Looking forward: the best films coming in 2024 – Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Luca Guadagnino return in the new year
From Holocaust drama One Life starring Anthony Hopkins to Pixar's return to consciousness in Inside Out 2 with Maya Hawke, here are the best films coming in 2024
One Life, dir. James Hawes
2023 has produced many dramas and documentaries centred around the Holocaust, especially on television with A Small Light (Disney+) and The US and the Holocaust (BBC). And further down this list, The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer’s first film in 10 years – takes place in Auschwitz. Black Mirror and Slow Horses director James Hawes joins them with his new biopic of stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who saved the lives of 669 Czechoslovakian children before the Nazi invasion in 1939.
In One Life, Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins play Nicholas at different ages. The retired Nicholas (Hopkins) ponders whether he’s made a difference in the world. That is, until he pores over forgotten documents detailing his efforts to save as many children as possible in Prague on the eve of World War II. With help from his mother, various volunteers and the British public, Nicholas (Flynn) undertakes the ambitious mission.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Priscilla, dir. Sofia Coppola
There's a certain fear and hesitancy when considering the story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Because they met when she was 14 and he was 24, the debate of historical contexts versus modern sensibilities always disrupts the nuances of what really happened. It's a tricky tale to tell in a post-#MeToo landscape. That's why Sofia Coppola's ambitious biopic Priscilla feels daring.
Coppola is too intelligent a filmmaker to opt for black-and-white portrayals that make abused women into helpless damsels and abusive men into ogres of toxicity. Instead, she observes from Priscilla's mindset – how she felt, how she saw things – shaving away the retrospective right and wrong. Dangling in this difficult territory, in which the King of rock 'n' roll has big groomer energy, the film provides a delicate, honest and empowering portrait of Priscilla’s journey from naïve girl to independent woman. The film stars Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elordi as Elvis.
Photo: A24
Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Since emerging from the Greek Weird Wave movement, Lanthimos has earned cult status with his surrealist English-language films The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer before turning down the bafflement (if only a little) for The Favourite. Poor Things returns the volume to where it was, but with a larger studio budget usually unthinkable for a film so bizarre and sexual.
A dead woman is brought back to life with a child’s brain, transplanted by the physically scarred Dr Godwin ‘God’ Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who’s openly derided by the ableist Victorian society. With a developed body and an infantile mind, Bella Baxter (an electrifying Emma Stone) lives among hybrid creatures like chicken-dogs in the doctor’s vast, scientific abode. Bella grows curious about the outside world, but it’s only with the arrival of the sexually lascivious lawyer Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) that she feels able to leave and explore.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
Mean Girls, dir. Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr.
It’s too soon for a Mean Girls remake, surely? For the uninitiated: the 2004 film is perhaps the defining female-led high-school movie of the noughties. Even more triggering for its original millennial audience, the trailer for the remake uses the tagline ‘This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls’, which is really rather rude. However, there is promise in this version. As well as being updated for the memefied TikTok generation, it's also an adaptation of the Broadway musical.
Angourie Rice (Mare of Easttown) takes the Lindsay Lohan role as Cady Heron, a new student who adapts to the social structures of an American high school. Reneé Rap (The Sex Lives of College Girls) plays the endlessly quoted Regina George, the alpha-female leader of top-tier clique ‘The Plastics’, who takes an interest in Cady. Things get complicated when Cady starts fancying Regina’s ex Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney). Also stars Tina Fey, Jon Hamm, Jenna Fischer and Tim Meadows, with music by Jeff Richmond (Girls5Eva) and lyrics by Nell Benjamin (Legally Blonde: The Musical).
Photo: Paramount Pictures
All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh
The concept of ghosts summarises two unanswerable conditions of human nature: the fear of death and the desire for immortality. These are devices favoured by horror movies and stories by torchlight, telling of phantoms that bump into and scream at and prey on the living. But in Andrew Haigh’s seductively somnambulant All of Us Strangers, the ghosts are kind, concerned and inviting.
They’re the dead parents of Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely 40-something screenwriter working on a new project that dives into his own past. This process inspires a visit to his family home. After a walk through the park, he meets with his dad (Jamie Bell) and, later, his mum (Claire Foy). They’re not smothered in blood, they don’t whisper his name down narrow corridors, and they harbour no ill will in the slightest. They just have a chat. Paul Mescal also stars.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer
Imagine a house, two storeys high. It has a large garden, populated with sunflowers and vegetables. An ostensibly idyllic family lives there: father, mother, kids, a baby and a dog. If they weren’t speaking German, you might mistake the sight for picture-postcard American suburbia. And then: the father, Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Heidel), emerges in his Nazi uniform. Instead of a white picket fence, the property is bordered by a tall grey wall – beyond which stand the brick buildings of Auschwitz.
This is the tangible absurdity of Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. The environment is almost Lynchian in its disparity: strolling across the threshold of the worst horror in human history. You can hear the screams and shouts of disorder. Kids play as gunshots snap in the distance. Smoke and flames erupt from a crematorium chimney, visible from the garden. The film relaxes into this eerie liminal space that isn’t properly acknowledged by the characters, like a 100-minute act of amoral disassociation.
Photo: A24
The Iron Claw, dir. Sean Durkin
Can you imagine a hotter male cast? The Greatest Showman’s Zac Efron with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Scrapper’s Harris Dickinson: all in one movie. In The Iron Claw, they play brothers in the Von Erich family – famous in the world of wrestling. But their story is among the most tragic in sports, filled with death and grief. The vibe is more The Wrestler than Fighting With My Family.
