Rarely do I go through a year without discovering at least one new film that I consider perfect enough to merit four stars. Alas, 2024 is one of them.
In fairness, I have not seen everything (who can?) and there may be a perfect 2024 picture lurking behind some unopened door. Should I discover it in the future, I’ll pen an addendum, but the best I can do now is note that 2024 was the year of “almost” -- a year of thoughtful, ambitious movies that introduced important ideas that often fell just short of greatness.
In most cases, these almost-perfect movies faltered due to excess (too long, too overt, too pretentious). In this camp, I include the following, many of which are critical favorites: Anora, a clever character drama about an exotic dancer; Here, a fascinating meditation on place, time, and humanity; Conclave, a taut fictionalized thriller about the selection of a new pope; Nosferatu, a brooding remake of F.W. Murnau’s vampire classic; The Brutalist, the epic saga of an architect who survived the Holocaust; and The Substance, a gory melodrama about aging, body image, and vanity.
These are all worth watching, all good movies that some may consider perfect, but for me they fell short in at least a minor way. Consider them my runners-up as I present a list of the seven movies that rose above the fray.
7) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: Although I enjoyed 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, I wasn’t in the camp that declared it a masterpiece. With Furiosa, Mad Max creator George Miller is bringing me around. The film gives viewers an early look at the title character portrayed by Charlize Theron in the 2015 film. It is exciting, action-packed, and emotionally powerful, largely thanks to Anya Taylor-Joy, who inhabits the role that Theron created. The supporting cast is also fun, especially Chris Hemsworth as the operatic villain Dementus.
6) Fly Me to the Moon: Director Greg Berlanti’s sweet dramedy about a marketing genius (Scarlett Johansson) hired to make sure NASA launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) puts a man on the moon “no matter what” is an underrated gem. The cast, which also includes Woody Harrelson, is charming, and the script is one of the better ones produced in 2024. True, it doesn’t carry the weight of epics like The Brutalist and Nosferatu, but it also skips the pretention and bloat. It’s just a really good time at the movies.
5) A Complete Unknown: The biggest flaw of this Bob Dylan biopic is that it strays unnecessarily from the truth. Dylan is one of the most fascinating figures in music, a real-life “trickster,” as author John Leland asserts in his book Hip: The History. With source material like that, one needn’t spend too much time fictionalizing. Still, writer-director James Mangold has crafted a terrific film. The plotting and details may not perfectly mirror Dylan’s life, but they capture his spirit with, of course, oodles of help from a fantastic lead performance by Timothée Chalamet.
4) Blitz: Part coming-of-age tale, part World War II drama, this wonderful film by writer-director Steve McQueen focuses on George (Elliott Heffernan), a young man who refuses to separate from his mother (Saoirse Ronan) during the London Blitz. After he is placed on an evacuation train, he boldly flees, starting a perilous journey back to London and his increasingly desperate mother. War movies that focus on the impact conflicts have on noncombatants are less common than shoot-’em-ups, so this is a welcome addition to the genre.
3) Saturday Night: Historically, the Oscars have been biased against comedy. The thinking seems to be that only “serious” movies deserve the highest honor. I push back against that stigma because making people laugh is harder than it seems. Few films this year delighted me as much as writer-director Jason Reitman’s biopic about the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Gabriel LaBelle does a fine job portraying SNL creator Lorne Michaels, depicted as a young producer struggling to keep a talented but unruly cast of misfits motivated and on track.
2) Wicked: Any movie split into multiple parts begs the questions: Can it be fairly rated as an individual work? Which part is most worthy of attention? Is it really a “movie” or theatrical miniseries? The answers aren’t clear, but I believe Wicked deserves accolades as it stands. We know there’s a second section on the way, but the first presents a complete and satisfying arc. Viewers get the origin story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the character demonized as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, and they understand that she isn’t as evil as once thought. They also get a more nuanced reading of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), the good witch Galinda (Ariana Grande), and Oz in general. Toss in the glorious music and pitch-perfect choreography, cinematography, and performances, and Wicked is an exciting film. If the story stopped here, it would still be great.
1)Civil War: It’s cliché for a writer to pick a movie about journalism as the best of the year, but we all have biases. Civil War imagines a future America even more divided than the one we currently inhabit. Political tensions and, presumably, political ambitions have plunged the country into full-scale war, and the film reminds viewers that combat correspondents are often in as much danger as soldiers. Writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t detail the beginning of the conflict. Instead, he follows a team of journalists traveling the country in hopes of reaching Washington, D.C., as rebel forces descend on the U.S. Capitol. Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson turn in fantastic performances, and Garland’s world building is realistically eerie.
Author Bio:
Forrest Hartman is Highbrow Magazine’s chief film critic.
For Highbrow Magazine