Films of 2024

For several reasons, 2024 was a year I focused far more on repertory cinema than new releases. First, it was the 40th anniversary of my favorite year of cinema, 1984, and I committed to producing a yearlong screening series of at least 150 films from that year on, or close to, the anniversary of their release dates. Second, in 2024, I launched ScreenBoston.com with a group of four other film lovers in the city. ScreenBoston is a one-stop place to find every old movie playing in the many cinemas throughout the Boston area. It promotes to the world that our fair city trails only New York and LA as a great North American cinema city—something far too few people, even film lovers who live here, are aware of.

And third, 2024 promised to be a weak year for movies, coming as it did on the heels of the prior strong movie year and being a year that saw multiple labor strikes across the film industry, which I assumed would mean slim pickings at the cinemas. By the end of 2024, I'd seen about 525 movies (108 in cinemas). Of these, 94 were new releases, 175 were films from 1984, and 136 were screened on 35mm or 70mm prints. From the less than a hundred new releases I'd seen, 2024 seemed like the subpar year I assumed it would be.

However, in January, when I started to prepare for the Brattle Film Podcast's annual Best of the Year shows, I began to get all kinds of recommendations for lesser-known movies that turned out to be quite good. By the recording of those podcast episodes, I'd somewhat changed my tune. While I still maintain that 2024 was not a great year for movies, plenty of very good, good, and interesting pictures got made. It just wasn't a year with a lot of exceptional work. When I look down my ranked list of the 140 films I've now seen from 2024, what strikes me is how many more 3-star and 2-star movies there are compared to the usual number of 4-star, 3 ½-star, and 2 ½-star pictures. Even the film that sits at the top of my list, The Brutalist, is hardly what I'd consider a film for the ages. It was simply the most interesting and "special" film I saw this year.

Unlike 2023, you could not easily find several of the best films waiting for you, running for months at your local multiplex. In 2024, the top 10 Box office hits were all kiddie-fare, and pretty bad kiddie-fare from the looks of it— Inside Out 2, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, and Deadpool & Wolverine (which was rated-R but come on, who are we kidding?) Only two big popular movies, Dune: Part II and Wicked, received much acclaim. Some terrific pictures might have been box office hits had they been given a proper theatrical release, but the thrilling Rebel Ridge, the delightful Hit Man, and the dumb-but-fun Carry-On either went straight to the streamer or hit streaming after a very brief contractually obligated theatrical release. That was also true of the awards-snubbed chamber pieces His Three Daughters and The Piano Lesson, as well as the lame legacyquel Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, all of which got buried on Netflix.

Of the big multiplex movies, only the surprisingly good and surprisingly popular Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and the unexpectedly solid Dune: Part II (both powered by the little engine that is Timothée Chalamet) were anything to write home about. The popular action movies Deadpool & Wolverine, Venom: The Last Dance, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Twisters, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The Beekeeper, and Madame Web all made a pile of money but were dismissed or aggressively mocked by nearly everyone who bought a ticket to them. Even though Gladiator II was far better than it had a right to be, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was far worse, if you missed either of those legacyquels, you didn't miss much.

You could find much more enjoyable fare by going to indie cinemas, which had huge successes with clever, independently produced movies like Hundreds of Beavers. After enjoying a brief theatrical run in a few cities, Hundreds of Beavers went on to become an old-fashioned cult-fave sleeper hit via its unique combination of old-school and new-school marketing. The unusual guerilla promotion of this DIY homage to Looney Tunes and silent comedies scored with its unconventional distribution strategy, including a vaudeville act called the "Great Lakes Roadshow." To prove to theater owners that audiences would show up, the filmmakers rented theaters in the Midwest and sold out multiple one-off screenings with a live vaudeville-style stage show featuring the various beaver mascot costumes used in the film. They then cleverly deployed social media influencers, produced a ton of swag to give away, and capitalized on the power of the film's near-universally positive reviews on Letterboxd.

