The movies of 2024.

Yeah, we need movies more than freaking ever, these days.

My favorite movies of 2024:

10. Hundreds of Beavers - I was worried that people were overselling this by calling it a live-action cartoon, but the description is very accurate. See it in a theater, if you can.

9. Juror #2 - The only honorable thing for Warner Bros. chairman (and enemy of art) David Zaslav to do is find some kind of machine to sap away his lifeforce and give it to Clint Eastwood if it allows the latter to make more unpretentious thrillers like this.

8. Hit Man - Low-key but enjoyable story of a teacher and his unusual (and dangerous) hobby. Watching this, it’s no wonder Glen Powell is a star.

7. The Bikeriders - What if Martin Scorsese applied his Goodfellas/Casino template to the story of a motorcycle gang? It’d probably look like this.

6. Trap - It’s worth all the strange dialogue and oddball plot twists in the world to get such solid genre pieces from M. Night Shyamalan.

5. Carry-On - It is impossible for me to be objective about the ‘if you don’t do this (illegal) thing, we’ll kill your loved ones’ subgenre, so I’ll just call this one a winner.

4. Inside Out 2 - Granted, the Pixar team was playing the same song this time out, but it’s a good tune and the fuller orchestrations are delightful.

3. Saturday Night - The only true things about this movie may be the names of the people and the day it took place, but who the hell cares? Amusing, affecting and perfectly cast down the line.

2. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - Guy Ritchie tamps down his time-jumping sensibilities to deliver a straight-up WWII adventure. I’d watch two or three more of these if the same crew joins up.

1. Jim Henson Idea Man - A truly heartwarming look at a singular talent and how his ambition created practically a new genre of entertainment.

Runners-up:

Abigail - Radio Silence delivers another bloody and (bloody enjoyable) contained horror movie with a wry sense of humor.

The Beekeeper - What seems on the surface to be an ordinary Jason Statham vehicle is engagingly eccentric.

Flow - A truly spellbinding animated film that relies on visuals to tell its story.

Gladiator II - Much pulpier than the first movie, but one can’t deny that Ridley Scott has a way with spectacle, and Denzel Washington is incredibly entertaining.

The Killer's Game - Fine mix of solid love story and cartoonish yet fun fight scenes.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - Meanders a bit, but still an exciting and evocative addition to a surprisingly durable franchise.

Music by John Williams - Little more than a stirring tribute to a master musician and who could ask for more?

Rebel Ridge - Modern variation on First Blood weaves some strong social commentary within its action beats.

Snack Shack - Quite likable coming of age comedy-drama that captures a real feeling for time and place.

The Substance - A truly strange and also truly compelling variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Underrated:

The American Society of Magical Negroes, Drive-Away Dolls, Kung Fu Panda 4 and Y2K

Overrated:

Didi, The Wild Robot and Your Monster

Streaming exclusives that should’ve been released in theaters:

Carry-On, Hit Man, Ricky Stanicky

Theatrical movies that should’ve been sent to streaming:

Afraid, Venom: the Last Dance

My favorite things in movies - 2024:

The baptism in The Book of Clarence

Channing Tatum having the time of his life as Gambit in Deadpool and Wolverine

Chevy Chase meets Milton Berle in Saturday Night

Demi Moore gets her makeup just so in The Substance

Hugh Grant uses various incarnations of Monopoly to explain religion in Heretic

The ice skating scene in Saturday Night

The interview montage in Hit Man

"Maybe, I just woke up." - Carry-On

Reggie cleans house in Bad Boys: Ride or Die

The showcase of the various types in The American Society of Magical Negroes

The song parodies of Ricky Stanicky

"They need us more than ever now." - Red One

Random thoughts:

- I had heard things about I Saw the TV Glow. I thought it could've been an interesting horror-adjacent movie for me to watch in October. As a friendless introvert who got lost in (now that I look back on it) cheesy 90s television (and still does, in a sense), the first half of this movie kicked me in the stomach with how relatable it was. But then, the second half happened and it flew off in directions I didn’t exactly hate, per se, but I just couldn’t relate to any more. It took an episode of The Horror Virgin to get me to understand the (barely sub) text that the writer/director was laying down. If not for that episode, I'd have been content to place this film on my ‘overrated’ list, but now, I think I need to carve out some space and really give it another look knowing what I know now.

- The Wild Robot was a critical and commercial success and quite possibly, a front runner for the year‘s Best Animated Feature Oscar. If I’m being perfectly honest, when the film focused on the titular robot - beautifully voiced by Lupita Nyong’o - it was every bit the masterpiece that people claimed it to be…but every so often, it’d focus on a less interesting (or in most cases, annoying) animal character, and the spell would be broken. The character of Fink, in particular, I liked much better when he was named Nick Wilde. (Hell, this wasn’t even the best animated movie with 'Robot' in the title that I’ve seen in the last 12 months. Robot Dreams eats this movie's lunch, dinner, and the following day's breakfast.)

- Seriously, are we just not gonna go into the potential platform that got Walter Peck elected Mayor of New York City in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire? No? We're just leaving that up in the air? Well, shit.

- The remake of The Crow was greeted with near universal vitriol. Whether, it was a natural revulsion to remakes or because the original was seen as some sort of unimpeachable masterpiece or both, Lord knows. I saw the 1994 original for the first time last summer and though it had a strong, visual aesthetic and a marvelous performance from the late Brandon Lee, I was left with the most overwhelming feeling of ‘…that’s it?’. The ridiculous wrinkle with Danny Huston‘s kingpin villain aside (Demon powers? Seriously?!), I found the remake perfectly cromulent.

