10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (2024)

The best Lifetime movies of 2024 have something for every Lifetime fan. Lifetime has a reputation for having some of the cheesiest original movies, but also the most dramatic. The network’s movies are more like extended soap opera episodes as they offer the most dramatic stories possible that usually include ill-gotten romance or even murder. The network’s demographic is largely female, and its movies have been guilty pleasures for a lot of people for decades.

✕ Remove Ads

In 2024 Lifetime had a new original movie almost every week. While some of the movies were acquired from other production studios or networks, most of them were made specifically for Lifetime. While some are inspired by true stories and offer inspirational tales of women in bad situations, others are campy or mysterious. There is a variety of movies when it comes to Lifetime’s best of 2024.

Related

Lifetime's Most Popular TV Shows, According To IMDb

From classic crime shows like You to captivating and unusual shows like Love At First Flight, the Lifetime network offers a variety of TV shows.

10 The Book Club Murders

Members Of A Book Club Get Threatening Messages

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (2)

The Book Club Murders is the kind of Lifetime movie that throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. It makes for an intense murder mystery with plenty of twists and turns that a Lifetime drama enthusiast will definitely enjoy.

✕ Remove Ads

The movie follows a woman who has taken a step back from the social scene in her small town since her husband died in a fire. It also sees her teenage daughter dealing with the disappearance of her best friend. It seems like tragedy follows them, but when the woman joins a local book club and the members start getting threatening messages before getting murdered, it also seems like it’s more than just tragedy.

The one downside to this movie is that, ultimately, the book club does not actually have a lot to do with why people end up dead. The movie is still a fun and soapy mystery for those who already love all of the Lifetime classics.

9 The Killer I Picked Up

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (3)

...a tense ride and a genuinely scary movie for Lifetime.

✕ Remove Ads

One thing that Lifetime does well is keep up with current trends. If there’s a big interest in cheerleaders, they feature several movies with cheerleaders in a calendar year. When rideshare companies become more popular than taxi services, they build a thriller around the idea of working as a driver.

Here, a single mom is just trying to make a living. She starts driving for a rideshare service to help pay her daughter’s college tuition. One of her customers, however, becomes obsessed with her - and not the customer viewers might initially suspect.

The movie has a great set-up as the dangers of ride-shares are often depicted as a driver potentially stalking a customer, not the other way around. Here, the customer stalks this single mom, essentially becoming obsessed with using her as a replacement for someone he has lost in his life. As the red flags start to pile up, the audience sees it long before the supporting characters do, and it’s a tense ride and a genuinely scary movie for Lifetime.

✕ Remove Ads

8 Stalked By My Amish Boyfriend

A Woman Becomes Trapped In A Relationship

If there’s one theme that trended in Lifetime movies in 2024, it’s relationships among the Amish. Or, more accurately, the potential for dangerous relationships when both partners are not honest with one another. The network just happened to depict those relationships among characters who are Amish in several movies this year. Of the movies with a similar idea, Stalked By My Amish Boyfriend is the best of the bunch.

The movie sees a college student befriend and then start dating a young Amish man who is on his rumspringa. They bond over shared tragedy, like both having lost their mothers, and they seem to have a real connection. When she decides they are from two different worlds and should go their separate ways, however, he begins stalking her, even going as far as threatening her father and using that threat to make her join him in an Amish community.

✕ Remove Ads

What’s interesting here is that the Amish community he is a part of is actually made of people who were raised Amish but shunned by their own communities for one reason or another. It’s easy to have empathy for those who are considered outsiders and still dislike the main character who has trapped his former girlfriend with threats and lies.

7 He Slid Into Her DMs

A High School Social Media Star Is Stalked By A Fan

Just as Lifetime gets into the rideshare trend this year, it also takes on social media influence in this movie. It’s also yet another movie among the best of Lifetime that is about a main character being stalked. Lifetime tends to have a lot of movies featuring a stalking storyline because of the very real threat it poses to its mostly female audience, but also because the storylines makes for a great plot for a thriller.

✕ Remove Ads

Here, the main character is a high school senior who has been using her social media influencer job to save money for college. When she and her boyfriend hit a rough patch because of her work, one of her fans reaches out to her, and they strike up a friendship that involves her selling him exclusive photos of herself to help pay for school. Her mom is her manager and encourages it, not realizing that he will become a stalker when she tries to break things off.

