The "GREAT" Movies of 2024
2024 Movie Rankings (Part 4/7 = S-Tier)
A S-tier movie is a “How was the movie?” “It was GREAT!” movie.
If you’re like most people who only to the cinema maybe 5 times a year (instead of being a sicko like me who watches every movie that comes out in cinemas): these are the movies I’d recommend you pay $15 to go out to the movies to watch. And if you want someone to watch them, shoot me an invite and I’ll clear my schedule1 because these are the movies that I’m always down to rewatch. If you were to tell me any of these movies were your favourite movie of the year, I wouldn’t react with the 🤨 “Huh, really?” face2 because any of these movies are great enough to be someone’s favourite movie.
Thus, there isn’t as much seperation between this tiers sub-tiers, because there isn’t that much difference between a GREAT movie and a GREATER movie3. They’ll all great! If I have to quickly delinerate between sub-tiers, I’d say…
S- Tier = A “cult classic” or “guilty pleasure”. These will likely grow to have niche but devoted fandoms. This year most of them are dumb-but-insane action movies4, fun-but-unnecessary franchise entries5, or promising-but-amateurish microbudget indies6.
S= Tier = These are where I’ve ranked many of the year’s “canonically” great movies which are destined to be studied in film school because their greatness is undeniable7…but not in a way that connects with me personally. However, this doesn’t mean they’re all Oscar-nominated art films: half of them are those genre classics8 that would’ve constantly been replayed on cable — if people still had cable. I guess the modern-day equivalent would be to say that these are the movies which will always be available on at least one of the major streaming services; like how even if The Shawshank Redemption leaves Netflix at the end of the month, you’ll be able to find it on Stan or Binge9 the next day.
S+ Tier = This is where my rankings get even more subjective than they already are. These are the movies I ❤️ on Letterboxd but still only give 4.5 stars10 because there’s something about them that appeals to my biography or uber-specific tastes, but they also have obvious flaws that stop them from being 10/10 perfect movies.
…but since it’s so hard to delineate between these sub-tiers, instead of giving awards for individual sub-tiers I'm just going to list all of the movies in S Tier and then group some of them together thematically into triple-features or “spiritual trilogies” which you can watch back-to-back over a weekend!
S-Tier = 🥳 GREAT movies!
S- = This movie is GREAT, but it would've just been good if...87. “GODZILLA X KONG: NEW EMPIRE” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…GODZILLA HADN’T SPEARED KONG INTO THE PYRAMIDS AND THEN GERMAN SUPLEXED HIM AND ALSO THERE’S A KAIJU DENTIST AND KONG GETS A ROBOT ARM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86. “BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for Jenna Ortega.
85. “KINGDOM 4” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…KINGDOM wasn’t one of my favourite manga.
84. “BOY KILLS WORLD” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for Jessica Roethe’s L33Tspeak helmet.
83. “IT ENDS WITH US” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…NOT FOR THE BTS DRAMA!
82. “ONE PERCENT WARRIOR” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for the flashlight scene.
81. “GOLDEN KAMUI” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…GOLDEN KAMUI wasn’t my #1 favourite manga.
80. “LA COCINA” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…I hadn’t watched it between seasons of The Bear.
79. “UGLIES” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…UGLIES hadn’t been my favourite of the teen dystopia YA novel trilogies when I’d been a dystopian teen.
78. “100 YARDS” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for the scene where the hero fights 100 guys with 100 different weapons!
77. “SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…Superman wasn’t my favourite superhero.
76. “JACKPOT” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…the adaptation of the comic CROWDED hadn’t been delayed.
75. “SLAY” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…I’d watched it by myself.
74. “VENOM 3: THE LAST DANCE” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…Eddie X Venom wasn’t the greatest cinematic love story of the last decade of American cinema.
73. “MUFASA: THE LIONG KING” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for Lin Manuel Miranda.
72. “PADDINGTON IN PERU” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for Paddington.
71. “THE FIRE INSIDE” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…I hadn’t gotten into women’s sports last year because of Caitlyn Clark vs Paige Breuckers in the Final Four.
70. “YOUTH (TRILOGY)”11 is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…I wasn’t Chinese and could’ve ended up in this movie if my parents hadn’t immigrayed to Australia (or if their grandparents hadn’t immigrayed to Malaysia).
69. “DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…my favourite genre of movie wasn’t movies-about-movies.
68. “F MARRY KILL” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…not for Lucy Hale.
67. “A COMPLETE UNKNOWN” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…James Mangold had tried to make a film about being great and not about being on the periphery of greatness.
66. “FEMME” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…it hadn’t nailed the ending.
65. “SEIZE THEM!” is GREAT, but it would’ve just been good if…it had more money/polish that it felt more like a real movie and not like a bootleg of the greatest school play you’ve never seen.
S = this movie is great because...64. “BLACK DOG” this movie is great because…I like dogs, motorcycles, and dogs riding in the sidecars of motorcycles.
63. “YOLO” this movie is great because…of Jia Ling’s IRL body transformation.
62. “ROAD HOUSE” this movie is great because…Doug Liman finally cracked the camerawork for how to make MMA fights cinematically interesting!
61. “LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL” this movie is great because…of its dedication to the bit.
60. “BAD BOYS 4: RIDE OR DIE” this movie is great because…BAD BOYS BAD BOYS WHAT YA GONNA DO? WHAT YA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU?
59. “KILL” this movie is great because…it’s exactly what’s advertised in the title.
58. “ASSASSIN’S PLAN, or KNOX GOES AWAY” this movie is great because…Michael Keaton would’ve been Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of a dementia victim if this wasn’t a genre movie.
57. “JUROR #2” this movie is great because…I love courtroom dramas and evil Nicholas Hoult.
56. “THE BIKERIDERS” this movie is great because…it’s cool, man.
55. “MY SUNSHINE” this movie is great because…ice skating + childhood romance!
