2024 has proved a bumper year for big-screen releases, with a flurry of long-delayed blockbusters—as well as some hotly anticipated sequels and new offerings from Oscar-winning auteurs—finally hitting theaters. As we barrel into awards season—mark your calendars for the Golden Globes (January 5) and the Critics Choice Awards (January 12) at the top of 2025—here are the films we’ve loved most this year.
Out of Darkness (February)
Out of Darkness is a prehistoric survival tale: Six Paleolithic characters against a dark force hunting them when the sun goes down. And, like any good late-night film, it takes no time to get moving. Be advised that the characters speak an invented language, Tola, devised with the help of an academic advisor and translated via subtitles. But the movie is a stylish, breathless wonder, shot in the stunning Scottish Highlands in spectral natural light and set to a percussive, thumping score. It’s more thriller than horror film, though there are bouts of visceral violence, and when the group plunges into a old-growth forest, the Blair Witch vibes fully descend. —Taylor Antrim
La Chimera (March)
Writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s mystical-tinged drama—the final part of her trilogy on Italian identity—examines the persistent ties between the living and the dead, the past and the present, the seen and the unseen. Josh O’Connor learned Italian to play Arthur, an English graverobber in 1980s Tuscany running with a crew of fellow tombaroli who finds himself haunted by a deceased love. Yet descriptions can’t do it proper justice—trust that it’s a strange, wondrous, lovely riddle of a film that lingers far after the final, heartbreaking scene. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
Dune: Part Two (March)
Director Denis Villeneuve’s desert planet blockbuster was so hyped—with the press tour to end all press tours—that it was almost a surprise that the actual movie, starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, and more, was actually really great. This is a sci-fi epic, mythic and self-serious, but somehow crisply paced and cool instead of ridiculous; extremely long but never boring; and packed with enough action set pieces and charismatic movie stars that you kind of can’t believe your luck. —TA
Love Lies Bleeding (March)
Rose Glass’s follow-up to her mesmerizing horror debut, Saint Maud, is this heady, headlong queer romance set in 1989 New Mexico about a gym manager (played by Kristen Stewart) and an amateur bodybuilder (Katy O’Brien, committed and excellent) who fall into a steamy, steroids-fueled affair, and cause all sorts of mayhem along the way. There are ideas about self-actualization and power here, but also a lot of neon-lit body horror. The result is potent and possibly a bit divisive. A conversation piece. —TA
Challengers (April)
Has any movie this year captured the internet’s attention quite like Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers? Starring a triad of extremely appealing young stars—Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist, and a career-best Zendaya—it’s a sexy and kinetic delight, propelled by satisfying performances, a thumping score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, and VFX tricks so wonderfully wacky it’s easy to miss just how technically impressive they are. A flat-out wonderful time at the movies. —Marley Marius
Civil War (April)
Civil War is an ultra-poised modern war movie, balanced between beauty and horror. Writer-director Alex Garland’s vision of a near-future America in battle with itself has ravishing moments, an incredible central performance from Kirsten Dunst, and a heart-stopping pace. But this is a movie built around a moral center, and it is as excruciating as any you’re likely to see this year. There are stunningly beautiful passages (tracer fire in the night sky, a drive through a forest fire) that will stick with you and needle drops (Suicide and De La Soul) that leave marks. Civil War is unconvinced of many things: that journalism will save us, that democracy will endure, that the left or the right has any purchase on rectitude. All it knows for sure is that when we turn on each other, no one wins. —TA
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (May)
Could the Mad Max prequel, Furiosa, possibly measure up to George Miller’s 2015 beloved Fury Road? The answer is a surprised and delighted yes. Longer, richer in character work, and twice as dark in its storytelling, this origin story with Anya Taylor-Joy is operatic and grand and gleefully demented in its set pieces. This is a revenge story, as classical in its arc as True Grit or Kill Bill, and Taylor-Joy holds the film’s rage and bloodlust in her tiny frame and stoic face. Like Charlize Theron in Fury Road, this heroine barely speaks, but her performance is a marvel of grace and physicality. Furiosa is populated by muscle-bound thugs who could probably bench-press 12 Furiosas, but Taylor-Joy plausibly defeats all of them. —TA
I Saw the TV Glow (May)