The film follows the bros during their ascendency in the early 80s, led by former wrestler and stern patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany). But in their drive to fame, the family refuses to confront the psychological scars each of them carries – said to be the aftereffect of a family curse, which the oldest brother Kevin (Efron) wants to break. Also stars Lily James.
Photo: A24
The Taste of Things, dir. Tràn Anh Hùng
Although Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, The Taste of Things was selected as France’s entry for the Oscars 2024. It was a surprising snub. But Tràn Anh Hùng’s new film looks like a delicious alternative: presenting a colourful array of culinary pleasures to enjoy on the big screen.
Loosely adapted from the novel by Marcel Rouff, The Taste of Things follows the ambiguous relationship between gourmet chef Dodin-Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in 1885. Despite the romance in the air, Eugénie has always wanted her independence – declining Dodin’s marriage proposal. And so, for the first time, he decides to cook her a meal.
Photo: Picturehouse Entertainment
Dune: Part Two, dir. Denis Villeneuve
Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sadistically complicated sci-fi novel, one that’s defeated legendary efforts by David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. But Denis Villeneuve (the mainstream auteur of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049) has managed to organise the story and its confusing space politics into a marginally accessible two-parter, allowing it room to breathe.
Part One concluded with the heir to House Atreides, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), joining the native Fremen on the Spice planet Arrakis with his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). In Part Two, Paul aims to overthrow House Harkonnen with the Fremen woman Chani (Zendaya). This final chapter also introduces Florence Pugh, Léa Seydoux, Austin Butler and Christopher Walken in major roles.
Read our review of Part One.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Evil Does Not Exist, dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi surprised global cinema with the success of his three-hour, grief-stricken epic Drive My Car, winning the Best International Film Oscar in 2022. (It was also Culture Whisper’s favourite film of 2021.) But whereas that film is psychologically eerie and concerned with the mysteries of human beings, Hamaguchi’s latest work Evil Does Not Exist grazes on the political.
Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter live modestly amid nature in a village near Tokyo. Local residents become aware of corporate plans to change their long-existing environment, turning an area near Takumi’s home into a glamping site for city-dwellers. This project threatens the village's water supply and its ecological balance.
Photo: Modern Films
Monster, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
2023 has been a busy year for the Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda. His surrogate family drama Broker was released in February, proving to be one of the best films of 2023. And he slipped into television, almost under the radar, with his culinary coming-of-age Netflix drama The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.
For 2024, he returns with a darker and more multi-layered project. Monster follows an incident between a student and a teacher with differing perspectives – adopting a fractured, Rashomon-like narrative. The teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayami) appears to have hit the student Minato (Soya Kurokawa) and called him ‘pig-brain’ without explanation. This spirals into a confused mixture of contradictory stories involving bullying and homophobia that make you wonder who’s telling the truth and who’s bending it.
Photo: Goodfellas / Monster Film Committee
Drive-Away Dolls, dir. Ethan Coen
The Coen Brothers are perhaps the most important director duo in American filmmaking. Rising in the indie wave of the 90s with Fargo and The Big Lebowski, they continued into the 21st century with movies ranging from the psychopathically thrilling No Country for Old Men to the mutedly existential Inside Llewyn Davis. Lately, however, the brothers have split from each other to helm their own projects. First was Joel Coen with his stylistic, black-and-white adaptation of Macbeth and now, following his documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis, Ethan returns to criminal comedy with Drive-Away Dolls.
The fun-loving Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and the more officious Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are at a bleak point in their lives, and they decide to take a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida. But they unknowingly take a car used by criminals to hide a special briefcase… and, naturally, the latter want it back. Also stars Matt Damon, Beanie Feldstein and Pedro Pascal.
Photo: Focus Features
Mickey 17, dir. Bong Joon-ho
After winning three Oscars for Parasite in 2019 (including Best Picture), filmmaker Bong Joon-ho stormed culture as a whole: proving how vital and beautiful world cinema is. And although Korean cinema has been popular for decades, especially Park Chan-wook movies, Bong has led a new army of fanatics.
Returning to science-fiction, Bong adapts the 2022 Edward Ashton novel – taking place in an interplanetary dystopia where bodies are disposable and memory is transferable. Plot details are scarce, but the book follows an Expendable: an employee with a disposable body sent to the ice planet Niflheim for future colonisation. The previous Mickey is captured by indigenous creatures, so the next Mickey tries to find him. The film stars Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun and Naomi Ackie.
Photo: Netflix
Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino
Summer 2023 was hit hard by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, even causing Challengers – the latest film from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All) – to pull out of the Venice Film Festival. The general release date has also been pushed back to next year.
But maybe that’s good, like delayed gratification for what looks to be one of the director’s steamiest movies. Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (all unbelievably beautiful), Challengers follows the tennis pro Tashi (Zendaya) as she navigates a tricky, sexy ménage à trois between fellow players Patrick (O’Connor) and Art (Faist) – mixing sports with pleasure.
Photo: MGM
Inside Out 2, dir. Kelsey Mann
The first Inside Out was a mindful wonder, a psychological adventure through the brain of 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias). Within the cage of her skull were Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Anger (Lewis Black), all operating a motherboard of reactions for Riley’s external self to facilitate. Besides being a classically heartwarming and tear-worthy Pixar movie, the film also provided a fascinating fantasy of consciousness.
Almost 10 years later, Pixar finally arrives with a sequel – exploring Riley’s destructive transition to adolescence. A gaggle of dark blobs invade her emotional hub and break everything. They even introduce a brand-new emotion: Anxiety (Maya Hawke). It’s hard not to relate…
Photo: Disney/Pixar/Sky