The 50 Best Movies of 2024, According to IndieWire’s Critics Poll (2025)

50. “It’s Not Me”

Director: Leos Carax

Cast: Leos Carax, Denis Levant

Read IndieWire’s Review: The 40-minute video essay sees Carax stringing together shots from his previous films alongside black-and-white clips from Old Hollywood, historical footage like the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and a few new shots that see him catching up with old characters like the sewer leprechaun from “Holy Motors.” The montage skips between topics ranging from the rise of hateful authoritarians around the world and Carax’s shortcomings as a father to the Hitchcock films that sparked his lifelong fascination with POV shots. Carax uses his own narration and textual overlays to regale his viewers with every thought that pops into his head, from existential fears to playful quips like “of all the colics, spare me the melancholic.” It all feels like something a nonagenarian Godard would have cut together long before Carax makes the reference explicit by playing a voicemail that the “Breathless” director once left him.

49. “Inside Out 2”

Director: Kelsey Mann

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paul Walter Hauser, Tony Hale, Ayo Edebiri

Read IndieWire’s Review: Teens mightneedthis sequel more than younger children needed the original, but I suspect the franchise’s unyielding didacticism won’t have the same effect for hormone-mad pimple-poppers whose physiology constantly makes them feel like history’s first and only freak (nothing resonates with 13-year-olds like a textbook!). It doesn’t help that the film’s basic plot — Joy is exiled from Headquarters along with some other emotions, and they all must make their way back to help Riley navigate some major life changes — is essentially just a redux of the story from “Inside Out.” After the previous movie made such a fuss about leaving childish things behind, it’s bizarre this one is so eager to retrace its footsteps.

48. “The Apprentice”

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova

Read IndieWire’s Review: Sometimes in broad strokes and sometimes with brutal specificity, “The Apprentice” does what it can to dramatize how the student became — and surpassed — his teacher by too perfectly embodying all of his lessons. If those efforts aren’t even close to enough for this movie to shine a meaningful new light on the most overexposed man who’s ever lived (or his mentor), that’s largely because it can’t get around the fact that Trump is too base and pathological to be of much dramatic interest. The guy is a mile wide and an inch deep (at least if you take his ass into account of your measurements), and no amount of “daddy didn’t love me” psychoanalysis is going to fix that.

47. “The People’s Joker”

Director: Vera Drew

Cast: Vera Drew, Lynn Downey, Kane Distler, Nathan Faustyn, David Liebe Hart, Maria Bamford

Read IndieWire’s Review: Making the most of a lean independent budget, the film’s creative use of mixed media is a visually clever way to mix its chaotic metaphors. DC may own the IP, but Batman has seen so many iterations that even the most superhero agnostic will recognize its many styles. The film includes visual references to the 1990s animated Batman series, the movies by Schumacher and Tim Burton, as well as to Todd Philips’ explosive 2019 “Joker.” This pastiche of interpretations seems to make a case for Batman as fair game for fair use.

Hopefully, legal woes will plague “The People’s Joker” just enough to drum up interest in Drew’s wild invention, but not enough to scare away the right distributor. Unlike many comedies — alternative and mainstream — “The People’s Joker” is not so in love with its own satire to rob it of any emotional truth. Underneath the satirical madness lies a genuinely moving story of self-acceptance, self-love, and the inspiring act of an artist stepping into her power. All jokes aside, the people deserve to see it.

46. “Love Lies Bleeding”

Director: Rose Glass

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jenna Malone

Read IndieWire’s Review: You can’t blame Lou (Kristen Stewart) for gawking at Jackie (Katy O’Brian) the first time she lays eyes on her. No one in Lou’s tiny Southwestern town — the only one she’s ever known — looks at all like Jackie, a budding bodybuilder who seems to have blown into town on a stiff breeze. Lou has plenty of time to look at Jackie, too, considering she spends most of her life working a demeaning job at a local gym (we first meet her as she’s unclogging a toilet, by hand) and doesn’t seem to care about much of anything. But Jackie? Oh, Lou cares, and quickly.

45. “Good One”

Director: India Donaldson

Cast: Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy.

Read IndieWire’s Review: A slight but sensitive and fantastically assured debut that unfolds with the pointillistic detail of a great short story, India Donaldson’s “Good One” is a coming-of-age story that jettisons all of the genre’s most familiar trappings in favor of a long walk in the woods.

