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      Best Movies of 2024

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      Our film critics rank their 10 favorites this year.As you browse, keep track of how many movies you’ve seen or want to see. Find and share your personalized watch list at the bottom of the page.Manohla DargisDazzling in Plain SightEvery year, as I start the herculean (and absurd!) task of winnowing down a year’s worth of movies into a top 10, I also sift through a lot of grim media coverage about the terrible, horrible, possibly salvageable state of the entertainment industry. In the movie world, things are always looking up (maybe) unless they’re catastrophically down, a cycle of boom and bust that has gripped the industry for much of its history and always convinces someone, somewhere, that the movies are dead. It’s a familiar charge with a changing cast of murder suspects: synchronized sound, television, cable, streaming and, of course, corporate idiocy.Despite their continued decline, the big American-based studios still dominate the mainstream media coverage and what little attention an increasingly fragmented, distracted audience has remaining. To that end, nearly every week another megadollar production comes hurdling toward us, gobbles up all the media interest, rakes in fortunes or becomes just another tax write-down or write-off. Some of these movies are OK, others are bilge; a scant few are memorable. Yet as my hardworking colleagues and I eagerly share in our reviews for The New York Times, the movie world is much vaster than what these companies offer, and good, great and miraculous work often flies under the radar. Here’s a sampling of the bounty.1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)This delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same, and centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another. Every so often, Kapadia, who has also made documentaries, incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching. (In theaters)____2. ‘Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic’Some of the most transporting movies that I watched this year were in a retrospective of Gehr’s work in March at the Museum of Modern Art. Generally short and now shot in digital, these moving images have no scripted dialogue and nothing resembling a plot. Liberated from the stranglehold of story, Gehr’s movies instead present and re-present outwardly ordinary places, objects and moving bodies — white clouds drifting across a stretch of blue city sky, people walking in front of a windowed storefront — that Gehr turns into heady studies of energy, chance, light, surface and space. Your perception of the world change when filmmakers like Gehr show it to you through their liberated lenses and frames. These are movies that expand and, at times, gloriously blow your mind.____ More

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      How the Visual Effects of ‘Death Becomes Her’ Changed Movies

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      The loony 1992 comedy’s visual effects broke new ground (along with Meryl Streep’s neck). With the film’s Broadway musical adaptation, a look at its enduring legacy.A tagline for the 1992 release of “Death Becomes Her” billed the film as “Your basic black comedy.” In truth, it was anything but: A screwball mélange of satire, slapstick and gonzo body horror, the movie would have been notable enough for starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, as lifelong frenemies who find immortality — and all the curses that come with it — via a magic elixir. (And for the fact that Bruce Willis, a die-hard paragon of broody masculinity, played the hapless, bumbling cuckold caught between them.)Reviews were mixed; The New York Times called it “wildly uneven.” But a series of groundbreaking visual effects — particularly unexpected in a mid-budget comedy — both shocked and awed audiences, and earned the film its sole Academy Award, along with an enduring cult following and now, a Broadway musical adaptation.“We actually didn’t think we had a chance,” Doug Chiang, the film’s visual effects art director, said on a video call, of the Oscar win he shared with three collaborators. “Because we were going up against two stellar projects, ‘Batman Returns’ and ‘Alien 3,’ and ours by comparison was rather small in scale.”“Small-scale” was hardly a byword for the director Robert Zemeckis, who at the time was fresh off a blockbuster run of three “Back to the Future” films and the pioneering live action-animation hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” So David Koepp, then a little-known 28-year-old screenwriter, didn’t expect the spec script that he and his fellow writer, Martin Donovan, had submitted under contract at Universal Pictures to land in Zemeckis’s hands.“We envisioned it as, if we were lucky, a $5 million independent movie, so we wanted some grotesquerie,” Koepp said by phone. “But our inspirations were like, ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘The Vikings.’” “The Vikings,” a gleefully hammy 1958 swashbuckler starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, featured a fight sequence between its two leads that Koepp said inspired one of the most indelible setups in “Death Becomes Her.” In it, Streep’s character, a fading but indomitable Hollywood actress named Madeline Ashton, is reunited with her old friend, Hawn’s wallflower novelist Helen Sharp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Juliette Binoche Is Taking Christian Louboutin to the Theater

