14 Underrated Movies of 2024 | Features

A lot of energy is expended this time of year on the best films that hit theaters (or streaming) in the last 12 months. It can get a bit repetitive. Most of us here love “The Brutalist,” “Anora,” and “Nickel Boys” too but they’re getting so much attention (even from us) that it can push deserving alternative works out of the conversation. We asked our regular critics to pick a film from this year that they’d love more people to see and talk about. The results are a wonderful display of the range of not only film this year but the taste of the people who write about it at RogerEbert.com.

“Exhibiting Forgiveness”

Orbiting the pain of the hidden and open wounds shared between parents and children, yet intertwined with patient grace, few films explore the messy reality of forgiveness better than writer-director Titus Kaphar’s debut feature “Exhibiting Forgiveness.”

There’s often a dangerous conflation between forgiveness and reconciliation, and Kaphar’s film is a righteous rebuke to that indiscretion, meditating on how forgiveness can be a near-impossible task. Initially conceived as a documentary before Kaphar thought a fiction framing would do justice to the narrative, the film focuses on a successful painter, Tarrell (André Holland) who keeps his painful and traumatic past at an arms’ distance by working through his emotions via art. He’s been able to hide his past from his wife, Aisha (Andra Day) and son, Jermaine (Daniel Michael Barriere), but the barriers he’s erected crumble when his estranged father, La’ron (John Earl Jelks) comes back into his life, seeking to reconcile. Having found God and desiring to make amends for physically and mentally abusing Tarrell, La’ron is eager to bury the past and start anew with his son, but for Tarrell, the process of “forgiving and forgetting” is far from straightforward. He begrudgingly accepts to talk with La’ron at his mother’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) insistence.

The way Elks and Holland navigate their father-son dynamic is masterful, and Elks, in particular, stirs as one who garners our empathy but never uses that to excuse the harm he’s committed unto his son. Kaphar’s artistic sensibilities shine not only in the visual language of the film (the marigold and earthy tones that make up the color palette of his paintings coat scenes like a glaze) but also in his direction. He trusts his actors, letting them stumble and unearth the pain they’ve long buried in the recesses of their minds. The camera lingers on their faces and we see, in live time, the impact of Kaphar’s words marking their visage, like coarse paint strokes on canvas. Kaphar’s time spent in seminary also manifests here in the way he explores with nuance, the ways religious spaces misconstrue forgiveness to mean total absolution and often demand that those who have been wronged try to make amends before they are ready.

“Exhibiting Forgiveness” courses with uncomfortable vulnerability, and, while it promises no easy answers for its characters, it acts as a benediction all the same, challenging those willing to engage with its pain to imagine that forgiveness is a gift that can only be granted by the victim not demanded by the perpetrator. We forgive, not necessarily to restore, but to begin our own journey to true healing. And that is enough. – Zachary Lee

Now on VOD.

“Touch”

Baltasar Kormákur is best known for Hollywood action films like “2 Guns” and “Beast,” but “Touch,” based on a novel by Olaf Olafsson is a delicate, tender story of love, loss, regret, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) learns that he is in the early stages of memory loss just as the world is shutting down in 2020 due to the pandemic. He decides he has just one goal: to see his first love again, half a century after she left him without explanation. The film goes back and forth from the search in 2020 to the romance he is remembering from the 1960s, with the young Kristófer played by Palmi Kormákur, son of the director.

The journey is grand in scope, spanning time and space, beginning in Iceland, then England, where Kristófer met Miko (Kôki) when he got a job at her father’s restaurant, and then to Japan. But the story has an intimate timelessness, allowing Kristófer and us a bit of breathing room. The search is his focus, but its urgency does not prevent him from taking time to appreciate the people and places he encounters. He is impelled to see Miko again, but it is not to find answers about the past or get an apology. There is no anger, regret, or resentment. “Touch” is as delicate as its title suggests, its tone and lush visuals perfectly suited to the kind of first love that is utterly captivating to the young and then, no matter how many years go by, imperishably vital.

Now on VOD.

“Rob Peace”

Written, directed by and co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, “Rob Peace” is an example of two types of endangered commercial filmmaking: it’s a biography of somebody who isn’t famous, and a handsomely produced and realistic movie about Black-American life that’s filled with details that ring true.

