Welcome to our guide of the Best Movies of 2024, featuring every Certified Fresh movie as they come in week by week!
June additions so far: Backspot. Gasoline Rainbow. Handling the Undead. Am I OK? Inside Out 2. Janet Planet. 20,000 Species of Bees. Tuesday. Ultraman: Rising. Fancy Dance. The Bikeriders. The Imaginary. Green Border. Ghostlight. Tiger Stripes. I Used to Be Funny. Thelma. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person.
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.