I basically agree with Josh when he opened his best-of-2024 list by writing “There are no ‘bad’ movie years, but some are better than others.” That’s about what I thought, too, though I found myself a lot more bearish on the year that was than in previous years. My top 10 list from last year included six nominees for Best Picture. This year, that won’t happen. I found myself really disconnected from a lot of the critical discourse and found myself feeling disappointed, or, at best, whelmed by the awards and best-of favorites. (I owe a drink to whoever – I have no idea earthly idea where I heard it – called Babygirl “50 Shades of Grey for people who think ‘Kamala is brat.'”) Where I found my enjoyment was not with new and exciting filmmakers, but with the reliability of veterans. Paul Schrader, Clint Eastwood, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and Luca Guadagnino all impressed me in previous years and they continue to stay on top of their game. A full twenty percent of this are either directed by or starring people in their mid-nineties.

10. Heretic (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods)

2024 might be the year that I’ve watched the most horror films in my life (and most of my hair is gray now). It’s not that I avoid them, but more that it’s a lane where my presence isn’t needed and others are infinitely more qualified to offer their opinions. Having said that, Heretic is my favorite of the lot. Hugh Grant shed all of his foppish tendencies (something I previously thought impossible) and is genuinely menacing towards two young ladies who knock on his door with the innocent goal of bringing him into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I still get a shiver down my spine when I think of this movie.

Heretic is available for rental on the usual VOD services.

9. Wicked (John M. Chu)

The long-awaited film version of the Wizard of Oz prequel took about twenty years to go from book to Broadway to the big screen. It appears to be worth the wait as Wicked is a grand, epic musical. There are a handful of showstopping song and dance sequences and some overt and subtle humor. Wicked is also a reminder that there are some things, namely large-scale musicals, that we need Hollywood for.

Wicked is currently playing in theaters.

8. Civil War (Alex Garland)

Alex Garland has never made a boring movie and his latest is as potent as it is polarizing. It’s some time in the near future and America is in bad decline. The movie follows a foursome of journalists making the dangerous trek from New York to Washington DC, hoping to interview the president before he’s deposed by a resistance force about to take over the country. Kirsten Dunst is de facto leader of the journalists, and this is one of her best performances. The movie isn’t for everyone, but I found it exhilarating. It’s like a hit of adrenaline that lasts about two hours.

Civil War is currently streaming on Max.

7. Thelma (Josh Margolin)

SIFF’s opening night film might also be the most fun movie of 2024. June Squibb, a youthful 95 now, gets her first above-the-title credit in a movie, and it’s a good one. She sneaks away from her nursing home, along with her friend Shaft, to track down the people who conned her out of most of her savings. Malcolm McDowell is the villain, definitively proving all of the treatments he underwent fifty-plus years ago in A Clockwork Orange are ineffectual at reforming delinquents.

Thelma is currently streaming on Hulu.

6. The Contestant (Clair Titley)

Easily one of the most unsettling movies I’ve seen in quite a while. The Contestant is about Nasubi, a Japanese man considered by many to be the first reality TV contestant. In the late 1990s, he gets cast on a television show where he’s stripped of everything (clothes, dignity) and forced to live in a small room with a stack of postcards, a stack of magazines, and little else, he’s forced to enter magazine contests by mail for his sustenance, clothing, entertainment. He’s known by pretty much everyone in Japan, even though he’s told it’s not being aired on TV. He’s in there for fifteen months! I’m not sure why I continue to be surprised by how sadistic people with power can be, but the TV producer who arranged this show is is in a class all to himself. The entire casts of both seasons of “House of Villains” couldn’t come up with something so diabolical.

Thelma is currently streaming on Hulu.

5. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)

Amazingly, June Squibb is not the only one in their mid-nineties to make a movie on this list, but 2024 was apparently a great year for nonagenarians in films. 94 year old Clint Eastwood has hinted Juror #2 will be his final film, and, if so, it’s a nice way to end. Starring a strangely ubiquitous Nicholas Hoult stars as a writer that gets called for jury duty, and realizes that he might have been responsible for a death whose suspect’s fate he’s adjudicating. What makes Juror #2 so absorbing is the exploration of what makes our judicial system so imperfect: that it’s in the hands of imperfect people who have differing views of what is right and just. There are many uneasy questions and few easy answers.

Juror #2 is currently streaming on Max.

