I'm fucking tired, man.
As I write this, Fuckface McDumbfuck has begun his second term of office and immediately made things worse for vulnerable groups, the great David Lynch just died days before his seventy-ninth birthday, and Los Angeles is on fire. 2024 was an objectively Bad Year for various political and personal reasons.
And it wasn't a great overall year for movies, if I'm honest, perhaps a knock-on effect of the SAG and WGA strikes, resulting in a relative lack of strong material to release. In some previous years I've struggled to keep my list to a reasonable level; this time I found myself including some movies that, while fun, probably don't belong on any "great films" list. So these write-ups are going to start pretty short, and then slowly become more voluminous until you won't be able to stop screaming "JESUS, DO THESE SENTENCES EVER END?" at your screen.
But there's a point to it all. I swear this to you.
Let's begin.
Great, necessary filmmaking? No. Did I start grinning as soon as "The Heat Is On" kicked in and didn't stop for two hours? Yes.
19. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
The nicest surprise of the year, a belated but lively and inventive sequel. Maybe Tim Burton still has some gas in the tank after all.
18. Trap
I am one hundred percent on board with M. Night Shyamalan's second act as purveyor of fine high-concept B-plus movies. Extremely silly—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—but always fun.
17. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Those apes are such good actors.
16. The Fall Guy
Overlong but otherwise breezy and delightful, the kind of star-driven, purposely insubstantial confection we don't get that often these days. (And probably won't again soon, given the box-office receipts on this one.)
15. Monkey Man
Dev Patel's directorial debut is a satisfyingly bone-crunching howl against encroaching authoritarianism in India, invigoratingly chaotic and with its heart firmly in the right place; it's tough to resist a film where a a sect of transfemme warriors just absolutely ninja the fuck out of a room of fascist goons.
14. Fancy Dance
Lily Gladstone and Isabel Deroy-Olson are terrific as, respectively, a small-time hustler on Oklahoma's Seneca-Cayuga reservation and her niece, whose flighty mother has gone missing. The kind of low-key slice of Native life we don't get to see often enough.
13. Heretic
Hugh Grant is bracingly creepy as the most terrifying of horror antagonists—the INTERNET ATHEIST!!! [music sting, thunderclap] Doesn't quite stick the landing, but fun throughout, and Grant gets extremely able support from Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as cheerful Mormon missionaries caught in his snare.
12. Hit Man
Richard Linklater's peppy black comedy turned me from Glen Powell agnostic to Glen Powell believer, as our current Generically Handsome White Guy Laureate turns in remarkably skillful and engaging work as a New Orleans professor who aids police in trapping people embroiled in murder-for-hire schemes. Powell has sizzling chemistry with Adria Arjona, turning the film on a dime from a Coens-esque "look at these idiotic criminals" romp to a Paul Thomas Anderson-ish "aww, the freaks found each other!" romance.
11. Late Night with the Devil
Ace character actor David Dastmalchian absolutely nails a rare starring turn in the Cairnes brothers' delightful mockumentary horror as fictional Johnny Carson rival Jack Delroy, hoping to juice his flailing show's Sweeps Week ratings by inviting on a very special guest…whose identity you've presumably already guessed from the title. A blast from start to finish, this low-budget indie (I have never seen so many production company logos before a film) did strike a sour note with its use of AI-generated "artwork" on screen. I know you didn't have much money, guys, but I'm pretty sure you had enough to pay an actual fucking artist. Sort your shit out.
10. The Order
Based loosely on a true story, Justin Kurzel's docu-thriller features Jude Law as a grizzled FBI agent with the sublime movie name Terry Husk, tasked with taking down the titular organisation, a hate group guilty of, among many other atrocities, the murder of progressive Jewish talk radio star Alan Berg (a cameoing Marc Maron)—the same story that inspired Costa-Gavras's deeply wrongheaded Betrayed, in which Debra Winger fell in love with Nazi Tom Berenger. (I guess you'll just have to trust me that this was considered a reasonable movie plot in 1988.) Just a straight-down-the-middle, gritty star vehicle for the ever-impressive Law (with excellent support from Nicholas Hoult and Jurnee Smollett), and for some reason I found it very satisfying watching the government punch white supremacists in the face rather than invite them to the White House.
9. The Substance
Demi Moore gives a scorching, career-redefining performance in Coralie Fargeat's satirical body horror as an "ageing" (actually a decade younger than the still-stunning Moore's real age; trust me, this film has layers) star that Hollywood has fewer and fewer uses for, leading her to seek eternal youth in the form of the eponymous medicinal sludge. Similar to Mickey Rourke's equally great work in The Wrestler, Moore brings every element of her career to date—the ups and downs, the plastic surgery, the lack of critical respect, the treatment from men—to bear in a role tailor-made for her, so it's a slight shame that the movie itself doesn't quite know when to quit and bloats out to an untenable 141 minutes. But Moore, costar Margaret Qualley as her younger doppelganger, the satirical edge, and some spectacularly gross set pieces still make The Substance more engrossing and memorable than higher-minded fare like The Brutalist (an entirely fine movie that nonetheless found no place on my list).
