The Best Things I Watched in 2024

New and (Mostly) Old

I’m still drowning in term papers so can’t really bust out a coherent essay. Though I want to change things up a little this year anyways, so who knows? Maybe it will be more explorations and taxonomies of things I find interesting.

Now, I saw a LOT of movies in 2024. Most of them were from the last century. But I did manage to get to a few decent films actually released in 2024 (the movies I most wanted to see—A Real Pain, Maria, Nosferatu, The Brutalist) come out much later, here in England. Of all the things I watched at home and in cinemas, only a few new films really blew me away. You’ll see which below. Everything else I consider either 1) New to me or 2) Possessing some kind of revelation or exciting new meaning. Hopefully one or two sparks an interest in someone and they go check out a masterpiece they might never otherwise have seen.

Oh, and if you want to check my Letterboxd? You can, if you want. I use it too much.

15. Dune Part 2

I found the first part of Villeneuve’s Dune chilly, bleak, and cruel. Of course that’s the point, though I’ve never read (and likely will never read) the book, and I treasure a lot of the tinny weirdness of Lynch’s old Laurentis fiasco. Villeneuve is a simple-minded filmmaker but a brilliant realisateur. I find most of his films to be admirably committed to a clinical, airless, almost artless misery. Dune the First was pale and colorless, in a handsome way—but it was all crescendo going nowhere. The interest was in the supporting performances and the sheer scale of it and all that great production design/fx work.

About ten minutes into Part Two, all that fell away for me. And I was left, put simply, with the best classical blockbuster in a decade, and easily Villeneuve’s best film—so good it justified every one of his artless tics. Finally there was genuine color (even the desert scenes seemed to have so much more vibrancy and life than the first) to complement all that design. Pugh, Zendaya, Chalamet, Butler all did just fine, though mostly I love the idea of films like this being fronted by the closest thing we have to young matinee idols. The real joy of the film is in the first hour-and-half, before the portentous Messiah arc kicks in. Out in the desert with the Fremen and crosscutting to the fuming baddies, with Rebecca Ferguson talking to a blue fetus, or back with the plotting Emperor and his retinue, I felt like Villeneuve had, perhaps accidentally, finally abandoned his heaviness for the perfect classical rhythms of the greatest pop flicks. The first half of Part Two is the closest thing we’ve go to Star Wars or The Dirty Dozen or any other example of the most pleasurable romping big-tent cinema. The rest is great, too. But that first hour-and-a-half? Tremendous.

14. Portrait of Jennie

Portrait of Jennie has to be one of the strangest films to come out of classic Hollywood, existing purely in a bizzaro, foggy, sentimental New York of the Mind. The score is a kitsch stew of rearranged Debussy pieces; Jennifer Jones is at her blank best (was any old Hollywood star ever so intriguingly shallow?). It was even technically an independent film, produced and distributed by David O. Selznick, following his break with United Artists. Part of a spate of movies he self-financed in the late 1940s, including Spellbound, The Third Man, and Duel in the Sun (also starring Jones, whom he was married to at the time). Selznick really is worth knowing about. He’s one of the true mavericks of old Hollywood: not only did he bring the world King Kong, Gone With the Wind, and Katherine Hepburn, he was the man responsible for luring both Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock to America.

I found Jennie entrancing. Though surely it was totally unique in its own time—an almost avant-garde expressionist fairytale about a painter who falls in love with a young woman, who seems to come from the past. Every time he sees her she’s become a little older, until eventually he discovers she’s probably already dead. None of it makes sense. But there's an argument to be made that it's the first postwar American arthouse film, even if nobody intended it as such.

13. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The other great film I saw in cinemas in 2024—a film only a true virtuoso madman could make. I still don’t understand how a single person considered Furiosa anything less than brilliant. No, it’s not as economical and linear as Fury Road, but who cares? To want the same thing twice is a cinephilic vice, not a virtue. And Furiosa succeeded in being genius in an entirely different direction, with its mind less on propulsion and more on sprawl—a little more Bible, a little less Monster Trucks. The action, when it happens, is every bit as good as Fury Road. But what George Miller is doing in between, fleshing out his weird little world, giving us his tribes and sects and communes, is just as interesting.

