The 10 Best New Movies (Right Now)
When searching for the latest and greatest cinematic offerings, the shifting distribution landscape makes one thing abundantly clear: No matter how badly we’d like for the big screen to be the place for the best movies, it’s simply not the case. Sure, the theatrical experience claims plenty of worthy films, but with on-demand video rental and the overwhelming number of streaming options—two areas where indie and arthouse cinema have been thriving as theaters shove them aside for more and more Marvel movies—alternative viewing methods bear consideration if you’re after a comprehensive list of the best new fare.
This list is composed of the best new movies, updated every week, regardless of how they’re available. Some may have you weighing whether it’s worth it to brave the theater. Some, thankfully, are cheaply and easily available to check out from your living room couch or your bedroom laptop. Regardless of how you watch them, they deserve to be watched—from tiny international dramas to blockbuster action films to auteurist awards favorites.
Check out the 10 best new movies movies right now:
10. Evil Does Not Exist
Release Date: May 3, 2024
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Stars: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani
Rating: NR
Runtime: 106 minutes
Evil Does Not Exist opens with the camera languorously tracking through treetops, seen from the ground, until interrupting itself abruptly with a music-stopping shot of Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), a grade-school-aged girl with her neck craned up – suggesting we were previously sharing her point of view. The implied closeness of that opening shot is the nearest the camera gets to its characters for a while; it’s 10, maybe 15 minutes before anyone in the movie is seen in anything resembling a close-up. We meet Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), Hana’s father, and figure out some details of their life, explaining the remoteness of the cinematography: They live in a woodsy Japanese village, broadly isolated but not alone, enjoying the quiet. We watch as Takumi performs outdoorsy tasks — chopping wood, hauling fresh well water — until we realize that, put together with minding Hana, they form his job, of sorts. Takumi and Hana aren’t that far from society; Takumi delivers the well water to a local udon restaurant, not exactly a strictly survivalist outpost. But there’s something pristine and untouched about their environment, making the interest of a company called Playmode both natural and horribly unnatural all at once. For a little while, it seems like Hamaguchi has made his own quiet, non-cutesy version of the story where the company man is tasked with steamrolling a small town, only to find himself charmed by its inhabitants and way of life. Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t exactly swerve away from that narrative; instead, it shifts again, slowly but surely, this time into more unsettling (and unsettled) territory. Hamaguchi’s previous film, his U.S. breakthrough and recipient of a Best Picture Oscar nomination, was the deliberate, sometimes mesmerizing Drive My Car. Evil Does Not Exist is only a little over half that movie’s length, and though it allows its characters a certain measure of soul-bearing conversation, it plays certain offscreen developments even closer to the vest. Hamaguchi’s film – and the performance style of Omika, a Hamaguchi crew member moving into acting here – is too controlled to produce an anguished tragedy out of this material, but it’s too unsparing to offer an easy exit. Even the most formidable steamrollers can’t always clear a path out of the wilderness.–Jesse Hassenger
9. Janet Planet
Release Date: June 21, 2024
Director: Annie Baker
Stars: Zoe Ziegler, Julianne Nicholson, Sophie Okonedo, Will Patton, Elias Koteas
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 113 minutes
Janet Planet immerses the audience in the boonies of Western Massachusetts during the summer and early autumn of 1991, allowing the viewer to absorb countless details of the period, mood, and relationships. Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), who will enter middle school in a few weeks, lives with her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and doesn’t have real friends of her own, which places her uncomfortably close to the adult orbit of failed romances and rootless non-careers. Mother and daughter both have what Janet later refers to as “forthrightness” while seeming, to some extent, at a loss for how to make each other happier. Baker’s (and Ziegeler’s) portrait of Lacy as the film continues is frequently stunning in its heartbreaking preadolescent candor. The bespectacled redheaded girl in oversized t-shirts expresses a sober self-analysis (“I usually have a hard time making friends”) that barely masks her sadness and ongoing neediness. She seems perpetually on the hunt for kids her own age, and simultaneously terrified that she’ll find them and be forced to pull away from Janet. Nearly every one of Lacy’s scenes is uneasily compelling – a coming-of-age story unbound by genre clichés. Why, then, does Baker insist on multiple scenes that grind the movie to a halt, even taking into account its deliberate pacing? Maybe Baker’s patience and empathy simply exceed my own. Shooting on 16mm celluloid, she captures moments that will become comforting memories, whether they should be or not: Lacy’s race through a local mall with a sadly temporary friend becomes a bucolic romp. The theme music of Clarissa Explains It All watched on a sick day becomes hypnotic. The many great scenes in Janet Planet underscore the frustrations of its few bad ones: Even an emotionally tumultuous childhood can be a lot more absorbing than the indulgences of the adult world.–Jesse Hassenger
8. Daughters
Year: 2024
Director: Natalie Rae, Angela Patton
Stars: Hugh Bonneville, Ben Winshaw, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, Nicole Kidman
Rating: NR
For ten long weeks, men who are incarcerated in a Washington, D.C. prison eagerly anticipate a rare opportunity to reunite with their daughters in the profoundly moving documentary feature Daughters. The film from co-directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton follows these fathers and their children as they prepare for a “Date with Dad” dance that will allow them to be reunited for six hours, a rare opportunity for physical connection as prisons across the board begin to limit in-person visitations. As part of the two-and-a-half-month lead-up to the dance, those eligible to participate complete a fatherhood coaching program, entailing an informal roundtable where the men are able to express their complicated feelings about their own upbringings and anxieties over their mandated absence. Rawly exposing the cruelty imposed upon predominantly Black children by the carceral state while also capturing the emotional whiplash of this fleeting encounter, Rae and Patton construct a visually stunning and narratively resonant portrait of love and longing. Lensed with love yet unabashedly committed to its nuanced depiction of familial strain—as well as the social systems that beget this separation—Daughters is a testament to the power of a father’s love and support, no matter the obstacle.—Natalia Keogan
7. Good One
Release Date: August 9, 2024
Director: India Donaldson
Stars: Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy
Rating: R
Runtime: 90 minutes
India Donaldson’s Good One trades in voyeurism, but not necessarily the type you’d expect from a nervy Sundance debut. Low-key in approach but deeply observant, much of the movie involves Sam (Lily Collias), a 17-year-old girl, watching and listening in plain sight. Sam’s dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) know that she’s there; sometimes, they even address her directly, or solicit her opinion about this or that, as the three of them embark on a camping trip. But neither of them are quite accustomed to how clearly Sam sees them, and how attuned she is to their middle-aged weaknesses, whether she’s amused or deeply disappointed. Chris and Matt seem to take their status as the adults in the room (or, in this case, in the woods) for granted, even as they’re giving lip service to Sam’s maturity. The audience better understands Sam’s watchfulness because Donaldson zeroes in on the face of her young lead, catching Collias in a range of expressions that far eclipse the stereotypical teenager repertoire of eyerolls and glowers. Those are there too, sometimes, but Sam also exhibits a kind of flickering skepticism over whether she can give these men the benefit of the doubt – or, in her father’s case, years of both love and frustration. Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions. Donaldson is closer to Reichardt in terms of incident and quiet; not overmuch of the former and plenty of the latter. Yet the movie does turn on a betrayal – a couple of them, even – with the clarity and grace of a perfectly wrought short story. Collias is a find, and Le Gros has become an expert at playing a certain type of muddling-through family man who convinces himself that certain selfish decisions are actually just him doing his best. The flipside of Donaldson’s close and careful observation is that even smaller developments start to feel inevitable in a quasi-literary sort of way. Once the story makes its biggest turn, the movie becomes more predictable, just a tiny bit easier to chart out, right up to its open ending – one moment that probably would work better with just the right closing sentence, rather than the particular image the movie lands on. Still, this is a striking introduction to Donaldson’s unflinching eye.—Jesse Hassenger
