My favorite movies of 2024

The list of new movies I wanted to see in 2024 is, as usual, three or four times as long as the list of new movies I actually watched last year. If you've already seen every movie you've ever wanted to, you probably don't have a standard relationship with linear time, so you already know I'm writing this from a place of sub-omniscience, but it bears mentioning because sometimes you have to write three extra paragraphs assuring everybody you know you aren't an authority. I know that about myself.

I didn't see Anora, for example, even though Sean Baker is one of my favorite filmmakers. I didn't see Bird despite loving Andrea Arnold or The Devil's Bath, despite being sent a screener for review (the screener didn't work!) and I didn't see Nickel Boys despite thinking Colson Whitehead is a genius. I didn't see A Different Man or AJ Goes To the Dog Park despite being at a festival where both played and I didn't watch the Jan Terri or Mogwai docs despite wishing for years that somebody would make movies about them. Guy Maddin released a new movie! One of the Coen bros released a new movie! Jia Zhangke made a new film (that, granted, I could only watch if I was in China)! I spent a year feeling down that I'd never see The People's Joker and then the movie came out and I wasn't able to actually see it!

I just did not get out to theaters. I believe I only saw four new, non-repertory movies on a big screen, and three of them made this list (I was involved with the fourth, so I'm not including it here because I have shame (Barack Obama, take note!)). My life is no longer conducive to getting out to a theater every weekend, which probably means my year in movies is no longer conducive to a top ten list. But I still love them, so here we are.

Some notes on things that didn't make the top eleven:

• I thought the Conner O'Malley special Stand-Up Solutions was great, but I also saw him perform it live a year or two ago. As much as I laughed at the filmed version, it didn't/couldn't hit me as hard as it did then, but it would probably be in my top ten if I had gone in cold. I also severely fucked up by not seeing the new specials from Courtney Pauroso and Carmen Christopher, though I saw versions of their sets live and think they're incredible. [I'm taking so long to write this that I've actually seen the Carmen Christopher special and I love it.]
• Trap was a lot of fun and Josh Hartnett's performance was incredible. Unfortunately, the movie hinges on another performance almost as much as it does his, and that one was not good. When Trap's trailer ended with a note that the film features "original songs from SALEKA as LADY RAVEN" and I googled who SALEKA actually is, it seemed suspect that Shyamalan would cast his own musician daughter as a pop star phenomenon and that her inclusion here would be considered a selling point. I felt bad that she was pushed on this big a stage for her first acting job, and I appreciate that her dad was trying to set her up at Taylor Swift Fantasy Camp, but she wasn't ready to play a character whose whole thing is stage presence. He probably should have given Anya Taylor-Joy another call. Regardless, Hartnett's bulletproof here, and the parts of the film he's allowed to own completely– something like 80%– are great. He gets even better as the film goes on, fully selling the idea that this psychopath either cares about his children or believes he cares about them. When Hartnett's character tries to give his kids life advice, despite just having been exposed as a monster, it's both funny and a little chilling, and I think most actors would have played it one way or the other. Hartnett possesses the same skill that James McAvoy had in Split, which is what Shyamalan needs in a collaborator for his post-Village work.
• My 2024 list is surprisingly short on documentaries, but I wanted to quickly shout out the miniseries Ren Faire, the Brucesploitation history Enter the Clones of Bruce and the emotionally devastating The Truth vs. Alex Jones. I know why that last one is so hard to sit through and I appreciate why the first act of the film is structured as a beat-by-beat timeline of what happened at Sandy Hook, but I wish I could unsee that whole section. There are some things I can't handle.
• The best pre-2024 movie I saw in a theater was Andrew Getty's The Evil Within, which screened as part of PhilaMOCA's Psychotronic Film Society. Take this to mean I really didn't get out of the house enough, that my taste is so bad you should disregard the rest of this newsletter or both. The only thing The Evil Within's inclusion here really speaks well for is the power of watching trash in a theater full of people.
• I decided to only include 2024 films I actually saw in 2024, so Janet Planet and Look Into My Eyes aren't included here, but I loved both.
• I sure wish there was a newsletter platform that had Substack's functionality and UI but not Substack's "hey, if a bunch of Nazis use our service, what can we do to stop them?" politics.