4. Queer (Luca Guadagnino)

Daniel Craig gives one of his very best performances in this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semiautobiographical novel from director Luca Guadagnino. Living south of the border because of American drug policy, “Lee” (the Burroughs stand-in Craig plays) goes from Mexican bar to Mexican bar looking for his next hookup, or his next drink until he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Eugene is young and handsome and quickly the subject of Lee’s obsession. The relationship is tender and moving when they’re travelling through South America and Lee begins experiencing heroin withdrawals. Then it becomes surreal when we meet Leslie Manville.

Queer is currently playing in theaters.

3. Rap World (Connor O’Malley, Danny Scharar)

Rap World is the type of no-budget movie where it’s set in 2009 so the characters can wax philosophical about Christopher Nolan’s Batman epic The Dark Knight (though they never actually do) and set in Tobyhanna, PA so the characters can rhyme it with Benihana. Everyone knows the type of dudes this movie documents: white suburbanite men rich on bravado and main character energy and low on actual talent. Most of the movie is about this group of jamokes who want to create a rap album in one evening, and it’s going to be epic, but only if their usual hanging out doesn’t cause a distraction. “Try to remember these times. Some of the best nights of my life were in parking lots,” one character says. Indeed. Rap World is absolutely hysterical, the funniest movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and it’s less than an hour long. Rap World is Citizen Kane for hot couch guys.

Rap World is currently streaming on Connor O’Malley’s YouTube page.

2. Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

Excepting Pedro Almodóvar, I don’t think there’s another filmmaker working today whose films hit me the same way Paul Schrader’s do. His latest, features a dying documentarian (Richard Gere) who agrees to an interview about his life, anxious to unburden himself before cancer takes him for good. While his resume is full of unimpeachable, influential left-wing films that spoke truth to power, he wasn’t the upright citizen his reputation suggests. Shrader said this movie is so personal because he wrote it because he thought he might be dying when he wrote it. I’m glad he’s still with us (and the only cranky boomer worth following on Facebook). Let me note, though, that while Schrader and his star Gere have had legendary careers spanning multiple decades (and longer than I’ve been alive), with both being in their 70’s, they’re positively whippersnappers by this list’s standards.

Oh, Canada is currently playing in very limited theaters and should arrive on VOD or streaming soon.

1. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

My favorite film at SIFF was also my favorite midway through year, and remains my favorite after we all finished 2024’s back 9. This story is about a Japanese talent agency who decides to create a glamping site to take advantage of tax credits from the government. The agency sends a couple of lackeys to try to smooth things over with the locals, who are concerned with the environmental impact. The community isn’t against the glamping site per se, but has concerns about how it will affect the habitat that could be worked out if there was interest from the company’s executives. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi does a beautiful job of showing empathy for the employees doing their job without having any power to enact change and the citizens affected by decisions above their paygrade. It’s a slow burn with a ending I can’t soon forget, and it’s incredible.

Honorable mentions and some random thoughts on the year in film 2024:

There were a lot of movies that are recipients of end-of-year buzz that I didn’t care for (The Substance, Babygirl, the ending to Conclave) and some I found fine (Anora, I Saw the TV Glow). I did like Nosferatu and A Complete Unknown more than my SunBreak friends and colleagues. But! There was a lot I did like that I want to shout-out (in no particular order):

• Kinds of Kindness: Yorgos Lanthimos follows up Poor Things, one of 2023’s big highlights, with this movie, an almost three-hour anthology of three shorter films that all feature the same stars (Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe). It’s a deliberately uncomfortable movie, but it’s also riotously funny.
• Spermworld: Lance Oppenheim’s latest documentary follows participants in the underground sperm donation system (mostly donors). It’s deeply moving, and heartbreaking, seeing people who want desperately to receive the gift of life, and the people who can give that. Everyone has their own motivations and goals for taking part in the process, but no one is getting rich from it. Now can we please just let megadonor Ari Nagle enjoy the party he threw for himself?
• Lee: Kate Winslet earns a Golden Globe nomination for her excellent turn as the fashion model turned WWII war photographer Lee Miller. It’s an excellent biopic from a figure I shamefully didn’t know much about, beyond being the inspiration for Kirsten Dunst’s character in Civil War (see above).
• Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara: the queer pop band comprised of sisters Tegan and Sara Quin has a large and devoted fan base, and it’s one they’ve cultivated by being accessible to those fans. But it also has opened the door for fans to be tricked and grifted by some clever people with hacking skills. This started about ten years ago. This was something I put on to watch while stitching and quickly became sucked into the story. It’s a pretty well-crafted whodunit that shows, after a decade, there are still more questions than answers about how it all happened.

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🎉📽️🎬 All of the Sunbreak’s 2024 Year-end lists: Josh | Chris | Morgen | Tony