The standout movies about artists and creativity in 2024 are especially attuned to how art bleeds into the everyday, transforming not only how we view the art world itself but our entire lives.

This past year provided yet another crop of silver-screen productions that take up the lives of artists and their creations. From plundered, anthropomorphized objects given the chance to speak for themselves to a droopy-faced antiquities hunter and art students in China in the ‘90s reckoning with the same questions of what anything means, 2024 has been a fertile year for movies that expand and interrogate what the art world looks like, who’s in it, and what its future might look like. 

Here are some of the year’s best cinematic art-inspired films.

Dahomey

A still from Dahomey. Photo: ©Les Films du Bal – Fanta Sy

How often is it that artifacts locked away in museums get to talk back? French actor-director Mati Diop, who has glowed on screen in movies like Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and who made her feature debut with Atlantics in 2019, takes this thought experiment and breathes a chilling magic into it. In this fascinating and elliptical documentary, Diop chronicles artifacts from the West African Dahomey kingdom being finally returned from France to modern-day Benin. On the journey, sometimes in darkness and others in hazily lit, glass case (or cage?) filled exhibition rooms, we hear a mask as it meditates on time, history, and home in a ghostly, centuries-old voice. Diop observes the loading and unloading of these ancient plundered objects with a gaze both jaundiced and filled with anxiety, and finds warmth and excitement in the voices and perspectives of the students who come to visit the exhibition of the returned treasures.

La Chimera

A still from La Chimera. Photo: Courtesy NEON

Director Alice Rochwacher has an uncanny knack for reading into a downturned, despairing face a kind of longing that pulsates across space and time. Whether it’s the time-hopping of Happy as Lazzaro (2018) or the earthly and ethereal La Chimera (2023, but released stateside in 2024), something about a hangdog expression brings out in Rochwacher the ability to connect the art world, which is sometimes the province of the elite, to a more earthy place. Josh O’Connor, as a wet-eyed and floppy-eared looter who is a veritable human antiquities detector, finds a way to make the pieces of art (and everyday life) that he plunders timeless and yet rooted in an intimacy shared between him, Rochwacher, and the audience, almost as if La Chimera is the best treasure of all. 

Civil War

Kirsten Dunst in Civil War. Photo: Murray Close, Courtesy A24

Alex Garland’s latest directorial effort polarized critics and viewers, but let’s give credit where credit is due: Garland (with cinematographer Rob Hardy) created arresting images that do convey the contradiction of photojournalists’ job of aestheticizing horrendous subject matter. Kirsten Dunst’s jaded veteran, Lee Smith (named in tribute to the iconic war photographer Lee Miller who dominated art-centric cinema this year), shoots frank and unfussy color shots on her Leica 35 Lux, while up-and-comer Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie develops her own black-and-white shots taken on a Nikon FE2 to reveal a harsh, haunting immediacy. 

Lee

Andy Samberg as David E. Scherman and Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in Lee. Photo: Kimberley French, ©Sky UK Ltd.

We also had the good fortune this year to meet the photographer Dunst’s character was named for: Lee Miller, the subject of this searing biopic. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Miller’s photography on our collective consciousness. Kate Winslet is up to the task of portraying the Surrealist photographer, fashion model, muse, and journalist as a determined and rigorous practitioner who saw her medium as an essential part of an increasingly interconnected world. Under the direction of Ellen Kuras, Winslet grants us insight into the toll taken on one of the most significant photographers of the century and shows us that her images of destruction and mass atrocity are far from just prints hanging on a wall; rather, they irrevocably shape our notions of who is granted humanity.

Art College 1994

A still from Art College 1994. Photo: Courtesy Dekanalog

The more things change, the more they stay the same, even for artists and, perhaps especially, for art students. Jian Liu’s affectionately acerbic animated panorama of artists studying at the Chinese Southern Academy of Art amid the shifting social and political terrain of the mid-1990s draws a clear and colorful line between the existential anxieties, artistic debates, and professional aspirations of his Gen X ensemble (featuring the voices of talents like acclaimed filmmaker Jia Zhiangke and his frequent collaborator Wang Hongwei) and the crises artists face today. With an aesthetic that accentuates the animation’s jagged, handcrafted quality and gives its characters a ragtag embodiment, Art College 1994 enlivens questions about what art is and what it can do for us. 

The Front Room

Brandy Norwood in The Front Room. Photo: Jon Pack, Courtesy A24.

If nothing else, The Front Room provides a grand arena for Brandy Norwood (yes, that Brandy) and stage stalwart Kathryn Hunter to go head-to-head. But in the foreground of this tale of manipulative mothers-in-law and the horrors of aging is Brandy’s role as an academic, an art history and anthropology aficionado whose acumen as regards ancient fertility statues is contrasted with Hunter’s fervid religiosity and adoration for Christian art. Based on Susan Hill’s short story of the same name, The Front Room is directed by the Eggers Brothers (Max and Sam, brothers of Robert). Also crucial are the production design by Mary Lena Colston, art direction by Brett A. Calvo, and set decoration by Lauren Crawford, because the film’s greatest strength is how it shows the home that Brandy shares with her husband (Andrew Burnap) as it is slowly but surely swallowed up by religious objects, the artifacts from Egypt and Africa all but discarded. Religious art can be one hell of a mother. 

Exhibiting Forgiveness

André Holland and Andra Day in Exhibiting Forgiveness. Photo: Courtesy Roadside Attractions

Being a working artist takes sacrifice, both in a figurative sense in terms of emotional investment, and literally in the ways artmaking takes times away from other facets of life. Artist Tarrell (André Holland) is torn between the success of his most recent show and his desire to care for his wife Aisha (Andra Day) and son Jermaine (Daniel Michael Barriere). Things get even more fraught when his estranged father reenters the frame. A tremendous study of the family life of an artist on the rise, Exhibiting Forgiveness is also a piercing examination of the expectations placed on artists and painters from underrepresented backgrounds, and the way those expectations shape both their work and their willingness to participate in the art world. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a semi-autobiographical effort and the feature debut of star painter Titus Kaphar, who also showed paintings at Gagosian that were featured in the film.

Problemista

Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton in Problemista. Photo: Jon Pack, Courtesy A24

As a writer on Saturday Night Live, in his 2019 HBO special My Favorite Shapes, and on HBO’s series Fantasmas (2024), comedian and writer Julio Torres has zeroed in on a sensibility that’s like a sugar glass bubble—finely crafted to refract light while also warping the world’s absurdity through its globular frame. In Problemista he’s armed with a candy-coated, Kafkaesque critique of the American immigration system, filling New York with stairs, mazes, and dead-end hallways. The film stars Torres alongside Tilda Swinton, Isabella Rossellini, RZA, and the performance artist Martine Gutierrez. Torres delivers an exceptionally generous and thoughtful take on the art world, one that acknowledges both its obstacles and biases while also excavating the fact that the function of art (and the art critic, here played with wily abandon by Swinton) is to reveal ourselves. Problemista is one of the best films about the artist-critic relationship; it understands that, despite whatever antipathy may exist between them, both are, at their best, chasing after the same thing: the truth.