Not only does her fan stalk her, but he also attempts to kill her. Luckily, the teenage girl’s mother is there to defend her and kills him instead, but then she also makes a decision that provides a twist for the rest of the movie and makes it about more than just the dangers of stalking.

Related

The Man With My Husband's Face: Where To Watch The Lifetime Movie Online

The Man with My Husband's Face is a Lifetime thriller about a mysterious doppelganger and the woman who keeps seeing him. Here's where to watch.

✕ Remove Ads

6 Trapped In The Rocky Mountains

A Group Of Friends Are Lured To A Reunion

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (6)

While so many Lifetime movies focus on a single relationship, this one goes for a group of friends - one of whom is no longer with them. It’s one of the rare movies that has a single-location setting for a small cast. Almost all of the movie’s action takes place at an isolated “resort” where the former college friends are all guests, giving it a different feel to most Lifetime movies.

The group of friends have all booked stays at the resort for different reasons, and they come to realize they have all actually been lured there exactly 10 years after one of their friends from college went missing on a weekend getaway. They all begin to suspect one another and the missing girl’s mother as being responsible for bringing them there and they all worry that something more sinister is going on.

✕ Remove Ads

While this movie might have been even better if it had worked harder at keeping the group even more confined to increase the tension, it’s still a great Lifetime mystery. There’s a twist that the audience might not see coming that definitely changes how the audience views the suspects.

5 Miss Cleo: Her Rise And Fall

The Story Of The Most Famous Employee Of The Psychic Readers Network

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (7)

Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall

Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall chronicles Youree Harris's ascent to fame in the late 1990s as Miss Cleo with the Psychic Readers Network. The film explores the subsequent turmoil when the network is embroiled in fraud and deceptive advertising allegations.

Director
Tim Reid

Release Date
August 10, 2024

Writers
Camara Davis

Cast
Ian Bohen , The Lady of Rage , Towanda Braxton , Shane Johnson

In addition to salacious mysteries and stories of love gone wrong, Lifetime also has a huge backcatalog of movies inspired by real events. The story of Miss Cleo is one of them, though just how much has been changed for the network’s movie is not clear.

✕ Remove Ads

Miss Cleo was a psychic who gave people readings on a phone hotline in the late 1990s. She became the face of the network and was also the face of its downfall when it was investigated for fraud. This Lifetime movie is the story of how actress and writer Youree Dell Harris became Miss Cleo. It all starts with a single mom looking to provide for her daughters and responding to a Help Wanted ad.

The best thing this movie does is show the audience that while Miss Cleo cannot be blamed for the company’s practices as a whole, she did contribute to their money-making idea. The movie makes it seem as though she believes she is helping hotline callers by telling them what they want to hear. It also, however, makes it clear that she ran with money from investors for a play she was supposed to be putting on long before she ever became Miss Cleo, allowing the audience to see that there are gray areas in her story - and human nature.

✕ Remove Ads

4 Nightmare In The Desert

A Proposal Goes Awry In The Desert

...one of the best crafted Lifetime movies of the year.

This movie is another case of Lifetime throwing as much drama into a story as possible and making it work. It’s unusual for a movie with seemingly too many plot threads to be able to weave them together and make them believable, especially when it comes to a Lifetime movie. Nightmare in the Desert, however, does.

A woman and her boyfriend return to the town where she grew up. She’s there to get ready to sell her dad’s house and tell her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. He plans on proposing. Their plans go awry, however, when someone from her past follows them and puts their lives in danger.

✕ Remove Ads

Giving specifics for how they’re in danger and what the person’s motivation is would spoil some of the most emotional scenes in the movie. It’s certainly one of the best crafted Lifetime movies of the year.

Related

10 Memes That Sum Up The Lifetime Movie Channel

The Lifetime channel is easily mocked, but more so when it's done from a place of love. Here are the best memes that totally get the cable network.

3 Searching For A Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story

A Rookie Police Officer Runs Her Own Investigation

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (9)

Another Lifetime movie that was based on a true story in 2024 is Searching For A Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story. This mystery involves a rookie police officer unable to let go of a murder case that she is worried others don’t care about.