6. Longlegs
Release Date: July 12, 2024
Director: Oz Perkins
Stars: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood, Kiernan Shipka
Rating: R
Runtime: 101 minutes
The first thing I wanted to do after seeing Longlegs is take a shower. Some horror movies have you looking over your shoulder on the way out of the theater, jumping at shadows in the parking lot. These are the horror movies that follow you. Longlegs doesn’t follow you. You’re drenched in Longlegs. It’s all over you—in your hair, on your clothes—by the time the credits roll. Its fear is less tangible than a slasher or a monster, even less than a demon. It’s just something in the air, in the back of your mind, like the buzz of a fluorescent lamp. Oz Perkins’ Satanic serial killer hunt is his most accessible movie yet, putting the filmmaker’s lingering, atmospheric power towards a logline The Silence of the Lambs made conventional. Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion. After FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) successfully, and mysteriously, locates a killer on little more than a hunch, her charming boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), assigns the quiet savant to a long-dormant investigation into a suspect known only by how he signs the coded letters found at the crime scenes: Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). Only, the mystery to be solved isn’t Clue. You’re not filling in weapon, location, suspect. The question crawling under Longlegs’ skin is how grounded this case actually is, whether it’s a truly by-the-book procedural or whether that book is bound in skin and filled with spells. Lee is tight-lipped and uneasy in her own skin, a child’s soft voice wrapped in a blue FBI windbreaker. But she doesn’t balk at corpses, or head for the hills once she realizes she’s on Longlegs’ radar. Longlegs could also feel like familiar territory for Cage, at first glance. And that’s all we get at first, glances. Like any good monster movie, we’re denied a close look at Longlegs for a decent chunk of the movie’s three segments, but once we see him, that’s all you can think about. You see how a demonic seed has been planted and left to its own devices, down in some forgotten cellar, festering in the dark. As Perkins’ story progresses, you wonder where else those seeds have spread. It’s rotten Americana, every god-fearing Bible-thumper’s fears proven right. Longlegs contains a handful of impressively controlled performances, a dilapidated aesthetic rich with negative space, a queasy score, a methodical but always gripping pace, and one of the most original and upsetting horror villains in a long while. Perkins’ haunted vision is so convincing, you also might feel like scrubbing it off of you after you’ve hustled back to the safety of your home.–Jacob Oller
5. A Different Man
Year: 2024
Directors: Aaron Schimberg
Stars: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson
Rating: R
Runtime: 112 minutes
You can change your hair, you can change your clothes, you can surgically change your face to that of Hollywood hunk Sebastian Stan, and you’ll still be the same awkward, unlikeable weirdo on the inside. Or at least, that’s what writer/director Aaron Schimberg asserts in A Different Man, an exhilarating blend of body horror, dark comedy, sci-fi and romance. Even with all the power of the 21st century’s most scientifically advanced beautifying technology, the human race has still not figured out a medical surgery to make us better people, perhaps because this wouldn’t be a particularly profitable industry. It’s not that Edward (Sebastian Stan), an unsuccessful actor afflicted with neurofibromatosis, is a particularly vain individual. It’s once Edward abandons his own name for a fake sounding one and forsakes his former nice guy identity for a new debaucherous life as a wealthy real estate asshole that we realize, hey, maybe this wasn’t such a great guy to begin with. On top of that, maybe I, the viewer, am also an asshole for assuming Edward was a decent guy just because his face was deformed. And then the charismatic Oswald (Schimberg’s previous collaborator Adam Pearson) enters their lives stage right, and suddenly, he’s everywhere. Pearson is so compelling here that I hope it becomes his new calling card after long being known as “the guy from Under the Skin.” A Different Man is a major work—even as it shapeshifts from Cronenberg to Kaurismäki, developing into new territory at every turn, Schimberg never loses sight of his central questions: What makes us who we are? What does it mean to be a good person in this weird but beautiful world, surrounded by other people? Without providing precise answers, or resorting to the tired old cliché of “beauty is not skin deep,” Schimberg throws us in a new direction.—Katarina Docalovich
