There’s a line I’ve been thinking about a lot lately from George Carlin’s Hippy Dippy Weatherman routine: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued dark tonight, turning to partly light in the morning.”
That’s about all the summary I have in me for the year behind us and the year ahead. Things are dark. Continued darkness is expected, hopefully turning to partly light at some point in the future. But, to paraphrase the old man in the cave, “It’s dangerous to go alone! So take this list of my favorite films from 2024.” They were each pockets of light for me in the year behind us; May they offer something of the same to you in the days ahead.
Honorable Mention: The 4:30 Movie*
For a long while, I had only really thought of Kevin Smith as a podcaster and professional raconteur. I would hear him sometimes on various shows talk about the things he was making or writing, but it wouldn’t ever occur to me to seek those things out. I was happy he was able to pay his bills with Clerks III or Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, but those always felt a lot more like curios for his über fans than anything I would get something out of. I got a lot more interested when he started talking about The 4:30 Movie, though.
A little while back, Smith went in with friends of his to save his childhood movie theater. Part of the theater’s struggles could be tied to it desperately needing to be updated, but what Smith realized was that what he then had on his hands was a movie theater that was basically already dressed for an 80s/90s period film. So, he knocked out a script to take advantage of that. The unexpected result is maybe the sweetest movie of his career, about the semi-autobiographical misadventures of a young boy trying to take a girl he likes on a date to the movies. Something about Smith’s usual mix of crass dialogue, silly set pieces, and heart-on-sleeve sincerity ends up being perfectly calibrated for a story about young teens just coming into their own. What it most reminds me of in terms of tone, was something like the early Savage Steve Holland films, like One Crazy Summer and Better off Dead. I want to be careful not to oversell this, because it really isn’t trying to do all that much, but I don’t know that I saw anything this year that I was more surprised by how much I ended up liking it.
(You can read Damian's full review of The 4:30 Movie here.)
Ten: The Wild Robot
These aren’t two films that are intended to go together, but I can’t think about The Wild Robot without thinking about Nightbitch. The satisfaction of watching Nightbitch is how it speaks to that feeling of being consumed by the relentlessness and invisibility of being a parent, so much so that Amy Adams’ character is just credited in the film as ‘Mother’. That film is fluent in the secret and very human ugliness that is sometimes bubbling away inside a lot of parents just trying to make it through one hard day after another. The weird satisfaction of The Wild Robot is that it’s kind of like a version of Nightbitch that you can watch with your kids.
Adapted from the book by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot, is the story of a robot that finds itself responsible for raising a baby goose. The film explicitly speaks to how hard parenting can be, along with the kinds of unappreciated sacrifices it can typically entail, but clearly packaged in a feel good story with the message that, despite those hardships, parents do still genuinely love their kids anyway. Recommended if you always thought Fly Away Home needed more explosions.
Nine: Widow Clicquot
I love how this film plays with audience expectations. Initially we meet Barbe-Nicole as a newly widowed mother, overwhelmed by being left in charge of her brilliant husband’s vineyard. Except, it turns out, overwhelmed is just how others see her. She’s profoundly sad by the loss of her husband, but she was also at his side building the vineyard with him, and is more than capable of taking things over. The whole film is structured in these kinds of subtle reveals and reversals that keep reframing the story as it moves along. Perhaps Barbe’s husband isn’t quite what we thought? Perhaps the motives of those who doubt Barbe-Nicole’s ability are actually more conniving than they first seemed? Perhaps Barbe-Nicole actually knows herself to be something much greater than anyone around her suspects?
In the end, what seems like the story of a grieving widow trying to make the best of a bad situation, slowly evolves into the story of a shrewd, innovative, and historically important business woman, who changed the course of her industry forever. By rooting this business drama so firmly in the personal drama of Barbe-Nicole’s struggles during those first years after she took over the vineyard, it helps hide that this is another in a string of “origin of a business” films that have been in vogue in recent years (e.g. Blackberry, Tetris, Air, The Beanie Bubble, etc); but where this film thrives is that the story is always far more interested in the widow Clicquot herself than it is in the Veuve Clicquot champagne company. The story of Widow Clicquot isn’t that Barbe-Nicole was forever defined by the death of her husband, but rather, that remaining a widow was the only legal means she had at that time and place to continue to run this business as her own. Her story isn’t ultimately one of grief, but of stubborn and inventive resiliency in the face of a society that wanted to see her fail.
