I avoided talking about Donald Trump in my year-end post timed to the actual end of the calendar year -- or, talked about him only to say I was not talking about him, which is not quite the same thing. But I can't avoid the inevitable any longer, since there is no doubt the former and future president had a stamp even on the movies we watched in 2024, and not just because he was a character in one of them.
Alex Garland's Civil War would likely not exist if Trump had not spent the better part of the last decade -- really, a full decade now -- raising the temperature of political discourse in the United States, and prompting American citizens who had previously only angrily disagreed with each other to consider actually rising up and killing each other. We don't know who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys" in Civil War, nor what ideologies of the warring parties we can squint and associate with either today's Democratic party or today's Republican party. The beauty of the movie is, any viewer can probably see themselves in whoever they see the heroes of the story to be, though that may only be useful to the extent that it helps them reconsider their own tendencies toward this sort of violence. (And if you want the ultimate answer of whose side Garland is "really" on, it's as simple as the fact that the characters we follow are journalists, traditionally the enemy of someone like Trump, as he himself defines it.)
Whether or not actual violence prevailed -- thank you, Democrats, for showing your high road by not fomenting an insurrection like your rivals did four years earlier -- there is no doubt that incivility ruled the day, and has again reduced us to lesser examples of the human species than we once were. At the movies, this may not have resulted in a lot of stories about people strangling each other and calling each other names, though I'm sure there were a few examples of that.
No, more than anything a certain sense of apocalypse hung over the movies of 2024, and this was well before an actual apocalypse was visited on Hollywood and its surrounding neighborhoods in the form of the tragic wildfires of last week -- an event that occurred in 2025 so it cannot meaningfully speak to 2024 anyway. Even my #1 movie, The Substance, embodied this sense of anxiety and imminent destruction, as a woman fought her very self with competing values, ultimately none of them actually heroic, and all serving as a metaphor for the civil war embedded in our psyche right now. Even Hollywood is tearing itself apart in this movie, sometimes literally.
There is always a chance that a second Donald Trump presidency will contain actual good things, endeavors he never dared undertake the first time because he wanted to pander to his conservative base, talking points he no longer needs to execute because he has no more elections to win. Unfortunately, there seems to be a greater chance that the next four years will just engender more creative efforts in the mold of Civil War, which require us to wrestle with our very soul as Americans.
Here's my annual look back on the year just passed with honors, details and other statistics, a thing I have traditionally posted the day after posting my list, for more than a dozen years now.
Best and worst performers of the year
Each year in this spot I tell you that the performers listed below -- they aren't always all performers, but this year they are -- are not necessarily the best (or worst) at their craft in the year just completed. They are, however, people who had more than one good (or bad) performance, meaning it was worth writing up something about them beyond just praising them for a single instance of good work. (Or tearing them down for one particular instance of the opposite.) Also, the most determining factor is the quality of the movies they were in, not how they were in those movies.
Three who had a good year
Demi Moore - Demi Moore stormed back on to the scene in 2024, but not because she was everywhere. It was because she was in one particular place that provided her with the opportunity to do the most daring and thrilling work of her career. What's more, Moore's role as Elizabeth Sparkle in
The Substance (#1) involved her confronting the elephant in the room -- the plastic surgery fails of famous women trying to extend their time in the limelight -- and taking that elephant by the trunk, the big floppy ears and the tail, all at once. If Moore hadn't had her own (relatively tasteful) plastic surgery done, she might not be as convincing in the role of a woman so desperate to recover her youth that she tries a mysterious drug that will literally clone a younger version of herself out of her own biological material. As Moore throws strange ingredients in a bubbling pot on her stove and spits expletives, and especially when she rubs makeup off her face like she's rubbing off her own skin, we see a fearless 61-year-old woman (who has since turned 62) for whom the work obviously matters more than the glamour. Her willingness to go nude is only extra credit for the performance, which we are too condescending if we call "brave." Of course, a single good performance would not usually qualify someone to make this special recognition area, and so it is that we were primed for
The Substance by seeing Moore in
Brats (#62, to match Ms. Moore's age), Andrew McCarthy's documentary that tries to get all his contemporaries as worked up over the term "brat pack" as he is. One contemporary, Demi Moore, is the first to have a truly calming influence over this film, trying to suggest that Andrew take it easy and that it's all good -- but generously, without diminishing his perspective. At least where I sat, this film showed us that Moore, through whatever tabloid experiences she's had and marriages to Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher, is doing great, thank you very much.
