The 10 best movies from 2024 that went under the radar

Posted On December 25, 2024December 25, 2024

With a constant stream of movies being released, knowing where to start can sometimes be hard. You feel guilty when you miss the highly anticipated indie darling or disappointed when you finally sit down to watch the film that everyone has been raving about, feeling slightly underwhelmed and empty. Because of this, it’s only natural that some titles slip under the radar, being added to your infinite watch list and never quite finding the time to check them off.

Over the course of the year, there have been countless hidden gems to escape the cultural consciousness and find their way to the bottom of the pile, regardless of their innovation and impact. Thanks to the current streaming era and abysmally short theatrical release periods, it’s more complicated than ever for smaller films to make a splash and make their voices heard, with a cloud of noise and distraction fogging mainstream audiences that prioritises established filmmakers and commercial enterprises.

Despite this, the best stories will always find a way into the world, even with the challenges that make it harder for emerging filmmakers to realise their vision: authenticity and vulnerability always shine through the cracks and find a way to reach the right people.

So, without further ado, here are the 2024 films that have gone under the radar and deserve the complete and undivided attention they didn’t get the first time around.

2024’s best under-the-radar movies:

Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Quy)

Viet and Nam is Truong Minh Quy’s sophomore feature film and one of the most entrancing viewing experiences of the year. Set in modern Vietnam, the story follows two coal miners who attempt to make the most of their little time together before one of them is shipped overseas, reconciling with the impact of their country’s turbulent past on their ability to forge a new future.

With clear influences from Apichatpong Weeastheakul, Minh Quy uses the language of slow cinema to create a hypnotic spell that immerses the audience in the longing and dwindling hope of a doomed romance and the effect of generational grief. The characters are trapped between their grief towards the past and distant cracks of light in their future, the past and present blurring as one, unable to distinguish between the effects of both.

The director adopts a poetic visual language unlike any other, creating something that feels both delicate and harsh, creating a jagged backdrop to such a tender central relationship. Each person is heartsick for a future that is drenched in uncertainty, trapped by unresolved pains and the darkness of their history, contrasted by the stark hopefulness of the central romance as they desperately cling to each other for any sense of stability and comfort.

Janet Planet (Annie Baker)

Janet Planet is a film for anyone who grew up being told they were an old soul. The story follows a young girl called Lacey during the summer of 1991, growing up in rural Massachusetts with her mother, Janet.

Annie Baker creates a refined and deeply empathetic film that is effortless in its warmth, capturing the comfort that Lacey finds in her mother as a deeply shy child who doesn’t quite fit in with other people her age, choosing to spend time alone or simply observing the actions of other adults. The people that drift in and out of Janet’s life make up Lacey’s world, quietly orbiting around each space that she touches, finding comfort in being an observer and living in the background.

It captures the unique feeling of having an older person’s melancholia as a young person, creating a weight that anyone who’s ever felt burdened by something they can’t yet articulate or understand will immediately recognise. Few filmmakers care to understand or dwell on the perspective of children, but Janet Planet is able to capture the infinite possibility, nostalgia, and imprisonment of adolescence.

Will & Harper (Josh Greenbaum)

Will & Harper is one of the most moving documentaries of recent years, following Harper Steele as she embarks on a road trip with longtime friend Will Ferrell to reintroduce him to her true self after coming out as a trans woman.

It’s marked by equal measures of light and dark, capturing the joy of living authentically and the power of friendship, as well as the threat of small-minded people who seek to strip trans people of their dignity and rights. In a world plagued by these kinds of people, the film manages to strike a balance between optimism and confronting us with the dangerous reality of this experience for many, leaving you wondering how different the road trip would be without the presence of Ferrell’s fame and the meta-narrative around how this affects our ability to be seen.

Will & Harper is a necessary and poignant story about blind vulnerability and unwavering love, showcasing the beauty of friendship, the importance of genuine allyship and how to forge a brighter future and advocate for the people who need it most.

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Universal Language is an ode to Abbas Kiarostami, the inner world of children and the magical realism of growing up.

Set in the middle of a snowy Winnipeg winter, the film follows a collection of interweaving storylines in this small town, from the adventures of a child who tries to extract money from a block of ice, a walking tour guide and a man called Matthew who reunites with his estranged mother. It is a beautifully odd love letter to the power of community and the people who live around us, with Matthew Rankin adding strange and hilarious details that add to the surrealistic feeling of a story world that is both bleak and colourful, creating dreamy brutalism that reminds us of our place in the world and the neighbours that help us through it.

Completely charming and endearing, with a creative visual style and whimsical sense of humour that perfectly encapsulates Rankin’s description of the film as an “autobiographical hallucination.” 

National Anthem (Luke Gilford)

Luke Gilford redefines the binaries of gender in the wild west through his tender and ethereal film National Anthem, following a construction worker who stumbles upon a queer rodeo ranch, joining their community and seeking solace from his turbulent home life.

