Co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen acknowledged the anniversary, which coincided with the release of the new horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, by drafting a team of their ten favorite A24 movies a couple weeks back. Naturally, it made me want to determine my own top ten -- as well as see which of the co-hosts drafted a better team. (Now you get the meaning of my subject for this post, which might have seemed grammatically inelegant, to say the least, before now.)
I should point out that neither of their lists represents an actual top ten. Each movie could only be selected by one of the two of them, and there was enough consensus between them on the best movies released by A24 that each would have taken as many as half of the other's picks if they'd had the chance.
I am under no such constraints. So what you'll get from me is a pure top ten.
I thought about making this list organically, since it's usually more fun to do it this way than just to rely on my Flickchart. But when I scrolled through the titles on the Wikipedia page devoted to A24 films, I jotted down a full 26 titles that I thought might be contenders for my top ten. I decided it was easier, in this case, just to let Flickchart do the work for me -- especially since some database person, probably somebody I know, went to the trouble of creating a way to filter your chart to see only your favorite A24 films. (It's one of hundreds of filters available on the site.) Instead of doing the hard work myself, I'll reward his or her hard work instead.
Doing it this way will also make for a more pure comparison with Adam's and Josh's selected teams. Having already listened to the show, I could unconsciously bias a list I made organically. But I can't unconsciously bias the result of more than 130,000 individual duels performed over time.
So, hot off the presses, here are my ten favorite films released by A24:
1. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) - Flickchart #79
2. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015, Oz Perkins) - Flickchart #111
3. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) - Flickchart #134
4. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - Flickchart #160
5. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader) - Flickchart #165
6. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022, Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) - Flickchart #332
7. Climax (2018, Gaspar Noe) - Flickchart #485
8. Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) - Flickchart #529
9. Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve) - Flickchart #552
10. Eighth Grade (2018, Bo Burnham) - Flickchart #560
To get an idea what other films I would have considered for an organic list, these were the other 14 I shortlisted, in order of their release:
The Bling Ring
Tusk
Ex Machina
The End of the Tour
Room
The Witch
Moonlight
The Lovers
The Florida Project
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Lady Bird
The Disaster Artist
The Death of Dick Long
Waves
Saint Maud
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Good run. I told you.
In order to figure out whether Adam did better or Josh did better, we'll need to go deeper into my Flickchart, obviously, since they both picked some films I don't actually love.
They each also picked a film I haven't seen, and only one of those is because I've been delinquent on it. I still haven't seen Joanna Hogg's 2019 film The Souvenir, so I certainly haven't seen its 2021 follow-up, The Souvenir Part II. That was Adam's ninth pick. In the case of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Josh's seventh pick, I don't believe it's been released in Australia yet. I'm not conscious of it having a release, in any case.
If one of them had picked more films I hadn't seen than the other, I was thinking we'd have to find an average value on my Flickchart of the films I have seen, in order to be fair. Since they each picked one, I can just do a net addition of where their films rank on my Flickchart. Lowest total wins.
So here's what they picked, followed by my Flickchart ranking:
Adam:
1. Ex Machina (939)
2. Moonlight (676)
3. Under the Skin (134)
4. First Cow (3401)
5. Spring Breakers (79)
6. Uncut Gems (1584)
7. While We're Young (2094)
8. Krisha (2343)
9. The Souvenir Part II (N/A)
10. Locke (1420)
Josh:
1. Lady Bird (1565)
2. After Yang (1373)
3. First Reformed (165)
4. The Florida Project (821)
5. Everything Everywhere All at Once (332)
6. The Green Knight (2262)
7. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (N/A)
8. The Witch (2082)
9. Zola (4859)
10. The Lobster (1999)
You couldn't pick A Ghost Story? How dare you.
Who won seems to be pretty evident at a glance, but let's run the numbers:
Adam's total = 12,670, for an average of 1,407 per movie
Josh's total = 15,458, for an average of 1,718 per movie
Not all that close, but not quite the blowout that the numbers in parenthesis suggested it might be.
Zola drags things down quite a lot for Josh. Zola really didn't work for me. In fact, it may be the only one of the 18 movies they picked that I've seen that I actively dislike. First Cow is my next least favorite, but I don't dislike it, and it's a whole 1,458 spots ahead of Zola. If Josh had taken both, as he wanted to, it would have been a blowout.
On the positive side, Adam picked my #1 (Spring Breakers) and my #3 (Under the Skin) on my personal top ten, and Josh's highest pick on my top ten was my #5 (First Reformed). Interestingly, they only picked four of my top ten in total, two each, leaving The Blackcoat's Daughter, A Ghost Story, Climax, Swiss Army Man, Enemy and Eighth Grade out in the cold.
And these are the guys I go to each week to soak up their opinions on movies?
So in this case I'm an Adam. I've been a Josh on at least one exercise similar to this in the past.
I'll be curious to see which list the Flickchart listeners voted as the winner, which was always the intended outcome of their little game. That information is certainly already available, but I'm still catching up on my podcasts from being gone in America.
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