✕ Remove Ads

Regina Smith becomes a police officer after getting out of an abusive relationship and wanting to do something in her life that will not only help her daughter but help others. While she initially has a hard time in training, she becomes a dedicated officer. While still a rookie, she finds the dead body of a sex worker with her eyes removed. Though she’s told to stick with her own work and let homicide handle it, Regina pursues an investigation with her partner.

Regina is responsible for bringing the responsible serial killer to justice, and the movie does a great job at showcasing her need to solve the case. Regina is someone who cannot allow the families of the murder victims to not have justice.

In reality, when the killer was caught, the police could only tie him to one murder, which he was convicted of, but he’s suspected of several more.

✕ Remove Ads

2 Blood, Sweat, And Cheer

A Mom Gets In On The Cheerleading Act

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (10)
Blood, Sweat and Cheer

TV Movie

Thriller

Comedy

Blood, Sweat and Cheer follows a suburban divorcée as she disguises herself as her teenage daughter to join a local high school dance squad. Released in 2023, this film explores themes of identity and ambition within competitive cheerleading.

Director
Traci Hays

Release Date
April 15, 2023

Cast
Tammin Sursok , Monroe Cline , Courtney James Clark , John Paul Kakos , Kaylan Montgomery , Aliyah J. Vasquez , Andrew R. Shaw , Rhyn McLemore , Anna Rappaport , Shannon Beshears , Sasha Hatfield

Runtime
95 minutes

2024 has been a big year for Tammin Sursok. The former Pretty Little Liars star has been appearing in a lot of projects that film in the Vancouver area, specifically movies for Lifetime and Hallmark. This is definitely one of her most interesting projects.

In Blood, Sweat, And Cheer, Sursok stars as the mother of a teenage girl who misses her own glory days of cheerleading. Now, she lives vicariously through her daughter’s achievements. When she and her daughter have a falling out, her daughter moves in with her father and quits the school’s dance team while her mother flounders. Sursok’s character, who believes she can still pass for a teenager, decides to enroll in another high school under her daughter’s name and compete in order to secure her daughter a college scholarship.

✕ Remove Ads

That initial plot is something truly outlandish for Lifetime, and it’s definitely fascinating to watch Sursok attempt to pull it off. Of course, the movie also spirals into something even darker as she struggles to maintain her secret. It’s a little wacky for Lifetime, but the movie was actually acquired from Tubi for the network, so it makes sense that the tone would not be exactly the same, and it’s not a bad thing to break up the sameness of the channel.

1 Tempted by Love: A Terry McMillan Presentation

A Woman Juggles Her Aunt’s Ailing Health, A Successful Career, And New Love

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (11)

Garcelle Beauvais might currently be better known as one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but she is an actor first. Here, she plays a woman who has a high-powered career as a chef in a European restaurant. At 50 and with rheumatoid arthritis though, she’s having trouble keeping up with her younger colleagues. When her aunt needs emergency medical care, she rushes back to the US to help her, and her driver from the airport is a man 20 years her junior whom she hits it off with right away.

✕ Remove Ads

While she’s staying with her aunt, she weighs her career options and gets to know the man she has perfect chemistry with. While she’s initially hesitant to get involved with someone so much younger than her, they have a lot in common, like his own desire to become a chef. When they both have to make decisions about their careers, they also have to make a decision about their relationship.

This movie is not like the usual dramatic and even scandalous Lifetime original movies. It’s more heartwarming, a study of how a relationship progresses rather than a look at one that’s going up in flames. It makes for a lovely break from the usual Lifetime movies.

10 Best Lifetime Movies Of 2024 (2024)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Manual Maggio

Last Updated:

Views: 6000

Rating: 4.9 / 5 (49 voted)

Reviews: 88% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Manual Maggio

Birthday: 1998-01-20

Address: 359 Kelvin Stream, Lake Eldonview, MT 33517-1242

Phone: +577037762465

Job: Product Hospitality Supervisor

Hobby: Gardening, Web surfing, Video gaming, Amateur radio, Flag Football, Reading, Table tennis

Introduction: My name is Manual Maggio, I am a thankful, tender, adventurous, delightful, fantastic, proud, graceful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.