11. Hometown Prison (directed by Richard Linklater)

Hit Man was great, but Hometown Prison, one third of HBO's God Save Texas, was the Linklater thing I most connected with last year. It doesn't feature any half-assed Investigation Discovery reenactments, though, so Max didn't seem to promote it at all. The other two films under the God Save Texas umbrella were similarly strong, so it's too bad the series seemed to pass through the world so quietly.

The primary recurring question of Hometown Prison is "How can Huntsville, Texas, where Linklater grew up and which he loves, be so dependent on a prison?" For me, the emphasis on that parenthetical is the key to its success. Linklater isn't shitting on the place he grew up, he isn't saying "Thank god I moved to Austin and never looked back." He's got genuine affection for the people in Huntsville, even if so much of the economy and culture there relies on human misery. Linklater's empathy is one of his big strengths as an artist and his ability to genuinely ask the questions he asks here, rather than start at an endpoint and work backward, is beautiful. I still haven't been able to shake the footage of the kid waiting for his dad to get out of jail. I used to work with incarcerated people but rarely worked with their families; I probably would have gotten burnt out much quicker if I had talked with their kids. What a fucking mess.

10. Rap World (written and directed by Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar)

I saw this at PhilaMOCA, one of my favorite places on Earth, but it made me wish Good Good Comedy, where I saw so many of the comedians in Rap World live, still existed. All three leads performed at Good Good, sometimes together, and I knew then it was special but didn't realize how short-lived that venue would be. You have to protect that stuff.

9. I Saw The TV Glow (written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun)

I wish every movie had this many choices. I know that sounds stupid, a half-step removed from Harry Styles saying he loved that he was in a movie that felt like a movie, but so many movies were made without anybody making any choices. I'm not just talking about fish in a barrel films here– plenty of indie darlings get by on somebody else's framework, be it David Lynch's or John Cassavetes' or Agnes Varda's or any of the big canonical people everybody apes when they want to make a smart movie without doing a ton of thinking. I don't like some of the choices here (the bad cover of "Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl," the film's tiny part in the cultural rehabilitation of Fred Durst, etc.) but appreciate that somebody was willing to try something. We aren't always so lucky.

I haven't read too many other people's thoughts on I Saw The TV Glow but what I've gone through makes me think I have a significantly worse view on the "There is still time" theme. As far as I can tell, there was time but there isn't anymore. The Owen character had all these little moments in time when he could have done something, but he didn't, and now he is where he is, mumbling apologies to people who didn't notice him. "There is still time" is such a romantic notion, but maybe you need to pierce it the way I believe this movie does to really kick people and make them realize the difference between that and "There will always be time." I'm doing a little hedging here– I don't want to pretend I can speak to Jane Schoenbrun's intentions or larger feelings– but the way I felt about I Saw The TV Glow's end was probably the most depressed I felt about any art in 2024. I appreciated its power.

8. Alien: Romulus (directed by Fede Álvarez, written by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues)

Jurassic Park is the film series most comparable to Alien, in that both start with perfect films and continue on with sequels that are, at best, kind of enjoyable if you pretend you aren't watching a follow-up to one of the greats. If I acknowledge there will never be another Alien and that a new sequel won't top what's already been made, I can have a hell of a good time with Romulus. The Flowers for Algernon bit with the android isn't that effective, especially because it collides with the absolutely dire Ian Holm zombie, and if neither was here– if Fede Álvarez just replaced their scenes with slow tracking shots of all of these perfect computers with CRT screens and chunky, blinking lights– the movie might be perfect. As it is, Romulus makes this list with a huge asterisk. It would have been less distracting if they'd hired Kevin Spacey to play the Ian Holm character.

