The competition for on-demand movies has grown in recent years beyond cable companies like Time-Warner, Charter, Cox Fios and Xfinity to online video-on-demand companies like FandangoNow and internet giants Amazon, Apple and Google. We searched through the offerings of all of the above to bring you the Best Movies On Demand, though no one service offers them all. We limited it to new VOD movies available to rent for less than $10.
Many of the cable companies have branded their Movies on Demand service, so Time-Warner and Charter customers will be looking for Spectrum, Comcast on-demand is branded Xfinity, Verizon goes by Fios and AT&T calls its program U-verse. The selections are up to date, but cable providers change their film on demand offerings regularly.
You can also check out our guides to the best movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max, Hulu, and YouTube. Or visit all our Paste Movie Guides.
Here are the 25 Best Movies on Demand:
1. Nickel Boys
Year: 2024
Director: RaMell Ross
Stars: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Jimmie Fails, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Rating: PG-13
The experimental style of Nickel Boys recalls the more adventurous side of NYFF, where international directors will often bring formally rigorous, ambitious, or challenging films to an appreciative audience: For the most part, director and cowriter RaMell Ross constructs his film version of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel entirely in point-of-view shots.
First, we’re only privy to the first-person experiences of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp, then Ethan Herisse), a Black high school student in the Jim Crow-era Florida of the early ’60s. We see what Elwood sees, which means not much of his actual face or body, catching a glimpse of him as a faded image in a store window, where he gazes at a row of television sets – or, in one beautiful shot, his reflection in the metallic trim of an iron held by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Early in the film, Elwood, a strong student who qualifies to take classes at a local college, is wrongly accused of helping to steal a car. (He’s only just accepted a ride from a stranger.) The police send him to Nickel Academy, a reform school that Whitehead based on a real institution, trafficking in segregation and cruelty. Once there, Elwood, who earnestly believes he can work his way out of the system, befriends the more cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson), opening up a second avenue for POV shots. From there, the movie alternates between the two of them. Though they grow close, the two boys rarely get to share the frame – which makes one wonderful overhead-mirror shot, reproduced on the film’s poster, even more memorable.
Shot after shot, in fact, sticks in the mind; even when the movie technically breaks from the point-of-view approach, the effect still lingers. The occasional archival footage, by its nature and through the movie’s context, starts to feel like a POV shot, as if we’re sitting alongside whoever is watching or reading the material in question. Another seeming departure, where a fixed point of view continually shows an adult version of one character from just behind him, affixed to his body but outside of it, distinguishes those flash-forward scenes. Later, it’s revealed to make even more thematic sense than it originally seems. This might all sound very technical, and to some extent it is. But the discipline with which Ross adheres to his own rules belies what an intuitive, unrestrictive film he’s able to craft within and because of those constrictions. —Jesse Hassenger
2. A Real Pain
Year: 2024
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes
Rating: R
When we meet cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) it’s in an airport as they prepare to embark on a trip of great ancestral significance, traveling to Poland to participate in a Jewish historical tour in honor of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who played an outsized role in their family hierarchy, having been particularly close with Benji until her passing. The latter has since clearly fallen into depression, something etched in the fatigue lines of Culkin’s face from the moment we first see him on an airport bench, desultorily scanning the unfamiliar faces as they swirl around him. Both cousins likely see the trip as some kind of conduit for emotional outpouring or transformation, but the relative lack of it ultimately afforded to them is seemingly part of Eisenberg’s thesis: We plan for events like a vacation to change who we are as people, but we’re naive to view change as something so transactional. Throughout, A Real Pain resists the gravitational pull of storytelling convention that insists upon clean character arcs and affirming revelations, opting for a more realistic journey in which it’s difficult to say what, if anything, has truly changed. This both makes the film interesting as a narrative experiment and no doubt frustrating to a subset of the multiplex audience weaned on weepy dramedies of this sort, in which everyone ultimately learns the specific lesson their character requires to unlock growth, like an RPG character earning XP. —Jim Vorel
3. All We Imagine as Light
Year: 2024
Director: Payal Kapadia
Stars: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon
Rating: NR
In the city of Mumbai, one of India’s busiest and most populous cities, three women work at the same hospital. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the head nurse, and she shares an apartment with her junior colleague Anu (Divya Prabha) in the city. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a hospital cook, and leans on Prabha when her chawl becomes a target for demolition and she considers moving back to her village hundreds of miles down the Konkan coast. In fact, the three women are united in facing a private crisis: Prabha’s absent husband migrated to Germany for work shortly after they were married; Anu has to hide a relationship with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). They are all tethered to something that is not tangible, permissible, or permanent, and as the main characters in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, they are our female, Indian, and working class lens into the constant, murmuring instability that defines modern capitalist life.
