Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

(Photo by Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection. NOSFERATU.)

Welcome to our guide of the Best Movies of 2024, featuring every Certified Fresh movie as they come in week by week!

November and December additions so far: Better Man, Conclave. Juror #2. Blitz. Emilia Pérez.  Wicked. Caddo Lake.  Maria. Nickel Boys. Flow. Queer. Joy. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. The Last Showgirl. The Girl with the Needle. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Nosferatu. Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

October additions: MadS. Memoir of a Snail.  Smile 2. V/H/S/Beyond. I’ll Be Right There. Things Will Be Different. It’s What’s Inside. Saturday Night. The End We Start From. The Beautiful Game. Exhibiting Forgiveness.  Piece by Piece. We Live in Time. Terrifier 3. Rumours.  The Apprentice. The Goldman Case.

Spooky season started early in September with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Sleep and Speak No Evil were there with the assist. We kicked off our guide to the 50 best new action movies with the Netflix’s Rebel Ridge. And the synths had their day with The Wild Robot (way up there on the DreamWorks Animation guide) and Transformers One (ditto for this on on the Transformers list).

August staved off the typical late-summer doldrums with Alien: Romulus, the first Alien movie to be marked Certified Fresh and not directed by Ridley Scott in some nearly 40-odd years. Sing Sing is keeping Colman Domingo in the awards contender discussion post-Rustin. And more from horror and likewise genre efforts with Blink Twice, Cuckoo, The Substance, and Strange Darling.

July was blockbuster month worthy of the summer season mantle, as Twisters carved its warpath, and fast in its wake Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel’s sole MCU offering for the year. MaXXXine, Longlegs, and Oddity made a case for one-word horror titles. And in the limited release spectrum, Dìdi is an instant new Asian-American classic, while Hindi-langague Kill thrilled audiences. Those who missed the Hindi-language thriller of course will have their eternal chances to catch it on streaming, or even until the American remake comes out next year-ish.

Let’s talk about the June wide releases that went Certified Fresh. First, there’s Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which revitalized the box office and brought back the studio in a big, big way. The Bikeriders is a crime drama starring Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Jodie Comer. It was directed by Jeff Nichols, who has unassumingly amassed one of the most impressive filmographies of any working director; all six of his directed movies are Certified Fresh. And let’s make some noise for A Quiet Place: Day One, which is now 3-for-3, a true horror rarity outside of George Romero‘s original Dead trilogy. 

May brought the start of the summer movie season, launching with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt‘s The Fall Guy. The following weeks saw Mad Max sequel Furiosa, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which built upon the reboot trilogy of the 2010s (how to monkey-see the series in order, if you’re so inclined). Glen Powell‘s Hit Man saw some limited theatrical play before dropping on Netflix, where it’ll be permanently one of the streamer’s 100 best-reviewed movies. Viggo Mortensen directed his second feature, western The Dead Don’t Hurt, while Pamela Adlon made her directorial debut with Babes. In a Violent Nature took viewers on a (very) slow ride from a slasher villain’s point of view. And check out Daisy Ridley’s crowd-pleasing Young Woman and the Sea.

Horror had an unexpectedly strong month in April, with Universal monster movie Abigail, Nic Cage action-hybrid Arcadian, The First Omen reviving the dormant franchise, and indies I Saw the TV Glow, Blackout, and Infested. A24 had their first #1 box office-debuting film with the heated Civil War. Zendaya continued her Certified Fresh streak with Challengers, and Dev Patel made a major directorial debut with Monkey Man, which had its own long journey to go from being dumped on Netflix to theatrical major studio distribution. Nowhere Special becomes the highest-rated movie of the year.

In March: Love Lies Bleeding and Problemista, both from A24. One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins. Ordinary Angels, starring Hilary Swank. In horror, we got You’ll Never Find Me and Late Night with the Devil, the latter which also tops our best horror of 2024 list. Dialogue-free animation Robot Dreams and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World jockeying for the top spot here.

And what about February? Dune pretty good, thanks for asking. Part Two went Certified Fresh within an hour after the reviews embargo lifted on February 21st. With it outclassing the first Dune, we took a look at 20 sequels that got better Tomatometer scores than their originals. Otherwise, things got freaky with horror film Stopmotion and the comic zaniness of Hundreds of Beavers taking the crown for the best-reviewed of the year.

We didn’t have a blockbuster January like we did in 2023‘s, when genre surprises M3GAN and Plane went Certified Fresh. But Daisy Ridley got her post-Skywalker win with Sometimes I Think About Dying. Mads Mikkelsen re-teamed with his A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel to find The Promised Land. With The Crime Is Mine, Francois Ozon is getting career-best reviews, and his 10th Certified Fresh film over the past decade-and-change. And Netflix scored with The Kitchen, Orion and the Dark, and Good Grief.