I could spend a good portion of this introduction to my best films of 2024 list by lamenting (yet again) how the past year was taxing on my mental health, how it kept me from publishing as much as I wanted to, how the state of the world has me down, blah, blah, blah. This year, the United States held what I believe will one day be viewed as the most disastrous election in my country’s history. Unless, that is, the Christian nationalist/fascist/oligarchic coalition using Donald Trump as their battering ram ultimately wins and rewrites history in their own image.
I was let down by people I know personally who decided to help Make Fascism Great Again. With his new administration only days old, Trump has already presided over sickening raids of undocumented immigrants that have swept up US citizens. He’s also attempting to destroy the US Constitution by trying to overturn one of its amendments by fiat.
Oh, and, I once again get to state that last year set a new record for being the hottest year in recorded history. (Anyone want to take bets on whether I’ll get to make the same statement again next year?)
But instead of going on (and on and on, and believe me, I could) about the pitiful state of the human race, I want to focus on a theme that I teased out of my 2024 best-of list. After looking at the final roster – which you can find below – I couldn’t help but notice how many of the films gave me a new perspective on people and communities that are mostly foreign to me.
That shouldn’t be surprising – least of all to me – because, as I’ve stated on this website ad nauseum, like the late, great Roger Ebert, I view cinema as a powerful empathy machine that puts the viewer in the shoes of a stranger in ways unmatched by any other art form. I’ve taken it as my mission on Earth to experience as many different cultures, ideas, and ways-of-life as I can through the magic of motion pictures. My best-of list this year reflects that goal as much as or more than any other year since I’ve been writing film criticism.
And I’ve been doing it so long now that I hit a major milestone last year. As I wrote last month, December of 2024 marked the tenth anniversary of my site going live. I would never have predicted that, when I sat down one weekend at the tail end of 2014 to start work on the look of the site, I’d still be publishing reviews a decade later. Doing this work has enriched my life in ways I can barely describe.
I had a setback this year when I was denied press credentials for what had become my favorite and most anticipated film festival of the year, Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest. With the sale of the Alamo chain to Sony Pictures Entertainment, it seems that the new owners are more interested in granting access to influencers with huge followings than to critics who care about cinema more than anything else.
I added a new fest – for the first time, I attended and covered the Oak Cliff Film Festival on a press pass – keeping the total number of fests I covered, at four, equal to my 2023 total. In addition to the OCFF, in 2024, I was also able to cover South By Southwest (on assignment for a pop culture/entertainment website), the Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF), and the It Came From Texas Film Festival. Half of my top ten are titles I initially saw at one fest or another.
One of those titles is on the list due to a bit of skullduggery on my part. If you listen to the movie podcast Filmspotting, you’ll know that one of the hosts, Adam Kempenaar, is famous for cheating during the show’s top five segments. He routinely crams one or two extra titles into a single slot on the countdowns in order to eat his cake and have it, too. I’m taking a page from Kempenaar to cheat and include on my 2024 list a picture that appeared on an earlier year’s list, but I have (what I think is) a good reason.
I saw The People’s Joker during an early-morning Press & Industry screening at Fantastic Fest 2023 – if you’ve seen Vera Drew’s bonkers, touching film, you’ll understand what a discombobulating experience seeing it at seven o’clock in the morning was – because I feared I wouldn’t get into the regular screening. The film was scheduled to screen at FF 2022, but was pulled due to a legal challenge from what Drew described as “a media conglomerate.” You can choose your own adventure as far as if it was Warner Bros. Discovery or DC Comics throwing their weight around to crush a small, independent artist.
After seeing The People’s Joker at FF 2023, I slotted it into the “best of the rest” part of my list, which contains entries 11-25 in my annual assessment of the year’s best cinema. I’ve decided to include the movie on this year’s list, and in the top ten, for a few different reasons. I’m now considering 2024 as the proper release year for The People’s Joker. That’s because last year is the first time the general public was actually able to see it. In 2022 and 2023, it only played the festival circuit. In 2024, Drew’s film got a proper theatrical release as well as a physical media rollout. (A friend gifted me the Blu-ray.)