Miller succeeds were nearly all post-apocalyptic genre crap fails miserably. He gets culture. He gets that in the wake of disaster, humans go on writing histories, coming up with stories, developing rituals—no matter how violent, or how strange—that there will always be new names for things. He gets the human urge to make something out of the world, to read into it. He has time in the middle of his decade-long revenge story (or proper Epic, more like) to give you a world that has actually bothered to create its own rules, to invent its own religions, to practice its own weird little arts. And of course, to build some gnarly Monster Trucks.

12. El Cid

Before seeing El Cid, I knew its director, Anthony Mann, largely from the six or seven stone-cold-classic westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the Fifties—movies like The Far Country, Winchester 77, The Naked Spur. I’d also heard that the Cid held up pretty well, though it was clearly stuck awkwardly at the tail-end of the big Hollywood Epic boom (Ben-Hur was 1959 and Spartacus was 1960). By 1961, there was something anachronistic about those big, bloated Epics. Think of men with Mid-American accents cosplaying as Romans, wearing ridiculous levels of makeup. Think of Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments saying “Where’s you’re god now, Moses?” the same way he spoke in Little Caesar.

But El Cid more than holds up—it’s glorious. It’s better than Ben-Hur, better than Spartacus, and not nearly as ridiculous as either. It blasts past sentiment, blasts past camp, entering a terrain so elegant and formalized even the requisite Hollywood anachronisms can’t tank it. Mann’s direction is some of the best I’ve ever seen in that Classical Hollywood style—I’m not sure any filmmaker of his time ever managed the horizontal scrawl of CinemaScope quite like he does here. He's as good as Lean, Kurosawa, Visconti, or Tarkovsky at handling such a sheer abundance of space, and blocking so many bodies and giant buildings in it, choreographing everything precisely. The production design, the costumes, have to be some of the most beautiful and detailed in the history of color film, and there are a few sequences—especially in the first hour, especially with Sophia Loren and her extraordinary headdresses (she is dressed and photographed in this film like a genuine religious icon)—where it lifts off into the kind of territory only reserved for the great masters. It’s one of the old Hollywood’s last great forgotten films.

11. Brewster McCloud

I think that if you want to understand the American Century, all you really need to do is watch John Ford, and then watch Robert Altman. No filmmaker ever explored or elaborated the American Myth (both good and bad) like Ford did, and none ever punctured it as precisely as Altman did. Brewster McCloud is ostensibly about a young man building giant Icarian wings to fly around the Astro Dome. But it’s also about how Shelly Duvall is hot, and how Sally Kellerman is hot, and how old racist rich men deserve to be pushed onto highways in their wheelchairs, and how a professor might just turn into a bird as he lectures the audience about the avian world.

It’s a film in which a hip, self-serious, turtleneck-wearing detective comes to Houston to investigate a series of bird-related murders and show up the local cops, and when he crashes his car into a tiny pond at the end, and a young man calls and goes for help, the detective grimly says “That won’t be necessary,” and shoots himself in the head. Somehow it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. And Brewster is one of the zaniest, silliest, most antisocial movies of the 70s—a brutal skewering of Nixon’s America and a totally rambling, wooly counter-cultural farce. That is: a Robert Altman film.

10. & 9. Raining in the Mountain & Legend of the Mountain

The great Taiwanese director King Hu is the acknowledged master of the Wuxia—or Chinese medieval martial-arts epic. His Dragon Inn and A Touch of Zen are absolutely wild masterpieces, which I love. But I’d never seen any of his later-Seventies fare until these two. I honestly couldn’t tell you what happens in either Legend of the Mountain or Raining in the Mountain, or which film is which, exactly. I watched the two films while drinking far too much tea, staying up until four in the morning, which, although deadly as a routine, is by far my favorite way to watch a film. I can say that there are competing Buddhist monks, ghosts, magic drum battles, fog, evil Eunuchs, thieves, and people bouncing around forests and off walls in choreography only Hu would ever think to create. The man simply lived in his own esoteric Middle Ages, inhabited it like it was the highest spiritual plane available to man, and asked you to get your rocks off trancing out to the wildest and coolest shit he could imagine to put in it. If you’ve never see a King Hu film—don’t die without doing so.