Kapadia was born in Mumbai, and her first wholly fiction feature film debut paints internal urban dispossession as something clashing with the swelling, impassive cityscape. The pressures and conditions of living day to day amplify these women’s romantic and sororal tensions until, left with no other option, they each decide to create their own catharsis. Kapadia’s film is a precise, affecting, and sometimes spiritual journey through a discordant city symphony, imbued with an emotional verve that ranks it as one of the year’s finest dramas. Kapadia continues to map out how the political entwines with the personal on a subdermal level, shaping the ways Indian women imagine themselves in relation to labor, capital, and physical spaces. All We Imagine as Light is both admirably restrained and deliberately poetic, painting its constrained women with nuance and empathy, before they light up a narrow path out of liminality. —Rory Doherty
4. Anora
Year: 2024
Director: Sean Baker
Stars: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Darya Ekamasova, Aleksei Serebryakov
Rating: R
By sheer volume of people screaming obscenities and insults at and past each other, Sean Baker’s newest film harkens back to his breakthrough Tangerine, in which a trans sex worker recently released from jail embarks on a day-long journey to track down her cheating boyfriend/pimp. Anora runs nearly an hour longer, is shot on 35mm film instead of an iPhone, and follows the whirlwind courtship of its title character, an exotic dancer played with fire by Mikey Madison, and the aftermath once she marries the son of Russian oligarchs. The movie uses this extra time, and a gorgeously expanded frame, to live in its scenes a little longer, past some of the big laughs they contain. When confronted with Russian and Armenian muscle, Ani reacts with combative self-defense. She’s not willing to leave her marriage quietly, or possibly at all. But Madison’s performance is less shticky than it might seem from the Brooklyn accent and brassy attitude; notes of panic and hurt creep onto her face in between her passages of crowdpleasing bravado. Baker’s whole movie is like that: wildly entertaining even as a surprising range of emotions show themselves. —Jesse Hassenger
5. Companion
Year: 2025
Director: Drew Hancock
Stars: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend
Rating: R
Truth be told, the first 20-odd minutes of Companion are a bit of a tough sell; the performances are stiff, and the stilted interplay between its characters feels assembled from various abandoned CW show bibles. The overall phoniness of it all set my teeth on edge. Fortunately, it’s here that Companion makes its first twist, recontextualizing all the odd and strangely mechanical things everyone previously said or did. Like Barbarian, the film shifts to a different gear, and so does its cast, smoothing out the movie even as Iris’s situation spirals out of control.
As a romantic sci-fi thriller that often feels like a schmoopy response to Black Mirror, its future-as-parable conceit is imperfect. Society, as it exists in this movie, is ill-defined, and Josh’s technology-embracing nice-guy schtick has little nuance. (I mean, “treating women as malleable fawns makes you an asshole” is hardly the most subversive idea to be tossed into a relationship movie, though I did appreciate the sinister edge Quaid applies to his million-buck grin.) By comparison, Iris is the more compassionate, multifaceted character (Thatcher successfully wriggles free of her character’s Stepfordian trappings early on), which, perhaps rightfully, simplifies the film’s conflict. Hancock lets us have fun with the candy-coated easiness of it all. Once Iris breaks free from Josh’s control, Companion becomes a gleefully silly, crowd-pleasing techno-romp, a Turing test valentine for those still learning to better love themselves. —Jarrod Jones
6. The Monkey
Year: 2025
Director: Osgood Perkins
Stars: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood
Rating: R
The Monkey doesn’t exactly conceal that the monkey toy, by “choosing” people in relatively close proximity but without any further detectable rhyme or reason, is standing in for the cruel randomness of death, the fact that a freak demise could be waiting for us around any corner. But as the movie digs into Hal and Bill’s differing forms of anxiety over that inevitability, The Monkey steers away from the realm of pure horror-comedy japery or specific Stephen King piss-take, and becomes in its haunted way, an affecting coda to the dark joke of life’s potential meaninglessness. Perkins, the son of actor Anthony Perkins, lost both his parents decades ago (his mother was killed in one of the flights on 9/11) and although he has too much experience as a horror showman to deny the audience a gruesome blood circus, he allows an ache to emerge from the spectacle, even from performances that initially seem a little too heightened to work as fully human characters. The canary in the coal mine is Maslany, who lays enough groundwork in her early scenes for the movie to eventually circle back to something more reflective.
That the movie does so without really letting up on its initially contraption-like cheap thrills and self-satisfied transgressions is almost more satisfying than if The Monkey had felt more like a “real” movie to begin with. It’s a little too blunt to call it a magic trick – and a ultimately too reflective about the psychology of grief to call it a blunt-force attack. What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living. —Jesse Hassenger
7. The Substance
Year: 2024
Director: Coralie Fargeat
Stars: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Rating: R
In terms of sheer dominance over The Discourse, there can be no doubt that 2024 belonged body, mind and soul to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. A quantum leap forward in terms of ambition and sophistication after her slick but streamlined 2017 debut thriller Revenge, The Substance is an ode to self-destruction and bruised egos, greed and blindness to cycles of perpetuated avarice.
