Wildly late as usual on my plans. This post concludes the Top Movies of 2024 series.
I'm still considering exactly what I'll do for a Top 10 List of Video Games in 2024, whether or not even such a list even makes sense anymore. I'll have something out eventually on that front, I hope. Still gotta finish Metaphor ReFantazio and that game is loooong.
But for now, let's talk about all the Good Movies of 2024 That Didn't Make the List - there's a lot. Also a Bad Movie. And a few movies in between.
And yes, I am requesting that you watch every single one of these movies (except the last one). If you start now you can probably be done by about oh... Sunday. I'll talk to your boss for you, they'll understand. This list is in no particular order, by the way.
Hundreds of Beavers, dir. Mike Cheslik
One of the few movies whose title could easily be its own porn parody. Hundreds of Beavers was really close to making the Top 15, until I ultimately decided I did not have much to say about it that was not just 'describing the object'. It's a really cool movie to describe, sure, however, my opinion does not bring much to this movie. I like this exists, I cannot I learned much about life or myself watching it - besides learning that I really need that hat.
Hundreds of Beavers is a live-action cartoon comedy. The entire thing operates on a mixture of Looney Tunes physics and video game economics. Our trapper hero (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) completes several "runs" to collect loot and objects across an old-timey theme park vision of 17th century fur trading in the Great Lakes region. And maybe he'll win the heart of a local cute Furrier girl (Olivia Graves). This movie is all black and white, with almost no spoken dialog. And everybody is wearing big goofy mascot costumes. It is a little over-long. Personally, I'd have cut down the first act by a lot, but Hundreds of Beavers has a vast wealth of jokes, and lots of visual gags. It is maybe the most creative movie of 2024. Everything you can imagine, and several things you could never imagine, happens in this grand battle between fluffy animals and our goofy bearded protagonist.
Joker: Folie à Duex, dir. Todd Phillips
I did not like Joker 1 at all. Beyond everything else, it was a movie that made the Joker not fun. And what good is that? There's plenty of more interesting movies starring a dangerously anti-social Joaquin Phoenix with mother issues. For example, you could watch Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid, which at least was doing something completely original versus a Scorsese retread. Of course, Joker 1 got showered with praise, made like a bajillion dollars, and received several Oscar Noms. Therefore, it is entirely a 'Me' thing, to really enjoy the sequel, that nobody liked, made no money, and was buried by critics.
Joker 2 is a mess, but a fascinating one. It is a movie that is at war with itself. It seems to dislike Joker 1 more than even I did, since it is absolutely out to destroy any hero fantasy made you might have seen. It brings this Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) character into Chicago, a courtroom drama with musical numbers that appear in the protagonists' head. Only they purposefully decide to make even this part largely un-fun. Phoenix sings very poorly and his co-star psuedo-Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) sings way below her talents. We get one really good Sonny & Cher moment but otherwise, no joy to be had there. Arthur is given multiple paths to be the supervillain the audience and most characters want him to be, then rejects those paths too. He cannot be the Joker, he cannot go back to being Arthur, he has no place either in the glitzy musical fantasy world or the grim 'real' world of 70s New York. I think it works, and I admire this act of career suicide both from our Joker and our director.
Oh just so that everybody properly hates me, I really, really disliked the other Joker movie, The People's Joker. That movie looked like a pile of garbage by aesthetic purpose, I know, but also it looked like a pile of garbage. Not for me.
Smile 2, dir. Parker Finn
Another sequel that is better than the original. Smile 1 was an extremely competent work of what I call 'normie' horror, a very standard genre picture about a demon hunting a lady down and playing tricks on her until she dies. Even central gimmick of "the monster makes people smile at you" is stock. This is a simple, cheap trick that is effective. It is really creepy when somebody smiles way too much for way too long - that cannot be denied. That first movie had a little bit more edge than you'd expect from something so standard. It could have easily been much more generic. There was a mean streak to Smile 1, such as when the demon manipulates things so our heroine presents her little niece a dead cat for her birthday. Nasty stuff.