4. Between the Temples
Release Date: August 23, 2024
Director: Nathan Silver
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein
Rating: R
Runtime: 111 minutes
“A widower and his old music teacher prepare for a late-in-life bat mitzvah” sounds a bit like the set-up for a joke. A bartender in Between the Temples deadpans about as much, undercutting the hilarious, vigorous, emotionally rich movie with exactly the right amount of wry self-awareness. Filmmaker Nathan Silver re-teams with his Thirst Street co-writer C. Mason Wells (not to mention cinematographer Sean Price Williams and editor John Magary; this thing is an indie talent smorgasbord) for an endlessly energetic look at two lost souls’ desperate search for something to hold onto. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t looking for love, or even purpose, really. He just needs to get through the day. Carla (Carol Kane) isn’t here to help him, but to knock herself out of a rut. Their spark, never cloying and always quippy, matches all the heat radiating from Between the Temples‘ grainy ’70s aesthetic into its snowy setting. Its quick and clever script, enhanced by plenty of improvisation, is matched by a movie that never quits reaching into its bag of invigorating tricks. The movie looks fantastic, and it never stops looking fantastic in new ways, with fun flourishes of style juicing up every sequence: We zero in on these two lives through iris shots and reflections, zipping around alongside them like Benny Hill, getting more in their heads with intense zooms, jump cuts, split diopters and split screens—Between the Temples has it all. And all this flash piles up underneath the two engrossing central performances to build a light-hearted foundation from which yearning can naturally blossom. As Ben teaches Carla for her upcoming coming-of-age, we’re swept away by genuine connection, convincingly sung from the bimah.–Jacob Oller
3. Rebel Ridge
Release Date: September 6, 2024
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Stars: Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, Don Johnson, David Denman, Emory Cohen, James Cromwell
Rating: NR
Runtime: 131 minutes
Not long after we first glimpse Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), huffing it on a mountain bike down a vaguely and deeply Alabamian road—Iron Maiden in his headphones blocking out every sound but his breath—he’s knocked to the ground. The impact is sudden and vicious, even with a cop cruiser just out of focus seconds before, looming and swerving behind Terry’s rear tire. That anxiety persists through the rest of Rebel Ridge like a low hum in the pit of one’s stomach. Violence waits impatiently, haunting every moment. Terry’s shitstorm with the Shelby Springs police only builds, of course. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s films are never shy about abrupt savagery born from endlessly escalating suspense. Rebel Ridge is Saulnier’s second film for Netflix after 2018’s dreamy, dreary Hold the Dark. An open riff on First Blood, with shades of the 1973 Joe Don Baker vehicle Walking Tall, Rebel Ridge also feels like a determined return to the relentlessness of Saulnier’s first films. But as Terry’s plans unravel and contingencies disappear, Saulnier doesn’t double down on the grisly nature of Terry’s fate. Instead, with Pierre’s disarmingly symmetrical face carrying the majority of Rebel Ridge’s frames, the writer-director’s never been more restrained. Without breaking into gnarly gore like in Green Room, nor surprising with a burst skull or two like in Blue Ruin, the film barrels forward heedlessly, every conversation, interaction and inevitable smoke-swathed shoot-out about the way power is wielded and manipulated between characters. Even steeped in political commentary, Rebel Ridge is breathlessly staged. Aided by cinematographer David Gallego, Saulnier sticks primarily to Pierre’s point of view, revealing the world around him in mirrors, through car and clerks’ windows, and between door frames, limning his indelible presence in countless layers of bureaucracy and making him walk, via unshowy long takes, down old hallways whose décor seems designed to crush the human spirit. Yet, information and context gather in every shadow, the pasts of characters and the town’s moral shape slowly brought to light. Like Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, or the Jack Reacher book series, about a mysterious loner coincidentally caught in the deadly drama of a small town, Rebel Ridge feels cut down to its essentials.–Dom Sinacola
