Caveats
Sticking with just movies I saw in calendar year 2024 for this list – sad to consign movies like Nickel Boys and The Brutalist to the no-mans land of the new year awards-fare but it is what it is – Perfect Days would have been my #1 movie in 2023 if it had been available to watch before 2024, but instead it goes on no list except the one in my heart.
Honorable Mentions:
Queer, Anora, Challengers, Kill, Megalopolis, I Saw the TV Glow, Civil War, The Substance, Problemista, and Sing Sing
10. Exhuma
It was a weird year for horror, with a lot of mid-budget under-deliveries and micro-budget over-deliveries. Terrifier 3 and The Substance being the big money movies of the year might indicate audiences are ready to move on from “prestige horror” into something more in the vein of “schlock and awe”. Also, there was a prequel to The Omen which was one of the best studio horror movies in ages by which I mean: it was alright.
I saw most of the mainstream horror releases last year (although I missed some key ones, especially some interesting indie flicks that only played in town briefly – Oddity and Frogman come to mind). Of the ones I saw, the only one that really stuck with me (besides number 8 on this list) was Exhuma. Exhuma is a Korean horror flick starring Choi Min-sik of Oldboy fame focusing on a couple teams of Korean exorcists/grave feng shui experts. They find themselves reluctantly dragged into taking on an obviously cursed job by the lure of money and the opportunity to put to rest a great evil. It’s the kind of big and exciting supernatural thriller that was the James Wan sweet spot 15 years ago, with successive twists that up the ante to new heights every time you think things are finally under control. The final act of the movie took me completely off-guard and absolutely rocks.
What makes this movie stand out to me is its sense of scale. It spends a lot of time building up the context of Korean spiritual practice and the expertise of the characters, showing their confidence and competence in dealing with other spirits. The point of all this is so that when they get scared, we know we should be Really Scared. When they realize the thing they were scared of was just the forerunner of a way scarier thing, it feels dark and enormous, infinite – that’s that sense of scale I’m talking about. In a world where the best Hollywood horror movie of the year is a prequel to a 70s Gregory Peck vehicle, it’s nice that someone out there is making original horror films that feel big.
9. Trap
The story here is Josh Hartnett’s incredible performance, one of the greatest performances of a strong year. So much of this movie takes place inside of Hartnett’s serial killer dad of the year’s head, and he convincingly sells every line of thought, every tactic, every juke and maneuver. You end up rooting for him to get away, or at least wanting to see how he’ll pull it off (we know how movies work – logic tells us he will escape, but how?). And then M Night pulls off the biggest trick of the movie by pulling the POV out of Hartnett’s head and into Night’s daughter’s character Lady Raven, confronting us with how fucking scary Hartnett is once we’re in the perspective of a potential victim. It’s a new take on the classic M Night twist, one that works at a character/audience relationship level instead of at the plot level – I found it very effective.
On top of that, the movie is an exercise in delight from start to finish – M Night’s love of plot contrivance, his joy in strange dialogue - it’s all surfaced here in a really fun way. We’re in on Cooper’s little secret, and because of that every dialogue exchange for the first hour plus of the movie gets to be a little joke that the other character’s aren’t in on. M Night’s classic twists are not so much radical surprises as they are continually drawing back the curtain, exposing more and more of this world in ways that feel additive and fun.
Finally, the movie is a visual delight as much as anything else – between working on this and challengers (no disrespect to either!) Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is making me feel like it’s 1955 again – both movies feel like the 2020s version of the old B-movies that were forgotten until Scorsese et al elevated them 30 years later because they were shot as beautifully as anything in international art cinema. As a side note I have no opinion in the great M Night wars, neither a reclaimer nor a hater. I’ve mostly been medium on the little bit of his work I’ve seen, but this certainly inclines me towards giving him more of my time.
8. Nosferatu
The last big drop of the year (for me at least, Complete Unknown and Babygirl heads go with god), I’ve been anticipating this for some time. While I initially got off on the wrong foot with The VVitch (I have since re-evaluated), I loved the Lighthouse, and when I finally got around to The Norseman in early 2024 I loved that too. Seeing this on Christmas Day was an interesting experience – I think my ultimate opinion is this is a movie that delights in the details but is lacking as an overall object. Everything visual in the movie is masterful. Costumes, obviously. Beautiful shots top to bottom. The way Eggers gets juice out of every little bit of light so that he can slather the film in oppressive darkness while still keeping everything perfectly legible and aesthetically delightful is a real triumph, although as others have pointed out this will likely be a real issue when it goes to streaming. Thank god we have a filmmaker not pre-emptively editing or colour-grading with Netflix in mind. The real stand-out for me is the scene in the eastern European village/inn – since if you listen to Eggers talk, so much of his take on the film is going back to original vampire legends and adaptations of eastern European folk stories (and of course the original Nosferatu), this scene really stands out as the one depiction of the people who originated the vampire, and it’s one of the powerful and memorable scenes in the film.
