The cinematic year of 2024 was decried so early and so quickly by some that they announced that it would be the “end to theatres”. It wasn’t a good sign that The Fall Guy and Furiosa disappointed at the box office so close together, and with lower in general attendance numbers for many films it was starting to feel like nails were being prepared for the cinematic coffin.
While it’s been an awkward first half of the year, there are signs of hope on the horizon with Deadpool & Wolverine and the continued success of Inside Out 2. Even though audiences may not go out in droves to every movie for the first week, they will clamour to a film still remaining in theatres maybe several weeks or months down the line, like they used to. It’s been a fascinating and rather good year so far for cinema, so I’ve taken a look at some of the best films so far. Make sure to let us know your favourites of 2024.
Challengers
Challengers is the twisted and tumultuous tennis triptych of love, lust, deception, and obsession from Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, and it was one of the most electrifying, entertaining, acidly funny, lurid, and sexy films I’d seen in quite some time. Comparisons at first based on aesthetics and content were made to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (also produced by Amazon MGM), but Challengers has far more to say about its complicated and toxic characters saying one thing and then doing the complete opposite, all in the name of pleasure and victory. All three performances are excellent, delivering expert chemistry across all three sides of this corrupted triangle and making them characters you love to hate, but hate to love.
On the technical side, Gudagnino and regular cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom take the Mike Nichols & Bruce Surtees method (director & DP of The Graduate) of shooting Challengers by assaulting the audience with every camera trick in the book, always keeping us on our toes, never knowing what will come next and thoroughly enthralled at all times. This is a non-stop delicious and tantalizing drama, pulsating and sweating profusely, building and building until you can’t take anymore, all the while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ magnificent electronic score gets the blood pumping and the nerves firing, keeping everyone in the mood for a damn good time at the movies. Challengers is one of the slickest, sexiest, and most seductively intense sports movies we have seen in a long time, maybe of all time, and should be remembered long into next year’s awards season.
Civil War
War in cinema is as old as cinema itself, and it has a tendency to show war, a horrible thing, as glorious. Intense films like 1917, Saving Private Ryan, and any version of All Quiet on the Western Front manage to show wars brutality as they render battle sequences with some level of majesty or awe. Patriotism is an eventual consequence of victory, and even defeat could be seen as noble or honourable. The sides of a war are clearly drawn thanks to historical context, and to remove ourselves from that can be almost impossible. Alex Garland takes all of these notions of war cinema and subverts them with his fourth film as director (eighth as writer), Civil War.
The film follows Kirsten Dunst as photojournalist Lee Smith in the thick of covering a second American Civil War ripping apart the country and entering its final phases. The Western Forces (a challenging union of California and Texas) are closing in on the Loyalist Army defending the third-term authoritarian President (Nick Offerman), so Lee and Reuters journalist partner Joel (Wagner Moura) commit to travelling to the front lines of Washington D.C. to get the last interview with the President before he is surely eliminated and the war ends. The voyage across the war-torn United States brings along cub reporter Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and gentle veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
Civil War‘s story and characters are obvious archetypes; veterans clashing with the young and naïve, a journey into hell to confront an elusive target, and one can definitely predict who is going to meet a tragic end. This is all intentional writing from Garland, and though it can be too obvious at times, it ends up working well because of how Garland builds from this archetypal base. Instead of being clear about the “heroes and villains” of the war, portraying one side as demonic and the other as righteous, he ensures that we are never sure which is which. Soldiers in skirmishes wear identical armour and gear or civilian clothing adorned with ARs and ammunition, eerily reminiscent of the open-carry NRA-fanboys that the American South and the Midwest is full of. Truth is so obscure on the battlefield, and the only understanding we are given is through these journalist characters forcing themselves to be as objective as possible, even in the face of certain death.
Sequences carry a palpable tension thanks to expert editing and photography that feels almost lurid and unreal, making us uncertain of what comes next, with one standout scene carried by Jesse Plemons being the stuff of nauseating nightmares. The all-out assault on the capitol in the finale isn’t a last stand for victory and triumph, but closer to the hellish descent into absolute horror seen in Come and See, Apocalypse Now, and Garland’s own Annihilation. The sound design is brutal and real, and the effect is deeply confronting and debilitating. The performances throughout, especially Dunst and Spaeny, are terrific, the mid-budget production feels so much more evocative and effective than blockbusters that cost four times as much, and Garland’s filmmaking remains as subversive as ever, leading to Civil War being one of the most concerning, unique, and true war films out there.
