The "Pretty Good to Good" Movies of 2024
2024 Movie Rankings (Part 3/7 = B-tier to A-tier)
The difference between a B-tier and an A-tier movie is the difference between saying “I guess that movie was pretty good…” and “That was a good movie!” when someone asks your opinion on a movie. Or it’s the difference between recommending a movie when someone asks you “Should I watch this specific movie this weekend?” and “What movie should I watch this weekend?”
Most B-tier movies are what we traditionally think of as “B movies”. They’re unnecessary but still enjoyable sequels1, cheesy romcoms2 and “based on a true story” tearjerkers3 that I watch with my Mum, bro-y action movies4 and schlocky studio horror5 that I watch with my Dad, and the occasional failed Oscar play6 that’s admirable for its ambition but dull or sloppy in its execution. A-tier movies are often in the same genres as B-tier movies, except they’re just better: with bigger budgets and bigger movie stars and bigger aspirations.
Ok, onto the rankings! This time I’m going to give an award 🏆 to one movie in each A/B sub-tier!
B-Tier = 👍Pretty Good?
B- = this movie is pretty good, but it would've been just okay if...“RUMOURS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…it’s confusingness and pretentiousness wasn’t balanced out by its weird horniness.
“TAROT” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…I wasn’t vaguely interested in tarot cards and Jacob Batalon wasn’t my spirit animal.
“CROSSING” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…it had had a cishet saviour-y happy ending.
“MOTHER OF THE BRIDE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…I hadn’t been raised on CW Teen Dramas.
“GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for the lesbian ghost coming-of-age romance subplot.
“WOLFS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for Ethan from Euphoria.
“MOANA 2” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…I wasn’t nostalgic for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
“WELCOME TO BABEL” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…I wasn’t ethnically Chinese and didn’t live in Sydney.
“THE LAST FRENZY” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for its insane high-concept that will inevitablity get a Hollywood remake starring Will Ferrell or Steve Carrell.
“GLADIATOR 2” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for BABOOOOOOOONS!
“THE WATCHERS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…POPMART’S Peach Riot figures hadn’t reignited my childhood love of fairies.
“SUNCOAST” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…The Fault In Our Stars hadn’t instilled me with a weird fascination for teen cancer movies?
“SEED OF THE SACRED FIG” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for the meta of it’s writer-director being a fugitive from the Iranian government.
“MONKEY MAN” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for TRANS WARRIOR NUNS?
“WE LIVE IN TIME” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.
“THE FABULOUS FOUR” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for Dolly Parton and Susan Sarandon!
“REZ BALL” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…it’s true story wasn’t so inspirational.
“THE CROW” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…I didn’t love Hot Topic.
“DADDIO” is pretty good, but it would’ve been just okay if…not for Dakota Johnson and her acrylic nails.
Since the peak of the Frat Pack7 and Ocean’s crews8 in the early 2000s brought us the last generation of true movie stars, Hollywood has been in a quiet crisis over “the death of the movie star” as movies are being sold more and more on their IP than their talent. The most obvious example of this being the MCU: audiences don’t turn up to a Thor movie to see Chris Hemsworth — as evidenced by how audiences haven’t turned up to see Chris Hemworth’s non-Thor movies — they go to see Thor and the after-credits scenes teasing the next installment of the MCU. The same applies to almost all of the MCU actors: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Brie Larson. They may technically be “movie stars” in that they star in movies, but they’re not true movie stars like those of the 80s and 90s — Julia Roberts, Robin Williams, Denzel Washington, Jim Carrey, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise — who can open a non-IP movie and carry it to $100+ million domestic on their name alone.
But the movie star may be on the verge of a resurrection. For in 2024 two young actors emerged to possibly, maybe lead the vanguard for a new generation of true movie stars: Zendeya and Timothee Chalamet. Together they helped Dune 2 to $700+ million and individually they both drove their own indie drama star vehicles — Challengers and A Complete Unknown, respectively — to $100-ish million9 worldwide. From box office success to critical acclaim to ubiquitous celebrity, Zendeya and Chalamet check all the boxes to be considered “true movie stars” except one: they’ve yet to single-handedly elevate an otherwise bad movie into a pretty good one.
For example: Wolfs is a crime-caper-comedy which isn’t funny and whose crime/mystery plot is incomprehensible gibberish…but it’s still a pretty good movie because you get to hang out with Brad Pitt and George Clooney for 2 hours. Gladiator 2 is mostly a soulless rethread of Gladiator which would’ve been disappointing even if it had been released straight-to-DVD in 2003 (which you would think it was based on how its special effects look)…but it’s still a pretty good movie because we get to be queer-baited by Denzel Washington. However, although they were close contenders, neither of these were the truest movie star performances of 2024. Instead…
The Philosopher’s Stone Award 🏆for the movie star who turned shit into gold goes to…DAKOTA JOHNSON for Daddio.
Dakota Johnson starred in 3 movies in 2024: Madame Web, Am I Okay?, and Daddio.
I liked all of these movies, even though they were all critical and commercial failures. But even if you, like most people, hated Madame Web: you have to admit that you wouldn’t remember it at all — like how we’ve all already forgotten Kraven The Hunter10 — if not for Dakota Johnson’s deadpan line-readings of memeable one-liners like “He was in the Amazon with my Mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” and her even more iconic Andy Kaufman-esque press tour. And although you probably haven’t even heard of Am I Okay?, because it was a Max Original Movie and nobody watches Max Original Movies, if you have it’s only because of how its queer later-life coming out story has been cited as “evidence” of Dakota Johnson’s long-rumoured (or hoped for) bisexuality — for true movie stars are not only actors but icons and thus their filmographies become their iconography, like how Taylor Swift lyrics are dissected by her fans to try to uncover the details of her biography and the secret of who she really is.