Much of the film’s success comes down to the incredible willingness that Fargeat taps into in its performers to make themselves as reprehensible–and yes, “ugly”–as possible, becoming portraits of desperate individuals who have long since abandoned common decency or a shred of empathy. That of course includes Demi Moore’s Elisabeth, who pathetically clings to the faintest shreds of vicarious achievement despite the fact that she can’t really enjoy them, addicted to the rush of seeing her avatar succeed even as she resents herself and physically drains herself dry. It includes Dennis Quaid’s not-so-subtly named Harvey, a slavering psychopath who treats his talent with no more respect or tact than he puts into masticating an entire plate of shrimp in a sequence that rivals any of the other stomach-churning sights of The Substance. And the willingness to tap into the depraved side of human nature even applies to Margaret Qualley’s pristine Sue as well, a woman so eager to debase and objectify herself just to live up to the archaic standards of success set by Elisabeth, never once considering that her unique circumstances could afford her a second chance to live life different than Elisabeth previously did “in her prime.” The tragedy of The Substance is that Sue can’t even conceive of a more fulfilling alternative than willingly throwing herself into the exact same meat grinder that chewed up Elisabeth and spit her out, except Sue is apparently determined to speedrun the entire process.
On a thematic and visual level, The Substance has perhaps been given more credit at times for its outrageousness or uniqueness than it necessarily demands, which mostly serves to illustrate how this kind of boundary stepping body horror has become a rarity to see on a big screen in recent years. Reactions to the film almost serve as a litmus test for whether any prospective horror geek has ever gotten around to seeing Brian Yuzna’s Society from 1989–if you have, then you probably find Fargeat’s film a bit less shocking. But the sheer, unapologetic gusto with which The Substance tackles its squelchy, bone-cracking delights makes its combo of visceral transformation and misanthropic satire into a vital piece of modern horror filmmaking, anchored by some of the best performances the genre has seen in recent memory. —Jim Vorel
8. Love Lies Bleeding
Year: 2024
Director: Rose Glass
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris
Rating: R
Love Lies Bleeding is, in actuality, a far more effective horror film than Saint Maud. Filmmaker Rose Glass excels at crafting horrific images, moments of pure grotesquery and terror, and she pushes the boundaries of an otherwise grounded thriller-crime drama into something that resembles a gorgeous night terror. Sensuality oozes from every frame for a film that isn’t even terribly gratuitous during its sex scenes. But the physical act of sex between bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) equals otherwise non-sexual scenes, such as Lou jabbing a syringe into Jackie’s butt cheek, or Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) whispering in Jackie’s ear before she fires a gun—or even Jackie’s roid rage-fueled murder of JJ (Dave Franco), which plunges Jackie and Lou’s passionate neophyte romance into an explicitly gay Thelma and Louise, where the two lovers must flee the wrath of Lou’s criminal family. The connection between the two women is desperate, carnal and overwhelming, if simultaneously toxic and even a little superficial. Suddenly, nothing matters to Lou quite as much as her ripped new girlfriend, whom she’s more than happy to continue supplying with body-enhancing drugs that cause Monstar-like eruptions under her skin in sequences of heightened surrealism. As the walls close in on Jackie and Lou, Glass amps up the tension with tight, suffocating shots, propulsive editing and an absorbing score by Clint Mansell. At the center of it all is Jackie and Lou’s cacophonous romance. By all accounts, the gay Romeo and Juliet were doomed from the start. Stewart and O’Brian have incredible chemistry, and Stewart’s understated naturalism really shines. Love Lies Bleeding is easily one of the best of 2024 so far: A thorny, thrilling narrative about two fucked-up women that is—most importantly—genuinely, scintillatingly hot. The film is also very obviously about the myriad, terrifying ways human beings express love to one another, and on the surface seems to question which ones are more or less valid.–Brianna Zigler
9. Novocaine
Year: 2025
Directors: Dan Berk, Robert Olsen
Stars: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh, Jacob Batalon
Rating: R
Novocaine starts with a premise that is Crank-like in its absurdity, deepens it with feeling, and then rams full speed ahead through a litany of stupidities. A common message-board-level complaint about a movie is that it “doesn’t know what it wants to be.” Here’s a helpful correction: Most movies, even bad ones, know. What Novocaine seems less sure of is why it wants to be. To sell a high-concept screenplay, probably. You can see why someone would buy it. Nathan Cain (Jack Quaid) has a rare genetic condition that doesn’t allow his body to feel any pain, nor sensations of heat, nor cold. This leaves him both resilient and fragile. A fist, knife, or bullet might not faze him, but could still kill him; our bodies have pain receptors for a reason, and Nathan’s body is incapable of receiving crucial warning signs. Once given an approximate life expectancy of 25, he has surpassed it through learned vigilance: He only consumes drinkable foods, because he has been warned that he could accidentally bite off his own tongue, and he must set a three-hour timer reminding him to use the bathroom, lest he strain his bladder without realizing it. —Jesse Hassenger
10. Red Rooms
Year: 2024
Director: Pascal Plante
Stars: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Shagnon, Guy Thauvette
Rating: NR
Red Rooms is a movie fixated on a single performance, itself fixated on a serial killer. The performance is that of Juliette Gariépy, fantastic as the unblinking Kelly-Anne. The serial killer is the Gollum-like and dead-eyed Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of butchering three young girls live on a pay-per-view stream. This dark web snuff stream is a Red Room, and it’s unclear what aspect of the case Kelly-Anne is obsessed with as she stares intently in the background of the film’s gripping courtroom scenes.
