The Ten (Or So!) Best Movies of 2024

‘Anora’ (MovieStillsDB)

Sometimes I go back and look at my old best-of lists to see if they hold up. I would humbly suggest that my 2014 list was pretty good. Interstellar was there (loved my rewatch a decade later in IMAX 70mm). The Grand Budapest Hotel is among the best movies of the decade if it is not the best movie of the decade, a clarion call about the danger of creeping totalitarianism and the clash between civility/civilization and nihilistic barbarism. Plus Blue Ruin (it’s great, check it out), John Wick (nearly the only original movie to have spawned a hugely successful franchise in the last 10 years?), and Snowpiercer. To say nothing of the number one pick, Gone Girl, which may be my favorite David Fincher movie.

Anyway, the point is: lots of great movies on that list, yeah? And yet, what’s the subhead on that year’s crop of picks? What was my overall takeaway? “A lot of good films in 2014, but few great ones.”

Oops.

Turns out another line holds up better: “No room for well-made but disposable and unmemorable awards bait on this list, I’m afraid. I went with the pictures that stuck with me, that inspired repeat viewings and left indelible impressions.”

And so that’s what I’ll be doing here. Again, I’m not sure if there are a ton of capital-G Great movies this year, but there are a bunch that left an impression. Some seem timeless, some vibed with our moment in ways that felt almost eerie, but every movie here left me thinking. This is not a guide to awards season but a guide to the movies that stuck with me.

(Honorable Mentions: Rebel Ridge, The Bikeriders, The Order, Here, Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, The Substance, Terrifier 3, Late Night with the Devil, and The Promised Land.)

10. Megalopolis/Horizon: An American Saga—Part One

I don’t know that either of these works entirely as a standalone film.

Horizon because it’s the first of four epic Westerns planned by Kevin Costner, the second of which was supposed to come out six weeks or so after the first and then got shelved because the first bombed at the box office so horribly. Some have said this should have been a TV show, and maybe it should have, but we don’t get nearly enough sweeping Western vistas on our biggest screens.

Megalopolis, meanwhile, is a bloated mass of messy ideas that have been percolating in the brain of a mad genius for nearly 50 years now, and you see remnants of ideas that maybe should have been cut before Francis Ford Coppola started shooting in 2023. (I dunno man, I’m not sure a Soviet satellite should play a key role in a movie made in 2024 that takes place in the future.) But Megalopolis remains one of my favorite moviegoing experiences of the year thanks largely to the completely deranged performances Coppola wangled out of Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Voight.

Regardless, I feel like we need to pay tribute to our elder statesmen of cinema who pour their own money into realizing massive visions of filmic excess. I’ll never punish a filmmaker for overreaching.

9. The Last Stop in Yuma County/Strange Darling (Tie)

If Megalopolis and Horizon¹ are examples of auteurist excess to be celebrated, then The Last Stop in Yuma County and Strange Darling are great examples of budget-constrained auteurist self-control. The spiritual heirs to Tarantino’s early-’90s output, both films play with expectations and structure and are just a little mean to the characters and audience alike.

The Last Stop in Yuma County isn’t quite a one-room thriller, but it’s close. Writer/director Francis Galluppi packs a whole bunch of crazy in one room and patiently waits for the fuse that was lit the moment we heard a radio announcer say a couple of bank robbers are on the road to reach the dynamite. Once it does, there’s quite the explosion.

Strange Darling, meanwhile, plays with structure in a way that’s clearly designed to hide a ball—one can’t help but think of Reservoir Dogs’s time-hopping screenplay—but it’s not clear precisely which ball writer-director J.T. Mollner is hiding or why until you’re pretty close to the end of the film. And even if you realize early on that someone’s playing with your expectations, you won’t mind because stars Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald are so damn compelling on the screen.

8. Between the Temples

Honestly, I just love Jason Schwartzman in Between the Temples and wish he was in more stuff. He’s so good in this as the awkward cantor trying to find love. (He’s also very good in a one-scene role in The Last Showgirl, which is hitting more theaters at some point in the next few weeks here, I think.) Everyone in it is good. Carol Kane is good. Robert Smigel is good. Madeline Weinstein is good. Better than good, maybe; I’ve thought about her more than just about anyone else from the film in her kinda-sorta double role as Ben’s dead wife and potential future wife. I hope to see her in more stuff going forward. (The editing is pretty good, too.)

