100 Best 2024 Movies You Should Watch Right Now

In the first twenty minutes, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin seemed to be quite unremarkable, with the usual way a biographical documentary would go, that is, loved ones waxing poetic about how great the dead person was in life. But the documentary takes this to introduce Ibelin the same way his parents discovered the online life Mats Steen lived. It’s a unique documentary, mixing in the usual home videos with the animated gameplay of the archived life Steen lived in Ibelin, but it’s grounded by, and somewhat co-created through the words Steen himself typed about his life as a disabled man, and the game history he shared with the community he formed online. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin ends up being quite a remarkable depiction of living online, that feels much more honest, human, and creative than the condescending or cautious narratives we’ve previously heard about the online world.

There is nothing quite like The Substance right now. It’s unsubtle, it’s provocative, and its satirical humor can be a hit or miss for some viewers, but it strikes at the one thing that’s fundamental to everyone, that can make or break their lives, yet that is rarely given grace and consideration– that is the body. Legions of people have yearned for youth and beauty, but The Substance systematically outlines how much these have been intertwined with our livelihoods, opportunities, and identities, and how other entities would capitalize on this yearning and push many of us to take that out, suck that out, literally, from ourselves. The Substance does this all with insane, frenetic energy.

The first things that grab your attention in Nickel Boys are its beauty and technicality. Director RaMell Ross, a large-format photographer, ensures every frame relays something deep, intimate, and moving. Then there’s how he takes these shots: we see things unfold through the POV of Elwood and Turner, students at an abusive reform school in Tallahassee, Florida. The year is 1962, and even though the civil rights movement inspires Elwood and his peers to stand up for themselves, the political climate is as skewed and violent as ever. Nickel Boys tells the unfortunately common story of how Black men, in particular, had to endure unimaginable abuse during the Jim Crow era in the South. What is uncommon, though, is the sensitivity and boundless inventiveness with which Ross tells this story. Yes, violence is unavoidable in a story like this, but Ross swaps trauma porn with something more effective and chilling—a mixture of silence, archival photographs, time jumps, and that immersive POV, which forces you to be in Elwood and Turner’s shoes. The world before them may be brutal, but inside, they hold space for beauty, fun, relationships, and wonder, manifested in the film in dreamy visual sequences. What Ross does is art in the highest form, an unforgettable balance between style and substance.

Not everybody holds a good relationship with their sisters, but ideally, we get to reunite and repair things in a good time. Unfortunately, for some families, the only time they reunite is due to a parent nearly dying. This is the case in His Three Daughters, where the three sisters meet after years living apart. It’s a common plotline, mostly depicted in the feel-good, family friendly variation, but writer-director Azazel Jacobs makes the three sisters distinct by taking the easy assumptions many people would make about them, and naturally push them to reveal the opposite. Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen form a great trio, delivering equally excellent performances under the same roof.

Beautiful in its painterly compositions and gut-wrenching in its storytelling, The Wild Robot has been dubbed one of the best animated features in a while, and rightly so. The film, which is a bit like if Tarzan were a robot, or if Stitch had to assimilate in the wild instead of the city, is a classic tale of an outsider learning to love and be accepted by her community. It’s about many other things, too, like the violence of nature, the supreme power of kindness, and the complexities of parenthood (it’s deeply humanistic for a film that features almost no humans at all). But for all the themes it tackles and the colorful multitude of characters it covers, it feels incredibly light and easy to watch. Perhaps that’s due to its hand-drawn aesthetics, which recall Studio Ghibli films more than anything, and to the voices who bring the characters to life, most notably that of Lupita Nyong’o, who gives the robot Roz so much warmth and depth despite her electronic limitations. All these and more make Wild Robot a must-watch, if not an instant classic.