The title character (Jay Will, in an all-timer of a lead performance) is a gifted student from East Orange, New Jersey who overcomes all manner of challenges to become a biochemistry student at Yale. But he keeps getting pulled under by the tragic undertow of his personal life: his father Skeet (Ejiofor) was sent to prison for killing two women with a handgun after a prosecution that might have been a frame-up. Rob turns a portion of his gifts towards helping his father in his endless legal battle to overturn the conviction, selling designer weed that he developed himself to pay attorney’s fees. He also uses it recreationally himself, and it’s a part of his popularity on campus; this is not a movie that paints its main character as a plaster saint, only a complicated young man.

As a filmmaker, Ejiofor keeps the focus on Rob but takes care to fill out numerous supporting characters (including Rob’s supportive mom, played by Mary J. Blige) and creates a big, bustling canvas filled with life. The screenplay especially is a marvel of economy, giving you crucial information you need when you need it but never feeling as if it’s rushing you along to the next plot point. The scenes feel fuller in the memory than they actually were. You come away from it moved but not sure quite what to think, which may be the rarest quality of all in a movie like this.

Now on Netflix.

“The Last Stop in Yuma County”

There was a time, young readers, when everyone wanted to be the next Quentin Tarantino. After the landscape-shifting success of “Pulp Fiction,” dozens of writers sold their scripts about tough-talking idiots and the mistakes they made in the middle of a crime spree. Most of them were truly horrible, only making Tarantino’s voice more laudable by comparison. And the over-saturation led to the genre basically drifting away until it felt like no one knew how to make a fun crime movie anymore. In that era, even amidst all the copycats, Francis Galluppi’s feature debut would have stood out as a damn fun movie. Unpretentiously delivered by a stacked cast, it’s the kind of “good time” that I truly think more people are looking for in an era when so many independent films take themselves a few degrees too seriously. It’s a movie that just needs to find its audience.

Set in the 1970s, “Yuma County” starts by following a traveling knives salesman (Jim Cummings, who should be a household name and who I often wish could have been active during the prime of the Coen brothers because of how perfectly he nails that deadpan tone) who ends up at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. As he waits for the refueling truck so he can be on his way, a pair of bank robbers enter the station, and, well, things get unpredictable from there. With appearances from living legends like Richard Brake and Barbara Crampton, alongside great supporting turns from Jocelin Donahue and Sierra McCormick, this is a movie that I keep waiting to drop on Netflix so it can rocket to the top of their charts and find the audience it deserves. For better or worse, that’s how it works in 2024. We just have to wait for the streaming fuel truck to get to this one. – Brian Tallerico

Now on VOD.

“Limbo”

Jack Huston’s terrific “Day of the Fight” was one of at least two outstanding 2024 pictures to make purposeful, evocative, emotion-stirring use of black-and-white cinematography. The other is less known and should be more widely seen. The other is the Australian crime picture “Limbo,” which, astonishingly, was not only written and directed by Ivan Sen but co-produced, shot, and edited by him. And he did the music too. Sen has an Indigenous mother, and most of his films — this is his seventh feature — dwell on the topic of identity in modern Australia.

The actor Simon Baker, here playing a retired cop turned detective who comes to the town of Limbo to investigate a murder case that’s been cold for twenty years now, is a beautifully concentrated co-conspirator with Sen. As I wrote in my review of the picture of the actor, who’s been best known for his television work, “he is not shy about letting Sen’s camera […] pick up every crease and wrinkle on his tanned face. His acting here, understated, enigmatic, mindfully physical, is of a different order than I’ve ever seen it. And it grounds this terse, unsettling mystery that’s inextricable from the shame of not only the title town in which the story is set, but all of Australia itself.” While the sociopolitical dimension of the movie is crucial, I’m wary of leaning on it too much as I entreat film lovers to seek the movie out: “Limbo” is also what they call a crackerjack thriller that grabs you by the throat even as it shakes at your conscience. – Glenn Kenny

Now on VOD.