But the best evidence of Dakota Johnson’s natural movie stardom was her worst movie of 2024: Daddio. The movie is literally 2 hours of being stuck in LaGuardia-to-Manhattan traffic with NYC’s most annoying, misogynistic, can’t-shut-the-fuck-up cab driver who’s naturally played by America’s most annoying, misogynistic, can’t-shut-the-fuck-up actor Sean Penn11. This movie is like being stuck in Travis Bickle’s cab for 2 hours as he jerks off to the Joe Rogen podcast. This movie would easily be 💩-tier if it weren’t for Dakota Johnson who makes it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. I was willing to endure 2 hours of Sean Penn ranting about how “Madonna had it coming!” so that I could spend 2 hours gazing at Dakota Johnson’s platinum blonde bob, rainbow acrylic nails, and ironic eye-rolls.
Because a true movie star is someone you’d go to the cinema to pay $10 to watch do literally anything, or even nothing, for 2 hours.
B = this movie is pretty good, because...“THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE” is pretty good, because…KILLING NAZIS!
“ESCAPE” is pretty good, because…its race-against-the-clock plays in a real-time 90mins.
“THE INSTIGATORS” is pretty good, because…BOSTON!
“RED ONE” is pretty good, because…“What if Santa was kidnapped by terrorists?” is a good premise for a movie!
“BLITZ” is pretty good, because…SAIORSE RONAN!
“ORION AND THE DARK” is pretty good, because…of its meta framing story.
“KANGUVA” is pretty good, because…of its unique tribal setting.
“THE FIRST OMEN” is pretty good, because…it’s better than any studio horror franchise prequel needs to be.
“KUNG FU PANDA 4” is pretty good, because…slapstick comedy is a dying artform outside of animation.
“ABIGAIL” is pretty good, because…I like vampires and ballet.
“THE BEAUTIFUL GAME” is pretty good, because…it’s one of the few movies which addresses the growing homelessness crisis.
“DYING” is pretty good, because…of its ambition to be a novelistic family saga.
Most of the movies in this sub-tier are pretty good executions of pretty good ideas (e.g. Kung Fu Panda 4 is about as good as anyone could’ve reasonably expected a fourth Kung Fu Panda movie to be). There are only two exceptions, which were disappointing because they were only middling executions of potentially GREAT ideas: Blitz12 and Red One.
On most 2024 movie rankings, Red One would be side-by-side at the bottom with Madame Web.
It’s a prime example of how streaming sludge is killing the theatrical experience and cinema as an artform. For it had the $250 million budget and prime Thanksgiving release date of a holiday tentpole, but the laziness and shoddiness of most straight-to-streaming Prime Original Movies because Amazon doesn’t care if it’s any good or not — it just needed holiday-themed exclusive content to recommend on its front page and which starred movie stars who were popular with their algorithm — and neither do their creatives since they’ve already been overpaid up-front instead of netting a percentage of the backend. The Rock and Chris Evans sleepwalk through Red One to collect their paychecks, like they did in their other streaming original action-comedies (i.e. Red Notice and Ghosted respectively), and the movie overall feels like a 2hr SNL sketch written and directed by ChatGPT with VFX by Midjourney.
Yet I still thought Red One was a pretty good movie, because “What if Santa Claus was kidnapped and the head of the Santa Secret Service had to team up with a criminal on the Naughty List to rescue him?” is an inherently great idea for a movie.
Of course, whenever Red One introduces a potentially great idea, it proceeds to immediately fuck it up.
When the villain who kidnaps Santa Claus was revealed to be the adorable 5’2” Kieran Shipka, I thought to myself: “Wow, so is she like an Artemis Fowl-esque kid criminal mastermind who’s holding Santa hostage until he takes her name off The Naughty List? Or is she a Communist elf who kidnapped Santa so that his elves could take over Santa’s Workshop and claim the means of production from their masters?” Either of which would’ve been fun, but instead it was later revealed that she was…Grylla The Winter Witch? And that she’d kidnapped Santa to use his Santa magic to turn the world into a snow globe?
Then when its revealed that Grylla was working with Santa’s estranged brother Krampus, who was exiled from the North Pole after he invented The Naughty List, I thought to myself: “Oh so did Santa steal the Naughty List from Krampus and now Krampus is stealing it back, as a metaphor for how Christmas was culturally appropriated from pagan Winter Solstice festivals? Or did Santa put Krampus on the Naughty List for inventing the Naughty List but then hypocritically continued to use the Naughty List anyway, as a metaphor for the USA’s criticism of China’s totalitarian surveillance state despite the Patriot Act enabling the NSA to spy on American citizens?” Anything would’ve been more interesting than what we go…which was that Krampus betrayed his brother and was exiled from the North Pole because he’s a simp for The Winter Witch and she seduced him into punishing kids instead of giving them presents?