7. Dune: Part Two

‘Dune: Part Two’ (MovieStillsDB)

I’m very ambivalent about this movie. On the one hand, it has some cool visuals and featured the moment where I finally saw what everyone else seems to see in Timothée Chalamet. On the other, it’s a bloated mess—that whole middle hour is interminable—and the conflict between the Atreides and the Harkonnens simply doesn’t work because the Harkonnens are barely characters in this movie. Still: The opening floating Sardaukar assault, Chani and Paul’s attack on the spice harvester, and Paul’s first sandworm ride are among the best things I saw on the big screen this year, and it’s hard to knock a movie with three sequences so memorable off this list.

6. Anora

Anora is kind of the opposite of Dune: Part Two, in that the middle hour takes viewers on a sojourn but it isn’t dull or interminable. Indeed, it’s kind of the heart of the picture, the period in which Ani (Mikey Madison) is forced to come to grips with the fact that she’s married a child and their relationship was doomed before it even began. It also has my favorite supporting work of the year in the form of Igor (Yura Borisov), who just does tremendous face work as the guy who knows she’s going to have to come to grips with the fact that she’s married a child.

5. Red Rooms

Since I wrote my review of Red Rooms—which is at least partly about how social media numbs and warps us, a theme that had added resonance following the murder of Brian Thompson shown on a loop on social media—we’ve been treated to a woman being set on fire by a psychopath shown on a loop on social media, repeated gifs of another psychopath shoving a young man in front of a train, and endless visuals of carnage in New Orleans following the terrorist attack there this week. I think this is all very bad for us!

4. Longlegs

Longlegs is one of those movies I’m glad I saw in a theater where I had to surrender control of how I watched it: You need the uninterrupted slow-burn tension that accompanies Osgood Perkins’s framing of every shot as though something is about to sneak up on Maika Monroe’s character and the accompanying all-encompassing sound design. Very creepy watch!

3. The Beekeeper

I’m sorry, this is a movie in which Jason Statham acts as an avatar of righteous vengeance and goes to war with telemarketers who scam old people out of their money all while working his way up the ladder of the American government as he learns that the rot extends to the presidency. The Beekeeper is the most 2024 movie on this list, right down to the scumbag Gen Z dipshit begging for his life by offering Jason Statham—again: Jason Statham—NFTs to let him live. (The costuming is pretty good, too.)

2. Nosferatu

Nosferatu is just this perfectly calibrated gothic horror, the sort of picture that transports you to another age and plops you firmly into its ethos. As I noted in my review, between this, The Witch, and The Northman, writer-director Robert Eggers has created a body of work that accepts the moral landscape of its characters and dares to ask “what if mysticism and evil were real? How would pre-scientific people respond to that?” Which in turn causes us, the viewer, to ask what we’ve lost by rejecting the idea of inhuman, supernatural evil.

1. Civil War

I’ve found that most of the people who didn’t like Civil War simply wanted it to be a different movie. Sometimes what they wanted was a movie that put us inside the civil war we only catch glimpses of. Battles and tactics and all that stuff. More specifically, what these people seem to have wanted was a movie that offered a plausible route to a civil war based on current political grievances. This is because what they really wanted was the ability to say “this movie is Good because it shows how Bad my enemies are.”

But this is not what writer-directed Alex Garland is up to. I think the key scene in the film comes about midway through, when the quartet of journalists we’re following come upon a gas station where some good old boys have strung up a guy in a carwash and are torturing him to death because he was “looting.” Whether or not he was looting, the key fact to this case is that the guy with the gun felt slighted in high school by the guy hanging from his wrists. “He didn’t talk to me much,” the gunman says. And that’s the cold reality of so much sectarian conflict: Despite big, bold statements about ideology and belief structures and political systems and all that jazz, as much if not more violence in sectarian war is driven on a person-to-person level by basic resentments. Anger at neighbors, a desire for what they have, a demand for respect. Chilling stuff, and something all the cosplayers hoping for increased civil strife keep in mind.

1. I am aware that, strictly speaking, a two-way tie at ninth should mean that there is no tenth-place entry, let alone two tenth-place entries. This is why it’s the ten OR SO best movies of the year. My list, my rules.