2. I Saw the TV Glow
Release Date: May 3, 2024
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Stars: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 100 minutes
I Saw The TV Glow takes filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s canny observations about how pop culture can create identity and applies them to a warped world of dysphoric digital nightmares. On its face, the film follows the stunted Owen (an incredible, committed Justice Smith), who bonds with fellow outcast Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a Buffy-ish genre show. As the movie and its inhabitants evolve, changing but perhaps not growing up, it becomes like a bad trip to Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, where the grim setlist is composed of neon static. The film features performances from Phoebe Bridgers and Kristina Esfandiari, as well as small appearances by two men who are discomfort personified: Conner O’Malley and Fred Durst. Just typing their names so close together gave me a little anxiety. Interconnected with the film’s crushing reality is that of the campy series its characters obsess over, its haunted creatures (one of which looks a bit like if Mac Tonight was a sex offender) allowing real-world problems to be mapped onto their cartoonish make-up. If I Saw The TV Glow doesn’t awaken something in you, you probably didn’t grow up hiding your personality behind your favorite pieces of media. The result is a captivating feat of audiovisual style, unconventional storytelling, and pervasive emotional pain.–Jacob Oller
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Release Date: May 24, 2024
Director: George Miller
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
Rating: R
Runtime: 148 minutes
If you ever took a class on the Greek classics, you might remember that the epics of Homer are defined by their first words. The Odyssey is the story of a “man,” while the Iliad is a story of “μῆνις,” which is often translated as wrath, rage…or fury. The epics of George Miller barely need words at all, yet Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the Iliad to Fury Road’s stripped-down Odyssey. The latter’s elegant straight-line structure is replaced with lush chapters, documenting the interconnected systems of post-apocalyptic nation-gangs through the years. Through it all, a Dickensian hero clings to this world’s seedy undercarriage. Reducing Furiosa down to a single word does it as little justice as it does the sagas it scraps, welds and reuses like its countless Frankenstein vehicles. But understanding George Miller’s Fury Road prequel as the story of war—of sprawling futility, driven by the same cyclical cruelty that turned its deserts into Wastelands—makes it far more than a satisfying origin story. (Though, it’s that too). Furiosa speaks the language of epics fluently, raging against timeless human failure while carrying a seed of hope. What we learn, we learn through the eyes of Furiosa, from the moment she’s ripped from the Green Place of Many Mothers as a child, to the second before she tears out of Immortan Joe’s Citadel, smuggling Fury Road’s stowaways. As Furiosa grows from traumatized child (Alyla Browne) to damaged adult (Anya Taylor-Joy), she survives the slave-labor bowels of the Citadel, claws her way into a position aboard a trade caravan and waits for the perfect moment to enact revenge upon her initial captor, the chaotic, power-hungry biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Pushing back on the various men who hunt them, Browne and Taylor-Joy’s performances work in stunning tandem, steadily heating the steely young girl’s resolve until it turns molten. When you match the most powerful eyes in the business with Miller’s evocative framing (Furiosa is shot a bit like Galadriel’s brush with evil in Lord of the Rings—somewhere between avenging angel and Frank Miller cover), you get all the character you need. Each action scene, whether another amazing chase or a desperate rescue mission deep in enemy territory, is driven just as deeply by visual logic as by spectacle. These stunning visions of neo-medieval torture in Hell’s junkyard only work if we can make sense of it all. Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed. Miller’s movies strip folkloric epics down to their basic mechanical parts, functional skeletons that run on raw emotion like the war machines running on piss and guzzolene.–Jacob Oller
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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