Where I think the film suffers is the lack of anything that feels like a complete new idea in adapting Dracula – I think returning to the folk roots and centering the film much more heavily on the relationship between Dracula and his female victim, giving her much more characterization and agency, really more agency than any character in the film, is a good central idea, and Lily-Rose Depp’s performance is excellent and powerful, but it doesn’t feel like they give that idea enough juice to be more than just an idea. Additionally, despite the telegraphing the conclusion feels pretty underwhelming instead of the kind of tragically macabre myth or fable-like feeling of destiny I think Eggers is going for. I’m intrigued by the idea of a 3 hour directors cut coming with the Bluray, and that’s something I’ll be looking forward to this year.
Something I’ve been coming back to when thinking about this film is that often with these movies where I find the production excellent and the plot underwhelming is that often as I revisit them I like them more and more, as the lack of surprise becomes less important and the craft maintains its power – hoping it’s a grower, but I like it quite a bit already despite my quibbles.
7. Kinds of Kindness
One of the funniest movies of the year, Yorgos returns to his purest, most abrasive incarnation – this could only be more of a swerve from his last couple of academy beloved costume dramas if it had been in Greek (although, while I say that of course I loved both of those movies and don’t understand why the academy loved the disgusting and audacious Poor Things so much – I don’t expect The Substance to get the same treatment although it’s the 2024 film that I think should draw the most comparisons!) [editing note - The Substance actually did quite well with oscar noms – I guess my comparison was more appropriate than I realized.]
This triptych of nightmarish scenarios returns Yorgos to his primary obsession, the arbitrarily constructed laws and dictates of human relations, and the social punishments used to enforce them. A man lives his life precisely according to the daily instruction of another man. A woman returns from a presumed death to her mourning husband, who believes she’s an imposter and formulates increasingly strange and horrifying demands that she must complete to prove that she is herself. A new age religious sex cult obsessed with water purity sends out searchers to locate their messiah.
All three of these stories center on someone who disobeys a strange and unreasonable demand and is punished for it by shunning, a human practice as old as time. The stories end up centering on the ways they debase themselves to try and be accepted back into the relationship or society they are being shunned by, with mixed results. The entire movie is painful, humiliating, and extremely funny. The kinds of bizarre and elaborately complex relationships depicted in the film hearken back to his earlier works, particularly Dogtooth and The Lobster, for which maybe we should credit Yorgos’s co-writer Efthymis Filippou, who co-wrote all of Yorgos’s films pre-The Favourite. The scenarios themselves are the star of the show here, just like those earlier films. They are ostensibly set in our real world, but the way humans talk and behave make them feel like they’re from another planet, strange and alien. And yet their desires are so so human, and the way they’re forced to navigate these alien social constructs to gain the love, acknowledgment, and belonging they crave allows us to think about the ways that our desires are used to entrap us in elaborate social labyrinths that might seem strange and alien if encountered by an outsider.
6. Rap World
“Some of the best nights of my life were spent in parking lots.” A sub one hour youtube video is one of the best movies of the year. Rap World captures the energy of the late 00s better than any soulja boy needle drop in an oscar nominated film ever will. Connor O’Malley is the poet laureate of dude failure. He sees and captures certain kinds of guys and certain emotions and energies that are just that sweet spot of desperation, humiliation, and lack of self-awareness. This is one of the funniest, sweetest, and saddest movies of the year and it’s only 50 minutes and free.
5. La Chimera
A movie that has grown on me all year long. A modern Indiana Jones, a story of a man who can’t stop chasing the past even though it leaves him no future. What I love about this one is how dense it is – it’s a story we come into the middle of, making us archeologists ourselves, forced to construct the history of this man and his friends and the missing woman who is visible only by the impressions she left behind on those around her - like how a fossil leaves an impression in rock (I get that they’re archeologists not paleontologists but work with me here). We pick up bits and pieces here and there, snatches of conversation, little moments of context dribbled out amidst the slurry of living daily life. We watch Josh O’Connor’s character build the foundations of a new life, a potential for something real, an opportunity to leave the past behind. Much like the goddess’s head he and his friends hold for ransom, once it’s in his hands he realizes it’s not really what he wanted.
