With that in mind it must be time for me to put together my personal best-of list. It is, of course, a collection of my favorite movies and not in any way intended to be an end-all-be-all, definitive countdown. Art isn’t a competition, quality and value are subjective, there is no objective “best” when it comes to film, and I hate ranking and rating things. In case you want to know where I’m coming from.
[Related Reading: The Ten Best Movies of 2023]
As is tradition, there’s no coherent rhyme or reason to the arrangement. I do, as so often happens, have one clear, or at least pretty clear top movie and the rest will unspool randomly in whatever order they occur to me. Just know that if it’s on this list, I think it’s fantastic and is well worth your time and attention. And if we’re being honest, the moment I hit publish I’ll probably think of another ten movies I could or should have included.
If you feel like it, let me know your favorite movies of 2024 in the comments. They can be from this year or simply new discoveries you made in the last twelve months. Or you can tell me how wrong I am and what shit taste I have. That works too. You do you.
The more I think about it, the more clear it becomes that Furiosa: A Mad Max Story is my number one movie of 2024. It’s George Miller here to show the whippersnappers how it’s done, it’s post-apocalyptic, it has the best, most mind-boggling action of this or most years; of course I love this damn movie. It’s like it was grown in a lab to do every last thing I want a movie to do. At one point, Chris Hemworth’s delightful antagonist, Dementus, asks, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Miller casually strolls over, taps the mic, leans in, and says, “Yes, yes I do.”
With more production starts and stops that you can count (you can if you want, but there were a bunch), Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge has been on my most-anticipated list for a number of years. It finally arrived and it is good. The Green Room director challenged himself to make one of his trademark violent movies only without any death, and the result plays like bloodless Rambo that also happens to be a scathing indictment of civil asset forfeiture. It took its time but it was worth the wait in my opinion. Also, Aaron Pierre should be a huge star after this.
And now it’s time for Timo Tjahjanto to check in with yet another all-time ass-whipping banger. I maintain The Shadow Strays doesn’t quite hit the highs of The Night Comes for Us (no movie does, that’s not a realistic measuring stick), but hot damn does this deliver everything an action fanatic dreams about at night. Primarily utilizing actors without a background in action, Timo delivers a sprawling epic of violence and face punching that ‘s so beautiful it brings a tear of joy to your eye.
Wild, lo-fi, endlessly inventive, and almost litigated into non-existence, in The People’s Joker, writer/director/mastermind Vera Drew traces a journey of trans self-discovery framed as the story of everyone’s favorite comic book clown prince. Strange, resourceful, and genuinely moving while still steeped in camp, parody, and satire (this has way more emotional impact than a movie this silly on the surface has any right ot have), Drew and a massive list of collaborators deliver what is easily my favorite superhero movie of the year, my favorite of the last few years actually. You are unlikely to see anything like this anywhere else or any time soon.
You have to love a good neo-noir, and the top of that heap in 2024 is Love Lies Bleeding. Rose Glass’ sweaty lesbian romantic thriller delivers the goods. Katy O’Brien and Kristen Stewart are aces as an aspiring body builder and the daughter of a local crime boss, respectively, a creepy, be-mulleted Ed Harris. The film hits all the genre markers and adds enough off-the-wall flourishes to set it apart. I’m not as high on Glass’ previous film, Saint Maude, as many folks, but this is captivating and repulsive in equal measure. Fantastic stuff all around.
If you classed up Brian Yunza’s gooey 1989 body horror opus Society, you might wind up with something like The Substance from Revenge director Coraline Fargeat. A fading fitness celebrity (Demi Moore) turns to an illicit, mysterious drug that creates a younger, fresher version of herself (Margaret Qualley). And shocking, there are consequences. Goopy, gory consequences. A sharp, razor-witted take on aging, the beauty industry, and social pressures heaped upon women of all ages, this builds to one of the wildest, bloodiest climaxes of the year. And Moore and Qualley deliver two of the best performances of 2024.
We as horror fans did Abigail dirty letting it flop at the box office. The latest from Ready or Not directing team Radio Silence drops one of the most fun, straight up entertaining genre movies of the year. When a group of criminals kidnap the daughter of a powerful criminal figure, they get more than they bargained for, namely the tween ballerina is a vampire. The cast, fronted by Melissa Barrera, is fabulous across the board, though Dan Steven stands out doing what he does best, playing a delightful creepy weirdo. This is a damn hoot.
The only notes I mad while watching Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s novella Queer were, “Horny Lynch vibes. Thank fuck.” And I stand by that assessment. Daniel Craig has never been better as an aging gay junkie expatriate in 1950s Mexico City who thirsts after a young GI. The film is lush and off-kilter, and Guadagnino brings some groovy tricks and tactics to bear to visually exemplify lust and longing. There’s also a wild-ass sequence involving ayahuasca, puking up internal organs, Leslie Manville as a psychedelic jungle doctor, and some sloths just hanging around and being cool guys. I’m not sure how much Burroughs actually translates to the screen, but this is weighty, strange, bittersweet, and erotic in equal measure.