So Red One’s plot is stupid — but so are the plots of most buddy cop/criminal action-comedies, but they’re still fun as long as their buddy cop/criminal dynamic is fun. Unfortunately, The Rock & Chris Evans are not Will Smith & Martin Lawrence or Jackie Chan & Chris Tucker. And surprisingly it’s Chris Evans who’s the weak-link13. I was surprisingly moved by The Rock’s performance as a jaded idealist contemplating retiring from the job he’s dedicated his entire life to because he fears that his work has been meaningless and his life has amounted to nothing14. But although its always fun to watch Chris Evans revert to skeevy asshole mode ala Knives Out and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, he’s still too Captain America to pinch-hit for Kevin Hart as The Rock’s wisecracking beta-boy but also isn’t physically intimidating enough to be the Shaw to his Hobbs. Also, his character just doesn’t make sense in the story: he plays a black-hat hacker deadbeat dad who’s a cynical “3rd Level Naughty-Lister” who rediscovers the joy of Christmas when he’s reluctantly enlisted by The Rock to help him find and rescue Santa Claus. But why would The Rock recruit a hacker to find and rescue Santa Claus from a witch? Shouldn’t he have recruited someone with expertise in the supernatural and criminal investigation…like a PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR LIKE HELLBOY???
The Mike Mignola award 🏆 for the 2024 movie which would be most improved by the inclusion of Hellboy goes to…RED ONE.
You know who would be useful in tracking down Gylla the Winter Witch? HELLBOY!
You know who’s awesome at both punching and wisecracking that he could be both a physical rival and comic foil to The Rock? HELLBOY!
You know who had a sympathetically terrible childhood that made him grow up to be a violent, cynical, chainsmoking grump who needs to rediscover the joy of Christmas by saving Santa? HELLBOY!
The point is: bad movies can become pretty good movies if they at least have enough wasted potential to inspire you to, while you’re idly half-watching them, imagine the better movie they could’ve been — and often that better movie would’ve starred Hellboy.
B+ = this movie is pretty good, but it would've been good-good if...“ARGYLLE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…they’d just adapted the fake book into a real movie instead of a real book.
“LONGLEGS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I was a 14 year old who had never watched The Silence of the Lambs.
“KINDS OF KINDNESS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I wasn’t exhausted with Yorgos Lanthimos.
“WOMAN OF…” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…if the first half of the movie had been the entire movie.
“NOTHING CAN’T BE UNDONE BY A HOT POT” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…its gritty Hong Kong noir caper didn’t have to abide by CCP censorship laws.
“ULTRAMAN RISING” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it didn’t have so much baseball?
“FIGHTER” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…not for the Islamophobic Hinduvati propaganda.
“THE GARFIELD MOVIE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it wasn’t a Garfield movie.
“GHOSTLIGHT” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it wasn’t so heavy-handed.
“OFFICER BLACKBELT” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it wasn’t scapegoating moral panic about serial pedophiles to justify mass surveilance.
“SING SING” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it was either a documentary or a drama, instead of a docudrama.
“HAIKYUU!! THE DUMPSTER BATTLE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I was caught up on Haikyuu!!
“LOVE, DIVIDED” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…the MC’s quirky professions didn’t distract from the simple brilliance of its romcom high-concept.
“IN A VIOLENT NATURE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it was on Xbox Gamepass.
“THE APPRENTICE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…its political narrative didn’t conflict with its dramatic narrative.
“IT’S OKAY!” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it was about a form of dance I’m more interested in.
“THE CONVERT” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it wasn’t so worried about being #cancelled as a White Saviour movie that it was willing to be more morally ambiguous.
“SPACE CADET” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it didn’t end with Elon Musk saving NASA?
“TWISTERS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…THEY LET THEM KISS!!!
“SPEAK NO EVIL” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…the first half of the movie had been as ridiculously insane as the second half, or the second half of the movie had been as thematically deep as the first half.
“MEMOIR OF A SNAIL” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I got off on misery porn.
“DETECTIVE CONAN: THE MILLION DOLLAR PENTAGRAM” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I was caught up on Detective Conan.
“CONCLAVE” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I had downloaded the subtitles.
“THE CRITIC” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…the first half of the movie was the entire movie.
“LOOK INTO MY EYES” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…I was more used to Cinema Verite old school documentaries.
“CUCKOO” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…the rest of the movie lived up to Hunter Schaffer’s performance.
“BLACK BOX DIARIES” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…#MeToo had worked.
“ROLE PLAY” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo hadn’t been separated for most of the movie.
“ATLAS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it had been the single-player campaign for Titanfall 3.
“ALIEN: ROMULUS” is pretty good, but it would’ve been good-good if…it had been a PS5 Exclusive.
Since the invention of cutscenes, videogames have been trying to be more like movies15. However, in the last few years I’ve started to notice that more and more movies are trying to be more like videogames. I don’t just mean that there have been more movies adapted from videogames16, but that movies have started adopting the visual language of videogames — probably because the first generation of gamers are now old enough to start making their own movies. There are several examples of these “movies that should have been videogames” higher up this list: Boy Kills World intentionally plays like an 80s arcade beat-em-up, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was basically a Far Cry game, and Damsel could’ve been a spiritual sequel to Braid. But the three most prominent examples of this are in this sub-tier: the indie slasher from the killer’s perspective, In A Violent Nature, which is basically a Dead By Daylight expansion developed by Camp Santo; the Netflix mecha JLO star vehicle, Atlas, which I’m pretty sure has the exact same plot as Titanfall 2’s single-player campaign; and…
The Bizarro David Cage award 🏆for the movie which would’ve been better as a videogame goes to…ALIEN: ROMULUS!