Eight: Orion and the Dark*
Charlie Kaufman is no stranger to adaptation. Of his nine screenplays made into films, Orion and the Dark is the fourth to be adapted from someone else’s book. What all of these adaptations share with Kaufman’s original stories is a generally bleak view of the human condition, typically conveyed through the perspective of some lonely creative who shares many of the same fears and flaws that Kaufman sees in himself. Even when adapting someone else’s work, Kaufman always finds an approach that allows him to fit that story into his own strange voice. In this case, his voice comes through a neurotic 11 year old boy named Orion.
Orion and the Dark is so tonally out of step with the rest of Kaufman’s work, that it feels like a wild departure. In terms of actual content, though, this children’s film overlaps with the rest of his projects more than you might think. Orion shares many of the hallmarks of a typical Kaufman protagonist; he’s smart and terrified of the world, painfully aware of how close at hand the life he wishes he was living would be if he weren’t so incapacitated by his own fears. The key difference in this story, though, is that Orion is still young enough for his life to turn out differently.
Without going into details, the ending of Orion and the Dark is hopeful, happy, tidy, and family-friendly. Not at all Charlie Kaufman’s usual, but appropriate here because of the kind of story being told. Kaufman is approaching the same issues he normally does - human fears in a foreboding natural world - but from the opposite direction, from the standpoint of the child who still has their life ahead of them. This makes Orion and the Dark less of a departure for Kaufman, than an entry point for his ideas, tailored for younger viewers. Exactly the kind of film I wish I had when I was a kid.
*(You can read Damian's full review of Orion and the Dark here.)
Seven: It’s What’s Inside
I had first heard about It’s What’s Inside when Netflix made the largest deal at Sundance that year for its distribution rights. I lost track of it though because of how little promotion Netflix gives most of its properties. It wasn’t until I started seeing it pop up again on people’s Best of the Year lists that I remembered to check it out. Having now seen it, I am deeply bummed that this didn’t get a wide theatrical run and the attention it deserved. The premise of the film is that a group of friends, who used to be much closer, reunite for a bachelor party. One estranged member of their group, with some kind of shadowy job in the tech industry, shows up to the party with the prototype of a machine that allows people to switch bodies.
The party game that follows is: everyone switches bodies, and everyone tries to guess who is in which body. It’s a bit of a feast for the actors as we get to see everyone playing multiple characters, sometimes multiple levels deep as they are sometimes one person, in the body of another person, trying to convince everyone else that they are someone else. With these layers of deception, things deteriorate quickly as people take full advantage of what they can do in somebody else’s shoes that they could never get away with in their own.
Six: Hundreds of Beavers
My affection for Hundreds of Beavers has grown every time I’ve rewatched it. It’s the story of an Applejack salesman whose livelihood was ruined when his distillery and apple orchard were destroyed by the machinations of some local beavers, leading our hero to reinvent himself as the region’s pre-eminent fur trapper, while ultimately getting his revenge on those beavers in the process.
Made for $150,000, this film feels like a milestone. This is basically a full length live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. At first blush, it feels overstuffed with gags and ideas, until you realize just how purposeful and meticulously each segment fits into the whole. Every scene manages to be entertaining on its own, while teaching the audience something about how to understand the world of the story, so that the pace and scope of everything in the full tilt finale can land.
Five and a half: Trap
My top ten list was already four days late and over 2,500 words long when I saw Trap. I wasn’t about to cut anything I had already written, and I also wasn’t about to leave Trap off my list, so, here we are.
