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories, which – despite the uplifting nuances and impressive style of recent films like “Enchantment” and “Across the Spider” – Verse” – It can be frustrating that American studios largely tend to gravitate toward overly confusing plots and realistic designs. The very French “Chicken for Linda” via Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta is the clearest reminder imaginable of what we We lost an eight-year-old woman named Linda who needs to eat bird for dinner.
Read the full version of IndieWire by David Ehrlich.
“It takes talent to invent one sight gag after another in episodic riffs on the raw deals endured in the ranks of the gig economy in today’s Bucharest. Radu Jude mixes absurdist humor with social integrity, like a more biting Romanian response to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) become a 40-minute closing shot in the that tragicomedy abounds. . Tragicomedy with an unbearably brilliant effect.
Read the full version of IndieWire by Sophie Monks Kaufman.
“‘There is no evil,’ the name of the new film by ‘Drive My Car’ director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, is an ambitious realization in 2023 [the year the film premiered at Venice]. As it turns out from this poem with a strange and elusive ecological tone about man, nature, and the nature of man, this statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes.
“This sweetly melodious film, made in secret and set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo, comes across as a call for compassion on the surface: it focuses on how the townspeople’s citizens become involved in a corporation trying to open a glamping site in their forest. , only for the two opposing sides to finally find some unusual terrain. But this understanding proves to be an obstacle to a much darker twist that Hamaguchi brings to the film’s final act.
Read the full version of Ryan Lattanzio’s IndieWire.
“In our era of cancellation, there is little room for empathy toward identity-based violence and abuse. Enter Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s “Woman,” a British queer revenge mystery that dives straight into in the gray spaces that can shape between the aggressor and the victim.
“Adapting the pages of ’90s erotic thrillers to a 2023 sensibility, ‘Woman’ stars Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (the ‘Cuprits’ breakout) as a black drag queen who, after being attacked by a white thug locked up, he played George. MacKay takes revenge by seducing her attacker, who then recognizes him by surprise. But in the process, a bureaucracy of tenderness and charm emerges between Jules (Stewart-Jarrett) and Preston (MacKay), making Jules’ calculated act of revenge (and the film itself) even more complicated.
Read the full version of Ryan Lattanzio’s IndieWire.
“What to expect when you wait. . . to the Antichrist? Filmmaker Arkasha Stevenson offers her gleefully gruesome answer to this popular question in the terrifying and triumphant “The First Omen” of the 20th century. It’s a comfortable reboot of the franchise and the wildly amazing (if accidental) answer to Neon’s “Immaculate,” starring Sydney Sweeney.
“Yes, either horror film explores what happens when a child of Christ is forced, unknowingly, to give birth to a demon baby. And yes, either film has merit; banal but true, Damien just doesn’t have that “Cassie from ‘Euphoria'” touch. But only Stevenson’s edit of “The Omen” can tie its borderline NC-17 horror to a decades-long genre legacy that revels in remarkably advanced visual artistry. and a narratively satisfactory review of the replaced intellectual property.
Read the full IndieWire via Alison Foreman.
“Inveterate madman George Miller followed up the most impressive action movie of the 21st century, not with a sequel that picks up where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ left off (although he hopes to make one), but rather with a prequel that sets the bar. To know where it all started, it’s also understandable that Miller didn’t try to maximize the orgiastic style that brought his Ozploitation franchise into the 21st century: the guy might be crazy, but he’s still not stupid.
“Nor is he willing to settle for diminishing returns. Instead of meeting (and failing) the incredibly high bar he set for himself, Miller decided to do something even crazier and more rewarding: he created a five-part, decades-long symphonic work. Revenge Saga so immense and so personal that it resists being seen as a mere extension of some other film, although it manages to deepen the impact of “Fury Road” at every step.
Read the full IndieWire via David Ehrlich.
“Sinister and liberating in some ways (and at the same time), Jane Schoenbrun’s ultra-lo-fi film ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ exploited the loneliness inherent in webcams and the performative danger of online creepypasta to create a disturbing portrait of the potentially dysphoric trysts between screens and identity in the age of the Internet. The kind of sui generis film shot in the dark that seems to have been made by someone who wasn’t sure anyone would see it. The debut film. is one of the few coming-of-age films that manages to include complete fear and self-recognition, and so it almost immediately resonated with an audience of people (trans people in particular who had been waiting for it). a lot of time something like “We’re all going to the world’s fair” to have the language and know how much they needed it.
Read the full version of IndieWire by David Ehrlich.
“An intimate three-hour epic with a planned pace, Vietnamese writer-director Thien An Pham’s first feature film, ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,’ is a haunting story about the soul’s unfathomable longing for the otherworld, which in turn borders on the transcendental. in his cinematographic direction and in the progressive confusion between reality and fantasy.
“The film premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where the filmmaker had already won the Illy Award in 2019 for the short film “Stay Awake, Be Ready”, in which a twist of fate in a corner interrupted a verbal exchange. between three friends during a meal. This short film is loosely remade for the opening scene of the new film, which expands on the concept of exploring one man’s attempt to triumph over a deeply unfulfilled life, taking him from the city of Saigon to the interior. of Viet Nam, either out of family necessity or in search of meaning. Where and how to continue your life in the future.
Read IndieWire via Josh Slater-Williams.