4. Evil Does Not Exist
An absolutely puzzling movie that I’ve been knocking around in my head all year. I’m not sure if I’ve come up with anything intelligent to say about it, but that’s to be expected. I really enjoyed this – certainly one of the most beautiful movies of the year, and its strange tense energy lingered with me long after I left the theater (although I returned a few hours later for an evening showing of Princess Mononoke – the two films fit together, don’t they). I spent the whole movie tense – it felt like something horrible was going to happen, a feeling that built all movie long, until suddenly it did – but not in the way I expected. There’s no closure or explanation – just more unease. That’s nature for you, I guess.
3. Furiosa
A movie that was strangely controversial, but generally beloved by my friends and I. Comparisons to Fury Road are inevitable and of course unflattering, it’s kind of a miracle that we’re very lucky to have. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the way Miller constructs fantastical images that feel like they were taken out of the silent era, haunting and communicating emotion purely through visual language. Hemsworth is awesome, one of the great performances of the year, a sadistic and self-interested alternative Mad Max, a vision of the kind of monster a man like Max could have become, driven by vengeance and dropped into a world of violent tyranny.
I really like the mythic touches Furiosa brings to the familiar Mad Max setting – while Miller has always brought up in interviews the idea of Mad Max being a series of campfire tales about a semi-mythical figure (appearing most prominently in the actual films in Beyond Thunderdome with the cave kids), Furiosa makes that framing idea part of the text in a way the other films shy away from. The storyteller, the History Man, appears in the film, and we understand him to be the one telling ultimately telling the story to us – the way the final epilogue is presented as one possibility out of several then ripples back through the whole film, emphasizing that this is one man’s account of a different persons story, and making the film a kind of post-apocalyptic paul bunyan story.
2. Dune: Part Two
For me, the movie event of the year. My fiancé (nice) fell in love with Dune this year and so we saw this 4 times in theaters (she saw it 5!) [editing note - since I wrote this we went and saw it again] – I know it like the back of my hand. The strongest stuff is everything with Butler as Feyd-Rautha, an incredible performance backed up by excellent costume design, make-up, and production work. I love everything on Giedi Prime, I love the duel between Paul and Feyd in the climax of the film – it’s all stellar. I think the thing I find most compelling about both of Denis’s Dune movies but this one in particular is the way they hone in on this feeling of alien-ness that I think is core to Dune as a setting. This is a cold alien future hostile to human things, human scale, human desires, human ways of living. This is literally true in the sense of the harshness of space, the harshness of Arrakis, but it’s just as true in the way culture has developed, these complex aristocratic networks with elaborate social and political customs, strangling the worlds they dominate – the movies are about these small human acts and gestures standing out amidst worlds of monumental architecture and brutalist spaceships, and the Atriedes appeal and Paul’s appeal are the way in which they try to maintain a humanity amidst all of this – and ultimately Paul abandons his humanity to chase the coldest path imaginable, a campaign of mass slaughter chosen because from a computational perspective, purely number of lives lost vs saved, killing billions will lose fewer lives than the next best alternative. That’s frigid – that’s inhuman – that’s Dune.
1. Look Back
This is a special movie for me – I read the manga one-shot this is based on when it came out, loved it then, and when I saw this was coming out I figured it would be special. It feels excessive to do some of the most ridiculously detailed and beautiful animation ever put on screen to depict the everyday motions and activities of two children walking, drawing, and growing up together. That said, it’s central to the themes of the film – a story about two kids spending hours and hours drawing together, and the relationship forged in artistic dedication – you can only imagine the work hours that went into putting together some of the more impressive sequences like the protagonist running home after meeting her new friend for the first time.
The story itself is simple and heartwarming with a tragic but clever narrative trick in the middle that makes the film more than just cotton candy. The first half is about friendship and creativity and passion, and then the second half is about being older and reflecting on the choices you made and how things could have gone differently – it’s an emotional sugar rush, dumping multiple sequences that could be the emotional right hook of a peak era Pixar movie in quick succession, but I think they hold together and build rather than muting the effects of each other or wearing you out emotionally.
I had a really good time at the movies with this during a period where I was dealing with some tough stuff in my life and I hope anyone reading this checks it out and enjoys it.