The 10 Best Movies of 2024

Who’s ready to close the books on 2024, a year of unprecedented events and a bunch of top-notch movies? Much of we’re ready to bid farewell to in 2024 is baked right into the the year’s standout films: increasing climate catastrophes, unhinged TikTok personalities, religious dogma gone wild, nail biting economic dread, resistance to tyrannical despots, ill-advised cosmetic treatments, and the baffling popularity of creepy old men who only want to drain the life out of you. But that’s what we need movies for in the first place! 

So grab some couch, settle in, and have a good time with Cool Material’s picks for the best movies of 2024.

Belgian-Congolese renaissance man Baloji’s Omen has no equivalent in 2024’s cinema, because the man himself is one of a kind. His singular character as an artist feeds Omen’s aesthetics and informs its story, which he partially based on his own experience as a child of European and African ancestry. 

Calling the movie “autobiographical” would be a stretch, but Koffi (Marc Zinga), its initiating figure, echoes Baloji’s upbringing to degrees. Koffi has lived in Belgium for most of his life. With his girlfriend Alice (Lucie Debay) expecting twins, he decides to return to Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to see his family, tainted as he may be by local tribal superstitions. “Zabolo,” they call him: “Evil sorcerer.” Things don’t go well. 

But oh, the glorious patchwork quilt Baloji stitches out of bits and pieces from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, the Brothers’ Grimm, the historical record of colonial and Christian influence in the DRC. It’s a magical realist-cum-surrealist vision, and a bullhorn announcing Baloji’s latest medium to master.

2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road shouldn’t exist by the restrictions of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. We’re lucky to have it. Going by statistical odds, miracles don’t usually repeat, yet here we are nearly a decade later with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. 

It’s a very different vision of the post-apocalypse Outback, where Anya Taylor-Joy’s ferocious, self-determined survivor contends with Chris Hemsworth’s grandiloquent despot. Once again, George Miller has pulled off the nigh-impossible, reimagining origin stories as fertile ground for meaningful storytelling, an even greater feat than blowing up half the Australian desert without getting anyone killed. What Furiosa loses in propulsion compared to Fury Road, it makes up for through the substance of its new mythologizing.

Characters often make bad decisions in movies,, but there’s a limit to how bad a decision can be without breaking our suspension of disbelief. Want to extend that limit? Hire a cat. Feline dignity is no match for reckless feline curiosity, and the hero cat of Gints Zilbalodis’ urgent and vividly realized Flow courts peril in an already perilous circumstance —a global flood that only the world’s animals appear to have survived. 

No humans show up in Flood; we just see evidence of the lives they lived. The animal cast comprises a yellow Labrador, a capybara, a secretarybird, a lemur, and of course the cat, bobbing along together in a stray sailboat, subject to the water’s whims. A person in the cat’s place simply would not lean over the boat’s edge, but the cat repeatedly obliges its species’ handicap and pays the price by slipping overboard. Moments like these let Flow work out its thesis: when faced by an overwhelming crisis like climate change, unity across barriers, from cultural to language, is essential.

No performance this year better suits its brief and its tactical effect as well as Grant’s monster of a turn in Heretic. As Mr. Reed, the former rom-com heartthrob weaponizes his easy charms with a slow build-up for a chilling acknowledgment: That het may be playing a mean joke on LDS missionaries, or may be up to something far more sinister, nestled deep in the belly of his deceptively cozy home. Grant reframes his persona without changing it, and Heretic remixes the work he did in his leading man days, into something that’s half moralized and half sadistic.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, on the other hand, uses her reunion with the great Mike Leigh to reaffirm herself as one of her generation’s best and most underappreciated actors. As Pansy, the perpetually puffed up lead in Hard Truths, she is a whirlwind made human: Sit her on the examination table in her doctor’s office, and she’ll still read like she’s in constant, agitated motion. Jean-Baptiste betrays none of Pansy’s most explicit emotions. That’s part of the film’s tragedy: Perhaps, once upon a time, Pansy could have been encouraged to let go of her bitter resentments, over what we presume are the consequence of a childhood too harsh for her to bear, but she is too far gone at her age and incapable of moving on from them. That Jean-Baptiste so deftly invites humor in Pansy’s outrages without making her a punchline is miraculous, too.

A Will Ferrell movie that isn’t straightforwardly comedic, where he plays himself? That is a surprise. But Josh Greenbaum cuts against expectations on this cross-country ride along with Ferrell and Harper Steele, Ferrell’s best friend since working together on SNL in 1995. Steele came out to Ferrell as a transgender woman in 2021, and to reintroduce herself to the world, the pair sets out visiting Steele’s old haunts as a veteran road tripper.