54. “TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED-IN” this movie is great because…its a loving but unsentimental tribute to the Golden Age of Hong Kong.
53. “RICKY STANICKY” this movie is great because…I would also pay John Cena to pretend to be my childhood friend!
52. “THELMA” this movie is great because…it’s like Gran Turismo but without the racism or toxic masculinity.
51. “TRANSFORMERS ONE” this movie is great because…it teaches kids how to overthrow their corrupt fascist governments?
50. “NUTCRACKERS” this movie is great because…Ben Stiller is the perfect muse to balance out George Washington era David Gordon Green and Your Highness era David Gordon Green.
49. “DIDI” this movie is great because…it perfectly captures what its like to be an Asian American/Australian teenager in the MySpace era.
48. “SNACK SHACK” this movie is great because…it’s the only wholesome movie about hustle culture.
47. “THE ROOM NEXT DOOR” this movie is great because…I want Pedro Almodovar to be my interior decorator.
46. “NICKEL BOYS” this movie is great because…it’s based pn a great novel that’s based on a horrifying true story, but one that needed to be told.
45. “THE BRUTALIST” this movie is great because…it got me interested in Brutalism.
44. “JANET PLANET” this movie is great because…it has the exuberance of a first-time filmmaker but the refinement of a master playwright.
43. “CARRY-ON” this movie is great because…it’s what DIE HARD 2 should’ve been.
42. “AM I OKAY?” this movie is great because…I also went through a best friendship breakup this year 😭 (and also it stars Dakota Johnson).
S+ = these movies are GREAT, but they would've been MASTERPIECES if...41. “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it wasn’t impossible not to compare it to FURY ROAD.
40. “HIT MAN” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…people were as likely to rewatch the entire movie, instead of just rewatching their favourite scenes on YouTube.
39. “MAXXXINE” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…the trilogy’s religious satire was as well-developed as its Hollywood satire.
38. “LISA FRANKENSTEIN” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…not so much “if” but “when” because this will be a masterpiece in 10 years after it’s had enough time to age into a sleepover classic like Jennifer’s Body.
37. “THE PEOPLE’S JOKER” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it wasn’t perfectly imperfect.
36. “THE FALL GUY” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…David Leitch had tried as hard with the rest of the movie as he did its brilliantly choreographed action scenes.
35. “BETWEEN THE TEMPLES” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had had one hit, original Carol Kane song.
34. “SPELLBOUND” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had had a real villain like the classic Disney Renaissance musicals its paying homage to, instead of a metaphorical villain like “parental neglect” like modern Disney animated movies.
33. “KNEECAP” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…I was Irish.
32. “HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS BEFORE GRANDMA DIES” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had been a little meaner.
31. “DRIVE AWAY DOLLS” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it was being viewed as Trisha Cooke’s directorial debut, instead of Ethan Coen’s first non-Coen Brother’s movie.
30. “LOOK BACK” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had elevated its great source material, instead of perfectly recreating it in animation.
29. “WICKED” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…THEY HAD MADE GELPHIE CANON!
28. “PUSHPA 2 — THE RULE” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it wasn’t setting up the next PUSHPA to be a MASTERPIECE!
27. “HER STORY” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…its feminism, while progressive for China, wasn’t that of an early 2000s Hollywood movie (or if it wasn’t worrying how soon feminism might be more progressive in China than in Trump’s “anti-DEI” Hollywood…)
26. “BETTER MAN” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…the movie’s storytelling was as innovative as its style.
25. “GHOST CAT ANZU” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had been 75/25 Takahata to Miyazaki instead of 50/50.
24. “YOUR MONSTER” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…the songs had been more memorable, although the point might’ve been they mid because they’re written by a mid songwriter in-universe?
23. “THE 4:30 MOVIE” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it didn’t remind me of how Kevin Smith hadn’t made a great movie, until this, in like 20 years.
22. “OUR LITTLE SECRET” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it had ended on a bigger comic setpiece instead of kinda running out of steam…
21. “THE COLOURS WITHIN” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…the Catholocism tied more into the movie’s themes instead of just being its setting or IF THEY’RE JUST BEEN LESBIANS?
20. “BABES” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…I was a mother.
19. “SPY X FAMILY: CODE WHITE” is GREAT, but it would’ve been a MASTERPIECE if…it worked as a standalone movie instead of an amazing anime arc.
👊 THE “ACTION BRO” trilogy
= One Percent Warrior → Kill → Road House
This is a trilogy to watch with your bros on “guys night” when Call of Duty is undergoing server maintenance and which will inspire all of you to sign up for a MMA class together…which you’ll immediately drop after getting your ass kicked in the first lesson. But at least that will give you even more appreciation for these movies and the lifelong dedication of their “these are real martial artists who can kill you with their bare hands” action stars — Tak Sakaguchi, Lakshya, and Connor McGregor12 — to honing their bodies into bareknuckle killing machines.
💅THE “GOOD FOR HER” trilogy
= It Ends With Us → Your Monster → MaXXXine
If you’re not familiar with what a “good for her” movie is: it’s basically a trendy microgenre born from the intersection of the concurrent rises of the #MeToo movement, Sad Hot Girl literature13, and A24 social horror in the late-2010s. It’s the “I Support Women’s Rights AND Women’s Wrongs!” meme made manifest. It Ends With Us doesn’t exactly fall into this category, because if it did then it would’ve ended with Blake Lively dancing to a Britney Spears song as she murders her abusive husband with her gardening shears…but I’m putting it here because that might just be how the Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni trial ends. And because it’d be a good soft melodrama to start the girls night with — “grab your friends! wear your florals!” — because you can talk over its dull scenes as you catch-up while mixing margaritas, but it also promotes female solidarity with its many “OH MY GOD!” and “NO HE DIDN’T!” scenes that would encourage everyone to share stories about their own toxic boyfriends. And because it’d be a good lead-in for Your Monster; which is a perfect “middle child” of a trilogy because it’s the best but weirdest of these movies14 as a sweepingly romantic, fantastical yet relatable, backstage meta-musical cringe-comedy that I can only describe without spoilers as “Fight Club for monsterfucker musical theatre girlies”…but it’s too much of a mindfuck to be the first in the trilogy and too open-ended to be the last. Thus, we’d close the night with MaXXXine because it gives us closure with a “happy ending” as the last installment in Ti West and Mia Goth’s X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy — which will likely be remembered as the defining work of “Good For Her” cinema.
