Best Media of 2024

For various reasons which either needn't be mentioned here or have already separately been mentioned here, I never did my Best Media of 2024 post. And while it's not a requirement or anything, I do nevertheless feel both an obligation and a compulsion to share this. Maybe it's because the world outside the movie screen seems so awful that I can't deal with anything else. And regardless, I figure that precisely halfway through 2025 is as good a time as any to say what I loved, liked, and hated of 2024.

As a reminder, I’ve written about the the Oscar race for 2024 back right before the broadcast, and I’m feeling pretty good about my prognostication there. I won my Oscar pool, after all1. But I’m not a professional critic, so I invariably fail to see all the major releases of the year I intend to, much less all the movies of the year I want to.

So in the interest of full disclosure, please see the footnotes at the end of this paragraph for the movies I can think of that I wanted to see2, or knew I should see3 but just haven’t for one reason4 or another5.

I saw, by my calculation, 123 movies last year, with 31 of them being from 2024. I’d say I only hated about a half dozen of them. That’s not a bad percentage. However, I would not say that 2024 was a great year for movie. There were times in the early summer I thought I would struggle to put together a top ten list here.

10 and 9 - (tie) Conclave and Juror #2: I defended the MCU for a long time. I grew up on comic books, and the MCU was fun for awhile. Until it took over culture and left us stilted movies stranded in sexless childhood. Conclave and Juror #2 are both sexless, but they are movies of adults living adult lives. I saw these movies the same week and they were a breath of fresh air of a type of movie that used to be available in theaters every week. They are reminders that movies are not only escapism, or, at least they can be an escapism to a world where adults take things seriously and try to do the right thing and figure out how to help others.

8 - Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl: A new Aardman movie is always welcome, especially with Wallace and Gromit facing off again against their greatest foe. This movie is just insanely charming and funny.

7 - Twisters: Twisters was the first summer movie I actually enjoyed in 2024 and just felt like a good old-school throwback to summer blockbusters. Plus, it is an excellent distillation of the out-of-control charisma of Glen Powell. His introduction in Twisters, where all you can see is a gleaming smile through the windshield of a Dodge Ram truck, was my first real taste that we have an honest to god movie star here.

6 - Flow: This lovely wordless animated movie about a bunch of animals banding together to survive an incomprehensible disaster. There are elements of magical realism in it that I didn’t love all the time, but it is well worth watching.

5 - A Real Pain: While A Real Pain is definitely about the Holocaust, it’s mostly about grief, and how overwhelming even ordinary grief is. It’s funnier than that sounds, but also sadder.

4 - The Brutalist: Man, what an amazing piece of cinema. Amazing cinematography, performances, score, and directing. This is an immensely exciting movie to watch, and even though I don’t love some of the choices and some of the conclusions the movie comes to, I love that they did it and that I got to see it.

3 - I’m Still Here: This is a great movie as a movie approached out of time, but it is an utterly gut-wrenching movie to watch one week after the Trump inauguration, as I did. I think, if you somehow managed to watch it divorced from our personal history, it would still hit with a force, but for me, I watched it and thought, "is this what it's going to look like for AOC's family when they take her?" As a movie it gains power because of that—as a moment in our history it's fucking rough to sit through and manifest your fears through.

2 - Hit Man: Not to spend two entries talking about Glen Powell, but this movie is great because of Glen Powell. Hit Man is breezy and charming fun, a genuine rom com (supported that very persuasively answers all the people who say “why is Glen Powell in every movie these days?” He and Linklater have built a movie that effectively coasts on his charisma and surprising versatility. Also Adria Arjona is sexy and charming as hell.

1 - Anora: Sean Baker seems to make movies that are utterly free from judgment—I struggled a little with Red Rocket because of that—and Anora benefits from it enormously. I had no idea where this movie was going at any moment and that’s part of what makes it great. At the end, you get a ride through a great character piece, and also a ride through America today. I was surprised when it won all the Oscars, because usually the Oscars don’t get it nearly so right.

In order of Good But Not As Good as I Hoped, all the way down to the last two Actually Terrible.

5 - Dune, Part II: There’s a bunch of great stuff in here, but ultimately I felt like the second part of Dune was a little flabby and indulgent, and wasn’t as great as the first half. Still damn good, though. I don’t like the changes to the ending, either.

4 - Furiosa: This is just being unfair, I know. I wanted Furiosa to be as good as its predecessor, but unfortunately it fell short of being One of The Greatest Movies Of All Time.

3 - Challengers: Challengers was advertised to us with a kind of winking, “Remember when movies used to be sexy?” and then it showed us two rat-face guys and Zendaya looking bored to be there. That soundtrack is fucking awesome, though.

2 - Gladiator II: How do you make a bad sequel to Gladiator? Ridley Scott figured out how.

1 - Megalopolis: You have to see this movie. It is crazy dogshit. Francis Ford Coppola spent so much effort on it and somehow made an incoherent gaudy piece of trash. It is at times glorious, and often accidentally funny. It doesn’t work at all and has the confidence of a man who has never failed. It is truly terrible and utterly idiosyncratic.

In no particular order

Aftersun: Amazing Paul Mescal performance, and this movie is heartbreaking. I still sometimes cry after hearing “Under Pressure” because of this movie.

Godzilla. It turns out that the original Godzilla is awesome. A great creature feature with inventive special effects and a real heart behind it.