44. “Youth (Hard Times)

Director: Wang Bing

Read IndieWire’s Review: With the “Youth” cycle, which was shot between 2014 and 2019, Wang and several other camera-handling collaborators entered the world of textile workshops in Zhili, a town in the Wuxing District of Huzhou. Zhili is one of the country’s primary locations for privately-run sweatshops, with most of the cramped offices and dormitories glimpsed in the film being located on Happiness Road. That name is one ironic gag; another punchline comes every time that onscreen text demarcates each space, only for there to be a near total absence of perceptible difference between the sites.

Nearly all of the employees are economic migrants from the nearby Anhui province. They work in brutal conditions and are restricted by the strain and requirements of constant, monotonous labor in order to provide the bare minimum of basics to get by. And yet, the largely young workforce — most that we meet are teenagers and twentysomethings — do manage to establish social lives and moments of spontaneous connection during 15-hour shifts spent stitching clothes and running machines whose humming noises compete for soundtrack space with pop music blaring from phones.

43. “The Bikeriders”

Director: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist, Emory Cohen, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Boyd Holbrook

Read IndieWire’s Review: Twenty years ago, Jeff Nichols found a book of photographs on his brother’s coffee table about an outlaw motorcycle club that rumbled around the American Midwest during the 1960s, and he immediately recognized it as the coolest fucking thing that he’d ever seen in his entire life — both the book itself, and the people in it.

To watch the greasy-as-hell movie Nichols has now adapted from Danny Lyon’s “The Bikeriders” is to know how he felt in that moment. And to watch that movie stall out after 45 of the most exhilarating and self-possessed minutes that Nichols has ever cut together is to know how he’s struggled to find a story worthy of the dirt-stained denim he’s been dreaming about ever since. As the leader of the Vandals laments about the crew that’s starting to slip away under his feet: “You can give everything you got to a thing and it’s still just gonna do what it’s gonna do.”

42. “Last Summer”

Director: Catherine Breillat

Cast: Léa Drucker, Samuel Kircher

Read IndieWire’s Review: Seductively empathetic without absolving its heroineortrolling the audience into aligning themselves with her, this adaptation bypasses any sort of moral binary in order to make the case that what happens between two people — or even between a woman and her own body — is far more complex than social ideology can ever hope to understand. Breillat sees art as the best hope we have for bridging that gap, and so “Last Summer” is less compelled by crime and punishment than it is by the soft mysteries that people struggle to solve within themselves. Rationales abound, but answers remain as elusive as the logic of a dream.

41. “His Three Daughters”

Director: Azazel Jacobs

Cast: Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen

Read IndieWire’s Review: That relative smallness of story makes it easy to imagine Jacobs’ latest as a stage play: The apartment (one of those great, actual, believable Manhattan apartments) serves as the film’s primary location, with a few forays outside for Rachel to smoke on a bench or hit up a local bodega, easy enough to snip for the theater. Each of his stars gets a chance to shine — Coon is a firecracker from the start, Lyonne eases into one of the richest roles of her career, and Olsen is the film’s sneaky-great secret weapon — but they’re all at their best when forced into working together.

And these sisters require plenty of forcing. In the early half of the film, Jacobs and cinematographer Sam Levy favor medium shots that keep their subjects in the center of the frame, no one else visible. They are the main characters in their own stories. As the trio eventually reaches a place of possible acceptance and dare we say it, even affection, those constraints ease. One or two sisters slide into frame alongside the others. There is room for all of them. They are all a part of this story.

40. “Red Rooms”

Director: Pascal Plante

Cast: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, Guy Thauvette

39. “Queer”

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Omar Apollo

Read IndieWire’s Review: As an adaptation of “Junkie” author William S. Burroughs’ second novel, “Queer” is about chemical addictions, yes. But it’s even more about being so addicted to a person that, no matter how much you turn yourself inside out trying to get them to love you — charming them with your literary voice, lathering yourself into a stupor on drugs, or even going to the far reaches of a jungle — they will never love you the way you want them to, and even telepathy couldn’t help explain to you why.
Luca Guadagnino’s profound and kaleidoscopic new film begins in a post-World War II Mexico City of the mind and ends in the Ecuadorian rainforest on an ayahuasca trip that’s part Apichatpong Weerasethakul, part “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but fully the “Call Me By Your Name” director’s own strange, sui generis creation. All sweaty, raw, self-lacerating, and debauched, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an ex-pat who wanders from bar to bar in the Mexican capital in the 1940s, here recreated at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios with the rigorous detail, scope and strangeness of the warehouse mindscape in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.”