Brats meant we wouldn't even need her to have a
Substance and she'd be just fine -- but how much better that we got
The Substance, too.
Austin Butler - I'm not sure if I've ever honored an actor in this section who's had two more different roles than Austin Butler had in 2024. They're so diametrically opposed, in fact, that I'm doing something I've never done in the history of this particular tradition on my blog: I'm including both pictures. How can one man embody both a character who is impossibly alluring and a character who is impossibly repellant, all within the same six-month period? (Answer: It's called acting. Look it up.) But seriously, Butler's work called attention to itself in 2024 -- and not just because I loved both
Dune: Part Two (#8) and
The Bikeriders (#11). And he wasn't just calling attention to himself by being showy, as that was only his mode in
Dune: Part Two, where he plays Feyd-Reutha, the sadistic Harkonnen who is the nephew of Baron Harkonnen and the Baron's equal in repulsiveness, only of a different brand. Due to his far more physically fit frame, Butler is like the most homicidal hairless mole you've ever seen, bathed in the black and white hues of his homeworld and drenched in unsavoury malevolence. Add hair and a bit of a crooked half-smile, though, and you've got the most dreamy guy to wear a leather jacket since James Dean. That's Butler's mode in Jeff Nichols'
The Bikeriders, which finds him more in his
Elvis breakout form, only a quieter version thereof. And it finds us unable to take our eyes off him, unable to prevent ourselves from falling for him, enabling us to understand how easy it was for Jodie Comer's Kathy to slip into a world where she doesn't actually belong, just because she can't help herself in the presence of this heartthrob. It's a performance that doesn't seem, on the surface, to require a lot from Butler, but we also forget how rare it is these days for someone to convert good looks and laconic charm into the type of performance that would have made him a matinee idol back in the 1950s. Especially since we'd most recently seen him as an abomination who'd get his jollies from strangling cats.
Cailee Spaeny - Actors don't truly break out in the role in which we first start to recognize them. No, they break out the next year, when they suddenly start appearing in all the biggest movies in Hollywood. That was the 2023-to-2024 trajectory for Cailee Spaeny, who was utterly unknown to me when she starred in
Priscilla in 2023, the role that surely got her her 2024 work in
Civil War (#7) and
Alien: Romulus (#30). Now of course, they had to cast her in those movies before they knew she would receive strong notices for
Priscilla, but the Spaeny wave that started in 2023 did indeed come crashing into the shore in 2024. Sharing some of the same traits that have turned predecessors Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman and Millie Bobby Brown into stars (even though she's six years older than Brown), Spaeny is giving us this perfect combination of vulnerability and toughness that characterized both of her 2024 roles. (Never mind that there is something of the shape shifter about her, as she looked more like a young Jennifer Love Hewitt in
Priscilla.) Speaking of taking the baton from previous actresses, she made one of Sigourney Weaver's best successors to date in
Alien: Romulus, which I liked more than any Alien movie since ... jeez, would it have to be
Aliens? It isn't a role that requires a huge amount from her, but she gives everything the role requires and then some. The trickier role, in part because of the hardening undergone by her character over the course of the film, is the young photojournalist in
Civil War, hopelessly naive and yet determined to throw herself into the fray like her professional heroes, such as Lee Miller. (Who had her own, far less successful movie in 2024.) Here she's the successor to the character played by Kirsten Dunst, as we get to see first hand how someone who went into the job for the right reasons steadily turns into someone who no longer submits her choices to the same sort of moral assessment. We see this change in Spaeny's performance as the movie goes. If 2024 is any indication, we should want Spaeny as anyone's successor, as she will surely carry that torch with honor.