- So, yeah, The Garfield Movie. The animated movie of 2024 for which my hopes were sky high. The director of Cats Don’t Dance and The Emperor’s New Groove, Mark Dindal, had been lost in the woods for some time, but the film was a box-office smash, reinvigorating his good name for years to come. Now, if only the goddamn thing had been any good. You can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers hate the ostensible title character as much as he hates Mondays. This movie bears all the signifiers of ‘Christ’s sakes, it doesn’t need to be good! It just has to keep the ankle biters off my back for an hour and a half!’ cinema: lame humor, obvious needle drops, bright colors, painful product placement. Now, it’s not illegal to have all of this stuff in a movie geared toward children…yet, but if a movie is ostensibly about the famous comic strip (and cartoon) character Garfield, shouldn’t it be…about Garfield? The cat is practically an extra in the movie that bears his name and Jon doesn’t fare all that much better, but why waste valuable narrative real estate on familiar characters when we have to establish brand new ones like Garfield’s deadbeat dad and the star-crossed cow couple and the overbearing feline villainess that sounds like the overbearing broad from The Fall Guy? Sadly, the voice acting in this movie - with one exception - is commiserate with the total lack of care cited elsewhere. Harvey Guillen makes a valiant effort following in the footsteps of Gregg Berger by doing a lot with very little as the voice of Odie, but no one else in the big-name voice cast sounded like they wanted to be there and it shows. But like I said, the film was a box office smash. For all the money it made, it would be monstrous to not put a little more effort into the inevitable sequel. It’s not illegal to put effort in a children’s movie…yet. I mean, this ain’t a goddamn Minions movie, you know?

- The year in PG-13 f-bombs: Venom: the Last Dance and my favorite - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

- Last year saw no fewer than half a dozen youth-oriented period pieces. The most memorable aspect of these movies, unfortunately, is just how over-the-top some of their mother characters were. Setting the story amidst the Terri Schiavo situation was...certainly a choice made by Suncoast's writer/director, but the thing that will stick with me most is how they pulled a Freaky Friday on the dynamic of The Edge of Seventeen, making the mother the incredible pain in the ass and the daughter the one frustrated at being unable to deal with it. Laura Linney is a terrific actress, but I can’t think of a moment in this movie where I didn’t want to slap her character silly. The 4:30 Movie saw Kevin Smith casting a glance at his teenage years while struggling mightily to fill 88 minutes of runtime, so he had Rachel Dratch (fresh from her American Home Shield commercials, apparently) stretch one excruciating minute of material into ten as the main character’s incredibly overbearing mother. Perhaps the universe was living up to Ian Fleming‘s line about once being happenstance, twice being coincidence and three times being enemy action, because by the time Lisa Frankenstein rolled around, I was not prepared for Carla Gugino‘s feature-length Lady Tremaine audition reel. However, it was gratifying to see that the mother characters of Snack Shack, Y2K and especially Didi were comparatively normal.

- A Quiet Place: Day One was quite effective, but it had another logic hole that matched the ones from the original movie: I don’t care how much that pizza place meant to you and your father. When there are monsters about, you get the fuck to safety, period.

- Despite strong word-of-mouth and critical notices, The Fall Guy was an unfortunate flop this past summer. More ridiculous than anything were all the people online bemoaning that an original movie like this can’t succeed in today’s IP-obsessed Hollywood, which only reinforces the need for a more widespread version of what TV Land used to be; even a cursory amount of research would reveal that this was an 80s TV show with a kick-ass theme song. I thought the film was pretty good fun save for one element that even now struck me as incredibly phony: the romance between Ryan Gosling‘s Colt and Emily Blunt's Jody. So, she was able to waste valuable studio time and money redoing one stunt just to punish Colt? Also, late in the movie, Colt was running from the gun-toting bad guys, but there was still time to talk on the phone with Jody to try and repair their relationship? That does not pass the smell test!

- For roughly 90% of its running time, Your Monster was a charming variant on "Beauty and the Beast"…but then came the ending. I don’t know what it is this past year with female writer/directors and shitty endings to otherwise damn good genre movies, but that needs to stop. Melissa Barrera’s Laura was an aspiring actress who was diagnosed with cancer. Her playwright boyfriend, Edmund Donovan‘s Jacob, responded to this the way any good-hearted individual would: he dumped her in the midst of treatment and, to add insult to injury, he decides to cast someone else in his play's leading role that he developed with and for her. In most circumstances, a guy like this would absolutely deserve to be torn apart by a monster, but this is one instance where an 'I am the bigger person' ending would’ve worked perfectly. At the end of the movie, however, Laura - having recovered not long after the movie began and ultimately, receiving the lead role that was initially hers - confronts her scumbag ex-boyfriend, Tommy Dewey's Monster waiting in the wings, then the Monster charges Jacob, the lights go out and when they come back up, it’s just Laura on stage, covered in blood and standing next to Jacob's dead body. Apparently, there never was a Monster. What a tweest! I’m sure that writer/director Caroline Lindy thought she was oh-so-clever with her little Fight Club homage, but think about it: what in the hell is Laura going to tell the authorities, much less the audience that witnessed this gruesome scene? "A monster did it!" Good luck seeing the outside of a women's penitentiary or an insane asylum for the rest of your life.

- Argylle, or ‘yo dawg, I heard you like twists, so I put a twist in your twist so you can twist while you twist’, was acceptably mindless for a while. However, the overwhelming need to throw rug-pulling twists at the audience made the experience a trial to endure. (I’m not saying that I exclaimed, “What the fuck?!” at the twist involving Bryan Cranston‘s evil agency head, but I’m not not saying it, either.) I feel like I’d be better off sticking with Romancing the Stone or Knight and Day or The Long Kiss Goodnight or any of the other movies this one so blithely rips off. To end on a positive note, though I suppose ‘positive’ is a relative term here: chunky Bryce Dallas Howard is really doing it for me.