Best new films out in 2024

Love Lies Bleeding

The British director Rose Glass "made a brilliant, disturbing debut with the 2019 psychological chiller Saint Maud", said Jonathan Romney in the FT. "She takes an unpredictable side turn with her second film "Love Lies Bleeding" – an all-American slice of crime", heavily laced with violence and "blazing carnality".

Set in New Mexico at the end of the 1980s, it stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, the lesbian manager of a rundown gym who is stopped in her tracks when Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an amateur bodybuilder, blows in en route to Las Vegas. Smitten by Jackie's "rippling muscles", Lou offers her a box of steroids. One "jab in the buttock" later, "red-hot sex ensues"; and soon, Lou and Jackie are an item. Their relationship comes under pressure, however, when Lou's sister is beaten up by her husband, and Jackie takes brutal vengeance. Essentially a "superior B-movie", the film loses coherence towards the end, but Stewart is good as a "trembling, tarnished waif", and Anna Baryshnikov is "nicely excessive" as her "cloyingly insistent admirer".

This "jaw-dropping" film is a "scoff-it-down dollop of outrageous gourmet pulp" shot through with the same ambiguity that made "Saint Maud" so exciting, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. It's the sort of film you "want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable". The story unfolds with "wit and dramatic flair", said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But as it cuts from plot point to plot point, it forgets to give its two main characters traits, interests, enthusiasms and backstories – giving rise to a blank "sense of emptiness".

The Teachers' Lounge

"The Teachers' Lounge is a short-ish German drama about a small sum of money going missing from a jacket in a secondary school staff room" – and it is "chalk-snappingly tense", said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Leonie Benesch (Princess Cecilie in The Crown) is "superb" as Ms Nowak, an idealistic young teacher from Poland who has taken up a position at a school in Germany. The school has been contending with a "low-level pickpocketing spree"; and after a Turkish pupil is accused – seemingly wrongfully – Ms Nowak leaves out her coat as bait, and trains a camera on it in an effort to catch the culprit. "Sure enough, after a while it captures an arm reaching into the inside pocket", clad in the "distinctive blouse" of a member of the admin staff – Ms Kuhn (Eva Löbau). "Case closed? More like can of worms cracked", as the incident unravels into an "HR nightmare" that is complicated by the fact that Ms Kuhn's son ("a wonderful Leonard Stettnisch") is one of Ms Nowak's favourite pupils. Nominated for best international feature film at this year's Oscars, the film "strikes upon a dream dramatic formula: a modest story with shattering stakes".

The first thing you notice about this "terrific, taut" drama is the score, said Wendy Ide in The Observer: "a choking panic attack in musical form". It's typical of the way the film uses "a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect".

Director and co-writer Ilker Çatak "has built an intricate, flammable nest of plotlines" and dangling half-clues, said Ed Potton in The Times. He "resists neat answers, and Benesch anchors the film with a performance of contained subtlety".

Scoop

Nearly five years after Emily Maitlis grilled Prince Andrew on "Newsnight", "the infamous interview and events leading up to it have been dramatised by Netflix", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. "No surprise there": everything about the royal family seems to end up on film in the end. And as one royal commentator tweeted at the time, the interview wasn't just a "train wreck": it was a "plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion". "Scoop" boasts a top cast: a heavily made-up Rufus Sewell plays Andrew; Gillian Anderson is Maitlis; and Sam McAlister, the "brassy" interview booker for "Newsnight", is played, "splendidly", by Billie Piper. The film begins in New York in 2010, when a photographer took "the now notorious snap of Andrew and [Jeffrey] Epstein strolling through Central Park"; then "whisks us forward to 2019", and follows McAlister trying to "woo" Buckingham Palace. Like "The Crown", it "deftly mixes historical truths with dramatic licence", but the film becomes "electrifying" when it reaches the interview itself.

As a farce, the film works well, said Danny Leigh in the FT. Less successful are the "hurried reminders" that this is also a story about sexual abuse. "Images of Epstein's victims land like afterthoughts, bolted onto an underweight story about people who work in TV." "Scoop" is a "brisk" and "solidly built" newsroom drama, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, but it lacks "boldness, irreverence, imagination and depth". Although the recreation of the interview itself is gripping, that's because it's a "carbon copy" of the real thing. "Why watch a hit song being performed by a talented tribute act when you could be watching the band that recorded the song in the first place?"

Civil War

"It wouldn't be fair to describe Alex Garland's new film as 'Apocalypse Now' for centrists", said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, but it certainly leads us on a "heart-of-darkness journey". The British writer-director's much anticipated drama takes place in the very near future, during a rapidly escalating civil war that is bringing "total societal disintegration" to the US. As the film opens, the breakaway armies of the "Western Forces" (California and Texas) are advancing on Washington DC and Florida is toying with secession. Meanwhile, an authoritarian president (Nick Offerman) is lurking, Colonel Kurtz-like, in a White House bunker, "fumbling through a dry run for an emergency broadcast, while newsreel clips of rioters punctuate his ahs and ums".