A surrealist story of two suburban teenagers obsessed with a cult 1990s TV show, I Saw The TV Glow is eerie, yearning, and piercingly nostalgic: a vivid account of youthful alienation full of luridly beautiful, and sometimes extremely alarming, images. It is 1996, and seventh-grader Owen lives his life in a state of pained dissociation—typically in the radiance of his family TV. When he notices a ninth-grade girl named Maddy reading a paperback episode guide to a TV show called The Pink Opaque, something cracks ever-so-slightly open within him. Maddy invites Owen to her house to watch an episode together, and a fixation develops, as well as a strange bond between the two. As the film moves through decades, it builds and works on your nerves, and the ending sequence, with an adult Owen beset by disappointment and a bottled sense of self, is scary and explosive. —TA
The Devil’s Bath (June)
In the hands of the filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge), rural 18th-century Austria looks like an extremely difficult place to be a woman. Based on historical accounts and filmed in gorgeous woodland light, this patient and unsettling film follows the spiraling mindset of Agnes, a young bride who finds herself isolated by chores and drudgery and sinking deeper and deeper into depression. In her small and deeply Catholic community, suicide is an unpardonable sin, so a horrible crime lures her with the promise of escape. Anchored by the no-holds-barred debut performance of Anja Plaschg as Agnes, The Devil’s Bath is nerve-straining and memorable. Stream it on the horror specialist, Shudder. —TA
Hit Man (June)
In Richard Linklater’s winning action-comedy, Glen Powell plays a dweeby, jorts-wearing undercover Houston cop posing as a suave and sexy hit man. Things start to go sideways when sparks fly with a woman he’s hired to kill (Adria Arjona). Even more improbable than Powell being a nerd? The whole story is indeed based on real events. It’s so much fun, you won’t be able to stop yourself smiling. One much-discussed scene left audiences applauding mid film—avoid spoilers at all costs. —LWM
Janet Planet (June)
Playwright Annie Baker’s first film is an intensely personal, hyper-specific wonder about a young girl growing up in the shadow and protective shade of her single mother in the hippie wilds of northwestern Massachusetts. The mother, Janet—played by the wonderful actor Julianne Nicholson—is an acupuncturist and iconoclast who lives in a cabin in the woods with her daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). The pacing is slow and the plot isn’t much–a series of adults that gain Janet’s attention disrupt Lacy’s small world—but the film holds you in its delicate grip all the way through. —TA
Dìdi (July)
A hilarious and poignant crowd-pleaser that first attracted buzz at Sundance, this first feature from the talented young director Sean Wang is a coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy growing up in early ’00s Fremont, California. The pleasures of Dìdi are in the specifics—skate culture, Myspace, pop-punk—and in the agonizing experience of flirting, making and losing friends, and fighting with your family, all out of a young boy’s desperate need to belong. —TA
Longlegs (July)
Inspired by gothic ’90s thrillers like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Osgood Perkins’s unsettling and periodically shocking mood piece is an intelligent example of occult-horror escapism. Maika Monroe, in a carefully modulated performance, steps it up as the film’s protagonist, an FBI agent investigating a series of mysterious killings in the gloomy, forest-cloaked Pacific Northwest. And by now, you’ve surely heard about Nicolas Cage in the title role. He is, quite simply, one of the weirdest, scariest movie monsters I’ve encountered in some time—glam-rock grotesque, reedy voiced, and satan obsessed. The whole thing is dark and relentless with plot turns that make this about familial secrets and the bonds of parents and children. —TA
Oddity (July)
Its setup might seem expected (an isolated house in Ireland, an insane asylum nearby), but Oddity loads such intense jump scares and go-for-it storytelling into its short running time that the movie feels singular and new. Oddity is the second feature from Damian McCarthy, an Irish writer-director with a fixation on dark hallways and building tension beat by beat. One should avoid spoilers when it comes to the movie’s plot, but suffice it to say that Oddity begins with the wife of a doctor from the nearby institution who is spending the night alone in their house. She’s visited by one of his patients, who desperately asks to be let inside. The choice she makes, of whether to open the door, sets off a slightly lunatic tale that involves her blind, psychic sister; haunted artifacts; and a central supernatural mystery that has a ruthless conclusion. —TA
Starve Acre (July)