38. “Hundreds of Beavers”

Director: Mike Cheslik

Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Wes Tank

37. “Green Border”

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Cast:Jalal Altawill, Tomasz Włosok, Maja Ostaszewska

Read IndieWire’s Review: Six weeks out of a national election in which Poland’s hard-right government is expected to extend its grip on power, “Green Border” also has a moral urgency beyond its representation of refugees’ hardship, who are described by members of Poland’s Straż Graniczna as “tourists.” If only it were so easy. The Belarusian government allows flights from war-torn parts of Africa and the Middle East in order to send migrants toward Poland, creating problems for its neighbor, a member of NATO and the European Union.
Bashir (Jalal Altawill) and his family are mere pawns in that petty political battle, believing the false promise that they can easily transit to Swedish city Malmö, where their extended family are based. Jan (Tomasz Włosok) is tasked with making their mission as difficult as possible: Belarus’s border force happily takes migrants to the barbed wire fences, and Poland’s pushes them back through. In the last couple of years Poland has introduced a so-called exclusionary zone, where normal rules don’t apply. Lawyers and activists can be imprisoned simply for traveling inside the area, while ambulances attending to the (many) medical emergencies must be accompanied by border guards, who’ll duly escort them back to Belarus upon recovery. Think of a bleak version of the Abe-Simpson-walking-into-Moe’s GIF.

36. “Wicked”

Director: Jon M. Chu

Cast: Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

Read IndieWire’s Review: We’ll get the big question out of the way first: Do you need to have seen “Wicked” on the stage to appreciate and understand Jon M. Chu’s long-promised cinematic adaptation of the smash-hit musical? No. And yes. Either way, this spin on the magical story of akindamagical land will push its audience to hit the Wikipedia (theWickie-pedia?) long and hard after it wraps up its stretched-to-the-breaking-point two-hour-and-40-minute running time. Even that might not help contextualize all of the mythology at play in this latest journey to the Land of Oz, but — ideally — it will help gloss over some of the film‘s more awkward parts and crystallize the achievements within Chu’s big swing of a two-part epic.

35. “Dahomey”

Director: Mati Diop

Read IndieWire’s Review: When Europe’s great powers raced to colonize a continent in the so-called “Scramble for Africa” just before the First World War, the tiny coastal Kingdom of Dahomey in the south of modern-day Benin, west Africa, was high on France’s shopping list. Only 85 French soldiers were killed when it was taken in 1894, while as many as 4,000 Dahomeans lost their lives. Nearly three hundred years of culture and history were extinguished, and thousands of the nation’s most valuable treasures shipped to Paris.
Mati Diop’s 67-minute documentary isn’t about the theft but rather the return in late 2021 of 26 Dahomean treasures to Benin from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. We’re told before the movie starts that their “captivity” in France is finally coming to an end. That feels a little dramatic, but Diop means what she says.

34. “Between the Temples”

Director: Nathan Silver

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Robert Smigel

Read IndieWire’s Review: It’s not as if it’s some great mystery why Ben and Carla are drawn to each other, and Kane’s non-judgmental warmth sells Carla as a clear panacea for a grieving man who just wants to feel the unconditional love of being a kid again. He probably won’t feel that way forever (the mirror his moms have hung next to a painting of Ben as a child won’t always look like such a damning portrait by comparison), but he’s not there yet, and Carla’s the only one who seems OK with that. She connects with Ben in the same way she connected with the Jewish music her parents wouldn’t let her learn about when Carla was a kid: She doesn’t really understand the words he’s saying, but she loves the way they sound.

“Between the Temples” — its punny title pointing towards the kind of latitude that Ben and Carla are begging for in order to find their bliss — ultimately isn’t sure if happiness is viable in the long-term. But in focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, it finds enough fleeting joy to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward.

33. “The Wild Robot”

Director: Chris Sanders

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames

Read IndieWire’s Review: Somewhere on a distant island, a verdant little slice of nature filled to the brim with all of North America’s greatest hits creatures (bears, raccoons, skunks, foxes, geese, all the recognizable stars), a snazzy robot has crash-landed. Her name is ROZZUM unit 7134, she’s winningly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, and she’s a real striver. Like all ROZZUM units — imagine the love child of The Iron Giant and WALL-E — she’s built to serve, and will “always complete its task, just ask.” Unfortunately, when a technological marvel like ROZZUM unit 7134 unexpectedly arrives on an uninhabited island, finding a human master to actually tell them her what to do is a hefty ask.

32. “September 5”

Director: Tim Fehlbaum

Cast: John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch

Read IndieWire’s Review:A story that doesn’t seem fresh on paper — and one previously explored in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” — may be a barrier to entry for some audiences. But Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5,” which takes audiences inside the airtight, under-air-conditioned ABC News control room as terrorists commandeered the 1972 Summer Olympics mere yards away, is a gripping, singular depiction that stands on its own merits.