Smile 2 is set in the world of pop stardom (a weirdly popular place for horror movies in 2024). Our new protagonist, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is not recovering from childhood trauma but also struggles with the intensity of fandom and addiction. There were a lot of great female-led horror movies in 2024, Scott needs to mentioned among that list of great performances. Her character is trying to take back her career with a big tour, and unfortunately, she has a Smiling Demon feeding off her negative emotions. There's a lot of great horror 'gags' in this, such as a sequence when the Demon summons a crowd of very-well-choreographed back-up dancers to chase Skye across her apartment. Or when we go to the scariest place on Earth: Staten Island, which a character openly grimaces at. Smile 2 ends on an impressively hopeless moment that I sure hope opens us up for a wild change of pace for Smile 3.
Mars Express, dir. Jérémie Périn
Mars Express is the best movie of 2024 that nobody saw and nobody talked about.
This is a French cyberpunk animated noir mystery film set on Mars. I'd recommend this to anybody who grew up with random anime movies playing at 2 AM on expanded cable. If you stumbled onto Ghost in the Shell or Armitage III or Megazone 23 while half-asleep and maybe looking for cartoon nudity, Mars Express is your thing. Our leads are a human detective (Lea Drucker) and her formally-human partner, Carlos (Daniel Njo Lobé), who is now a hologram of his face projected above his headless droid body. This is the typical noir story where the bottom of society, prostitution and exploitation are somehow linked up with huge tech conglomerates, which in case you Musk-freaks forgot, are the villains of every one of these stories. Carlos, for example, is living on borrowed time since his model of robot is already obsolete and it is becoming increasingly impossible to keep up his maintenance. There's great action in Mars Express, a ton of really impressive robot designs, the animation-style reminds me a lot of Scavengers Reign with its use of color and endlessly inventive kinds of robot guys. One hell of an ending too, deeply grim, deeply moving.
Stopmotion, dir. Robert Morgan
A lot of movies in my Top 15 were about the pursuit of art and creation; my admiration of achieving a craft. (See: Look Back, The Taste of Things, The Brutalist, even Challengers to a degree.) What if that artistic expression however is something terrible? The drive to create is also a drive to self-destruction? This is animator Robert Morgan's first feature film, about a young animator woman, Ella (Aisling Franciosi) taking on a massive personal project inherited from her ailing mother. This project is a decades-long work of art, reminding me a lot of The Primevals, the posthumous David Allen dream project that sat on Full Moon Entertainment's shelf half-finished for almost thirty years until it was released last year. Stopmotion is not about that, not about cute fuzzy monsters on an adventure. Ella abandons her mother's dreams to make something more personal, and much darker. She starts making dolls out of meat, then dead things, then finally... some... other material. "Put yourself into your art" has never been more literal or gross.
I was going to use an image from this movie in this post, but I'm honestly afraid Google will censor me again... so yeah. Stopmotion is probably too extreme for us here. But Robert Morgan crafts some wonderfully-awful visuals for his film-within-a-film. It is Mad God-levels of intense, with a plotline that takes us to Saint Maud territory of bleakness.
Exhuma, dir. Jang Jae-hyun
In order for a horror movie to happen, you typically need to ignore a few red flags. You think "hmm, this house had murders in it, but this is a price to die for" and then, yup, the ghost takes you up on that offer. Exhuma is a movie where the protagonists start ignoring some red flags, then some more, until finally the number of red flags not considered could fill a People's Liberation Army parade. If you thought the heroes from The Mummy were a little reckless with digging up a cursed dead guy, that's nothing. Our heroes in Exhuma are a group of geomancers and feng shui masters led by Kim Sang-deok (the legendary Choi Min-Sik), who also might be crooks on the side. Just a little bit. They're all too happy to look the other way on a few bent rules when the money is right, when a mysterious Korean-American businessman wants them to quietly dig up "a relative". Then they notice this grave violates every rule of Eastern esotericism, the body seems to point back to Korea's violent past, and they might have unleashed a terrible curse upon them all.
