I won’t pretend to be a box office expert, but if any movie studio executive tries to claim that the theater-going industry is in its death throes, I implore you to think about the many landfills-worth of branded popcorn buckets that have only flooded your local cinemas because audiences demanded them. 2024 brought us a Dune: Part Two sandworm bucket shaped like a fleshlight and a Sonic 3 bucket, which simulates eating Sonic’s brain—to me these are signs as clear as Deadpool & Wolverine’s billion-dollar summer that capitalism is still kicking ass.
Also kicking ass: the grueling passage of time! This year Ridley Scott trotted out Gladiator II, George Miller offered up Furiosa, and Kevin Costner released the first of a four-part Western, Horizon—all one-time passion projects finally manifest. Likewise, legends like Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood released what could be their final films, the former’s a resounding bomb and the latter’s a wet fart relegated to streaming, but only one of them actually wrestling with a career’s worth of themes and craftsmanship. Which makes it one of the year’s best.
As for the rest of the best, the following are my favorite ten films of 2024.
10. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Guidelines around whether something qualifies as an “Xmas movie” are pretty tenuous, but the best of them steep their plots in nostalgia without tripping into the holly jolly realm of Hallmark treacle. See: Tyler Taormina’s warm and surreal Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which spends the titular night with a teeming mass of relatives gathering at their family home, knowing they’ll have to decide what to do about their mom, who’s on the precipice of needing full-time care. Meanwhile, two laconic local cops (Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington) silently cruise the cold streets and other neighborhood personalities proliferate. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, the movie celebrates something that seems genuinely lost—namely, a time when big families begrudgingly found their way back together no matter what. It feels like a sweetly melancholy medley of traditional holiday fare—part Home Alone, part A Christmas Story—but suffused with the bitter pain of family: how they surprise you, how they let you down, how they love you unconditionally, and how they don’t. Shout out to Uncle Ray (Tony Savino), whose emergence as the movie’s sympathetic heart is almost unbearably moving.
Watch on AMC+ or available to rent.
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
When it comes to sequels, George Miller is no novice. His filmography is full of follow-ups: a phantasmagoric continuation of the Babe universe, a philosophic Happy Feet 2, and so many Mad Max entries they’ve made mincemeat of four decades. But Furiosa is a marvel of legacy-making in a cinematic environment overstuffed with legacies—a prequel-sequel hybrid and as much a successor to Fury Road as a dilation of its whole scorching, scummy world. It’s both crash course in the politics of Miller’s proverbial post-apocalyptic Wasteland—power pulled between the preening Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, best performance of his career, easily) and the steaming Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme)—and a thrilling depiction of the literal crash course of waging road war, which will likely be civilization’s primary mode of decision-making in the next four or five years.
Watch on Max or available to rent.
8. Juror #2
Speaking of cinematic legacies, Clint Eastwood’s last word on his own may be Juror #2, a humanely crafted and extremely handsome adult legal thriller set in a universe where COVID-19 doesn’t exist, but life still finds a way to suck shit. And speaking of sucking shit, Warner Bros gave the icon’s potential swan song a paltry theatrical release and functionally no promotion. Is this what Eastwood gets after 50 years with the studio? Is this what he deserves? Complex but clear-eyed, Juror #2 responds confidently: What does anyone really deserve?
Watch on Max or available to rent.
7. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Romanian director Radu Jude’s day-in-the-life-of odyssey follows overworked production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she drives around Bucharest, interviewing blue collar employees of an international organization who were injured on the job, hoping to cast one of them in a corporate safety video. Clocking in long days of menial labor, Angela downs coffee like water and blasts punk and hip-hop to stay awake, too exhausted to appreciate the irony of her own pending on-job injury behind the wheel. Favoring a fixed camera and long takes, Jude makes a hypnotic statement about how exhaustedly we’ve all come to accept that our jobs will inevitably kill us. The movie’s pretty funny, actually.
Watch on MUBI or available to rent.
