10 Awesome Recent Movies That Came Totally Out Of Nowhere

5. Small Things Like These

Hands up if you had any idea that Cillian Murphy starred in one of the best-reviewed films of 2024. Anyone?

Murphy's follow-up to his Oscar-winning performance in Oppenheimer was a low-key Irish historical drama in which Murphy plays a man who discovers disturbing secrets at a local convent and faces a dilemma over whether to act.

Despite premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival to strong reviews, where some predicted that Murphy might receive a second consecutive Best Actor Oscar nomination, the film's profile soon fell off a cliff.

The bleak drama failed to secure major distribution outside of the UK, and with Lionsgate having little prior success with awards campaigning, it ended up quietly hitting streaming at the end of 2024, where it got thoroughly lost in the shuffle amid a slew of more crowd-pleasing seasonal releases.

And so, to anyone who stumbles across the film's thumbnail while scrolling through a streaming service library, it must seem a tad strange that a raved-about drama from a recent Oscar winner was just tossed out there without even a shred of enthusiasm.