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The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

1. The Beast

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Bertrand Bonello has created a bold, fictional film about love, memory, pain and artificial intelligence that wanders through three time periods, each featuring versions of Gabrielle and Louis, played by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay. In a bleak and scary 2044, AI can be used to erase feelings of pain, a broken heart, but that means reliving those memories to erase them.

2. Immaculate

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Sydney Seeney (also the film's producer) stars in this terrifyingly creepy horror film about a novice American nun who learns that all is not as it seems in an Italian convent. What's most striking about the film is its willingness to take things to stunning extremes. There are countless moments when you look at it and think, 'No... it won't make it this far' and then it does.

3. Civil War

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Reactions to this film were almost polarized. Kirsten Dunst takes center stage as a photojournalist who, along with her colleagues – played by Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinley Henderson – put themselves in great danger to witness and report the actions around them.

4. Love Lies Bleeding

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Kristen Stewart's character has a miserable life at the start of Love Lies Bleeding, as Kristen Stewart's characters often do. She manages a seedy small-town gym, evades her gangster father (Ed Harris) and tries in vain to convince her sister (Jena Malone) to end her abusive marriage. But everything changes when a charismatic drifter played by Katy O'Brian steps in.

5. La Chimera

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Alice Rohrwacher's films – like the wonderful, fabulistic 2018 film Happy Like Lazzaro – are tinged with magical realism. La Chimera, set in Tuscany in the 1980s, is among her best as it walks the line between realism and dreams. Josh O'Connor stars as Arthur, an Englishman who works with a local Italian tomb group to find ancient artifacts in Etruscan tombs to sell on the black market. Arthur is reeling from the loss of his love, Benjamin. As one character says, he is searching underground for 'a door to the afterlife' and sometimes he seems to find it. The story has danger, crime and escape from the police, but the film is shaped by O'Connor's moving performance and Rohracher's elegant vision, filmed by the great cinematographer Helene Louvart.

6. Robot Dreams

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Robot Dreams is a cartoon like no other. It's a Spanish-French production and yet it's a loving homage to the vibrancy of 1980s New York. It's animated in a 2D picture-book style, and yet it's packed with little details. There's no dialogue, but it's still full of wit and wisdom. It's all about a dog and a robot and is a richly human exploration of loneliness and companionship. Adapted from Sara Varon's graphic novel and directed by Pablo Berger, this Oscar-nominated gem tells the captivating story of two friends who find joy in each other's company—and then must discover if they can learn to live apart.

7. Io Capitano (I the captain)

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

Few migrant dramas are as moving, humane and suspenseful as this one, about a 16-year-old boy's treacherous journey as he leaves Senegal in search of a better life. Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) won the best director award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival for the film, and its non-professional star, Seydou Sarr, won best young actor as the fictional Seydou, a gentle boy determined to go in Italy together with his cousin, Moussa. Each stage of the boys' journey presents a different danger. They set off across the Sahara with a group of other migrants. In Libya he is imprisoned and tortured. What about after? Watch the movie!

8. Perfect Days

The 8 best movies of 2024 to watch all weekend

You'd never think that someone who cleans public toilets for a living would have found the secret to happiness, but Wim Wenders' Perfect Days makes a strong case for the idea. A Japanese-language film, it follows Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) around Tokyo as he performs caretaker duties, waters his plants, reads novels, listens to rock music, and photographs trees. All this with the same earnestness and quiet pride. There are hints here and there of how Hirayama's life has changed and how it might change in the future, but the core of the film is a similar meditation on the serenity of an existence stripped to its core. Also, the public toilets themselves are so well designed that Perfect Days could turn them into tourist attractions.