Leave it to the Brits to do folk horror right. Starve Acre, a beautifully shot, eerie mood piece set among bleak 1970s Yorkshire moors, gives you all the elements: a desolate farm; creepy locals wearing ultra-nubby sweaters; a young couple, played by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, caught up in a demonic curse and descending into madness. It probably wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the committed and nuanced performances of Smith and Clark, who look transported right out of a ’70s time machine. They lose their young son early in the film, and their grief drives them into obsessive behavior even as the wildlife on their land begins acting strangely. Creepy and a bit unhinged, this is one to watch late at night. —TA
Twisters (July)
There is an art to making a popcorn flick, and Twisters is a masterclass. State-of-the-art special effects? Check. Wildly attractive leads with a will-they-or-won’t-they chemistry? Check. (Glenn Powell maybe even invented the trope of the manic pixie dream guy.) A do-or-die plot with a subtle redemption arc? Check. Many of the films on this list will go on to win Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes; Twisters likely won’t be one of them. But, as you sit watching Glenn Powell in a cowboy hat drive a pick-up truck full-throttle through the Oklahoma Plains, you’ll realize this is the most fun you’ve had watching a movie in years. —Elise Taylor
Good One (August)
The first thing to be said about Good One, is how quiet it is—an indie movie about a father-daughter camping trip in the Catskills that you inhale like a lungful of forest air. The second is how loudly its central performance speaks. With astonishing assuredness, newcomer Lily Collias plays Sam, a 17-year-old who mostly endures the company of her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy, also along for the camping trip)—two men in middle age who josh and joke as they hike, stressing about their careers and the disastrous state of their marriages. Sam is the good one in this triangle, a low-key teenager who withstands their teasing, cooks their dinner on a camp stove, exudes all the ambivalence of an almost-adult who still loves her father but is poised to leave him behind. Good One, a debut feature written and directed by India Donaldson, recalls the filmmaking of Kelly Reichardt in its near-plotless naturalism—until the whole thing turns on an act of bad judgment by one of the men that has heartbreaking power. —TA
The Goldman Case (September)
This true-life courtroom drama drew attention at Cannes back in 2023, a time when there was suddenly a surfeit of excellent French films set around trials: Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, the Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, and this Cédric Kahn-directed story about the trial of Pierre Goldman, a left-wing Parisian firebrand. American audiences have had to wait till now to see it, but it’s well worth seeking out. Goldman was the kind of hyper-principled intellectual radical that France specializes in—and as absorbingly portrayed by Arieh Worthalter, he glowers and gesticulates and speechifies from the dock. No, he insists, he did not kill two women in a pharmacy robbery in Paris, as he’s been accused, and he won’t dignify the proceedings by even cooperating much with his defense. Instead, he rages against bourgeois mores and unsettles the viewer as much as he enlivens the drama. The movie is all talk and debate—confined as it is entirely to the trial—but electrifying nonetheless.—TA
The Substance (September)
It’s hard to remember when I last saw a film that went as hard as Coralie Fargeat’s fearless follow-up to the candy-colored action thriller Revenge—the mind-bending tale of an actor (a career-best Demi Moore) deemed to be past her prime, who injects her body with a mysterious substance that promises to release a more perfect version of herself. Cue her collapsing onto her bathroom floor, her spine splitting open, and a younger alter-ego (a sweet and then devilish Margaret Qualley) emerging from inside her. What happens next inspired gasps, cheers, laughter and shrieks of horror in equal measure at the film’s Cannes premiere—and it, deservedly, left the festival with the best-screenplay prize. —Radhika Seth
Anora (October)
Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning crowdpleaser—a fleet-footed romp which follows the titular exotic dancer (a glorious Mikey Madison) who meets the goofy son of a Russian oligarch (newcomer Mark Eydelshteyn, already being dubbed “the Russian Timothée Chalamet”) and embarks on a madcap romance—seems to have secured its spot in the 2025 awards race. As with the beloved director’s previous work (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket), this is a funny, charming, and visually dazzling delight, which goes on to surprise you with its warmth and touching vulnerability—and an ending that’ll leave you utterly devastated. —RS
The Apprentice (October)