Dune: Part Two
Is it unfair that after seeing Dune: Part Two four times in cinemas and over seventy new release films from 2024 that I still believe this is the best of film the year? I don’t think so. Denis Villeneuve’s bolder and more ambitious sequel to the dark science-fiction adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic of the genre did the impossible: it made the general population care about and be invested in the dense, often impenetrable, bizarre, and hardcore world of Dune. Pop culture has now been affected by this film, with Fortnite skins and LEGO sets, memes about sandworm popcorn buckets and Javier Bardem’s Stilgar proclaiming “Lisan al-Gaib”, and a nearly double box-office take than the 2021 predecessor. I cannot be happier. The fact that Dune: Part Two can do this and be a top-notch cinematic experience is just an abundance of riches.
Timothée Chalamet commands immense control over the entire picture, Zendaya is the heart of it all, and Austin Butler’s blackhearted Feyd Reutha is the kind of villain you can’t get enough of. Every other performance is perfectly pitched, from returning favourites like Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson’s nefarious turn with Lady Jessica, Josh Brolin’s loyal to a fault Gurney Halleck, Charlotte Rampling’s shrouded and cold Reverend Mother, and Stellan Skarsgard’s daunting behemoth Baron Harkonnen, to welcome new additions like Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh. This is a cast for the ages, and to bring these incredible faces and emotions to light is a production team unlike any other.
Set design and construction is breathtaking, the sound editing and mixing echoes the organic work of Ben Burtt on Star Wars in 1977, the tangible and ancient costumes have never looked or felt better, Joe Walker’s editing makes this 165-minute epic breathe and flow like all-too precious water, and Hans Zimmer’s score is equally intense and painfully beautiful when it perfectly underscores the love of Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Zendaya’s Chani.
Honestly, above all else, pulling this entire cinematic experience together, is the monumental and masterful work of cinematographer Grieg Fraser and his crew who craft shot after shot that is quite simply perfect. Like all of the great sequels, Dune: Part Two excels due to a conscious effort by everyone involve to improve upon what was already established, and it all works. This is an emotional experience as much as it is an audio and visual one, delivering a captivating and heartbreaking narrative of the loss of humanity in the face of absolute power. I mean every word when I say that Dune: Part Two is The Empire Strikes Back of the 21st century, a beautiful, horrifying, and flawless masterpiece of science-fiction storytelling.
The First Omen
When taken as a whole, horror franchises by and large have more bad than good. For as many masterpieces of the genre that exist, there are countless sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes that have been forced out by producers and studios to keep the money train rolling along or to maintain a hold on the IP. Some have consistent quality or at least try to stay fresh, like Scream or Romero’s zombie films, some are okay with never being great (Friday the 13th), while most have an incredible first film that’s followed by decades of nonsense.
Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic The Omen has been privy to this treatment, with three abysmal sequels and an even more embarrassing 2006 remake, making the prospect of yet another film, a prequel no less, did not fill me with excitement. But then, at a session for Love Lies Bleeding (more on that one below), a strange teaser played in between ones for Immaculate and Civil War, showing bizarre and truly demented images all going in reverse tuned to “If I Had a Heart” by Fever Ray. It was honestly the most captivating teaser I had seen in a long time, and to find out it was all for The First Omen instantly piqued my interest.
And I’m glad I was because this one of the most exciting and compelling horror franchise instalments in quite some time. Director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson seeks not to ape or repeat Richard Donner’s work on the original but instead takes bolder inspirations from horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Possession to tell the story of how the twisted events of 1976 came to pass. It is unfortunate that this will be considered a “twin movie” with Immaculate, both about American nuns sent to demented Catholic churches seeking to bring about Christ/the Antichrist, because The First Omen succeeds immensely on its own terms. There is a palpable and evocative sense of capturing what 70s studio horror felt like, with just enough touches of Italian giallo for extreme effect.
Slow-motion deaths, intense lighting during scary sequences, jagged and unstable cuts away from some truly nightmarish body horror scenes, and a focus on an all-out lead performance from an incomparable actress, here being Nell Tiger Free. One major moment directly compares to Isabelle Adjani’s infamous “grocery freakout” in Possession, and Nell Tiger Free takes it all on with terrific effect, delivering a horror performance that’s the best I’ve seen in years. The First Omen may end up being about ten minutes too long and some changes to established elements of the original film are odd, but on the whole, it functions as a chilling yet exciting showcase for performance, style, and actually getting under your skin.