🦸THE “FRANCHISE DECONSTRUCTION” trilogy
= Drive Away Dolls → Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga → The People’s Joker
Many a cinephile has decried the domination of IP in the movie marketplace as The Death of Cinema and while that may be true to continue to harangue movie studios to “make original movies with talented auteur filmmakers!” is akin to protest voting for the Green Party: it’s the correct moral stance15 but it’s not actually going to do anything. Instead, I’d rather think about how franchises can be revitalized by deconstructing/reconsturcting themselves to tell unique stories that can only be told with their IP, like Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
“Coen Brothers Movies” technically aren’t a franchise but with their unique aesthetic and recurring themes and repetory ensembles, like “Wes Anderson Movies” and “Quentin Tarantino Movies”, they might as well be to Millenial cinephiles. However, Drive Away Dolls technically isn’t even a Coen Brothers Movie: it’s a Coen Brother Movie, as the first narrative feature solo-directed by Ethan Coen. Which makes it interesting to compare to Joel Coen’s first solo-directed feature The Tragedy of Macbeth: the difference between them suggesting that the darker and more “serious” Coen Brothers films with literary ambitions/inspirations16 were more Joel; whereas their lighter, goofier comedies17 were more Ethan. But what’s most interesting about Drive Away Dolls isn’t what it reveals about old Coen Brothers films, but the new elements it brings to the “franchise”: it’s the only Coen Brother(s) film without male protagonists18 and it’s very, very, very gay. Like college girls soccer team slumber party gay. This is probably because it was editted, co-written, and likely co-directed19 by Ethan wife Tricia Cook who I only found out upon researching this movie has been the Coen Brothers’ editor since Miller’s Crossing and has been happily married, with two kids, to Ethan Coen since 1992…but they’re in an open/poly marriage because she’s an out lesbian? I DID NOT KNOW THE COEN BROTHERS WERE PUNK LIKE THAT! Drive Away Dolls isn’t in the Top 5, or arguably even Top 10, Coen Brothers movies; but its queer, punk feminist energy felt like an adrenaline shot to the dick of a “franchise” which had been receding further and further into irreverent-but-irrelevant Old Hollywod pastiche since A Serious Man20. It’s a prime example of how new, diverse collaborators can reignite a dying franchise (or the art of an aging autuer).
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, on the other hand, is the Mad Max franchise comitting seppuku. It’s a complete 180 to its direct predecessor which many consider to be the best of the franchise, and possibly even the best action movie ever made, Mad Max: Fury Road; which was a 2-hour car chase across the Namibian desert, a non-stop “pure cinema” adrenaline rush of practical effects and “HOW DID THEY NOT DIE???” stuntwork, that takes place across only 2 days and can be watched as a standalone action classic without any knowledge of the previous Mad Max movies. Whereas Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve recently watched Mad Max: Fury Road21; is a novelistic coming-of-age epic that takes place across 20 years and was filmed in Broken Hill almost entirely on greenscreens; and doesn’t even have Mad Max in it. Instead, it tells the origin story of the breakout character/performance of Fury Road: Charlize Theron’s Furiosa…except she’s not played by Charlize Theron but by Anya Taylor-Joy…except even Anya Taylor-Joy is only in the second-half of the movie because in the first-half of the movie she’s played by newcomer Australian child actress Alyla Browne. So basically, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a sequel/prequel to one of the greatest movies of all time that deliberately does the opposite of what everyone loved about the previous movie. It’s like if Kay replaced Michael Corleone as the main character of The Godfather Part 2 and, instead of being about a male anti-hero doubling down on his toxic masculinity in pursuit of his violent revenge and the capitalist illusion of The American Dream under the guise of “providing for his family”, it was about a woman leaving her abusive gangster husband and escaping the American cycle of retributive violence to build a new life and a better future for her children…which probably would’ve bombed even harder at the box office than Furiosa22 but which might’ve been better for the culture considering how many fans still treat Michael Corleone as an aspirational figure instead of a cautionary tale. It’s why I prefer George Miller to Francis Ford Coppola23: it takes a brave artist to reflect on the flaws in the original IP they’ve dedicated their life to building — in this case, the brutal masculine violent revenge of Mad Max — and then “fix” them by subverting them through filtering them through a new perspective…while still having badass multi-vehicle car chases with stilt-walkers and rocket launchers.
