20 must-see movies coming out in 2024
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Priscilla
Sofia Coppola recasts Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate as a Rockwellian gilded cage, with the singer’s young bride as both its princess and inmate.
General release from Fri 5th Jan; read our review
One Life
Anthony Hopkins glistens stoically in this affecting biopic of the aid worker Nicholas Winton, who smuggled almost 700 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Prague.
General release from Friday 5th Jan; read our review
Poor Things
Venice’s Golden Lion winner hurls a stunningly game Emma Stone into a highly sexed gothic romp through Victorian Europe, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s Whitbread-winning novel.
General release from Fri 12th Jan; read our review
Mean Girls
The Broadway musical derived from Mark Waters’ 2004 high-school classic gets reverted to cinema à la Hairspray, with a Tina Fey script and Angourie Rice stepping into Lindsay Lohan’s old sneakers.
General release from Wed 17 Jan
The Holdovers
Two decades after Sideways, Paul Giamatti and Alexander Payne reteam for a grumpily uproarious character piece set at a draughty boarding school over a bleak Christmas break.
General release from Fri 19th Jan; read our review
The End We Start From
This post-flooding survival drama, adapted from Megan Hunter’s hauntingly spare novel, stars a tremendous Jodie Comer battling her way with a newborn across England’s blighted horizons.
General release from Fri 19 Jan
The Color Purple
One to file under shouldn’t-work-but-does, this high-sparkle musical brings gospel uplift and R&B heat to Alice Walker’s story of women’s hardscrabble lives in the American South.
General release from Fri 26th Jan; read our review
All of Us Strangers
Andrew Haigh’s shimmering mood piece has Andrew Scott as a lonely gay writer in a high-rise, who meets the ghosts of his dead parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) while also embarking on a fling with a neighbour (Paul Mescal).
General release from Fri 26 Jan; read our review
The Zone of Interest
The year won’t yield a more disturbing nor more vital film than Jonathan Glazer’s latest, which dramatises the work and family life of the young SS commandant who presided over Auschwitz.
General release from Fri 2nd Feb; read our review
American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright is a near-certain Best Actor nominee for his rare lead role here, as a frustrated professor who trolls the literary establishment by writing a self-parodic “Black novel”, only for it to be hailed as the real deal.
General release from Fri 2 Feb
Argylle
Matthew Vaughn directs a cameo-packed espionage caper, with Henry Cavill as a rent-a-Bond type who lures Bryce Dallas Howard’s shy novelist into the field, along with her cat. Sam Rockwell, Dua Lipa and Samuel L Jackson all pop up.
General release from Fri 2 Feb
Occupied City
Steve McQueen’s magisterial four-hour documentary compares Amsterdam under the Nazis with the city’s genial present, where its ghosts are both invisible and needlingly close.
Selected cinemas from Fri 9th Feb
The Iron Claw
The true-life saga of the Von Erich family – five brothers, pushed into the ring as pro wrestlers by their relentless father – becomes a thumpingly bleak sports epic shouldered by a near-unrecognisable Zac Efron.
General release from Fri 9 Feb
The Taste of Things
Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel star in this aptly delectable period piece about a brilliant 19th century cook and her gourmet lover. A date-night must: just please eat first.
General release from Fri 16th Feb
Wicked Little Letters
A neighbourly feud that rocked the seaside town of Littlehampton in the 1920s is retold, with Olivia Colman as a pious busybody at the receiving end of vicious correspondence. Jessie Buckley and Timothy Spall co-star.
General release from Fri 23 Feb
Dune: Part II
Bumped into 2024 by the actors’ strike, the conclusion of Denis Villeneuve’s SF epic will test Paul Atreides’s mettle as a messianic leader for the Fremen. It hopes to leave the shoddy finale of David Lynch’s version in the dust.
General release from Fri 1 Mar
Drive-Away Dolls
Ethan Coen breaks away solo, with a road-trip comedy, co-written/edited by his wife Tricia Cooke, about two lesbian pals (Geraldine Viswanathan, Margaret Qualley) who run into a spot of bother in the desert.
General release from Fri 15 Mar
Four Daughters
A Tunisian mother of four girls, two of whom became Isis brides, reflects on and reenacts their turbulent upbringing in Kaouther Ben Hania’s mesmerising documentary hybrid.
Selected cinemas from Friday 22nd Mar
Robot Dreams
Overflowing with handcrafted charm, Pablo Berger’s wordless animation about a dog and his android BFF offers a witty, gorgeous and profound meditation on the power and limits of friendship.
General release from Friday 22nd Mar
Mickey 17
Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho brings us a science fiction romp with Robert Pattinson as a “disposable” employee sent to colonise an ice planet – the 17th version of himself, since his job involves dying, painfully and often.
General release from Fri 29 Mar
