A24 Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

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A24

The latest: A24 has released a dozen narrative features this year (with the latest including The Smashing Machine, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and the domestic pickup for Ne Zha 2), with no slowing down as they still have The Smashing Machine, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Eternity, and Marty Supreme coming up.

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Independent movie company A24 has built an almost unprecedented level of brand identity and loyalty. Savvy moviegoers actually get excited seeing their rainbow chromatic card in front of movies, despite A24 not being associated with any one filmmaker (like J.J. Abrams with Bad Robot), genre (horror and Blumhouse), or medium (animation studios like Pixar). It’s simply a soft style that threads through the best movies they put out, not quite definable, that’s catnip to open-minded filmgoers and critics alike.

A24 began in 2013 with A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, directed by Roman Coppola. It was decidedly not a box office or critical success, but does present one of A24’s modus operandi: Giving risky movies from established outsider filmmakers a shot in the theatrical space. You’ll see it again with Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight won Best Picture in 2017, demonstrating A24 has got their finger on the cultural pulse (with credit to the Academy as well, of course).

Meanwhile, leaning into directorial debuts has paid off dividends, in the form of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, and Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Recently Everything Everywhere All At Once became a pandemic-era sensation and rose up as the company’s highest-grossing domestic movie ever. After that, we saw Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.

Among their 2024 releases, the Kristen Stewart romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, the tea-time conversation starter Civil War, allegorical horror I Saw the TV Glow, the death-becoming Tuesday, and glam ’80s horror MaXXXine.

Now, we’re ranking all A24 movies by Tomatometer, with Certified Fresh films first!

Tom Holland Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

Young Tom Holland has only been in the public sphere for less than a decade, but it’s been a momentous one. He was recognized an immediate potential star with his debut The Impossible, the dramatization of a family swept away by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2015, he was announced as the new Peter Parker, with Spider-Man swinging over into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He made his debut in Captain America: Civil War, with Peter’s wide-eyed sincerity a standout character trait against the superhero mayhem. Holland carried through with two of his own Spider-Man movies and emotional appearances in Infinity War and Endgame.

Playing Spidey must take up significant on-camera time, as a lot of Holland’s recent non-Marvel work has been voices in films like Spies in Disguise, Dolittle, and Onward. Beyond that, he also kept busy right on through the pandemic, releasing three films — The Devil All the Time, Chaos Walking, and Cherry, the latter of which re-teamed him with Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo. Spider-Man: No Way Home brought renewed financial hope to theaters, and Holland followed up by launching the Uncharted franchise. Now, we look at all Tom Holland movies by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo

(Photo by © RADiUS-TWC /courtesy Everett Collection)

60 Hidden Gem Movies On Netflix

We know people are burning through their Netflix queues at a cracking pace right now, bingeing the buzziest movies and series as they drop and finally getting to those things you’ve been putting on the backburner for months. To help out – and calm the stress that you could run out of things to watch (ah!) – the Rotten Tomatoes team trawled through the streaming service’s movie offerings with one mission: to find some not-so-obvious hidden gems to help keep your watchlist topped up.

How did we define “hidden gems”? A little broadly, we’ll admit. The collection below is made up of movies with impressive Tomatometer scores that have gone criminally under-seen (Slow West, I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore., Under the Shadow); movies that made a splash when they debuted but which you may have forgotten since (1922, My Life As A Zucchini, Obvious Child); under-appreciated gems – according to the RT staff (Can’t Hardly Wait, The Foreigner); and some bigger movies you may be surprised to see are available on Netflix. And we threw in a few surprise nostalgic favorites, too. Yes, even some Rotten ones.

We broke out the selections into five categories to help you find what you’re specifically looking for: Action and Adventure, Horror and Suspense, Drama, Comedy, and Kids and Family. If you’re after even more Netflix movie suggestions, check out our guides to the 250 Best Movies on Netflix, the Best Comedies on Netflix, the Best Romantic-Comedies on Netflix, and the Best Horror Movies on Netflix.

Found a hidden gem on Netflix that’s not on our list? Let your fellow fans know in the comments. 