Despite all its easter-eggs to the other Alien movies, the piece of Alien media that Alien: Romulus has most in common with is Alien: Isolation.
Alien: Isolation is a 2014 survival horror game which follows Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, as she’s recruited to the crew of USCSS Torrents which has been tasked with retrieving a McGuffin from the Sevastopol, an abandoned Weyland-Yutani space station. Alien: Romulus follows Cailee Spaeny, who’s playing an Ellen Ripley stand-in, as she’s recruited by the crew of the Corlebean IV which has been tasked with retrieving a McGuffin from Renaissance, an abandoned Weyland-Yutani space station that’s split into two modules: Romulus and Remus. However, it turns out neither of these space stations were as “abandoned” as Amanda Ripley/Cailee Spaeny thought…
The first 30 minutes of Alien: Romulus play out like the tutorial of a videogame. We’re given an objective and a time-limit: we have 36 hours to retrieve 5 cryopods from the Renaissance before it crashes into the planetary ring. We’re introduced to the playable characters and their different abilities: Tyler is an engineer, Navarro can pilot the spacecraft, Andy the Android can unlock doors. We’re presented with an overworld map of the Renaissance and familiarize ourselves with its layout by walking through it room by room, so that later we’ll be able to run through it without getting lost — like when backtracking through a Metroidvania. As we walk through the Renaissance we learn the basic controls: Andy has to walk-up to the door and press X to insert his finger to into the access-panel besides each door to unlock it. Hold R3 to crouch while moving through the air vents. Press L1 to equip the Temp-Scanner and then R2 to use it to scan for heat signatures. At the end of the tutorial, they find the cryopods but when they open the — a Facehugger leaps out and attacks them!
The rest of the movie follows a simple gameplay loop. You sneak through the station while trying to evade the facehuggers who, as the difficulty increases as you progress through the game, evolve later into Xenomorphs and platform through environmental hazards (e.g. the artificial-gravity cycling on/off every few minutes, being trapped in a locked room as it fills-up with water, having to sprint through a corridor filled with floating clouds of acid). You unlock new equipment as you level-up: Cailee Spaeny begins the game unarmed, by mid-game she acquires a F33AA Pulse Rifle, and by end-game she acquires a flamethrower. Throughout the movie, Andy the Android finds data-chips which he can install to unlock new abilities and read the data-logs to unravel the mystery of why the Renaissance was abandoned. Eventually, after the rest of your party has been picked-off one-by-one, your surviving PC becomes powerful enough that the game switches from survival horror to action platformer — or from Ridley Scott’s Alien to James Cameron’s Aliens — as you have to blast through a horde of facehuggers and Xenomorphs while racing against a countdown clock to backtrack through the various levels of the game and get back to the Corlebean IV so that you can escape the Renaissance before it crashes into the planetary rings! And of course, the game ends with a Final Boss battle against a super-monster which chimerically combines the abilities of all the enemies you’ve previously fought: THE HUMAN-ALIEN HYBRID!!!
Unfortunately, for all the lessons that Alien: Romulus learnt from Alien: Isolation when it comes to sci-fi level design, environmental storytelling, and survival horror jump scares — it also picked up many of its bad habits. Its characters are simple archetypes17, which would be fine in a videogame since we’d care about these characters’ survival because we’re controlling them but feels lacking for a movie, and its actors are the type of young B-list TV actors who would do motion-capture for a videogame, like how the guy from Shameless is now more famous for playing Cal Kestis in the Jedi: Fallen Order games. Its about 20 minutes too long, like how Alien: Isolation was probably 8 hours too long, as the second half of the game/movie got repetitive and lost its tense open-world survival horror gameplay as it descended into a series of quick-time event action setpieces. And the CGI Sigourney Weaver in Alien: Isolation’s DLC is just as uncanny valley as the CGI head of the late Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus — albeit less morally questionable since Sigourny Weaver is still alive and recorded the voice-lines for her digital recreation, instead of being resurrected by AI without their direct consent.
I appreciate the cultural cross-pollination between different forms of media. Obviously, since this Substack is mostly about movies, movies are my favourite medium; but I don’t think any artform is inherently inferior/superior to any other and they all have lessons they can learn from one another. With that said: I do think that the best movies do things that can only be done in movies, and the best videogames do things that can only be done in videogames. But none of these distinctions will matter in a decade or two when all movies and videogames and television shows are replaced by “interactive VR experiences” on HBO-ROBLOX.
A- = this movie is good, but it would've only been pretty good if...“DUNE 2” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for its production values.
“MEGALOPOLIS” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…it wasn’t so-bad-its-hilarious.
“FLY ME TO THE MOON” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson.
“TRAP” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for Josh Hartnett.
“WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for Lucy Hale.
“JOKER 2” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…it wasn’t a weird-ass crooner jukebox musical.
“THE BEEKEEPER” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…Jason Stratham didn’t blow up a scam call center.
“TERI BAATON MEIN AISA ULJHA JIYA” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…it had tried to be a sci-fi with romcom elements, instead of a romcom with sci-fi elements.
“BLUE LOCK: EPISODE NAGI” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…I was caught up on Blue Lock.
“LONELY PLANET” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…Liam Hemsworth wasn’t playing a finance bro who’s supposed to be unlikeable!
“THE BRICKLAYER” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…Aaron Eckhart didn’t beat a terrorist to death with a brick.