You may not leave The Apprentice feeling particularly refreshed—this is, after all, a 1980s biopic of Donald Trump’s rather unseemly rise in real estate and business. But director Ali Abbas’s film is undeniable in its force, especially for its central performances: Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as the notorious New York attorney and fixer Roy Cohn, who allied himself with Trump and acted as a kind of mentor early in his career. Both actors absolutely own this story of ambition, power, and corruption and their uncanny evocations of men who will stop at nothing to get ahead strike you to the core. But what is so fascinating about The Apprentice is its humanity. Stan’s portrayal of Trump makes room for shades of vulnerability and doubt (that you rarely see in the man himself), while Strong’s Cohn is haunted by his own mortality and waning potency. —TA
Conclave (October)
How can a movie made with such style and sophistication, with such a powerhouse cast, that is so entertaining and absorbing, also be something of a…trifle? That is the conundrum of Conclave, a movie that is just as dazzling to look at as it is slightly absurd, a Vatican-set melodrama that flirts with comedic excess, that robes itself with such seriousness of purpose that the whole thing feels borderline camp. It’s also tons of fun and has perhaps the finest performance of the year in Ralph Fiennes playing Cardinal Lawrence, a high ranking Vatican cleric who must oversee the selection of a new pope after the existing one has died. This closed-door process at the Vatican is famously opaque and Conclave juices the proceedings for maximum intrigue, expertly maintaining an air of mystery and crisis as the cardinals maneuver and double-deal, and try to consolidate power. Why should we care about any of this? I was never sure as the movie raced along, but I was delightfully gripped all the way to the totally crazy (don’t spoil it!) reveal at the end. —TA
The Outrun (October)
I wasn’t expecting to be quite so swept away by Saoirse Ronan as a 29-year-old struggling alcoholic in German director Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s best-selling 2016 memoir, The Outrun. But this movie, filmed mostly in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where the memoir was set, is emotionally rich and hugely generous to the character at its center (without descending into sentimentality or mawkishness). It’s not just alcohol that troubles Rona, but a mentally ill farmer father and a mother who has retreated into Christianity, and her tempests of drinking have driven away her boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). Her remedy is solitude in an even more remote place than the island she grew up on: Papay, in the North Sea. Ronan embodies the tenuousness and precariousness of sobriety with uncommon grace. —TA
All We Imagine as Light (November)
This patient and absorbingly beautiful Indian film, about the lives of two women—roommates and coworkers at a local hospital in contemporary Mumbai—won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, and it’s a marvel of friendship and lovelorn struggle. The feature debut of Payal Kapadia, Light has a clarity about working-class existence that draws you in. Longing is its subject: Prabha’s husband is far away in Germany, and her roommate, Anu, is swept up in a love affair with a young Muslim man. The film has the grace to spirit its characters away to a seaside village in its latter half where a dream logic descends and sadness and fantasy mix. Gorgeous. —TA
Emilia Perez (November)
In this audacious musical melodrama from French writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet), a Mexico City drug kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists the help of an underappreciated lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to fake his death so he can fulfill his dream of living as a woman—and that’s merely the first act. At Cannes this year, where the film won the jury prize, Gascón and Saldaña shared the best-actress award with costars Adriana Paz and Selena Gomez, the latter of whom is tasked with uttering one of the most gleefully over-the-top dirty-talk lines in recent memory. But this film is definitely not for pearl clutchers in any case; you may have already heard about the vaginoplasty song. It’s best if you strap in and just enjoy the ride of this exhilarating, genre-transcending extravaganza that out-Almodóvars Almodóvar. Saldaña pops in her solo song-and-dance showcase, and we’re rooting for Gascón to become the first openly trans actor nominated for an Oscar. —LWM
Heretic (November)
No one brings more mirth to a press tour than lovable old crank Hugh Grant, especially in what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career. After a recent string of unsavory and pompous characters (The Undoing, A Very English Scandal, Wonka), he goes full villain in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s psychological horror thriller, playing the cerebral and sinister Mr. Reed, who tests the faith of two young Mormon missionaries who knock on his door. Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East (who both actually grew up in the Mormon church before leaving to become actors) more than hold their own against Grant, and the dialogue-rich cat-and-mouse story provokes consideration of how religion can not only provide guidance and support but also be a means of control and lead to pain, violence, and misery. Dour subject aside, it manages to be rollicking good fun. —LWM