I had been holding off on Trap because, long before I would have had a chance to see it, I had read and listened to enough reviews of it, that I already knew every story beat. And, this didn’t seem like a film that would survive already knowing all its twists and turns. But, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I’ve never had the experience before of watching something for the first time, feeling like I was rewatching a classic. Josh Hartnett is undeniable here. I bought him entirely as both a great dad and a serial killer. He’s fearsome, but with a Lecter likability. Throughout, I found myself fervently rooting as much for him to get caught, as I was for him to get away, despite already knowing exactly what was going to happen. A film like that has something to offer you forever.
Five: Lisa Frankenstein
Before it was even out of theaters, Zelda Williams’ feature film debut, Lisa Frankenstein, was already being inducted into the new cult film canon. It was seen as a financial failure, but the people who loved it were all in immediately, and found one another right away. Williams openly wears her influences here, producing something that feels like John Waters and Tim Burton co-directing Promising Young Woman. Part twee gothic romance and part acid satire of the same, the animated opening credit sequence feels like something that would sincerely work as a segment in Corpse Bride, before transitioning into a story that often feels like a direct caricature of Edward Scissorhands.
Equal parts smart, acid, and gross, Lisa Frankenstein is the story of a teenage girl adjusting to a new school, a new step family, and a new life in the aftermath of witnessing her mother’s murder during a home invasion. That adjustment, however, just so happens to include an undead monster falling for her and murdering the people who do her wrong. Along the way, the film manages to be as much of a love letter to its influences as it is a subversion of them. If it means more films like this, I hope Zelda Williams has a long career ahead of her.
Four: Woman of the Hour
Anna Kendrick’s debut film is a staggering accomplishment. Even before getting into how compelling the story is, I was wholly unprepared for how much of a visual stylist she would be right out of the gate. Her use of the numerous outdoor landscapes and exterior settings is incredible throughout.
I ended up leaving Blink Twice off my top ten because I ultimately decided that everything I liked about what that film was saying, was expressed more successfully here. The hook of this film is the true story that a serial killer once appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game, and even got picked for the date. Just that idea is enough to get greenlit as a basic cable thriller, but Kendrick crafts a much richer story about the society that let a guy like this get away with what he was doing for as long as he did.
Three: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is one of the more impressive narrative experiences I’ve ever had watching a documentary. The film is structured so that we are initially told the story of the short life of a young Norwegian man, Mats Steen, who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy as a child. We meet Mats through a collection of home videos and interviews with his family about the life he seemed to have led as a young man isolated by his limitations, who spent most of his life playing video games in a basement apartment until he passed away at 25.
Through the course of going through his things, Mats’ parents discover that their son had been writing a blog about his life and experiences living with his condition. So, they wrote a short update to his blog, so that in case he’d had any readers, they would know what had happened to him. Mats’ parents were shocked to discover just how much they didn’t know about their son’s life when they receive a flood of messages coming in from all the people wanting to expressing their condolences. Messages from a great many people who don’t just know their son, but had deep and meaningful relationships with him as his World of Warcraft character, Ibelin.
From there, the documentary almost starts over, but now telling Mats' story through the prism of the character he spent so much time playing. Reconstructed using Warcraft style animation, chat logs, forum posts, and interviews with the people from the Warcraft guild he belonged to, we get a window into a life so much richer than even his family thought possible.
Two: Kneecap
I went into Kneecap almost entirely blind. I knew it had something to do with Irish rappers and that it had Michael Fassbender in it. The first time through, I loved it for what it seemed to be: the story of two school-age lads and their teacher, who formed an Irish language rap group as an explicitly political act, advocating for the rights of Irish speakers in Northern Ireland. In a flashback, Fassbender, as the IRA dad of one of the kids, tells both boys something he’s clearly told them hundred times, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.” At no point during that first watch did I realize that a) this was a true-ish story and b) it was starring the three guys from the real band.
