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.
So a year ago I thought the Top 15 should look like this:
15. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 14. Skinamarink, 13. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 12. The Boy and the Heron, 11. Monster, 10. The First Slam Dunk, 9. Oppenheimer, 8. May December, 7. Anatomy of a Fall, 6. Poor Things, 5. Godzilla Minus One, 4. Infinity Pool, 3. Past Lives, 2. Return to Seoul, 1. Asteroid City
Now looking at this list right now, I can already see the value in this process. Because I have not had much time to revisit any of these films. Worse than that, I have not thought much about them. I could easily forget Return to Seoul existed at all since nobody is ever going to champion that movie as hard as I did last year. It will disappear from history, and that is unfortunate. Godzilla Minus One is the movie that I still hear the most about, whereas its fellow blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has disappeared from all discussion entirely. Which I think says something about the MCU as a cultural force. It still sells tickets but it sure doesn't stick in anybody's mind. Oppenheimer has been on my mind lately because of its similarity to a movie that will make the 2024 Top 15. You might already guess which movie that is, I left you a hint. It will rank very high in the coming weeks.
So right now I'm going to reorder the list based on how I'm feeling in January 2025. This also means I need to add and subtract a few entries. Let's start with who got the boot.
We lost Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. I still think that movie is great. James Gunn made what I'm fairly confident will be the last good MCU movie. But I need room for other things, and honestly, the overall health of superhero movies as a genre feels more and more like an irrelevant discussion. I still love seeing Rocket Racoon carry those babies to safety.
Also I pruned How to Blow Up a Pipeline from this list. The potential of revolutionary violence is actually more timely now than it was in 2023. I still like that movie but... it is a very neat piece, with a clear argument and answer. You can be too clear with your art. I get the sense it is only preaching to a choir, and yeah I'm in that choir, which always makes me a bit suspicious. This movie just lacks the complications and difficulty that I think really great filmmaking demands. Movies might not be the vessel for this kind of statement.
Finally, and with most pain. I cut The Boy and the Heron. Let us be honest, that is far from Hayao Miyazaki's greatest work. It is an interesting and strange thing, only barely coherent, full of amazing images and adorable bubble guys. But with time passing, I think it made the old list due to obligation. We do not have much Miyazaki left to enjoy, I'm going to celebrate his output as hard as I can. This is a brutal, painful cut, however. It is not trimming fat anymore, it is more like trimming muscle. Or even cutting out full vital organs. The process is painful.
Now I'll go through the new list as follows and discuss how I feel about these movies.
15. Monster, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda - I still love this movie. It is one of the best romances and one of the best mystery thrillers of 2023. However, I think it has the Return to Seoul problem where I'm largely alone on this one. I try not to let the world's opinion influence my own that much, but if I'm the only one, I do have to second guess myself. I got very close to cutting this for Talk to Me, the Australian horror movie that I loved a lot and actually revisited in 2024. Monster is more vital and more relevant, and Talk to Me is getting a sequel. That movie will be fine without what little I can to do to champion it.
14. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan - A lot of the big "important" dramas that made the original list dropped a few ranks in my estimation...
13. May December, dir. Todd Haynes - ...The thing is, I'm not sure I have much more to say about any of these that I had not say last year. And if a movie is bringing nothing new out of me after so much time has passed, it deserves to lose a few points.
12. Infinity Pool, dir. Brandon Cronenberg - This made the list because it is extremely gross, and I love gross. I effectively had it flip places with Skinamarink, the other horror movie on the old list, which I have not stopped thinking about. Infinitely Pool has Mia Goth at her peak powers, which I sorely missed in MaXXXine in 2024, which just did not give us enough Goth-iness. Excited for Brandon Cronenberg's upcoming game that he's making with his coworker Michael.
11. Saltburn, dir Emerald Fennell - A previous honorable mention now upgraded to full Top 15 member. A lot of movies that did not make my Top 15 originally were things I saw very late. I saw this maybe a day before I wrote my Honorable Mentions, in fact. Yeah, this movie rules. There was weird Twitter discourse about this thing that scared me off - Twitter was fucking useless, that website is deader than the DCEU now so there is some justice. Saltburn ends on a naked dance scene to a song that I listened to about a 1000 times last winter. Also a dude drinks another dude's bathwater. It is making the list.
10. Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer - Another mention made more Honorable in retrospective. I am almost certainly never going to see this movie again. It is brutal in its pacing. I am not a patient person at all. But Zone of Interest is hard to forget. A Holocaust movie set just outside the walls of Auschwitz, where Hell is occurring out of sight, low on the sound mix. There's a particularly brilliant montage of scenes at the end set with caretakers cleaning up the modern museum set on the grounds where all this suffering occurred. That feels more profound and disturbing than the entire first part of the movie. I do not really know what those scenes meant, and that kind of difficult question is what I'm looking for in filmmaking. It is what Pipeline completely lacked.