Is she another romanticizing rubbernecker here to ogle real deaths as true-crime entertainment? Or is it darker? Is she—like her trial-observing counterpart Clémentine (Laurie Babin, excelling at a more emotive, girlish foil)—a hybristophilic fangirl, a prison groupie who’d send a love letter to Ted Bundy? These questions, and the complexity that lies underneath, drive Red Rooms beyond the effectively daunting way writer/director Pascal Plante reveals the details of the central crimes. And, without ever showing too much, Plante has crafted one hell of a stomachache. He doesn’t show, and he barely tells. The little we do glean only adds to the dreadful realism. Less than two hours, yet feeling like an eternity thanks to some well-planned and executed long takes (featuring some particularly engaging monologues from Natalie Tannous, playing the prosecutor), Red Rooms traps us in the mindset of its intense lead as we get ever more involved with the case. —Jacob Oller
11. Universal Language
Year: 2025
Director: Matthew Rankin
Stars: Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Mani Soleymanlou, Danielle Fichaud
Rating: NR
Rankin has crafted something that really is rather remarkable–a deeply weird, delightfully strange, inspiringly imaginative and genuinely heartfelt ode to how identity is shaped by community, connectedness and the uncontrollable randomness of fate. A wholly original fusion of Iranian cinema and esoteric gags about the banality of life in Winnipeg, it’s a totally original conceit from start to finish, and simultaneously one of the most unexpectedly funny and poignant films I’ve seen in recent memory.
The spell Rankin is able to cast begins with the surreal setting that Universal Language evokes, that of an alternative Canada that is one part Tehran, and one part dystopian, Soviet-evoking, monolithic brutalist architecture in seemingly infinite shades of beige. Most people speak Persian; some multi-linguates have also acquired French. Tim Hortons still exists in this world, but here it’s in the form of a homey, softly lit Turkish coffee parlor where matrons prepare donuts and steaming samovar full of tea–Iran’s national drink. As a tour guide leads a group of Winnipeg gawkers past such sights as a famously discarded mystery suitcase that has never been opened, they pass billboards with uplifting slogans such as the following: “A strong economy helps to prevent feelings of worthlessness.” —Jim Vorel
12. Hundreds of Beavers
Year: 2024
Director: Mike Cheslik
Stars: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Wes Tank
Rating: NR
Hundreds of Beavers is a lost continent of comedy, rediscovered after decades spent adrift. Rather than tweaking an exhausted trend, the feature debut of writer/director Mike Cheslik is an immaculately silly collision of timeless cinematic hilarity, unearthed and blended together into something entirely new. A multimedia extravaganza of frozen idiocy, Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick tour de force—and its roster of ridiculous mascot-suited wildlife is only the tip of the iceberg. First things first: Yes, there are hundreds of beavers. Dozens of wolves. Various little rabbits, skunks, raccoons, frogs and fish. (And by “little,” I mean “six-foot stuntmen in cheap costumes.”) We have a grumpy shopkeeper, forever missing his spittoon. His impish daughter, a flirty furrier stuck behind his strict rage. And one impromptu trapper, Jean Kayak (co-writer/star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), newly thawed and alone in the old-timey tundra. Sorry, Jean, but you’re more likely to get pelted than to get pelts. With its cartoonish violence and simple set-up comes an invigorating elegance that invites you deeper into its inspired absurdity. And Hundreds of Beavers has no lack of inspiration. The dialogue-free, black-and-white comedy is assembled from parts as disparate as The Legend of Zelda, Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, JibJabs, Terry Gilliam animation, Guy Maddin and Jackass. Acme is namechecked amid Méliès-like stop tricks and Muppety puppetry, while its aesthetic veers from painting broad violence upon a sparse snowy canvas to running through the shadowy bowels of an elaborate German Expressionist fortress. Guiding us through is Tews. He’s a wide-eyed mime with a caricatured lumberjack body, expertly gauging his expressions and sacrificing his flesh for the cause. His performance takes a little from the heavy-hitters of the form: The savvy romanticism of Harold Lloyd, the physical contortions of Buster Keaton, the underdog struggles of Charlie Chaplin, and the total bodily commitment of all three. You don’t get great physical comedy accidentally. Just as its intrepid idiot hero forges bravely on despite weathering frequent blows to the head, impaled extremities and woodland beatings, Hundreds of Beavers marches proudly towards the sublime transcendence of juvenilia. In its dedication to its own premise, Hundreds of Beavers reaches the kind of purity of purpose usually only found in middle-school stick-figure comics or ancient Flash animations—in stupid ideas taken seriously. One of the best comedies in the last few years, Hundreds of Beavers might actually contain more laughs than beavers. By recognizing and reclaiming the methods used during the early days of movies, Mike Cheslik’s outrageous escalation of the classic hunter-hunted dynamic becomes a miraculous DIY celebration of enduring, universal truths about how we make each other laugh.–Jacob Oller