Honorable mentions: Michael Shannon (The Bikeriders, A Different Man), Peter Dinklage (Wicked, Unfrosted), Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Nickel Boys, The Deliverance), J.K. Simmons (Juror #2, Saturday Night, Red One)
Three who had a bad year
Nicolas Cage - Nicolas Cage has two modes nowadays: The outrageous, playing-to-the-back-row-of-the-theater, gonzo mode that has made him an icon over the course of the last 40 years, and the staid, just-showing-up-for-a-paycheck mode that has resulted in so may straight-to-video movies in the past ten, that only Keith Phipps, the
Next Picture Show podcast host who wrote a book about him, could have possibly seen all of them. In 2024, Cage failed in both modes. Although I'm obviously in the minority on
Longlegs (#177), my worst film of the year, I doubt even those who liked the movie felt Cage's sing-songy performance as the title character was one of the film's best assets. (Isn't there a scene where he literally sings the birthday song for about five minutes? I've tried to block it out.) Describing him as looking like a bleached Robert Smith does a serious disservice to Robert Smith, but it gets at how ridiculous this guy seems in this movie -- though not as ridiculous as the movie itself. I can't begin to understand how some people found this performance disturbing, given that they knew it was Cage and that his performance is pure hackery. Then there's
Arcadian (#156), a truly forgettable post-apocalyptic movie where Cage plays a man who fights -- werewolves? what were they again? -- alongside his sons, in what appears to be England after some disaster has unraveled the rule of law. (While that sounds promising, I promise you, it's so forgettable that I won't even consult Wikipedia to refresh my memory on the basic plot.) Here he's bearded and solemn, and though the two bad performances may showcase as much range as Austin Butler's two good performances, they have a highly unfortunate net output of quality. The good thing about Nicolas Cage during this late stage of his career is there's little chance this previews an imminent decline, especially since I hear good things about next year's offering,
The Surfer. (And am friends with someone who produced it.) Cage'll be back, but he does need to be held accountable for 2024 first.
Pedro Pascal - This will be a sort of piling on of Pedro Pascal without any malice behind it. What can I say, making the shortlist for "Three who had a bad year" entails appearing in a certain quantity of poor-quality efforts, though that doesn't mean your own effort as an actor is responsible for the relative failures of the movies. And in some cases in Pascal's 2024, they truly are relative failures. But let's start with the one I really didn't like,
Drive-Away Dolls (#158), and proceed upward from there. The tone of Ethan Coen's movie was just way off -- epitomized by a Margaret Qualley performance I really didn't care for, which might have earned her a spot here if not for
The Substance -- and it starts from the film's opening, the only part Pascal is in. It's a poorly written part (what isn't in this movie), and it basically just involves Pascal looking scared while clutching a briefcase before he gets ... well, we won't get into that. But what's ultimately revealed to be
in the briefcase just makes the way Pascal acts the scene seem even sillier in retrospect. Then there was my next least favorite,
Gladiator II (#143), where Pascal was actually one of my favorite elements of the film. (See, I told you. Unfair piling on without any malice.) Still, I consider this movie pretty empty, and those who chose to participate had to sign off on its lack of usefulness as a sequel to a movie that never asked for or needed one. Finally we have a movie that you'll be surprised to see make this list,
The Wild Robot (#119), which most people consider a success. I don't really consider it a success though I did give it a star rating that correlates to marginal approval (three stars). Let's just say that the thing I didn't like about it most was the talking animals, and Pascal voices one of those talking animals. What's more, his fox character, Fink, is highly indebted to a much better fox character in a much better movie, Jason Bateman's Nick Wilde in
Zootopia. Pascal's year wasn't awful but it was far from either a utopia or a zootopia.
Carrie Coon - Like Cage, Coon spent 2024 straddling the line between art and commerce, and neither venture worked out for her. Let's start with the one that should have been in her wheelhouse because it most closely resembles the thing she spent the earlier part of her career doing. Azazel Jacobs'
His Three Daughters (#148) is basically a play, and the fact that it didn't originate as a play is frankly sort of astonishing. Coon was a renowned theater actress before she tried out screen acting, and she should absolutely thrive in this environment. And I'm not saying her performance is bad overall -- though there are times that I thought it was bad -- but the movie itself is extremely wordy and poorly directed, leading to sub-par performances from Coon as well as the usually reliable Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne. Jacobs' writing makes each of these characters obnoxious in her own particular way, beyond what I think was supposed to be their actual level of obnoxiousness, and all three performers are taken down by the deficiencies of the material. It's just that as the best pure actor of the three, Coon had the farthest to fall. Coon's role in the failure of
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (#147) is far more insignificant, in part because the cast is so overstuffed that no single player can bear the lion's share for anything the movie does right or wrong.
Frozen Empire isn't a
terrible movie, it's just such a lackluster one that it would almost be better if it were a flaming turd -- which would at least mean someone had made daring creative decisions that had not succeeded. Particularly for a performer like Coon, we'd rather see her swing wildly and miss than to lay down the feeble sort of sacrifice bunt that
Ghostbusters represents for her. Actors with Coon's sort of enviable pedigree don't stay down for long, and it's likely she'll come roaring back in 2025.