8. Hundreds of Beavers

Ok, so this one could maybe be argued as a 2024 movie, if only because that’s when it first became available on streaming, and immediately caused a bit of a sensation. Hundreds of Beavers is lunatic and brilliant, and plenty of other people have said so, far better than I can. Plenty have also pointed out the ways it’s like a video game, though I say even more than that it’s a dream film. At a certain point so many ridiculous things have happened, given the film’s absurd-but-rigorous logic, you can only sit back and let it go. By the time you discover the beavers are building a rocketship to space (out of wood, naturally), you’re more or less prepared to accept it. Like Buster Keaton, and like the great Czech animator/film-magician Karel Zeman (whom I’m surprised no one has mentioned in conjunction with the film), it’s a triumph of bare bones creation, loving detail, and a wonderful serious of increasingly violent slapstick numbers. A cult classic in the making.

7. Vanya on 42nd Street

Chekov meets Louis Malle, Andre Gregory, and Wallace Shawn—the team behind the immortal My Dinner with Andre. It’s just about the most original “filmed play” I can think of, set in an old crumbling theater where Gregory had actually been staging select performances of the Uncle Vanya. There’s a moment early on, after the actors have all wandered into the playhouse, scrummaged up some food, and sat down to get ready—you realize part-way through two actors’ conversation that the play has started, they’ve actually begun the performance. And from that point on, the play will unfold in just these kinds of sudden intimate moments—around a table, on a bench, on the floor of this decrepit ancient playhouse, sometimes with Gregory and other people sitting just off-center as an audience. Like My Dinner with Andre, it’s a meta-experiment on what “real” performance means when a camera and a script get involved. But like Andre, it’s better than that, too. It’s a tightrope-walking celebration of the hypnosis of acting, and the beautiful non-world of a great play (and somehow cinema, too).

6. I Knew Her Well

My intuition says that this is one of the great films of the Sixties (certainly one of the great soundtracks). But then I am exactly the target audience for this ultra-modernist story, of a doomed Italian party-girl wandering through the ennui of swinging-Sixties Rome. The ending is a bit tragically pat but most of the rest of its drifting malaise is exquisite. I’ve always felt the opposite of the way Pauline Kael felt about that world of Antonioni and Fellini. Where she would ask something like, “Who could care about all these frigid, alienated, beautiful middle class people wandering through these half-plastic cities?” I can only ever respond: “Who would want to see anything else?” I Knew Her Well is situated somewhere between those two, between the disillusionment and geometry of Antonioni, and the half-mad riot of Fellini. Antonio Pietrangeli’s sense of space is just as interesting, and he surely knew exactly how good a subject he’d found in Stefania Sandrelli, who gives one of the great performances of the era.

Unlike Monica Vitti or Anouk Aimee or Jeanne Moreau, Sandrelli has no worldliness or savvy to impart, she doesn’t reflect or challenge the camera or the situation. She projects a kind of feverish innocence, almost convincing herself and the audience that she can coast her way through abuse and misogyny and failure—until she reaches moments of such intense, clear world-weariness. Then even the camera cannot save her. You wonder how someone at 19 years old could ever see so clearly into the world’s misery. I think it’s no accident that so many of the best European films of the Sixties are about men following beautiful, interesting women around with cameras (think Antonioni/Vitti, Godard/Karina, Bergman and his many actresses, or Catherine Deneuve and her many directors). On those brilliant women’s faces you can read the entire twentieth century—all its confusion and beauty and pain.