But 2024’s most furious, audacaious, ridiculous act of IP subversion was The People’s Joker; which plays like a transfemme alt-comedy terrorist attack on the superhero-military-industrial complex. Written, directed, and starring Tim & Eric alumni Vera Drew: The People’s Joker is a microbudget parody of The Joker which premiered at TIFF24 in 2022 but only got a theatrical release in 2024 after being tied of in years of cease-and-desist red tape from DC Comics and Warner Bros. — which is how you know it’s good satire because it pissed off the corporations it was punching up at, instead of making a billion dollars for the corporation it was jerking off (e.g. Deadpool & Wolverine). But for all it makes fun of the superhero industry, it’s a greater love letter to the superhero genre than any $2 million fan film25 or DCAU panel-by-panel adaptation of a classic comic that virtue signals its fandom with the “accuracy” of its costume designs because it captures the original revolutionary spirit of the superhero. For although superheroes have now come to dominate mainstream culture as apolitical defenders of the status quo, they originally created by Jewish-American immigrants to punch Nazis in the face and at a time when “The American Way” was embodied by FDR’s New Deal instead of George W. Bush’s Patriot Act. In The People’s Joker the mentally ill villains of Gotham’s Rogues Gallery are recast as a queer (but still mentally ill) community based out of the UCB comedy club who are fighting to take down Big Pharma, Lorne Michaels, and a pedophile billionaire Batman — but for all its high-concept Marxist lunacy what’s most revolutionary about it is how Vera Drew turns it into a personal, nigh-autobiographical, trans coming-out-of-age meta-memoir. When superhero fans like to say “superheroes are the gods of modern mythology!” they’re usually about their power-levels or cultist fandoms or moral didacticism; but I think how they’re closest to mythology is in how they’re like oral histories, stories passed down in a game of telephone through a succession of creators who add and change elements to express their personal experiences and reflect the times they’re living in. The People’s Joker ultimately beat DC Comic and Warner Bros’s copyright claims by invoking Fair Use as a “transformative work”, which is definitely is, and although it hasn’t transformed modern superheroes into becoming less politically spineless or the movie industry into supporting more indepent filmmakers or mainstream comedy into being more subversive (in a way that isn’t just being racist) — at least it tried to. And hopefully it’ll inspire a few more people to try too.
🏆THE “BEST PICTURE NOMINEES” trilogy
= The Brutalist (Act 1) → Nickel Boys → The Brutalist (Act 2) → Wicked
Only one of 2024’s Best Picture nominees made it into my Top 20 of the year, but these three movies almost made the cut because they’re all undeniably 9.9/10 Great Movies — but they all have one forgiveable but glaring flaw that prevents them from being 10/10 Masterpieces.
Nickel Boys is an intrinsically moving story that’s still heartbreakingly relevant today, despite taking place over half a century ago. It’s a story that needed to be told, and retold to anyone who (like me) hadn’t read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel. But did it need to be told in this way? Because when people talk about the movie adaptation of Nickel Boys, most of the conversation won’t be about the whitewashed legacy of American racism or its youth “correctional” system that’s just an elevator school for its for-profit carceral “justice” system or even the names and faces of the characters buried in the unmarked mass grave on the grounds of Nickel Academy. Instead, it’s be about Nickel Boys subjective and impressionistic first-person POV style, which writer-director RaMell Ross brought with him from his Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. As someone who grew up playing videogames I’m not as impressed by the novelty of the first-person camera as most Oscar voters, whose median age is 6326, but even if I were to accept the premise that this style of camerawork was innovative for narrative features: I’m still not sure it elevated the storytelling? I understand the theory behind this choice: it allows us to empathize with the victims by literally seeing their stories from their perspectives, instead of sympathizing with them by gawking at their suffering as spectators in a way that can risk veering into voyeuristic and exploitative torture porn ala the criticism of brutal slavery movies like Django Unchained or Twelve Years A Slave…but for all the justifiable criticms one can aim at those movies, it’s a measurable fact that people watched Django Unchained and Twelve Years A Slave27 while nobody but film critics watched Nickel Boys28. And while obviously box office popularity isn’t an indicator of artistic success, it is an indicator of public awareness — and if the goal of Nickel Boys was to tell a true story that needed to be told to as many people as possible who needed to hear it, then I don’t think whatever debatable increase in artistic quality that came from its experimental camerawork was worth sacrificing the mainstream appeal that would’ve brought its important message to a wider audience.
The Brutalist, on the other hand, knows exactly who its audience is: Letterboxd filmbros and New Hollywood nostalgists who both think that cinema as an artform peaked in the 1970s. And they might be right. For although there’s been many great movies made since then, the 1970s might’ve been the last era whose Great Movies were also their most widely seen29. I loved The Brutalist for many of the same reasons I love Tom Cruise movies: I am awed by the raw chutzpah it takes to release a sweeping 3.5hr (4hrs including the intermission) VistaVision post-war historical epic cum intimate character drama on a $100 million scale but with only a $10 million budget, in the same way that I’m awed by Tom Cruise freeclimbing the Burj Khalifa and holding his breath underwater for 6 minutes. Or at least I loved the first half of The Brutalist, which is a masterpiece of American Nightmarism about a Hungarian Jewish Brutalist architect (played by Adrien Brody) who immigrates to the USA after surviving the Holocaust and has to work menial jobs until his talent is discovered by a wealthy industrialist (played by Guy Pearce) who comissions him to build a monumental church-cum-auditorium-cum-gymnasium-cum-community-center in the middle of rural Pensylvania. It’s a spiritual sequel to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist by way of James Gray’s The Immigrant with a sprinkle of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It’s The Fountainhead meets The Great Gatsby meets The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It aspires to be a cinematic Great American Novel with something to say about every crisis in the country: the opiod crisis, the plight of the immigrant, the exploitation of the working class by the American oligarchy, the psycho-sexual homoeroticism of toxic masculinity, the impossibility of making art under capitalism, and the Icarian ambition of the American Dream…
…but when I returned from the intermission, Act 2 of The Brutalist became more like the latter chapters of those serialized Victorian novels that drag on and on and on with tangential filler subplots, because the author’s getting paid by the chapter, until it finally crashes out with a random-yet-tropey “twist” because the author had written themselves into a corner and had no idea how to end their story. In The Brutalist’s case: its random-yet-tropey “twist” ending was rape, suicide, Zionism, and concentration camp art therapy. Although I was disappointed by its ending, as I left the cinema I was still in awe of it's filmmaking (if not its storytelling) — in awe of Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce’s titanic performances, and Lol Crawley’s Gordon Willis-esque cinematography, and Daniel Bloomberg’s instantly iconic DA-DA-DA-DUUUUUUUMMMM score — but then the “controversies” started to build around the film: the architectural designs being AI generated, the actors’ Hungarian accents being corrected by AI, and architects calling it out on its ahistoricism and misunderstanding of Brutalist architecture. I didn’t take any of these “controversies” too seriously, but I think they hurt The Brutalist more than other Oscar-contenders mudraked by awards-season hitpieces — which are fun talking-points to gossip about but usually don’t change how people feel about a film30 — because the movie sold itself so much on its “authenticity” and “classical filmmaking”. More than that, it inspired me to think more about the film…which made me realize there wasn’t that much to think about? In trying to touch upon everything, it didn’t dwelve too deeply into anything, like a survey of a subject that doesn’t teach you much about it except what to read if you want to learn more about it31. So although The Brutalist may not be a masterpiece: it’s still an almost-convincing imitation of one, which might be what makes it so American? Because what’s more American than starting strong with a utopia dream that “All men are created equal” but then ending with “We have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion…”
I probably have Wicked ranked higher than most people who watched as many 2024 movies as I did, since those people were probably film critics or film snobs (or both), but ranked the same as everyone else who went to the movies last year because most people only saw 2 movies in cinemas last year: Dune 2 and Wicked, both of which were wildly beloved and wildly profitable. But although I thought Wicked was a great movie, I was still disappointed by it because it wasn’t my favourite movie of the year — which it should’ve been because it’s my favourite musical of all time. I’m slightly embarassed to admit this, because it’d be much cooler for my favourite musical to be something by Stephen Sondheim instead of anything by Stephen Schwartz32, but the fact is that it’s the only musical I’ve seen live multiple times33: once in London and three times in Sydney, aka everytime its toured Australia.