Dishonorable mentions: Emma Roberts (Space Cadet, Madame Web), Celeste O'Connor (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Madame Web), Olwen Fouere (Tarot, The Watchers)
Trans stories take a step forward
There was some hope in among all the ascendant Trumpism of 2024. Movies by and about trans people were not only present in larger numbers, they had a cultural cachet they have not previously enjoyed. It reminded me that even as we see evidence of society taking steps backward, it is ultimately moving forward in ways that can never by dialed back, as the gradual mainstreaming of "others" also gradually has the impact of getting even Trumpers to start accepting them. And the big difference between these and past films about trans people is that there was always an actual trans person either in front of or behind the camera.
The biggest indication of this trend was likely Emilia Perez (#4), a movie not without its controversies in terms of its trans depiction. I've seen it labeled as "incurious" about the trans experience, using it more as a narrative device than as an actual exploration of the thoughts of a non-binary person or person undergoing a gender transition. My take on that is that Jacques Audiard wanted to make an ambitious film with a lot of different things on its mind, one of which is the transition of the title character, but which also includes a social drama worthy of a telenovela, a look at the criminal underworld and even a musical. If the trans themes got short shrift, at least they were there to begin with. And though the movie certainly has its detractors, it cleaned up at the Golden Globes in a way that can't be ignored and that no other film involving trans subject matter has ever done.
Moving down in my top ten just a few slots we have The People's Joker (#6), Vera Drew's controversial use of trademarked Batman characters to dramatize her own trans coming-of-age -- though I reckon this one was more controversial from Warner Brothers' perspective, given that Drew didn't have a legal right to use any of these characters. Her reward was an eventual lack of legal retribution by the copyright owner and widespread critical acclaim of a movie that had a very limited theatrical run, but was ultimately available everywhere for rental. This would be the answer to Emilia Perez in being the opposite of incurious, as it is essentially a confessional told directly to us by the person it most intimately affected. And it's affecting as hell.
Another trans filmmaker who had a prominent placement of her work in 2024 was Jane Schoenbrun, whose I Saw the TV Glow (#41) was a very thinly veiled trans story rather than an overtly textual one. As these characters imagine themselves as characters on a TV show as a metaphor for their trans identities -- more for one character than the other -- Schoenburn uses all her gifts as a filmmaker to place us within the depths of their at times overwhelming despair, putting some truly frightening images up on screen in what is effectively a horror movie. Only the film's flat ending prevented it from being higher on my list -- though I understand that may have been my own experience of it, dramatically from a narrative perspective and as a sis person, while others may have received it differently.
Finally you have the one true documentary of the group, Will & Harper (#29), which I only finally saw within the past week as my wife finally made the time to watch it with me, releasing it from cinematic purgatory. This is the useful companion to these other three movies that pointedly allows Will Ferrell to ask the questions of his friend Harper Steele that any person trying to warmly embrace the new trans identity of their friend might want to ask. Just because we are caring people with open hearts, it doesn't mean we don't have questions, and in the case of Will Ferrell, most of them are just in the interest of trying to better love his friend of nearly three decades.
If I had to sound one potential sour note about all this, there is the slight possibility that the new prominence of trans people in film played some role in getting Trump elected again. But every dying ideology has to find its last gasp of energy in targeting the thing that threatens it the most, and it's a necessary burning down of the old ways that prepares us for the new. Besides, do we really think your typical Trump voter in Arkansas saw any of these films, or was likely even aware of them?
If it keeps bringing members of our society equally deserving of love -- our friends, our family members, even strangers on the street -- further into the light of our acceptance, it's a short-term trade-off I'm willing to make.
Musician biopics ape-plenty
If I had to choose a type of movie that was dying out due to creative exhaustion, I might have provided you with the musician biopic as that subgenre. Then in the last month of 2024 movie watching I saw a half-dozen of them.
A couple of them supported my analysis of their dwindling artistic merits. But then, a couple of them did not in ways that I thought were really reinvigorating.
Rounding out my top 25 was Better Man (#25), Michael Gracey's take on Robbie Williams, bringing his razzle dazzle from The Greatest Showman. This is a straight biopic except, of course, for the fact that the main character is represented as an ape. I liked both movies with motion capture apes I saw this year, but I was more impressed by this one, especially a couple rip-roaring musical numbers that were recorded on a soundstage here in Melbourne (as was much of the film). In using a tantalizing central conceit, Better Man more easily got me to the place a biopic should get me, of making me realize that I love two Williams songs: "Rock DJ" and "Angels," the former of which is the standout musical number, possibly of the year.