Will & Harper is a reintroduction of a sort to each other, too; the movie orbits their personal conversations first, and their occasionally harrowing interactions with strangers second. Steele is Will & Harper’s heart, and Ferrell is its conscience. It’s in neither of their natures to be serious, but the film is to be taken seriously as a record of a transgender American experience and a lesson in the rigorous work of allyship.

“If the future exists for us, if we don’t disappear, then it was worth it,” says Slava Leontyev, co-director of Porcelain War, as well as one member of its central trio. Leontyev, his wife Anya Stasenko, and their friend Andrey Stefanov made the fateful choice to remain in Kharkiv during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; they are artists, and they continue sculpting and painting ornate porcelain figurines in defiance of tyranny and violent death. They reason that the surest way to kill off a culture isn’t to annihilate its people, but to erase proof they even existed. Each miniature they complete makes the Russian military’s goal that much harder to reach. If this sounds trite on paper, then in practice, it is terrifying; Leontyev, Stasenko, and Stefanov participate in their country’s defense, leading the film into combat situations, where death feels as if it’s just one cut away. This is as tense an action production as any fictional war movie released in the 2020s.

Robert Eggers makes such meticulously textured movies that watching them can feel like chafing. His work is defined by knotty, chipped wood, trace particulates settled on set decoration, and an intense focus on the imperfections of his actors’ faces (and, frankly, the perfections, too; that’s what happens when you cast Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Pattinson in your films). Nosferatu should be no different. What’s new to Eggers’ remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterwork is olfactory; you can almost smell Nosferatu’s blend of death, decay, and desperation. All of these lovely disgusting sensations waft through the lens of Jarin Blaschke, Eggers’ longtime cinematographer, bringing the same stark, tactile immersion to this classic tale of bad romance as he has in each of the director’s projects to date. 

Truth in advertising is the best policy. Right off the bat, Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers’ title informs viewers what they’re in for: a live-action crossbreed of a Looney Tunes sketch and a Super NES platformer, where applejack salesman turned intrepid frontiersman Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) sets out to catch hundreds of beavers and become the greatest trapper in all the land. Also, he’s smitten with the local merchant’s daughter (Olivia Graves), and to win her hand, he must sell her dad a whole heap of pelts. Folks whose pastime is grousing that nothing’s original anymore should take Hundreds of Beavers as a wacky salve; Cheslik, his cast, and his crew take such obvious pride in their madcap ingenuity that the film metastasizes into its own unique beast at a harefooted pace. You won’t laugh harder at any other 2024 release, because no other 2024 release has people in beaver suits getting annihilated by primitive Rube Goldberg machines.

This bloated, self-defeating, on-the-nose screed against women’s beauty standards, isn’t so much “obvious” as much as it’s “lazy.” The Substance pulls punches any time it threatens to say something smart, and assigns culpability to Elisabeth (Demi Moore), a fading film star, and Sue (Margaret Qualley), a younger version spawned from Elisabeth’s genetic material. The titular substance tempts clientele with perfection, then passes it onto the pseudo-doppelgänger that pops out of their spines instead. Coralie Fargeat’s film is stuffed with ideas but leaves viewers with nothing besides its ideas, most of which are contradictory. Even worse, the plot pits its leads, the victims of Hollywood’s beauty industrial complex, against each other, and not the pig-men running it. (One of those men, played by Dennis Quaid, is named “Harvey,” as if Fargeat is worried her viewers are too stupid to paint by numbers.) The Substance’s top-down design maximizes the plot’s meme potential at the expense of, well, substance. Fargeat is better than this.

Not a filmmaker in the world has the same facility for cataloguing the particulars of life on Earth right now as Radu Jude, whose latest work, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, welds a maximalist structure with a close-quarters character study. Jude possesses a preternatural understanding of how doom scrolling, alpha-male subculture, gig work’s ceaseless grind, and even Uwe Boll (the famously incompetent German director) all intersect, no matter how little they seem to relate to each other on a surface level. In Jude’s eyes, everything connects, because everything we do is tucked beneath late-stage capitalism’s umbrella and stirred by aftershocks of 20th century dictatorships. We can hardly blame exhausted PA Angela (Ilinca Manolache) for her pastime of posting TikToks as her alter ego, Andrew Tate acolyte Bobita—there are worse ways of tolerating our mundane end times than trolling people online.