Movies that played both the big chains and the art-house circuit also faired well. Both Anora and The Brutalist made sizable profits off of their modest budgets, ending up as the #72 and #73 top moneymakers of the year. Those two films perhaps best sum up my feelings about 2024. The Brutalist was my #1 movie, but I don't think it's any better a film than the kindred-themed The Immigrant, which was my #25 film of 2013. Similarly, I loved watching Sean Baker transform from an indie outsider making amazing, acclaimed little pictures about marginalized communities to becoming only the fourth person to win both the Palm d'Or at Cannes and the Best Picture Oscar. I can't say that Anora is Baker's best work, but of his eight films to date, it's in the top half, and it made my Top 10 of 2024.

Without question, however, the adventure the winsome Anora took up and down the Oscar predictions game was a fun, inspiring thing to watch. (You can read my thoughts about the year's Oscar nominations here). I was thrilled to see Baker become the first person ever to win four Oscars for the same movie. My esteem for this writer/director, who is just three months older than I, increased each time he advanced to the Dolby Theater stage. With each Oscar he accepted, he had something new and passionate to say. He was not afraid to prepare speeches but not so artless as to read them off paper. His time on the Oscar stage was classy, and I was moved when he won Best Director and made a plea to the assembled glitterati and the folks at home to go out and watch movies in theaters and to support independent cinemas.

The Oscars for 2024 were successful in general. First-time host Conan O'Brien felt much more alive and spontaneous than four-time host Jimmy Kimmel, who handled the duties the past two years with his usual competent but disinterested style. O'Brien seemed like someone who actually enjoys going to the movies, whereas Kimmel feels like someone who is friends with a lot of movie stars—a big difference. O'Brien also didn't seem to disappear in the show's second half, as so many Oscar hosts do. This was the first Academy Awards I'd seen in years that didn't feel like it was rushing to get the damn thing over with caused by producers' crippling fear that viewers might realize what the show fundamentally is. In fact, were it not for a few disappointing speeches, there wasn't all that much to complain about this year, short of all the people not included in the In Memoriam segment (no Tony Roberts? Alain Delon? Olivia Hussey? James Darren? Mitzi Gaynor? Tony Todd? Martin Mull?), which was mercifully uninterrupted by stars or singers stealing focus from the dead.

The Academy producers made the bold, running-time-extending choice of having presenters, sometimes multiple presenters for a single category, come out and directly praise each of the nominees. This format was used for actors' awards and also, for the first time, for the craft categories of Costume Design and Cinematography. It's an elegant, often moving way to handle these awards, especially when the presenters have a real history with the nominees.

The show also did away with stage performances of the nominated songs, most of which were forgettable to terrible this year. Instead, the show opened with a medley of songs from films inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, sung by this year's promotional tour buddies and darlings of the red carpet, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. There was little chance these two stars of the multi-nominated musical Wicked would win Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, so it was savvy to have them open the festivities. It was also effective, as the numbers from The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and Wicked reminded everyone what great movie songs and great musical performances are. One would not recall anything along those lines by watching the terrible musicals released in 2024—Emilia Pérez, Joker: Folie à Deux, The End, Mean Girls, Moana 2, and the deplorable Wicked itself, which was chopped into two movies and produced as one of the year’s ugliest, choppiest, and dumbest films.

The biggest upset of the night was the heavily favored Demi Moore losing Best Actress to newcomer Mickey Madison. The Anora star won the award for playing a more nuanced, powerful, and realistic variation of the "hooker with the heart of gold" that the Academy loves to reward: Janet Gaynor, Helen Hayes, Donna Reed, Susan Hayward, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Mira Sorvino, Charlize Theron, and Emma Stone all won Best Actress for playing prostitutes or former sex workers, while Anne Baxter, Clare Trevor, Jo Van Fleet, Shirley Jones, and Kim Basinger won Best Supporting Actress for playing this type of role. The sixty-two-year-old Moore losing the award to the twenty-five-year-old Madison seemed to make the central point of the film Moore was nominated for, The Substance, better than the movie itself does. However, Moore's inspiring awards journey and impressive comeback narrative are perhaps a more appropriate (and lasting) achievement than winning since The Substance is a hollow movie that is only made interesting because of Moore's casting.