9. The First Slam Dunk, dir. Takehiko Inoue - This one is still the best sports movie I've ever seen. It has been fun this year watching my team, the Denver Broncos, be this hodge-podge of scrubs surprising the league and actually being fun to watch. They made the playoffs and were in the game right up until halftime on Sunday. Been thinking about this movie every time Bo Nix throws a ridiculous touchdown pass the moment after I've decided he's actually not good. Sports can be magical. Or deeply cruel, depends which side you were rooting for.
8. Return to Seoul, dir. Davy Chou - Ji-Min Park needs to be in more things. I see she was in a French TV show last year, I hope her career keeps moving. She was ridiculously good in this movie.
7. Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet - Funnily enough, the next three movies did not move in their rankings at all.
6. Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos - Lanthimos is only going to become more his weird self in 2024, actually. As he progresses artistically, he's going to some wonderfully strange places. He did not exactly start off all that normal either. Is Poor Things actually the best Frankenstein movie ever made?
5. Godzilla Minus One, dir. Takashi Yamazaki - I considered dropping this movie a few ranks since I'm less convinced this movie has the right ideas about about the Japanese Navy in WWII. That revisionism feels dangerous. On the other hand, the next American attempt at Godzilla that came out in 2024 was one of the worst movies I saw last year. So Godzilla Minus One stays up here thanks to the power of comparison. And Godzilla is a beloved icon of my family, how could I let him down when we need him right now?
4. Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson - Formally Movie of the Year. The process is different this time, because I'm just ranking movies based on feel. When it comes time to actually 'Do the Thing', I usually decide Movie of the Year is the one I have the most to say about. Asteroid City is such a magnificent collage of influences and meta-commentaries upon itself, layers and layers that eventually become recursive. I love a structure that collapses, rules that fall apart. It is also very funny and horny. Wes Anderson has probably gone too far for most audiences, I hope he goes ever further.
3. Skinamarink, dir. Kyle Edward Ball - I hesitated on this one. I know Skinamarink is a very acquired taste, so I felt it could not rank too high. In this case, I've actually decided that the rest of the world's opinion matters less. In terms of a movie hitting me hard with affect, this blew my mind. I have not been this terrified watching a movie throughout most of my adult life. My review of this movie was easily the best thing I wrote last year.
2. All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh - Of all the 2023 movies that did not rank last time, this one I regret the most. All of Us Strangers is a truly beautiful movie, intensely lonely, full of affection and love, and even harsh judgement where required. I'm still not sure I agree with the genre twist at the end. But the movie's last shot really does nail that final emotion of two souls holding each other against the world. Andrew Scott went on to be in Ripley on Netflix, doing some of his best acting yet. Then Paul Mescal's big move towards stardom was Gladiator II, a movie where he was clearly out-shown by the hammy villains, especially Denzel Washington. Big sequels pay better than quiet British queer dramas, but I do not think that was good for Mescal's career. Still looks great in that short beard.
1. Past Lives, dir. Celine Song - This very nearly was Movie of the Year 2023 last year. I do not think any movie in 2024 outdid this one in terms of human emotion. Past Lives is a three-part romance with an impossible choice, with every option feeling correct. There's so much longing and real tenderness, it is a movie whose most hardest part is the fact it has to end. One evening of possibility has to cease and lives need to be torn apart again. There is a feeling just as you approach middle age about all the lives you should have had, and how cruel it is that we're only allowed to have one. I got a chance to walk along the East River in 2024, not by the merry-go-round but that general area. And damn, I really missed this movie while I was there.
...
So is this list any truer than the one from last year? No. The me of January 2024 was completely correct, and the me of January 2025 is a slightly different person with slightly different takes. Asteroid City remains Movie of the Year 2023 in the true sense because I'm not re-writing that review. I just wanted to examine how temporary and silly list-making is. Give it a year or a week or even an hour between writings and the list can be entirely different.
As I said before, this has no greater impact or purpose on the world. It is just loving art for art's own sake. If there was no real world, movies would never exist, they are productions of material reality. But material reality is clearly insufficient and broken, 2024 made that pretty fucking clear. It was an awful year, 2025 will be worse. That's why we need movies.
Anyway, without further ado, the list. I got fifteen movies to write about, then a lot of Honorable Mentions. A lot. 2024 had some bangers, dude:
The Actual List Part of the List:
15. Dune: Part Two
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