Consider, if you will, the tennis ball that Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist slap around for the last ten minutes of Challengers. Does it know where it's going? Not at all. Is it having fun? Hard to say--periodically? Depending on how much it enjoys being knocked around in a meaningless frenzy. But has it spent enough time whirling around in said meaningless frenzy that it's kind of just cool with it? Probably. Does it scream "let's fucking goooooooooo" in its head every two to four seconds? Almost definitely (assuming it has the vocabulary of a chronically online 15 year old or of every single candidate that has ever been on American Ninja Warrior, a haven for people who like to go if ever there was one). Point is, the ball spins and it goes and it only sometimes wishes it weren't getting smacked by a racket every half a second.
The other point is--and this might come to surprise you--that hey, I am that tennis ball. I've spent the past few years using my intros to lament the general malaise and stagnation that I've found myself in after academia came crashing down around my ears. And granted, I'm still feeling those things, but I am still spinning and going and ready for Josh O'Connor to slap me with his tennis racket. I've had ups and downs this year, professionally and otherwise (a recent conversation I had with a pseudo-employer: "If all goes well you can call yourself an X publishing house editor soon" Me, in my head: "joke's on you, I applied to be an X publishing house editor two months ago and they didn't want me"), but I'm still kicking (right into senility, I assume), and I'm here for it, so here we go.
This new (and surely short-lived) enthusiasm also extends to movies and writing. The past two years have seen me weeping about how I didn't see that many movies, or how it felt difficult to incorporating them into my life, or how writing these posts felt like an unavoidable chore--one I wanted to do, without question, but still one I had to psych myself up for. Well throw all that trash out the proverbial window (or literal window, I'm not your babysitter), because this year I am straight psyched to start this--so psyched, in fact, that I'm starting to get a chance one or two movies that I'd meant to find before I wrote these. But it's best to strike when the iron is hot, and call my iron every major film star of the classic era, because my iron is smoking, and it's probably not going to last that long compared to other, more down to earth irons.
Point is (is this the third point?) that I am excited to be here, and I'm excited you're here to share all this with.
(Sidebar: am I only striking this tone because I'm listening to the Challengers soundtrack? There is probably nothing on this earth I couldn't do a little cooler and more enthusiastically while listening to this soundtrack. Will definitely put it on whilst doing taxes, cleaning toilets, arranging funerals, staring quietly into the dead of night, etc.)
Last year, circumstances of all kinds kept me down to the low, low (for me) number of 74 movies from the 2023 calendar year. Well past me can suck it, because this year I've logged a neat 101 movies from 2024, which isn't a record for number of movies scene by 'best of' press time, but it's awfully close. And the result of that is....ehh? Followed by some lackadaisical shrugs and noodly arm motions. What a wildly off-consensus year for me--there are plenty of beloved movies out there, but I tended to find myself cool on (or actively antagonistic to) many of them. And even among those 101 movies, I'll admit there are fewer films that elicit real passion out of me than I'd like. But I don't think that's a bad thing! For me, the fun of all this comes from watching movies--however I feel about them--and sharing that with others, which is to say that watching 101 bad movies can be just as fun as watching 101 good movies. Luckily for all of us, neither of those extremes are the case this year, as you're soon to read. Lots of good stuff, lots of mediocre stuff, and a fair shaking of movies that made me gaze dully out the window, wishing that someone could find the first organism to crawl out of the primordial ocean and kick it back in before it made take a Gladiator sequel seriously.
I'll be continuing with my vaguely streamlined format this year (he says, meaning 8,000 words instead of 15,000), which is to say that paragraphs will be a littler shorter and pictures/links will be slightly more important. And I also don't think this is a bad thing, either: I'll probably never be able to return to the paragraphs-long entries for every category and movie that I so laboriously embraced when I was 19, but who was that helping? This way, you can read this in less time than it takes to read Moby Dick, and I can write these without developing debilitating arthritis in my hands at the age of however old I was two years ago. It also means that I will be copy-pasting any Letterboxd reviews I have for these movies over to here (though I will expand on them if I find them too insubstantial). This is a real shame for any of you who already follow me over there, and a less real but still important shame for those of you that don't, but I'd argue that the real shame is a) that no one has come to my home to break all my fingers yet, thus ending this nightmare for all of us, and b) that you don't all follow me on Letterboxd already, which is arguably the greater sin. Seriously, it's more or less the last good social media out there--it's just movie reviews, lists, pictures, and general silliness. If you enjoy these annual postings, you'll love it there, as you can find me doing this exact thing basically every day of the year. It is, in short, a certified hoot, and I highly encourage y'all to come play on it if movies play even a minor or tangential role in your life. So find me here if that's the sort of thing that interests you!