“Good One”

India Donaldson’s quiet, fearless debut concerns, on its face, a fateful weekend of camping with a young girl (Lily Collias’ Sam) and her father (James Le Gros), with his dopey middle-aged best friend (Danny McCarthy) in tow. But as the trio trudge through the Catskills for a three-day hike, with all its idle conversations amid babbling brooks, “Good One” reveals deceptive layers of observation and insight into the gap between generations, genders, and dreams left unfulfilled. Collias gives one of the best, quietest performances of the year, expressing volumes through curious gazes and pursed lips. For Sam, this trip will be a transformative one: Not one defined by blow-up fights or names called, but by a few simple exchanges that reveal the men in her life to be not what she thought, or at least hoped, they were.

Like Mark Duplass’s TV series “Penelope” earlier this year, “Good One” offers understated wisdom through the eyes of a young girl discovering the world through her interface with nature. But here, Sam learns the crushing weight of disappointment—the knowledge that the men around her, all older and with the benefit of experience, are just as childish, self-aggrandizing as they ever were. Amid Wilson Cameron’s verdant cinematography, capturing each leaf and stream the group wanders through, we see the impurity of the 21st century man: Divorced, afraid to put away childish things, always looking for the next subtle way to demonstrate their authority. Even if it’s to their own child. A transformative work, for both protagonist and filmmaker. – Clint Worthington

Now on VOD.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”

Tyler Taormina’s “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is nostalgia presented without the expected golden glow. Multiple generations of a big Italian-American family gather together on Christmas Eve, as they do every year. This year, though, will probably be the last time. The house is being sold. The grandmother needs to move into assisted living. Things are changing.

Taormina films this big group event from a slight distance. The film thrusts us into the middle of the family event but there’s an eerie sense occasionally that we are eavesdropping from a million miles away. As you get older, nostalgia can harden into “back then was better than now”. Nostalgia can be filled with lies, in other words, and it’s rarely as simple as “Those were the good times” because the “good times” back then include the present reality: a loved one has since passed away, you are no longer young, your friends in high school are no longer your friends. Time does its work on everyone.

Taormina creates this difficult to capture (and yet familiar to all of us) atmosphere sensitively and specifically: there are a couple of surreal effects, the camera floats through the house from group to group, there are very few specific close-ups, and Taormina uses an Altman-esque soundscape of almost disembodied voices floating through the air, snatches of conversations overheard before we move on. All of this sets “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” apart from other “home for the holidays”-type films. Richard Brody described it perfectly in his New Yorker review: the film “provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence.”

The wintry scene inside a snow-globe is an idyllic idealized miniature world of church steeples and snowmen. But you look into that world through a glass. You can’t get in there. That miniature world was real once. It’s now a memory. And memories, ultimately, are all we’ve got. – Sheila O’Malley

Now on AMC+ and VOD.

“Blackout”

Larry Fessenden is among the most fiercely independent filmmakers working in the American genre cinema today — and, not coincidentally, one of its chronically undervalued. Even as his New York-based Glass Eye Pix has backed filmmakers like Ti West, Jim Mickle, and Kelly Reichardt in breaking through, Fessenden himself has continued to operate at a low-budget level, where his chillingly atmospheric features—all monster movies, to some degree—have for decades observed the philosophical struggle of people to know themselves in the face of larger socioeconomic and environmental collapse. Together, films like vampirism-as-addiction allegory “Habit” and climate-change reckoning “The Last Winter” comprise a singular, deeply personal body of work; individually, they’re all striking, emotionally resonant studies of the beast within.

“Blackout,” released quietly to VOD this year, is perhaps Fessenden’s most haunting and poignantly hand-crafted creature feature to date — a werewolf film where an existentially afflicted outsider (Alex Hurt), having contracted the curse amid grieving his father’s death and separating from his partner, falls back into an old drinking habit and enters a downward spiral. With his liberal upstate New York community besieged by politicians who exploit voters’ fears of the Other for their own financial gain, exposing a rot in the heart of small-town America, our protagonist is caught between skipping town and standing up for what’s right — even as his efforts to suppress his animalistic instincts, and the self-loathing he’s felt all his life, make “Blackout” blurrier than a study in good and evil. That our protagonist is a painter, specializing in nature scenes that grow more violent and abstract as he transforms, gives “Blackout” an ingenious device through which to explore art as an outlet for anguish, as a mirror to the soul.