Then that movie ends, and Exhuma basically does it all over again. Yeah, there's another curse under the first one, another even more wicked body. You'd think somebody would have learned their lesson, but it gets worse. Turns out this entire nightmare is the final vengeance of the imperial powers that tore Korea apart, installing the kind of desperate capitalism that forces its mystics into con-artistry. After all, Kim looks the other way on all this horror just to pay for his daughter's wedding. His attempt to hold onto traditional social values is next to impossible in the modern world.
Kill, dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
The Raid on a Train, basically. There's a lot of really great action coming out of India lately, see also Monkey Man and Shah Rukh Khan's action double-feature of Jawan and Pathaan from 2023. Kill is one of the hardest and most violent movies I've ever seen. A gang of robbers take a train hostage, and it is up to an Indian army commando on leave, Amrit (Lakshya) to save his fiance and his soon-to-be step-family. Along the way he savages scores of robbers, who all turn out to be basically Somebody's Uncle. A lot of schlubby middle-aged guys with mustaches really upset about losing a different schlubby middle-aged guy with a mustache. They're all one big family business of crime and this particular caper has gone horrendously wrong. There's almost a Jeremy Saulnier quality where both the heroes and the villains are stuck in this nightmare of stabbing - and oh boy, do people get stabbed a lot. That title Kill is not an exaggeration. There's a lot of great fight choreography staged in very tight train locations, which is impressive. I'm not sure that Amrit even could survive the number of injuries he takes. He just keeps finding new darker places to go across the movie, leading to a great final boss battle against Fani (Raghav Juyal), the single best villain of 2024.
Also Lakshya goes shirtless for a few minutes in this film and the worst thing about Kill is that he puts his shirt back on.
Sting, dir. Kiah Roache-Turner
My favorite little movie of 2024. Sting is about a preteen girl, Charlotte (Alyla Browne, who also starred in Furiosa) who befriends a spider from outer space. Then that spider grows up and eats lots of people in her Brooklyn apartment building. It's a perfect monster movie, with an Australian cast doing a great job pretending to be New Yorkers. Sting just on that edge between adult and children's horror, maybe the little girl will get eaten by her pet, maybe her baby brother will get eaten, maybe the dog will get eaten, maybe her adorable grandma. Certainly the nasty neighbors are not safe.
Sting opens on a perfect joke with a good horror punchline, where an exterminator (Jermaine Fowler) comes to the building, sees a rival's truck parked outside, and realizes he's been called by a very forgetful old woman. He's exploring the space, looking for the bugs, and then just before he's eaten, he sees his rival has already been cocooned by the monster. Cut to the old lady looking through the phone book for more exterminators to call.
Nickel Boys, dir. RaMell Ross
Last year's American Fiction had this critique of modern films about African American subjects, which felt that Black people were treated more as victims than as people. I'm not really sure what exactly to do with that critique, not that American Fiction really seemed to know what to do with anything it was bringing up. There is something here about a fetishization of victimhood that might be disturbing, but the alternative is just to pretend that none of it happened at all. Just say "well, that history isn't pleasant and doesn't fit my narratives, so we're not going to talk about that", and that sucks worse. Be very suspicious of the people who want to avoid these conversations and get angry when they come up.
Nickel Boys is shot entirely in POV, from the perspective of two kids Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) attending Nickel Academy, seemingly a reform school, in truth a kind of slave plantation meets chain gang. For some this full-POV way of filming might be a brand new language of cinema, I found Nickel Boys seemed to have run out of visual ideas. There's something inherently alienating about seeing through a character's eyes, not seeing their face, which is why POV shots are traditionally used for the killer stalking the helpless victim girl in the woods. We do get our two heroes looking at each other, which brings humanity out of them. There is a great reveal halfway through Nickel Boys when you finally see Elwood's face and how he carries himself in the world. Most people never get to see themselves the way the world sees them, after all.