“GOODRICH” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for Michael Keaton.
“THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…Hollywood still made period costume dramas anymore.
“THE LAST SHOWGIRL” is good, but it would’ve only been pretty good if…not for Pamela Anderson.
The Ken-Dom Award 🏆 for the movie most likely to replace The Godfather in the “I’ve never seen (insert movie)! Can you start the movie over and just talk through the whole thing?” joke when they call back to it in Barbie 2 goes to…DUNE 2.
As far as I know, I’m a straight cis man. Yet over the last few years — and I’m not sure how this happened — somehow my social circle has mostly narrowed into a gaggle of girls, gays, and genderqueers. And I think that being forced to watch multiple seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race has affected my taste in media because unlike every other straight cis man who went to the movies this year: I didn’t love Dune 2.
The Ken-Dom Award 🏆 for the movie most likely to replace The Godfather when Barbie 2 does a call-back to the “Tell them that you’ve never see (insert filmbro movie) and that you’d love them to explain it to you” bit.
I respect Dune 2. I recognise that it’s a good movie, or at the very least an objectively well-made one. Its special effects and production value are undeniable. Its ambition to be the LOTR of the 2020s — a faithful yet concise adaptation of a genre-defining literary classic into a trilogy of intelligent sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster war epics — is admirable. Dennis Villeneuve may very well have inherited the title of “Favourite Director of all Comic-Con Filmbros” from Christopher Nolan and I probably would’ve loved Dune 2 if I’d watched it 15 years ago, when I was 15 years old and The Dark Knight was favourite movie and Christopher Nolan was the only director whose name I knew…
…but Oppenheimer was my Worst Movie of 2023.
I didn’t get why Oppenheimer got a pass for its white-lens of white-guilt which ignored the Japanese victims perspective of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or why Dune 2 got a pass for being an Orientalist White Saviour story that’s basically Lawrence of Arabia with more eugenics and less self-awareness. I didn’t get how Oppenheimer was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, or why anyone felt that Dune 2 was snubbed when it wasn’t nominated, when neither of these movies could write one believable female character. I’m no longer interested in the self-flagellation of “morally ambiguous”18 Male Anti-Heroes or their isekai harem of Suffering Wives, Overbearing Mothers, and Seductive Mistresses who chastise them for doing bad things but then enable them to keep doing more bad things. I’m bored by the masculine aesthetic of “The Epic” which prioritizes size and scale over intimacy and sensuality, which misbelieves that they have to be colourless to be serious and unemotional to be intellectual, whose costuming and production design care only for realism and practicality instead of beauty and fantasy, and which worries more about how to capture the vastness of its empty landscapes in IMAX 70mm than the lives of the people living within them.
My personal distaste for Dune 2 was re-emphasized a month later by the release of Challengers19. The comparison was inevitable, despite these movies being nothing alike, because they both star Zendaya and I imagine that Timothee Chalamet would’ve also starred in Challengers if not for scheduling issues since he’s Luda Guadagino’s favourite twink. Which led me to ask myself: what if Luca Guadagino had directed Dune 2?
It would’ve been much sweatier, for one, visually and metaphorically.
If you’ve watched Challengers, you know that Luca loves to film glistening skin on beautiful bodies; and if you’ve watched any Luca movie, you know that he loves hot messy love triangles. If he’d directed Dune 2: Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet wouldn’t have had the romantic chemistry of non-kissing cousins and thus the emotional heart of the movie — with the tragedy of the ending hinging on us believing that Paul Atreides was sacrificing happiness with the love of his life for a political marriage to conquer the universe — would’ve actually had a pulse. Lady Jessica would’ve been played by Dakota Johnson, instead of Rebecca Ferguson, and the Bene Gesserit would’ve cast spells through interpretive dance like the witches in Suspiria. Paul’s spice-induced visions would’ve looked like the Ayahuasca nightmare in Queer instead of like they’d been directed by someone who narcs if they’re offered a joint. It would’ve be tonally closer to David Lynch’s bizarre, surrealist, operatic Dune (1984) and visually closer to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic “the greatest movie never made” version of Dune with its Moebius-designed costumes and bug-inspired spaceships20.
Would this have made Dune 2 a better movie?
Most people would probably say “no”, especially if they were fans of the original novels. It definitely would’ve been weirder and thus made less money.
But it would’ve been infinitely more interesting to me.
Because when I walked out of Dune 2, my biggest takeaway from the movie wasn’t “Wow, what amazing sci-fi worldbuilding by Denis Villeneuve, with his immersive use of practical sets and photorealistic CGI!” or “Wow, what a faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s DUNE which subverts the messianic white saviour narrative and captures the complex geopolitics of resource wars!” Instead, it was:
“Wow, Florence Pugh really pulled off that Jean Paul Gaultier chainmail dress!”
A = this movie is good because...I don’t only have a list ranking and grading every movie I watched in 2024.
I also have a master list ranking and grading every movie I’ve ever watched.
So there was strangely no 2024 movies in this A= sub-tier, because every 2024 movie was either worse than the lowest-ranked movie or better than the highest-ranked movie in this sub-tier on my master list. 🤷
A+ = this movie is good, but it could've been great if...“UPGRADED” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had more to say about art.
“LIFT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…the movie was as tightly orchestrated as its heist plot.
“BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had more of Bob Marley’s politics.
“LOVE LIES BLEEDING” is good, but it could’ve been great if…they’d cut out the body-horror crime noir elements and it had just been a neo-realist lesbian bodybuilder romance.
