The 2024 Oscar race is officially on, and this year’s top films are an eclectic mix of studio epics and indie treasures. Here is a rundown of the movies that will be vying for supremacy throughout the awards season, which officially gets underway at tomorrow’s Golden Globe Awards.

Poor Things

Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) is one of the most unique storytellers in modern filmmaking. His latest epic is a Frankenstein–inspired fantasia centered on Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) who is reanimated by a demented scientist (Willem Defoe). Bella has the body of a woman, the mind of a toddler, and a ravenous curiosity outsizing her stuffy Victorian society. When she runs off with a hedonistic lawyer (Mark Ruffalo), Bella is exposed to a whirlwind of experience, freeing her from prejudice and emboldening her stance for equality and liberation.

Lanthimos reunited with Oscar winning screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Great, The Favourite) to adapt the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. The film won top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and has been nominated for seven Golden Globe awards and 13 Critics’ Choice awards.

Barbie

When Margot Robbie (I, Tonya, Bombshell) secured production rights for this monumental film, she had only one director in mind to create Barbie Land: Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women). Gerwig accepted the challenge, brought aboard her partner in work and life, Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, Mistress America) to co-write, and erected a cinematic juggernaut packed with endearing kitsch and significant depth.

Barbie has an overarching theme of existentialism, and delves into patriarchy, womanhood and capitalism, all the while producing a feast for the eyes with enchanting hand painted sets and sensational costuming. The film received six Golden Globe award nominations and 15 nods from the Critics’ Choice Awards.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Fate is life’s ultimate decider. When Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns home to Osage County, Oklahoma after serving as a cook in World War I, he had no intentions of joining a deadly conspiracy. The impressionable country boy with an exuberant passion for money and whiskey wants only to have fun and work hard for his ever–powerful uncle, Bill Hale (Robert De Niro). But Ernest’s inability to understand basic cause and effect makes him aloof to his personal involvement in harming the wife he loves (Lily Gladstone), and allows for his complacency in carrying out a genocidal lifestyle.

This true story of love, greed and betrayal is an epic feat of filmmaking for writer/director Martin Scorsese (The Departed, The Irishman). His ability to capture beauty alongside emotional savagery is remarkable. Little is widely known about the history and legacy of the Osage Nation. Every American should learn the story of this native land and its peoples.

Oppenheimer

In the summer of 1942, the United States government opens offices at 270 N. Broadway Ave, in New York, where they establish The Manhattan Project—a top-secret mission to design and develop the atomic bomb. With the Nazis in hot pursuit of their own bomb, the U.S. broadens its scope of the project, opening offices across the country and making the controversial decision of appointing theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) to lead the mission. Oppenheimer then convinces the government to erect a makeshift town in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the greatest scientific minds can set up residency to propel the project. Three years later, on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and a team of scientists see their work come to fruition as they witness the world’s first nuclear explosion, forever altering the course of history.

Beyond the rousing bomb making storyline, and investigations to determine any communist involvement in The Manhattan Project, writer/ director Christopher Nolan (Inception, Dunkirk) takes the story into Oppenheimer’s personal life, placing the complicated marriage between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) at the heart of the film. The movie also features Florence Pugh (Little Women, Don’t Worry, Darling) as Jean Tatlock, a physicist and influential love interest of Oppenheimer’s.

Anatomy of a Fall

Sandra (Sandra Hüller) finds herself living a nightmare when she’s indicted for the murder of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). When the couple’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) and his service dog, Snoop, initially discovered the body lying dead on the snowy ground, it seemed Samuel slipped and fell from the third story terrace of the family’s home. But further evidence indicates Samuel either jumped or was pushed. As the gripping investigation and trial unfold, it’s not only the fateful fall that is analyzed. The anatomy of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage becomes the focus, revealing just how little one can know the people to whom they are closest.

The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is nominated for four Golden Globe and three Critics’ Choice awards.

Maestro

This film has been a passion project for producer/writer/director/actor Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born, Silver Linings Playbook) for six years, and Carrey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman, She Said) has been along for the ride since 2018. Cooper wanted to tell the life story of composer Leonard Bernstein, but didn’t want to make a typical biopic, so he opted to tell Bernstein’s story through the prism of his devout partnership with wife and actress, Felicia Montealegre.