People will no doubt find echoes here of the dying days of the Trump presidency, said Adrian Horton in The Guardian, but the film "assiduously" avoids making any direct comparisons with the present-day polarisation in the US. Instead, the plot focuses on the struggle for survival of photo-journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her team of reporters, who are trying to cross "war-torn suburban US" to secure a last interview with the president.

It makes for thrilling cinema, said John Nugent in Empire: there are tense encounters (including with a menacing Jesse Plemons), some "ridiculously well-staged, muscular set-pieces" ("the symbolism of a firefight on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is obvious but irresistible"), and cinematography that "mixes chilling realism with graceful, haunting beauty". "Always gripping, always pummelling your senses, always ghoulishly compelling", this is a "gorgeously made film... War is hell – and it's never looked better."

Monster

A single story plays out from three different perspectives in Hirokazu Kore-eda's "affecting, heartfelt" drama "Monster", said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. It is set in an unnamed Japanese town, and each section begins with the same event: a building on fire. First, we meet single mother Saori (Sakura Andô) and her son Minato (Soya Kurokawa), watching the flames from their flat. Minato is soon exhibiting odd behaviour: one day he arrives home from school with a bloody ear, and tells his mother that his brain has been transplanted with a pig's. Is he being bullied, perhaps by his teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama)? In the next section, we return to the fire, but now see it and other events from Mr Hori's point of view. Finally, it's Minato's story, which explores his burgeoning romantic friendship with a male classmate. All this builds to an ending that is "open to interpretation" – and though that is often "the most annoying kind of ending", in this case it is "beautiful and joyous".

With its themes of bullying, abuse and homophobia, "Monster" could "have been a dense drama, but throughout it retains a sense of lightness that keeps it immensely watchable", said Francesca Steele in The i Paper. The film "is often very funny", but it amounts to a "moving examination of how far gossip can pull us away from the truth".

Unusually for a Kore-eda film, the script was not written by him but by Japanese TV writer Yuji Sakamoto, who "arguably deserved an original screenplay Oscar nomination for his work here", said Kevin Maher in The Times. The performances, too, are "unanimously strong", and the score – the last by the great Ryuichi Sakamoto – suffuses the action with lonely piano chords, "reinforcing the dominant theme of lives misread and misunderstood".

Red Island

French director Robin Campillo's "haunting" drama draws on his own early life in the 1970s, when he was "an army brat on a military base in post-colonial Madagascar", said Kevin Maher in The Times. "Mood is everything here, as all experiences and narrative arcs are filtered through the quietly discombobulated mind of Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), the ten-year-old protagonist and Campillo stand-in." Through his eyes, we come to see the Madagascar of this era as a "troubled paradise" where French military families gather for "booze-sodden parties and sun-kissed canoodling under the watchful eye of gun-toting guards". Gradually, the tension between the "illusion of a blissful Gallic enclave and the threat of violence required to sustain it" becomes a "moral sickness that appears to infect the entire base". The film is "beautifully shot" by Jeanne Lapoirie, who creates scenes that are "simultaneously magical, dreamlike and disturbing".

As Thomas puzzles over his parents' lifestyle and that of their friends, he "becomes fascinated by a young Malagasy woman – and her relationship with a Frenchman, which soon attracts the ire of the base's Catholic priest", said Jonathan Romney in the FT. Aiding him in his enquiries as he roams the base and its surroundings is an imaginary friend: the French comic-book detective Fantômette, who is brought to life in stylised fantasy sequences. This "wonderful, personal movie" is reminiscent of Albert Serra's "Pacifiction" – "a cheese dream of French imperial tristesse" – but it doesn't have the same "self-indulgence", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "It's a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work" that already feels like a "classic depiction of childhood on film".

Dune: Part Two

About an hour into "Dune: Part Two", Denis Villeneuve's "epic science-fiction sequel", it becomes clear that its makers have totally "abandoned logic and clarity", said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. But if you just "go with it", you'll be able to revel in one of the most "jaw-droppingly weird pieces of arthouse psychedelia ever to come from a major studio". Adapted from the second half of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, the film picks up where part one left off: in the desert. Timothée Chalamet is back as Paul Atreides, "an interstellar aristocrat whose family has just been massacred by the evil Harkonnens". He and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) are hiding out with the Fremen, the tribespeople of the planet Arrakis. "There is a good chance that the Fremen will help Paul fight back against the Harkonnens, but first he has to win their trust", which involves him learning to ride on a gargantuan desert worm, like some "illegal train surfer". The characters aren't given "enough interesting things to say", and Paul's romance with Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) isn't especially involving; but Austin Butler is superb as a sadistic new "Harkonnen baddie", and the film's "powerfully doom-laden atmosphere" alone "more than justifies the price of a cinema ticket".