Then on my second-to-last night of the year I watched Piece by Piece (#37), Morgan Neville's documentary of Pharrell Williams that is really hard to classify that way because the entire thing is made of Legos. So yeah, it's interviews with Pharrell and others who worked with him, but it reads more like a biopic because of this glorious bit of artifice. It might have taken me a few minutes to adjust to the choice, but eventually it just made the thing achieve lift-off ... and also made me realize how influential Pharrell has been on the industry. I can't even name the Williams songs I love like I did for the other Williams, because this movie revealed there are too many.
Then there was a combo of the biopic format and the documentary format, as Kneecap (#34), the movie about the Irish rap band of the same name who rap in the Irish language, actually play themselves in the movie. But then everyone else is actors, most notably, Michael Fassbender. The movie has a joyous punk aesthetic but combines with real social commentary about Ireland and great music. Made me think of Trainspotting, not for the subject matter but for the milieu.
Alas, that leaves three more titles that were decidedly not in my top 40. The Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (#120) and Bob Marley: One Love (#121) were so similar in their mediocrity, and seen in such similar proximity to one another (both on the same leg of one flight to America -- separated only by Kneecap, as a matter of fact), that they couldn't even extract themselves from one another in my rankings. But the big disappointment was A Complete Unknown (#128), the final film I saw of 2024, which was so lacking in narrative momentum that I was dying for some sign, any sign, of how close it was to ending -- and not just because I'd start to get finalizing my list as soon as I got out of the theater. It was also lacking in compelling reasons for its existence, which was the bigger sin.
Sorry, long foreign movies
I don't usually spend a lot of time in these wrap-up posts talking about movies I didn't see, but this idea struck me and I decided to lean into it as my final mini piece.
I seemed to accumulate a lot of very long foreign-language movies on my Letterboxd watchlist ... and then didn't get to watching most of them. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a 179-minute slow cinema movie from Vietnam, was on my radar almost the whole year because one of the Flickchart hosts championed it, ultimately naming it his #1 movie of the year. I learned of his lofty placement of the movie before I finalized my list, but still didn't carve out the time.
A similar fate befell Victor Erice's Close Your Eyes, from Spain, whose 169 minutes would have been marginally easier to fit in. I did go looking for it a couple months ago, but it was not available yet on iTunes, and by the time it was available I'd moved on to other things. Besides, I still sort of want to see his movie Spirit of the Beehive first, but this does not seem to be available for rental anywhere.
There was probably never any chance I'd see Seed of the Sacred Fig from Iran, because it was a late release and not available for rental yet (nor in cinemas here yet in Australia). But it's two hours and 47 minutes might have gotten me anyway.
The one long foreign movie I did watch, however, maybe suggests it was a good thing I didn't try to fit in the others. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, from Romania, clocked in at 163 minutes -- incidentally, the shortest of these four -- but only clocked in at #110 on my list.
Top ten non-2024 films I saw in 2024
I always have to give shout-outs to the best of the best that weren't qualified for the year in question, that I saw in the year in question, and this is me doing that again. Listed alphabetically:
Charlie's Country (2013, Rolf de Heer) - A vital document of the present-day Aboriginal experience by a white Australian director who can pull off that sort of thing, performed by the great David Gulpilil as something of a career capstone.
Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov) - This harrowing and unflinching one-timer about the horrors wrought upon Russians during World War II holds your face in its hands in the way the title suggests, and is as enthralling a work as it is depressing.
The End of the Affair (1955, Edward Dmytryk) - I read the novel, then intended to rewatch the 1999 film, but watched this instead, and was very happy I did.
Giant (1955, George Stevens) - The sort of sprawling American epic they used to make regularly, complete with a performance from James Dean that I never would have expected given what I know about his screen persona.
Godzilla Minus One (2023, Takashi Yamazaki) - Near my 2023 ranking deadline, I chose to watch The Boy and the Heron in an available time slot where I could watch one of two Japanese-language movies that qualified for that year. I chose poorly.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, Tommy Lee Wallace) - I watched 11 Halloween movies I hadn't seen in 2024, but this one -- not part of that project, and actually watched nearly a year ago -- was easily the best, simply by not being indebted to anything else in the series.
The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi) - A sprawling Japanese epic as long and as engrossing as Giant, which takes the time to burrow down deep into its characters and setting.
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack) - Both Godzilla and King Kong made it onto this list, but I didn't even see the 2024 film in which they appeared together. Mad respect for one of the original monster movies that has effects I can't believe were done in 1933.
