The 20 Best Movies of 2024

I have thought about dropping my year-end favorites list on Oscar Nom Day several times in the past, but timing-wise it just hasn't worked out before -- this year looks to be an exception, however! My reasons for thinking it's a good idea are 1) as stated in my earlier requisite post acknowledging that those nominations happened I just don't care about them and I don't want to spend all day reading people's brain-numbing statistics and theories all of which rob me of a will to live. So this gives me something else to focus on. Also today is the first day of Sundance and while I might not be there in person this year (sigh) I will be reviewing movies virtually, and I'm going to be very busy starting to do that almost immediately. So if I don't do this today it'll be a couple more weeks. 

Also -- I've had the list of movies on a spreadsheet for weeks now, and every other day I go onto the doc and I move them around a little bit depending on my mood, and... I could just keep doing that forever, or I could just say enough! And organize them into their final form, waffling be damned. That said 2024 turned out to be an especially amorphous year with no single frontrunner slam-dunk -- any of my top five on any given day could've been my number one. Which isn't to say I think 2024 was a bad year for movies -- quite the opposite! There's a lot of love spreading around here. But let's just stop our yammering and get to the goods. Here at last are...

My 20 Favorite Movies of 2024

20. Strange Darling (review)

19. Femme (review)

18. I Saw the T.V. Glow (review)

17. I'm Still Here

16. Love Lies Bleeding (review) 

15. Janet Planet

14. A Different Man (review)

13. Flow

12. The End (review)

11. National Anthem (review)

10. Kinds of Kindness (review)

9. Rumours (review)

8. Red Rooms (review)

7. Bird (review)

6. The Substance (review)

5. Challengers (review)

4. Nosferatu (review)

3. Hard Truths (review)

2. Queer (review)

1. Evil Does Not Exist 

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And here are ten runners-up: Problemista, Babygirl, Wallce & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Hundreds of Beavers, Blitz, Trap, The Brutalist, Memoir of a Snail, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and Oddity.

Okay -- that's that! Onward and onward!

 Let's get 2025 rolling...

Five Frames From ?

What movie is this?

Oscars Remain Pointless, News At 11

Well the Oscar nominations are here and they flopped the only test I was giving them this year -- nominate Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths for giving the best performance this year, perhaps even this decade, in Best Actress. So I fully don't give a shit about the rest of the noise even if a couple of cool things happened -- I expected The Substance to get Best Actress and maybe even Best Director but scoring Best Picture seemed a stretch and they went there, which is cool. Hoping they will make it Ralph Fiennes year FINALLY; happy for Fernanda Torres, who is wonderful in I'm Still Here and I certainly don't blame her for MJB's absence -- not when two of the Best Actress nominations are straight up trash. Yura Borisov! Guy Pearce! Nosferatu nabbing several noms for its exquisite everything! But mostly in a really interesting year for movies they nominated the least interesting, basic, to downright bad things -- shocker! Conan O'Brien hosing the audience down with blood and reenacting the end of The Substance might be the only saving grace, I fear. 

Well now that that is over we can get back to talking about movies yay

— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 10:19 AM

Good Morning, World

A big bulging Thirst-day morning bounty of thanks to actor Taylor Zakhar Perez and Lacoste brand underpants for slipping our Red White & Royal Blue star into their briefs as their new brand ambassador -- I love it when brands call their models "brand ambassador" and I long to one day be a "brand ambassador" myself. For what though? Hmm. I could be the brand ambassador for Gap sweatpants maybe. I have spent at least half my life in those. That wouldn't be so bad -- it could be much worse. I certainly don't have Taylor's abs so itty bitty briefs are out of the question but I can rock a pair of sweatpants. If I do say so myself! I don't mean to brag or anything. Ahem. Anyway hit the jump, we have lots more of Taylor's blessed bumps to bounce upon ahead...

Ye Olde Wolfe Movie

Even though I said I was going to get off the couch this past weekend and force myself to go see Wolf Man in theaters I did not -- I am the lyingest liar who ever lied and I hope Christopher Abbott shows up at my door and slaps me. (With what I'll leave up to him.) Anyway obviously that makes it my fault that the film flopped, but I did think about the movie some -- that's the same, right? What I thought about was my god, will anyone make a werewolf movie that works again? I mean this is admittedly an insulting thing to think about a movie I haven't seen yet, but the general consensus appears to be that Leigh Whannell's movie doesn't work and it got me thinking -- what was the last werewolf movie that really did work? That was truly great? I saw and liked last year's Werewolves recently but it's not a "good" movie -- it just knows how dumb it is, it has really fun practical effects, and it leaves us on a high note:

Thank you #Werewolves for ending on a high note
(this shot of Frank Grillo) pic.twitter.com/3OiOIKlvql

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 29, 2024

2021's Werewolves Within is a lot of fun too but I don't know that I can quite call it an iconic success -- maybe if it hadn't been released in the depths of the pandemic and had grabbed hold of the cultural imagination, but I do think the movie is a little wobbly on its own outside of just being fun. It's certainly not scary, and I want a scary fucking werewolf movie already! Anyway to finally get to the point -- on the heels of Nosferatu's tremendous box office success (huzzah!) our lord and devilish savior Robert Eggers has announced his next movie and it's going to be a scary fucking werewolf movie! (And we know he won't shy away from some blessed werewolf transformation nudity either!) 