I'm afraid I found it all rather empty, said Kevin Maher in The Times. "It looks fabulous", but also slightly ridiculous. Desert capes are shown "fluttering in slow-mo" and "moody faces" are presented "half-hidden by shadow", until – "braaaaam!" – Hans Zimmer's "overblown score" kicks in. The ending does not deliver the "closure to which we all might, maybe naively, consider ourselves entitled" after nearly three hours, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But it's undoubtedly a "sternum-juddering" spectacle, and it's "exhilarating to find a filmmaker thinking as big as this".

The Taste of Things

"'The Taste of Things', which is this year's French entry for best international film at the Oscars, is a gastro-film, but it is not of the 'Angry Male Chef' genre," said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. It is not stressful. No one screams "Yes, chef!" Instead, it is sensuous and soothing, and may also force a reappraisal of vols-au-vent, after their long exile in Britain's culinary wilderness. Written and directed by Tran Anh Hung, it is set in a country house in the 1880s, and stars Benoît Magimel as Dodin, a "famous gourmet" who is in love with his cook of 20 years, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, Magimel's ex in real life). Every so often, he asks her to marry him; every time, she declines. "The film breaks the rules of storytelling": there are no "obstacles to overcome, and every character is kind". It is, perhaps, "narratively underpowered", but if it's "about anything, it's about pleasure: how to give it, how to receive it, how love can be communicated through the deep passions you might have".

At first glance, "The Taste of Things" "looks like just another decorous prestige period drama", said Wendy Ide in The Observer. "But in its elegantly restrained way", it is really rather daring. The 35-minute-long opening sequence, for instance, is given over to the near-silent preparation and consumption of a meal. There is also something "refreshingly unconventional" about the film's depiction of the "well-worn love" between a couple in the "autumn of their lives". This is "a love letter to classic French cuisine, to French cinema, and, it has to be said, to beautiful French women of a certain age", said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. A word of warning, however: be sure to eat before going to see it. If you don't, you may find yourself "gnawing hungrily at your knuckles".

The Iron Claw

"The tragicomic spectacle of American wrestling, with all its poignant pantomime machismo and showbiz fury", is the subject of Sean Durkin's "deeply sad" drama "The Iron Claw", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Set mainly in the 1980s, it tells the true story of the Von Erichs, a family of professional wrestlers from Texas who suffered so many "heartbreaking calamities", they were rumoured to be cursed. At the centre of the film is Zac Efron, who has "bulked up to a staggering degree" to play Kevin Von Erich, the oldest of four wrestling brothers and the one most anxious to please their tyrannical "patriarch-manager" father (Holt McCallany). In part it's a sports movie, but it's also an "odd true-life drama", like the Von Trapp family but with a "'roid rage death wish". Durkin does not shy away from the "very real agony of the Von Erichs' experience" – the "punishing training", the "injuries and the fatalities", and you wonder whether their sacrifices were ever worth it; but the film has real "force", and an "inspired", if sentimental, ending.

I'm not sure that the film quite earns its plunge "into full-throated tragedy", said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. But for "moviegoers whose most fervent wish is to see the buff, nut-brown body" of Efron bulging out of Lycra hot pants, it should hit the spot; and the performances (from Jeremy Allen White, Lily James and others) are "deeply affecting". If you ask me, "The Iron Claw" is "a knockout", said Dulcie Pearce in The Sun. The wrestling scenes are "fast, fierce and fascinating", and the camaraderie between the brothers is so tenderly portrayed, you feel "you are peeping through the curtains of a family home".

The Zone of Interest

"The director Jonathan Glazer is best known for big, glossy films such as 'Sexy Beast' and 'Under the Skin'," said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. "His latest, 'The Zone of Interest', could not be more different." Shot in a "low-key, fly-on-the-wall style", the drama (in subtitled German) unfolds in the "meticulously run house and well-tended gardens" occupied by Rudolf Höss, the notorious commandant of Auschwitz, and his family. We know that in the concentration camp – which is "literally next door" and within earshot – "hell" is unfolding. But in the Höss household, "it is very much suburban life as normal". Höss is brilliantly underplayed by Christian Friedel; "even better" is Sandra Hüller as his wife Hedwig, "a woman as happy to describe herself as 'the Queen of Auschwitz' as she is to preen and pose in a freshly stolen fur coat".

