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