Hurt people hurt people, the saying goes, and nowhere is that more evident than in Hard Truths. Directed by Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky), Hard Truths follows two sisters who couldn’t be more different. One is Chantelle, a cheerful hairdresser who has raised equally ebullient daughters, and the other is Pansy, a hardened woman who lashes out at everyone from her family to the people queuing up in the grocery. Pansy is brutal, the sort of person you’d roll your eyes at if you were unlucky enough to encounter her in public. But Leigh gives us a glimpse into her internal struggle; nothing too obvious, as is the naturalistic director’s style, but we feel her pain whenever she goes out of her way to avoid the people closest to her, or when she savors a moment alone and hides her tears. There is no linear plot in Hard Truths; instead, it’s a collection of lived moments and ordinary joys and sorrows. It’s also a welcome reflection of our fractured reality. Loneliness, grief, anger, anxiety—these feelings are often inexplicable, and they come out of us in ways that are never immediately understandable or direct. So why should Pansy be? The film is an exercise in sympathy as well as a mirror to our own complicated and invisible hurt.

To plenty of countries around the globe, democracy has become so ubiquitous that we forget it’s relatively new, at least relative to the rest of human history. Bhutan is one of the last countries that became a democracy, and writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji chose to depict a slice of how they made the shift in The Monk and the Gun. As Tashi sets out to obtain two weapons for his mentor, and Ron seeks a specific antique gun, Dorji presents slice-of-life moments of the beautiful Bhutan countryside, intercut with the subtle ways tradition still persists amidst modernity, and the funny ways change can clash with culture. It’s no wonder The Monk and the Gun was chosen as the Bhutanese entry for the Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards.

There are three threads in Daughters that directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton weave beautifully together. The first thread follows the incarcerated men who gather every week to talk about fatherhood, mostly, because of the program that they’re in, but also: masculinity, race, systemic poverty, social mobility, and the skewed prison system in America. The discussions are raw and enlightening. “This isn’t normal, that we’re all in here,” one of the men wisely says, and it feels special to witness that moment of shared empowerment. The second thread follows the daughters, whose ages range from 5 to 15. In line with the film’s honesty, it shows us girls who miss their fathers and girls who don’t; girls who know everything about them and those who can’t even remember their faces. One is oblivious, the other suicidal. This part is enlightening in a different way: you hope the kids are too young to realize what’s going on, but that’s almost never the case. The final thread is where the two others meet: it offers the most heartbreaking parts of the film, but also the most beautiful. Both parties dress up, take pictures, move on the dancefloor, and say their inevitable goodbyes, and all this is captured in the same darklit, grainy color as the film cameras the fathers and daughters are given to document the dance. The direction and editing is artistic, but never in a gratuitious way. Instead, like other parts of the film, it’s filled with gentleness and empathy.

Is there anything more lovely than hearing Martin Scorsese talk about cinema? Maybe it’s just the film nerds in us– we are, after all, always on the hunt for A Good Movie to Watch– but it’s just wonderful to hear Scorsese talk about movies, especially from directors he loves and are inspired by. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is about the influence of The Archers, and while it’s mostly a straightforward documentary, director David Hinton makes it something like a cohesive film course on the directors, with Scorsese as lecturer. Oftentimes letting the directors’ shots and music speak for themselves, with Scorsese adding needed context, it won’t be a surprise that Made In England would be a treat for film nerds, but it also would be a great introduction for casual viewers, or viewers that want to start watching classic films, like those of The Archers.

Before this documentary, I didn’t have the faintest clue that the formative films of my childhood—Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, ET, and Harry Potter, to name a few—were scored by one man: John Williams. This film is a loving tribute to Williams, who at 92, is still as lively as ever as he shares how he stumbled into Hollywood and found his calling as the definitive movie composer. It features interviews with frequent collaborators like Steven Spielberg and Yoyo Ma and fans like Chris Martin and Seth MacFarlane, but it’s truly Williams’ music that makes watching this a special experience. As soon as you hear the chilling first notes of Jaws, the brash opening of Star Wars, and the melodic strings of Jurassic Park, you’re hooked. Then Williams, often along with the directors, go on and recount how those came to be, and you find yourself seated, eyes wide with wonder.