13. Thelma
Year: 2024
Director: Josh Margolin
Stars: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell
Rating: PG-13
Every good action hero knows you’ve got to stick to your guns. Ethan Hunt is a marathon-running master of disguise. John Wick has never lost count of his remaining bullets. Jackie Chan’s various inspectors and agents view the world as their personal set of monkey bars. When writer/director Josh Margolin’s debut Thelma keeps its sights trained on its rogue granny on a mission (June Squibb), its hilarious geriatric reframe of action-movie tropes has a game champion. Like its absentminded hero, the film can sometimes get sidetracked right when things are getting good, wandering down schmaltzy or twee narrative paths. But when it lets Thelma (and Squibb) do her thing, the comedy is perfectly cute and a stellar showcase for what an actor’s late career can offer.
In fact, much of Thelma is about adjusting our ideas around aging. There’s novelty in the comedic turns from the 94-year-old Squibb and her 81-year-old co-star, Richard Roundtree (in his final film role). These actors get to tap a well that’s unique to their age and the genre without sticking them into the boxes that generally contain old performers. They’re not utterly dignified, wisdom-dispensing elders. They’re not tragic victims of time. And they’re certainly, blessedly not the dreaded “rapping grannies” who are more punchline than performer. As the pair abscond on their quest to retrieve Thelma’s stolen savings, solicited from her cookie jar and mattress by phone scammers, they’re clearly complex, pulling off warm humor, endless charm and impressive stunts. A 94-year-old doesn’t have to ride a motorcycle off a cliff to make you gasp. —Jacob Oller
14. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Year: 2024
Director: George Miller
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
Rating: R
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
15. Twisters
Year: 2024
Director: Isaac Chung
Stars: Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka
Rating: PG-13
A follow-up to his poignant, Oscar-nominated autobiographical drama Minari, Twisters might seem like an odd fifth feature for director Lee Isaac Chung. Odd, yes, to those with little knowledge of the film industry and a lot of straightforward common sense—why hand a filmmaker by all accounts concerned with small, personal features the keys to a blockbuster franchise sequel? But that’s just Hollywood de rigueur, seen with the likes of Jurassic World and the MCU, often to, shall we say, mixed results. Studios like to slap an indie up-and-comer’s name on a feature while allowing them little to no real creative leeway, giving the illusion of artistry and progress while the suits at the studio pull all the strings. And while there is no outwardly auteurist stamp on Twisters to make it feel like anything other than that Chung was a hired hand, Twisters certainly isn’t Eternals. On the contrary, Twisters is, at best, pretty fun—a decidedly breezy two hours. It has thrills, and chills, and Glen Powell doing his darndest to bring the concept of “movie star” back into the year 2024. The tornado effects are impressive (special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher was also in charge of the VFX on Oppenheimer), especially on an IMAX screen. And there is a not insignificant push of focus onto the casualties of tornadoes in contrast to the original 1996 film, which gives the sequel a more present sense of scale and tragedy. —Brianna Zigler
16. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Year: 2024
Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Monica Belluci, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe
Rating: PG-13
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice takes Burton back to what he does best: silly-scary horror-comedy that at once feels lovingly homespun and vibrantly realized. His ambitions aren’t high with this 35-years-later sequel, but they don’t have to be. In returning to a world with a solid foundation but relatively unexplored fringes, mysterious enough to expand on the rules of the afterlife or make them more pliable to his liking, Burton seems keen to let loose. His work isn’t bogged down like so many of his later films. It’s a trifling diversion, but it’s also Burton’s most comfortable, freewheeling and satisfying movie in years.
