On the back of industry-wide strikes, I had low expectations for 2024. Surprisingly, the movies delivered. The year wasn’t rife with five-star bangers, but there was a lot to like. I wholeheartedly recommend 19 movies below.
With the Barbenheimer phenomenon, new movies from masters like Martin Scorsese and Hayao Miyazaki, and less reliance on comic book IP, movies were back in the cultural conversation for the first time since Avengers: Endgame. It didn’t hurt that you could craft a top 20 as strong as most year’s top tens, either.
The movies are kind of back? After filmmaking was ravaged by legitimate concerns for cast and crew safety, pandemic protocols, and studio delays, 2022 brought a breadth of excellent films, the quality of which hasn’t been seen since at least 2019.
As Hollywood continues its systemic eradication of the mid-budget movie, most of what remains is micro-budget indies and mega-budget blockbusters. Some incredibly talented filmmakers managed to make the best of an increasingly binary industry in 2021.
Peter Jackson’s fond farewell to Middle-earth is the standard-bearer for epic-fantasy filmmaking and the best work in the director’s lauded filmography. The Return of the King is a reasonably faithful adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s final Lord of the Rings (LOTR) novel of the same name. Make no mistake: Jackson’s sign-off is indulgent, but with more than nine hours of film leading up to it, its sentimentality is earned.
The Invisible Man, an 1897 novel by sci-fi titan H.G. Wells, was an out-of-the-box choice for a horror movie adaptation. The 2020 movie of the same name is a far cry from the book; it’s a cross between an Elisabeth Moss vehicle and psychological horror movie. Blumhouse, the studio behind The Purge series and Get Out, used recognizable, existing IP to sell a movie concept. It’s become a familiar formula for Hollywood with Peter Berg’s poorly received Battleship (2012) coming nearly a decade ago and a Margot Robbie-led Barbie movie on the horizon.
In response to the 2016 presidential election, a new documentary from A24 and Apple turns to America’s youth to explain how we got here and where we go next. Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss followed 1,000 sweaty, hormonal teenage boys during the American Legion’s week-long civics camp to figure out if the kids are alright. Boys State is an uncomfortable glimpse at partisan politics tinged with an unnatural concentration on toxic masculinity in adolescence.
Black troops accounted for 32% of the American military force in Vietnam, but only 11% of the country’s population at the time. Spike Lee has dedicated his career to identifying socio-political issues, venerating and participating in film history, and restoring Black history. In Da 5 Bloods, Lee sets his sights on the Black soldier’s rightful place in the war film genre. Generations of Hollywood whitewashing and historical erasure have minimized Black military history. Lee’s uneven, affecting film, which debuted on Netflix in June, engages Donald Trump and war’s long-term impact on its participants.
Sony’s body-swapping adventure returned in 2019 for another nostalgic romp through the untamed frontier. Jumanji: The Next Level, the second Jumanji movie in as many years and the fourth since 1995, added Awkwafina, Danny DeVito, and Danny Glover, but the rest of the nostalgic franchise remains frozen in stasis.
2019’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette is the nineteenth film from Richard Linklater, and one of the few women-led films in the writer-director’s catalog. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, adapted from a 2012 novel of the same name by Maria Semple, opts to change the novel’s narrative structure. The movie’s fresh framework kills the book’s central mystery and most of the resulting conflict. Not quite deep enough to serve as a character study, Where’d You Go must settle for an affable tale about an architect’s midlife crisis.
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