2024 was a terrible year for animated movies, but the five nominated by the Academy were the correct five. When the seemingly indomitable Pixar lost out to the independent animated feature from Latvia, Flow, 2024 was further confirmed as a year of indie cinema. Pixar's release this year, Inside Out 2, was an ill-advised sequel to one of their best films, and it rightly lost to the far more interesting and original Flow. That wordless environmental animal adventure was also up for Best International Feature, along with the deplorable Emilia Pérez, the thrilling The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the dark and disturbing The Girl with the Needle, and the best of the bunch and eventual winner, I'm Still Here from Brazil (which was also deservedly up for Best Picture and Best Actress).

For my money, the best international film was the Romanian picture Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Radu Jude's hilarious, cynical, drawn-out comedy perfectly summed up the state of our contemporary society by following an overworked, underpaid gig worker employed by a heartless multinational company as she spends an 18-hour shift driving around Bucharest and shitposting on TikTok as her vulgar alter ego. Do Not Expect Too Much, which made it to the top of many critics' 10-Best Lists, was the quintessential movie of 2024 because it captures the current state of the world and is, therefore, one of the few films this year that I think will stand the test of time.

Speaking of standing the test of time, this year, we also saw several films by legendary directors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. In many cases, these filmmakers' 2024 release will likely be their final cinematic work. Woody Allen, 88, released his 50th film, Coup De Chance, and while it is no masterpiece, it makes a more substantive swansong for the prolific writer/director/actor than any of his last half-dozen pictures. Similarly, Clint Eastwood, 94, directed the solid, old-school legal thriller Juror #2, which, even though it didn't star Eastwood, is a more satisfying finale than his last two vehicles, Cry Macho (2021) and The Mule (2018). The beloved 84-year-old Spanish film director Víctor Erice made his first feature in thirty years with Close Your Eyes, while the 75-year-old French provocateur Catherine Breillat made one of the best pictures released this year, Last Summer. The 94-year-old master of Cinéma vérité, Frederick Wiseman, released his latest documentary, the four-hour Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros.

Of course, there is little chance that Gladiator II will be the final film of the prolific 86-year-old English director Ridley Scott or that the excellent Green Boarder will be 75-year-old Polish director Agnieszka Holland's last movie—as these two show no signs of slowing down. Holland's fellow countryman, Margarethe von Trotta, who is 82, released her Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert this year, which I have yet to see. And the latest from 91-year-old Roman Polanski, The Palace, was released in Europe in 2023 but, like his prior picture, An Officer and a Spy (2019) failed to find an American distributor.

Perhaps the most significant release by an elder statesman of the cinema was Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, the long-gestating passion project for which the 85-year-old writer/producer/director sold his Sonoma County wineries in order to fund the film's $120 million budget personally. The movie, about a futuristic New York City that mirrors the fall of Rome, failed to win much favor from almost everyone who bothered to see it, including me. Nevertheless, I must admire the hutzpah and passion for filmmaking required to take such a risk. This type of risk is nothing new for Coppola, who has laid his personal finances and sanity on the line for a film on more than one previous occasion. Still, at age 85, people often focus more on their legacy and leaving behind wealth for their family than they do trying to reinvent cinema. Megalopolis was nominated for six Razzies—the annual tone-deaf “joke awards” given for the worst movies of the year—and when Coppola learned that he'd won the Razzie for worst director, he issued a blistering response.

Taking to Instagram, the icon of cinema wrote, "I am thrilled to accept the Razzie award in so many important categories for @megalopolisfilm, and for the distinctive honor of being nominated as the worst director, worst screenplay, and worst picture at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking! In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive 50 years from now. What an honor to stand alongside a great and courageous filmmaker like Jacques Tati who impoverished himself completely to make one of cinema's most beloved failures, PLAYTIME! My sincere thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who joined me to make our work of art, MEGALOPOLIS, and let us remind ourselves that box-office is only about money, and like war, stupidity and politics has no true place in our future.” That response was more artful than anything in Megalopolis.