So I enjoyed the movie for the same reasons as everyone else did: Cynthia Erivo is undeniable as Elphaba and Jonathan Bailey is almost as dazzling as Fiyero, Erivo & Grande are a reasonable replacement for Mendel & Chenoworth’s iconic frenemy black-cat/golden-retreiver double act as Elphaba & Glinda, the songs still slap and the story still sings — in ways that are remarkably but unfortunately still topical. And I have most of same criticisms of the movie that most Wicked fans had: the CGI and overall aesthetic was a bit too 2013’s Oz The Great And Powerful, I’m still not sure if Ariana Grande’s dead-eyed doll-stare was bad or so-bad-its-good or just legitimately good as a performance of Glinda’s inability to perform authenticity, and I’m skeptical of the “creative choice” to split Wicked into two movies as being anything more than a money-grab because every Ozian34 knows that Act 2 of Wicked…sucks ass? Everyone agrees that it peaks with Defying Gravity and the only good songs in Act 2 are For Good; and maaaaayyyybbbbeeeee No Good Deed if you loved belting it as a solo when you played Elphaba in highschool, or As Long As You’re Mine if you ship Fiyeraba35…
…but most Ozians ship Gelphie36.
I was honestly surprised, shocked even, that when talking to the “casual” (i.e. straight and not-on-Tumblr) musical theatre fans in my life that it wasn’t universally accepted that Wicked was lesbians. The core relationship of the story is between Elphaba and Glinda — no one gives a shit about Fiyero37, he’s just their mutual beard — which follows the classic “roommates at boarding school” enemies-to-frenemies-to-lovers-to-doomed-yuri arc and whose seperation at the end of Act 1 with Defying Gravity feels waaaaaaaaaay more like a break-up than a “we’re just friends who can’t hang out as much after we left school and followed different career paths”. I don’t think it’s even subtext, it’s just THE TEXT: it’s super gay! The original author of the novel admits it, the composer of the musical loves performing Defying Gravity with gay men’s choruses, and almost EVERYONE IN THIS MOVIE IS QUEER — and everyone who isn’t is a (problematic) Gay Icon or at least an ally who guest-judged on Drag Race. Also, duh, it’s based on The Wizard of Oz; which is the urr-text of queer-coding, ala “A Friend of Dorothy”.
So as someone whose seen Wicked live multiple times: I knew how the movie was going to end. But during Defying Gravity when Elphaba walks away from Glinda as she sings the line “Kiss me GOOOODDBYYYYYEE! I’m DEFYING GRA —” I wandered what would happen if Glinda chased after her, spun her around to face her, and then bullet-time Vertigo kissed her mid-sentence as the chorus swells! For one, it’d be hilarious…
ELPHABA: Wha-what are you doing?
GLINDA: You JUST SAID to ‘kiss me goodbye’…
ELPHABA: I didn’t mean literally!
GLINDA: WELL HOW DO YOU KISS SOMEONE METAPHORICALLY?
…but also, why not?
You could say it’d be changing the story too much…but who cares? They were already going to have to make significant story changes to Act 2 of Wicked to stretch it from 1 hour to 2.5 hours in the sequel and at least this would be a significant story change that would justify splitting it into 2 movies, instead of bloating the runtime with appendices lore filler like The Hobbit trilogy. If Glinda kissed Elphaba and accepted the offer in Defying Gravity to run away with her to become lesbian-animal-rights-terrorists it wouldn’t just be a 20 year wish fulfillment for the generation of Ozians for whom Gelphie Tumblr fanfic was their queer awakening: it would also fix the main story problem with Act 2 of Wicked, which is that Elphaba and Glinda are separated for the rest of the play until their duet in For Good — and like any great double act they’re just not that interesting when they’re not playing off each other. Sure, you could make the mercenary argument that it would hurt the movie’s 4-quadrant box office by alienating Middle America and getting it banned in Saudi Arabia…but do we really believe that the homophobic Wicked fans who’d have boycotted the movie over a gay kiss outnumbered the gay musical theatre kids who’d have rewatched Wicked another 10 times if it ended with Cynthia Erivo making out with Ariana Grande? Because even if this would’ve made the movie less “faithful” to the book of the stage musical, it would’ve been truer to its spirit — it would’ve elevated the movie from an accurate recreation to a true adaptation and modernization by doing what the original clearly wanted to do but couldn’t do when it premiered in 2003 in a pre-Glee, pre-Gaga, pre-Obergefell-v.-Hodges USA — because Wicked has always been about reinterpretation because its LITERALLY FANFICTION: Wicked the musical (2003) is fanfiction of Wicked the novel (1995) which is fanfiction of the The Wizard of Oz movie (1939) which is fanfiction of the original Wizard of Oz novels (1900). And fanfiction is the act of individuals subverting the established norms of (fictional) universes purely out of love, because they can’t profit of it, which is what makes fanfiction — and Wicked — intrinsically queer.