7. In A Violent Nature (written and directed by Chris Nash)

Gus Van Sant's Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park run is one of my favorite stretches in anybody's filmography. I am the proud owner of a "Blockbuster exclusive" DVD of Paranoid Park (shout-out to 2Cs Vendor Mall in St. Helens, Oregon). So this is extremely my shit. I wish more people took genre not as a series of limitations but as a series of tropes to truly play with (beyond stuff like "what if a WOMAN was the killer this time?"). In some ways, In A Violent Nature is a reverse-Elephant, in the sense that Elephant spends its first chunk with victims and then cuts to the aggressor's viewpoint for the final third. In A Violent Nature's also got the same aspect ratio as Paranoid Park and you know I'm a total slut for weird aspect ratios just kidding I don't know what that would even mean.

There are a million differences between this film and Elephant, but it's interesting to compare In A Violent Nature to Van Sant's films (and those like them) because writer-director Chris Nash is evoking such a specific aesthetic. Elephant is based on a school shooting, and even if a few details may be changed in Van Sant's fictional version of Columbine, you know before the movie even starts that innocent kids are going to be shot and killed. Last Days is about a Kurt Cobain-figure and is titled Last Days. These outcomes are inevitable. Everybody who sat down to watch these films knew what was coming. This movie's plot has a few inevitabilities based on its genre, but the "final girl," the most famous slasher trope, gets upended all the time and when one of the characters here emerged as the final girl, I didn't know what to expect. There's a very long shot of nothing that scared me more than any long shot of nothing ever has because I wasn't sure if the movie intended to subvert or honor that trope. Beautiful stuff. All the little lore bits were similarly clever in the context of this movie– if this were actually the fourth or fifth movie in a horror franchise, the "call backs" would feel pandering, but here they were an interesting, sideways version of the building blocks of a slasher series.

Honestly, though? Movie could have been slower.

6. Dan Licata: For The Boys (directed by Danny Scharar, written by Dan Licata)

I just realized Danny Scharar directed two movies on this list (Dan Licata has a small role in Rap World, too) and does a good job complementing Licata's "middle school kid who watched CKY videos and played Tony Hawk games at a friend's house" aesthetic in both of them. There isn't a ton you can say here without just repeating, and thus ruining, all of Dan Licata's jokes, but I laughed a ton and am amazed at how well his energy works on camera. I've seen him live twice and think he's a genius but you never know if things will hit differently when you're watching them on your couch and the TV volume is low so your kid won't wake up. He's too good for that to matter, though.

5. This Closeness (written and directed by Kit Zauhar)

I reviewed This Closeness over here. Briefly, I'll say that I probably embarrassed myself in front of writer-director Kit Zauhar when I interviewed her and said I related most to This Closeness' least relatable person (or, better put, the person you'd least want to relate to, which of course isn't the same thing). There are three primary characters in the movie, two are regular people and one is the kind of person you'd look at on the bus and think "Something's clearly going on there." It's a skill, though, to make me empathize with that person's weirdness, beyond the easy movie shortcut of making that character's life overwhelmingly sad. There are some pretty fascinating things going on here, empathy-wise, but if I kept writing I'd just start accidentally repeating what I wrote in that review last year.

4. Furiosa (directed by George Miller, written by George Miller and Nico Lathouris)

I don't know how he keeps doing it. I liked Fury Road more than I liked the original Mad Max trilogy and I might like Furiosa more than I liked Fury Road. So much of that is career-peak (as of now) Chris Hemsworth, playing some combination of Warren Ellis (of the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds, not the comic guy) and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Anya Taylor-Joy's total reserve works beautifully against this character who took the apocalypse as an excuse to become a murderous Freddie Mercury. If we never get another Mad Max movie, by which I mean a George Miller Mad Max movie and not a reboot from whoever's directing Gerard Butler movies right now, this was the best way to go out. And if we do, I'd be shocked if they were this good. But George Miller's pulled off miracles before.

3. Everything I Learned When My House Burned Down (written and directed by Jacy Catlin)

This feels a little on the nose given what Los Angeles is going through, but Everything I Learned When My House Burned Down) has been in this spot since I started writing this list in December. This is a short documentary/monologue that you can watch in nine minutes right here, so I'd do that.