Fessenden’s long been fascinated by perversions of the psyche, and by the sorry state of a world filled with such damaged individuals; his “Blackout” is personal and political in the way of all enduring horror. – Isaac Feldberg 

Now on VOD.

“All You Need is Death”

My friend Paul Duane has been telling the stories of artists practically crooked with belief in the power of art. John Healy, Bernard Natan, Chris King, Jerry McGill, Bill Drummond – they may not share much beyond one inescapable ideal: that art is everything. Some of them died for it. Well, here Paul creates a society of people who live in fear that they might do the same thing. That a song may not save your life but take it instead. Paul pays homage to the likes of Andrzej Żuławski and Robin Hardy, but the vibe is all his: a spectral jam session with hands from a malevolent beyond gripping the strings of things unseen. His heroes search for something that wants to be found so it might infect and displace once again, a Robert Chambers-esque yarn that will never lose its potency as long as humans search for innovation in their arts. What’s new is old, and what’s ancient may still have claws and teeth and a desire to be heard.

In his beautiful little movie, one of his best, Paul creates a new song for a confused time. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Paul over ten years and this is precisely the kind of ambitious statement I expect from him. He has seen it all and done just about the same, and this window into his view of the creative process would be invaluable even if it weren’t clearly so personal. To create is everything, but to preserve equally important. Here love for art becomes a blueprint for madness. – Scout Tafoya

Now on VOD.

“The Young Wife”

Chaotic bisexual exes, not-so-quiet quitting of soul sucking corporate jobs, slowly creeping anxiety fueled by a world ravaged by climate change, and a stacked ensemble cast featuring the likes of Kiersey Clemons, Leon Bridges, Kelly Marie Tran, Michaela Watkins, Aya Cash, Brandon Micheal Hall, Lukita Maxwell, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Judith Light. Tayarisha Poe’s latest film, the lo-fi sci-fi romantic drama “The Young Wife” has it all. Poe began working on her bold and visually ambitious film in 2019. Between then and the film’s debut at last year’s SXSW a lot had changed in both the world and Poe’s life. The filmmaker described her film as, “about living through that vibe shift, in a world of peri-post-pandemic maximalism. It’s a sunny day panic attack, a Lisa Frank lucid dream. An expression of future nostalgia.” 

Set in a slightly distant future with light dystopian undertones and shades of Afrofuturism, Poe’s film centers on the titular young wife Celestina (the always great Clemons, who expresses her anxiety and anticipation as if she were always smiling, despite walking on knives) on the of her wedding. Celestina’s big day is swarming with a cacophonous flurry of friends, family, in-laws, and even a very nosy co-worker, all clamoring for her attention as she eagerly awaits the return of her groom River (Bridges). Poe, along with cinematographer Jomo Fray (who lensed her debut film “Selah and The Spades,” as well as last year’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” and this year’s Oscar-contended “Nickel Boys”) and editor Kate Abernathy capture Celestina’s visceral disorientation with fluid camera movement and edits that feel like bee stings. Watching Poe’s film feels like reading a deeply personal diary entry. It is a singular experience brimming with fears – and joys – that are as uniquely rendered as they are universally felt. – Marya E. Gates

Now on VOD.

“Stress Positions”

“Takes place during COVID” is a simple, relatively ubiquitous way to elicit skepticism from moviegoers in 2024. However, Theda Hammel’s feature debut “Stress Positions” subverts the pessimistic expectations we have of its setting. Hammel’s film, set in Brooklyn, revels in the absurd socio-political chaos of the period with sometimes cutting, other times deliciously ridiculous humor. 

Pointing the finger at her own generation, Hammel utilizes her characters to dissect and ridicule the vanity of thin liberalism in young people: politics adopted and orated as clear regurgitations of text rather than as the result of engagement. When they press play on a YouTube video that begins with “What is the Middle East? And why should you care?,” it’s funny because it is damning. Moments like this are prevalent amidst hysterical physical comedy from John Early’s frantic Terry and a slew of perfectly humorous line deliveries from Hammel’s dry, abrasive Karla. 