So here's how we'll proceed from here: 101 movies (in the past, I would make an alphabetized list of everything I've seen, but present me is old and tired, so feel free to just ask what I have and haven't seen!), a list of the 20 best movies of the year, the five worst ones, the best scenes of the year, and a truly punishing number of typos, bad jokes, and embarrassing outpourings of emotion. I'm excited--and you are either excited or tied to a chair and being forced to read this. And either way, You're here for the long haul, so we might as well all settle in.
Note: I had meant to see No Man's Land before writing this up, and I should be seeing it this week, but I decided not to wait. If it does crack the top 20 after the fact, I'll have to find a way to draw attention to that.
Honorable mentions: though they didn't make my top 20, I'm still grateful for the verdant, slothful stillness of Here (the Belgian movie, not the Robert Zemeckis fever dream of the same name), the high-octane antics and frolics of Thelma, and the carefully considered dilemmas and vape hits of Conclave.
20. Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel)
Loved this martial arts/revenge flick whose primary goal is to stage some of the gnarlier fight scenes in recent memory, but manages to hit plenty of other goals besides. Dev Patel's got stronger acting chops and a more consistent vision than most the people out there tossing their $200 million budgets around; somebody back a Brinks truck up to his house and let him go nuts.
(on Amazon Prime, rentable elsewhere)
19. Big Boys (dir. Corey Sherman)
Wildly specific in its sidelong glances, half-realized hopes and fully realized fears, and in the performances of its stellar and keyed-in ensemble. Conjures the kinds of hazy memories that get pushed down and become less important as your come into yourself, but *god* were they earth-shaking as they happenedThe relationship between the two brothers also struck me as one of the most honestly and organically realized examples of antagonistic siblings that I'd seen in some time. Overall, a lovely (and at times totally mortifying) watch.
(rentable)
18. Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Gets an automatic pass purely based on the number of moments that made me sit up and say 'jesus christ' in the theater, but it doesn't need that pass anyway; it's a bigger, uglier, and more interesting than the first Dune. Kind of thrilling that blockbusters (or at least one of them) get to look and behave like this.
(on Netflix, Max, rentable)
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17. The End (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer)
Like watching people doing finger painting next to silhouettes burned onto the wall by an atomic bomb: naivete depicted in its best and worst iterations. Hideous--kind of a slow cinema horror movie, even?--and special, even if it never seems totally sure why it's a musical. The kind of movie that ensemble prizes were made for: everyone is fantastic, sure, but in such a specific way that makes it feel totally plausible to imagine that this group of people, their chemistry and dynamic, has been unearthed after decades in a bunker together.
(rentable)
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16. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
A real experience in throwing everything into the woodchipper, genetically and aesthetically, just to see what gets stuck, but nothing wins me over like killer sound design and an eyeball inside another eyeball. It's not subtle (or is it so over the top that crashes back down onto subtle), and it's got substantially more buckets of blood than your average Hollywood satire, but it's stuck with me for months and remains compulsively rewatchable, even when (especially when) it's being kind of gross.
(rentable)
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15. Trap (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
Shyamalan's movies, for all their ups and downs, are so proudly, resolutely their own thing, and they're always the better for it. Is there any other living director whose camera is so elegant, eloquent, and weird at the same time? This movie understands that Josh Hartnett is always at his best when everything good about him is being weaponized (like here or in The Virgin Suicides) or when he's being taken more seriously than anyone has ever been taken seriously before (like in Black Hawk Down or Oppenheimer), and Trap has the good sense to do both of those things.
(on Max, rentable)
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14. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof)
Pretty miraculous in its existence, distribution, and execution, the way it weaves its own complexities, warmth, and horrors into a narrative that largely takes place inside an apartment or a phone. Feels like a sledgehammer in both the best and worst senses.
(rentable)
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13. Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
Somehow ended up being the movie I wanted both The Wild Robot and Ponyo to be while also being not at all the movie I expected to see. Staggering on a visual level--would that every director working in animation (or any medium) had as sharp a sense of blocking and framing as Zilbalodis does. There were moments in here that made me gasp from their beauty alone, or maybe their simplicity or their casual thematic resonance--lots of gasping, at any rate.