“DAMSEL” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had been a Metroidvania on the Super Nintendo.
“EXHUMA” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it was an indie dramedy instead of a horror blockbuster.
“CIVIL WAR” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had been directed by Michael Bay.
“THE ROUNDUP (4): PUNISHMENT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it wasn’t slightly xenophobic.
“THE LAST DANCE” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it hadn’t had so many subplots.
“AfrAId” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had been titled “Afr.A.I.d”.
“INSIDE OUT 2” is good, but it could’ve been great if…Disney were honest and had included Horny as an emotion.
“KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it was FAR CRY 7.
“WICKED LITTLE LETTERS” is good, but it could’ve been great if…the direction was as irreverent as the screenplay.
“ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had just been a documentary.
“YODHA” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it wasn’t so Islamophobic.
“THE NATURE OF LOVE” is good, but it could’ve been great if…I had noticed that my iPad had automatically went into bedtime mode halfway through and I hadn’t accidentally watched the entire 2nd half of the movie in black and white.
“CHRISMAS EVE AT MILLER’S POINT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…I was an Italian American who’d grown up on Long Island.
“THE IDEA OF YOU” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had actually co-starred Harry Styles.
“TRAPEZIUM” is good, but it could’ve been great if…the protagonist had been more manipulative!
“RUNT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it was more like a 90’s childrens’ movie.
“SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it had uncovered some original footage?
“QUEER” is good, but it could’ve been great if…I’d read the novel.
“WOMAN OF THE HOUR” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it didn’t look like a TV movie.
“CITY HUNTER” is good, but it could’ve been great if…it wasn’t so faithful to its 80s source material.
“ALL SHALL BE WELL” is good, but it could’ve been great if…its camerawork hadn’t given me paranoia sweats.
“CITY OF WIND” is good, but it could’ve been great if…its coming-of-age romance had been a throughline to, instead of a distrction from, exploring the subculture of Mongolian shamanism.
My sister-in-law was a kid when, a few years before The Handover in 1997, she and her family immigrated from Hong Kong to Australia. So she grew up in the Golden Age of Hong Kong Cinema. Or at least she grew up watching the movies of that era on pirated VHS’s bought from an Asian Video Shop in Strathfield Plaza — unsubtitled, since she’s a better Chinese than I am and can actually speak Cantonese and thus didn’t have to grow-up watching the cheesy English dubs of pre-Hollywood Jackie Chan movies.
But although she has a lot of nostalgia for this era of cinema, she’s never interested in watching the new movies of her childhood idols — even when they’re sequels to their movies that she loved as a kid (e.g. Chow Yun Fat’s 2010s Macau movies, which were basically continuations of his 1990s God of Gamblers movies). Because all of the legends of The Golden Age of Hong Kong who didn’t die too young21 or semi-retire at their peak22 have had to immigrate to work in either Hollywood, where they’ve been reduced to playing the token Asian character on a Paramount+ Original23 or a supporting role in a Disney franchise24, or Mainland China, where they’ve become spokespeople for CCP propaganda. It’s hard to root for Jackie Chan’s scrappy Everyman heroes when he’s yelling at his neighbours to kowtow to Brother Xi and stop whining about this silly “democracy” stuff. “Nah, they’re all terrible now.” My sister-in-law will answer if I ask whether she’s interested in watching a new Chinese movie. If I add that it’s a Hong Kong movie, she’ll say: “They don’t make real Hong Kong movies anymore.”
At least that’s usually the case, but in 2024 there were two Chinese movies which she asked me about25: Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In and The Last Dance.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a reunion and a swansong for the legends of Hong Kong action cinema: starring Louis Koo, Sammo Hung, and Aaron Kwok. It’s like if Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Sylvestor Stallone’s The Expendables had a Hongkonger baby. Or like Infernal Affairs meets Once Upon A Time In China. It’s an intergenerational martial arts Triad epic — the first in a planned trilogy — with a blockbuster budget and “real” R-rated martial arts, instead of the CGI wirework wuxia webnovel adaptations which dominate the Mainland China box office26, where the heroes are allowed to be flawed human beings instead of Heroes of the Republic and the villains can sometimes get away with their crimes instead of the movie ending with a tacked-on CCP-approved epilogue listing exactly how long each of their prison sentences were27, and where the government can be criticised…since the movie is set in pre-Handover Hong Kong and thus all the crime and corruption depicted it in can be blamed on British Colonial rule and EVERYTHING HAS BEEN GREAT IN HONG KONG SINCE IT WAS RETURNED TO THE LOVING EMBRACE OF THE MOTHERLAND!
More specifically, the movie is set in the Kowloon Walled City, which was to 20th Century Hong Kong what Time Square or Hell’s Kitchen was to NYC in the 70s: a crime-ridden, gang-controlled immigrant slum, which we nonetheless romanticise as a lost landmark of the “real HK/NYC” which has since been gentrified into a tourist trap28 when the city was “cleaned up” in the 90s. So although Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a badass, kickass, balls-to-the-wall, rollicking good time of an action movie…it’s also sad, grieving in nostalgia for the loss of its city’s Golden Age. It’s not saying “This is how movies should be made again!” but “This is the type of movie we don’t make anymore…and might never make again.”