Hit Man
2024 has, so far, been an abysmal year for Netflix movies. Perhaps we will discuss this later, but Lift, Rebel Moon: Part Two, Atlas, Unfrosted, Under Paris, Trigger Warning, and A Family Affair would all easily crack most “Worst Films of the Year” lists, having represented an absolute lack of quality control for the world’s biggest streaming service. Luckily, beyond some acceptable exceptions like Orion and the Dark and John Ridley’s Shirley, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is the rare example of a streaming movie that works in a way movies used to ‘back in the day’, leading to many asking why it isn’t making bank in theatres.
Glen Powell leads this film which he co-wrote based on the life of Gary Johnson, a Houston college professor who moonlit as a fake contract killer for the police in the 80s and 90s. Powell and co-writer Linklater take multiple liberties with the story, using more as a springboard for a modern-day sexually-charged philosophically-rich crime comedy involving a romance with a potential suspect, a case gone wrong, a corrupt cop as an enemy, and actual murder which Johnson never did at all. Glen Powell plays Gary as a dork at first, slowly brought out of his shell of inactivity by his moonlighting job, dressing up as eccentric characters that people just believe are professional hitmen based on all the movies and TV shows that make that life seem plausible.
Hit Man entertainingly strips back those notions of contract killers being available to the public as just a ruse concocted by law enforcement, and then has a lot of fun putting Glen Powell in outlandish wigs and fake teeth, having him doing silly accents, and at one point just straight up be Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman. What works even more than these montages of setting up people looking to get someone killed is the relationship of Glen Powell’s Gary pretending to be a guy named Ron with Adria Arjona’s Madison. Powell and Arjona’s chemistry is unbelievable, gentle and comfortable like the natural chemistry found in Linklater’s Before trilogy, then shifting into total sexual freedom ripped straight from the pages of steamy romance novels that have never gone out of favour. The script flows with ease, dancing between philosophical concepts about violence and humanity’s treatment of it, to legal ramifications of Gary Johnson’s deceptions, to a type of neo-noir murder plot in the second half that has a darkly comedic ending which might not be what you expect.
Hit Man is a grounded romance fantasy, realistic enough to be believed but confident enough to paint a picture of an idealised existence: where one can look like Glen Powell, be an intelligent college professor, live a dozen double lives, hook up with Adria Arjona, and have it all work out in the end. This is Richard Linklater back on top form delivering a rather nice, easy, fun, sensual, and totally entertaining romp, delivering brilliant performances from Powell and Arjona, and proving that sex still has a place in cinema today.
Inside Out 2
Inside Out 2, a sequel seen as a sign of Pixar slipping away from original films which was their bread and butter for nearly 30 years, is, surprisingly, quite a good film. Conceptually, it might not feel absolutely necessary as the 2015 predecessor is one of the company’s crown jewels, an astonishing original work of animated art that speaks to universal concepts of human emotion and understanding. What new director Kelsey Mann and returning writer Meg LaFauve bring to the table is much of what inspired the first film, focusing on understandable yet complex emotions that many older audiences can recall with clarity and younger audiences can understand for when they find themselves facing “Anxiety”, “Envy”, “Ennui” and “Embarassment”. These four new characters (voiced by Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Paul Walter Hauser) invade the control room of Riley’s mind, led by Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Anger (Lewis Black), and wreak havoc all in the name of making Riley better.
Anxiety seeks to change Riley’s “sense of self” to make her better at hockey and be more liked by new friends, which banishes Joy and the other old emotions to the back of Riley’s mind, which is a conceptually heady plot but one that ends up speaking, once again, to difficult scenarios that we face as people in this world, unsure of our own emotions or how to reconnect with our own senses of self. The plot points here can be a little outlandish, like a tube-cannon that banishes bad memories out of sight or a vault of Riley’s secrets who bend and twist the normal animated style of the film, but this can also be a critique of the first film. These are adventure films through the mind of a young person, full of eccentric and clever perspectives on things we all experience and negotiate day-by-day, and also give a voice and vision to things we might have forgotten a long time ago.
