THE BEST AND WORST MOVIES OF 2024
In my opinion, this has been a year with the worst crop of movies than I’ve seen in years. Now, there were still lots and lots of films I enjoyed. It’s just not like in years past when there were ones I went nuts over. People often ask me how I come up with my ratings. It’s all based on how entertained I was while watching the film. I don’t care if it has a great cast with great performances, if the story is weak. I don’t care if the movie has the best message in the world. We’re there to be entertained, not lectured to, or to be impressed with a great actor doing a monologue. With that, here are my 10 favorite, most entertaining, movies of the year.
The BEST MOVIES OF 2024.
10. THE WILD ROBOT. A touching animated story about a robot protecting a bird, whose family he accidentally killed when he fell out of an airplane shipping package. Beautiful scenery, story, and score from Kris Bowers (Green Book).
9. A DIFFERENT MAN. Not to be confused with the Robbie Williams biopic “Better Man” (which was good, and also had a man with a disfigured face). Sebastian Stan plays a struggling actor with a disease much like the elephant man had, and when he has experimental drugs that make him handsome – hijinks ensue! And it’s a thousand times better than the most overrated movie of the year, with a similar theme – The Substance.
8. CONCLAVE. Director Edward Berger got a lot of attention with “All Quiet on the Western Front” a few years ago. Now he has assembled a stellar cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The story about cardinals fighting over who will become the next pope is going to get a number of Oscar nominations.
7. STRANGE DARLING. I never liked the song “Love Hurts” until seeing this movie. It’s one of the only times I can think of that an actor (Giovanni Ribisi) was a cinematographer. The only actors I recognized were Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr. This is a rather bloody and violent, fictional story that shows the last two days of the most notorious serial killer in U.S. history. Your mind will be blown.
6. THELMA. Maybe it helped that I had a great aunt named Thelma; or the fact that I’ve loved June Squibb since “About Schmidt” 22 years ago, and “Nebraska” 10 years ago. She’s 95-years-old and going strong. It’s a funny, and touching, story about an old lady getting conned out of money. She picks up her buddy (Richard Roundtree, in his last movie) and they go seeking revenge.
5. WICKED LITTLE LETTERS. This was a great movie that started the year off right in January. It has three Oscar nominees (and one winner) in this real-life story about a woman in 1920s England who receives nasty letters. Her neighbor gets arrested over it, and it becomes a bizarre courtroom drama. It’s a shame that already, the award season has forgotten about Olivia Colman, Jesse Buckley, and Timothy Spall. This is exactly why studios wait to release their good stuff until the end of the year.
4. SING SING. Colman Domingo can do no wrong. This is based on a program at Sing Sing prison that had inmates performing plays. The cast consists of a lot of the prisoners that were reformed through this program. It was a pleasant surprise seeing Paul Raci, who was so good in “Sound of Metal” five years ago.
3. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. It’s the one of the few movies on my list you can still catch at theaters. Timothee Chalamet is great as Bob Dylan (but please, let’s not give him credit for “sounding” like him). The surprise is the always amazing Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. And actor Dan Folger, who makes me laugh in every movie I see him in, is fun as the manager.
2. THE OUTRUN. Saoirse Ronan was in my favorite movie of 2017 (Lady Bird), and she gets accolades for everything she does. The movie she’s getting attention for this year is “Blitz.” I liked this one more. She plays an alcoholic returning to Scotland, and dealing with a father that drinks, a caring boyfriend that’s at his wits’ end, and a job studying birds. It doesn’t sound exciting, and to some, it won’t be (others might not like the non-linear storytelling). It moved me to tears many times. If you think you’ve seen every conceivable way filmmakers can tell the story of an alcoholic, you haven’t.
1. A REAL PAIN. Jesse Eisenberg is usually playing a neurotic mess on screen. He wrote, directed, and stars in this movie. It has two cousins (Kiernan Culkin, who will get a best “supporting actor” Oscar nomination) going back to Poland, to see where their grandmother survived a concentration camp, and her childhood home. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Oh, and nobody put baby in a corner. Jennifer Grey has a nice role.
Honorable mentions: Unstoppable, Alien: Romulus (most other critics liked “Dune II” better), Death of a Rose Bush, and Kneecap.I won’t give long explanations as to why these movies are on my list, but if you saw them, you know.
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The WORST MOVIES OF 2024. In no particular order, except as they entered my mind while typing.
THE BEEKEEPER. Stop it already Jason Statham.
CHALLENGERS. Stop it already, Luca Guadagnino.
CIVIL WAR. Alex Garland has made one brilliant movie (Ex Machina) and a bunch of garbage since.
I SAW THE TV GLOW. Well, seeing a TV glowing would be more interesting than sitting through this.
FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA. I never thought I’d utter the phrase: I miss Mel Gibson.
BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. There was only one funny scene. Watching Martin Lawrence trying to catch candy in his mouth during a shoot-out.
RED ONE. A rare misfire for the usually reliable J.K. Simmons. If you want a newer Christmas movie, see the underrated “Spirited” from a few years back (Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds).
TUESDAY. Julia Louis-Dreyfus pulls an Ozzy, and eats a live bird. Oh, the bird also talks, and is helping her daughter through cancer treatments. I wish she would’ve just eaten the script.
JANET PLANET. A great performance from the young girl, but a painfully boring story, with characters you just don’t care about.
MEGALOPOLIS. Francis Ford Coppola heard that Kevin Costner spent $38 mil to make a bad western and said, “Hold my beer.” He sold his beer (well, wine company) to spend $130 million of his own money on this garbage. Perhaps the worst investment in movie history.
JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX. They added bad songs, and took out Batman. Enough said.
HERE. Yes, even Tom Hanks can make bad movies.
THE SUBSTANCE. This movie will probably get me the most blow back, as many critics have it on their “best of” list. Dennis Quaid is too over the top, and it becomes goofy satire. Seeing Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley naked all the time really doesn’t add anything and just feels exploitative. And if you really think about the story, it doesn’t make sense. She’s getting drugs (that she doesn’t seem to pay for, and a company she knows nothing about), to make her young, so she can stay on TV. Yet that’s not what the drug does. It merely has another person come out of her back, somehow, who gets to spend a week living, before returning…uh…into a heap of bone and skin on her bathroom floor. Why not just make her turn young, without the clone, but she can only stay that way for a week? And don’t get me started on how idiotic the third act is.
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