5. Solaris

Though it’s almost completely overlooked, my chance viewing (and subsequent re-view) of Soderbergh’s version of Solaris confirmed for me that it’s not only one of the best sci-fi films of our century, as well as Soderbergh’s best film, it’s even better than Tarkovsky’s classic version of the book (the only Tarkovsky film that I think deserves, at times, to be called truly dull). What Soderbergh does with the story and the sleek look of the film—those warm low-light interiors on Earth, or the blue confines of the space station—creates a bleary, beautiful, truly hypnotic (I can think of no better term) vibe. Clooney is also frankly fantastic, a reminder that he can act like somebody other than George Clooney (which, to be fair, he has done best and most wonderfully for Soderbergh, too). There are some really magnificent sets and eerie fx—all of which feel just real enough to trick the mind. I suspect much of it may have had a secret influence on Nolan’s Interstellar.

In a way, Soderbergh’s Solaris is the film Interstellar wanted to be. Sleek, mournful, and quietly devastating, where Nolan could only ever be bombastic. What takes Solaris from great to extraordinary is its mood and its music. The score by Cliff Martinez is one of the best of the century—there are moments in the middle of the film, in which Clooney is going in and out of consciousness, blipping between memories of his dead wife on Earth, while the music swells and recedes, which come close to 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Stalker in portraying a kind of cosmic, alien power. But it is to Soderbergh’s credit that there is something just as human and beautifully sad in there as well.

4. Le Mépris, 4K Restoration on the Big Screen

Jean-Luc Godard was an ass, and his self-congratulatory theories (especially going from the late Sixties into the Seventies) have always struck me as exhausting and pretentious—he seems like a man who was always guilty about not being able to be radical enough; he could never let cinema be cinema. But he was also a truly brilliant and unbelievably prolific filmmaker. His best films are magnificent, and as I get older many of them seem funnier, warmer, and far more elegant than I often took them for when I first saw them. There is no better case than Le Mepris, his masterpiece, which I was lucky enough to catch last year at a University showing on a big screen, in the brand new 4K release (the trailer included above is from the older 2016 release, simply because the trailer gives you far more of the beauty of the film).

Partially because of Georges Delerue’s all-time-great score, partially because of the legendary Raoul Coutard’s color photography, partially because Brigitte Bardot is constantly acting her eyelashes off without any Godardian irony whatsoever—Le Mepris is Godard’s most emotional cinematic experience. It’s also weirdly the greatest film of Homer’s Odyssey, mostly because it’s about a filmmaker (Fritz Lang, playing himself!) who is failing to make Homer’s Odyssey. Some things are just too great a folly—the folly itself is where the art is.

3. White Noise 5 times in two weeks

I think I must be the only person in the world who cares for Noah Baumbach’s flop adaptation of Don DeLillio’s White Noise. The sheer number of people (critics and Letterboxd users alike) who basically threw up their hands and said “I guess I just didn’t get it” or hemmed and hawed about the way it transformed the book—these should’ve been dead giveaways to people that a potential classic had been unveiled. Nobody ever gets these things when they first arrive, they always seem unassimilable. I loved the film when I first saw it in theaters in 2022. I thought it was absolutely amazing that Netflix had thrown $100 million dollars at Baumbach to make this, of all films. And yet there was something perfect about it: its depiction of DeLillo’s infamous “Airborne Toxic Event” not only resonated eerily with the pandemic era, it came a year before the exact actual event happened in East Palestine, Ohio, the exact place where the fucking movie was made. Some people fleeing the actual event had been extras in the film when it was made two years before. You cannot make these things up.

Revisiting Baumbach’s film, however, I found myself growing strangely closer and closer to it. Until eventually it became important I watch it. For a story obsessed with the fear of death and the subtle propaganda of our materialist society, it was oddly comforting—just like the soft fluorescent glow of the supermarket the character J.A.K. Gladney compares to some kind of pre-death bardo. I began to memorize the film’s rhythms. I think I probably watched it five times in two weeks. Something about it sustained me, I don’t know exactly what. It’s since become my favorite film of this decade so far, easily, and feel protective of it, that anyone who dismissed it was an idiot. Baumbach made it with superb irony, turning the middle into a Spielbergian family disaster comedy and the last part into a lurid DePalma paranoia piece. He got Danny Elfmann to do his best work in years, and managed to get Gerwig, Driver, and Cheadle (along with the incredible younger actors) to rehearse and spout out DeLillo’s unreal dialogue almost word for word from the novel, in a way that feels like watching a glorious filmed theater. The whole thing is a triumph, and it’s all capped by that end scene—an absolute masterpiece of a credit sequence—set to that infernally catchy James Murphy song. For that sequence alone, Baumbach deserves to be recognized for what White Noise finally turned him into: a great filmmaker.

