The Pamphleteer’s Ten Most Anticipated Films of 2024

Now that the strikes have settled and Dune is finally debuting, it’s time to return to business as usual at the multiplex. The word of the year is franchises with an embarrassment of riches from reboots of The Lord of the Rings, Twister, and The Wizard of Oz to the four comic-book movies that survived superhero fatigue.

2023 easily brought the biggest cinematic bounty since 1999. While we aren’t sure what 2024 holds, there are plenty of releases to warrant getting off the couch and out in the world. To see our Comprehensive 2024 Film Guide, click here. Without further ado, here are our picks for ten best 2024 has to offer.

10) Rumours (TBA)

Canada’s Guy Maddin has kept silent-era aesthetics alive for decades with films like The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg, but his latest just may bring him into the present. Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander star in this globalist satire about leaders at the annual G7 summit who get lost in the wilderness while trying to draft a statement about an international crisis. An art film both Thomas Pikkety and Steve Bannon could get behind. 

9) The Fall Guy (May 5)

Although it’s based on the Lee Majors early '80s TV series, the opening salvo of the summer blockbuster season managed to attract current Oscar nominees Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. The pair play an on-again, off-again stuntman and director who get caught up in a criminal plot while working on a high-concept action movie. With John Wick and Atomic Blonde director David Leitch at the helm, it has the meta-comic potential of 21 Jump Street written all over it. 

8) Oh, Canada (TBA)

Fresh from the men-in-crisis triptych of First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener, living legend Paul Schrader turns his attention to the Great White North for this adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel, Foregone. Starring Richard Gere as a Vietnam draft dodger turned famous documentarian dying of cancer who wants to demythologize his life, the film seems like a resonant bookend for the guy who wrote Taxi Driver half a century ago. Also starring Uma Thurman and current “It” Boy Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla, The Sweet East). 

7) The Bikeriders (June 21)

Jeff Nichols (Mud, Loving) returns from an eight-year hiatus with this examination of the development and descent of a 60s biker gang featuring Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Jodie Comer, and Elvis’s Austin Butler. Could be a low-key triumph from one of America’s most unassuming talents. 

6) Megalopolis (TBA)

For those who think the best thing about film culture these days is Francis Ford Coppola’s frequent use of Instagram, news that the ultimate auteur’s long-gestating self-financed, $100+ million magnum opus should finally see the light of day this year seems like manna from movie heaven. Ostensibly about an architect who tries to rebuild New York City in the wake of a devastating disaster, it could do for our current political moment what The Godfather did at the height of 70s unrest. Featuring a who’s who of cinema’s past and present: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Talia Shire, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf, Forest Whitaker, Jason Schwartzman, and Laurence Fishburne.

5) Challengers (April 26) and Queer (TBA)

Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria, Bones and All) continues his reign as Hollywood’s greatest risk taker with this doubleheader. In the former, Zendaya stars as a tennis prodigy whose career takes unexpected turns when she falls into a love triangle with two best friends on the circuit (The Crown’s Josh O’Connor and West Side Story’s Mike Faist). In the latter, the filmmaker takes a stab at Beat writer William S. Burroughs’s unhinged classic with Daniel Craig as a New Orleans bohemian who falls for an addict during a jaunt to Mexico City. Regardless of how these pan out with critics and audiences, Guadagnino promises to inject some much-needed energy into a year dominated by IP.

4) Borderlands (August 9)

Horror maestro Eli Roth builds on the momentum of last November’s sleeper hit Thanksgiving with this big-budget adaptation of the 2009 first-person shooter game. On the planet of Pandora, a stacked cast of Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Edgar Ramírez search for a mysterious relic. It could be the next Jumanji or end up like Assassin’s Creed. Whatever happens, Roth is sure to sustain his status as American cinema’s greatest social critic. 

3) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (May 24)

We’ve waited nine years to revisit the unadulterated spectacle that George Miller brought to Fury Road. Now, it’s finally time to witness the origin of the one-armed Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) as the world collapses and she contends with a new gluttonous madman (Chris Hemsworth). Miller has long been the Spielberg of Australia. This year, he may also be the unofficial savior of the multiplex. 

2) The Brutalist (TBA)

Child-actor-turned-director Brady Corbet has been silent since Natalie Portman’s popstar diva exploited school shootings in 2018’s Vox Lux. But his follow-up to one of the best films of that decade is finally ready for release. Adrien Brody plays László Toth, an Eastern European architect feeling the Iron Curtain in 1947 with his wife (Felicity Jones) whose uneasy alliance with a powerful benefactor (Guy Pearce) wreaks havoc on his ethics and home life. Corbet is hands-down his generation’s major talent. Whatever the result, it’s sure to be a wild ride. 

1) The Shrouds (TBA)

As expected, details about the latest from Canadian body-horror pioneer David Cronenberg are scarce, but it involves a widower played by Vincent Cassel who copes with his grief by creating a device to communicate with the dead via a burial shroud. From Schrader to Coppola, 2024 may be the year the cinema’s greatest artists probe their mortality. But it’s a guarantee no one will go as hard as Cronenberg.