Inside Out 2 still successfully balances the story of the emotions on their quest to find a new way of guiding Riley’s mind with the real-world plot of Riley trying to impress star players at a hockey camp, which pushes away her friends and sends her spiralling into a full-blown anxiety attack when she no longer believes herself to be a good person. Everything builds to a climax that is frightfully realistic and potentially triggering to those who experience crippling anxiety, but the resolution is once again a beautiful encapsulation of the human experience, full of conflicting and confusing emotions that work together to make us who we really are. The voice performances are wonderful yet again, with Maya Hawke perhaps being the standout as she gives Anxiety an unexpected honesty and relatability, the animation is unsurprisingly sumptuous, going for a more cinematic widescreen look this time around, and the emotional resonance is just as intelligent as ever. Inside Out 2 doesn’t exceed the brilliance of the first film, but it may well stand tall as perhaps the best Pixar sequel outside of the Toy Story franchise.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, under Dune: Part Two, was perhaps my most anticipated film of 2024, beyond Furiosa or Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. The idea of a new story within the continuity set by the Andy Serkis’ Caesar trilogy, which ended with the masterful War for the Planet of the Apes in 2017, was exciting even if it sought to not bring back any returning characters and take place 300 years in the future. Kingdom acts as a clean slate of sorts to the world, building up the journey of young ape Noa (Owen Teague), struggling to find his place in this new world that is controlled by neither apes nor humans. Tragedy and enslavement, ala Apocalypto, comes to Noa’s clan of eagle-training apes, and Noa quests to find what his left of his clan across the landscape of overgrown buildings, unforgiving terrain, and a new kingdom of apes led by the charismatic yet tyrannical Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).
The “hero’s journey” of Noa brings along the orangutan scholar Raka (Peter Macon) who is one of the last bastions of the teachings of the original Caesar, but they are also trailed by seemingly mute human woman Mae (Freya Allan), who’s purpose and intelligence is all handled as a rather excellent twist on what we expect humans to be in Planet of the Apes. The film has a trudging and glacial pace through its first half, echoing the steadiness of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes but can also feel one or two scenes too long. Once we enter the kingdom of Proximus, the story shifts towards a kind of classical Hollywood epic, sumptuous vistas of hundreds of apes all indoctrinated by a Roman-esque Emperor who uses Caesar’s words as his weapons. Wes Ball and writer Josh Friedman seek to explore the manipulation of ideology for the purposes of power, the staggering weight of differences between man and ape, and the burden of self-discovery, and while the film doesn’t provide concrete answers to these concepts, it certainly sets up a compelling overall narrative to come, while still telling a complete story here and now.
This new “Bronze Age” for the planet of the apes is staggering to behold, with the production using the landscapes of New South Wales to wonderful effect. The action is impressive and clever, the lead performances of Teague and Allan are emotionally rich and fascinating, the ending is heart-in-mouth stuff as it asks serious questions for the future, and the Wēta Digital visual effects are jaw dropping and have never looked better. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may not meet the emotional heights of the last two films, but remains just as contemplative, inspired, impressive, confident, and classically entertaining.
Love Lies Bleeding
From the opening credits montage of pulsating, gyrating, and drenched bodies all in movements of pain and pleasure, to the truly bizarre surrealist finale, Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding is an uncompromising film that is not for the faint of heart or stomach. The British filmmaker’s first film Saint Maud was already a terrifying, haunting, and truly unique portrayal of blind faith and body horror married together, led by astonishing work from actress Morfydd Clark. Love Lies Bleeding similarly relies on its lead performances here from Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian as desperate and passionate lovers caught in a twisted trap of lust, murder, sex, and steroids, and the effect is truly something else.
Stewart has been getting better and better as an actress, taking on roles that require immense faith in her directors and she rewards us with a raw, anxious, and delightful performance as a woman trying to do right by victims of abuse and is perfectly happy to go to hell because of it. Katy O’Brian stands on equal footing with Stewart in her breathtaking portrayal of Jackie, a homeless lesbian bodybuilder who’s powerful and commanding physical frame carries with it an emotional realism that mixes perfectly with Stewart’s Lou and all of her insecurities and desperations.
This is basically Thelma and Louise with steroids, but rendered through a dark and scuzzy 1980s aesthetics, touched up with David Fincher-esque visuals in Ben Fordeman’s cinematography, and then seasoned with Cronenberg body horror. Love Lies Bleeding is sexual without being exploitative, horrific without being nauseating, emotional without being melodramatic, and funny while still balancing a darker side of things. It’s a pulpy, evocative, intense, ambitious, and rewarding ride for those in the mood for something they have never seen before, though the surrealism may well be too much for some out there.
Monkey Man
Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man (also star, co-writer, and co-producer with Jordan Peele and multiple others) is not what you might expect. Trailers tuned to “Mundian to Bach Ke” by Panjabi MC focused on the intense action sequences and striking visuals of Patel’s character dressed in all black taking rooms of henchmen with ease, and it has all of this but not in as much measure as you may assume. The story Patel’s Kid (unnamed and only credited as such) who seeks to climb a ladder of government corruption and violence to avenge his mother and her people (victims of religious extermination) is ripe for that kind of intense and entertaining action, but the basis of this story is something old, something classical, and something rather personal to Dev Patel.