2. Eureka (directed by Lisandro Alonso, written by Lisandro Alonso, Fabian Casas and Martín Caamaño)

I reviewed this one for a site, and you can read that here. Everything I say here will most likely be a worse version of what I said in the review.

There's a lot going on in Eureka and watching it unfold is part of the joy, but I'll briefly sell it to you like this: It's a triptych where each part has obvious immediate connections and connections that grow the more you think about the movie, which I had no choice but to do. You can't stop thinking about art like this.The first section is a Western, shot in black and white, starring Viggo Mortensen as a cowboy on a Searchers-like quest to rescue a white woman from her Mexican captors. Its sterile violence becomes more upsetting the longer it goes unremarked on, until you're watching Viggo, the white hat hero, blow people away without warning, from a gun he doesn't need to reload. A possible to key my interest in these opening scenes: I think The Searchers sucks.

This section ends abruptly when it's revealed to be a movie on a TV in the second section. In the present day, in full color, two sisters on a South Dakota Indian reservation deal with regular life. The older sister, Alaina (Alaina Clifford) is on the Oglala Sioux tribal police force, while the younger sister, Sadie (Sadie Lapointe) helps Alaina and plays basketball. There's a crime, a white actor (who appeared in the first segment) shows up to do research for a trauma porn movie she's preparing, a trashed hotel room is perused. If this was a short by itself, even without the context of the preceding and following segments, it would be one of my favorite movies of the year. This is the first on-screen credit for both Clifford and Lapointe and if they're given material this good in the future, or if they're given Lifetime-level material, or if they're given nothing more than scripts for household appliance TV spots, I have confidence they'll be worth watching. They're incredible here, to the point I hope director/co-writer Lisandro Alonso releases whatever unused footage he has of the two. I'd watch them do anything and I'm excited to follow their careers.

The third segment jumps back in time a few decades, to a Brazilian jungle where a different colonized people are living their normal lives. The transition between the South Dakota segment and this one is too poetic and fascinating for me to blow here, in a blurb in a newsletter. We have to leave it there. But if you see Eureka, let me know. Let's talk about.

1. Rebel Ridge (written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier)

I'd been waiting four years for this and it was worth every day. This is the good pulp, the perfect Jeremy Saulnier shit, what so many deluded hacks think they're making. It takes one of my favorite crime subgenres, the "Why haven't they reported what I did?" freak out, and nails every part of the story. It's a crime Rebel Ridge went straight to Netflix but it's a miracle I live in the same city as the film's (brilliant) composers, the Blair brothers, and got to see it on a big screen. Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson and AnnaSophia Robb provide three perfect angles on a crime rotting a city from the bone, and then Saulnier continues to explore different facets of who's damaged and who's complicit in endemic corruption, until everything's been laid out and blowing apart a wall in a police evidence locker feels like one of the subtler ways to set things right.

Pierre, especially, is a revelation, running the high wire act of playing a character both in control of every scene and smart enough to know he can't reveal he's in control. He has to hold his cards so close to the vest he practically folds at times. At the screening with the Blair brothers, which was my second time with the film, one of them pointed out Pierre was playing Saulnier's first competent protagonist. It's a smart observation, given Saulnier's past leads have been regular people who accidentally wandered into hell or who had half-thought-out plans that didn't come together when the time came.

Piere's character's hyper-competence becomes such a huge part of the rage at the core of Rebel Ridge: If this person, who knows his rights, could suplex any living thing and picks up on every detail he sees can get screwed over by the police, what chance do you and I have? This character could have torn through Murder Party, Blue Ruin or Green Room in Quibi timeframes. He would have possessed the training to deal with Hold the Dark's machine gun stand-off. These movies, to varying extents, created immediate empathy in the viewer by focusing on regular people traveling through hell. But I'll never move like Aaron Pierre moves here, never be this tactically smart in any context. That ends up making the movie more tense than something where I'm physically and intellectually about square with the characters I'm watching. It doesn't matter if you're the most competent person in America, a crooked police force and a complicit court system can hunt you and all of your friends.