With Cooper in the lead role and Mulligan portraying Felicia, audiences are introduced to the couple when they meet at a party in 1946, and witness their love affair up until her death from lung cancer in 1978. The majority of the movie is set during the height of Bernstein’s career, when Felicia chooses to make sacrifices in both her career and marriage in order for her genius husband to thrive. The film is a profound illustration of how deeply the famed conductor depended on Felicia for guidance. 

Cooper had such determination in capturing the couple’s connection, he committed himself and Mulligan to a five-day “dream workshop” where they used their dreams to connect their subconscious to the characters’.

May December

Director Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, Carol) is masterful at capturing a woman’s mystique and intrigue with his camera lens. His films dive deep into the female psyche, revealing the divine complexities therein. May December is his most profound character study, incorporating true tabloid sensationalism.

At the center of the story is married couple Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), whose lives are based on the real life couple, Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. The story takes place 20 years after Gracie is convicted of two counts of felony second-degree rape. Gracie and Joe are now living comfortable lives with their three children: Honor (Piper Curda), who is away at college, and twins Charlie (Gabriel Chung) and Mary (Elizabeth Yu), who are about to graduate high school. The family’s peaceful life is disrupted when a TV actress (Natalie Portman) descends on their homelife to conduct research for her upcoming role as Gracie in a prestigious film focused on the early years of the couple’s scandalous affair.

Debut screenwriter Sammy Burch composes a captivating script that injects a waft of unease throughout the movie. Motives come into question and suspicions abound, culminating in a spine-tingling twist that reveals the true predator among them.

American Fiction

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a professor and novelist, who specializes in academic reworkings of ancient Greek plays. Unfortunately, his last few books have tanked, and he’s having trouble selling his latest novel because his critics want him to write “Blacker” books. But Monk insists he doesn’t see race and rejects the establishment profiting from Black entertainment that relies on tired and offensive clichés.

Fed up and desperate for money, Monk jokingly sits down and types out a book chock full of all the tropes he distains and the industry loves: a story of drug dealings, deadbeat fathers and gang violence. He titles the book My Pafology and submits his piece of performance art to his agent under a pseudonym. But the joke is on Monk. My Pafology is picked up by a publisher and becomes a hit, making more money than any of his previous books. Now, Monk finds himself at the heart of the hysteria and hypocrisy he claims to loathe.

First time filmmaker Cord Jefferson based the movie on the novel Erasure, and the end result is a boiling satire with a sharp, witty screenplay. The film won top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has been nominated for three Golden Globe and five Critics’ Choice awards.

Past Lives

With her first feature film, writer/director Celine Song took real events from her life and created a 105–minute dream of truth and tenderness. The story follows Nora (Gretta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) who become deeply connected friends at age 12, only to be wrest apart when Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea to Canada. Twelve years later, the two reconnect, but with an ocean between them, emotional angst forces them to disconnect from one another yet again. A dozen years thereafter, they are reunited for a fateful week as they confront destiny, love and the choices that shape one’s life.

The Holdovers

A pompous, cranky prep school instructor (Paul Giamatti) who has no family and nowhere to go over the Christmas holiday in 1970, remains at school to supervise students who can’t journey home. After a few days, only one student remains—a brainy but damaged troublemaker (Dominic Sessa). Eventually, one other holdover, the school’s head cook who recently lost her son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), joins the student and professor for some lively discussions, and the trio form a profound bond during two very snowy weeks in New England.

The Holdovers reunites Giamatti and director Alexander Payne 19 years after their collaboration on the film Sideways. Payne designed the role of the curmudgeonly school instructor specifically for Giamatti, and the result is a piece of cinematic charm. The film is a display of humor, sentiment and reconciliation.

The Zone of Interest

Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) has created an idyllic homelife for her husband, Rudolph (Christian Friedel), and their five children. Their lavish two–story Germanic chalet has multiple bedrooms to accommodate the entire family, an Eden–like garden, cooks who prepare and deliver delicious meals, and servants to clean up any messes left behind. Yet, no one within the household talks about, references, or seemingly thinks about the fact they are living next door to Auschwitz Concentration Camp where Rudolph serves as commandant.