The Last Dance, however, pays homage to the less glamorous — but not less important — side of the Golden Age of Hong Kong Cinema. While Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and John Woo were making millions and garnering international acclaim for Hong Kong Cinema with their Kung/Gun-Fu action blockbusters; Second New Wave directors like Fruit Chan, Peter Chan, Marbel Cheung, and Wong Kar Wai — the only one who went on to be known outside of Hong Kong — were making intimate, indie dramas on only $50,000 budgets about local issues for Hong Kong audiences with in-jokes which don’t make sense if you don’t speak Cantonese.
Which is why I hadn’t heard anything about The Last Dance until my sister-in-law asked, “Should I watch this movie The Last Dance? I heard it was great.” Which was an unusual experience for both of us because usually I’m the one trying to recommend her movies that she’s never even heard of. I’d seen The Last Dance on the list of movies screening at my local cinema when looking up session times, but it hadn’t had any festival buzz and I didn’t recognise the director of any of the actors so I assumed it was just one of those random Chinese/Bollywood/Anime movies my cinema29 would screen as schedule filler for one-week-only in-between two big Hollywood releases: it came out in Australia on December 5th, so between Wicked and Mustafa30. But the next week, when I checked the session times, I was surprised to see The Last Dance was still showing. Same when I checked the week after that, and the month after that. So after I’d watched all the Boxing Day movies, my curiosity finally got the better of me and I had to go see why/how this random little Chinese movie was still in cinemas when the other movies released on the same week were already on VOD.
It was a 1PM session on a weekday. Granted, it was December 27th, so it was a public holiday — but still, when I usually go to a weekday matinee at my local cinema its a good turnout if there are 5 other people in the theatre…but on that day The Last Dance was sold out! After it had already been in cinemas for a month! And I think most of the audience were Hong Kongers: I hadn’t been in a room with so many people speaking Cantonese since my brother’s wedding. And also like my brother’s wedding, by the end all the grandmas were crying! Everyone in the theatre was crying! Well, everyone besides me: to me it was just a good indie dramedy about an interesting local subculture — it’s about this wedding planner whose business goes broke because of COVID and so he has to make a late-career pivot into inheriting his fiance’s uncle’s funeral parlour but in order to do so he needs to befriend the cranky local shaman — but it felt 30 minutes too long with too many episodic funerals-of-the-week and tangential subplots about each of the shaman’s family members31. It didn’t move me to tears…but it moved me to see the rest of the audience moved to tears. Because this movie wasn’t for me: its for Hong Kongers.
And the success of this movie — it grossed over HKD$152 (USD $18.9 million) to become Hong Kong’s highest-grossing domestic film of all time and USD $20.2 million worldwide on a budget that couldn’t have been more than a few hundred thousand, with veteran TVB actors but without any Mainland Chinese stars, and from a writer/director (Anselm Chan) who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — shows that Hong Kong cinema can survive on the support of Hong Kongers without having to compromise its values to appeal to Mainland Chinese audiences. It shows how all local film industries can survive, including Australia’s, when competing in the modern movie marketplace dominated by same-day internationally released IP blockbusters: by making small-to-mid budget movies with a unique cultural appeal to their local, or diaspora, audiences. And it shows how you can still make personal, culturally specific art while living under a colonialist censorship regime32 which seeks to stamp out individuality and independent thought — and independent cinema.
However, the bravest, most personal, most culturally specific 2024 Hong Kong indie drama which I saw last year was…
The Shaw Brothers award 🏆 for best local Hong Kong film of 2024 goes too…ALL SHALL BE WELL
All Shall Be Well is a Hong Kong movie that most Hong Kongers wouldn’t even know about because although it played at the 48th Hong Kong International Film Festival: it never got a theatrical release in Hong Kong. Or anywhere else. I saw it at the Sydney Film Festival and so far, having yet to secure any distribution deal, it feels fated to become one of those films that will only ever be seen in film festivals. Not because its terrible or pretentious33, although it is minimalist slow cinema which has limited commercial appeal34, but because its about a topic the CCP censors almost as much as Pro-Democracy Protests and Uyghur concentration camps: it’s gay.
The movie opens by depicting the idyllic domestic life of Pat and Angie: a lesbian couple in their 60s who’ve been living together as life-partners for the past 30 years, whose relationship is accepted by each other’s families and who are comfortably set-up for the twilight years after selling their business and buying their dream multi-room apartment — which by Hong Kong real estate prices is like owning a mansion in Sydney. But then, about 30 minutes into the movie, Pat tragically dies from a sudden heart-attack. And because she was too superstitious to write a will and they weren’t legally married, because same-sex marriage is still illegal in Hong Kong (although Hong Kong does recognise overseas same-sex marriages), Angie has no legal claim to Pat’s inheritance or even their apartment because — despite them building their busienss together and being domestic partners for over 30 years — everything was under Pat’s name. Instead, by Hong Kong law Pat’s inheritance goes to her brother and his family, who promise they’ll “take care” of Angie and of course they’ll let her keep living in the apartment…but quickly descend to squabbling amongst themselves over how to divvy-up the loot and eventually they evict Angie to sell the apartment.
There are two main lessons I took from this movie:
Write a will! If you have loved ones and anything worth inheriting and you’re not under 25 and in perfect health: CALL AN ESTATE PLANNER NOW!
Queer people should never totally trust in the goodwill of Cis/straight people.
