Top Ten Films of 2024
Honorable Mentions, in no particular order:
Gladiator 2. Saturday Night. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Alien: Romulus. The Bikeriders. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Civil War. One Life. Dune: Part Two. Heretic. Horizon: An American Saga - Part One.
Top Ten, in ascending order:
10. Caddo Lake
This film was a surprise discovery for me, and I hesitate to say too much about it, lest I steal the surprise from anybody else. The IMDB plot description – “When an 8-year-old girl disappears on Caddo Lake, a series of past deaths and disappearances begin to link together, altering a broken family’s history” – isn’t wrong per se, but so belies what goes on in this film it constitutes a massive undersell. I thought I was about to watch a family drama/mystery. What it actually is . . . well, let’s just say it nearly broke my brain. I almost decided to take notes to keep track of the layers upon layers of revelation. And I watched it twice in two days, just so I could watch my wife watch it and re-experience it through her eyes. It’s not a perfect movie, of course, and not all of it works, but it all worked for me.
9. The Instigators
Doug Liman’s latest looks like another one of those disposable crime comedies that inexplicably costs $200 million and hits streaming services every other week (Wolfs, anyone?), but this one is actually a blink-and-we-forgot-about-it gem. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star as awkward partners in a heist gone wrong, and they’re both so funny and so affecting, the material is elevated to a modern spin on classic buddy action films like Midnight Run or 48 Hours. The action scenes are fine. It’s the characterization that rules. Bonus points for featuring my guy Paul Walter Hauser as a gangster-schlub with a Baa-stin accent.
8. Longlegs
The latest exercise in dread from writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of the late horror icon Anthony Perkins) pulls a bit of a fast one, beginning as a kind of serial killer puzzlebox movie (think Silence of the Lambs or Seven) but pulls the rug out from under the viewer in a way that is both slow and jarring. For a horror film, the violence isn’t gory and the scares aren’t exactly jumpy. Instead you get a gradually overwhelming sense of malice brewing as FBI agent Lee (Maika Monroe) gets sucked into the pursuit of a serial killer (Nicholas Cage) who may or may not be connected to her own family past. It’s a bizarre film, and not for the faint of heart, but I appreciated the thematic assessment of the devil as being both very, very evil and very, very pathetic.
7. Rebel Ridge
Aaron Pierre plays a former Marine trying urgently to get bail money to his cousin when he is hijacked by the civil assets forfeiture corruption of a small police force in a rural town. Based on the real-life occurrences of such practice, the movie deftly keeps its message elegantly submerged in its smooth execution of thriller genre tropes. An elevated action film, sort of a prestige version of First Blood, about a black veteran finding any privilege unearned by his service to his country, Rebel Ridge has top-notch performances and really tense action scenes. Riveting.
6. Flow
This Latvian animated film, now the recipient and nominee for multiple awards, follows the journey of an independently spirited cat – which might be redundant – thrust into an awkward community of diverse creatures trying to survive a cataclysmic flood. A cat, a dog, a lemur, a capybara, and a secretary bird enter a boat. That might be a setup for a very convoluted joke, but it’s also the setup for a very moving, very lovely film. Featuring no dialogue and no song-and-dance numbers, just the authentic animal sounds recorded for each creature (though I’ve learned a baby camel has stood in for the capybara), Flow is about friendship and community and how a survival instinct is heightened when you don’t feel disconnected from others. While the animation is an odd combination of lush and rudimentary, the composite result is a beautiful movie.
5. Thelma
June Squibb’s titular character gets scammed by a virtual con-artist preying on the elderly, and while her family helplessly worries about her ability to survive in the outside world, hijacks a friend’s scooter and goes looking to get her money back. Thelma is about aging and dignity, although not in a heavy-handed way. Instead it’s hilarious and heartwarming. The performances are great, especially Squibb’s, and despite a bit of language, it’s the kind of work that makes the best kind of family movie (because it’s not trying to be).
4. Juror #2
This is probably Clint Eastwood’s final film, and Warner Brothers should be tarred and feathered for mishandling its release so badly. Nicholas Hoult stars as the juror in question, brought in to help try the case of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend on the side of a road. But as it turns out, Hoult’s character might have some intimate knowledge of the crime. It’s an ethics quiz wrapped in a courtroom drama enveloped in a thriller. Eastwood’s trademark editorial sparseness and economic pacing give the drama a constant sense of momentum, and the conclusion left me thinking about it for days. He should have been nominated for a Best Director Oscar.
3. A Complete Unknown
I went into the Bob Dylan biopic very skeptical, but I guess I’m Chalamet-pilled now, because James Mangold’s latest musical history (he of Walk the Line fame) is really entertaining and surprisingly moving. Chalamet plays Dylan as an enigma, an iconoclast with populist affections, a walking, shape-shifting inventor not just of music but of his own persona. The writing is crisp. The performances are substantive. (Ed Norton is especially great as the legendary folk singer and activist Pete Seeger.) But of course the real stars of the show are the songs, and Chalamet acquits himself well, evoking the essence of the raspy folklorist without lapsing into caricature. A real winner here.
2. A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin star as estranged cousins who take a trip to Poland to visit the homeland of their Jewish immigrant grandmother. Winding up on a kind of Jewish heritage tour, the sites – and their own proximity – provokes long-simmering differences and anxieties to rise to the surface of their erstwhile relationship. A Real Pain has a double meaning. Culkin’s Benji is a real pain in the butt. Alternatively the life of the party and a depressive jerk, Eisenberg’s David struggles to empathize with him, feeling a genuine affection but resenting him at the same time. And thus “a real pain” is also about coming to grips with the struggles of others, seeing beneath the facades of their social performance to try to get to know the real person – and the real hurt – underneath. Culkin is getting all the awards buzz, and his performance is great, but it was Eisenberg’s David that I really resonated with. Working from his own script and direction, Eisenberg’s neurotic superiority resonates with anyone who’s ever thought about those who wear their feelings on their shirt sleeves, “Straighten up. Everybody struggles. What makes you so special?” (That these considerations are being made in the context of a trip that takes them on a visit to the Madjanek concentration camp.) David’s little insight into Benji shared with a fellow traveler at a dinner table nearly brought me to tears.
1. Perfect Days*
A Japanese single man spends his day carefully and pleasantly cleaning public toilets in Tokyo parks and his evenings reading paper back novels before going to bed. Then he wakes up and does it again. And again. And again. Punctuated by little pleasures like listening to classic rock cassette tapes in his van, buying the same vending machine coffee every morning, eating at the same ramen bar, and eating the same sandwich every day in the same park at lunch time while he takes the same photos of the same trees above him. Then his niece enters his world, pressing open his sacred solitude and prompting him to ponder his hazy past and his routine present. Perfect Days is about the sacredness of work, the dignity in living a quiet life, and the beauty to be seen around us if we could only manage to be still, and to get small enough. It’s a beautiful film, for those who have the eyes to see.
*Perfect Days is technically a 2023 picture, but it didn’t release wide until early 2024, so I’m counting it among last year’s films.