8. In a Violent Nature
An arthouse spin on Friday the 13th, Chris Nash's slasher is a deliberately paced exercise in sustained tension. You already know the story—there are woods, there are campers, there is an unkillable evil unleashed—but you're probably unused to seeing most of this unfold from the killer's POV, a conceit that Nash plays to the hilt with a series of long takes and minimal dialogue, slowly cranking the anxiety levels with rigid formal control rather than jump scares and shakycam. Does end up feeling slightly thin despite a sub-hundred-minute running time, but it's an impressive feat nevertheless.
7. Woman of the Hour
Given Anna Kendrick's sparkling onscreen presence and "fun best friend" public persona, you might not expect her directorial debut to be a deeply disquieting chronicle of how simply existing as a woman in the world can be a terrifying experience, but hey, that's on you, not her. Based on the story of so-called Dating Game Killer Rodney Alcala, but wisely centring his victims, Woman of the Hour attempts to get across the skin-crawling anxiety of living with the threat of violence constantly dangling overhead, and does so with such effectiveness that there are scenes where you won't want to move a muscle for fear of setting the creep off.
6. The People's Joker
I saw Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's heartfelt, long-gestating, self-financed $100m paean to sucking his own dick, in 2024. Folks, it was absolute fucking dogshit. I also saw Vera Drew's wildly inventive, personal ode to trans self-realisation, made for ten bucks and a pack of Parliaments, and friends, it pisses in the face of Megalopolis and then kicks its ass all over Gotham. Freely combining live action on wobbly green-screen backgrounds and snatches of work from dozens of animators, Drew's opus (a clear parody of the Batman universe, as much as Warner Bros. may have tried to claim otherwise) is a riotous collage of passions, hilarious, touching, and gloriously zine-y.
5. A Real Pain
A lot of us know someone like Benji (a surely Oscar-bound Kieran Culkin) in A Real Pain: brash, honest, a bit much, funny, charming, manic, depressed, would definitely give you a kidney if you needed it, secretly you kinda wish you were more like them. I lost such a friend in 2024, so perhaps that's partly why I was so taken and moved by Jesse Eisenberg's second directorial effort, about two cousins visiting Poland after the death of their grandmother—but A Real Pain is so finely considered that I would've loved it regardless. Eisenberg has got the goods.
4. Lake George
With a face like a crumpled pack of cigarettes and an expression that perpetually says "ah, Christ, this shit again," character actor Shea Wigham was made for noir, and Jeffrey Reiner's is a prime modern version of the sunburnt L.A. variant. Wigham is Don, a former gambling addict and recent parolee who, in classic noir fashion, finds himself in dire circumstances and agrees to a "favour" for wannabe crime kingpin Armen (Glenn Fleshler)—knocking off the dirtbag's sort-of girlfriend Phyllis (the great Carrie Coon, dynamite as usual). Chaos must inevitably ensue, but what makes Lake George so much more than a catalogue of genre tropes is Wigham's performance as a dope who's just old and tired and would really like to rest awhile before he's done.
3. Love Lies Bleeding
And speaking of people in over their heads… Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding recalls the small-town neo-noirs of John Dahl (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West), but with a queer perspective. Kristen Stewart's New Mexico gym manager Lou catches the eye of just-passing-through bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian), and soon enough the corpses start piling up. Blood is spilled, cigarettes are smoked, steroids are injected, and cinematographer Ben Fordesman casts everything in the most lurid of reds and the darkest of shadows. Sweaty, thrilling, and refreshingly sleazy.
2. Rebel Ridge
Utilising the "these small-town cops messed with the wrong guy" formula of First Blood (and the eighties programmers that ripped it off), elevated-genre expert Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) makes the riveting Rebel Ridge a sustained outcry against injustice while delivering the action goods. Aaron Pierre takes a hopefully star-making turn as Terry Richmond, an ex-marine biking into a Louisiana town to bail his cousin Mike out of jail, stymied at every turn by corrupt police and an uncaring bureaucracy. And then these motherfuckers just have to push him too far… But that's just the beginning, and Terry finds himself tangled up in something even bigger than he imagined. Top-notch support from Don Johnson and AnnaSophia Robb, combined with Saulnier's spare, tight direction, make Rebel Ridge possibly the best action film of the last decade ("without Mad Max or John Wick or :Impossible in the title" division).
1. I Saw the TV Glow
Roger Ebert liked to describe film as "a machine that generates empathy". I dearly wish Roger had lived long enough to see I Saw the TV Glow, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun's second work after the fascinating We're All Going to the World's Fair and one of a small handful of films in the last decade I can quite confidently label a masterpiece. A trans narrative shot through a magical-realism horror lens, rarely has a movie so captured a feeling of wanting to crawl out of one's skin because something isn't right, so captured the ways pop culture can help us understand ourselves, so captured the soul-destroying pain of not living the life you need. It's a movie I hesitate to even describe at a basic level, so full is the film with the wonder of discovery (for the characters and the viewer), stunning visuals, and striking, heartfelt performances. I Saw the TV Glow is a machine that generates empathy. It is the best film of 2024, and nothing comes close.
I hope David Lynch saw it. I think he would've loved it.