I love Wicked, but I can’t love this movie adaptation — although I still greatly enjoyed it — because it makes me worried that LGBT+ rights are going to backslide to 2003 if Gelphie are still in the closet in 2024.
👶THE “JEREMY-CODED” trilogy
= Uglies —> Better Man —> Spy x Family: Code White
These are the 3 movies in S-tier that are the most “me-coded” in that they should all be much lower in these rankings if I were judging them by any traditional measurement of cinematic quality; but which specifically appeal to me, despite their obvious flaws, for reasons that go beyond personal taste (i.e. it’s not just that they’re niche microgenres that I love) and into personal biography.
I came of age as a reader at the height of the YA dystopia craze of the 2010s.
I’ve never been particularly fond of Dystopia as a genre — I’ve always preferred Hopepunk to Cyberpunk, I didn’t enjoy The Giver as much as everyone else in my 5th grade class, and I kinda agree with Hugh Laurie’s villain monologue in Tomorrowland? — but I still read most of the major trilogies out of FOMO…or at least watched their movie adaptations.
The Hunger Games was the best and most famous of them…but as a film geek I was always one of those pretentious kids who’d say “The Hunger Games is just BATTLE ROYALE for white people” and I never watched enough reality TV to fully understand what it was satirizing. The Mazerunner movies were my favourite YA Dystopian movies; but that’s mostly because Kaya Scodelario in Skins UK was my first TV crush and if you squint Dylan O’Brien kinda resembles Tom Cruise when he’s sprinting, and I never read the books which people who have read the books tell me are much better and very different from the movies. And I watched all the Divergent movies, but I didn’t really like them because beyond all of them being bad movies I couldn’t personally relate to their colour/occupation-based caste-system which I’m guessing was an overblown metaphor for the Mean Girls social stratification of American highschool caferterias…but I’m Australian and went to an all-boys Christian private school38 where everyone wore the same gray uniform and ate outside sitting on the grass because we didn’t have a cafeteria.
The only YA Dystopia that really grabbed me was Uglies.
I’m woefully “upper middle class” so I couldn’t relate to growing up in poverty like Katniss, or to Cassia Reyes in Matched because I went to an all-boys Christian private school where we were all too busy trying to kick each other in the dicks to worry about our non-existent dating lives, or to Todd Hewitt in The Knife of Never Letting Go because — despite going to an all-boys Christian private school — I was always a nerd and never a Christian so I never hung out with sports jocks or religious fundamentalists who promoted toxic masculinity through weird manhood initiation rituals. But as an awkward, chubby, pimply tween; I could relate to Tally Youngblood in Uglies wanting to take a magic sci-fi pill to instantly cure her body dysmorphia.
So for all of the very justified criticisms of the Uglies movie (e.g. its special effects make it look like it was released in the same year as the book39, the concidentally QANON casting of Laverne Cox as an evil dictator forcing kids to surgically transition, that the “pretty” transformation is just a platinum blonde dyejob and contouring, and its overall laziness as algoritmically-approved Netflix slop) I still liked it because I would’ve loved if it had been released 20 years ago. And because Joey King is my favourite Netflix baby. And because it has a HOVERBOARD CHASE ON A ROLLERCOASTER!!! Although while watching the movie I kept asking myself: is Uglies more or less relevant than ever now that the Kardashians have normalized plastic surgery (or at least cosmetic injectables) and there are real “magic sci-fi pills” which give you an almost-instant glow-up (e.g. GLP-1’s and microdosing Accutane) whose side-effects are much less serious than giving you brain damage?
Like YA Dystopias, another trendy genre that I’ve never been much of a fan of are music biopics. I’m skeptical of biopics in general because I’m skeptical that any real person’s life can be summarized in a 2hr movie; but I’m especially skeptical of music biopics because they tend to be even more hagiographic than other biopics since they need the music-rights from their subject’s estate, who understandably don’t want to damage the legacy of their breadwinners (and the profitibility of their back catalogues) by canonizing that they were wife-beaters and pedophiles. However, there are 3 things about Better Man that make me like it much more than most music biopics:
ROBBIE WILLIAMS IS STILL ALIVE. Historically, biopics have usually only been made about famous dead people. However, since the successes of Straight Outta Compton and Rocketman, more and more famous musicians have been making their own biopics to “control their narrative” while making a $100,000,000+ for themselves while they’re still alive40. Now you’d think that biopics would become even more sanitized if they had to be approved by their still living subjects; but I feel like the opposite has proven true with music biopics of still living subjects playing like petty, tittilating, rambunctious (ghostwritten) tell-all celebrity memoirs — which may not be factually accurate, but which are at least true to how their subject chooses to remember their lives. This rarely leads to cinematic masterpieces of biopics whose long dead subjects allow for more creative license41 or clarity of hindsight42; but they’re much more interesting than the biopics of the relatively recently deceased whose estates, run by their living family, at best whitewash their lives to make them boringly inoffensive so that they can play on Disney+ without “content warnings”43 or at worst bastardize their story to victim-blame and make themselves look better44. If I want to learn about the life story of Robbie Williams: I’d prefer it be told to me by Robbie Williams — which is why I love that Robbie Williams is literally the narrator of Better Man.