In a tight 94 minutes, Fehlbaum pivots from the mayhem outside and solely toward the handful of sports broadcasters forced to improvise as eight Palestinian militants, known as Black September, took the Israeli Olympic team hostage. All 11 hostages were killed. Though going into this movie with that historical perspective doesn’t impede the tension onscreen — even if “September 5’s” psychological inquiry into the crisis and how it reshaped TV news, and how that very broadcast coverage may have spurred a nightmare to its worst possible horizon, is occasionally pat and less penetrating.

31. “A Complete Unknown”

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Boyd Holbrook

Read IndieWire’s Review: “A Complete Unknown” presents one of the most forcefully idiosyncratic figures of our lifetimes as a creature so inextricable from the culture he shaped that it all but deprives him of any agency of his own, a feeling exemplified by the film’s unwillingness to engage with its political context (an especially bizarre choice for a movie that’s bookended with appearances by Woody Guthrie). Mangold so clumsily interpolates the March on Washington, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other marquee ’60s signifiers into his subject’s rise to fame that Dylan almost comes to have a Forrest Gump-like quality about him, as if his place in history were an accidental byproduct of his efforts to just do his own thing.

30. “Megalopolis”

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Giancarlo Esposito

Read IndieWire’s Review: Coppola has always believed in America, but his faith is eroding by the second, and “Megalopolis” is nothing if not the boldest and most open-hearted of his many bids to stop time before it’s too late (an effort that has informed so much of his career, from “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” to “Youth After Youth” and “Jack”). As ever, he recognizes the futility in the attempt, even if his characters are sometimes a bit slow on the uptake.

What elevates “Megalopolis” so far above those other films — even “Jack” — is how clearly the constant madness of its folly and the occasional disaster of its design serve as conduits for its writer/director/producer/financier’s entire creative ethos. Coppola might lack the imagination required to invent the new cinema that his new movie so desperately wishes it could will into being (he’s not even De Palma in that respect, let alone Godard), but he’s always seen the need for it better and more urgently than any of his contemporaries.

29. “Babygirl”

Director: Halina Reijn

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas

Read IndieWire’s Review: In what might be an American movie first, Kidman is here the female version of those lored-about male CEOs who hire younger female escorts to tie them up and leave them locked in a penthouse for a long weekend, parsing morsels of food from a dog bowl. Romy infantilizes herself under Samuel’s sexual grasp, with Kidman’s petite frame and Romy’s pleadingly hungry carnal need at times turning her into a little girl hoping to be loved. And fucked. “Look at me! I’m not normal,” she tells Jacob in a moment of throwdown candor. But Reijn doesn’t care what “normal” looks like, and Romy’s tumble into an erotic stupor is never made out to be a perversion. It’s more that Romy is finally getting a grip on what she really wants out of life and sex.

28. “Hit Man”

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Retta, Austin Amelio

Read IndieWire’s Review: Powell and Arjona have fizzy chemistry with each other, which isn’t much of a shock for two people who could probably get a spark going with a paper bag during a rainstorm, but it’s fun to watch both of their characters throw themselves into their new lives. It’s not particularly funny, however, as Powell and Linklater’s script opts for broad charm over big laughs to an extent that leaves “Hit Man” a bit too milquetoast for a movie whose star is ready to make a bigger impression, but Powell’s ability to power through some dull material on charm alone only reaffirms the credibility of his stardom, and the film’s general lack of ambition keeps things from going awry whenever a joke doesn’t land. Aim small, miss small.

27. “The Room Next Door”

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola

Read IndieWire’s Review: Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through” — and the second mounting of a Nunez book this fall season alongside David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend” — “The Room Next Door” is mannered in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful, stilted and stiff where it should be sumptuous, and aches of the feeling that the Spanish auteur passed his sensibility, and his script, through a direct-to-English transferal that lacks the nuances that, say, a bilingual literary translator would bring to a text brought from Europe to the United States. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, playing longtime friends who reunite as the latter decides to give up stage-three cancer treatment to choose euthanasia instead, move and speak as if in different films.

26. “Nosferatu”

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe

Read IndieWire’s Review: Faithful as it might seem to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu,” Eggers’ lush and rapturously psychosexual riff on the same material isn’t a simple remake so much as a seductive reverse shot. Where the earlier film climaxes by casting the silhouette of a vampire against a solid wall, this new one starts by projecting the same image across the soft white curtains of its heroine’s bedroom window, as young Ellen Hutter’s (Lily-Rose Depp) midnight prayer for “a spirit of comfort” is answered by a hunger so close at hand that its appetite seems to be rooted within her own heart.

