My five favorite movies of 2024

(So far...)

Before I sat down to write this post, I was feeling pretty down on 2024 as a movie year.

A couple of big, event-y sequels that I was looking forward to — Gladiator 2 and Furiosa — were both kind of disappointing. The Marvel juggernaut seems to be on some kind of hiatus, and the one big superhero release this year, Deadpool & Wolverine, was dreadful. Last year’s Barbenheimer phenomenon seemed to presage a “we’re so back” moment for mainstream cinema that just never quite materialized. Even in the children’s entertainment zone, we got the “make a bad sequel to a beloved original” treatment with Moana 2, which was so commercially successful that we’re now surely cursed to suffer an endless parade through that expanded universe.

I’m also annoyed because despite my commitment to these year-end lists, I’m not an actual film critic, so I don’t get screenings. And these days, I feel like more and more quality film releases are packed in at the very end of the year. I hear great things about Nickel Boys and The Brutalist, and I will see these movies when they are actually available in DC. But for now, I admit this list feels a bit incomplete, as it did this time last year — Anatomy of a Fall wound up being my favorite movie of 2023, but I didn’t see it until January of 2024.

That said, writing the list is a fun trip down memory lane.

We got a great sequel this year, and a few crackerjack original stories from independent filmmakers that just didn’t happen to be huge hits. We had some fun genre stuff. It didn’t make the list, but I enjoyed the Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie. I’m also enjoying our Movie Star Renaissance, with Zendaya, Glenn Powell, Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler, and Sydney Sweeney establishing themselves as the sort of big stars who can work across genres and genuinely carry a project. So, I’m going to start with a movie that had enough IP and CGI that it arguably didn’t really need stars, but assembled a stacked cast anyway.