I was able to see People’s Joker, and take Rae, to a screening at the Texas Theatre, with Vera Drew in attendance for an introduction and Q&A. That screening was electric. It was nothing like the quiet response from the five or so of us at the P&I screening at the crack of dawn. I then showed it to the friend who bought me the Blu-ray and my brother; they both enjoyed it thoroughly.
I bumped it up into the top ten on this year’s list because, like so many of my other 2024 picks, The People’s Joker begs for the audience to find empathy and compassion for a marginalized community; in this case, trans people. It was thrilling to experience two different audiences find joy in a character – and a filmmaker – living the unapologetically authentic version of themselves, and the painful journey that getting to that point can often be.
The People’s Joker is also just a banger and a hell of a good time.
I’ll have a few more words on it below, so, without further ado, let’s dig into my top 25 movies of 2024. As has been my practice since 2022, I’m listing my top ten films of the year in the order in which I saw them. You can find my explanation for why I changed from a standard best-to-least format here.
*Note: Each movie title above the picture is a link that will take you to my thoughts on that movie, with four exceptions.
Grand Theft Hamlet
This documentary, about two out-of-work actors staging a complete production of Hamlet inside the game Grand Theft Auto during the COVID-19 pandemic, contains more pathos than you might otherwise expect from the silly premise. Over the course of Grand Theft Hamlet, during which one begins to root intensely for the ragtag team to make their vision a reality, we see and feel the isolation and despair brought on by the pandemic. This was the first title I saw at SXSW 2024 that hit me square in the feels. What it has to say about artistic endeavors and our species’ need for connection and community creates a stark contrast to the amusing scenes of the actors getting killed again and again by other GTA players while trying to get their project off the ground.
The People’s Joker
Director and actress Vera Drew used one of the most iconic comic book creations of all time to explore her painful, difficult, and ultimately liberating experiences during and after coming out as a trans woman. She does so with a quirky, devilish sense of humor in The People’s Joker by setting this semi-autobiographical tale in a dystopian version of Gotham, where comedy has been outlawed unless you are officially sanctioned by those who monopolize the entertainment industry. Nobody’s safe from Drew’s cutting satire, including Batman and Saturday Night Live mastermind Lorne Michaels, who is voiced in the movie by comedian Maria Bamford. Drew proves her Dark Knight bona fides by cleverly incorporating numerous elements from the Batman world — like how her character’s doctor prescribes her Smylex to tamp down the feelings of gender dysphoria — into her story. The People’s Joker is a wild ride that uses its budget as creatively as its wonderful imagination.
Desire Lines
I discovered the documentary Desire Lines at DIFF 2024. It’s an uncompromising look at the culture and humanity of the transmasculine community. Director Jules Rosskam delivers an intoxicating mix of documentary-style interviews with trans men that are woven throughout a fictional storyline. The narrative portion of Desire Lines focuses on an Iranian-American trans man who experiences the history of the LGBTQ+ community firsthand while performing research in an effort to understand his own identity. I was really swept away by the creativity of this movie to present standard documentary talking-head interviews in a novel way.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird
It appears that documentaries took over my top ten this year. The opening night film of the 2024 Oak Cliff Film Festival, Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, uses 1000 hours of home-movie footage to tell the story of the duo behind the bands At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta. The meticulously selected clips from these hours and hours of footage, almost completely shot by Omar Rodríguez-López, gives the audience an up-close-and-personal view of these musicians over the course of their 40-year career together (and, sometimes, as we see in the documentary, apart).
Fantasy A Gets a Mattress
Shot on a mind-blowingly small budget of only $3,800, Fantasy A Gets a Mattress stars real-life autistic Seattle rapper Fantasy A and his attempts to find a mattress – and stardom – after getting kicked out of the halfway house he calls home. It’s a tale of crooked landlords, mysterious open mic proprietors, unscrupulous martial arts instructors, and big dreams. I also saw Fantasy A — both the movie and the man, who made an appearance at the screening — at OCFF 2024. It may not be the most technically flawless film you’ve ever seen, but the story, the cast, and the absolute chutzpah of everyone involved made for an infectious and unforgettable viewing experience.
