100 Best 2024 Movies Released So Far

In 1966, Elizabeth Taylor and her friends recorded themselves talking about the ups and downs of her life. These candid conversations are the basis of The Lost Tapes, a revealing tell-all that allows Taylor to set the record straight in her own words. Here, you get to see and hear the many parts of Taylor–her romanticism, activism, and passion, as well as her fun banter with the journalists, friends, and lovers who alternately interview her. Of course, the downside to having Taylor and her loved ones narrate a biography is you only get one side of the story, while the thornier parts of her life are skated over. Things like child labor and having to play a married-24-year-old at 16 years old, or being physically abused and suffering a miscarriage, these are things Taylor, and therefore the documentary, shy away from expounding. But while it may not be the definitive documentary on Taylor, it certainly is the most personal and intimate. It also serves as a reminder of how we’d all like to be remembered—in our own and our cherished friends’ words.

When modern systems like law enforcement and forensics fail to come up with definite answers to a murder, loved ones of the victim usually have no recourse, which is the fear at the heart of Irish horror film Oddity. To lose someone you care about, forever, hurts. So when Darcy takes more strange and esoteric means of investigation, and when writer-director Damian Mc Carthy slowly reveals through personal effects, psychic images, and an excellent pace, the hurt and the pain intensifies the murder mystery and the hope that she would receive justice for her loss. Oddity feels genuinely unsettling, because Mc Carthy understands what’s truly scary about losing a loved one.

At first, you wonder, couldn’t this behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Boy and The Heron just be a DVD special? But a few minutes in, it becomes clear how rich the material is. It’s not just about Miyazaki and the making of a movie, it’s about him grappling with grief and transforming it into art. A surprising chunk of this documentary is about death. Miyazaki’s friends and colleagues are passing away, it seems, every month, and the only way Miyazaki can mourn and honor them is through his (their) art. The Boy and The Heron itself is a fulfillment of a promise Miyazaki made to his closest friend, Isao Takahata, or Pak-san, as Miyazaki lovingly calls him. It’s Pak-san whom he mourns the most in the movie, but almost everyone who’s passed makes an appearance both in the documentary and the film. The lines between the two are often blurred by Miyazaki, in his failing memory, and by documentary director Kaku Arakawa. Arakawa’s editing is chaotic, if not experimental. He cuts between reality and fiction—documentary footage and Ghibli clips—faster than you can make sense of it all. “I opened my brain way too far for this project,” Miyazaki claims, and you can feel the exhilaration and fear in every second of this brilliant film.

It’s What Inside can seem like another obnoxious movie about adults acting like teens, edited with enough neon glare and social media cuts to make it palatable to a younger crowd. But the horror comedy is more than just streaming fodder; it’s fun, funny, and clever, unfolding like a game night gone terribly wrong. There are romantic entanglements, identity crises, steamy role play, and welcome jabs at our generation’s increasing tendency to replace personality with social media presence. Its critique may not be as sharp as other horror comedies that have come before it (most recently, Bodies Bodies Bodies and The Blackening), so it can feel a bit dated. But it’s still an enjoyable watch, one best seen with friends who you haven’t seen in a long while and who have maybe, once or twice, made you feel painfully, irrationally, (murderously?) jealous.

It’s kind of amazing how Johnson, who writes, directs, and stars in this feature, narrowly escapes narrative holes by being so darn self-effacing and likable. The female lead Maddy (Anna Kendrick) should be denounced as a Manic Pixie Girl, but because of Johnson and Kendrick’s overflowing charm, you don’t question the flimsiness of her character until much later on. The game itself should not make sense, but because Johnson is so committed in his physical performance, and so arresting in his charisma, all is forgiven. Self Reliance is like a tasty souffle that looks great at the moment, but left for longer, poofs and deflates. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, the film should be a fun if forgettable ride.

When it comes to ghosts, plenty of films are centered around personal, unresolved business in the living world, but rarely do films examine how the spirit world would be, unless it’s for fantastical fights or horrific terror. The Parades instead focuses on a world of lost, but ordinary, and thankfully kind, souls. And as the film builds its calm world, Minako (and the viewers) get to meet the people who would form her eventual found family, whose various lives uncover the intimate and personal hopes of ordinary people, shaped by the events of their respective times. While the film doesn’t fully resolve all their stories, The Parades celebrates life, in all forms, and the powerful ways storytelling and community helps us go through it.

If given the outline of this film, it might be easy to just call it poverty porn. But there’s a genuineness to Mambar Pierrette that keeps this film from sliding into melodrama, a certain subtlety that captures the everyday life in Douala, Cameroon. Filmmaker Rosine Mbakam, who made her start through documentary films, brings her naturalistic style here, placing the titular seamstress front and center as she responds to each and every difficulty that comes her way. And as the flood comes, and so too her troubles, Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat shines with a subtle charisma, a performance full of dignity for the titular single mother that carved out a life through her craft. Mambar Pierrette might have a familiar neo-realist story, but it’s done well due to its excellent balance.

Shot for only 20 days with a budget of a million dollars, The Last Stop in Yuma County is a small film, but it achieves significant feats, thanks in large part to first-time feature director Francis Galluppi’s strong vision. The set is stylish, the characters feel lived in, and the central mystery—will these robbers get away with it?—feels so taut and tense that it’s enough to fuel the entire film’s energy. There’s no need to look for backstories, motivations, or subplots; just waiting to see whether the finger will let go of the gun’s trigger, or if anyone will catch the hostage’s silent plea for help, is absorbing enough.

When Moviepass announced that it would allow you to watch at least one theater film a day for just $10/month, the deal seemed too good to be true. And it was, though it wouldn’t be apparent till a couple years later after top executives Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth burned through the company’s funding and ultimately ran the company down to the ground. That’s one story MoviePass, MovieCrash tells, that of a business that bit too much than it could chew. But the documentary also brings to the fore the overlooked story of Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, the company’s Black co-founders who built something special and innovative, but who were shoved off in a frustrating move of greed and racial politics. That’s the more interesting part of the film, especially since Spikes eventually reclaims what’s his. It’s also what gives the documentary more heart than the usual tale of a business’s downfall.

The Great Lillian Hall doesn’t do anything particularly great to a familiar premise, but it’s still worth watching for the knockout performances. There’s Lange, whose dementia both complicates her desire to mount one last performance and resurfaces her guilt for being an absent mother. There’s Bates, who offers both sympathy and tough love. And then there’s Rabe, who’s gut-punching as the pained daughter crawling her way into her mother’s stiff arms. Everything else about the film is not as noteworthy as it drags the film for way longer than it should be. But that trifecta of performances makes it all worthwhile.