As implied, this is a Beetlejuice sequel through and through, bearing all the meaning that may have to you depending on your relationship to the original material. To me, it means a thinly sketched-out story with broad ideas of characters that exist to deliver an assembly line of clever, gross and funny sight gags which, to be fair, the film is packed to the brim with. This sequel’s existence harkens back to a time where something like this was released out of Hollywood without much in the way of pomp, nor circumstance. Though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice acts as something of an inverse to its predecessor: Whereas the first film follows a relatively simple throughline of small-town domesticity coming crashing down under the sudden cognizance of life after death, its sequel is defined by an excess of storylines, all vying for their claim to a meager slice of the 100-minute runtime. —Trace Sauveur
17. Longlegs
Year: 2024
Director: Oz Perkins
Stars: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood, Kiernan Shipka
Rating: R
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
18. Babygirl
Year: 2024
Director: Halina Reijn
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly
Rating: R
Babygirl is all Kidman. To be fair, she’s an ideal choice to build an entire movie around. But anyone primed for a sort of quarter-century-later, similarly Christmas-set spiritual follow-up to Eyes Wide Shut, this time centering a woman’s point of view, or a flipped dynamic from the boss-employee S&M of Secretary, may come away unfulfilled. There’s little menace or mystery to Babygirl; Romy’s desires are mysterious to her, at least at first, but not particularly to us, especially not after she offhands a convenient bit of backstory about her childhood growing up in “communes and cults.” The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review. —Jesse Hassenger
19. Y2K
Year: 2024
Director: Kyle Mooney
Stars: Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Kyle Mooney, Lachlan Watson
Rating: R
If obsession is at the heart of many great filmmakers, maybe doing Saturday Night Live sketches is a better training ground for the cinema than we’ve long assumed. The conventional wisdom has held that for every star on the level of Eddie Murphy or Bill Murray, there are plenty of alumni whose starring vehicles feel like sketches strung out on a loop. Yet the increased segmentation of the show over the years has allowed for emergence of SNL players with hyperfocused, hyperspecific areas of expertise, like Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island’s ongoing study of pop music, or Sarah Sherman and her infatuation with body horror. Before, during, and after his nine-year run on the show, Kyle Mooney has specialized in observing and dissecting turn-of-the-’90s junk culture, from crummy family sitcoms to hacky stand-up comics to Saturday morning TV blocks, locating an awkward melancholy beneath their banal exterior. For his feature directorial debut, Mooney jumps ahead, but not too far: Y2K starts out on December 31, 1999, during the transition from one millennium to another and, perhaps more importantly to Mooney’s interests, from “Tubthumping” to “The Thong Song.”
It also helps that the movie is shot by frequent Edgar Wright cinematographer Bill Pope, a veteran at delivering comedy-genre hybrids with genuine style – even if this particular production occasionally sacrifices dramatic lighting to digital demands. For another form of verisimilitude, though, this should really be shot like a McG video. Even moreso than Mooney’s Dumpster-diving in his shorter-form projects, Y2K becomes a willfully silly act of reclamation – a narrative version of how a terrible radio song from our youth can offer a peculiar comfort when tinnily piped into a grocery store PA years later. Someday it might be neat to see what, if anything, Mooney has to say about actual, genuine adulthood. For now, though, he’s approaching his favorite subject with just the right mix of preserving nostalgia and breaking stuff. —Jesse Hassenger
20. Abigail
Year: 2024
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Stars: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand
Rating: R
The filmmaking collective led by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella are more than great shoppers for the ingredients; they can also really cook. The ingredients are assembled again for the group’s latest feature, Abigail, a new take on Universal’s classic Dracula’s Daughter story, albeit one with an entirely different story dreamed up by writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. As with their previous major releases, Radio Silence brings the right atmosphere, the right blend of horror and comedy, and a great ensemble cast led by some seasoned horror performers. It’s a beautifully set table, but Abigail really comes alive when Radio Silence flips that table and sprays it with gore, transforming a high concept into a chaotic, gleefully gruesome piece of popcorn horror. The girl of the title, played by Alisha Weir, looks like a cute young ballerina with a rich father. But, as every trailer for the film has informed us, she’s actually a vicious and clever vampire, which spells lots of troubles for the sextet of kidnappers who’ve been hired to abduct her for a hefty ransom. It’s only supposed to take about 24 hours of keeping Abigail at a spooky old country house before the ransom money pours in, so everyone – Frank (Dan Stevens), Dean (Angus Cloud), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Joey (Melissa Barrera), Peter (Kevin Durand), and Rickles (William Catlett) – decides to get a little drunk, try to relax, and wait for the long day to end in piles of cash. Right away, though, Joey senses something is wrong, particularly when Abigail starts to peel back her scared little girl persona just enough to let some not-so-veiled threats slip through. Soon, intrigue, paranoia, and sheer brutality emerge, as the kidnappers begin to realize they’re in way, way over their heads. While it’s certainly not the most frightening horror film you’ll see this year, Abigail might end up holding the title of the goopiest, goriest mainstream studio release of 2024. Bettenelli-Olpin and Gillett, no strangers to over-the-top violence, keep building and building on every injury, every kill, every new piece of vampire lore they lace into the narrative, until by the end there’s blood on every surface, bodies popping like grapes, and a sense of seat-of-your-pants joy that will have fans of gore effects cheering. For seasoned horror fans, it’s that sense of gory fun that will shine through most. Abigail is a brutal, bloody blast.–Matthew Jackson
21. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Year: 2024
Director: Wes Ball
Stars: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy.