ROBBIE WILLIAMS IS A MONKEY. If you have no idea who Robbie Williams is — and most of the world doesn’t seem to considering this movie bombed everywhere outside of the UK and Australia — but you’ve heard about this movie: you probably know it as “that biopic where the guy is played by a CGI monkey?” I could explain the deep, symbolic reasons for why Robbie Williams is depicted as a reboot Planet Of The Apes-esque CGI monkey (who was played by Jonno Davies in a mo-cap suit): monkeys have been recurring imagery in his lyrics and music videos45, its a visual metaphor for his body dysmorphia and how he viewed himself like “a performing monkey” when he was in Take That!, etc. etc. But the truest and simplest reason for why Robbie Williams is a monkey in this movie is that IT’S FUN! IT’S FUNNY! HE LIKES MONKEYS! I LIKE MONKEYS! WHO DOESN’T LIKE MONKEYS? I wish more musicians took themselves less seriously and were more concerned with entertaining their audiences with their biopics than with glorifying their own legacies.
I LOVE ROBBIE WILLIAMS! I grew up on his music! The first concert I ever went to was a Robbie Williams concert, when I was 9 years old and he played the last show of his Escapology tour in Sydney at Aussie Stadium on December 14th, 2003! And this movie is as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing his XXV Greatest Hits tour, which I still regret missing when it came to Sydney at Allianz Stadium — formerly Aussie Stadium) on November 16th, 2023. I SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE IT WOULD’VE BEEN SUCH A GOOD BOOK-END!
Last but not least, we have Spy X Family: Code White.
This is the odd-man-out in this trilogy as the one movie I don’t have childhood nostalgia for because the Spy X Family manga only started in 2019 and the anime in 2022, but it is one of my favourite currently-running manga whose new chapters I read within the hour whenever they drop biweekly-ish on the Shounen Jump app.
I love its ecletic mix of kickass action, zany romcom, family drama, and sci-fi espionage that would be too weird for Hollywood and too ridiculous for live action — if you haven’t heard of Spy X Family its logline is “Loid Forger, aka the enigmatic superspy ‘Twilight’, is assigned to Operation Strix which requires him to assemble a pretend family to infiltrate the private elementary school Eden Academy; but unknownst to him his newly adopted daughter Anya is secretly a telepath and his new wife Yor is secretly a master assassin" so it’s basically James Bond meets Kill Bill meets The Pacifier meets Lil Orphan Annie meets Akira — but which somehow makes perfect sense for anime that its become one of the most popular Shounen Jump series of the decade. And I love this movie: the only reason it isn’t in M-tier or even 🦄-tier is because it might not work as a standalone movie if you’ve never read the manga or watched the anime…but then again it doesn’t need to and it shouldn’t have to. To criticise Spy X Family: Code White for being potentially confusing to newcomers is like criticising Avengers: Endgame for being confusing to someone who’s never watched a MCU movie: if they’d never watched a MCU movie then they probably wouldn’t be interested in watching Avengers: Endgame and if for some reason they still wanted to then it’d be easy for them to catch-up by subscribing for a month of Disney+.
Actually, that’s a bad comparison: it’d be more like someone trying to get into the MCU by watching Iron Man 3 or Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Unlike recent movie spin-offs of popular ongoing anime that just continue directly off the last season of the anime by adapting the next arc of the manga with better animation on a cinematic budget46, Spy X Family: Code White has a self-contained non-canon original story. However, whereas the annual One Piece and Dragon Ball and Detective Conan movies also have self-contained non-canon original stories but have built up so much lore and such a large ensemble of characters over their 20+ year runs that they’re almost impossible to follow if you’re not caught-up on the manga; Spy X Family has only been running for 5 years and thus Spy X Family: Code White is still simple enough to be perfectly comprehensible if you’ve at least read the first 3 chapters of the manga or watched the first 3 episodes of the anime to understand its basic premise. For even if you don’t get all the inside jokes or character beats, it’ll still be a fun comic-adventure story:
The story of the movie follows the Forger family going on a vacation to the snowy mountain village of Frigis so that Anya can learn how to make the town’s signature delicacy the Meremere, which is her principal’s favourite desert, so that she can win her school cooking contest and earn a Stella Star — with the overarching goal of Operation Strix being for Anya to earn 8 Stella Stars to become an Imperial Scholar so that the Forger family can visit the Imperial Room, which is a private club for imperial scholars and their families and one of the only places that Donovan Desmond, the father of one of Anya’s classmates and the reclusive chairmain of the National Unity Party (i.e. Nazi analogues), is known to frequent, so that Loid can befriend and spy on (or assassinate) Donovan Desmond. (To clarify the premise: Loid doesn’t know that Yor is an assassin, Yor doesn’t know Loid is a spy, and neither of them know that Anya is psychic; but Anya knows that her new parents are a spy and an assassin, but can’t let them know she knows because she doesn’t want them to know she’s psychic. Also, the family dog Bond is clairvoyant.) However, their family pastry-making vacation is derailed when Anya accidentally eats a piece of chocolate with a microfilm hidden inside it that a rogue Nazi colonel needs to launch a false-flag attack to start World War 3. I won’t spoil the rest of the movie, because I think that anyone who’s even vaguely interested in modern anime should watch this movie and watch/read Spy X Family; but as a teaser I’ll say that the ending involves an exploding zeppelin, a Nazi cyborg with a machine-gun arm, and one of the greatest poop jokes in the history of cinema.
If that sounds like it’s too much to you, then I warn you to never play D&D with me.
The reason that Spy X Family: Code White is in the Jeremy-Coded Trilogy isn’t because I’m the #1 Spy X Family fan — at least not until I can convince another weeb to marry me and then adopt a kid with me purely so that we can do a Loid/Yor/Anya family cosplay — but because this movie is my platonic ideal of a D&D campaign.
If you ask anyone who's ever had the misfortune of playing in a campaign I’ve GMed: they will confirm that my plotting style is to start every arc with the party in a seemingly innocous everyday situation47, then splitting the party into several seemingly unrelated personal sidequests, and then rapidly escalating the stakes until all the subplots converge into a usually literally explosive climax…which I’ll then immediately undercut by ending the session with a NPC making a poop joke.