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Action and Adventure

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HORROR AND SUSPENSE 

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Drama, Mystery, and A Documentary or Two 

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COMEDY

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FAMILY AND KIDS 

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Thumbnail image: © Well Go USA, © Gkids, © A24

(Photo by © Focus Features)

105 Great Movies to Watch Alone

For some, staying home right now can mean curling up with a loved one on the couch for a date-night flick or gathering the whole family together for movie night. For many others, it can mean flying solo – long days and nights of streaming by yourself. We’re here to help with some movie suggestions we think are tailor-made for that latter experience.

Just like going to the movie theater alone can be a singularly joyous “treat yo self” excursion, solo home-viewing can be a great experience too – if you choose the right film. There are movies out there that actually benefit from being watched alone: It might be that they require a level of concentration and focus that distracting friends and loved ones just won’t allow you, or that the maximum scare factor is best felt when you are completely isolated – just like the babysitter being stalked on screen. It might just be that the movie has the kind of awkward/titillating sexy bits that make watching it with a first date – or, let’s say, mom – not exactly ideal. Watch it alone – no judgment, no nervous giggles.

To help those solo-fliers get through the next little while, the RT team pulled together a list of movies perfect for watching alone for all of those reasons – and a bunch that are just guaranteed to put you in an awesome mood the moment they start. Which might be the best reason of all.

What’s your favorite movie to watch by yourself? Let us know in the comments.
Click on each movie’s title to find out more, including where to stream, rent, or buy.  

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE REQUIRES YOUR ABSOLUTE CONCENTRATION…

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE IS GONNA MAKE YOU UGLY CRY…

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE WILL INSTANTLY PUT YOU IN A BETTER MOOD…

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE’S VERY SEXY BITS WILL BE LESS AWKWARD SOLO…

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE’S EVEN SCARIER IN PERFECT SILENCE…

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Thumbnail image: Everett Collection, Paramount Pictures, Focus Features

Praise the sun! National Daylight Appreciation Day is here, inspiring this week’s gallery of 24 movies set under the blanket of night (or at least in rooms that could use a few windows) that will want you want to get grossly incandescent with some hot vitamin D.

Though he made his debut over a decade and a half ago in the celebrated HBO war miniseries Band of Brothers, Tom Hardy has truly broken out over the past few years, making a name for himself in major blockbusters and smaller indies alike. This weekend, he’ll anchor a BBC miniseries called Taboo, which will subsequently air in the U.S. on FX on January 10. It’s a period drama about a London man who returns home from Africa in 1814 to take charge of his late father’s shipping business amid a swirl of dark conspiracy, and it provides Hardy with another complex role to sink his teeth into. With that in mind, we thought it would be appropriate to take an appreciative look at some of the brightest critical highlights from his impressive filmography.

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10. London Road (2015) 76%

While Tom Hardy is best known for a handful of high-profile roles, his filmography is far more eclectic than his blockbuster projects might suggest, and 2016’s London Road is a fine example of just how far afield he’s gone when picking scripts. Part real-life murder mystery, part musical (yes, really), director Rufus Norris’ look at the way a series of murders affected a British community blends jarringly disparate elements into an utterly memorable whole — and enlists the services of stars like Hardy, whose appearance highlights rarely tapped areas of his range. As Dave Calhoun wrote for Time Out, the film adds up to “An exciting, unsettling experience blessed with imagination and compassion.”

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9. Layer Cake (2004) 81%

It sounds sweet, but Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake is anything but — it’s actually a pitch-black morality play about a successful drug dealer (Daniel Craig) who plans to retire from the business without tipping off his powerful supplier (Kenneth Cranham), partly with the assistance of a science-savvy young associate (Hardy). It’s all for naught, of course, and he soon finds himself needing to stay one step ahead from a growing list of enemies intent on doing him in before he can walk away from the business. “Vaughn’s film falls short of Goodfellas,” argued Kyle Smith of the New York Post, “but thanks to his ability to organize a complex story and bold, color-drenched photography by Ben Davis, Layer Cake is a cocked fist of a movie, impossible to ignore.”

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8. Warrior (2011) 84%

After countless entries — some of them classics — how do you add something new to the professional fighting movie genre in the 21st century? Well, you probably can’t, but if you’re going to add to the list, it definitely helps if you step into the ring with a cast that includes Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte, all of whom answered the bell for director Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior. Starring Hardy and Edgerton as brothers whose separate quests for redemption put them on a collision course that can only be settled by beating people to bloody pulps, it made unlikely believers out of critics who’d seen more than their share of this kind of story — including Roger Ebert, who mused, “This is a rare fight movie in which we don’t want to see either fighter lose.”