I don’t think any movie this year, or most others, captures such a specific, singular viewpoint as Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. No one could have made this movie but her. It straddles genres, delves deeply into gender, identity, the crushing loneliness of a life unrealized, and the myriad continuing struggles, intricacies, and pitfalls those involve. And all of this filtered through a spot-on ‘90s aesthetic and an exploration of the power of the cultural touchstones we cling to, define ourselves by, and that form the texture of who we are. Dense and layered, it’s a movie I haven’t stopped thinking about and that rewards repeat viewings.
Based on a real life theater program at New York’s notorious prison, Sing Sing tells a story of the redemptive power of art and inmates using performance to stay connected to their own humanity while incarcerated. With a few exceptions, most notably an astonishing Coleman Domingo delivering my favorite performance of the year, the cast is made up of real alums of Rehabilitation Through the Arts playing versions of themselves. Greg Kweder’s film is quieter and more contemplative than your typical prison movie, and the result is a naturalistic, deeply affecting narrative of the transformative capacity of joy and love and hope even in the most dire circumstances.
The Rest
I don’t know that Macbeth director Justin Kurzel’s thriller The Order is quite on this list, but it’s a blast, which is odd to say about a movie about violent white supremacists. Jude Law is great as an oddball, world-weary FBI agent hunting a chilling Nicholas Hoult, a villain who feels all too current. Also, based on a real story, this happened near where I live and I’m old enough to remember seeing it unfold on the news.
The latest from Tilman Singer (Luz), Cuckoo, falls into the near-miss category. Definitely not for everyone, it’s strange and sad and scary, and anchored by a fantastic performance from Hunter Schafer. It also features another Dan Steven quirky weirdo creep role, which is always a welcome addition. And this time he gets a flute solo.
Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms dives headlong into the darkest corners of the internet. His horror thriller about an extremely online fashion model’s obsession with true crime and an ongoing trial of a serial killer explores the psychological toll of parasocial relationships and our incessant need to know everything about everything all the time. It may not all entirely come together, but it’s a thought provoking project that lingers long after the credits roll.
So many movies about punk and punks get all the surface trappings right but whiff when it comes to anything beyond aesthetic trappings. Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s Los Frikis, about a group of punks in Cuba in the ‘90s who intentionally inject themselves with HIV so they can live at a government sanitorium, captures the messy complexity of the seemingly utopian existence and the desire to live a life of freedom.
This is getting long, so I’m going to speed things up a bit. Hold onto your butts, I’m about to name drop a whole mess of movies.
100 Yards delivers probably the best overall fight choreography of the year (I honestly can’t say why I didn’t include this on the main list other than sheer laziness), and The Tai Chi Master is up there in this regard as well. We also got multiple installments in the always delightful Baby Assassins franchise. And I won’t call it a good movie, but damn, Madame Web is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
People who moan that there is no good horror simply aren’t looking. As always, there’s a mountain of fantastic genre offerings out there from this year. If I have time, I may do a horror best-of list, and I don’t even care for some of the bigger titles from this year—Longlegs, Nosferatu, Heretic, though the latter includes what can best be described as Chekov’s magic underwear.
I don’t even know how to describe She is Connan, but it’s a bonkers, innovative spectacle to behold. If Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a wacky romantic Estonian musical, that might begin to explain Chainsaws Were Singing. Maybe. Cambodia got in on the act with Tenement, the spooky tale of a generationally haunted apartment complex. Oddity doesn’t quite stick the landing, but the first hour or so taps into some primal, deep down dread. Ghost Killer, from many of the Baby Assassins players, could and maybe should go into the action category, but there’s a ghost, so here we are.
Much like with Abigail, we owe Lisa Frankenstein an apology for letting it flop, it’s messy and uneven, but also a damn fine time. Prequels are hit and miss, but A Quiet Place: Day One is both thrilling and expands on the world established in the other movies. Die Alone has a unique and interesting take on the well-trod zombie territory. It’s What’s Inside offers up an inventive, witty body-swap horror, and features the only instances of Chekov’s spiked vagina sculpture I can think of in cinema. The Vourdalak, sometimes grandpa wanders into the woods and comes back a puppet. Strange Darling has plenty of twists and turns and shifts in perspective, and an incredible performance from Willa Fitzgerald. Trap is a goofy blast, as is Get Away. Steven C. Miller’s Werewolves is another banger action/horror hybrid. And we got the nun horror tag team of The First Omen and Immaculate. Both rule. Also, I didn’t hate The Crow. I know, I’m the one.
I could keep going, I barely touched on sci-fi and didn’t mention a single documentary, but I’ll wrap this up now. Movies are awesome. I don’t have anything more insightful to offer than that.
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