Two major flaws dogged the films of 2024. One was how blatantly artificial so many of the movies looked. Even expensive, uncompromising movies like Megalopolis and acclaimed, multi-award-nominated pictures like Nosferatu looked overproduced and/or inorganic. Films in which the setting and location were a major character, like Emilia Pérez, Queer, The Fall Guy, Carry-On, The Six Triple Eight, Shirley, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and Unfrosted felt like they took place on another planet from where they were supposedly set. Even some movies that were shot on location where the stories took place, like Doug Liman's The Instigators, Ti West's MaXXXine, and Arkasha Stevenson's The First Omen, looked like they were patched together with green screens and rushed CGI.

The major fantasy flicks had a related problem, with pictures like Wicked, Twisters, Alien: Romulus, and even Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga looking like synthetic and cheap riffs on the movies they were building on. This ersatz quality was not limited to big effects-driven movies. Intimate films that hardly used any special effects, like the awkwardly shot The Piano Lesson, and movies where the computer-generated wizardry was the whole point, like Here (which should have looked like the standard bearer for cutting-edge VFX), look far worse than some films made in the 1990s.

Fortunately, by the end of the year, I'd seen plenty of pictures that bucked this ugly trend. The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I'm Still Here, About Dry Grasses, Maria, National Anthem, A Real Pain, Nickel Boys, Sing Sing, All We Imagine as Light, Coup De Chance, and Dune: Part 2 all unfolded in what looked like fully realized environments, be they real or imagined. Still, I found myself frustrated that even the movies that made a big deal about shooting on film (with some releasing on film)— Anora, Nosferatu, Cuckoo, Janet Planet, A Different Man, Between the Temples, Challengers, Queer, Twisters, Armand, Bird, Handling the Undead, and Saturday Night—use celluloid as a kind of Instagram filter. The only pictures I saw shot in 16mm, 35mm, or 70mm that really impressed me were Riddle of Fire, The Bikeriders, I Saw the TV Glow, Kinds of Kindness, I'm Still Here, September 5, The Devil's Bath, Maria, and The Brutalist, and some of these were still guilty of using their “shot on film” bona fides at least partially as a promotional gimmick.

The second overarching flaw affecting 2024 movies was how few of them had strong endings. Even some of the year's best movies didn't finish as well as they started. That was true of The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Last Summer, The Bikeriders, Juror #2, Kinds of Kindness, Love Lies Bleeding, The First Omen, Armand, Hit Man, Heretic, Between the Temples, Thelma, The Instigators, The Wild Robot, Carry-on, My Old Ass, Ghostlight, Wicked Little Letters, Nightbitch, Babygirl, Better Man, Civil War, Cuckoo, Queer, and MaXXine. The only films I saw that didn't run out of gas in the last third, prolong their climax, veer off into an odd direction, or weigh themselves down with explanations of what we'd just seen were Anora, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Rebel Ridge, His Three Daughters, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I'm Still Here, The Beast, Good One, and Immaculate. Only that small handful of films had powerful and memorable endings.

Perhaps the most interesting trend of 2024 was the unprecedented number of movies in which the central protagonists are played by themselves or directed by themselves and movies with unique real-life connections. Certain films instantly seemed a whole lot more impressive once the credits started to roll, as audiences were surprised to learn we'd been watching something based on a true story. Anna Kendrick's Woman of the Hour is a movie I watched questioning the structural approach with each major narrative turn. Then, at the end, when I learned everything was based on a true story, every decision Kendrick and screenwriter Ian McDonald had made seemed just right. The historical horror movies The Devil's Bath and The Girl with the Needle also benefit from closing credit revelations that they're based on case studies of actual people and real-life occurrences.

Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo as an incarcerated man involved in the creation of theatrical stage shows mounted by the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the maximum security prison, takes on additional weight and power when you realize that many of the actors, including Domingo's principal co-star, Clarence Maclin, are formerly incarcerated men playing themselves. But the best example of this trend was the Irish movie Kneecap, about a pair of young drug dealers who, with the help of a frustrated high school teacher, start a hip-hop group that raps in the Irish language as a political statement. When the amusing but somewhat generic movie ends, and you realize you've been watching the actual band members playing ten-years-younger versions of themselves, the power of the picture you've just sat through intensifies by at least fifty percent.