Still, I got really tired of the POV. And I think the movie did too. This is why we spend so much time cutting to Daveed Diggs as a grown survivor of Nickel, with a camera apparatus pointed at the back of his head. Nickel Boys has this ambition to be about more than just the worst years of these kid's lives. So we get their present, their future, and in artsy montages of all kinds of borrowed footage, their dreams. The death camp exists in time, in culture. This movie does succeed in painting that picture.
Love Lies Bleeding, dir. Rose Glass
"Pain is weakness leaving the body" was written on the walls of at least two movies in 2024. One was my Movie of the Year, I Saw the TV Glow, the other was this one. Neither movie seems to actually believe that statement, they're messages of the inherent cruelty of the world that some people seem to cherish. It is why both films become queer romances, a kind of escapism from the social imagery of hetero Darwinism. Love Lies Bleeding is a rough gritty lesbian crime romance set out in a desert full of David Lynch call-outs and visuals. I especially need to discuss the performance of Katy O'Brian whose body type in this movie is very atypical for a Hollywood sex symbol, and oh boy, is her character ever a potent fuel of eroticism in Love Lies Bleeding. This film is a romance between Lou (Kristin Stewart) and Jackie (O'Brian), two young ladies with androgynous names working in very male fields: body building, gun ranges, and eventually murder-revenge. Also features an Ed Harris as the villain, Lou Sr, with Cryptkeeper hair and who chomps on bugs as much as he chomps on scenery.
Love Lies Bleeding is another one that just narrowly missed the Top 15 and I'm already regretting it, mildly. The ending is a very surreal moment that seems to be triumph of the fantastic, a superhero moment. Then that i, followed by a long take of reality setting in the morning after. Nothing left to do but finish the ugly business, take out the human trash, after the magic dies down.
[By the way, I also happened to like Drive-Away Dolls a lot too, the other lesbian crime thriller that came out two weeks before this Love Lies Bleeding. That's definitely a minor Coen (singular) Brother work. Margaret Qualley has a very big accent in that one, there's a subplot involving Matt Damon's dick, it's fun.]
Wicked: Part 1, dir. Jon M. Chu
I hate to admit that this movie was pretty dang good. I'm even less pleased to admit that Ariana Grande as Ga-linda was probably the best part of it. I didn't like the stunt-casting, I'm not a fan of her music, but Grande is absolutely perfect here. As a big budget musical blockbuster, Wicked is actually as good as you can possibly hope. The trailers showed this movie at its worst, with gross-looking CG landscapes and obvious green screen void spaces. Those are in the movie, the train station is some truly terrible-looking stuff, nothing is physical. However, in Wicked there are big impressive sets, huge crowds of dancers, big singing, it is a proper Show. There's shelving made out of giant spinning wheels in the library, which make no sense, but still are very fun vehicles upon which people can jump around and perform. You get a lot of inventive mileage out of that nonsense concept.
And yeah, Wicked is overly-long. This could have been one movie. The padding is never more than obvious than in 'Defying Gravity' which takes a whole ten extra minutes since they keep shoving exposition between Cynthia Erivo's very solid ability to sing as Elphaba.
Part 2 will almost certainly be worse since they used all the good songs in Part 1. Then again, whenever you split a story in half to make two movies, the second half is always worse.
The First Omen, dir. Arkasha Stevenson
I had roughly zero hope for this movie after the recent reboot of The Exorcist was such a disaster, on every level. The First Omen makes no sense lore-wise. Why should we care who Damien's mother was? Wasn't she a jackal after all? Well, ignore that lore stuff, and try to ignore the really dumb sequel-bait ending too. The First Omen is a movie that truly gets the terror and the history of demonology films. I did a whole series on this back in 2023, and I wish I could have ended it here, with a movie that did not exist yet. Because Arkasha Stevenson knows about how Satan can be a tool of powerful religious forces to defeat independence and tear down modernity. She took basically the thesis of that whole series and made a movie about it. And look where we are now, modernity is fully over, we have a Priest-Emperor, a Wicked capering Vizier, armies of loyal supporters, and God is happy he no longer has to pretend to love his children.