7. The Revenant (2015) 78%

Hardy was overshadowed here by Leonardo DiCaprio’s ferociously committed performance — and arguably also by a bear — but any old-fashioned revenge quest is only as good as its villain, and as the loathsome John Fitzgerald, Hardy gave DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass a burning need to drag his battered body across the American frontier. One of 2015’s more grueling dramas, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant was also among its most critically acclaimed; as Brian Tallerico argued for RogerEbert.com, “You don’t just watch The Revenant, you experience it. You walk out of it exhausted, impressed with the overall quality of the filmmaking and a little more grateful for the creature comforts of your life.”

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6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) 84%

Few novelists have ever been able to match the cerebral layers that John le Carré applied to his take on the spy thriller, and adapting his work for the screen has always been a daunting task, particularly given that he operated in a genre that’s tended to prize action over intelligence. But director Tomas Alfredson (working from an adaptation written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan) proved himself more than up to the task with this 2011 version of the author’s 1974 classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman as a retired spy brought back into active duty to investigate some troubling claims made by a defected MI6 operative (Hardy). Cool-tempered and whip-smart, this Tailor brought the book satisfyingly to life for critics like NPR’s Ella Taylor, who wrote, “Alfredson offers no concessions to hindsight, no lessons for today. Instead, he’s kept faith with le Carré’s bleak, romantically elegiac vision of a moment in 20th century history at once glorious and doomed.”

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5. Inception (2010) 87%

Hardy’s marvelously committed performance in Bronson put him on the radar for a number of new fans, but it was his appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Inception the following year that announced his arrival into the blockbuster ranks. Part of a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page, Hardy played Eames, a member of the team of “extractors” headed up by DiCaprio’s character whose unique method of identity theft involves burrowing into dreams and impersonating people the dreamer trusts. It’s heady sci-fi stuff, punctuated with thrilling set pieces and impressive visuals, and topped off with an ending that viewers are still arguing over years later. “Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels,” wrote an admiring Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. “[It’s] a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes.”

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4. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) 87%

The Dark Knight Rises had a tough act to follow in The Dark Knight, and a fair portion of that burden fell on Hardy’s performance as the movie’s villain, the masked terrorist known as Bane. Forced to act behind a facemask and under the shadow of Heath Ledger’s trilogy-defining turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight, Hardy put his own stamp on the series — and, with some bone-crunching combat in the movie’s big fight scene, on Christian Bale’s Batman. “Give Hardy credit,” insisted Dann Gire for the Daily Herald, “for supplying Bane with plenty of conviction and gravitas in a movie that, frankly, is less about actors than knockout set pieces captured in eyeball-popping spectacles.”

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3. The Drop (2014) 88%

There have been so many gritty neighborhood crime dramas at this point that narrative twists are few and far between, and the success or failure of a movie like The Drop — directed by Michaël R. Roskam from a Dennis Lehane screenplay — rests more heavily on its stars than most. Happily for Roskam, he hit paydirt with his leading men, casting Hardy as a bartender caught up in an organized crime operation run by his cousin (James Gandolfini in his final film performance) and surrounding them with a supporting cast that included Noomi Rapace and Matthias Schoenaerts. “With actors as interesting as Hardy, Gandolfini and Rapace,” observed Michael Phillips for the Chicago Tribune, “at least the cliches in The Drop have a fighting chance of holding your attention alongside the odd severed limb.”

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2. Locke (2013) 91%

It takes place entirely in a moving car, and the camera rarely even leaves his face, yet Locke is as minute-by-minute gripping as any classic action thriller — and none of it would work without the mesmerizing work Hardy delivers in the title role. Starring as a man speeding to a fateful destination while caught between life-altering professional and personal crises, Hardy runs the emotional gamut from pleading to outraged over the course of the movie, and is never less than riveting; as Ty Burr wrote for the Boston Globe, “Hardy rises to the gimmick and grounds Locke with a performance as watchably charismatic as it is minimalist. You can’t take your eyes off him — which is fortunate since there’s no one else there.”

