Best and Worst Films of 2024

Usually I start off these lists with some kind of apology for not having seen - and therefore judged - every film of interest that was released in the previous year. I still haven't seen If or the musical version of Mean Girls; I'm sorry, I've let you all down.

New policy: no apology! Mostly because this year I spent much of my movie-watching time watching things I was interested in seeing, which inevitably meant I watched a lot of things many more serious critics avoided (ie: the Arj Barker vehicle The Nut Farm). What can I say? I have poor taste, as the list to come will no doubt reveal.

And yet once again I am, in creating this list, holding my taste up as something to pay attention to. This is very much a privilege: watching movies on any kind of a regular basis and claiming to be "a critic" is very time-intensive, time is money, and at a time where the phrase "good luck getting paid" is pretty much the only useful advice I can give to anyone wanting to be a critic, doing this kind of thing even remotely professionally requires resources unavailable to most people.

So I watched a lot of undemanding film this year, a lot of it at home. Undemanding doesn't mean bad of course, unless you believe hard work is a virtue and/or its own reward, in which case I have a ditch I'd like you to dig. 

As usual this list is slightly skewed by the way the end of the year is the time when the distributors show all the films they're releasing early next year in the hopes of scoring big during awards season. The Brutalist will almost certainly be on this list next year (unless I forget); Nosferatu (Jan 1) and Conclave (Jan 9) will also be up there, so if you're reading this a week or two into 2025 feel free to mentally add them in.

Also this should technically be titled "Best and Worst Films I Saw That Were Released In 2024" otherwise it'd mostly be Japanese Yakusa films of the 60s and 70s, plus the 1973 hobo epic Emperor of the North. And who knows when the third Baby Assassins film will get any kind of release outside Japan but when it does you want to run, not walk, to whatever venue is offering it.

The Good Ones, in no particular order:

*Mad Max: Furiosa

 

*Anora

 

*A Quiet Place Day One

 

*The Zone of Interest

*The Shadow Strays

 

*Bangkok Breaking: Heaven and Hell

*Rebel Ridge

 

*Kill

 

*Mars Express

 

*American Fiction

 

*The End We Start From

 

*Blood for Dust

 

*Mayhem!

 

*Challengers

 

*Bad Genius

 

*Twilight of the Warriors Walled In

 

*Blitz

 

*One More Shot (no list is complete without a Scott Adkins film)

 

 

Plus five I do not in any way recommend:

 

*Audrey

 

*The 2024 French remake of Wages of Fear

 

*Cash Out

 

*Armor

 

*Gunner

 

 

Review: Nosferatu

If you're going to make another Dracula film, the field is wide open: if you're taking a swing at Nosferatu, you're setting your sights a little higher. Both the original 1922 silent film and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake are masterpieces of menace and dread, subjects director Robert Eggers (The VVitch, The Lighthouse) knows a little about. So this is the perfect match of subject and talent? Lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Nosferatu began its (un)life as a bootleg version of Dracula. So while there's a few changes around the edges (the setting is now 1838 in Germany), the core, both in characters and story, remains the same. Thomas (Nicolas Hoult), a junior real estate agent, is sent to visit a creepy Count - here named Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) - in his spooky castle, only to be stuck there while the Count heads to his home town to menace Thomas' wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and as a sidebar, destroy the rest of humanity.

Vampires might be a type but here Orlok is singular, referring to himself at one point as "an appetite". He bites you, you die and don't come back; he brings rats and plague and death in all manner of forms. The tone here is apocalyptic. Orlok isn't merely feeding on humanity, he's a being incompatible with all human life.

Ellen has powers of her own; we're told more than once that her supernatural teen desires revived the Count and bonded them forever. Which you'd think would make for at least a few moments of at least minor sexiness, but sadly the rampant horniness of something like Coppola's Bram Stokers' Dracula is not to be found here, no burgeoning sexuality stifled by Victorian-era morality.

Orlok is literally a decaying corpse with a Stalin mustache, a looming figure of dread rather than an object of erotic fixation. There is no love beyond death here, or even a love of death; for much of the film, Orlok just is, a threat lurking in the shadows.

With the horror focused on Orlok, and Orlok focused on Ellen, she gets a few Exorcist-style sequences to keep the creepiness flowing as she shudders and writhes from the looming presence of her dark lover. It's effective in the moment, but her character - and everyone else living in the film - rarely stretch the confines of their well-worn types (though it is fun to see Willem Dafoe in the Van Helsing role).

There's a performative atmosphere to much of this, a knowing sense that we're watching a familiar story being told yet again (which of course, we are). That feeling of ritual gives this version of Nosferatu its strength; at its best this feels like watching an unholy summoning, the characters going through the familiar motions required to bring the greatest of vampires back once again.