(on Max, rentable)
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12. Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass)
The sound design alone is well worth the price of entry, but luckily, so is everything else. Went into this expecting to scream Kristen Stewart's name from the rooftops--and I've done that too--but my immediate impulse was to frantically google how I can see more of Katy O'Brien as soon as possible. (Imagine my horror discovering that I'd already seen her in Ant-Man: Quantumania--whatever, we're still cool). Is there any better combination than tender queer romance, hallucinatory imagery, and horrific violence? (...there probably are, but it's still a fun combo.)
(on Max, rentable)
11. Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar)Phenomenally warm and moving stuff. At what point do we crown Colman Domingo as one of the best actors of his generation (or on the planet), because it's a crown he keeps earning. Not to take away from the ensemble cast, who are just as strong. Any moment not spent with the group and the theater production felt like a moment missed. It's all a huge and expansive achievement--and another in this year's line of movies about theater--that I'd happily seek out again.
(available on demand)
10. Ghostlight (dir. Alex Thompson, Kelly O'Sullivan)
Great year for movies about how both art and healing are an active choice, and how both enrich how you experience the other. The movie levitates a little every time it drops the camera in a rehearsal room or performance and lets us spend time with the process of creating something out of nothing. Plus a series of shots near the end that gave me full-body chills--really special stuff.
(rentable)
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9. A Different Man (dir. Aaron Schimberg)
Another (but not the last!) movie on this list about the cathartic or destructive power of theater, this time squashing questions of identity, disability, and how they exist both in the real world and as depicted in film into a giant, metaphor-shaped blender and shredding them into a hunk of material it shapes into a mask. Hard to think of an object that does more heavy lifting this year than Sebastian Stan's mask of his old face that he uses to help him perform a life that used to be his own. And speaking of Sebastian Stan, what a year that man's had--and he's at his absolute best here, by projecting oil as an excuse for charm when silence doesn't feel like it's enough.
(on Max, rentable)
8. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)Could just as easily have been called The Persistence of Memory, if that title weren't already famously taken (and maybe a little gauche in a 2024 context). How people see, or are seen, and how these moments are passed through a dream filter and reconstructed to establish the shifting sand on which you can build a life, or an idea, or the whole world. Things that are personal become massive and structural, and things that are massive and structural shrink to the size of a shed, a lawn, or a street, which is to say almost invisible--except to the people that are looking Ross's experiment in first-person film is daring, joyous, and painful--a folded crane of a life (or lives) pushed into a camera lens.
(available on demand)
7. Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
People love to personify nature, but when nature tears people apart, it doesn't feel anything at all--something it has in common with all of the other structures wrapped up against each other. Despair as a fundamentally empty and emptying experience, one that can creep into the smallest and most unnoticeable places. Things that don't matter until they're stacked on a ladder, a whole sequence of thoughtless little tragedies raining down on each other. An inevitable and mindless kick to the stomach filmed in slow motion.
(on the Criterion Channel, rentable)
(source)
6. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
At the best of times, it's really, really hard to be what you already are, much less when there is someone in the moon who wants to put you in the ground. I'll always fall for movies about the transformative power of walking down familiar hallways made unfamiliar by light, sound, or the thing you're feeling today that doesn't feel like it did before. I'll doubly fall for anything that knows I can clock the Buffy credits font from a mile away. If theater as transformative tool is one recurring motif in this list, I also have to draw attention to the movies filmed and framed like horror movies but taking place entirely inside other genres (this one, Evil Does Not Exist, The End).
(on Max, rentable)
5. Better Man (dir. Michael Gracey)
Not one I had on my register as a sneak contender for my favorite movie of the year, but what can I do--it's so lush, romantic, peppy, starry-eyed, its heart gleefully stapled to its sleeve, that I was fully in its grasp (paws?) before the title card even dropped. Maybe a case of right movie at the time, but I laughed, I cried, I drove home buoyed, singing, feeling like I had "it," whatever that was supposed to mean, at least for a little while. A+ moviegoing experience, and a real tragedy that more people didn't go out for it.
(available on demand)
(source)
4. Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu)
Impossible for me to have watched this objectively as a tragic theater kid who came of age in the Aughts. With all the matching ridiculous and melodramatic baggage that this movie and I bring to each other, I couldn't walk out of this without feeling like it taught me how to feel joy again in some specific and looney way. It's not perfect (sometimes it's not even good--'Defying Gravity' is the easiest slam dunk out there, but the movie still managed to fumble it in like three different ways), and I couldn't really claim this is a perfect example of cinematic excellence that earned its spot here through skill alone, but it sure as shit is exactly what I wanted and/or needed this year, and I'm happy to embrace that. Who am I kidding--I absolutely loved this movie.