As far as documentaries, four of the best this year were movies in which the director or directors were also the central characters. Epitomizing this pattern, No Other Land was made by a team of two Israeli and two Palestinian filmmakers chronicling the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta village. Two of the directors are also the central characters, a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist who form an uneasy alliance. That film deservedly won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The three other examples of the approach were also Oscar-nominated. Porcelain War was shot entirely by the people we meet in the doc—Ukrainian artists who fight Russian tanks, missiles, and fighter jets as they continue to live life and make art. Two of the artists are also the directors of the movie.

Shiori Ito's Black Box Diaries, a record of her experiences of being sexually assaulted by an esteemed colleague and going public with her accusations against this well-connected individual, is an infuriating and inspirational blending of personal journal and investigative journalism. Sugarcane co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat interviewed people like himself and his family, who are survivors and descendants of the Canadian Indian residential school system that covered up the abuse and murder of dozens of Indigenous children. These were the four best documentaries I saw this year, even though I don't usually gravitate towards personally focused non-fiction films. I often question if that approach truly serves the story the filmmakers are trying to tell, but in all these cases, it does.

In terms of who had the best year in 2024, there are a number of candidates. Margaret Qualley, for one, had a banner year, becoming 2024's It-Girl with her three starring turns. In Ethan Coen's first solo directorial outing, Drive-Away Dolls, she played a young, lesbian version of a Coen Bros George Clooney character. She reunited with her Poor Things director and star as part of the all-star ensembles who each play three separate roles (or in her case, four) in Yorgos Lanthimos' "triptych fable" Kinds of Kindness. And she co-starred as Demi Moore's greedy alter ego in Coralie Fargeat's acclaimed The Substance. The classically trained ballerina and daughter of actress Andie MacDowell even danced at the Oscars in a musical tribute to James Bond. This late-in-the-evening lavish production number was not a highlight of the 97th Academy Awards, and it's the type of thing that rarely pays off for a young actress, but Qualley pulled it off.

Sean Baker is certainly another candidate as someone who had an excellent 2024, riding the awards circuit wave to multiple wins for Anora. Now that he's the first individual to win four Oscars for one picture, the stalwart indie filmmaker becomes a major Hollywood player, and it will be fascinating to see how he uses this capital. I have faith that this filmmaker will not squander the attention and prestige on a Marvel movie or live-action Disney remake.

But I think the person who had the best 2024 was Timothée Chalamet. The 29-year-old has been acting in movies since 2014 and has been an almost annoyingly omnipresent movie star this past decade due to his throng of young fans. No question of him having the goods, though, and always has. His performances in movies like Call Me by Your Name, Lady Bird, Beautiful Boy, and Little Women are outstanding, even on occasions when he doesn't seem the best choice for a given role. This year, he headed up two of the most loved movies, Dune: Part II and A Complete Unknown. In his five years preparing to play Bob Dylan, he learned to play guitar and harmonica and sing like Dylan, and he immersed himself in the peerless songwriter's catalog.

Prior to the Oscars, Chalamet appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, playing some of his favorite early Dylan songs—not ones he learned for the movie, but ones that spoke to him and to the moment we're living through. I think it's fantastic that Gen-Zer discovered Bob Dylan by way of Timmy; it gives me a tiny sliver of hope for the future. I ended 2024 recording a podcast about the Marx Brothers, and in it, I lamented that America is entering an era in which we need the Marx Brothers more now than any time since the late '60s. I think this is also true of Bob Dylan. That my favorite artist of all time also had a great 2024 at age 83, and his vital songs are reaching a whole new generation makes me feel good about this year.

We are entering a time when the arts will be more important than they've been in many decades. Perhaps the film industry will need to break free of its Silicon Valley overlords and addiction to providing shareholder value over art and entertainment to survive. I'm personally doubling down on my belief in the continued relevance of cinema, especially independent cinema. In the last months of 2024, I joined with the managers of two of my favorite local movie theaters to take over the running of these venues from their longtime owner. The jewel in the crown of these moviehouses, the 111-year-old Somerville Theater, has been running films continuously since the silent era. I am proud to become one of its stewards through the difficult socio-economic times I believe lie ahead. I know that movies are a source of comfort, inspiration, edification, community building, and escape, and I intend to do whatever I can to help movies thrive these next few years, at least on a local level.