6. A Different Man
In one of two unreal performances this year—the other being a burgeoning Donald Trump in The Apprentice—Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis who, after undergoing an experimental procedure to “cure” his disfiguring facial tumors, is left with the traditionally appealing visage of a man who could star in Marvel movies, a proverbial “Sebastian Stan type.” And with a new physiognomy comes a brand-spanking-new identity, plunging Edward down a Vertigo-like variety of neo-noir crises, the further he gets from his original physical form. In fact, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man may be the only example of an MCU actor actually using their clout to do something sincerely fearless, about the extent to which we’ll lie to ourselves to avoid accepting the deeply unfair nature of being alive.
Available to rent.
5. Local Legends: Bloodbath!
This year, Matt Farley was the subject of a New York Times profile about his music when the author, Brett Martin, discovered that Farley, under the band name Papa Razzi and the Photogs, wrote a song called “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes.” As the article goes on to describe to New York Times subscribers, Farley has built a livable income around gaming the algorithm of streaming services like Spotify, publishing tens of thousands of songs under an army of aliases to garner however many pennies-per-play he can, trusting that kids will implore Alexa to play a song about poop with their name in it or that a New York Times writer will google himself.
A consummate spirit of the hustle, Farley has also been making micro-budget movies with friend Charlie Roxburgh for the past 25+ years. Casting loved ones, locals, non-professional acquaintances, and even fans, the duo write and direct odd and delightful comedies at a remarkable clip, at least one per year since 2021, skirting the realms of B-movie genres like sci-fi and horror, under the Motern Media banner. So in the same year we got a Gladiator II, we finally got the sequel to Farley’s autobiographical opus, 2013’s Local Legends, in which he first laid out his whole modus operandi. Ten years and a lot more attention later, Local Legends: Bloodbath! is both a wacky slasher movie—Farley’s self-promoting ego comes to life as a murderous business man doppelganger, you know how that goes—and a moving reflection on what success even means in a world where art is worth less than ever. It’s as good a place as any to start with Farley’s work, representing a wealth of lovely homemade films to explore, especially if you’re lucky enough to have Farley write a song about you too.
Watch on Vimeo; physical release coming soon.
4. Dune: Part Two
I already showered affection on Denis Villenueve’s swole-ass sequel to Dune: Part One, reaching far back into my ancestral memory like a Bene Gesserit witch to come up with as many synonyms for “big” as I could, but what I never fully appreciated until recently was just what an impressive accomplishment the two Dune films would turn out to be. Deploying blockbuster scale and action, these behemoth halves of pop art awed massively diverse audiences, despite both being nearly three hours apiece and based on nerd fodder so convoluted most people wouldn’t even bother. Turns out, we can still have nice things.
Watch on Max or available to rent.
3. The Beast
As I detailed in my review, The Beast takes place across three time periods and three past lives of Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux), whose unrequited love for Louis (George MacKay) ties their space-time inextricably together. What still lingers in my mind are the film’s final moments, when the beast finally reveals itself, and reality collapses around the nightmare that nothing, not even love, can last forever.
Watch on Criterion Channel or available to rent.
2. The Brutalist
I’ll write more about The Brutalist when it comes to Portland, in January, but until then I’ll just encourage you—dear reader, wherever you are—to see Brady Corbet’s VistaVision marvel whenever you’re able. Immense in its intimacy, it’s a consistently transforming, transformative treatise on creation, trauma, and the ways art consumes us, an astounding portrait of the American prerogative to commission. I’ve had dreams about seeing it again.
Opens in some cities in December; in Portland on Thursday, January 9, 2025.
1. Evil Does Not Exist
In my estimation, the obvious film of the year is director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist: a pro-conservationist drama that refuses to romanticize nature’s brisk brutality, let alone look away from all the existentially boring chores—chopping wood, toting water, walking around a lot in the snow—necessary to survive. Eiko Ishibashi’s score is enough to bring you to tears in the film’s opening moments, in case you’re looking for more reasons to cry in the coming year. Happy 2024!
Watch on Criterion Channel or available to rent.