And if you ask anyone who’s ever had the greater misfortune of GMing a campaign that I’ve played in: they will confirm that my favourite character archetype to play are “annoying magical children (e.g. Anya) and talking animals” who love punching Nazis and blowing up vehicles, and I once played a talking bird who had an elaborate scheme to be elected Mayor by getting rich and fixing the city’s sewage problem with a one-stone-two-bird solution of recycling the city’s sewage overflow to supply a start-up fastfood franchise that made poop-burgers.
Anyway, I have been kicked out of all my D&D campaigns so if anyone’s group is looking for another player I’m free on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Weekends 👍.
WE’RE ALMOST THERE! 19 MORE 2024 MOVIES TO GO AND THEN I CAN FINALLY TELL YOU ABOUT MOVIES THAT CAME OUT THIS YEAR! WE CAN DO IT WE JUST HAVE TO POWER THROUGH COMEON LET’S GO!
And for real this time, the next post will definitely probably maybe will be a non-TLDR reasonable length that can fit into 1 email! IF I KEEP SAYING THIS ONE DAY IT WILL BE TRUE I’M MANIFESTING.
That’s a turn-of-phrase. I wouldn’t have to clear my schedule I’m usually not doing anything!
although most people would react that way to my favourite movie of the year.
If I were using a traditional rating scale: all of these movies would be 9/10 with the highest and lowest movies in this tier — ranked #19 and #81 — separated by mere decimal points.
e.g. Boy Kills World, Godzilla x Kong: New Empire, One Percent Warrior
e.g. Venom 3: The Last Dance, Paddington in Peru, Mufasa: The Lion King
e.g. Slay, Femme, F Marry Kill, Seize Them!
e.g. Thelma, Nickel Boys, The Brutalist.
e.g. Road House, Transformers One, Carry-On
Hulu or HBO Max, if you’re American.
even though there are movies I’d give 5 stars to but won’t ❤️
Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy consists of Youth (Spring), Youth (Hard Time), and Youth (Homecoming); and although the former was released in 2023 that it technically doesn’t qualify for this list, these movies were filmed back-to-back and I watched them back-to-back at the Antennae Documentary Film Festival — so I’m counting them as one 2024 movie.
and even Jake Gyllenhaal is surprisingly convincing as a washed-up MMA fighter.
e.g. Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Raven Leilani
I am not biased when I say this as a middle child.
e.g. O Brother, Where Art Thou! being inspired by The Odyssey; No Country For Old Men being adapted from the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy; and The Man Who Wasn’t There being inspired by the novels of James M. Cain.
e.g. Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading
There’s been Coen Brothers films with female co-protagonists before, but either as one-half of a male/female duo (e.g. Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty) or as part of a larger ensemble without any true “main character” (e.g. Fargo, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs).
in the same way that early Coen Brothers film attributed the “director” credit solely to Joel Coen, despite everyone knowing they were a directing team, to abide by DGA rules.
with its follow-ups being True Grit in 2010; Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013; Hail, Caesar! in 2016; and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018 — 3/4 of which were great films but each feeling less relevant than the last.
Or you’ve watched it so many times and read the tell-all oral history book about how it was made that you remember the names of all the minor background characters and have been desperately waiting to learn the origin story of “The Doof Warrior”.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga made only $174 million worldwide against a $168 million budget (excluding marketting) compared to Mad Max: Fury Road making $380 million against a $150 million budget.
besides the Australian bias 🐨
Toronto International Film Festival
e.g. Superman: Solar, Spider-Man: Lotus,
despite recent efforts to diversify The Academy’s voting body.
Django Unchained and Twelve Years A Slave grossed $426 million and $187 million worldwide, respectively, and both won multiple Oscars.
It only made $3 million worldwide.
The #1 movie at the US box office from 1972 to 1977 was The Godfather, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Blazing Saddles, Jaws, and Rocky. The #1 movie at the US box office over the last 6 years, from 2018 to 2024, was Black Panther, Avengers Endgame, Bad Boys For Life, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, and Inside Out 2 — all of which I like but most of which will not be getting any votes in the 2032 Sight & Sound poll.
Unless the hitpiece isn’t about the subjective quality of a film, but a takedown which leads to someone involved in the film getting #cancelled ala Emelia Perez.
e.g. I thought its Brutalist church design was cool…until I saw the monastry it rips off is waaaaay cooler.
but at least it’s less cringe than anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
except Miss Saigon, which I’ve seen twice, but that’s mostly because it’s my Dad’s favourite musical.
The fan name for Wicked fans.
The ship name for Fiyero x Elphaba.
The ship name for Glinda x Elphaba.
and I say that as someone whose favourite song from the musical is Dancing Through Life.
I was on a scholarship! I USED TO BE SMART I’M NOT CHRISTIAN OR RICH!
2005.
e.g. Madonna, Bruce Springsten, and Billy Joel all currently have their own music biopics in-production.
e.g. Baz Lurman’s Elvis, Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Oliver Stone’s Nixon
e.g. Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, Bennet Miller’s Moneyball, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X
Freddie Mercury’s queerness being dialed down from “leather-daddy gay orgies” to “respectably dying of AIDS off-screen” in Bohemian Rhapsody.
2024’s Amy Winehouse biopic which was approved by her abusive dad and husband, who portray themselves as the victims instead of enablers of Winehouse’s addiction.
Most notably in the song Me And My Monkey, wherein the “monkey” is a metaphor for his drug addiction, which ironically does not feature in this movie.
e.g. Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020), The First Slam Dunk (2022), Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle (2024), and in 2025 we’ll be getting Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle — Part 1 and Chainsaw Man — the Movie: Reze Arc.
usually some sort of large party: a wedding, a tourney, a festival, etc.