Anyway, The First Omen stars Nell Tiger Free, a magnificent actress who leads this movie through her subtle quirks and anxieties. A lot of praise was given to Lily-Rose Depp for pulling off an Isabelle Adjani impression in the newest Nosferatu, I was one of those praising her. Free does an even better Adjani call-back by recreating a particularly loud and unforgettable sequence from Żuławski's Possession. There are a few call-backs to the previous Omen movies, but really, The First Omen wants to be much more. It's the Suspiria remake, it's Rosemary's Baby, it's got a legit style by taking place in Sixties Rome and incorporating the massive student protests that spread across Europe in that decade and making that a feature. The script is clever, just when you think a nun would not act that way, you're given a very good explanation for why.
This is how you do a reboot. Don't actually remake the previous movie, make something of your own entirely and borrow the franchise's cache to sell it.
Trap, dir. M. Night Shyamalan
I am mildly in awe of this movie. This also came extremely close to making the full Top 15, by the way. Shyamalan has never been this silly before. He's had goofy premises before ("a beach that makes you old") but he usually plays them very seriously. Or rides the line so well that you cannot tell if Mark Wahlberg listening to a man blather about hot dogs in The Happening is supposed to be funny or not. In Trap, he's fully uncapped into gonzo wacky territory. This movie's premise makes almost no sense - the police decide to use a massive concert with 60,000 people attending as a sting to catch one serial killer, Cooper (Josh Hartnett). What even would do if they caught him? Could they even hold him amongst the sea of a billion other dads also attending this event? Hartnett gets the assignment completely, becoming a figure bouncing between menacing monster and lame Dad trying his best. Trap also operates on laughable video game logic, where our villain-protagonist is constantly fed the exact bit of information he'd need or the exact tool he'd use to solve the next puzzle to get to the next step. This is the most Hitman movie we've ever had, playing directly into the comedy of that game series: you can go anywhere and do anything with the right hats. The slapstick opportunities are endless.
At one point, Cooper is given a free box cutter and declines the tool, simply due to the lack of sport. His adventures drag on to the point that Trap has four different endings - making one wonder, does a movie actually need to end? Maybe we could just keep doing this forever? We do truly end this movie on a close-up of Hartnett, struggling to contain his laughter, maybe finally realizing what his world is. There are no consequences, he is living in a game. This is a playground of murders and hijinks and it can go on for as long as he wants to play.
All of Sony's Wonderfully Strange, Butchered Messes of Spider-Verse Movies
I'm going to miss this franchise.
I feel like we've over-corrected in terms of 'let's not talk about bad movies'. There's a lot of people who actively do not want people to post 'Worst Lists' anymore. And yeah, the early internet discourse of filmmaking was over-focused on "WORST MOVIE EVAR" talk. I'm guilty too. But also, some movies are just really bad in really interesting ways. We should appreciate this. I'm not calling these Sony Spider-Verse movies "good", but I am enjoying them on their level, which is something I cannot say for say, Deadpool vs Wolverine, a movie I enjoyed on practically no level. I don't want to see successful MCU movies anymore, I want to see people miss completely and create something unique by accident. No, I appreciate Sony for being so bad at this, because their movies are strange.
These are not strange in the way that a singular filmmaker having a unique vision creates something singular and personal. Ari Aster did not make these movies. Instead they are highly-processed and built by committee. No single human could have made the choices that led Sony to where they got to in 2024. Who ever could have thought a Madame Web movie would have been a good idea? Maybe somebody, but definitely no single person could have made a movie where Pepsi-Cola has more screentime than its title star. Where there's a a group of teenage Birds of Prey-esque Spider-Babes who fight crime... in the future but not in this movie! There were so many re-writes that the villain (Tahar Rahim)'s entire dialog is dubbed over so he seems like he's in an Italian movie from 1979. How many thousands of edits on that trailer gave us the immortal line: "he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died". Dakota Johnson almost by accident is the perfect lead for a movie like this. She's A-lister beautiful but she always feels just a little bit off, like she's holding back laughter at her own script.
