The Best Historical Movies of 2024
What’s past is prologue, and that famous phrase certainly holds true when it comes to movies. This year’s most notable historical dramas brought their subjects to life in a way that only movies can, using the unreality of filmmaking to show how our understanding of what’s come before informs the present. Here are five of the best of them.
The Settlers
Another word for “settler” is “colonialist,” and indeed the original Spanish title of Felipe Gálvez’s debut feature is Los colonos. Set in 1901 in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago divided between Argentina and Chile whose name means “Land of Fire,” the film is nothing if not combustible. Inspired by real events, it ranks among the most brutal Westerns ever made. And yet it’s also strikingly beautiful, with cinematography that literally glows like a small, resilient campfire illuminating an otherwise pitch-black landscape from which anything — friend, foe, man, beast — could emerge. It’s not often that a film set in uncharted land feels so genuinely uncharted.
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The Brutalist
One of the year’s best movies, historical or otherwise, is Brady Corbet’s stunningly ambitious The Brutalist. It plays like a sweeping biopic of its (fictional) protagonist, Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth, whose postwar arrival in America is signaled by the upside-down appearance of the Statue of Liberty in a stunning opening sequence. Adrien Brody plays Tóth in what’s surely the performance of his career — no small feat, considering he’s still the youngest Best Actor winner in history for The Pianist — alongside Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Raffey Cassidy, and Stacy Martin. It’s a marvel of a movie, the kind that doesn’t come around often and demands to be seen on the largest screen possible.
Small Things Like These
Cillian Murphy could have done just about anything after his well-deserved Oscar win for Oppenheimer, and it’s notable that he chose to star in and co-produce Small Things Like These. An adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, which won the Orwell Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it both lives up to and transcends its humble title. Set in the 1980s but tracing its narrative back decades earlier, Small Things Like These concerns a coal merchant (Murphy) who lives near a school for girls that he gradually realizes is actually a Magdalene laundry — a cruel institution run by the Catholic Church for so-called “fallen women” who were exploited for cheap labor and essentially kept as prisoners. Irish cinema has a long tradition of taking hard, revealing looks at the darkest chapters of the country’s history, and Small Things Like These is no exception.
The Bikeriders
The first question to ask of a new Tom Hardy movie: What strange, compelling voice will the actor affect this time? The second: Is the movie any good? Both are worth finding out for yourself when it comes to The Bikeriders, but rest assured that writer-director Jeff Nichols’ latest film is very much worth seeing. Nichols, the thoughtful filmmaker behind movies such as Take Shelter, Mud, and Loving, charts the rise and fall of a late 1960s motorcycle club called the Vandals (based on the real Outlaws Motorcycle Club), that starts as something fun and ends as something much more sinister. Jodie Comer, Austin Butler (who still sounds like Elvis), and Michael Shannon co-star in the film, which shows the romantic sides of its subject without romanticizing it.
The Promised Land
Not unlike The Settlers, Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land charts the taming of a wild landscape. In this case it’s the barren moorland of Denmark, which Captain Ludvig Kahlen has taken on the quixotic task of cultivating in order to gain a noble title — an effort that some in power would prefer to fail. Mads Mikkelsen plays the gruff Kahlen, who was a real 18th-century military official, with his usual steely charisma. The soil is harsh, but that doesn’t mean nothing worthwhile will grow in it.