It’s a gentle story about the transformative power of finding your people and being truly seen. Love and care seep through every frame, creating an overwhelming sense of reverence for this community. Through lush, hazy visuals, the film invites us into a unique space, with Gilford crafting a queer utopia within a traditionally conservative and hyper-masculine setting. This reimagining breathes new life into the space, replacing rigidity with dreamy imagery and heartfelt displays of tenderness.

A heavenly viewing experience that lingers in the joy of watching people flourish when shown true kindness for the first time, allowing us to imagine a radical future in which this kind of life is possible.

Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)

Nathan Silver’s low-budget comedy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and made its way to the UK in August, but it seems to have been overshadowed by flashier releases.

It stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben, a cantor at a synagogue whose life has gone downhill since the death of his wife. When he meets his former primary school music teacher, Carla (played by the great Carol Kane), he agrees to help fulfil her lifelong dream of having a bat mitzvah. Their lessons lead to an unlikely friendship and possibly more. At every turn, however, they’re met with the pressure and discomfort of those around them.

Both characters are lost souls who find an unlikely kindred spirit in the other, but this isn’t a typical romantic comedy. Ben is suffering from grief and a crisis of faith. His attempts to date age-appropriate women are painfully awkward, and the sound design, overlapping dialogue, and use of extreme close-ups ensure that there is a sense of tension and discomfort throughout. Culminating in a family dinner worthy of The Bear and Shiva Baby, this is a perfectly paced, sneakily moving comedy.

The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)

Nikolaj Arcel’s Danish historical epic may have flown under the radar because it was so late in coming. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in August 2023, it wasn’t until February of the following year that it finally debuted internationally.

Set in 1755, it stars the incomparable Mads Mikkelsen as Ludvig Kahlen, a destitute veteran who receives royal permission to cultivate the Jutland Heath, a vast, forbidding peninsula where lawlessness reigns and crops lie fallow. There is a touch of The Revenant in The Promised Land, with its cinematic adoration for natural light and landscapes and its distaste for the men who try to tame it.

But Arcel is going for an even grander scale, and the film feels as vast and immersive as Jutland itself. Mikkelsen’s grizzled features and penetrating stare are the perfect personification of the ruggedness of his surroundings, but even Denmark’s greatest actor cannot upstage the setting. It’s a shame it wasn’t more widely available during its theatrical release because it deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Les Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)

Rodrigo Moreno’s languid heist comedy will feel like a bait-and-switch for some viewers. It stars Daniel Elías as Morán, an anonymous pen-pusher at a Buenos Aires bank who casually steals hundreds of thousands of dollars in small increments from his employers. His plan is to turn himself into the police and hide the money with his friend, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), while he serves his prison sentence, splitting the cash upon his release.

At more than three hours, this is not a taut thriller. In fact, it isn’t really a thriller at all. Just when you thought the set-up was perfect for an easygoing crime caper, Morán tells Román that he’s hidden more money in the hills of Cordoba that he must retrieve. This sends his friend on a meandering, pastoral journey in which he falls in love with a local free spirit at just the wrong time and experiences an existential awakening.

This film is a surreal, untethered journey to which you must relinquish yourself to fall under its spell. Once you’ve surrendered, however, it will sweep you away in its charms and impart a few revelations of its own. Poetic, silly, and defiant, it’s a wholly unusual experience and one that deserves a much wider audience.

Timestalker (Alice Lowe)

At some point, I will stop banging on about Alice Lowe’s transcendentally loveable anti-romance Timestalker, but not until it has reached the audience it deserves. Premiering at South by Southwest in March, it has somehow slipped through the cracks, either through botched marketing or simply because its premise of a self-absorbed woman who pursues an even more self-absorbed man across several thousand years of reincarnation is too original for its own good.

The jokes here are plentiful and multifaceted. There are the one-liners, the 18th-century dildos, the bedraggled pink Persian cat, and sight gags galore. There’s a satire of everything from British period dramas to David Bowie. And at its centre is a deadpan performance by Lowe as Agnes, whose immaturity and unrequited obsession with an overtly dickish prima donna is the funniest performance of the year.

This is a cult classic in the making, and you may as well get in on the ground level so you can be one of those smug film nerds who get to say, “I told you so” 15 years down the line.

Girls Will Be Girls (Shuchi Talati)

Perhaps the single most overlooked film of the year is Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama about a teenager at a boarding school in the Himalayas who experiences her first romance.

Preeti Panigranhi is Mira, a straight-A student whose hard-earned position at the head of her class falls by the wayside when she meets Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a new student who’s spent time at various schools around the world and already knows his way around sexual intimacy. Complicating Mira’s new romance is her protective mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti, who also stars in All We Imagine as Light), who develops an uncomfortably close relationship with Sri.

Despite unfolding with masterful subtlety, Girls Will Be Girls features some of the most memorable moments of the year, including a scene in which Mira, Sri, and Anila dance in the living room, their wordless interactions marking a sea-change in their dynamic. The final scene, which reveals it’s been a mother/daughter story all along rather than a romance, is also silent and the most breathtaking and tender ending of the year.

Related Topics