Movie Superlatives, 2024
My friends li and bcj and I decided that instead of producing "a list of The Good Movies that we watched in 2024", it would be fun to come up with a list of categories to which we can each assign winners and honorable mentions. As you can tell, obviously, I do now and forever stand by this list and think that it is representative not just of my own taste but correct (not just popular) opinion. It's not possible that I forgot anything.
The following is the list of categories & winners & honorable mentions. Categories and honorable mentions are sorted in alphabetical order ("the safe one"). Please enjoy:
Most Interesting Adaptation: Suspiria (2018)
It is shocking how different this movie is from the original Suspiria (1977), considering they share a name and a fairly high-concept premise. It makes far more choices in its adaptation than seem possible, and honestly I'm not at all sold on many of them. But I think every single one is fascinating and deeply thoughtful, and there is plenty in this movie that I continue to regularly think and talk about. There are some scenes in this movie that I'd call my favorite scenes that I watched in all of 2024: and I'm not even sure if I'd call some of those scenes "good." I think every director should adapt Suspiria, but I think most of them would be less interesting than this one.
Honorable mentions
- The Depths (1963): "An intense, explicitly political fictionalization of a scandalous, politically-charged real-life crime."
- Let the Corpses Tan (2017): "A supersaturated visual and aural adaptation of a prose novel that uses editing techniques and shot composition that evoke the language of comics."
- Zazie dans le métro (1960): "Based on a novel that was something of a sensation in France that itself played with language and speech, that as director Louis Malle says, takes the novel's verbal-language playfulness and applies it to the language of cinema."
Dishonorable Mention
- Rollerball (2002): "This is the only one-star movie that I have ever seen. This movie is bad in evil ways that could only be chosen by a knowing, malicious bad-faith saboteur."
Best Chair: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
The TONTO "Electric room" counts. What do you want from me. Look at that thing. It's awesome. He's sitting. Come on let me have this one.
Honorable mention
- Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime (1968): "Unparalleled time travel machine design. Next-level stuff. What if a time machine was a comfy chair was a blob that eats you."
Movie That You're Most Frightened By The Idea That You Almost Never Watched It: A Grin Without A Cat (1977)
I almost gave up trying to watch this film! I kept running into issues with subtitles -- for a while I thought I was in a situation where I just simply might not have access to a proper subtitle file, and that I should just move on. I was able to resolve the situation. Subsequently: this is one of my favorite films of all time. A thoughtful, opinionated, beautiful, moving, heart-breaking, hopeful, challenging, informative video essay documentary on the New Left in the 60s and 70s. I will be thinking about this documentary forever, as it will be informing my thoughts and outlook and creative decisions for the rest of my life.
Honorable mentions
- The Blair Witch Project (1999): "Don't let a little thing like 'I'm scared' keep you from watching one of the most influential films of all time."
- Dressed in Blue (1983): "Film restoration: one of the last truly noble professions."
- Get Out (2017): "In some ways I am glad I gave this film seven years to breathe (too many annoying people liked it too loudly) because it let me come back to it and watch it on its own terms and: it's great!"
Most Honest Movie: Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1981)
This movie does not do the work of synthesizing its subjects and their thoughts for you. There are through-lines and themes to pick out, but nobody is discounted by the authorial voice. Instead, women from all over the acting industry are asked a bunch of questions about their experiences, about their thoughts, about feminism, about themselves -- and their answers are presented. The women talk through their memories and opinions, share often contradictory (or at least inconsistent) philosophies and takeaways. But in total it coheres into a portrait of a pretty patriarchal industry that discounts their agency and abilities, and pidgeonholes into very particular modes of being onscreen and off.
Honorable mention
- Dressed in Blue (1983): "A film that is often deeply vulnerable and open and empathetic. Real even in its explicitly heightened, recreated, fictional scenes."
- Megalopolis (2024) "Francis Ford Coppola bears his entire soul for an audience of zero."
Best In-Movie Movie Experience: Mary Jane's Not A Virgin Anymore (1996)
"Richard but there's not really a specific 'movie experience' in this one they're just at a movie theater." Yeah well have you considered that that's an experience of movie, aka movie experience? Pretty much most of the movie is hanging out working hanging out at the movie theater while movies are happening. If your aesthetic taste is "the 90s" then this is the coolest movie theater that there has ever been. Society if this movie was a well-known 90s classic...
Honorable mention
- Pictures of Ghosts (2023): "An incredible contextualization of Kleber Mendonça Filho's films by way of his home town and how it has changed over time, during and after the explosion of deeply influential local theaters."
Best In-Theatre Movie Experience: The People's Joker (2023)
Letterboxd | Review 1 | Review 2
I saw this on Vera Drew's Screening + Q&A tour in a packed room in a lovely old theater nearby. The vibes in a movie theater have literally never been better.
Honorable mentions
- Daisies (1966): "I watched this in my favorite indie theater with a small but delightful audience, and the vibes were just ideal."