Or perhaps the call is emanating from somewhere else in her body, as Ellen comes to the voice as much as it comes to her. The prologue might end with a paroxysm of violence, but first there are a few timid whimpers of nascent pleasure; Bill Skarsgård’s base and primal Count Orlok is a nightmare who arrives on the wings of a nocturnal emission. Despite Orlok’s prosthetic decrepitude and the plague-like toxicity of his love, what truly horrifies Ellen about him is that some unknown part of her nature craves his touch.

25. “Civil War”

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jesse Plemons, Nick Offerman

Read IndieWire’s Review: t’s like an immersive experience of being in a war zone, which establishes a sort of battlefield camaraderie between the audience and the group of journalists who guide us through the Eastern part of the U.S. in the last days of a devastating civil war. The “Western Forces” of Texas and California and the “Florida Alliance” are closing in on Washington, D.C., and despite the confident tone of his daily radio addresses, the president (Nick Offerman) is expected to surrender any day now. The political dimensions of all of this are never explained, and are frankly irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how these states joined together, or why they seceded. What matters is what the ensuing violence has done to Americans as a whole.

In real life, America is growing crueler and more divided by the day, and the social fabric of the country is disintegrating along with its infrastructure. But “Civil War” isn’t a plea for empathy, or even civility. It simply follows this trend to its logical end point, which is a country where militiamen with automatic weapons shoot strangers on sight and torture their old high school classmates in the burned-out shells of abandoned car washes. Everyone who isn’t directly affected by the violence pretends it isn’t happening, in the name of “stay[ing] out” of politics — a stance that the film condemns more strongly than any.

24. “Juror #2”

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Colette, J.K. Simmons

Read IndieWire’s Review: Opening with broad strokes of patriotism that paint the American legal system in an idyllic light, it descends into a study of the ways that an imperfect system can be made even less perfect by the mortals tasked with running it. Yet it’s more interested in giving everyone the benefit of the doubt than casting blame on any individual person or group. Even in the film’s darkest moments, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams beg us to consider the possibility that our enemies are doing their best to get through the day without veering too far from their own definition of a good person, only to remind us how short of those ideals we’re each capable of falling. “Juror #2” argues that nobody should be defined by their mistakes, but we can’t move on from them without admitting to ourselves that we’ll never be fully liberated from our pasts.

23. “Janet Planet”

Director: Annie Baker

Cast: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler

Read IndieWire’s Review: Working with cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, Baker uses 16mm to create a wistful haze of nostalgia that is punctured by Lacy’s budding cynicism. In their compositions, energy beams off of Nicholson, who has a tricky task at hand that she pulls off spectacularly. In the eyes of so many of the other characters, she’s luminous, but she’s also wracked with self doubt. Rarely do we see her without Lacy’s gaze nearby, and Nicholson manages to create a fully formed character even with the intentional limitations of that viewpoint.

Baker and her production designer Teresa Mastropierro pack their frames with such care that you can almost smell these spaces — the armpits lacking in deodorant, the herbal shampoos, and the musty books.

22. “Sing Sing”

Director: Greg Kwedar

Cast: Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin

Read IndieWire’s Review: Founded in 1996, Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) helps incarcerated people “develop critical life skills through the arts,” per the program’s website. The organization currently offers different arts-based workshops across multiple New York correctional facilities, but theater remains their flagship program. Members of the prison population stage classic and contemporary plays alongside developing original works for the benefit of their peers and families.

“Art as therapy” might be a hoary concept in the privileged abstract, but within the context of a punitive system all but designed to degrade, there’s genuine merit to the idea that creative collaboration can help foster empathy and reconnect a person to their shared humanity. In fact, the proof is in the pudding: Less than three percent of RTA members return to prison vs. 60% of the prison population nationwide. By providing a safe space to be vulnerable and inhabit different perspectives, RTA offers a humane alternative to criminal justice, which primarily (and futilely) focuses on punishment as a means to an end.

21. “Furiosa”

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth

Read IndieWire’s Review: It stands to reason that inveterate madman George Miller has followed the most spectacular action movie of the 21st century not with a sequel that continues where “Mad Max: Fury Road” left off (though he hopes to make one of those someday), but rather with a prequel that paves the way to where it began. By the same token, it also stands to reason that Miller hasn’t tried to outdo the orgiastic mayhem that brought his Ozploitationfranchise screaming into the 21st century all shiny and chrome —the guy might be insane, but he isn’t stupid.