Rating: PG-13
It should have never been a surprise that the Planet of the Apes franchise would rear its head again, though Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is content to build off the goodwill of the reboot trilogy rather than attempt another full reinvention. Wes Ball (director of the Maze Runner trilogy) takes charge from Matt Reeves, but continues to follow the legacy of science-project-turned-war-captain Caesar. Caesar’s quest for ape liberation, amid humanity’s downfall to the Simian Flu pandemic, and heroic death have afforded him martyrdom—legend status further down the timeline; as the film puts it, “many generations later.” That’s where we meet up with Noa (Owen Teague), a young ape whose main character traits are that he is young and an ape. He lives with his clan at a small, remote outpost where they have developed a pocket of peaceful habitation following the many years over which apes have slowly grown to be the dominant, more intelligent species compared to the ever-rare vestiges of humanity. Noa doesn’t even know what a “human” is—all he knows is that his clan refers to those things as “Echos” and that he’s occasionally seen a small one scavenging for food from their stock. That becomes the least of Noa’s problems when a rival ape tribe storms his home, killing his father and taking most of his family and friends hostage for someone calling themselves Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). With that, Noa hops on his horse and sets out into the mysterious world beyond his encampment, and quickly learns how much his elders kept from him. Ball and writer Josh Friedman veer away from the suffocatingly bleak and dour tone that fueled Dawn of and War for the Planet of the Apes, and more towards traditional action-adventure blockbuster spectacle. Though the immediate plot machinations of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes are more directly of the “ape vs. ape” variety than before, this dichotomy of human and ape coexistence is one carried over from the previous trilogy and, indeed, one inherent to the franchise itself. It’s compelling to see how the growth of the ape population, as humans have continued to shrink into the shadows, affects this dynamic so many years later. But the big problem here is that Kingdom feels like table-setting for a more interesting movie that could come later down the line.–Trace Sauveur
22. The Fall Guy
Year: 2024
Director: David Leitch
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Stephanie Hsu
Rating: PG-13
The deceptive difficulty of action movies, comedies, and their intersection is being able to do something completely stupid with total straight-faced commitment. Like so many easily dismissed parts of film production, a punchline delivered with invested emotion is just as hard to pull off as a pratfall performed with total abandon. If either misses its mark by a hair, you fall flat on your face and leave the audience hating your smug performance or hyperactive flailing. It’s all the more impressive, then, that Ryan Gosling does it all in The Fall Guy. He plays stuntman Colt Seavers, living bruise, returning to action One Last Time in order to help his old flame Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) on her first directorial effort, Metalstorm. That’s the simple set-up, designed to showcase the jock rock of filmmaking: A stunt spectacular combining the technical prowess and meathead charm of the dirtbag daredevils behind every awesome car crash and killer fight scene. And, thanks to Gosling—playing his role like his schmuck detective from The Nice Guys accidentally found himself in a Mission: Impossible—the film breezily flits between a savvy behind-the-scenes pastiche and a committed action rom-com. Ok, The Fall Guy owes its success to far more people than its leading man. That’s kind of its point. Directed by longtime stuntman David Leitch (with this film, distancing himself from solely being the less impressive half of the John Wick team) and written by Drew Pearce (one of Leitch’s Hobbs & Shaw scribes), The Fall Guy works best as an anti-blockbuster. It wants to blow shit up and wow us with its ballsy choreography, but it also wants to take the shine off these feats of movie magic. Funnier and more effective than most movies built upon a foundation of car chases and fistfights, The Fall Guy is smart enough to showcase its dumb action in a new and exciting way. Its affection is infectious, whether that’s for the art of filmmaking, the haywire pleasures of being on set, the adrenaline rush of a well-made gamble, or for finding someone special to share your simple corner of the world. The ambitious meta-film overcomes the baggage of trying to be both the movie of the summer and the movie that comments on those kinds of movies, hitting a cinematic sweet spot and singing the praises of stunt performers everywhere.–Jacob Oller
23. Dune: Part Two
Year: 2024
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, Souheila Yacoub, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Javier Bardem
Rating: PG-13