He's calling it Werwulf because of course our favorite history nerd is leaning into Ye Olde English -- the script was co-written with his Northman writer and is apparently stuffed with annotations due to its use of Olde English lol. I love this dork so much. The only other info we have is it's set in the 13th Century and Eggers was going to shoot it in black and white but now he is not doing that. Oh and Focus Features has already dated the movie for Christmas Day 2026 because they are counting their great big checks from the holiday counterprogramming of Nosferatu and saying "Gimme more of that shit please!" If we start getting Robert Eggers horror movies every other Christmas I will be a very very happy boy y'all. Long may our dark prince reign!

GIVE US THE WEREWOLF SEX WE DEMAND!!!

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 1:46 PM

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Hech of a Summer

And lo, another thing to look forward to! Actors Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard (yes he of Stranger Things twinkdom) have written, directed, and are co-starring in a campground slasher film called Hell of a Summer that is coming out in April! That's cool but the thing that makes me happiest about this is the actual lead of the film is my wee little snausage Fred Hechinger of The White Lotus and Thelma fame. MNPP is a Fred Hechinger Fan Club...

... and we support any and all things him. I admit I'm a little wary that thing movie was completed and screened at TIFF two years ago (I am refraining from looking up reviews) but wer're in no matter what! Here's the trailer: 

Hell of a Summer comes out April 18th!

44 Until 17

Just as I can't seem to remember the number in the title of Bong Joon-ho's new movie -- every time I'm like, "Is it Mickey 18? 19? 12?" -- I certainly can never remember its release date because it's basically had 17 of those. But here with this new poster release let's look it up like a proper "reporter" and do y'all a solid -- as of today, January 22nd 2025, Mickey 17 is scheduled to release in theaters in the United States on March 7th. That's 44 days from today. Maybe they can go back in and photoshop Robert Pattinson's head a little bit better on this poster in that time? That is one awkward giant head floating on a tiny disembodied body. 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Carrie (1977)

Margaret: I can see your dirty pillows. Everyone will.

Carrie: Breasts, Mama. They're called breasts, 

and every woman has them.

The grand Piper Laurie was born 93 years ago today!

Have some roadhouse whiskey in her honor!

Five Frames From ?

What movie is this?

Good Morning, World

It is a blessing that the fashion magazines seem to have finally realized they need to be gifting us with Aaron Pierre photoshoots -- see also this past Monday -- so at least 2025 hasn't totally murdered us yet! We're three weeks in and we have fresh Aaron Pierre photos to stare at -- deep breaths. If they can just keep giving us this sort of thing twice a week for the next, uhh, two hundred and eight weeks? (Damn you, calculator.) We might survive. (Wow, dark mood this morning.) Hit the jump for them all..

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1946

There is a prompt going around Bluesky (ahh remember harmless fun prompts on social media?) asking people to name a favorite movie of 1975 and it reminded me -- I still have a few entries in my "Siri Says" series left to do! It's been so long since I've done one of these posts (since November of 2022 for god's sake; time has absolutely no meaning anymore) let me remind you what the hell I'm talking about -- "Siri Says" began with me asking my phone to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100 and then whatever number it gave me I would pick my favorite movies of that year. For example the last time I did this all those many months ago I got the number "56" so I shared my favorite movies of 1956. 

The game has sort of changed over time though -- since I only have a handful of numbers left (less than ten) I wrote the remaining years down on pieces of paper and I blindly choose one (since otherwise it would take me a billion years to get Siri to narrow it down to a number I hadn't done before). Yadda yadda I was tired of doomscrolling social media this afternoon so I decided to spend some time on one of these posts (they eat up a surprising amount of effort) and here we are. Today I picked the year 1946. And so now I give you...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1946

Notorious

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on September 6th, 1946 --

It's a Wonderful Life

(dir. Frank Capra)

-- released on December 20th, 1946 --

A Matter of Life and Death

(dir. Powell & Pressburger)

-- released on December 26th, 1946 --

Dragonwyck 

(dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

-- released on April 19th, 1946 --

Beauty and the Beast

(dir. Jean Cocteau)

-- released on October 29th, 1946 --

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Runners-up: Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor), The Big Sleep (dir. Hawks), The Stranger (dir. Welles), The Spiral Staircase (dir. Robert Siodmak), The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Tay Garnett), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (dir. Lewis Milestone)

Never seen: The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. Wyler), The Killers (dir. Siodmak), The Yearling (dir. Clarence Brown), Paisan (dir. Roberto Rossellini), The Blue Dahlia (dir. George Marshall), Great Expectations (dir. David Lean)

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What are your favorite movies of 1946?