20. “No Other Land”

Director: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor

Read IndieWire’s Review: The first major film about the occupation of Palestine since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October of last year, “No Other Land” naturally assumes a tragic new urgency in light of the fact that at least 29,000 Palestinians —more than 12,000 of them children — have been murdered in their own country since Adra and his collaborators began editing their documentary in preparation of its Berlinale debut, but this harrowing and unforgettable portrait of endurance is all the more powerful for its focus on the decades of colonial degradation that paved the way for Israel’s latestand most nakedly genocidal effort to oppress its neighbors.

19. ‘Evil Does Not Exist’

Director: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa

Read IndieWire’s Review: “Evil Does Not Exist,” the title of the latest film from “Drive My Car” director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a bold statement to make in the year 2023. As it turns out in this eerie and elusive ecological tone poem about man, nature, and man’s nature, the statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes.

This made-in-secret and gently lilting film set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo seems like a call for compassion on the surface — it centers on how the village’s inhabitants tangle with a corporation trying to set up a glamping site in their forest, only for the two opposing sides to eventually find common ground. But that entente proves a foil for a much darker twist Hamaguchi pulls in the film’s last act

18. “A Different Man”

Director: Aaron Schimberg

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson

Read IndieWire’s Review: A caustically funny cosmic joke of a film about an insecure actor who finds a miracle cure for his facial disfigurement, only to be upstaged by a stranger who oozes self-confidence despite (still) having the exact same condition the main character had once allowed to hold him back, Aaron Schimberg’s ruthless and Escher-like “A Different Man” might have felt cruel if not for how cleverly it complicates its punchline.

Are we supposed to be laughing at someone — someone who’s been treated like a monster for his entire adult life —just because they couldn’t resist the opportunity to shed their skin? Anyone familiar with Schimberg’s “Chained for Life,” which similarly defenestrated the notion of disabilities as “God’s mistakes,” already knows the answer to that question. Besides, who among us would pass up the chance to look like Sebastian Stan?

17. “Emilia Pérez”

Director: Jacques Audiard

Cast: Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana, Édgar Ramírez

Read IndieWire’s Review: You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a movie musical where the words “mammoplasty, vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty” play out in song. Nor have you lived until you’ve seen that same movie musical in which Selena Gomezsays the words “My pussy still hurts when I think of you.” And you’ve never seen a movie musical at all about transness that takes as bold of swings as Jacques Audiard‘s “Emilia Pérez,” which is stylistically unforgettable while missing the crucial element that makes any movie musical work: Actually good, memorable songs.

16. “Flow”

Director: Gints Zilbalodis

Read IndieWire’s Review: Walt Disney’s “Bambi” is considered by animation buffs to be a high point in the history of the medium: For the depth created by its multi-plane camera, the almost nature-doc-like naturalism of its animal characters’ movements, the environmental effects of the rain, snow, forest fire, and leaves blowing throughout that add texture, and its almost plotless “circle of life” theme and structure. “Flow” matches that and ups the ante — these animals don’t even talk! The environments are CGI and the “camera” moves through them with a handheld-like jerkiness and momentum that puts to shame Jon Favreau’s idea of simulating “filming” an animated movie in his “Lion King” remake. You really feel like you’re watching a lived-in environment here, with the frame that’s limiting what you’re seeing capable of going in any number of directions.

15. “Close Your Eyes”

Director: Victor Erice

Cast: José Coronado, Manolo Solo

Read IndieWire’s Review: “Close Your Eyes” is neither an autobiographical cine-memoir à la “The Fabelmans” nor a teary-eyed tribute to the magic of the movies in the vein of “Cinema Paradiso.” Yet, as if by accident and divine purpose all at once, it also becomes both of those things by the end. Set at the dawn of the streaming age and shot with the funereal sterility that came with it, “Close Your Eyes” openly laments the loss of a more tactile film experience (the kind that included actual film), but only so that it can honor the way certain images take root inside us when seen under the right circumstances, as inextricable from our being as a soul from its body.

14. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

Cast: Misagh Zare, Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki

Read IndieWire’s Review: “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is an anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian filmmaker who just fled his home country for Europe after an eight-year prison sentence from the Islamic Republic. This is not the first brush with theocratic law for the dissident director, who’s been working steadily out of Iran for two decades.

So while Iran will never, ever submit his deeply unsettling latest masterwork for the Best International Feature Oscar — often the only harbinger of anti-establishment Middle Eastern films making their way to the U.S. — this searing domestic thriller deserves the widest audience possible. With the brutal 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by government hands as his launching point, Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.

