2024 Wrap-Up
If you’re just interested in my top ten, you can skip my preamble and other categories by clicking here.
At this time every year comes the inevitable question: was it a good one for movies? This year more than most, there are a multitude of ways to answer that question.
The box office was down, falling short of last year's total, to say nothing of pre-pandemic business. If you prize original storytelling, 2024 didn't hold much good news for you either: you have to look outside the top 20 domestic grossers to find a screenplay which isn't a sequel or adaptation, and to #19 at the worldwide box office. If you're sick of superhero movies and cinematic universes dominating the box office, I regret to inform you that while there was only one major release, it grossed over a billion dollars, all but ensuring the trend is far from dead.
That said, there are some positive signs. Longlegs and Terrifier 3 were phenomenons both online and at the box office, proving indie horror remains a fertile ground for success and innovation, especially when taken in context with the other smaller hits of the year. A spate of late-year indie dramas lit up their respective festivals, strength which carried over into box office performance and audience response online, leading to the most wide open Oscars race in at least five years. And despite a slow start to the year and underwhelming offerings at a couple of the festivals I attended, the strong finish has left me feeling pretty good about the year's slate.
Granted, that last bit is more subjective. You can find great triumphs and huge letdowns in any year. As such, assessing the "quality" of releases will always have something to do with your taste and what you happen to see, and reasonable people can disagree. My perspective is heavily informed by having only caught a single movie which really blew me away by the end of June, leaving me worried the cinema would be full of films which were good but not great, or great but not exceptional. Fortunately, the best films of the year were released after June: only three of my mid-year top ten stuck around, with some not even making the cut for runners up.
To me, this all adds up to a year that was good but not great, a step down from last year's undeniably excellent crop, but full of interesting gems all the same. Despite being very comfortable with my top ten and runners up, as I look over my full ranking I see a handful of movies I wish I could justify talking about. No, the bench isn't as deep as last year, but it absolutely exists.
Interestingly, I have relatively few outsider picks as compared to last year, when my entire top five got few accolades elsewhere. But it is what it is: I can't help but admit it when the bulk of the field is correct. The most interesting development in my list is its queer representation. Including the runners up, nearly half of my picks are overtly about queer themes. I don't know if it was a particularly strong year for LGBTQ storytelling, or if it was simply a function of the movies I saw, or what. All I know is that it's a welcome change from my list last year, when a generous reading counts just two films.
Alright, that's enough context and musing. Let's get to it, shall we?
The List
As has become my tradition, each time I watched a new release during the year, I added it to my master list, building up a ranking as I went. Part of the intent is to minimize end-of-year bias, as each movie gets positioned based on my impression at watch time. The alternative would be building it at the end of the year by looking over the list of movies I rated highly, when I would naturally gravitate towards those I saw more recently. Especially since so many studios build their release schedules specifically to keep their highest-confidence awards plays for the final months of the year. I've also rewatched as many of them as possible in order to ensure they hold up.
I consider a new release any movie which received a proper US theatrical or digital release. I say "proper" because some do an end of year release on a few screens in NYC and LA, and don't expand until the new year. Which I find obnoxious, so they count for the following year. There are a few such movies which appear below. The exception is if I saw it at a film festival, then I count it regardless. There are a couple instances of that, too.
As with last year, I’m borrowing the list format from the movie podcast Battleship Pretension. It starts with the single worst film of the year, then moves into overrated and underrated, a small blurb on five runners up, then a longer comment on the top ten. So it begins negative, and gets more positive as it progresses.
Worst
This category is pretty clear: what’s the worst movie I saw this year?
Spy x Family Code: White
Letterboxd Review (contains spoilers)
On the one hand, this isn't fair. I saw this unexpectedly, as the final Monday Mystery Movie before my local Regal closed. I'm not a big anime guy, although there are some I've enjoyed. I wasn't familiar with the TV show, and this is a feature length episode right in the middle of its continuity. So there were a bunch of things which almost caused me to give Madame Web this slot.
But everything about this movie's construction is insufferable. It's constantly screeching at you, the plot points are nonsense, it both starts and ends in the middle of a story, and the animation is atrocious. The characters were incredibly dumb, and we were subjected to their constant internal monologues, despite adding no insight and just stating everything already on the screen.
Maybe this works for fans of the show. But if you're not already bought in, this makes no attempts to speak to you.
Most Overrated
When you call a movie overrated, people sometimes misunderstand. It doesn’t mean I hate it. I may even like it! But I’ve seen it receive heaps of praise, far above what I think it deserves.
