This list is updated monthly with new “best of the year” worthy titles.
In the first three months of the year, all eyes are often on the films that came before — the contenders that dominated the fall, vying for Academy Awards. But while studios usually save their glitziest, prestige-iest films for the horse race, there are, in fact, many movies worth your time and attention that have come to us in late winter and spring. Some might be epic-scale blockbusters (Dune: Part Two), but most of this year’s best so far are smaller films, released without a major studio’s marketing budget. One is a violent swashbuckling-adventure film, and another is a brilliant comedy as bleak as it is funny. Two mark the debuts of commanding new voices in film; another is a bittersweet good-bye to a great composer and musician. All will reward you for seeking them out. Here, the best of the many dozens of movies we’ve seen this year so far.
Movies are listed by U.S. release date, starting with the most recent titles.
Alam
The conversations around Palestine and Israel often don’t leave much room for nuance, but Firaz Khoury’s moving coming-of-age film offers a corrective. Not everyone realizes that there are Palestinians in Israel, living in Palestinian neighborhoods, going to schools with Palestinian teachers — but they’re taught Israeli history, seen from Israel’s perspective, all under an Israeli flag (alam is an Arabic word for banner). So they learn about Israel’s battle for independence, even though for them it’s known as the Nakba — the “catastrophe,” in which their families were displaced in 1948. In Alam, a group of middle-class students wrestles with romance, authority, and political awakening in the days leading up to Israel’s Independence Day. These are kids with means and prospects, with families and teachers who want them to keep their hands clean. To them, the political (and physical) battles being waged over their homeland sometimes seem abstract, and yet they can’t help but look for ways to be involved. This is a marvelous, mesmerizing film that offers no easy answers. —Bilge Ebiri
It’s sexy, it’s sweaty, it’s mean, and it’s just so fun — Luca Guadagnino’s tennis romance is one of the year’s treats, a film that revels in the baby-movie-star qualities of leads Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya, allowing them to be larger than life even as their characters act hopelessly petty. A BDSM drama as told via sporting events, Challengers manages to make tennis look hot and to make the romantic maneuvers among the three characters into athletic competitions. All that, an oomph-oomph score, and a finale that includes shots from the POV of the ball? What did we do to deserve this, and how do we do it again? —Alison Willmore
➽Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of Challengers, Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of Zendaya’s movie performance, and Joe Reid’s explanation of who won in the ending scene.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Joanna Arnow’s feature directing debut is an unclassifiable deadpan comedy about a Brooklyn woman, Ann (played by Arnow herself), whose entire life seems to revolve around humiliation: She’s in a sub-dom relationship with an older man whose reluctant, disaffected approach to her needs might be part of their whole thing; she endures constant awkward conversations with her parents (played by the director’s own parents); she’s completely ignored at work even when she’s being given an award. There’s a surreal quality to the film, and yet it all feels so true. Arnow has captured something about the authentic and mortifying absurdity of modern life — and she’s done it in a thoroughly entertaining way. Her filmmaking style is episodic, but not in the exhausting, indulgent style of so many other plotless dramedies: Her vignettes vary from extended sequences to comically brief snippets, giving the picture a unique and irresistible cadence. —B.E.
Civil War
What makes Alex Garland’s controversial new film so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield. The film is set in what appears to be the present, but in this version of the present a combination of strongman tactics and secessionist movements have fractured the United States into multiple armed, politically unspecified factions. Smoke rises from cities; the highways are filled with walls of wrecked cars; suicide bombers dive into a crowd lined up for water rations; death squads, snipers, and mass graves dot the countryside. How we got here, or what these people are fighting over, is mostly meaningless to the journalists covering this war, who gather in hotel bars, get drunk, and loudly yuk it up with the jacked-up bonhomie we might recognize from movies set in foreign lands like The Killing Fields, Under Fire, and Salvador. They’re mostly numb to the horrors they’re chronicling. The movie’s lack of a political point of view has received some understandable criticism, but the conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or … well, the list goes on. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything. —B.E.
➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Civil War; Matt Zoller Seitz’s interview with director Alex Garland; and Roxana Hadadi’s essay on the movie’s final shot.
In Flames
Could we call In Flames, Pakistan’s submission for last year’s Best International Film Oscar, a horror movie? How could we not? It looks at the life of a young Karachi woman whose world is upended after the death of her father: Men stare at her, attack her, obsess over her, ignore her. The prying eyes of a patriarchal society see her as both victim and prey. A brief, seemingly promising relationship ends in tragedy. She’s pursued by haunting visions as she begins to lose the line between reality and illusion. Director Zarrar Khan depicts both supernatural shocks and real-life terrors with the same jump-scare-laced bravado but does so without ever shortchanging the very real drama at the film’s heart. —B.E.