- Nightbitch (2024): "I watched this movie at the theater with my real life mother and the whole way home we talked about it and about motherhood and my childhood and honestly that is a big part of why I liked the movie I think."
Best Long Take: Plague at the Karatas Village (2016)
The very first scene in this film lets you know what you're getting into. A car drives up, and its headlights hit some sort of totem, topped with a small animal skull. It parks, the engine dies down, and you see the title card. We then see a shot of the car at the end of a dirt road, flanked by buildings. The sky is a deep black night; all that is illuminated is done by the the meager lighting. The camera remains static for the next two and a half minutes as we are treated to people walking in and out of view, people acting with unknown intent, confounding shadows, all with a quiet certainty: everyone knows what is happening except for you, the viewer. The scene ends with a punchline that the film loves and will return to; the world around these characters is somehow indifferent to everyone inside of it and yet itself seems to understand comedic timing. This opening shot exists as if to say, "if you're not picking up what I'm putting down, just stop the movie and go do something else instead". Haunting, slow, naturalistic, precise, opaque, dark.
Honorable mentions
- The Text (2024): "Genuinely impressive in its execution--an entire 48 minute film shot truly in one continuous 48-minute single take--but for better and for worse the formal experiment takes a backseat to some just very funny jokes."
Best Mime/Clown/Miming/Clowning: The People's Joker (2023)
Letterboxd | Review 1 | Review 2
Frankly I feel like I should not really have to explain this one. Simply a genius recontextualization of The Joker, who is objectively a clown. And it's funny (clowning)! And the Penguin (looks like a mime. probably. don't look it up just choose to believe it) is some of the best Guy representation in Hollywood in the last decade.
Honorable mention
- Blow Up (1966): "At first I was like lol but then I was like oh wait that's good."
Best Use of Mirror (Literal): Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
There is a scene about twelve minutes into this movie in which Cléo enters a hat shop. This hat is full of hats and, naturally, mirrors to check your own appearance. As Cléo wanders around the shop, the camera pans and moves to follow her movement. We peer in through the highly reflective shop windows, peeking around mirrors as she tries on her hats. The camera remains completely invisible; the camera operator and the actors hit such precise marks that at no point is it caught in a reflection. You literally have to (re)watch this scene while thinking about how many mirrors there are and how precisely this all must have been choreographed. Agnès Varda undefeateed.
Honorable mentions
- Freddy Got Fingered (2001): "'The Backwards Man' is one of the brain-stickiest, funniest jokes I have ever seen in my life."
- Orpheus (1950): "Walking towards a mirror in first-person: one of the coolest things ever put on film"
Best Reflection, Indirection, Doubling, or Mirroring: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
YouTube (Full Movie) | Letterboxd | Review
This movie is intensely capital-s Surrealist. The psychoanalytic unconscious mind style Surrealist. Dreams as the mind's reflection in a broken mirror. Symbols and subjects repeated, but they're always different. Together it all means something, probably. Or maybe what it means is however you read what is reflected back at you.
Honorable mention
- Silvia Prieto (1999): "It's really remarkable how many different literal, metaphorical, poetic ways you can double something. The very end blew my mind."
Pervert Movie Month (Ongoing) Pervert Movie of the Year: Salome's Last Dance (1988)
I have been thinking about this movie for basically twelve months since I saw it. Oscar Wilde & Ken Russell -- y'all are freaks for this one. Just a deeply, deeply horny movie. Imogen Millais Scott should have won an Oscar for this if I am being honest.
Honorable mentions
- Bottoms (2023): "The best, funniest movie of 2023."
- Heavenly Bodies (1984): "Unfortunately a little too self-seriously heterosexually horny but I kind of can't stop thinking about it."
- The Lair of the White Worm (1988): "There's something for everyone in here!"
Best On-Screen Piss: goodlongpee the movie (2023)
YouTube (Full Movie) | Letterboxd | Review
It's really hard to pick just one piss scene, ya know? Each is a cathartic release (in more ways than one!) that serves as an important milestone in the film's emotional journey. But also, on a more technical level, they serve as viscerally upsetting, surprisingly imaginative concepts that will really make you question if this film is being made specifically to provoke you into turning it off. And you will keep actively wondering that for 72 minutes and the credits will roll and you will be no closer to knowing the answer.
Honorable mentions
- The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988): "Classic piss (joke)."
- Rapado (1997): "Classic piss (naturalistic)."
Dishonorable (pisshonorable?) mention
- Cube (1997): "I'm shaking my head thinking about this one."
Best Product Placement: Get Out (2017)
If you ever need to remember what year Get Out was released, just recall that it's stuffed to the brim with Windows Phone branding and you'll just be like "oh yeah right it was 2017". This is like just classic top-shelf product placement stuff right here.
Honorable mentions
- I cannot think of even one more example -- does this mean that I am immune to advertising? Or dangerously susceptible?