Part of the surprise comes from what scumbags the guys in the band are. You wouldn’t expect anyone telling their own story would be willing to paint themselves in such an unflattering light, but this humanizing touch ends up working incredibly well for the emotional heft of the narrative. Even if these are actually more personas than reflecting who the guys in the band really are, and even if the events depicted are heavily embellished, this winds up being one of the most successful musical biopics I’ve ever seen.
One: I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow is one of the more important films released in 2024, thanks to its powerfully evocative approach in trying to depict something visceral and true about the trans experience; That said, sometimes calling a film ’important’ can come off as damning it with faint praise, and sometimes, saying a film speaks to the experiences of a marginalized community can lead people to assume the film is only for that community. I Saw the TV Glow is more than important, it’s the best film I’ve seen this year; And, though it is a film with a particular aim, the result is a message that should play for anyone.
It is challenging to relate the plot of this film because it’s a story that only reveals itself very slowly over the full course of its runtime. Like Lynch’s Lost Highway or Inland Empire, the narrative is built in such a dreamy way that you need to have seen the ending in order to really make sense of the beginning. It does work as an experience as it’s moving along, building with each new sequence, but it only fully comes together in its final haunting moments.
The story opens in the 90s with a young, sheepish boy named Owen, who tags along with his mom when she goes to vote at his school. While he’s waiting for her to finish, he sees a girl a little older than himself named Maddy. She’s sitting by herself, reading the episode guide to a TV show called The Pink Opaque. Owen has seen commercials for the show, and has been interested in it, but he has never been able to check it out because it comes on after his very strict bedtime.
Maddy is about as awkward as Owen is shy, but they are able to sufficiently bond over the show for them to make a plan for Owen to fake a sleepover at a friend’s house so that he can sneak over to Maddy’s house to watch the show the following weekend. That evening winds up being a turning point in his life.
The show is very deliberately meant to evoke comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even using the same font for their credits. Like Buffy, The Pink Opaque is structured as a monster of the week show, where its two main characters, Tara and Isabel, have to defeat a different villain each week, but all of the episodes are part of an overarching storyline about a larger fight against the real big bad, Mr. Melancholy. Aside from the pilot episode of the show, when Tara and Isabel meet at summer camp, the two spend the rest of the series apart, but remain psychically connected to one another as The Pink Opaque.
Mirroring the show, thanks to the disfunction of their respective home situations, Owen and Maddy initially only meet up in person this one time to watch the show together. But, they remain connected, however, as Maddy continues to help Owen keep up with the show by leaving VHS tapes of the episodes for him to pick up in the school’s dark room. Such parallels become increasingly important to the story as Maddy eventually comes to believe that she and Owen really are Tara and Isabel, and that they’ve been imprisoned in their current lives by Mr. Melancholy. Owen is especially troubled by this idea because, besides feeling like a paranoid delusion, it also happens to feed into questions he’s not yet ready to start grappling with about his (her?) own identity.
Like with their debut film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun has a masterful handle on balancing the tone of a story like this where it’s unclear if a character is crazy or if the world really is something very different than what they had ever thought before. Schoenbrun also has the most incisive sense about that particular feeling of being lost and isolated when you are still trying to figure out who you are and what your place in the world is. The particular novelty of Schoenbrun’s work so far, though, is how they relate those feelings as unapologetic horror stories.
The standard metaphor is the as yet unhatched egg, just waiting to come out of their shell into a brand new life, which can be a fine heartwarming story when it works out. Schoenbrun is more interested in this transformation as a Chapel Perilous, a struggle through a long dark night of the soul where the outcome on the other side is far from certain. Besides making for more interesting stories, such a framing also takes seriously the ways in which becoming who you need to be is fraught with peril. While this message may be most resonant for a particular audience, there is surely something in it for everyone.
The Rest of My Top 20:
20) Abigail, 19) His Three Daughters, 18) Last Stop Yuma County, 18) Late Night with the Devil, 16) Hit Man, 15) My Old Ass, 14) Young Woman and the Sea, 13) Sometimes I Think About Dying, 12) The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Damian Masterson
Staff Writer
Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.
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