(Technically, this should be Spy x Family Code: White, as people quite liked it. But I want to avoid repeating myself.)
Twisters
One of the biggest legacyquels of the summer at the box office, revered by audiences and critics alike...except for me.
Chung attempts to flip the story of Twister on its head to keep things fresh, which is an admirable goal. But that means the team we're following is the boring, well-funded, dorks. And you better believe Daisy Edgar-Jones doesn't have the chops to keep you the least bit interested. Meanwhile, Glenn Powell helms the far more exciting and charismatic Tornado Wranglers, who provide reason for some of the better VFX, and are just more fun. Almost every event is a direct riff on the original, either mimicking it or subverting it, reminding us of a movie which did a far better job arguing for its existence.
It contains some solid ideas, but just can't seem to pull them off. Sure, the set pieces are pretty cool, I'll give it that. But they fail to fully explore even these action scenes, and all the ways they could play with the idea of tornado touchdowns now that our CGI capabilities are so much better. To say nothing of the bits of drama used to bridge convenience and repetitive storm chasing sequences: a big fat nothing, with only Powell leaving any sort of impression, which he does every single time he's on screen.
Most Underrated
Of course, this is the flip side of overrated. I don’t have to love my pick here, I just think it’s been unfairly trashed or misunderstood.
In a Violent Nature
Letterboxd Review (contains spoilers)
A slow, plodding horror film told from the perspective of the villain in a slasher film? Sign me up!
But I get it. Slow cinema is not for most people, especially general audiences. And while horror aficionados like movies off the beaten path, they tend towards ones that are bananas. This has some absolutely brutal kills, but they're separated by long shots as we silently trudge through the woods along with the killer.
Which is exactly what I like about it: you're forced to take it all in, to slow down and empathize with this undead being, and to reckon with what happens when nature is disturbed enough to push back. The sound design is wonderful, the practical effects (augmented with clever compositing) are brilliant, and the story is perfect for the genre.
Runners Up
Picking just five runners up is always tough, especially in a year like this where so many excellent films stumbled in some significant way, rendering them slightly lower on the list. But I have to make the cut off somewhere. So we’re sticking with five movies which fell just outside my top ten. When you see as many movies as I have, this isn’t a condemnation. But to set them apart, they only get a sentence or two of discussion.
15. Love Lies Bleeding
Kristin Stewart and Katy O'Brian starring in an 80s lesbian neon-noir about a female body builder who strolls into town and stumbles into some unsavory dealings which she cannot help but rectify, crossing Ed Harris playing a man with male-pattern baldness hippie hair? And a pulsing synth score from Clint Mansell, directed by the woman who brought us Saint Maud? Love it, unsatisfying ending be damned!
14. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
A fantastic antidote to the idea that only American society is trapped in a late stage capitalist nightmare where corporations dictate the terms of our interactions with the world, this wonderfully balances the frustration of such an existence with the resignation that's so hard to stave off. At the same time, it raises questions about how much technology really frees us from the bondage of our lives, and draws an unfavorable comparison to life under an authoritarian regime, while being careful to point out it doesn't have to be this way. The film is a primal scream, designed to speak to our moment, and doing so incredibly effectively.
13. I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun's second feature film maintains their signature lo-fi, dream-like, vaporwave aesthetic, as well as their deep connection to modern internet culture and the media landscape instrumental in constructing it. Coming from an even more obviously personal place than their debut, we experience the wild discord and disorientation that comes from walking through life in a body that doesn't feel like your own, forming a clear trans allegory while also delving into what it means to experience and relate to the world through television.
12. The People's Joker
By far the most unique film on this list stylistically, Vera Drew and her crew do an incredible job from jump of softening you up for their Gatling gun of aesthetics and jokes, as well as the whiplash of changing tones, resulting in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. That this continues to be available despite its bold parodic use of Warner Bros. IP is a triumph, a monument to what film can be, and proving that you don't need a big budget if you have vision and creativity (although money always helps).
11. Femme
A person's reaction to a traumatic experience is incredibly personal, so it can be vexing to everyone (including themselves) at the same time they're actively working through it. A gay drag queen sets in motion a plot for revenge against his intensely homophobic attacker by seizing a chance meeting in a bath house to establish a sexual relationship fraught with complicated and ever-shifting power dynamics and various levels of gender performance. And it contains one of the best performances of the year in Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, despite awards bodies failing to take notice.
Top Ten
Here’s the meat and potatoes! My top ten favorite new releases of the year. Fascinatingly, the only non-English language film it contains comes from the UK.