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      “I’ve seen this play three times, and it’s five and a half hours long,” said the actress, who stars in the new movie “The Return.”In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Penelope waits 20 years for her husband, Odysseus, to come home after winning the Trojan War.Juliette Binoche waited even longer to reunite with Ralph Fiennes after “The English Patient,” the 1996 film in which they co-starred.Their collaboration this time: “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s reimagining of Homer’s epic, and a project the filmmaker worked on for 30 years.Binoche was excited by Pasolini’s vision for the movie — a kind of stripped-down landscape with actors wrapped in cloth instead of costumes.“There was something bare about it. He tried to really go to the core of the dialogue,” she said in a video call from Paris. “He made those characters very human.”Binoche was also at a point in her life where “I was in touch with the feeling of abandonment, the feeling of the patience that you need to have for this male side of anger, of going into the world and conquering,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Earl Holliman, Rugged, and Familiar, Screen Presence, Dies at 96

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      Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.His death was confirmed by his husband, Craig Curtis, who is his only survivor.While never a household name, Mr. Holliman was a seemingly ubiquitous presence on both the big and small screen, collecting nearly 100 credits over a career that spanned almost five decades.Ruggedly handsome, he was a natural choice for Westerns, war movies and police procedurals. Among his many notable films were “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954), starring William Holden and Grace Kelly; “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957), starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965), with John Wayne and Dean Martin; and “Sharky’s Machine,” the 1981 Burt Reynolds detective thriller.Over the years, he also popped up in many television series, including “Gunsmoke,” “CHiPs” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Mr. Holliman’s career started with promise. He broke through in the Depression-era romance “The Rainmaker” (1956), winning a Golden Globe for best supporting actor for playing the impulsive teenage brother of a lovelorn woman (Katharine Hepburn) who encounters a grifter (Mr. Lancaster) promising rain in drought-ravaged Kansas.A relative unknown, Mr. Holliman managed to win the role over Elvis Presley, who was then rocketing to fame as a rock ’n’ roll trailblazer, but who took time out to read for the role. (Mr. Holliman apparently had little to worry about: “Elvis played the rebellious younger brother with amateurish conviction — like the lead in a high school play,” Allan Weiss, a screenwriter who saw the audition, recalled.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Looking for Quality Indie Cinema? Try Ovid.

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      The streaming service is a great place for independent films off the beaten path.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for independent film fans.When the streaming service Ovid launched in March 2019, it aimed to fill a gaping hole in the online cinematic landscape. An initiative of Docuseek, L.L.C., Ovid’s founding distributing partners (Bullfrog Films, First Run Features, The dGenerate Films Collection, Distrib Films US, Grasshopper Film, Icarus Films, KimStim, and Women Make Movies) had watched services like Netflix, which were initially happy to host independent movies, turn away from smaller films in favor of splashier mainstream fare and their own, in-house offerings. At Ovid (and a few other streamers we’ve spotlighted in this column), those titles could find a home for viewers with an interest in cinema from the fringes.The service initially housed 350 titles, most of them from the nonfiction space. It now boasts 2,282 titles, and has expanded from those initial eight distribution partners to over 60 from around the world. The library remains heavy on documentary, with films helpfully curated into categories of (among others) biography, arts and culture, politics, the environment, L.G.B.T.Q.+ issues, civil rights and, of course, movies about movies. The service also curates specialized collections, including films about basketball, journalism, the Vietnam conflict, jazz music and “dead French philosophers.”Ovid isn’t merely for doc-heads, however; the service has also grown its library of narrative films, primarily from the worlds of independent and international cinema. Their offerings include contemporary award-winners like Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex,” Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” and Sophia Takal’s “Always Shine,” as well as recently rediscovered and restored gems like “The Strangler,” “Delta Space Mission” and “The Tune.” And bingers will find an assortment of fine television shows as well, from the docuseries likes of “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” “With God on Our Side” and “Reporters Against Power,” along with some less-expected titles (such as the BBC series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” and “At Last the 1948 Show,” which featured various members of Monty Python before they teamed up for that troupe).The interface is smooth and intuitive, and picture quality is sharp, even for older, presumably long-neglected titles. And the service is priced quite competitively — a great deal at $6.99 per month, or at a discounted rate of $69.99 for a full year, one of the most competitively-priced specialty streamers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jim Abrahams Brought Timeless Gags to “Airplane!” and More