Maria (November)
In the latest from Pablo Larraín, Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas, the famed soprano who was one of the most acclaimed opera singers of her time, and whose personal life was the subject of intense scrutiny. Like many of Larraín’s films, Maria takes the larger-than-life person at its center and renders a portrait in sumptuous, striking scenes; this is a film as much about atmosphere as plot, and if you’re happy to float along with the arias, it will be a pleasant ride indeed. Here, the setting is primarily the apartment where Callas spent the last days of her life—dying ostensibly from a heart attack, but suffering from numerous afflictions—at the age of 53 in 1977. That apartment, and Callas herself, is meticulously tended by her butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher), and the film renders their care and love for this difficult, inspiring figure with touching generosity. —Chloe Schama
A Real Pain (November)
The headline deal to come out of Sundance was a $10 million sale to Searchlight for this highly watchable road-trip comedy about two Jewish cousins, played by Jesse Eisenberg (who wrote and directed) and Kieran Culkin, taking a kind of Holocaust tour through Poland to get in touch with their heritage. It would all be an amusing odyssey of squabbling and jokery—with some serious moments, too—if not for Culkin, who achieves lift-off just as he did on Succession, and adds a dose of tragedy to the proceedings. —TA
Wicked (November)
Listen, I was as skeptical as the next guy about Wicked—I wasn’t convinced by the trailers, or the bizarrely sincere press tour, or even the need to adapt this beloved but somewhat clunky Broadway musical in the first place. I’m happy to admit I was entirely wrong, and it proved to be one of the most thrilling (and delightful) cinematic experiences I had all year. You can chalk that up to Jon M. Chu’s dizzyingly choreographed musical numbers, or more likely to the knockout performance from Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, who brought an impressive emotional grit to what could otherwise have been an irritatingly worthy caricature. But like just about everyone else, it was Ariana Grande who was the real revelation: her killer comic timing led to some of the loudest belly laughs I’ve heard in a theater in recent memory. For my sins, I’m still humming the tune to “Defying Gravity” many weeks later. —LH
Babygirl (December)
Perhaps reports of the death of the movie sex scene are premature. Babygirl is the supremely entertaining new film from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, and it has already attracted buzz for Nicole Kidman’s all-out brave performance as Romy Mathis, a tech CEO who descends into an S&M-ish affair with Samuel, an intern at the company she runs. (He’s played with sure-footed cockiness by Harris Dickinson.) The movie is about kink and shame and lust and helplessness, and also about marriage, family, and middle age. The sex scenes are so real that you watch them through your hands, but they hit hard, and Kidman’s performance is one of the year’s best. —TA
The Brutalist (December)
The first half of Brady Corbet’s 215-minute-long The Brutalist traces the journey of Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who, after being freed from a concentration camp, travels to America to begin a new life, ultimately receiving a commission from an enigmatic property tycoon (Guy Pearce) to build a community center in rural Pennsylvania. At the same time, he works away with his lawyers to secure the necessary immigration papers for his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to join him—all the while navigating a growing addiction to heroin and the rising tides of antisemitism. At the Venice Film Festival, where The Brutalist premiered (and Corbet won the Silver Lion award for best director), sequences capturing the sounds and textures of industrial America—the clang of steel girders, the roar of a smelting furnace—drew audible gasps. The film’s scale is immense, the sets for the mausoleum-like architectural marvel at the center of its novelistic narrative are astonishing, and all three central performances are knockouts. The Brutalist is not without its flaws, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing—but what a pleasure it is to see a filmmaker swing for the fences and hit home run after home run. —Liam Hess
A Complete Unknown (December)