13. “The Beast”

Director: Bertrand Bonello

Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay

Read IndieWire’s Review: Compelling evidence that every major arthouse director should be required tomake their own “Cloud Atlas” before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange “The Beast” finds the French director broadening — and in some cases challenging — the core obsessions of his previous films into a sci-fi epic about the fear of falling in love.

12. “A Real Pain”

Director: Jesse Eisenberg

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin

Read IndieWire’s Review: With his debut feature “When You Finish Saving The World,” Jesse Eisenberg proved surprisingly deft in his handling of interpersonal drama between family members at odds. His follow-up, “A Real Pain,” sees him wearing multiple hats, as he directs himself in the role of the socially anxious but professionally put-together David Kaplan. On its surface, it’s hardly a departure from Eisenberg’s other roles. But through David’s relationship with his moody and energetic cousin Benjamin, or “Benji” (Kieran Culkin), the actor-writer-director unfurls a number of intricate personal and social dynamics that turn the lens not only on the deep insecurity underlying the average Eisenberg character, but Eisenberg’s own piercing guilt as an American Jew with European roots — who comes from a place of unimaginable trauma, but frets over the small things.

11. “Conclave”

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow

Read IndieWire’s Review: A very silly but wonderfully staged papal thriller that’s only made credible by the immaculate talents of Berger’s cast and crew (please ignore the movie’s absurd insinuation into above-the-line Oscar races, overdue as Fiennes might be), “Conclave” is far too entertaining to dismiss in a puff of white smoke, even if the film might be a bit too convinced of its own dramatic import. Of course, few actors are better than Ralph Fiennes at elevating silliness to the level of high art (see: “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “A Bigger Splash”), and his performance as Cardinal Lawrence — the dean of the College of Cardinals, and the man entrusted by the Holy Father to manage the conclave in which they’ll elect a new one — keeps this soap opera from turning into suds.

10. “Hard Truths”

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett

Read IndieWire’s Review: Leigh explores these feelings with the softly familiar touch of a late work, but even in this small portrait of a story he remains peerlessly sensitive to how life grows around the hurt that threatens to stop it in place; he waters the weeds that more didactic filmmakers would instinctively try to pull out of the ground, and in doing so digs up a degree of compassion that belies the scabrousness of the world itself. There’s no instant cure for Pansy’s condition; no emotional breakthrough that will put a stop to her downward spiral or heal the pain that she’s forced her son and husband to suffer in silence.

Per its title, “Hard Truths” doesn’t go in for easy fixes, and the film seems to end in much the same place as it starts. But it doesn’t. Not quite. The earth might quake wherever Pansy goes, but the film’s real power is in watching her family hold on to the shared history that she threatens to uproot. “I love you,” Chantelle tells her. “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” It’s a message that Leigh has been trying to convey to his characters for more than 40 years, and one that has seldom been so natural to accept for ourselves.

9. “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”

Director: Radu Jude

Cast:Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrsan, Nina Hoss

Read IndieWire’s Review:

It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.

Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.

8. “The Substance”

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

Read IndieWire’s Review: An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” will stop at nothing —and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of “The Fly” or the final minutes of “Akira.”

7. “Dune: Part Two”

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Austin Butler

Read IndieWire’s Review: Denis Villeneuve has insisted that “Dune: Part Two” would be a direct continuation of its predecessor rather than a sequel, and the man has absolutely made good on that promise: Not only does this new movie pick up exactly where the last one left off, it also carries over the strengths and weaknesses that made the previous chapter so astonishing to look at but stultifying to watch.

6. “I Saw the TV Glow”

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

Cast: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine

Read IndieWire’s Review: Another, more explicitly trans meditation on the role that media can play in revealing people to themselves, Schoenbrun’s astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale. If “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was a 360p snapshot of dysphoria in motion, “I Saw the TV Glow” is an intimate landscape shot with the ultra-vivid resolution of a recurring dream; it marries the queer radicality of a Gregg Araki film with the lush intoxication of a Gregory Crewdson photo, and finds Schoenbrun holding on to every inch of their vision as they make the leap from outsider artist to A24-stamped auteur. This is a movie that knows it will be seen (or was at least financed with that expectation), and yet, to an even greater degree than Schoenbrun’s debut, it’s also a movie about how the things people watch can have the power to see them in return. Even the parts of themselves they might be hiding from. Even the parts of themselves they aren’t ready to name yet.