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      With the death of Jim Abrahams, one third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker writing and directing trio, a looks at some of the funniest moments from their key films.It’s almost hard to believe that at one point Leslie Nielsen was thought of as a serious actor who was an odd choice to play a comic role like the deadpan doctor in the disaster movie spoof “Airplane!”But casting the unflappable Nielsen to deliver lines like “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” in response to the completely reasonable phrase, “Surely you can’t be serious,” was part of the brilliance of Jim Abrahams, who died Tuesday at the age of 80. Along with David and Jerry Zucker, his pals from his youth in Wisconsin, Abrahams was a pioneer of some of the most beloved, gleefully over-the-top comedies in cinema history.Nielsen delivering his “don’t call me Shirley” line in “Airplane!”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies took their extreme silliness extremely seriously. Their actors, like Nielsen, were as committed to the bit as they were. With a few exceptions — like the kidnapping comedy “Ruthless People” (1986) — the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker mode was parody, taking genres that audiences loved and deliciously skewering them. But their humor was so undeniable that even if you didn’t know what they were making fun of you could lose your breath laughing.When my parents sat me down at a young age to watch “Airplane!,” I had never seen any of the flicks it was riffing on, like “Airport” (1970) or “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), the latter of which also featured Nielsen. Instead, I was captivated by the sheer absurdity and sometimes perplexing strangeness. The quotable lines are legion, but the bizarrely funny images are also why “Airplane!” lingers so large in the cultural memory.For me, it’s the eggs. During the flight where nothing can seem to go right, Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack attends to a woman who is feeling ill. With ominous music in the background he starts gently, but firmly extracting a series of eggs from her mouth. After the third one comes out, he cracks it against the side of a cup. A little bird flies out. The tension that exists in the scene is real and almost frightening, the woman’s face contorting like something out of a horror film, but the end result is just so ridiculous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sweethearts’ Review: Friends Without Benefits

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      Two college freshmen conspire to simultaneously dump their exes in Jordan Weiss’s unremarkable debut feature.Bright, breezy and requiring little in the way of close attention, the teen rom-com “Sweethearts” is perfect for those who prefer their movies to be barely more than background noise. Otherwise, the lame plotting (by Dan Brier and Jordan Weiss, who also directs) and lack of jokes soon become painfully obvious.Even so, this direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material. Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga play Jamie and Ben, friends since childhood and now freshmen at the same college. Both are feeling hobbled by their high-school sweethearts, whose incessant sexting is ruining their enjoyment of college life. Deciding to dump these millstones, Ben and Jamie head home to Ohio for Thanksgiving and a spectacularly convoluted plan to free themselves from their romantic pasts.Though embodying a rather sweet message about finding community and healing the scars of high school, “Sweethearts” is more often vulgar than funny. A gentle but unnecessary subplot involving the public coming-out of a close friend (Caleb Hearon) at least allows the fine Tramell Tillman to low-key capture some scenes as a gay football coach. Likewise the talented comedian Sophie Zucker, who makes the most of her too-brief appearances as Jamie’s mouthy hometown nemesis.Like so many movies these days, “Sweethearts” languishes for the want of a decent screenplay. You can’t just shoehorn in clips from “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) and hope some of that film’s magic rubs off.SweetheartsRated R for flying urine and a flaccid full-frontal. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Reinas’ Review: Memories of Lima

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      The political turmoil of Peru in the 1990s serves as the backdrop for this intimate domestic drama about growing up and learning to let go.To this day, political violence continues to be an issue in Peru, though the ‘80s and ’90s — when the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path waged bloody conflicts against the Peruvian government before being crushed by President Alberto Fujimori — are considered the country’s rock-bottom.“Reinas,” by the Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, takes place during this tumultuous period. For most of the running time, it keeps politics on the margins, like a phantom presence looming over the members of one bourgeois family’s everyday lives.The principal characters are two sisters, the teenage Aurora (Luana Vega) and her younger sister, Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic), both of whom can’t entirely wrap their heads around why their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo), wants so desperately to leave Lima.Preventing their departure is the girls’ estranged father Carlos (Gonzalo Molina), a taxi driver who decides to reconnect with his daughters on hearing that Elena might soon whisk them away to the United States. Both parents must sign a notarized form for their children to leave the country, but Carlos stalls, and his renewed interest in the family gives Aurora (whose world seems to revolve around her friends and the beach) hope that she might be able to stay behind with him.More compelling than this somewhat unconvincing family dynamic, structured around the coming-of-age arc and the trite theme of learning to let go, is the film’s intimate sense of time and place, and the subtly effective manner by which the grim social context is made known (such as a citywide curfew and sugar shortage). Seemingly inconsequential moments — like a cozy house party scene — shine with loving specificity, making the perpetual return to the Carlos drama feel dutiful. In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.ReinasNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More