Monkey Man is inspired by the tales of the Hindu deity Hanuman, who suffers torture and near-death throughout tales of his mythological life, only to keep surviving and defeat evil. Kid’s story is one of immense pain and loss, carrying with him trauma that festers and manifests into narrow-minded vengeance that leads him to an ever-lower place in life than he has ever known. Patel infuses this type of revenge story, something very familiar to the action genre, with a powerful spirituality and connection to deeper feelings about Indian culture, political injustice, religious persecution, the exclusion of gender non-conforming people, and epic notions of good and evil that makes this a truly exceptional and rewarding film.
Monkey Man takes its time to develop its story and the character of Kid, Patel having faith in the audience’ patience towards a story of two clear distinct halves with a long and methodical middle stretch. Dev Patel put absolutely everything into this film, leading him to multiple injuries in the process, total loss of funding, and partial loss of his crew due to COVID shutdowns in the Indonesian shoot location. One feels the total abandon by which this whole film was made, an ambition that we need more of from new filmmakers, and the effect, while not without its flaws, is terrific. The patience is rewarded with absolutely delirious action sequences that match the intensity of South Korean action movies like Oldboy or films starring Iko Uwais, and the voice Patel gives to the Hijra community of India (transgender people) is beautiful. Monkey Man is a steady, considerate, passionate, thoroughly ambitious, and meaningful action movie that proves why Dev Patel is one of the most exciting voices in film today.
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Perhaps the most left-of-centre entry on this list, and fittingly last after many sentences of me blathering on about Hollywood tentpoles and genre flicks, Sometimes I Think About Dying is a small, quiet film led by a small, quiet, internalised, and gently moving performance from Daisy Ridley. Directed by Rachel Lambert, adapted from a 2019 short film by Stefanie Abel Horowitz which in turn adapted the 2013 play “Killers” by Kevin Armento (also-co-writer here), the story follows Fran, a social awkward and almost non-human office worker who spends a quiet and lonely existence never interacting with anyone beyond dull pleasantries and daydreams about dying in increasingly macabre fashions.
Fran is as disconnected as one person could be from everyday existence, eating dull foods, never connecting with any emotions shared by others around her, unengaged from any art or creativity. It may seem like a stretch to believe any person could be totally like this, but the film is akin to a fantasy that blends drama with romance and comedy in a rather balanced method. At some point in our lives we have felt like totally disappearing inwards, disconnecting from society and living in the void, the no-place that brings forth no emotions beyond total nothingness. Fran is always this abyss, a fantasy of if that passing thought could be a whole mind, and Daisy Ridley plays this to a disarming and fascinating effect.
Fran is slowly brought out by someone who genuinely wants to know her, leading to a confusion over who she is, which in turn brings out passionate feelings on her behalf that her dark fantasies and emptiness of the mind was not pitiful or something to “fix”, it was all just a way of coping with the emptiness of modern life. This slow and steady realisation of who she really is becomes an achingly beautiful resolution for a film that takes its time, plays its cards right, delights at the perfect moment, and ultimately means something to those seeking meaning. Nobody could truly call Sometimes I Think About Dying exciting, but it is certainly affecting, touching, and proves how brilliant Daisy Ridley is when she is put in the right kind of film outside of Star Wars.
2024 has, so far, delivered challenging, uncompromising, surprisingly beautiful, and consistently brilliant films, and this is just 10 of them. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga only just squeaked out of this list, despite being pretty great in its own right, but that was only because I needed two viewings to ascertain my honest opinions about it, similar in fact to Fury Road. The Fall Guy and A Quiet Place: Day One are top-notch genre films that I can see holding up quite well in the years to come, Turtles All the Way Down is a rather sweet and insightful young-adult story about OCD, and I quite liked Drive-Away Dolls, Godzilla x Kong, Mean Girls, and The Idea of You. I will also highly recommend the 7-minute short film The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story which is brilliant because I guess anything “spider-verse” related really is.
I’m still holding eager anticipation for Kinds of Kindness, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, Alien: Romulus, Zoë Kravitz’ Blink Twice, The Wild Robot, Wolfs, Gladiator II, Wicked, The War of the Rohirrim, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Kyle Mooney’s y2k, the Palme d’Or winning Anora, whatever Barry Jenkins can come up with for Mufasa, and the expected inexplicability of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. There are probably dozens more I am missing, so let us know your favourites of 2024 so far and what you’re looking forward to next!