Nominated for five Oscars and nine Baftas, this is an "unmissable" film, with "much of its power coming from its meticulous sound design". The film is loosely based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel of the same name, but what inspired Glazer to make it was visiting Auschwitz and noticing that Höss's house "was so near to the death camp that the two places even shared a wall", said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. His film "will haunt you today, tomorrow and maybe for all your days to come". At one point, Hedwig's mother, a cleaner, "smirks with Schadenfreude" when she considers that her former boss, a Jewish intellectual, might be "over there", said Kevin Maher in The Times. "It's a chilling moment that boldly illuminates the deep-seated cultural prejudices of the time. And, like every other highly considered frame here, it articulates a landmark movie, hugely important, that's unafraid of difficult ideas."

All of Us Strangers

"Some films you love for their finely wrought performances," said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. "Others sneak up on you. Few break you wide open, play you like a piccolo and send you out into the world feeling exalted, drained and pleasurably weak, as if you just had deep-tissue body work." But that's what Andrew Haigh's "All of Us Strangers" does. Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a screenwriter who lives in one of those high-rise blocks in London that no one seems to go in or out of. One night, his neighbour (Paul Mescal) knocks on his door, and the pair begin a relationship. Meanwhile, Adam is trying to write a script inspired by his life. On a research trip to his childhood home in Croydon, he finds his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) alive and well – and still the same age as they were when they died in a car crash when he was 11. The film is a reflection on "the connections we all know exist between our childhood histories and our adult relationships", and it is "magnificent".

Loosely based on a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, "All of Us Strangers" is essentially a "ghost story", said Deborah Ross in The Spectator – but if you don't like films about the supernatural, "don't let that put you off". The ghosts here are not the "walking-through-walls" kind. Foy and Bell bring a "strange, eerie, everydayness to their roles". As for Scott, he "infuses his character with such vulnerability that you'll want to reach into the screen and comfort him". It's an "aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness" that had me mesmerised.

The acting is "immaculate", agreed Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. And the film is "thought-provoking". But I am afraid "I watched in admiration rather than adoration, tremendously engaged – but not enormously moved".

The Holdovers

Twenty years after the success of "Sideways", the comedy-drama about two men on a wine tour, "The Holdovers" reunites director Alexander Payne with actor Paul Giamatti, and the result is a "great big warm hug of a movie", said Kevin Maher in The Times. Giamatti plays Paul, a "misanthropic" classics teacher at a New England boys' boarding school in the 1970s that serves as an Ivy League feeder. Paul is contemptuous of his pupils, whom he dismisses as "vulgar little philistines" and "foetid layabouts"; so he is annoyed when he is asked to babysit "the holdovers" – a handful of boys who are not going home for Christmas. Initially there are five, but four of them find somewhere to go, leaving just one, the recalcitrant Angus (Dominic Sessa). Also marooned at the school over the holidays is kitchen manager Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose son – a former scholarship student at the school – has just been killed in Vietnam. Payne has had a run of disappointing films of late, but this is terrific: "the softest and sweetest of his career so far".

Somewhat surprisingly, "The Holdovers" turns out to be "the ideal Christmas film, not only set at Christmas but featuring carols, a tree and the obligatory ice-skating scene", said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. So its release in January feels a bit odd. Still, we should welcome what is "a proper grown-up film" – one that calls to mind "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" and "The History Boys". It brilliantly evokes its early 1970s setting, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. It is also "impeccably acted" and often hilarious; but it's the quieter shared moments between the characters that give the film its "lingering glow of wisdom and warmth".

Society of the Snow

"There is no shortage of books, films, documentaries and TV series" about the plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes in 1972, said Maria Delgado in Sight and Sound. As detailed most famously in the 1993 film "Alive", based on Piers Paul Read's book, "the survivors endured the 72-day ordeal by consuming the remains of those who had perished". In "Society of the Snow", Spanish director J.A. Bayona retells the story, drawing on Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci's 2009 book and featuring a cast of "largely unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian" actors (in "Alive", the stars were mainly American). The film's strengths lie in balancing "breathtaking moments" such as the plane crash with the "tedium and desperation" of the weeks the survivors spent waiting and hoping, sometimes chewing on shoelaces in an effort to tamp down their "escalating hunger".

"Shot at altitude in the icy Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain", this gripping film "plonks you right in the middle of that frostbitten hell and leaves you feeling not just for its victims", but for its cast and crew too, said Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. "You hope they had thermals on." The characters, from "optimistic Marcelo (Diego Vegezzi) to genial outsider Numa (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán)", are enterprising and lacking in self-pity; and though it's tricky to "keep track of who's who", it's "never hard to feel for them". A wrenching, harrowing film, "Society of the Snow" dispenses with the usual "sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit", said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. You'll be left amazed that "even a third of them made it out".

Sign up to The Week's Arts & Life newsletter for reviews and recommendations