Movie That You Specifically Most Needed To See: Hi, Mom (1970)
I feel as though it has become pretty difficult to genuinely shock me with something in a movie. You live enough of a life and seek out the avant-garde and at a certain point you can kinda imagine anything. There is stuff in this movie that I'm still not sure if it was a good idea to put in it. Brian De Palma is one of my favorite film directors, and he doesn't have many films that I love. I love his style, I love his maximalism, I love his appreciation for the language of cinema, I love that he fills his movies to the brim with good and bad ideas. This is De Palma still in an early, raw, rough, experimental period of his output. It has the energy of a young political radical shooting off in too many unfocused directions, but maybe that's also the point. This was the film that made me realize that I love De Palma in part because he is one of the few people who has made films that deeply provoke me and in some cases turn me off, and do so in ways that I want to grapple with and think about and take seriously. It's easy to make something pleasant and agreeable, and it's easy to make something that just flips everyone off. It can be weirdly difficult to make something that rides that line in a way that feels considered. This is the film at the end of a bunch of different spectra of artistic qualities, and all of them I am very interested in. If and when I get around to making a film it is impossible to imagine that it is not in some way in conversation with Brian De Palma.
Honorable mentions
- Dead Slow Ahead (2015): "Of the short list of films to which I am constantly comparing other films, art, experiences. Haunting in a way unlike anything else."
- Futureworld (1976): "Not to brag but I am uniquely trained and qualified to pull the interesting ideas out of this messy and unnecessary sequel."
- Threads (1984): "It's good to watch the films that you have turned into strawmen in your imagination."
- Zazie dans le métro (1960): "Upon one of my rewatches of this, I finally understood that it is my mission in life to help more people experience this absolute joy of a film."
Movie You Felt Most Seen By: Snow (1981)
Juliet Berto is awesome. She understands that the world is falling apart. It's not us -- it's the system and its enforcers that are careless, if not out to get us. In the meantime, we can have some fun together. But in the end it's important for us all to help each other. Although in this world, not every instinct to help is a good one: sometimes you pry where you shouldn't, and sometimes you're punished for doing what's right. And sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes they're extremely bad ones. But, above all else: ACAB.
Honorable mentions
- La cosa (1990): "Somehow the missing link between Jamesonian Postmodernism and me burning out of political organizing."
- Mr. Freedom (1968): "This wins my 2024 award for Being Mean And Antagonistic And Spiteful Towards The United States of America."
- The People's Joker (2023): "The Penguin is the ultimate Guy representation."
- Problemista (2023): "Julio Torres 'gets it'."
Coolest Practical Effect: La casa lobo (2018)
This is my list and I say that stop-motion animation counts as practical effects. And with that, this category is resolved trivially. This is simply the most visually exciting movie that I have maybe ever seen. Beautiful, disturbing, and quite simply an exercise in technical and artistic excellence.
Honorable mentions
- Beauty and the Beast (1946): "The living wall-statues and sconces are genius and haunting."
- For All Mankind (1989): "For real though it is beyond incredible that they did all of this in real life."
- Rollerball (1975): "The dystopian bloodsport so cool that they played it in between takes."
Most Ill-Advised Drug or Recreational Experience That You Would Still Try After Seeing The Movie: Altered States (1980)
Even if everything happened to me literally exactly how it does in this movie I would be personally so cool with it. I wouldn't do like the parts where Eddie sucks as a guy but the drugs stuff and the sensory deprivation stuff just seems awesome.
Honorable mentions
- Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010): "Beyond being sandwiched inside of a transcendent 10 minutes of film, the Black Goo seems very relaxing."
- Suspiria (2018) "I have a great respect for experimental dance and I would love to come back for another evening performance of Volk."
Movie That Taught You Something: The Disappearance of Shere Hite (2023)
I have spent many years with the broad, oversimplified understanding that "the second wave of feminism is the sex-negative one". I had never really thought too much about it, but obviously in retrospect that (and the cluster of similar reputations) is obviously a pretty uncharitable reading that doesn't really engage with historical and social context. This film, while not about that specifically, really helped me ground feminism in the 70s-80s in the continuity of time & society around it and explain why it was the way it was. I had, true to the title's word, not heard of Shere Hite or the impressive-for-how-disappered-she-is impact she had with her books and personality.
Honorable mention
- Dressed in Blue (1983): "I've now literally watched a breast implant surgery."
- The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981): "I got like 5 minutes into this film and went 'what the hell was happening in Poland in 1981??' and paused the film and did a web search and it turns out that the answer is: a hell of a lot."
Thank you for reading. I hope that you've found one movie in this list to check out. Even better if you'd never heard of it before. I also hope that you enjoy it, but I would be a fool to guarantee that. If you use Letterboxd, I created a list on that website with every movie that I mentioned in this list. It's a list that really makes me say "wow" when I scroll through it. I don't think I regret including even the bad movies on it.