The Beast
Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic is Henry James by way of David Lynch, a beguiling, slippery creation that spans three time periods and settings, and that manages to constantly surprise and unsettle. As Gabrielle, Léa Seydoux is a tragic costume-drama heroine, a stalkee in a horror film, and a frustrated seeker in an aloof futurescape, and she manages to create a sense of continuity over these very different lives, into which Louis (George MacKay) inevitably appears. The Beast is wistful, scary, and unsettling, and more than anything, it’s a big swing — a movie about being afraid of vulnerability that is itself fearless. —A.W.
➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of The Beast.
The First Omen
Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, this prequel to 1976’s The Omen is another modern horror movie that speaks to our current moment even as it tells a fantastical story rooted in the past. In this case, the year is 1971, and young novitiate Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) has just arrived in a turbulent Rome to work at an orphanage. She becomes intrigued by the odd, introverted Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), one of the orphans. She sees something of herself in the girl and tries to forge a bond with her. Then a rogue priest warns her that Carlita might have been bred by the church specifically to give birth to the Anti-Christ — this is, after all, an Omen movie — and our protagonist becomes determined to save the girl. The film will surely leave you with more questions than it answers, but like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The movie is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears. If horror is all about loss of control, about feelings of helplessness conjured in the audience to reflect the helplessness of the characters, then this is a true horror film.
➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The First Omen.
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher’s film follows Arthur Harrison (Josh O’Connor), a strange man with a strange gift for robbing graves, finding and lifting the antique knickknacks the ancient Etruscans of central Italy used to bury with their dead. A former archeologist, he seems haunted by his own exploits, and this occasionally rambling, often gorgeous film’s queasy dream logic suggests that we’re watching a man halfway between this world and the next, struggling to find his place. Rohrwacher, one of Italy’s foremost filmmakers, makes earthy movies with a dash of what we might call magical realism. The performances are naturalistic, the location shooting authentic and ground level, but the stories often hover on the edge of fantasy. The director fills the picture with folk ballads, naif art, playful asides to the camera, and bursts of sped-up slapstick, giving it all the quality of a ramshackle operetta. But O’Connor’s concave, melancholy demeanor undercuts the picture’s levity, likely by design: The more the film goes on, and the more fanciful it becomes, the more Arthur seems unable to reconcile himself to the world around him. He’s a sad, walking embodiment of the notion that those who spend their time worrying about the next life will never feel peace in this one. —B.E.
➽Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of La Chimera.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Caustic and brilliant, Radu Jude’s latest is a comedy about the terrible absurdity of life under late capitalism that includes among its wide-ranging reference points classical haiku, Goethe, the German schlockmeister Uwe Boll, and a series of profane TikToks records by its main character, an overworked PA named Angela (Ilinca Manolache). Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World consists primarily of Angela’s encounters as she drives around auditioning possible subjects for a company employee safety video, a worker-blaming production made even more absurdly bleak by the fact that Angela has been putting in such long hours she’s in danger of falling asleep on the road. But woven in, brilliantly, are clips from a communist-era film about a female taxi driver, also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), whose state-sanction dramas under the Ceaușescu regime provide a counterpoint to the present day Angela’s gig economy life, until the two characters converge for the final act, which involves the shooting of the corporate production, and is one of the most blackley funny sequences you’ll see this year. —A.W.
➽Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
A few months before he died in March 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded what he himself suspected might be his final solo concert. It had been created across a few days out of pre-recorded segments that were then assembled and streamed around the world. An expanded version of that concert now exists as a feature film, directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora. And it’s a moving, spare, and self-reflective work. Sakamoto was a savvy and thoughtful performer, always aware of his audience and in playful conversation with them. Now, as he communes with his music, we feel like we might be intruding on a private requiem. He doesn’t seem particularly frail during this performance. The fragility lies in the music, in the vulnerability with which he plays it, and in the austere cinematic presentation. The shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves heighten the intimacy of the performance. —B.E.
➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.
Dune: Part Two
If the first Dune was Timothée Chalamet’s movie, the second belongs to Zendaya, and it’s better and more emotionally accessible for it. Denis Villeneuve’s Frank Herbert adaptation continues to be a spectacular and genuinely alien epic about genetically engineered messiah figures, space witches, massive sandworms, and BDSM-inflected goth fascist planets. But it’s Zendaya’s character, the Fremen warrior Chani, who provides the film’s heart, as a fierce-hearted rebel who’s won over by Chalamet’s Paul despite knowing better, and despite being aware that he’s saying all the right things to win her community to his side for what may be his own purposes. Dune: Part Two has incredible sweep, but it also manages to have recognizable human drama, and that comes entirely from Chani’s perspective as the representative of a people whose own desires are forever subsumed by the machinations of much larger powers. —A.W.
➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Dune: Part Two; Matt Zoller Seitz’s behind the scenes look with cinematographer Greig Fraser; and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.