“In the opening moments of ‘Janet Planet,’ the silent miracle of Annie Baker’s first film, a young woman walks through a dark box and makes her way to a probably deserted structure. He picks up the phone in the dimly lit room and makes a shocking statement: he’s going to kill himself.
“It’s a disconcerting thing that immediately leaves the viewer wondering what exactly this movie is or what it could become. It also turns out to be a tongue-in-cheek joke that serves as an adventure for Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler), the wonderfully quirky preteen whose attitude is the film’s driving force.
Read the full IndieWire version by Esther Zuckerman.
“Nothing in this ill-healthed, unhappy world is easier or more confusing than sex, a precept that helps explain why the ever-provocative Catherine Breillat – whose films so enshrine female preference as making it violently indefinable – was induced to remake a Danish film from 2019. A film about a middle-aged lawyer who dedicates her life to protecting young rape victims, only to begin a torrid affair with her own 17-year-old stepson.
“El-Toukhy’s The Queen of Hearts has turned this blatant hypocrisy into a melodrama full of shame and secret darkness. Breillat’s “The Last Summer” is much lighter in every way, and even more revealing; it explodes the same premise in a rich exploration of the insufficient judgment that such a premise exists to invite.
Read David Ehrlich’s IndieWire article.
“American director Ben Mullinkosson began filming “The Last Year of Darkness” to document the lives of his frifinishes, a diverse collection of DJs, ravers, drag artists and skateboarders who found themselves in the exciting world of Funky Town, a queer underground. hidden. club in Chengdu. Filmed over five years and drawn from six hundred hours of footage, Mullinkosson’s second feature captures in detail the euphoric joy of China’s select club scene, a position where foreigners, and other gay people in particular, can be who they need to be. And yet, the end result is much more than just a laudatory documentary.
Read the full IndieWire via David Opie.
It’s [Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s] sizzling chemistry, which Glass channels into a series of truly gripping sex scenes that more than result in the need for such sequences in films that are based on genuine romantic relationships between human beings, that motivates “Love Lies Bleeding,” an alternately seductive and gruesome crime mystery that also smacks of midnight movie horror and excitement. Glass, who has already won many instant enthusiasts with his “Saint Maud,” once again approaches the human body as a vessel for pain, emotion, and much more, even if the brutally brutal imagery that dominates the film loses its force over time. “
Read the full IndieWire version by Kate Erbland.
“With Ti West’s visceral and moody ‘MaXXXine,’ this ultra-modern [snot] trend crystallized as a sharp yet eye-catching deconstruction of what’s known as female empowerment, arriving in theaters just in time for your cute little summer. A24’s titular scream queen, Mia Goth, makes her elegant and, yes, clearly bratty return as Maxine Minx in this horribly important finale to the “X” trilogy. At the very least, the dazzling finale feels like a piece. hyper-violent ’80s movie designed for girls. It delivers some of the show’s most excessive kills, as well as its most productive uses of bright costumes, bloody testicles, and feminist subversion for a whirlwind ride that also doubles as a social punishment.
Read the full IndieWire via Alison Foreman.
“If today you went to the São Luiz cinema, or the most famous cinema in Recife (the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco), you would find closed doors and a now iconic sign that says: ‘We will meet again’. . . ‘Again soon. ‘ ” Due to the pandemic and probably endless renovation work by the government, this sacred place has been closed for up to three months since March 2020.
For locals like me, that’s one of the reasons why watching it through the lens of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s incredibly private new documentary, “Pictures of Ghosts,” is so poignant. Through a combination of archival footage and new recordings, “Pictures of Ghosts” sees its director — whose filmography already includes deep and complex portraits of his hometown, such as “Neighboring Sounds” and “Aquarius” — revisits the places that created it. Recife’s cinemas are the main among them.
Read the full version by Guilherme Jacobs on IndieWire.
“It’s as much about belonging as it is about the desperate desire to belong, and it’s this pain that [drag queen] Simon (Théodore Pellerin) is forced to triumph over when his life becomes somewhat happier (at first) with the arrival . from a new drag colleague named Olivier (Félix Maritaud). as queer itself, intertwining drag as art with the kind of poisonous dating dynamic that Fran Rogowksi brought to life so vividly last year in Ira Sachs’ “Passages. ” And, of course, what would be an argument about. French-Canadian queer cinema specifically without mentioning Xavier Dolan, whose fixation on the bad mother/son dynamic also resonates here.
Read the full IndieWire version of David Opie.
“Sometimes Fran imagines herself dead, lying in a quiet forest. Sometimes Fran imagines being lifted, probably by the neck, through a huge crane, dying. Sometimes there is a large snake or a desolate beach. Sometimes yes, Fran thinks about dying. And that’s okay because Rachel Lambert’s whimsical “Sometimes I Think About Dying” and the confused woman in the middle think about other things, clever things, too. Like, well, don’t die. Maybe even, perhaps, alive. For a film about the allure of death, there’s a lot of life in this charming, understated one.
Read the full IndieWire via Kate Erbland.
“The summer of 2020 shouldn’t assign fond memories to the brain maps of those who endured it, yet Theda Hammel’s anxiety-inducing feature film, “Stress Positions,” set around July 4, COVID in New YorkArray asks you to live again. The scary days of sheltering in place, banging pots and pans in solidarity with healthcare workers and hands-on social distancing or providing comfort feel like you have status for something.
Read the full version of Ryan Lattanzio’s IndieWire.