Best Movies of 2024: From Challengers to Furiosa

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 than Pretty Woman. But Challengers taps 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 a rather startling film back in 1969) but with everyone wearing immaculate shorts and tennies. The movie is a dizzying original — an erotic workout.

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, gives a performance that feels like 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 defines Conclave. 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.

3: Anora

Many years ago a well-known film critic, reviewing Diane Keaton’s performance in the largely forgotten Looking for Mr. Goodbar, wrote, "If she doesn’t win the Oscar, there is no God!" I feel the same way about Mikey Madison’s breakthrough performance in this comedy-drama about a Manhattan sex worker, Anora, who meets the boy-man of her dreams. Played by Mark Eydelshteyn, he’s the mindless, affable son of Russian gangsters and lives in a large, charmless house on Long Island, where he installs Anora as his princess — and bride — and goes back to playing video games.

4: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

From Russian with love: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison. All of this, along with endless action scenes, is directed with swift, vivid boldness and mechanical precision by director George Miller. And yet Furiosa was met with indifference by moviegoers, who seemed to prefer the vast, stately vision of Denis Villeneuve’s superb Dune: Part Two. (Taylor-Joy has a cameo there, by the way.) But it’s just show business, isn’t it? Nothing to get furiosa about.

5: A Real Pain

Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg and Succession’s Kieran Culkin play formerly close cousins trying to re-bond during a group tour of Poland. The title and setup might make you think you’re embarking on yet another buddies-on-the-road story, but the film slowly reveals tremendous depths of sorrowful empathy — it ends up being about many kinds of pain, among them the agony of mental illness (Culkin’s character, for all his slacker humor, is crippled by some undiagnosed form of depression), Jewish history (did I mention that the tour is focused on Holocaust sites?) and how subsequent generations of American Jews have continued to grapple with the shadow of genocide.

6: Hit Man

Glen Powell lands 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 plays Gary 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.

7: Nickel Boys

Novelist Colson Whitehead has enjoyed great good fortune with the adaptations of his two most recent novels. The Underground Railroad, both a history and an allegory about an enslaved woman who escapes from a Southern plantation, became an unblinkingly strong Prime Video series. Now his Pulitzer winner, Nickel Boys, has been turned into an equally uncompromising yet at times surprisingly lyrical film directed by RaMell Ross. When a Black teen (Ethan Herisse) is unjustly sent off to a notorious Florida reform school, a life of promise is derailed. The camera’s shifts in perspective only deepen the hurt and ultimately complicate the question of how racism can be overcome.

8: Inside Out 2

The most successful cartoon in history, this sequel to Pixar’s beloved 2015 hit doesn’t stint on the original’s ingenuity or emotional honesty, but what’s happening this time (inside and out) is adolescence. Which means heroine Riley’s mind has to make room for new feelings: These include Anxiety, Embarrassment and — the special companion of any adolescent who wants his or her growing existential doubts to be noticed and taken seriously by everyone else in the room — Ennui, limp as an overcooked strand of linguini.

Conclusion

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 were so good, so vital and so wholly realized, they’ll be remembered and revisited long after.

FAQs

Q: What is the best movie of 2024?
A: According to the article, the top choice is Challengers, a film that explores the fluidity of attraction and the desire to smudge those chalk lines.

Q: Who stars in Conclave?
A: The film stars Ralph Fiennes as a beleaguered cardinal overseeing a papal election.

Q: What is Anora about?
A: Anora is a comedy-drama about a Manhattan sex worker who meets the boy-man of her dreams and installs him as her princess and bride.

Q: Who directed Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga?
A: The film was directed by George Miller.

Q: What is A Real Pain about?
A: The film is about two cousins trying to re-bond during a group tour of Poland, and it explores the agony of mental illness, Jewish history, and the shadow of genocide.

Q: Who stars in Hit Man?
A: The film stars Glen Powell as a philosophy professor who develops a unique second career as an assassin-for-hire.

Q: What is Nickel Boys about?
A: The film is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel and tells the story of a Black teen who is unjustly sent off to a notorious Florida reform school.

Q: What is Inside Out 2 about?
A: The film is a sequel to Pixar’s beloved 2015 hit and explores the emotions of adolescence, including Anxiety, Embarrassment, and Ennui.