Godzilla Minus One: It turns out the most recent Godzilla movie is awesome. A great creature feature with inventive special effects and a real heart behind it.

Born Yesterday: This is one of those classic rom coms that still feels fresh and exciting today. It might in fact be my favorite movie I saw in 2024. Even though everything in the plot is more or less cliche by now, it is just excellently executed. William Holden and Judy Holliday are great together.

Picnic: Almost as good as Born Yesterday and also starring William Holden (with Kim Novak this time), Picnic is about a charming drifter who comes into a small town to see an old friend of his, just in time for the town’s city-wide Labor Day picnic. Over the course of 24 hours, he meets and falls in love with his friend’s girlfriend, and fireworks ensue. A great piece of two misfits finding each other and falling for each other, there’s a lot of great characters in the town swirling around. This was a movie I’d never heard of before and one that deserves greater attention.

Onibaba: A fantastic and creepy Japanese movie about two women on the fringes of feudal Japan who rob and kill samurai, who wind up getting more than they bargained for.

The Color of Money: It’s Scorsese, early Tom Cruise just finding his legs, and Paul Newman reprising one of his old roles. Just perfect.

It Follows: I am not great with horror and gore, but It Follows is great, and uses the entire field of vision wonderfully. There’s always something slowly moving towards you in the background.

5 - Nobody Wants This: This show had its flaws and a couple of missteps, but the chemistry between Adam Brody and Kristen Bell is perfect. They are fantastic together and the show floats on that fact.

4 - Slow Horses: You should watch all of these. Not for the plots, which are usually somewhere between fine and great, but for the acting, especially Gary Oldman having the time of his life, especially when he gets to spar with Kristin Scott Thomas.

3 - The Bear S3: People complained about this season, so I put off watching it for a long time, and now I don’t listen to people any more. The Bear is a hangout show with people who shout a lot, not a show about getting to the next plot point. Sure, they spent an entire season not resolving their conflicts. That’s what people do, cousin!

2 - Severance: Severance is great, as the entire internet will tell you, and would be number one in almost any other year, if not for…

1 - Shogun: What a piece of work. Just beautiful, wonderfully acted, and impeccably adapted from a readable but vastly inferior work. The original book is a perfect book that dads would buy at the airport if they'd already read all the Tom Clancy there. It was a dated story about a white guy getting fascinated by Japan. The decision in the new miniseries to focus on the Japanese characters was an inspired one, especially with actors like Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai, two of the coolest motherfuckers out there.

A catchall category for moments—often in larger works—that were awesome, amazing, or otherwise noteworthy.

7 - Jesse Plemons in Civil War. Civil War was not a great movie. Making an inexplicable decision to tell that story of a war from the perspective of journalists trying to decide whether to be emotionally invested in their story or remain impartial—and that story is a fucking civil war tearing apart America—is a hell of a choice. But while they do that, they wander through the civil war and have some effective scenes—none more so than Jesse Plemons utterly stealing the movie away from them. It definitely reminded me of the time Landry killed a dude and totally got away with it.

6 - The last chapter of Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility. Mobility is a deceptively small-scale story of a single girl who eventually becomes a woman during this time, and how her life is changed and affected as she works in and around oil, and all that that entails for her both as a career and as a person living as best as she can on this rapidly heating planet; just a woman living her life: getting promotions, dating shitty and less than shitty men, going to friends-of-friends' weddings, and occasionally dealing with increasing turbulence in flights, worse-than-expected hurricanes, and sexism in the resource extraction industry. Until the final chapter hits, and everything feels inevitable in all the right ways, crystalizing the rest of the novel in a surprisingly quick and effective fashion.

5 - Riding the Sandworm in Dune Part II. Dune Part II meandered too much for me and I didn’t love the deviations from the book, especially at the end, but the sandworm scene was Denis Villeneuve at the top of his game, demonstrating his ability to mix practical and special effects to make the fantastic to feel unquestionably real.

4 - The deserved ubiquity of Chappell Roan: I feel like there are no universal pop stars anymore, but Chappell Roan definitely comes close. No one has been sung more (mostly to our cats) in our household in 2024. Her music was everywhere, and almost universally welcomed. My favorite random instance of this was a now-deleted Tik Tok of a geek trying to explain that Chappel Roan was a fellow geek because “"I heard you like magic, I got a wand and a rabbit,” was, she thought, a reference to The Chronicles of Narnia.6

3 - The Baptistry at Padua Cathedral:

2 - "Republicans are weird" That high water mark of the campaign was "Republicans are weird." For one brief moment it seemed like it was going to work out, because someone was saying the truth. Those corrupt evil fuckers are fucking weird. Reader, it did not work out. “They’re weird” summarized the deeply weird feeling of looking at people who are socially in the uncanny valley. Then Democrats abandoned that track, started attacking anyone concerned about Palestinian lives, listened to a bunch of consultants about running towards the center and appealing to Republicans to do the right thing and vote for Kamala. You can never count on Republicans to do the right thing; they will intentionally do the wrong thing because it upsets us so much, and the thing that upsets us is the most evil motherfucker ever to hold power in America is back.

1 - Closer to a Cure for Lupus: The news that researchers at Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital had potentially identified the cause—and a potential treatment—for lupus was one of the best moments of 2024. The possibility of treatment rather than blunt immune suppression could put years or even decades onto my life.

These are, unfortunately, also the programs that have been aggressively defunded by the aforementioned most evil motherfucker ever to hold power in America.

C’est la vie.