5. “Challengers”

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor

Read IndieWire’s Review: If, as Blanche Dubois once said, “The opposite of death is desire,” then Luca Guadagnino will live forever, and his latest film — a transcendently sweaty tennis love triangle so turned on by the heat of competition that its sex scenes feel like foreplay and its rallies feel like porn —is possibly the most unbridled portrait of resurrection since “The Passion of the Christ.”

It’s definitely the horniest story ever set within the purgatorial concrete nothing of New Rochelle, NY, which is where this movie’s three main characters all happen to cross paths during the final match of a dingy U.S. Open qualifier that’s being sponsored by a local tire store. They’ve been fucking each other on and off the court for more than a decade by the time “Challengers” unleashes its first serve, and yet, despite winning on every level of their chosen sport,these long-limbed athletes have lost their lust for life at some point along the way. At this point, their lust for each other might be the only force on Earth powerful enough to get their heads back in the game.

4. “All We Imagine as Light”

Director: Payal Kapadia

Cast: Divya Prabha, Kani Kusruti

Read IndieWire’s Review: This casual everyday vignette is brimming with a sensuality (the rain, the clothes, the food, the women) that people don’t tend to notice when caught up in the rhythm of life. It takes a snapshot from a photographer removed from the situation to make you realize how full these moments are. Each shot by Ranabir Das in this gorgeous and absorbing film has been composed to have the skin-prickling effect of a photograph taken by someone with a deep and attentive care for their subject — a photographer sufficiently removed to see clearly while still close enough to feel the thrum of a lifeforce.

3. “Nickel Boys”

Director: RaMell Ross

Cast: Brandon Wilson, Ethan Herisse

Read IndieWire’s Reviews: These two boys, so different in their outlooks but so complementary in their dreams, elegantly come to embody the historic disconnect between what is and what can be — and the eternal struggle to reconcile those realities within ourselves. Light on its feet and soft as a velvet hammer, “Nickel Boys” mourns the stolen potential of its characters while rescuing a profound resilience from how they come to see themselves in each other (a synthesis crystallized in the film’s casually stunning final minutes, which force us to look at this story in a whole new light just as it ushers us out of the darkness).

2. “The Brutalist”

Director: Brady Corbet

Cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn

Read IndieWire’s Review: It might seem too easy to observe that Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” —a 215-minute slab of a film that spans 30 years in the life of Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who flees to America in the hopes of building a better future — has been constructed to embody the aesthetics of its title character. Shot in VistaVision and projected on 300lbs.’ worth of 70mm film stock, Corbet’s epic draws a perfectly self-evident connection between the weight of its raw material and that of the concrete monolith Tóth creates over the course of the story, and the same could be said of its minimalistic framing, its bone-deep aversion to nostalgia, and, most of all, the movie’s efforts to reveal the soul of its subject through the geometry of its design.

But anyone familiar with Corbet’s previous features (“The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux”) will recognize that the seismic and shuddering obviousness of his style provides its own point. A deadly serious and fetishistically Euro-centric young auteur who’s fascinated by the cyclical relationship between trauma and culture (“The Childhood of a Leader” was about the abuse suffered by a fascist tyrant during his formative years, “Vox Lux” about how a school shooting gave rise to a pop star whose celebrity is then repurposed towards even more fatal ends), Corbet delights in the violent cause-and-effect of the 20th century, which shook the Earth off its axis in a way that invited people to reimagine it in their own image.

1. “Anora”

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn

Read IndieWire’s Review: Anora —or “Ani,” as she prefers to be called—is a brassy, 23-year-old Russian-American stripper who shares a small house with her sister in Brighton Beach. Ivan — or “Vanya,” as he uses interchangeably — is the 21-year-old son of a Moscow billionaire who stays in his father’s cocaine mansion on the far side of Brooklyn whenever he’s in New York, which if it were up to him would be always. She works seven nights a week at the Manhattan strip club where she’s the only Russian-speaker. Ivan, meanwhile, has clearly never worked a day in his life. She’s the child of a mom who lives in Miami and a dad who doesn’t exist, while he’s a hyper-juvenile nepo baby who may never be mature enough to graduate into a large adult son.

There’s probably an effervescent rom-com to be made about these two wildly mismatched kids meeting over a lapdance and falling in love with each other after Ivan pays Ani $15,000 to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week. Lucky for us, there is no way on God’s green Earth that Sean Baker—who’s devoted the better part of his career to destigmatizing sex workers across raw and frenzied and utterly exhilarating films like “Tangerine” and “Red Rocket” — would ever allow these characters to settle for such an inauthentic story. Not even a little bit.