That Was The Year That Was in Movies

Last updated: Mon Dec 30 2024

In 2024, I watched 68 movies and 20 seasons of television. Here are some of the standouts. Imagine that each one gets a little statue of me saluting them 🫡

Special Awards

Serial Experiments Award: Andor Season 1

I watched a surprising amount of television this year. Some of it was good (most of The Curse, the flashback arc of Jujutsu Kaisen, Baby Reindeer, Atlanta), most of it was honestly really bad (the last episode of The Curse, 3 Body Problem, House of the Dragon, Scavengers Reign, and yes Arcane season 2 sorry not sorry).

But the standout was…

Okay, the standout was Atlanta season 3 episode 1 “Three Slaps”, but conveniently I haven’t finished Atlanta, so that gets to be my top TV show for 2025 😉

No, the standout was, to my complete and utter surprise, a Star Wars tie-in show on Disney+. Like, seriously, I cannot stop going around telling people that they’re sleeping on this masterpiece of a show. I wasn’t even that big a fan of Rogue One!

But you honestly don’t need to know anything about Star Wars to appreciate this show. Okay, maybe you need to know that there’s an evil Empire, but that’s about it. What you do need to know is that it’s a slow-burn political thriller with some of the best pacing I’ve ever seen and worldbuilding that always Just Works™️ without ever becoming twee, which quietly spells out the themes of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State like it’s a graduate political science seminar. Plus, Diego Luna. (I swear I’m not a Diego Luna fanboy.) It’s just really, really enjoyable and all-around great.

Plus, it has a soundtrack by Nicolas Britell, the Succession and Moonlight composer. So, you know, a soundtrack full of bops.

Be Kind Rewind Award: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

This year, I rewatched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I liked it the first time I saw it a year or two ago, but I’m not sure I loved it. But this time I fell head over heels.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the perfect comfort food movie. It’s low stakes but takes its drama seriously, it’s funny (like, really funny), it has great musical numbers, and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell play off each other better than pretty much any actors have ever played off each other before. Plus, for a film released in 1953, it’s refreshingly feminist — it’s really just a story about two gals being pals, and what could be better than that?

King of Trash Mountain Award: Megalopolis

I am probably the world’s second biggest fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable after Francis Ford Coppola. I love this big, dumb, goofy, brash, dumb, goofy film that takes itself so goddamn seriously. I love that Aubrey Plaza plays a character named Platinum Wow the Money Bunny. I love that Adam Driver is acting his heart out for a script that definitely does not deserve it. I love that there’s this bizarre formalist interlude when Adam Driver’s character takes one (1) drugs. I like that he can stop time and this isn’t even a major plot point — he just randomly yells STOP TIME. I love that Francis Ford Coppola clearly thinks about the Roman Empire even more than I do. I love that the film has intertitles that attempt to spell out the (incoherent) themes. I love that Natalie Emanuel looks like she wandered in out of another film and looks very confused about what’s going on.

But most of all I love that Francis Ford Coppola clearly loves this incredibly dumb film. He took the massive budget he was given (or, more correctly, mortgaged his winery for) and made exactly the film he wanted to make.

Megalopolis has heard of good taste and wants nothing to do with it. Megalopolis simply is.

Honorable Mentions

The Master

The Master was my first Paul Thomas Anderson film. (I’m trying to catch up on all the great directors I missed, you see.) And boy, was it a good choice. It’s such a strange, idiosyncratic little film — the tale of a wayward man glomming onto a Scientology-esque cult in the aftermath of World War II, or perhaps the tale of an L. Ron Hubbard-type glomming onto a man he can’t quite fix.

It’s a film that says a lot — about cults, about power, about finding a meaning in life — without seeming to say very much at all, anchored by a transcendently bizarre performance from Joaquin Phoenix and perhaps the best performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman.¹ (Sorry, I don’t like Synecdoche, New York that much.)

Also, it features one of the greatest scenes of transparently homoerotic wrestling in the history of film. So.

Frances Ha

Frances Ha shouldn’t work, especially not for me. It’s a slice-of-life low-stakes comedy-drama about a spoiled 20-something New Yorker that can’t get her life together, with a pretentious black-and-white color grade and ~ stylized ~ dialogue that’s just a little too clever.

But somehow it just clicks. Maybe it’s because the audience is both laughing at Frances and laughing with her. Maybe it’s because Greta Gerwig plays Frances as just on the right side of annoying. (It makes one almost — not quite, but almost — regret that she gave up acting to focus on directing.) Maybe it’s because, for all the trying-to-make-it-in-New-York stylings, it’s really a story about two friends growing apart and back together.

In any case, Frances Ha was unexpectedly poignant and an easy choice for a future double feature with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Also, unexpectedly seeing a young Adam Driver in one of his breakout roles made me laugh harder than almost anything else I saw this year.²

Look Back

Look Back is a charming one-shot manga from Tatsuki Fujimoto (the Chainsaw Man author… really) about the competitive friendship between two young women who just really, really want to draw. It’s a poignant story that takes less than an hour to read and comes highly recommended.

This year, it was lovingly adapted into a film, resulting in one of the all-time-great adaptations from page to screen. Although it carefully replicates every frame of the manga, it adds a few flourishes that only work in animation; especially impressive is a scene of one of the girls skipping across the countryside, celebrating her recognition as a great artist by the other girl.

The only real criticism I have is about the length — the manga’s size doesn’t translate nicely into a feature-length film. But that’s a minor quibble about a beautiful, touching film.

I saw this at a special AMC screening that also included behind-the-scenes interviews with the creators. Seek those out if you can — the care and craft is evident in how they talk about every shot.