(available on demand)
3. Kneecap (dir. Rich Peppiatt)
The whole runtime felt like sticking a fork into a socket, in the best way. Where's the word for feeling briefly close to an entire world that you've got absolutely nothing to do with? This movie had me feeling moved by the idea that I'm the last person in my family (on this side of the ocean) that still speaks German, a mundane but essential skill that they carried with them in a boat over a century ago, only for that mundane, essential skill to slowly slink away across the generations. Of course, there's an obvious world of difference between an endangered language whose use is itself a political act and learning a widely spoken language that your family used to speak, but here we are. Anyway, I had an absolute blast with this whirling dervish of a biopic/music movie/call to language and teared up when the radio worker told the boys she was learning Irish--not bad for a movie in which someone snorts an industrial amount of cocaine through a wrapping paper tube in front of an audience.
(on Netflix, rentable)
(source)
2. All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia)
Difficult, for some reason, to express exactly how this made me feel, so I'll leave it short by saying that this movie does exactly what movies should--capture something something ineffable, something impermanent, and make it feel as though it can last forever. Achingly beautiful--a good reminder why cameras were invented, or maybe cities, or trains, or dreaming.
(rentable)
1. Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Nothing this movie doesn't want you to know about itself that can't be found in the first two minutes as it introduces the New Rochelle Phil's Tire Town Challenge in some little backyard tennis court with ESPN graphics and the music screaming like it's Wimbledon or the end of the world--and, obviously, it's both. Everything in this movie, like for most people, takes place at the halfway point between stupidity and grandeur. Everyone would be embarrassed if the camera pulled back just a little bit further and they could see themselves, but who ever sees themselves? It's all sweat and ripped insides and what might happen but probably won't but what if it did, right?, and the ridiculous (and real) certainty that whatever you're doing in this one stupid moment is the most important thing that has ever happened.
I was legitimately scared to blink for the entire ending sequence, and in plenty of other sequences besides. This movie felt like it crawled inside my brain and did some origami with it while Trent Reznor mauled a drum kit somewhere nearby, which is maybe the highest compliment I've got. A joy, a rush, a watertight argument for style as substance. What more could any of us want?
(on Amazon Prime, rentable)
And there's that! (I say, like I haven't been working on this since this morning). In interest of brevity (and the fact that I need to press 'publish' on this within the next 90 minutes or face terrible, terrible consequences), let's keep moving and dive into the best scenes of the year!
Note: I'll link to a clip where possible.
Note note: I generally avoid choosing endings for this category, but I'll mention if a scene contains big spoilers.
Best Scenes of the Year
10. Fun on the Freeway-Carry-On
In a movie that's all about ratcheting up the tension until you can hardly breathe, this scene, in which a detective on the trail ends up fighting a suspect while driving down the freeway, takes the cake.
9. Hallway-I Saw the TV Glow
I already mentioned how much I love a good walking down a transformed hallway scene, and this example from I Saw the TV Glow really stands out, the main character strolling down previously hostile (or empty) school halls that have been with him his whole life, only now to be filled with the secret world that the two loners at the heart of the story have built for themselves. A triumph in mundane things--light, music, descriptions of a tv show that doesn't exist--creating something transcendent.
8. Angels-Better Man
What do you get when you mix a funeral scene with Robbie Williams' biggest, most emotional song? Thank goodness (and what a shame) that there was no one else in the theater when I saw this, because I was audibly sobbing by the time this scene was through.
7. Dancing Through Life-Wicked
Is this on here because it's a high-energy musical number that ties all of the movies various emotional and narrative threads together and sends them on their merry way, or is it because Johnathan Bailey's performance so hot that literally everyone who saw this had to pick their jaw up off the ground when the number was over? Baby, it's both, but who care.
6. Hotel Room-Challengers
Is this the awkward boner that launched a thousand ships and/or tennis balls? Challengers' inciting incident for a decade of shitty games knows it has to make us believe that everyone involved would spend years chasing this high, and it succeeds with flying colors and/or tennis balls. Funny, awkward, and--like all good uncomfortable threesomes you have with your best friend and the tennis pro you met three hours ago--desperately horny.
5. Finale-Evil Does Not Exist
Vaguely senseless to put this here, as there are no Youtube clips and I'm not going to describe it at length so as to avoid spoilers, but all I can say is that if you've seen this movie, you will certainly remember the ending.