Set aside the complicated calculus of food, shelter and family needs. It’s time to shell out the big bucks and head to the local IMAX. To borrow from Kidman’s AMC commercial more explicitly, though you might not be “somehow reborn,” there will be “dazzling images,” sound you can feel and you will be taken somewhere you’ve “never been before” (at least, not since Dune). As befits a Part Two, Villeneuve’s film picks up in medias res, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and the Fremen encountering and dealing with a murderous Harkonnen hunting party while trying to reach the Fremen stronghold. From this encounter, Villaneuve nimbly guides the narrative from one key moment to the next, a veritable dragonfly ornithopter of plot advancement (with a few slower moments to allow the burgeoning relationship with Paul and Zendaya’s Chani to breathe). If the outcome of each narrative stop feels very much fated, that in turn feels appropriate given the messianic prophecy undergirding the entire tale. Dune: Part Two’s production design is as much center stage as its star-studded cast. Villaneuve pummels the viewer with the sheer scale and brutal, industrial efficiency of the Harkonnen operation—well, it would be efficient if not for those pesky Fremen—yet all of it is engulfed in turn by Arrakis itself. Meanwhile, the sound design and throbbing aural cues evoke the weight and oppressiveness of a centuries-spanning empire, the suffocating cunning of “90 generations” of Bene Gesserit schemes and the inescapable gravity Arrakis and its spice-producing leviathans exert on both. For those torn on whether it’s worth venturing forth to the multiplex, consider Dune: Part Two a compelling two-hour-and-forty-six-minute argument in the “for” column. And that “indescribable feeling” you get when “the lights begin to dim?” That’s cinematic escape velocity, instantly achieved. Next stop, Arrakis.–Michael Burgin
24. Cuckoo
Year: 2024
Director: Tilman Singer
Stars: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens
Rating: R
Cuckoo is a twisty, giallo-inspired, semi-body horror mystery that double acts as an impressive lead showcase proving that Schafer is more than just an “it girl.” Gretchen, a moody American teen grieving the recent loss of her mother, is forced to move in with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), his much younger English wife Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu). Luis and Beth have relocated from the States to the Alps, where they had once honeymooned at a lavish resort and subsequently conceived Alma. Both architects, the couple has been solicited by the resort’s owner, the overly pleasant Herr König (Dan Stevens) to build him a new resort. Thus, their project leaves them, and now Gretchen, with an indefinite stay in Germany. This is much to Gretchen’s chagrin, to put it lightly. She resents her stepmother and half-sister in what is customary for this archetypal character dynamic: a new mother has laid eggs in Gretchen’s nest, stealing resources. So, too is Gretchen’s relationship with her father strained. She had previously been under her mother’s welcomed custody, but in the wake of her untimely passing, Gretchen is now required to encroach upon her father’s new, younger family whom he had willingly abandoned her for.
One could argue that Cuckoo’s chief failing is that it doesn’t allow its tone to lean into the pure, visceral absurdity of its narrative. But I’d argue back that the seriousness adds to a certain charm, in a way where it’s clear that Singer isn’t trying to be overly self-serious; certainly, Argento characters are still taking the graveness of their stakes to heart. That König is so dead-set in his absurd goals is delightful, because there’s still a little twinkle in his eye, and Cuckoo manages to imbue this vibe with an earnest terror that makes for an exceedingly entertaining horror film. —Brianna Zigler
25. Hell Hole
Year: 2024
Directors: Toby Poser, John Adams
Stars: John Adams, Toby Poser, Petar Arsić, Aleksandar Trmčić, Marko Filipovic, Anders Hove, Max Portman
Rating: NR
The filmmaking collective known as the Adams Family has spent the last decade or so establishing themselves among the best indie creators in the horror genre, cultivating an ever-expanding fanbase while doing it all Their Way. The minds behind Where the Devil Roams (one of the best horror films of 2023) and Hellbender (one of the best horror films of the last decade, bar none), to name just a couple, have proven remarkably versatile in terms of tone, craft and sheer ingenuity, simultaneously upping their ambition with each project and holding onto the DIY qualities that made them into scrappy fan favorites to begin with. With Hell Hole, their latest feature, the filmmaking family has constructed their biggest horror sandbox yet, packing every frame with as much production value as their small budget can muster and riding a fascinating tonal line between black comedy and sincere character drama. The results are mixed, but while Hell Hole is not the family’s best film, it is proof that they’re still among the most fascinating and consistently entertaining players in the horror game. —Matthew Jackson