Shayda
Noora Niasari’s debut is based on her own childhood experiences, which is evident from the tangibility of its details, but also from the poignant sense that it’s a film about revisiting turbulent young memories with the distance and knowledge of an adult. Holy Spider’s Zar Amir Ebrahimi gives an astounding performance as the title character, an Iranian immigrant in Australia who’s fled an abusive marriage and brought along the young daughter, Mona (Selina Zahednia), that she’s terrified will be taken from her. Shayda deftly lays out the dynamics of the womens’ shelter, and of the local Iranian enclave, pitching its story of escape as a kind of intimate thriller in which Shayda must try to create a sense of normalcy and safety for her child while never being able to let her own guard down. —A.W.
Io Capitano
The Italian director Matteo Garrone likes to fuse the topical with the fanciful, and in this modern-day tale of the refugee crisis, he’s made one of his more shattering films. It follows the journey of two Senegalese cousins, Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) who set off for Europe and find themselves confronted along the way with a variety of monstrous incidents, which feel at times like terrifying images out of an old storybook. Garrone mixes magical realism, epic sweep, and gruesome horror in a story that’s been built out of the experiences of real people who’ve made this journey. But he’s not interested in alarmism. His protagonists aren’t desperate to flee any kind of abject poverty or strife — they simply want to travel to Europe, the same way that First World youths have sought to see the world for decades, even centuries. That’s maybe the most novel (and heartbreaking) aspect of Io Capitano. It rejects the idea of its heroes as solely victims, instead placing them in a grander, nobler tradition of exploration and curiosity. In doing so, it asks an implicit, and pointed, question: Why don’t we in “the West” also see them in this light?
The Promised Land
Mads Mikkelsen is a phenomenally skilled actor, but he’s also clearly the kind of performer who understands the value of a good, cold, hard stare. This makes him uniquely well-suited for the role of Captain Ludvig Kahlen, an impoverished, stoic Danish war veteran who sets out in the mid-18th century to try and tame the Jutland Heath, a huge and forbidding area where no crop can grow and where lawlessness reigns. The Danish title of the film, Bastarden, translates as “the bastard,” and could be both a literal and spiritual description of Kahlen. He was born to an unwed servant, and he is a tough, at times heartless taskmaster. As he learns that he has to learn to rely on others in order to survive, Kahlen also finds himself at odds with a local landowner, a preening and sadistic aristocrat named Frederik de Schinkel. And so, The Promised Land transforms from a stately and lyrical tale of rural survival to something more primal and intense; think Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven crossed with Michael Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy, only with more scenes of people being boiled alive. —B.E.
➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Promised Land.
Pictures of Ghosts
This terrifically bittersweet documentary from Bacurau’s Kleber Mendonça Filho is part memoir, part history of the director’s hometown of Recife, and part meditation on the nature of photography that outlasts the subjects it has captured. But more than anything, it’s a tribute to a life shaped by cinema that manages to avoid the syrupy sentimentality of so many other movies about movies. Filho starts his film in the childhood apartment where he shot so much of his work, and then guides it outward, to the city’s once-grand downtown, studded with cinematic palaces that have mostly been repurposed into other businesses. In doing so, he gracefully reflects on the faded glories of his favored medium. —A.W.
➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Pictures of Ghosts.
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Phạm Thiên Ân’s first feature can be elliptical to a fault in the way it chooses to unfold its story of a drifting young man named Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ) who, after the death of his sister-in-law, inherits custody of his nephew and embarks on a journey to find his brother, the child’s father. But the virtuosity of its filmmaking is remarkable, and some of the shots that Ân composed (with the help of his cinematographer, Đinh Duy Hưng) have lingered with me like persistent afterimages. In particular, there’s the sequence that starts the film, in which the camera drifts from a nighttime soccer game in Saigon, past street vendors and spectators and over to a bustling outdoor cafe where three men are talking about faith over beers until they’re interrupted by an off-screen collision. It’s impressive in its complexity and utterly haunting in its execution, as if it contains the whole world before its focus narrows in on one particular figure. —A.W.
Frida
There have been many movies about Frida Kahlo over the years, but none have given us such a sense of the artist as an actual living, breathing person as Carla Gutiérrez’s innovative new documentary. Gutiérrez, an award-winning editor, has built the movie entirely out of archival material, using Kahlo’s own words and pictures to present her life as seen through her own eyes. Thus, we hear Frida’s own achingly confessional words (spoken by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero) as she narrates her childhood, growing up with a deeply religious mother and an atheist father; her vivacious teen years as a hip young medical student, adored by many; her lengthy, turbulent marriage to the lecherous, revolutionary muralist Diego Rivera, who overshadowed her in her time; as well as her own passionate affairs with both men and women. The director has also taken Kahlo’s drawings and paintings, including some of the most immortal ones, and animated them so that the images now shift before our eyes to reflect her emotional transformations, with pictures often mutating into one another. It’s an inspired path into the work of an artist who often painted her own visage in visually striking arrangements. By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. —B.E.
➽Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Frida.