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is, for better and for worse, far more straightforward than earlier efforts to dramatize Bob Dylan’s life and work, inserting the Nobel Prize-winning icon into a familiar narrative structure (unlike, say, Todd Haynes’s experimental I’m Not There, from 2007). Yet it demands to be seen, if only for the virtuosic performance by a soft-spoken, hollow-eyed Timothée Chalamet at its center. Dylan aficionados will, no doubt, weigh in on the accuracy of Chalamet’s voice, gestures, mannerisms, and musical abilities, but I was most impressed by his ability to wrap so many specificities into his performance without ever seeming overly mannered. His portrayal is an entirely committed, entirely different from anything he’s ever done before—and surely heralds the beginning of an exciting new chapter in his career. —RS
The Girl with the Needle (December)
This feature by filmmaker Magnus von Horn is a little hard to casually recommend—a historical drama about a serial killer of infant newborns in gritty Copenhagen—and yet I found it darkly gorgeous and brave. It unfolds slowly, telling the story of a factory worker, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who, believing her husband is dead or missing in the fields of WWI, has an ill-advised affair and finds herself pregnant and destitute. When she tries, horrifically, to abort the baby, she is saved and taken in by Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who specializes in finding infants adoptive parents. The second half of this film is uncompromising and horrific without ever being gruesome, and the black and white cinematography is unfailingly beautiful. It’s a movie about gothic monstrousness but it ends with unexpected grace. A bleak, uncompromising marvel. —TA
Hard Truths (December)
At first, Hard Truths may appear to be a “small” movie, concerned as it is with a few days in the life of a family in suburban London captured with a cool, melancholic detachment. But in the assured hands of veteran filmmaker Mike Leigh—and with the help of knockout performances by its two leads, Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the troubled, belligerent Pansy and Michele Austin as her patient, kind sister Chantelle—its emotional impact couldn’t feel bigger. There is a dark humor to Pansy’s vicious diatribes against seemingly anyone whose path she crosses (a supermarket checkout assistant, her dentist, even her own husband and son), but as Leigh’s largely improvised script elegantly unfurls, it’s clear that her hard exterior serves to mask a deeper sadness and loneliness, despite the desperate attempts to help by those who love her. Even if it’s rooted in a very specific set of circumstances, there’s something quietly universal about Hard Truths, as Pansy moves day-to-day through a world she doesn’t always understand. Oh, and if Jean-Baptsite doesn’t get an Oscar nomination come January, I will riot. —LH
Nosferatu (December)
Between the jump scares, five thousand rats, gushes of blood, and an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård as the titular vampire, Robert Eggers has created the most terrifying movie of the year. (Some esteemed colleagues admitted to yelping in fright at their screenings, as I did too.) But eyes covered or not, Eggers’s strangely alluring worlds (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) are always irresistible. Here it’s gothic 1830s Germany, with tightly cinched ruffled frocks contrasted with unusual folk traditions and rapidly spreading disease. As the object of Count Orlok's obsession, Lily-Rose Depp gives a committed, impressive performance, as does Nicholas Hoult, who plays her distressed husband. But the menacing atmosphere is what haunts long after the end credits. —LWM
The Room Next Door (December)
Pedro Almodóvar’s first full-length English feature stutters a bit at the outset. There are all the hallmarks of the Spanish master: sumptuous interiors splashed with vibrant colors; rich, wordy roles for layered female characters; life-and-death stakes woven into the fabric of the everyday. But in its notes of melodrama, which veer into an almost cartoonish version of the genre, make the opening a bit rough going. Give it a chance: Once the flashbacks cease, and the plot settles, it is a stunning and ultimately simple meditation on love, friendship, and death. The film stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as two friends, reunited after many years as Swinton’s character fights a losing battle against cancer. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, the film unfolds with grace and restraint. —Chloe Schama
Santosh (December)
A compelling police drama opening later this year, Santosh offers a closely observed view of life for women in contemporary India. Here, we are inside a rural police force that our heroine, Santosh (Shahana Gaswami)—a widow in desperate need of income—joins as a lady constable. She is tasked with an investigation of the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, and taken under the wing of an older female inspector (Sunita Rajwar) who draws her into brutality and corruption. This one is a fascinating procedural: understated, human, and tense. —TA