The Sacrifice

It must have been a good year for film, because Tarkovsky didn’t make it onto my top 5. In any case, his final film The Sacrifice is his attempt at making an Ingmar Bergman film — he even hired some of the same crew! — and I have yet to see a Bergman film I truly love.

Still, this fable of nuclear annihilation and contracts with God is well worth watching for anyone that can stomach Tarkovsky’s runtimes. The partygoers’ philosophical dialogue suddenly interrupted by screaming fighter jets is one of the few hair-standing-up-on-end scenes I saw this year.

Get Out

You know Get Out is good. You don’t need me to tell you that. But if, somehow, it has taken you eight years, like it did myself, to watch the debut of one of the most interesting artists working in film today… drop everything and watch it.

5. The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest is the worst film on this list, by a wide margin. It’s just too clever for its own good. Why is there a formalist subplot shot in anachronistic night vision in an otherwise obsessively grounded film? Why is the ending an unexplained postmodern time skip? Why are there attempts to juice the plot with family drama that’s not actually resolved?

Fundamentally, The Zone of Interest should have been a 20 minute art film playing on a loop in an art exhibit, not a feature film playing in theaters.

But The Zone of Interest deserves its place on this list because I cannot stop thinking about it.

On a field trip in high school, I had the… well, I hesitate to call it good fortune, so let’s say that I had the honor of meeting a Holocaust survivor.³ She was not yet a teenager at the time of the Holocaust, so she was probably nearing 80 when she talked to my class. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she’s passed away in the past decade since then. The point I’m making is that the Holocaust is passing out of living memory. Children today are unlikely to ever hear, firsthand, from a survivor.

So how media represents the Holocaust is important, because it will shape how future generations think about, relate to, visualize the Holocaust. And that is why Zone of Interest is important.

Because it makes the horror real, and immediate, and relatable. The perpetrators of the Holocaust were not comic-book villains. They were basically normal people, who obsessed over their gardens, and fought with their wives about whether their family would move when they got a promotion, and found meaning in their lives by claiming they were doing Great, Meaningful Work. But, of course, The Zone of Interest never lets you forget exactly what Great, Meaningful Work is going on offscreen.

I am curious how actual Holocaust survivors feel about the film, if any saw it. But, regardless, despite its flaws, The Zone of Interest entered my head and never left.

4. Rosemary’s Baby

It feels strange, in 2024, to be praising a film directed by Roman Polanski, and especially praising a film that is literally about (not) believing women.

But goddamn this movie is fantastic.

There are parts that have aged a little strangely — the acting, for instance, is right on the transition point between the more theatrical acting styles of early Hollywood and the more naturalistic acting of modern film. But even those parts end up just working, because they lend an even deeper air of uncanniness to a film that is already deeply unnerving.

I don’t want to say anything more, because this film is one of the very very few that deserves not to be spoiled. Pray for Rosemary’s baby.

3. Barton Fink

This year, I finally started to catch up on the Coen Brothers — previously I had only seen (most of) The Big Lebowski, but this year I caught up on their masterpieces Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Those films are great, sure, but something about them left me a little cold. They just weren’t, y’know, Russellcore.

Barton Fink, on the other hand, is one of the most Russellcore films of all time.

A spooky hotel. A writer having nightmares due to writer’s block. A nebulously supernatural not-quite-antagonist. A surreal, coincidence-filled plot. A 1940s, noir-ish setting. A black comic tone. A sense of nostalgia for someone you never knew.

I could continue, but instead I’ll just say that some scenes in Barton Fink were so similar to scenes I wrote in one of my horror novellas that I had deja vu. I’ve never seen Barton Fink before… have I?

So Barton Fink was definitely going to make it on the list, but luckily it’s also easy to recommend — hilarious and chilling in equal measure, endlessly rewatchable and analyzable. Fargo and No Country for Old Men are also recommended, but Barton Fink will always be my Coen Brothers film.

2. Tár

I watched Tár at the very beginning of the year. Until a few weeks ago, when I saw the number one pick, I was certain that Tár would be film of the year. It’s just that good.

The only way I can describe it is that Tár feels literary. It largely consists of dense dialogue between sharply-drawn characters broken up by plot-moving set pieces. Yet, like all great literature, that deceptively simple description disguises a great deal of depth, as Tár explores power, art, and all those other great abstractions. Tár is the film on this list that would most reward rewatch and reanalysis.

But to call it “literary” also sells it short. Tár could work as a book, sure, but then it wouldn’t quite be Tár. It’s not as flashy about its filmic techniques as some of the other films on this list (cough Zone of Interest), but it could only really exist as a film — not least because of Cate Blanchett’s barnstormer of a performance. That Tár follows a conductor — the most visual part of an auditory experience — means that it works best in the only medium that combines visuals and audio.⁴

But, let it be said: as much as I love this film, I’m still glad Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the Oscars instead. But Tár doesn’t need your accolades. Tár simply is. Immutably great.

1. Y Tu Mamá También

Y Tu Mamá También opens with a sex scene. Then, in case you didn’t get the point that it was a raunchy sex comedy, it follows this up with another sex scene.

But as we follow two lads from different social classes as they drive across Mexico in an attempt to woo an older woman (remember: raunchy sex comedy), the music suddenly drops away and the narrator somberly informs us: if they had been driving down this highway a year earlier, they would have seen a truck crashed off the side of the road, engine on fire, produce and chickens scattered across the highway, dead bodies sticking out at odd angles.

Y Tu Mamá También is not a raunchy sex comedy. It is, in fact, one of the most poignant films I’ve ever seen and an immediate inductee into my top ten films of all time. I could say more, but the simple truth is that I have nothing to add: you just have to watch this film.

And not just because I’m a Diego Luna / Gael García Bernal fanboy, but my goodness, doesn’t it help? 😅