Drama movies 2024: new films out this year

Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don’t miss; 1 star=don’t bother).

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The Boys in the Boat

"'The Boys in the Boat', directed by George Clooney, is an old-fashioned movie," said Amy Nicholson in The New York Times. Based on a 2013 book by Daniel James Brown, it tells the true story of the University of Washington's junior varsity rowing crew, who represented their country at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The USA's eights team had won every gold medal since 1920, but screenwriter Mark L. Smith "glides past that fact" to stress that these boys are the underdogs in this contest, because they are "mostly middle- and working-class landlubbers who'd only taken up oars to pay for school". The film is handsomely made, but the screenplay is as subtle "as a bonk on the nose"; and its female characters are merely "one-note cheerleaders".

Clooney has been "a charming and dapper Anglophile presence on the awards circuit this season" while promoting this, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, "so it's sad to report that his film clunks harder than redwood". "Stodgy and sententious", it orders us to feel sentimental "about a time and a place of which no one involved can have any real memory or feeling". Clooney is capable of more: "this feels like an animatronic museum display". The film has been panned by critics, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent, but unfairly, I think. Yes, the female characters are "barely more than ciphers", and the fact that the action is taking place in Nazi Germany is scarcely addressed. But it's "heartfelt and well crafted", and it offers viewers the chance "to forget their cynicism and take its Cinderella-like story of sporting glory at face value". You could look at it as 2024's "Chariots of Fire", a film that was itself old-fashioned at the time, but which audiences adored.

One Life

****

"You'd need a heart of stone not to be touched" by "One Life", which tells the extraordinary story of Nicholas Winton, the "British Schindler" who helped evacuate 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After the war, Winton virtually never mentioned his rescue effort, even to his family. It only came to public attention in 1988, when he appeared in an episode of "That's Life!", in which Esther Rantzen asked members of the audience to stand up if they owed him their life – and dozens of people sitting around him silently rose to their feet. This "quietly affecting drama", made with "simplicity and heartfelt directness" by director James Hawes, does justice to that "overwhelmingly moving event".

Winton is played in the 1980s by Anthony Hopkins and in the 1930s by Johnny Flynn, both of whom turn in performances that are worthy of "a remarkable and almost comically modest man", said Ed Potton in The Times. The film also has a "secret weapon" in Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Winton's German émigrée mother, Babette. She is "formidable with a capital F, storming into the London visa office in her fur coat and putting obstructive civil servants firmly in their place ('Sit down young man, I have something to tell you')". With its "syrupy strings and somewhat grey palette", "One Life" does have "more than a hint of BBC TV drama about it", said Hamish MacBain in the Evening Standard. But Hopkins is "superb", imbuing every frame with "warmth and wit and sadness and charming British eccentricity". Anyone who doesn't "blub their way through" the last half-hour "should be checked for a pulse on the way out".

Priscilla

*** 

"Priscilla", Sofia Coppola's film about Elvis Presley's courtship of his future wife, Priscilla Beaulieu, which started when he was 24 and she was 14, "will make for uncomfortable viewing for fans of the King", said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. The film presents Elvis (Jacob Elordi) "as an insecure narcissist" who started to fixate on Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) when they met at a party during his military service in Germany, and who was unwilling to give her "any independence" once they'd married. Adapted from Presley's memoir "Elvis and Me", the film is a "downbeat and dour affair, with little of the exuberance" of Baz Luhrmann's 2022 biopic "Elvis" – though Spaeny gives a "compelling and moving performance" as a bright young woman "whose spirit is slowly crushed".

"With the exception of the totally brilliant 'Lost in Translation', I've never really got on with the films of Sofia Coppola, and this modest antipathy continues with Priscilla," said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. "The drama feels flat and episodic"; and Elordi and Spaeny's performances left me cold. It's "lushly styled", said Adrian Horton in The Guardian, but provides "little sense" of who its heroine was, and what she thought of the things that happened to her. "The real Priscilla was, by all accounts, no wallflower." But in "this absorbing yet frustrating film", you could easily mistake her for one. I found "Priscilla" a "little dull", said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. "Neither a scathing post-#MeToo take-down of 'the King' nor a particularly deep character study of a teenager groomed from the age of 14 to become his doll-like wife, it is, instead, another of Coppola's dramatically inert explorations of life in a gilded cage."

Tchaikovsky's Wife

***

"The unhappy union between the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron) and his wife, Antonina Miliukova (Alyona Mikhailova), is the jumping-off point" for this "feverish" period piece from the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. The film, which has only "a passing acquaintance" with the facts of Tchaikovsky's "turbulent life", begins with his death, before rewinding to the start of his and Antonina's romance. It is a "punishing watch at times", but its ambition is "admirable". Serebrennikov is an "extravagantly talented director whose opposition to Kremlin ideology led to a two-year house arrest", said Jonathan Romney in the FT. "But even while laying siege to a national monument of male genius, "Tchaikovsky's Wife" has the leaden institutional feel of a prestige superproduction." There is "a crazed magnificence" to its lavish evocation of the period; yet there is "little real drama here, just flamboyant gesticulations at it".

I found the movie a "chore", said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. "Watching it feels like competing in a sort of arthouse cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise en scène, and writhing mental collapse." One scene actually manages to combine all of the above. The film has an "expansive, 140-minute running-time", and there are points when it is hard to work out exactly what's going on in it, said Trevor Johnston in Time Out. "But with its intensely felt performances, haunting winter lighting, and seemingly inescapable claustrophobia, it leaves a mark."