TMS List: Top 10 Movies of 2024
(Sony Pictures)
As 2024 closes in, it’s time for me to do my annual top 10 films released throughout the past year. Whenever I look back and try to list my favorites from the last 12 months, I usually have to either condense down a list of over 10 movies I very much enjoyed, or struggle to fill 10 spots in a year that was a bit underwhelming. Take ’24, which I struggled with initially. George Miller’s Furiosa and Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters were both disappointing to me, and I didn’t love Sean Baker’s Anora or Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain as much as I was hoping to. But then, the more I looked back, the more I realized I do have some legitimate favorites from recent memory. Sean Wang’s Dìdi and Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples crept up and delighted me on a personal level as an aging millennial and longtime neurotic. Dìdi was a huge blast to the zeitgeist of my school years in the late 2000s, and Between the Temples featured two impressionable performances from leads Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane, while also reminding me of some of my old, early favorites from famous neurotic Woody Allen. Speaking of Woody, no one was more shocked than I was how his release last April, Coup de Chance, was actually more than decent and harbored back to his roots in an effective way. I wouldn’t put it up there with his classics, but it was a nice, nostalgic 90 minutes to me.
(Maiden Voyage / Focus Features)
Around the same time, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers was finally released after a six-month delay, and lived up to the hype for a lot of film fans. Though not nearly as graphic or risqué as the marketing led on, the tennis love/lust triangle was a great throwback to these types of movies that were more common half a century ago; and included standout performances from Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, as well as another stellar soundtrack from Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross.
For more romcom adjacent entertainment this year, there was Richard Linklater’s indie success, Hit Man, and David Leitch’s loose screen adaptation of The Fall Guy. The former with Glen Powell and Adria Arjona and the latter starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Both successfully fit the romantic comedy mold while technically being a part of other genres [crime for Hit Man and action for Fall Guy]. Another crime themed picture released on Netflix was Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, which put an intriguing modern spin on the plot of Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982).
(Searchlight Pictures)
Jeff Nichols returned to the director’s chair after a seven-year hiatus with the retro docudrama The Bikeriders, led by a cast of recognizable faces like Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon and Tom Hardy. While Nichols’ laidback/subdued style didn’t work for every viewer, Bikeriders landed for me as a casual fan who also likes the actors and the 1960s setting. Similarly, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan based drama A Complete Unknown, might not interest non-Dylan fans that much, but I dug it as a long-term appreciator of the singer-songwriter, and it made me a new fan of lead Timothée Chalamet. Last but not least, John Crowley’s tearjerker We Live in Time, starring the always solid Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, was another throwback to a once common genre and fed those [i.e. me] who longed for movie romance and melodrama in the modern age.
Yet another notable year for cinema, and it looks like 2025 has a lot in store for fans too. I’m personally looking forward to seeing Dominic Sessa in a new movie after his tremendous debut in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023). Let’s keep the hits coming.