Hundreds of Beavers
Here’s my out-and-out goofy comedy pick of the year. This wild tale of Jean Kayak, a 19th century entrepreneur, and the zany antics he gets up to when his apple orchard is destroyed by, well, hundreds of beavers is so much fun. It takes the best of silent film era slapstick comedy, The Three Stooges, and Looney Tunes (particularly the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote shorts) and mixes them in a blender while adding dreamlike CGI sets and effects to create something wholly new. The bit where Jean tries to pick up a coin from a table had me laughing so hard that I was gasping for air.
The Substance
“David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat.” That’s how I started my review of The Substance, Fargeat’s bonkers treatise on youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society. The picture stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as versions of the same woman who will do anything to stay on top in the sexist and ageist entertainment industry. When it comes to the absolutely insane final act of The Substance, when Fargeat & Co. really let the body horror rip, I can’t put it any better than IndieWire critic David Ehrlich did on Letterboxd: “[W]atching the last 30 minutes of this movie with a packed audience is truly one of life’s greatest pleasures.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
In the wake of his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, gaining entry into the 2024 Cannes film festival, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran to eight years in prison, whipping, and a fine. Luckily, Rasoulof was able to flee his home country to a safe house in Germany before he was taken into custody. The oppressive government of Iran doesn’t like the things that Rasoulof has to say about them in his movies. He’s run afoul of the Iranian government before — one of his films explores the country’s death penalty — and Sacred Fig’s production drew their ire once again. The movie tells the story of Iman, his wife, Najmeh, and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana. Iman has received a promotion as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. As the real-life 2022 uprisings — in protest of the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police for not properly wearing hijab in public — come to a boil, Iman is troubled by the dozens of death sentences he is asked to approve without question. Meanwhile, Rezvan and Sana become radicalized when they witness the brutality of the state crackdown on the protestors via social media. This all leads to a pressure cooker situation for the family that finally explodes in the last act. The gruesome sequence that gives us an up-close look at the effects of state-sanctioned violence on political protestors is one of the most harrowing scenes of the year.
The Vourdalak
I missed catching The Vourdalak at OCFF 2024 — there was a repertory screening of the silent masterpiece Häxan happening at the same time that I couldn’t pass up — but luckily Rae went for me, and she told me after the screening that it was one of the weirdest cinematic experiences of her life. She was very excited to show it to me once it became available for streaming later in the year. Set in 18th-century Eastern Europe, The Vourdalak tells the story of a travelling French marquis who finds refuge (or so he thinks) with a family after being robbed by roadside bandits. When the family’s patriarch, Gorcha, returns home from fighting the Turks, his family begins to suspect that he has been transformed. He is now a vourdalak, a vampiric creature of Slavic folklore mythology. The movie features striking cinematography, costumes, and performances, but the real highlight is Gorcha. This vampire is embodied by a human-sized marionette puppet with the strings and puppeteers digitally erased. The effect is mesmerizing. Rae was treated to a brief live puppet show before the OCFF screening, and, I’ll be honest, I’m a little jealous of her for getting to see it.
Queer
I was floored by Luca Guadagnino’s latest film Queer, which the filmmaker had wanted to make for over three decades. This adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novella, revolving around a thinly veiled version of Burroughs himself, features an outstanding performance from Daniel “Bond. James Bond.” Craig about a man on the fringes of society. William Lee is as uncomfortable with himself as a man can get, and he’s desperate to find the secret to telepathy, so he can finally be completely understood. The search for a magic drug that will facilitate this desired telepathy leads to one of the most riveting drug-trip sequences in recent memory. Guadagnino’s aesthetic and storytelling prowess combined to give me a cinematic experience I won’t soon forget.
The rest of the best:
Here’s the rest of my top 25 of the year. As above, I have listed them in the order in which I saw them. I’m not going to comment on them at all. I’ll simply link to my reviews, where available. If any of them grab your attention, check ‘em out: