2024 Roundup: My Year In Movies
Maybe 100? It’s so good to live ~20 minutes train away from BAM and Metrograph.
I wish I’d seen some more Hong Sang-Soo. I should have seen Substance. I’m glad I skipped Civil War. Underline means 2+ watch. Megalopolis might have been the best time I had in a theater all year long. If you missed watching it with a couple hundred jeering strangers, you must change your life.
The Best of ~2024 (newer releases)
Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
Unrest (2022)
Nearly the Best of ~2024
La Chimera (2023)
The Zone of Interest (2023)
The Best Older Stuff
The Mother and the Whore (1973) – SO MUCH ACTING
Mikey and Nicky (1976) – how is this the same person who did A New Leaf and Ishtar?
Bushman (1971) – So many films to pair this with: Story of a Three-Day Pass, The Human Pyramid, Black Girl, and Soleil Ô
No Fear, No Die (1990) – somehow from the person who brought you High Life?
Opening Night (1977) – RIP GR
Letter Never Sent (1960) – Cranes Are Flying / Soy Cuba / and this
La Dolce Vita (1960) – one million stars, incomparable
K (1954) – a short, but perhaps the first filmed Kafka adaptation? MoMA’s Lorenza Mazzetti set
Stolen Kisses (1968) – charming! Funny!
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – far weirder than I expected
Phantom of the Paradise (1974) – it has EVERYTHING
Thief (1981) – highly technical!
West Indies ou les Nègres marrons de la liberté (1979) – beyond me, would need a month to understand
Toute une nuit (1982) – C Akerman and a cast of Belgian hundreds
Pretty Good! (newer releases)
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
Janet Planet (2023)
Nickel Boys (2024)
Problemista (2023) – charmingly weird like you’d expect
Kinds of Kindness (2024) – BARF. But I’m into it.
Kneecap (2024) – you want a couple of kids in their 50s to rap constantly in Gaelic? This is the film that’ll make you do that
Chicken for Linda! (2023) – day after election, exactly what I needed
Pretty Good! (older stuff)
The Funeral (1984) – great Japanese comedy! Not a thing we often see!
Pressure (1975) – earnest, essential London
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Orlando (1992)
Together (1956) – more of MoMA’s Lorenza Mazzetti set, worth it for the pub scenes alone
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Cabaret (1972)
Hukkle (2002) – supplement to Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, trust me
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) – the CIA, they hated this!
City Unplugged (1993) – post Soviet Estonian big caper, “there’s a lot of movie in this movie”
High and Low (1963) – ultimately melodrama?
The Great Unwashed: newer films / unregretted user hours
Anora (2024) – really fun? But the emotional ending felt somehow pretentious?
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) – exceedingly earnest and deservedly so, great use of architecture at the end
Dune: Part Two (2024) – what you paid for
Challengers (2024) – almost what you paid for
Tótem (2023) – sorry to the aesthetes for your problems / French-style bourgeois drama but Mexican
Between the Temples (2024) – laughed
Will & Harper (2024) – sweet / earnest / wish it’d swung the election
Ode to Nothing (2018) – helpful corpse horror
Sibyl (2019) – you like movies about drunks? This one isn’t bad
Babygirl (2024) – about power and consent but the real workers are all robots offstage so in a way total luxury bdsm
A Real Pain (2024) – I know the editor and he’s a good fella
Coconut Head Generation (2023) – earnest protest documentary, very glad this exists
Dikit (2021) – short Philippine monster movie, feels like it’s trying to hit all the right notes, your undergrads would probably like it
Dìdi (弟弟) (2024) – someone should make a movie centered on a parent of an annoying teen
Save Yourselves! (2020) – I laughed enough
The Great Unwashed (older releases)
Nazar (1990) – absolutely defeated by this. Good to try the limits of comprehension once a year.
A Serious Man (2009) – I’m glad the Coen bros did a midwestern Jewish movie! It’s funny in the way their films are funny.
Four Days in July (1984) – kinda sentimental? Stagy? But a good supplement to reading Say Nothing
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The Country Doctor (1953) – astonishing document, Lorenza Mazzetti does a short Kafka
The Baron of Arizona (1950) – Vincent Price in his pre-horror days, some wonderful monastic infiltration, a real scam
It Should Happen to You (1954) – I’d follow Judy Holiday anywhere. Your ur-influencer movie
Little Odessa (1994) – sad gangsters / pair with Anora
Not Exactly “Good” But A Good Time
Megalopolis (2024) [the rarest thing in our era: a new camp classic! Maybe the best time I had at the movies this whole year]
Dracula 2000 (2000) – it’s so stupid but I feel kinda warm about it
Twisters (2024) – summer movie gets the goods
Conclave (2024) – airport dad novel of a movie, vaping evil cardinal
Scanners (1981) – the best of the b-moviers
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – one damn thing after another
In the Loop (2009) – wants to be quoted
Escape from New York (1981) – one damn thing after another / a great b-movie
The Quiet Earth (1985) – somehow, uh, better than it is
Polite Society (2023) – it’s fine?
The Odd Couple (1968) – professionally done
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) – supporting cast has been bussed over from a workplace safety movie, everyone else is bananas
Bits Are Good
Uncut Gems (2019) – I just hate all these people
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024) – baby club doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Twister (1996) – chaste
Alien: Romulus (2024) – what I paid for
Heathers (1989) – rich kids / the camera set up for the running through the woods scene is hilariously cheap
Nosferatu (2024) – shockingly inept dialogue, what I imagine it’s like to read fan fiction
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) – you know who’s going to win by who has good hair. Surprise courtroom drama.
No Thanks!
Navalny (2022) – necessary but ultimately hopeless hagiography
The Silent Partner (1978) – hateful. But if you want a Canadian Christmas movie with some absolutely savage violence, here you go.
Tenet (2020) – you wish he could just make a movie about free will and time without having to load it up with his dumb plots.
Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012) – a supercut critique of Hollywood that just gives us a Hollywood movie
Another Round (2020) – the Danes can do sentimental trash too
Wolfs (2024) – a movie that would be beloved by dudes if it’d come out in 1995
The Greatest Night in Pop (2024) – hagiography, but worth it to learn that all these people I thought were crap when I was a teen can actually sing
Bed and Board (1970) – Antione Doinel’s continuing life, but without the joy and pop of Stolen Kisses
Ishtar (1987) – people have tried to recuperate this. The final bit with the bad songs = great. But it’s an awful, slow moving mess. It’s no A New Leaf.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
Messiah of Evil (1974) – looks great, sounds great, ass plot, if you love 70s horror, you gotta see it
Memories of Murder (2003) – sadsack and sharply made but an utter mistake given how the crime actually ended up getting solved
Prometheus (2012) – pretentious, horrible
The Holdovers (2023) – looked good, but centered on people I could not possibly care about
Croupier (1998) – writer is sad and thinks that makes him cool
Deep Red (1975) – you’d think the first Goblin soundtrack would be good but for me it’s not
Filmmakers for the Prosecution (2021) – there’s a feature-length documentary in this but this isn’t the one
The Last of the Sea Women (2024) – some beautiful footage, but if you want to inadvertently feel that there’s no political hope in anything, this is the film for you
Gangs of New York (2002) – sons vs fathers who cares, I tried again, I can’t
The In-Laws (1979) – the Chock Full o Nuts fight scene is fabulous but overall it’s crap
Robinson Crusoe (1954) – not a children’s movie but a kind of childbrain version, I haven’t seen everything but surely this is one of Buñuel’s least works / I hope it paid his rent
The Wicker Man (2006) – Labute must have hated the original. Not even camp.