10. The Substance
When one of the most talked about movies of the year is a fearless body horror film made by someone not named Cronenberg, you know something's going right.
By leaning hard into bluntness and stylization, choosing maximalism and aggression at every turn, Coralie Faraget's film proactively refutes any claim that's it too straight-forward. She's not interested in nuance, instead shining a glaring spotlight on the damage done by beauty standards and the industry's insistence on preying on societally reinforced insecurities about getting older and fears of losing their celebrity and lifestyle. It's in your face, it's angry, it's bitter, it's unpleasant. Yet it manages to be laugh out loud hilarious from start to finish, whether those laughs come from jokes or the shock at how audacious it is.
The gross-factor may turn some people off, but they've no idea the incredible experience they're missing out on.
9. All of Us Strangers
The first of two movies on this list I saw on the same day in January, it's remained bouncing around my head all year. A recent rewatch reminded me why: no other film as capably captured the sense of longing and loneliness inherent in the modern world quite so well. Although Adam insists being gay is unrelated to his isolation, it's clear in his conversations with his parents and Harry that it's more complicated than that. He's been unable to work through the trauma caused by being raised in a society in which the best he could hope for was indifference. Fortunately, an unknown force gives him the opportunity for closure, at least as it pertains to his home life. And in his relationship with Harry, he manages to unravel his insecurities, experience a tenderness he doesn't think he deserves, and finally comes to terms with the loss he's allowed to define his whole life.
Such an achingly beautiful portrait of a man adrift simply cannot be ignored.
8. The Brutalist
This thing came with incredibly pumped up expectations, and yet it managed to meet them.
Pitched as a modern American epic, it fantastically encompasses the immigrant experience, and in doing so lays bare just how short of its stated values America consistently falls. After landing in New York, László Tóth is only able to get on his feet due to the generosity of his cousin. He's only able to put his tremendous skills and vision to work due to the incredible luck of being around when a rich kid inquires about surprising his father. Of course, it goes south just as suddenly, because elevating your station in American society is more about luck than skill, meaning it can all be ripped away from you at the drop of a hat.
Featuring a trio of the best performances of the year, stunning architecture strikingly photographed, and a flooring epilogue which peels back the layers to reveal the importance of holding interpretations of artwork until you've taken in the whole thing, it's no wonder this was the talk of Venice a few months ago.
7. Anora
Coming out of Cannes, there was a single film on everyone's lips: Anora. As a big fan of every Sean Baker movie I've seen, I was quite excited. Even more so when it started to get thrown around as a favorite for Best Picture at the Oscars. As soon as I had the chance, I drove over an hour out of my way to see it, and I was not disappointed.
A whirlwind from start to finish, Baker expertly wields his razor sharp pen to keep you constantly laughing while steadily dialing up the tension. Of course, his writing would mean nothing if not for the unbridled fury and humanity in Mikey Madison's incredible performance, the awkward empathy of Yura Borisov, and the persistent impotence of Karren Karagulian. All of which leads to a final shot which will leave you breathless and contemplative, while maybe finally, finally allowing you a moment of release. It's a dazzling and remarkable film, not least because Baker and his cast has got mainstream American media, prudish and conservative as it is, heaping praise on a movie about a sex worker, which isn't shy about showing her and her colleagues at work and confronting the reality of it as a job.
6. Challengers
Despite being tennis-centric, Challengers is not a sports movie by any conventional definition. Instead, it uses the one-on-one nature of tennis to play out character dynamics and evolve their relationships, as a measure of passion and drive, and to crystallize emotional maelstroms by turning subtext into serves. All driven home by Reznor and Ross's brilliantly pulsing score, which cuts out each time a point begins to allow us to focus on the content of the scene with no distractions. Because Guadagnino knows the visuals are incredibly rich, and enough to carry the scenes on their own.
Tashi, Patrick, and Art are easily three of the best characters of the year. Ambitious and manipulative and messy, they do whatever they can to deny their own humanity in service of their goals. The stellar performances underlying them help you understand what makes them tick despite how unrelatable they are.
It also features the year's most electric ending, made possible by daring to piss people off.
5. Rebel Ridge
The type of thriller which will only find you exhaling in order to utter "Jesus freaking Christ", Aaron Pierre completely holds the screen with his ability to present absurd intensity while remaining absolutely calm. It's a skill he'll need as he faces down a corrupt police department, abusing civil asset forfeiture to plug funding holes caused by budget cuts enacted as retribution for their tendency to use unnecessary force during arrests and traffic stops.
