The Best Movies of 2024: From the Erotically ChargedChallengersto the Roaringly WildFuriosa

Mar. 15, 2025

Zendaya watches a crucial tennis match.Photo:MGM

MGM

We’ve just enjoyed one of the best movie years in a long time, wouldn’t you say? Spread wide across the genre landscape, many of 2024’s films were so good, so vital and so wholly realized, they’ll be remembered and revisited long after.

You had Netflix’sflamboyant Mexican musicalEmilia Pérez,Jesse Eisenberg’ssomber, small-scale comedyA Real Pain,and therampaging action-fantasyFuriosa: A Mad Max Saga.Can you imagine sharing an Uber with them as your fellow passengers? Your route home might be complicated, but you’d arrive happy at the end, and you might be inclined to give the driver five stars.

By the way,you won’t findWickedon this hallowed list. The movie is certainly a phenomenon that’s made millions of people happy — audiences sing along with it! — andCynthia ErivoandAriana Grandeare both first-rate as the future Wicked and Good Witches. But it’s a middling musical that failed to make me want to go along for a deep dive into the witches' backstory.The Wizard of Ozwas about going over the rainbow.Wickedbasically goes under it.

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1: Challengers

Tennis, anyone? Everyone? In director Luca Guadagnino’s sexually sizzling film, the zipping ping and pong of a fuzzy yellow ball back and forth across a net builds to an almost orgasmic frenzy. Zendaya plays a onetime tennis prodigy who now manages her husband, a stalled star player (Mike Faist). To restore his mojo, she maneuvers him into a match against his former best friend, now rival (Josh O’Connor). But she may have her own spin — as Guadagnino slowly reveals, she alone understands that they’re all in love with one another. It’s just that their emotions play out on court.

This may frustrate people who want the film to be, in effect, a kind of three-wheeled rom-com, only perhaps more progressively unorthodox thanPretty Woman. ButChallengerstaps into something richer that’s also spectacularly messy. It’s about the fluidity of attraction — the desire to smudge those chalk lines. The film at times has the encompassing pansexuality of a D.H. Lawrence novel (Women in Love,say, which was adapted into arather startling film back in 1969) but with everyone wearing immaculate shorts and tennies. The movie is a dizzying original — an erotic workout.

It’s also much more successful than Guadagnino’s other 2024 film,Queer,which is focused solely on the thwarted gay passions of an American expat in 1950s Mexico.Former 007 Daniel Craigis excellent in the role, but the movie eventually wanders far off into the jungle as he searches for hallucinogenic drugs. Leslie Manville, looking as if she’d spent the last decade in a mud bath, supervises Craig’s surreal, CGI-enhanced trips into the sexual unconscious. The film isn’t so much sizzling as sozzled and sticky.

Challengersis now streaming on Prime Video and MGM+.

Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal at the heart of a papal election.Courtesy of Focus Features

Courtesy of Focus Features

2: Conclave

The most satisfying entertainment of the year stars Ralph Fiennes as a beleaguered cardinal overseeing a papal election. Although the movie is more slick and suspenseful than spiritual, Fiennes, in a performance that depends on the intricate interplay of his worried eyes and tense, purse-lipped mouth, suggests a genuine dark night of the soul. You might very well come out thinking that a few hours of shallow fun is more up your line — but that pretty much definesConclave. The supporting cast includes John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini as a nun who’s as unintimidatable as the warden of a women’s prison. That, too, is a job that probably requires its own special calling.

Conclaveis streaming on Peacock Dec. 13.

From Russian with love: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison.NEON

NEON

3: Anora

Is Anora in love with him or these luxe suburban trappings? Madison’s performance is both too tough and too vulnerable to let you decide one way or the other. But then the boy-child’s mother arrives (with a giggling, useless husband in tow) and makes it absolutely clear that she brings war and not peace: The marriage has to end, and Anora has to go. Madison is flawless in these closing scenes: stunned, heartbroken, unable to respond to the tentative romantic gestures of a Russian henchman who’s taken a shine to her. Poor Arona is not only thwarted but maybe defeated. God help her.

Anorais in theaters now.

Saldaña and Gascón.Netflix

Netflix

4: Emilia Pérez

Emilia’s drive and willfulness, combined with a new sense of maternal obligation, would have exhausted Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and all those legendary stars who played hard-working, social-climbing dames in old Hollywood movies — some of which, particularly Crawford’sQueen Bee,probably contributed toEmilia’scorkscrew DNA. As Emilia,trans actress Karla Sofía Gascónhas the warmth of an earth mother, but that warmth can’t completely defrost the cold-bloodedness of her past. It’s a performance that will be celebrated throughout the awards season, although I found myself gravitating more to Gomez, with her glamour and sour malice. One complaint: The musical numbers are too brief.

Emilia Pérezis now streaming on Netflix.

Saoirse Ronan.Sony Pictures Classics

Sony Pictures Classics

5: The Outrun

Saoirse Ronan, who taps into natural forces so authentically she could probably turn herself into a tree — trembling leaves, birds' nest and all of that — is extraordinary as a young alcoholic woman finding rebirth in remote Scotland. Ronan’s relationship to the camera can’t be explained, but when everything is clicking you could probably call it a love affair. The actress is magnetic, whether she’s drunk, troubled and drab or calmly radiant as she reaches a new stability in her life. There are good, sympathetic performers from the supporting cast, among them Saskia Reeves (Slow Horses) as Ronan’s mother. I just wish I cared.

It’s only fair to note, though, that even Ronan can occasionally get lost in a production: This year she also starred inBlitz,a viscerally thrilling recreation of the German bombing of London in World War II. But all that stunning havoc was built on a weak, muddled script that left Ronan dramatically stranded as a woman whose son has gone missing. The film may have been aiming for the primal mother-child connection that made Steven Spielberg’sEmpire of the Sunso moving. If so, it was buried in the rubble.

The Outrunis available to rent or own on demand.

This ain’t no joy ride: Anya Taylor-Joy as young Furiosa.Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Pictures

6: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagais now streaming on Max.

Culkin and Eisenberg travel over emotionally rugged terrain.Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

7: A Real Pain

A Real Painis in theaters now.

Adria Arjona and Glen Powell.Netflix

8: Hit Man

Glen Powelllands a much-deserved leading-man vehicle in this larky comedy from director Richard Linklater(Boyhood),and he handles the responsibility with a kind of sexy graciousness that never pushes the humor too hard. He playsGary Johnson, a philosophy professor who develops a unique second career with the New Orleans police posing as an assassin-for-hire in order to entrap disgruntled wives, husbands and lovers willing to pay to rid their lives of other human encumbrances.

The issue of entrapment is an interesting one, butHit Manis too playful to get hung up on that or other moral and ethical issues. Even Gary’s would-be clients tend to be likable. Why hold their murderous impulses against them?Hit Manultimately is about Gary’s romance with another potential paycheck (Adria Arjona), who has some of the enticingly dangerous appeal of a femme fatale out of a James M. Cain thriller. However, as sex symbols go, Powell is the winner here.When he appears in a white tee,you want to tear it off with your teeth.

Hit Manis now streaming on Netflix.

Ethan Herisse.Courtesy of Orion Pictures

Courtesy of Orion Pictures

9: Nickel Boys

Nickel Boysis in select New York theaters Dec. 13, then select Los Angeles theaters Dec. 20 before expanding nationwide in the following weeks.

Joy (Amy Poehler) and Anxiety (Maya Hawke).Disney/Pixar

Disney/Pixar

10: Inside Out 2

Note: I should let you know that in compiling this list for the Dec. 9 issue ofPEOPLE,I went withInside Out 2over the beautiful and movingThe Wild Robot,which will almost certainly be its competitor in the upcoming Oscars race. My decision was based on what might seem a trivial as well as an unkind excuse: I just didn’t take to the movie’s little protagonist, a goose named Brightbill. What can I say? I apologize to Brightbill’s fan base and hope they all take flight on their own wings of courage.

That said, when I was still weighing the one cartoon against the other, I hadn’t seen the stunning Latvian animated featureFlow,a meditative, dialogue-free tale about a cat trying to survive in a world where the rivers keep surging and swallowing up the land. It’szen-sational (ha-ha) and superior to eitherInside Out 2orTheWild Robot.

Inside Out 2is now streaming on Disney+.

source: people.com