I say this as someone who’d like to be considered an “ally” by my queer friends35 and who would like to think that I’m not the type of person that would sell them out for a million dollars…but for several million dollars and the deed to an apartment on Park Avenue? I don’t know, man…
I think history has, unfortunately, proven time and time again that minorities which think they’ve “won the fight” to be “accepted” by the mainstream are actually only being “tolerated” and only for as long as they don’t cut into the profit-margins of the majority. It’s happening now in America as the white women, POC men, Muslims, and “good immigrants” who voted for Trump are starting to realize that they are not the exceptions-that-prove-the-rule to his anti-DEI policies. It’s even happening now in the queer community, as some of the LGB are trying to cut off the T like they’re trying to gnaw off a limb that’s caught beneath a rock…because of trying to move the rock. It’s happening everywhere as the world slide back into Mid-century Modern Fascism.
It’s why minorities need legal protections — on a Constitutional level — because the role of democracy, or any government, is not only to represent the will of the people but to protect the people from the worst of their whims. And although Hong Kong has surpassed the very low-bar of Mainland China when it comes to LGBT+ rights: they’ve still yet to legalize same-sex marriage or reach other benchmarks for equality. But then again, neither has Australia. Which is a shame and an irony because before the Handover, Hong Kong used to be at the forefront of queer culture (if not queer rights), just as Sydney was once the Drag Capital of the World.
In an alternate universe, there’s a version of All Shall Be Well that was directed by Stanley Kwan and starred Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, as a spiritual sequel to Happy Together, which made more money than The Last Dance — or even Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In — as 2024’s universally beloved tearjerking tribute to the Golden Age of (New Queer) Hong Kong Cinema. But in our universe, Stanley Kwan’s been blacklisted by the CCP; Tony Leung Chiu-wai is now most famous for playing Shang Chi’s evil dad; and Leslie Cheung swan-dived off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel.
Tune back tomorrow for my S-Tier “GREAT” movies of 2024!
(note: I swear the next post will be shorter! Probably! Maybe? WE’LL SEE.)
e.g. Moana 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, Detective Conan 27
e.g. Space Cadet, Role Play, Mother of the Bride
e.g. Rez Ball, Sing Sing, The Beautiful Game
e.g. Fighter, Monkey Man, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
e.g. Tarot, Abigail, The First Omen
e.g. We Live In Time, Seed of the Sacred Fig, Kinds of Kindness
e.g. Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell
e.g. Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon
A Complete Unknown hit $120 million, while Challengers barely missed the mark at $97 million.
because Aaron Taylor Johnson isn’t a movie star, no matter how much Hollywood tries to make him one. STOP TRYING TO MAKE AARON TAYLOR JOHNSON HAPPEN! HE’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!
Okay, maybe second most annoying after Zachary Levi.
which was being touted as a serious Oscar contender as Steve McQueen’s return to prestige historical dramas, after winning Best Picture with 12 Years A Slave, with a tour-de-force performance by Saiorse Ronan…up until people actually watched the movie.
at least surprising to me, since I usually like Chris Evans more than The Rock.
probably because The Rock was suffering from a similar existential crisis while making this movie, as he wondered how all his lifetime of hard work climbing to the top of WWE and Hollywood led him to making Red One…
e.g. 80s/90s FMV horror games, Naughty Dog “cinematic” quick-time events, and the entire careers of David Cage and Hideo Kojima
although there have been: in 2024 there was Borderlands and Sonic The Hedgehog 3; and 2025 is slated to release A Minecraft Movie, Until Dawn, Mortal Kombat 2, and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
The Ripley analogue, The Android, The Leader, The Dickhead, The Pregnant Woman, The Pilot.
i.e. asshole
which I’ll talk about in more detail later, since it’s higher in these rankings.
which were later reappropriated for their legendary sci-fi comic The Incal.
e.g. Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui
e.g. Stephen Chow, Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung
e.g. Michelle Yeoh in Star Trek: Discovery
e.g. Donnie Yen in Star Wars: Rogue One, Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung in Shang Chi
If you ask me about any movie that’s been out for a week in Australia, I’ll probably have seen it.
In 2025, the top grossing movies in China so far are Ne Zha 2, Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force, and Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants.
although I actually love this trope and think its a hilarious reversal of the romcom ending with a photo-montage of what happened to all of the couples.
in 1993 the Kowloon Walled City was demolished, then rebuilt and reopened in 1995 as the Kowloon Walled City Park — just in time for the Handover.
which is in Burwood: a neighborhood in Sydney with a large population of Chinese and Indian immigrants.
or Wicked and Kraven The Hunter if you want to be nasty.
Or alternatively, it felt 30 episodes too short: it would’ve been a great TVB drama, like the Cantonese Six Feet Under.
Can we say that Mainland China is “colonizing” Hong Kong, even though technically it’s reclaimed Hong Kong after it was colonized by the British?
or Jeremy-appeal, but thankfully its only 90 mins — which is about as much slow cinema I can take before falling into a coma — instead of 3.5hrs. NO OFFENSE JEANNE DIELMAN STANS!
I won’t claim to be an “ally” because I’m suspicious of any cishet person who claims to be an ally, like I’m suspicious of any man who claims to be a “feminist” (e.g. Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, Justin Baldoni). I feel like that’s a title that has to be bestowed upon you, like in a Fantasy novel where a character kills a dragon and everyone starts calling them “DRAGONSLAYER” — which is cool, but they’d be kind of an asshole if they went around calling themselves “DRAGONSLAYER”. Especially if no one saw them kill the dragon and we just had to take their word on it.