I saw Venom 3 on election night. That movie features a dance sequence in Vegas, a family vacation to Area 51, and a Sephiroth-looking villain from another dimension in a sequel set-up that will never happen. I had a great time. They're melting down Area 51 in that movie with giant vats of acid, I don't know why. This movie is not good, but it is so heartfelt with its not-goodness that you cannot find a way to hate it.
You know the single greatest moment in movies in 2024? It was not Megalopolis and Adam Driver going "go back to cluUuUuUuUuUuUub", though that was close. (Megalopolis, also a wonderfully strange disaster that I love for being such a disaster.) No, the moment was in Kraven the Hunter, a movie that somehow existed, I also don't know why. Alessandro Nivola, star of The Brutalist, this time playing The Rhino, makes a squealing dolphin noise. That is cinema to me.
Worst Movie of 2024: Rebel Moon dir. Zack Snyder
On the other hand there are movies that simply bad and there's nothing fun about them being so bad. Rebel Moon is technically two different movies, or maybe four (it is needlessly complicated). I held off on writing about about Rebel Moon: Part 1 in 2023's list since Netflix and Snyder chose to release the movie in two parts. I figured, "hey, might as well give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it all comes together in the second half". It does not. Rebel Moon is Seven Samurai meets Star Wars, a concept that Star Wars shows have already done several times, and better. Zack Snyder made a four hour movie when Roger Corman did this concept in 1980 in Battle Beyond the Stars in just 105 minutes - and Corman's version was more fun. Snyder takes this so bitterly seriously, it is exhausting. His grim fascist muscular sculpture style has never felt more out of place than in space opera.
Worse than that, Rebel Moon is embarrassing. It feels like a child's first draft of a fantasy universe. Something you drew in middle school during algebra class and wisely forgot about. None of the hero characters have personality or fun gimmicks. I remember the spider monster that shows up in one scene more than any of the heroes. One Rebel Moon movie is two hours of backstory, and then the next entry is another hour of lore, followed by an endless dull war sequence.
How is there so little movie in this massive movie? You could have saved a half hour by cutting out the slow-motion!
Also, I watched the original 1954 Seven Samurai for the first time in 2024 - in theaters - and would you believe that movie is much better? One of the greatest movies ever made, it was the Best Old Movie I Saw in 2024. Also Kurosawa knew how to make a fun movie with charming unique characters. Snyder could never have anybody with as much life and personality as Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo.
I know there's an even longer Rebel Moon cut that's R-rated and is apparently better. That version runs that at six hours, one of the longest movies ever made, which sounds like a fucking nightmare. I will not watch that. I might rewatch Battle Beyond the Stars though, that movie has goofy costumes and John Saxon's giant head and spaceships with boobs.
...
Anyway, on that note of spaceships with boobs, I think we're done. But also, one last thing:
Here is a Sure-To-Be Wildly Inaccurate and Probably Embarrassing Top 15 Predictions List for 2025, even though we're already like 11% of the way through this year. My predictions for 2024 had a 4/15 accuracy rate. Maybe I can do better. Or I'll just go through my favorite directors working today and pick out which of their movies are coming next year:
15. Superman, dir. James Gunn
14. Predator: Badlands, dir. Dan Trachtenberg - Also he has some other Predator movie coming out this year too!
13. The Monkey, dir. Oz Perkins - I didn't much like Longlegs, but this trailer looks like a lot of dumb fun. Perkins doing a Final Destination. Also we're getting a new Final Destination.
12. Warfare, dir. Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza
11. 28 Years Later, dir. Danny Boyle - I think it has just been enough time to get nostalgic about the zombie craze of the 2000s.
10. Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler
9. The Ugly Stepsister, dir. Emilie Blichfeldt
8. Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro
7. Materialists, dir. Celine Song
6. The Phoenician Scheme, dir. Wes Anderson
5. Eddington, dir. Air Aster
4. Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Movie Rumored to Be About Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
3. Bugonia, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
2. The Shrouds, dir. David Cronenberg
1. Mickey 17, dir. Bong Joon-ho - The Silksong of these lists. This movie will finally come out, at least.
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