Despite being set up like a traditional revenge flick, the layers of social commentary and restraint demonstrated by Terry set this apart. As do the careful construction of the antagonists. Eschewing the traditional straw men, Saulnier put lots of care into constructing the police officers, sure to display their intelligence in each situation, which makes it understandable how they've gotten away with their horribly unethical and tyrannical behavior for years unchallenged. While never making them sympathetic, it does make them more human, enacting a far more effective commentary on the state of the world than I was expecting.
4. National Anthem
The premise sounds uninspired: a young man begins to find himself and how to express his identity as he spends more time with self-possessed trans women and pansexual men. But there's so much more to it than that, even just setting it on a ranch in New Mexico solely populated by queer people. Sure, cowboys and the Old West have long been part of LGBTQ culture, but more often as place to hide. The House of Splendor is a refuge away from the world while still very much of it, its inhabitants free to fully be themselves and safely explore their identities and sexuality. The characters therein are varied and fully fleshed out, often subverting the common tropes by gesturing at them before moving on.
While there are brief moments which show this dream cannot last forever, they never come to define the story, eschewing the tragedy which is so often a crutch in movies about LGBTQ characters. Instead, the tension comes from Dylan trying to navigate his own feelings and what all of this means for his relationship to his brother and mother. Trying to figure out where he fits in on the ranch, if he fits in, or if it's just a step on his journey.
3. The Zone of Interest
Telling a story from the perspective of an infamous Nazi is an incredibly risky move. One false step could cause the whole endeavor to collapse, and risks invigorating the very people it intends to condemn.
Which makes Glazer's film all the more remarkable. Simply by juxtaposing the palatial life of Rudolf Höss and his wife with the looming presence of Auschwitz just on the other side of their garden wall, we cannot ignore the intense darkness and oppression. Some part of the wall or towers is always visible, and the sounds of the camp are inescapable: the grind of the crematoriums, the yells of the guards, the gunshots. None of which phase the characters, making clear from the outset that despite being the subjects of the film, they are also its villains, humans whose souls have left them long ago.
2. Dìdi (弟弟)
Few coming-of-age films have the boldness to fully embrace the unique experience of the filmmaker. Which is part of what makes Sean Wang's film so special. He recreates his own childhood, imbuing its specific challenges with a remarkable amount of empathy and humanity for his younger self. A teenager fumbling through friendships and family and trying to present himself to the world is of course the focus. But less common in these stories is the deep and explicit treatment of identity: Chris being Taiwanese-American permeates and complicates everything, making him feel even more alone both outside the home and within it. And like all the best, his mother is experiencing a parallel struggle, approaching it with more maturity and poise, but never pretending that everything is fine.
Of course, none of this would be possible without the pitch perfect performances of Izaac Wang and Joan Chen, imbuing these characters with such a wonderful life and light that I never for a moment disbelieved their authenticity. Which allows us to forgive their mistakes and imperfections: we accept that they'll be messy, just like we all are.
1. Nickel Boys
The power of film lies in transportation. For my money, more than any other storytelling medium, it has the ability to put you inside the narrative. This can be used to force you to experience things you never will in real life, or to make you feel seen by acknowledging and re-enforcing a reality with which you're intimately familiar but is less discussed. Director RaMell Ross could barely have employed that strength more perfectly than he does here. While the underlying story and broader social issues it lays bare hammer home the disturbing nature of our very recent past (as well as how its impacts ripple through today in myriad ways, and how we continue to uncover the buried atrocities it contains), his inspired use of the first-person camera and astounding sound design connects you to this story in a way that violently refuses to let you go.
It's a tragic story, yes, but more than that it's a human story. Not by presenting the events through rose-tinted glasses; there is no instant where you could mistake what's happening to Elwood as good or even okay. Rather, the bits of compassion and friendship and beauty that emerge from the circumstances arise from the kids' desperately but hopelessly reaching out for a hand in the darkness. They don't find a savior, but they find support and comradery in each other because they have no other option, becoming deeply bonded. They refuse to lose hope, to give-up, determined not to let the bastards get them down. The experience leaves an indelible impact, one which Ross doesn't shy away from, using both narrative and a slight shift in perspective to drive home.
That a film like this is getting as much awards buzz as it is signifies how strange the year it. It's been on or atop many critic year-end lists, but it's very much the type of critical darling that does well playing out of festivals. The coup is its presence in the Oscars conversation, and even been nominated by a few predecessor shows. Only time will tell how it fares. But that only matters insofar as this incredibly important film gets seen by as many people as possible. You'll have to wait until January to catch it in most theaters, but you'll be very glad you did.