I saw about seventy movies with initial public releases in the United States in 2024 - which as always, is my requirement for what qualifies for this. Seventy is a lot of movies, there's a lot to talk about.
Warning: this may get delayed because personal stuff already means I'm further behind than I want to be.
What will follow will be short reviews/essays about all Fifteen of the Best Movies of 2024, decided objectively and scientifically by my own taste at this one random second. One review released a day until we hit Number One.
But first, the preamble thing!
Argument:
Why do I do this? This is the fulcrum of my writing output every year, this recap of my year watching movies, then later my other recap about video games. (Which I can already tell you is going to be very late this year.) I am far from the most influential critic. I have never made a movie, I know as little about the craft now as when I started writing twenty years ago. I do not think I have a clear a capital-T 'Theory' of what makes art good versus bad, important versus unimportant. One tries to come up with a better rubric than 'that was really cool' or 'really gross', however, in real terms, that governs a lot more of my thinking than I'd like to admit. You never stop being a six-year-old jumping up and down in the living room as the Death Star explodes on standard definition 4:3 on VHS. You just gather a lot of fancy language to cover up the simple animal pleasures that really dominate your thinking.
For the last few years I've been using these Master Posts as a 'here's what I think about the year in movies that just passed'. For 2024, I do not know what to think about the year in movies. It was strange, but not strange in a definable way. The artform is certainly not lacking in product and there were a ton of great movies. But I don't see much of a trend or a plotline that one can gather out of these random data points. I could not tell you why audiences really wanted to see Deadpool & Wolverine any more than I could tell you why they did not want to see Furiosa. 2024 was like a holding pattern of a year, where the superhero blockbuster thing is far from over, but its absence did not make me miss it all that much. Few wept because there were no Fast cars being driven Furiously by Dominic Toretto. In general there were not many huge sequels to the big franchises. Movies that spoke to our mass-anxiety over the future of our country came out like Civil War, but sparked seemingly no real discussion or gave much insight to the future.
Movies just existed. And that's good enough for me. Civil War is a great movie. It did not do anything to stop the election from being a nightmare. Bad things are still coming.
I'm doing something different this time with the preamble. I'm actually going to rewind back to the 2023 list. I want to rethink that previous list before I start working on this one. This process is as much a fashion statement as anything. Some of these movies age poorly in my estimation. Some grow.