Me and Orson Welles (2008, Richard Linklater) - I didn't expect this to pop up among the big guys for non-2024 movies I saw in 2024, but I really liked this movie.
The Prince of Tides (1991, Barbra Streisand) - My periodic Audient Bridesmaids series, in which I watch best picture-nominated films I haven't seen, hasn't turned up a real winner until this one, which I had (incorrectly) written off as sentimental pap back when it came out.
Statistics
Here's where I tell you about what I saw and how I saw it.
Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (15), 4 stars (27), 3.5 stars (50), 3 stars (28), 2.5 stars (20), 2 stars (19), 1.5 stars (13), 1 star (2), 0.5 stars (1)
As it usually is, 3.5 stars was far and away the leader, though this year it was larger than usual as both ends of the spectrum seemed to be a bit less represented.
Movies by source: Cinema (44) (5 by advanced screening), Netflix (44), iTunes rental (30), Amazon Prime (17), Airplane (14), Screener (8), MIFF (7), AppleTV+ (6), Disney+ (3), Stan (2), Kanopy (1), Max (1)
Very similar to last year except screeners and airplane movies both took a jump up, and Disney+ fell off.
Total new movies watched in the year: 287
Total rewatches: 35
2024 movies watched more than once: 2 (Unfrosted, The Dead Don't Hurt)
Discoveries
Ariana Grande (Wicked)
Katy O'Brian (Love Lies Bleeding)
Karla Sofia Gascon (Emilia Perez)
Vera Drew (The People's Joker)
Maisy Stella (My Old Ass)
Welcome back
Demi Moore (The Substance)
Mary-Louise Parker (Omni Loop)
Viggo Mortensen (The Dead Don't Hurt)
Ellen Burstyn (Mother, Couch!)
Oliver Platt (Babes)
Dearly departing
Richard Roundtree (Thelma)
M. Emmet Walsh (Brothers)
Louis Gossett Jr. (IF)
John Ashton (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F)
Quincy Jones (The Greatest Night in Pop)
(We lost plenty of other lovely movie people in 2024, but these were the ones who were also in a movie I saw this year.)
Another name for ...
Inside Out 2 is ... Joy
Joy is ... Babes
The Substance is ... My Old Ass
AfrAId is ... The Wild Robot
MaXXXine is ... Hundreds of Beavers
MaXXXine is ... How to Have Sex
MaXXXine is ... Woman of the Hour
The Crow is ... The Dead Don't Hurt
Harold and the Purple Crayon is ... Imaginary
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is ... Don't Move
Sasquatch Sunset is ... It Ends With Us
Mary is ... Immaculate
A Different Man is ... Emilia Perez, The People's Joker or Will & Harper
Lightning round
I usually start out with some comparisons of my list to the Oscar nominations. Alas, not this year. So let's get right into the other stuff:
Most surprised I loved: Wicked
Most surprised I did not love: Longlegs
Best relative to hype: Conclave
Worst relative to hype: A Complete Unknown
Best movie named after the main character: Emilia Perez
Worst movie named after the main character: Mary
Most surprising use of an actor: Adam Pearson (A Different Man)
Least surprising use of an actor: Chris Pratt (Garfield)
Most common word in 2024 movie titles: Man (Better Man, Spaceman, Monkey Man, Super/Man, Hit Man, Hellboy: The Crooked Man)
Least common word in 2024 movie titles: Sasquatch (Sasquatch Sunset)
Most likely to appear in multiple 2024 movies: The Joker (Joker: Folie a Deux, The People's Joker)
Least likely to appear in multiple 2024 movies: Lorne Michaels (Saturday Night, The People's Joker, Will & Harper)
You could furnish a living room with: The Coffee Table, I Saw the TV Glow and Mother, Couch!
Director who lost me: Oz Perkins (Longlegs)
Director who won me back: Clint Eastwood (Juror #2)
Best title of the year: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
Worst title of the year: My Old Ass (but good movie)
Narrative that most needed its shuffling: Strange Darling
Narrative that least needed its shuffling: We Live in Time
Best item hidden in a suitcase: It's What's Inside
Worst item hidden in a suitcase: Drive-Away Dolls
Best movie with a miniscule budget: The Coffee Table
Worst movie with a huge budget: Gladiator II
Longest title: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Shortest title: IF
Best umpteenth movie in a series: Alien: Romulus
Worst umpteenth movie in a series: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Okay, one final 2024 wrap-up post tomorrow with my annual portmanteaus post.