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1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) 97%

Hollywood’s franchise hunger has reached the point where any level of cynicism regarding a sequel, reboot, or reimagining is defensible, and given that it had been 30 years since the last Mad Max installment, one could be forgiven for approaching this Hardy-led continuation of the saga with a somewhat jaundiced eye. But all that time away from the franchise clearly gave director/co-writer George Miller plenty of ideas, because Fury Road is that rarest of blockbuster beasts: an action thriller that isn’t content to merely string together set pieces. In fact, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful film, one whose message is afforded equal importance alongside epic action sequences arranged with balletic, eye-popping grace. Amidst all this, Hardy’s Max Rockatansky remains a man of few words – in fact, he spends a good deal of the film with a mask covering his mouth – but alongside co-star Charlize Theron, he grounds the movie’s gonzo outbursts with palpable human emotion. “Believe all the hype,” cautioned Christy Lemire. “This movie will melt your face off.”

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In Money Monster, a financial TV host (George Clooney) gets his show taken over by an angry audience member. The twist: it’s all in real-time (i.e. the 98 minutes it takes to watch this is the exact amount of time that passes in the movie), inspiring this gallery of 24 more in-the-moment movies.

Awards season is on, and with everything that is going on from December through February, it’s difficult to keep track of who is getting what. To help you with that, we created the Awards Leaderboard, a ranking of movies by the number of awards won and their respective categories. Read on to find out where your favorite movies stand, and who is leading the pack.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association revealed the winners of its 40th annual awards on Sunday, December 7th. Boyhood was honored with the award for Best Picture of the Year

Also available this week:

• The Railway Man (66 percent), starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in a true story about Eric Lomax, a former WWII POW who discovers years later that his Japanese interpreter is still alive, and seeks him out.
• Breathe In (54 percent), starring Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones in a drama about a foreign exchange student who upsets the balance in her host family’s home.
• Hateship Loveship (51 percent), starring Kristen Wiig and Guy Pearce in a dramedy about a young girl who plots a faux relationship online between her housekeeper and her widower father.
• Summer in February (36 percent), starring Dominic Cooper and Emily Browning in the dramatized true story of painter Sir Alfred Munnings, who falls in love with the same woman as his closest friend.
• Frankie & Alice (21 percent), starring Halle Berry and Stellan Skarsgard in a drama about a woman with multiple personality disorder trying to make sense of her condition.
• Rage (15 percent) starring Nicolas Cage in an action thriller about a man with a violent past who seeks revenge when his daughter is kidnapped.
• The Certified Fresh first season of NBC’s The Blacklist (82 percent) is available on DVD.
• Season one of AMC drama Low Winter Sun (45 percent) is also available on DVD.

Also opening this week in limited release:

• Blue Ruin, a thriller about a drifter driven to exact revenge on the man who murdered his parents, is Certified Fresh at 93 percent.

• Last Passenger, starring Dougray Scott and Lindsay Duncan in an action film about a group of commuters who must work together to stop the madman who has taken control of a London train, is at 92 percent.

• Locke, starring Tom Hardy in a thriller about a man whose life unravels over the course of a long drive, is Certified Fresh at 90 percent.

• The Machine, a sci-fi thriller about a couple that develops a self-aware computer the government wants to use as a weapon, is at 74 percent.

• The German Doctor, a thriller about an Argentinean family that unwittingly offers shelter to fugitive Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, is at 65 percent.

• Who Is Dayani Cristal?, a documentary that explores the life of a man who was found dead in the Arizona desert trying to immigrate to the U.S., is at 57 percent.

• Bicycling with Moliere, a comedy about a soap opera star who tries to convince his curmudgeonly actor friend to mount a production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, is at 50 percent.

• For No Good Reason, a documentary portrait of gonzo artist Ralph Steadman, is at 36 percent.

• Walking With The Enemy, a World War II-era drama about a man who disguises himself as a Nazi officer in order to find his missing family, is at 25 percent.

• The Girl and Death, a period melodrama about a young medical student who falls in love with the mistress of a vindictive aristocrat, is at 20 percent.

Finally, props to Caleb Paasche for guessing A Haunted House 2‘s nine Tomatometer.