But in large, “Stress Positions” is about egoism in storytelling: the tales already lived and those currently in flux. It ponders the intersection of voyeurism and ownership. Hammel’s cast of unlikeable characters are constantly making the circumstances about them. Whether it’s Karla’s partner, who co-opted the story of her transition to sell a novel, or Bahlul’s falling out with his mother, narrated by Karla in the film, personal histories are delivered via a third party, constantly leaving us guessing as to where truth devolves into fabrication. Bahlul states, “fiction is freedom,” and, with “Stress Positions,” Hammel lets loose with her high-octane satire, elegantly juggling sharp, shameless humor with genuine cultural provocation. – Peyton Robinson

Now on Hulu.

“Sujo”

Near the end of the 2020 Mexican film “Identifying Features,” a mother who’s been searching for her missing son discovers that what’s happened to him is worse than death. He’s been forced to become a killer for the cartels. Such unspeakable bleakness lingers long after watching. But while the new film by directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero begins in similar territory—with the son of a murdered sicario growing up in hiding—as the drama unfolds glimmers of hope find a way in. That the same young actor, Juan Jesús Varela, plays both boys in these two films can be interpreted as directors offering two versions of what the future can look like for young men in a country ravaged by violence.

In “Sujo,” the protagonist is determined not to repeat the sins of his father, even if that means removing himself from the proximity of those he loves. And as he moves from rural Michoacán to Mexico City, then his battle becomes one not strictly of survival but of class. Instead of condemning the protagonist to a gruesome fate, Valadez and Rondero cautiously introduce the possibility of forging a new path by way of a mentor that positively responds to the boy’s curiosity for learning. The directors observe these stories as Mexican women who share in the hurt, the fear, and the desire for change of the majority of the population, and not through foreign, exploitative gaze. Their hard-hitting, yet profoundly humanistic cinema seeks to image an alternative future where light can slowly but resolutely break through the darkness. – Carlos Aguilar

Unavailable as of this writing but likely on VOD soon.

“Drive-Away Dolls”

For his first solo turn at directing a narrative feature, Ethan Coen conjured up this cheerfully cartoonish and decidedly ribald road comedy about a couple of lesbian friends—free spirit Jamie (Margaret Qualley, kicking off what would be a hell of a year) and the more reserved Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan)—who decide to escape their respective romantic troubles by heading to Florida via a car acquired from a drive-away service, only to be pursued by the trio of criminals who were supposed to get both that particular car and the contraband stowed in the trunk.

Coen and co-writer Tricia Cooke have cooked up an alternately lurid and goofy tribute to exploitation classics like “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Assault of the Killer Bimbos” that perhaps may not be the most substantive of films but which is nevertheless an absolute blast while it is running, thanks to its outrageous sense of humor and a more-than-game cast headlined by Qualley and Viswanathan—two of the most reliable scene-stealers working today making for a dream team-up here—and supported by the likes of Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, Coleman Domingo, Matt Damon and one of today’s top pop stars in a WTF?-style cameo for the ages. Although it floundered during its brief theatrical release, it definitely deserves another look because it was arguably the funniest (and certainly the horniest) American comedy of 2024. – Peter Sobczynski

Now on Prime Video.

“The Tuba Thieves”

What’s the tone of a space? It can be mediated, pitch-shifted, or otherwise altered, depending on your perspective. The enchanting and mysterious documentary “The Tuba Thieves” questions the way we experience sound through specific rooms and various media. “The Tuba Thieves” is also a metaphysical detective story since it follows big, spacey questions inspired by the disappearance of several marching band tubas that were stolen over two years (2011-2013) from various Los Angeles County high schools. This isn’t a true crime doc about the privileged nature of listening. More like a bold, questing, stylish collage about the deaf community, the mysteries of noise and how it’s first received and then carried by us.

In this new and surprising context, the persistence and polyphonic nature of sound is presented through a rich collage of disparate events that includes everyone: John Cale, Prince, some deaf skate punks, Bruce Conner, and some wild cats, too. Beautifully composed static takes emphasize the subjective experience of being everywhere from the bleachers of a high school football field to the sound booth at an audiologist’s office. Descriptive captions break down what we’re hearing into component parts like, “[thick air]”, “[loud traffic]”, and “[a distant siren].”

“The Tuba Thieves” presents its well-shuffled cast of characters in non-binary terms, not as victims or survivors, and not deprived or gifted, isolated or unified, but all together and in their own separate existences. There’s music everywhere for those who want to listen and observe. – Simon Abrams

Now on VOD.