2. Trust/Simple Men/Surviving Desire

Of all the discoveries I made in 2024, I think none meant as much to me as the films of Hal Hartley. One of the great saints of American indie films—so indie he’s had to go to the Internet to crowd-fund remasters of many of his best films, which can often be impossible to find. Seeing the films Trust and Simple Men, and eventually tracking down the 1-hour feature Surviving Desire (which is probably the best long short film I’ve seen), were like finding an entire new corner of the American subconscious I’d never seen before, but somehow always knew was there, or possible. As a writer and director, Hartley is maybe only comparable to David Lynch or Wes Anderson—though only barely. He’s also more in touch with normal people than either of them. I don’t know how to express what he does: the tone is entirely his own. It’s literate, a little stilted and stylized. The characters are deadly earnest but in constant deadpan.

The best place to start is probably Simple Men—if only for the scene above, which encapsulates the kind of authentic underground Nineties most people now assume never really existed (though I would say that Hartley’s relative obscurity proves otherwise). His best long feature is Trust, where the late, great Adrienne Shelley and Martin Donovan give two of the best performances of the entire era. In fact, between those films and Surviving Desire, I think Donovan was maybe the most original male performer of his time—his entire persona, his disaffection, his control of every little shrug, is totally unique and captivating.

But it’s Surviving Desire that most captured my heart. I really think it needs to be seen by everyone who cares about film. It’s an amazing testament to what a single filmmaker can do with a single camera, a few locations, a great script, and great actors. As a classic story, of a professor and a student who fall in love with their projections of each other, it’s perfectly balanced and wonderfully pretentious while constantly, gleefully skewering itself—it often feels like Hartley was figuring out, in flashes, a new kind of film writing and film acting, a process entirely his own.

1. Inherent Vice, in 35mm

Alright, so I discovered my favorite film of the decade, and a new revelatory filmmaker hero—so what could be left? Only another woefully underrated, gorgeous masterpiece, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, which I think is slowly becoming recognized as the classic it is. I don’t think I’m being very controversial here in declaring that PTA is the greatest working American artist, in any medium. Every last one of his films is incredible in some way but I find his perfect four-film run from There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, and Phantom Thread mind-boggling. To find that many actual masterpieces (each so different from the others) made back to back, you have to go back to Bergman or Hitchcock or Ozu, and even then I don’t think they ever made so many in a row that were all that good.

Though The Master stands as probably the best among equals, and Phantom Thread is edging up there with each re-watch, my favorite has always been Inherent Vice, another adaptation of a supposedly un-filmable author that was initially met with confusion. The high point of all my movie-watching and cinema-going in 2024 was the chance to see the film projected on proper 35mm, in all its fuzzy, scuzzy glory. Something about seeing the film (already a stoned, obscure analog dream) with the whir of the projector, the real grain on the screen, and the slight awkward pauses as the operator shifting over to the next reel—it transported me to that older world and taught me something about film I can’t quite put into words. It’s a feeling I’m going to be trying to recapture for a long time.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I hope to be back in about two weeks time when I have a chance to write something more consistently.

NOTE—if you’re in London and you have any interest, I’m going to be speaking with my good friends Thomas Lambert and Justin Smith-Ruiu (of Hinternet fame) at a panel on Art, Paranoia, and Conspiracy Theory. It’s being held at the Verdurin Art Space in Hoxton on Saturday, February 1st. You can find the event here: https://verdur.in/event/paranoia/.