Visually stunning and overwhelming in its atmosphere, this rarely comes to life as a story. The characters don't convince, the events follow each other merely because they always have. We're left helplessly watching as a horror existing outside humanity feeds off our attention, shuffling characters and settings around to arrange its own apocalyptic birth. Nosferatu is a vampire movie.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Better Man

There's no real explanation as to why Robbie Williams appears in this biopic as a monkey. There's a suggestion that it's a metaphor for how he sees himself; as he begins his traditional pop star downward spiral he's constantly seeing angry versions of his chimp self taunting and threatening him. But as far as explanations go, "it makes Better Man a better film" is pretty much all you need.

For one thing - and it's a pretty big thing - having Williams as a monkey (the motion capture performance is by Jonno Davies, with Williams providing his own voice) instantly makes what is otherwise a firmly standard music biopic (rise, fall, rise again) seem fresh. 

(it also dodges the bullet that comes with casting a look-alike: the monkey version here is clearly just a stand-in for the real thing, even if at times they do look very much alike)

Just about everything here is something you've seen before, even if it's all true: wanting to impress a distant dad (Steve Pemberton), dealing with with a dodgy manager (Damon Harriman) and Take That bandmates who sour on him, solo success followed by a downward spiral into drugs and relationship failure just seems that much more interesting when it's a CGI chimp dealing with it.

That's not to say it's a bad biopic, just a generic one. There are occasional flashes of personality here and there where Williams introduces (then dismisses) elements of his past he's not going to fully explore - rumours about his sexuality, rumours about his relationship with his long-term (musical) partner. But mostly this is a story you've heard before, even if you know nothing about Williams the man or the musician.

More interestingly, having a CGI lead frees director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) to go big with the musical numbers. They never quite shade into full-blown fantasy, but the editing and dance moves have a computer-assisted energy that boosts them well above the norm. 

It helps that Williams has had a string of legit hits (despite what the befuddled US reviews claim - who knew music was popular outside the continental USA?), giving the best numbers here a pop energy that most recent musical adaptations struggle to deliver. An euphoric street sequence at the height of Williams' Take That fame set to 'Rock DJ' is easily the high energy dance number of the cinematic season, and is worth the admission price on its own.

The result - flashy, brash, cheeky at times but rarely surprising - feels like it captures something authentic about Williams. He's a solid entertainer (as he puts it himself) who delivers the goods, and if those goods might not have anything all that original about them... well, being a good salesman is better than nothing.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mufasa: The Lion King

Whether or not we needed a sequel-slash-prequel to The Lion King is up for debate; whether it needed to be told using photo-realistic CGI animation is a lot easier to judge. An epic fantasy story about anthropomorphic animals requires an expressive storytelling medium to fully encompass the heightened emotions and conflicts driving events; the visuals here, while impressive on a merely technical level, aren't up to the job.

Put another way, the framing device for what is basically Mufasa: Rise to Power is that it's a story being told by Rafiki (John Kani) to Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), daughter of the OG Lion King Simba (Donald Glover). So even in-universe, it's a kids story... one in which at least four named characters die and a whole bunch of others also get bumped off off-screen. 

Which is fine, except that because it's all photo-realistic there's a constant struggle (one the film mostly loses) to figure out a non-realistic way to kill off the multiple cast members that have to die. There's a lot of cutting away from characters in situation that seem pretty survivable, only to have them never be seen again. Bad guy Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) keeps on saying "you killed my son", presumably to make it clear that his son is in fact dead.

The high body count is especially striking because - unlike the first film - most of this story could be told without stacking up the corpses. After being separated from his family by a flood while a cub, Mufasa is befriended by Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr). Taken in by his pride - though Taka's father, local king Obasi (Lennie James) isn't a fan - we quickly get two main plot drivers: Mufasa wants to get home, and Taka wants to prove himself to his father.

Then Kiros and his pride of "outsiders" turn up and the killing begins, just to make things even more dramatic. Considering Taka's cowardice is a major character point it wouldn't be hard to just have him run away (especially as his brother Mufasa already has motivation to leave). It's hard not to think that the main reason for the constant murders is that the first film is based around a big memorable death and so the follow-up has to bump up the stakes.

That's not to say this would be a better film without the killing, but if you're telling a story that's based around constant murder - only you don't want to show any murder - you're setting yourself a pretty tricky line to walk and Mufasa doesn't do a great job of it. Maybe if you don't want your audience noticing that your predator main characters are never shown eating, don't have a supporting character make a big joke about scarfing down bugs and insects.

Director Barry Jenkins can't do much with his relatively expressionless characters but the visuals are otherwise solidly impressive and sometimes striking, while Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs aren't going to displace the originals any time soon (as the film itself acknowledges). 

As with all prequels, knowing how things will end undercuts a lot of the tension, though this manages to sidestep that a little by focusing heavily on Taka's journey from happy and fun-loving cub to the sullen and beaten down Scar we all remember (hint: it involves a girl).

It's not really a problem that the title character is the most boring character in the film, though it does give the story the air of political propaganda: Mufasa was the best at everything, which is why he was the best choice for king. At least Kiros gets to point out that the "circle of life" is just predator and prey. Once again a Disney bad guy speaks the truth.

- Anthony Morris