4. High Street/Rock DJ-Better Man
An astounding feet of short form storytelling, choreography, and pure energy--we dash through years of history without losing any of its coherence, the dopey joy of finding success as a boy band, or the fact that the main character's a bit of an asshole who can't help but hurt everything around him. Add all that to the giddy camera with its faux one take and you've got something electric.
3. Nightclub Brawl-Monkey Man
Dev Patel works his way through a multi-story nightclub filled with an army of enforcers aided only by whatever he can pick up in the kitchen, a few fireworks, an army of trans women, and some stellar music cues. 6 minutes of ante-upping mania.
(no huge spoilers in this, but it does take place near the end of the movie, so bear that in mind if you want to go in not knowing much) (also this is pretty violent, so click with care:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPZKw6Nyx24)
2. Gas Station Labor-We Live In Time
Not necessarily a perfect movie, but it does have the good sense to take a 10 minute detour into perfection in the middle of the movie as the central couple gets stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital and ends up having their baby in a gas station bathroom with the attendants serving as put-upon midwives. The scene itself is hilarious but also wildly moving, finding the right amount of pure light in which to bath everyone who's there--I still think about the moment the two attendants share with each other after the paramedics have left, quietly sitting in that post-event joy and and enjoying it with each other for as long as they can. And speaking of things I still think about, the way Andrew Garfield breaks into tears the second the labor is over has snuck its way into my head at least once every week or two since I saw this.
(No trace of this scene whatsoever on youtube, sorry)
1. Match Point-Challengers
I know I said I avoid endings, and massive spoilers for Challengers here, but come on, how could I not? Simply one of the wildest and most invigorating endings that I've seen in some time, a headlong rush of color and sound that makes you want to cheer and throw up at the same time, all driven at a breakneck pace by the sick dance beats/gnashings of horrible little electronic elves that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross can cook up for us. Like I said earlier: I was afraid to blink the whole time.
And finally, the worst movies of the year! While I don't want to dwell on negativity or end on a down note, there's some catharsis to be found in setting fire to the things that wasted your time and then walking away with a smile on your face. And I've brought the matches! Note that I generally avoid movies that are supposed to be awful (life is too short and I am too tired), so this can just as easily be seen as a list of most disappointing movies.
The Worst Movies of the Year
5. Saturday Night-on Letterboxd, I did a whole bit about how Lorne Michaels and Jason Reitman think their god and expect us to follow suit; here, I'll just say that this exhausting and self-satisfied bit of wankery is rightfully going to spend the rest of its existence in the $5 bargain bin at Wal Mart.
4. The Book of Clarence-This both had me rolling my eyes at its limp attempts at spirituality and unleashing my inner screaming Sunday school six year old ("That's what you got from the Mary Magdelene story? A chance for Jesus to show off his superpowers and call a woman a whore? He didn't even draw anything in the goddamn sand!"). Feels like Jeymes Samuel's audition for an X-men movie? Or at least for a music video staring the X-Men. That's the only plausible x-planation for that guy showing up to the crucifixion carrying the nails like goddamn Wolverine.
3. Here-eagle-eyed readers will remember the Robert Zemeckis fever dream I mentioned earlier, and oh look, "here" (be sure to know that I am winking directly at you right now) it is! It gets points for trying something genuinely unique and strange, and then promptly loses all of those points for an unending series of the most baffling choices imaginable executed at the level of high school theater.
2. Gladiator II-One of those semi-annual acclaimed movies that makes me hold my head in my hands and think wow, cinema really is a dying medium.
1. Madame Web-Walking into a theater at 10.40 on a Tuesday, saying "one for, uh, Madame Web, I guess," and having the cashier laugh at me is one of the more genuine human interactions I've had in a long time. Which is good, because it's the only thing keeping me from writing this whole experience off as a hallucination. It's almost hard to put something this guileless and terrible ahead of some of the other, weightier entries on this list, but all I have to do is think about how aggressively and obviously an artistically bankrupt cash grab this is, and it helps me sleep at night.
And that's it for today! Against tradition, I won't be back tomorrow with the next entry, but I will be back Thursday! I'm terribly sorry to make you wait an entire two days before I deliver my lukewarm thoughts on actors doing actor things, but such is the world we live in. In the meantime, what do you think? How many envelopes filled with angry bees are you sending me about the fact that I've got Wicked and Better Man in my top five but never once mentioned half of the other best picture nominees? Luckily, you'll have til Thursday to stew in your anger and realize that I'm right*.
*I am never right, but we have fun anyway
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