As 2024 draws to a close, it would seem fitting to offer up a top-ten best-film list and maybe throw in a worst-of-the-year list, too. However, I live in Vermont, which is not a large market for the film industry, and we hardly have any theaters in the state where new films can be seen, so there is still a batch of year-end movies I’ll need to see before I can commit to an official “best of 2024” list.
Instead, I offer some post-Santa vibes for which movies wound up on my “naughty” list and which were “nice.”
Horror
It was a better-than-average year for horror movies. Horror isn’t my favorite genre unless it’s done right.
“Longlegs” proved Anthony Perkins’ son, Osgood Perkins, is a filmmaker on the rise. This a-level creep-fest got under my skin in ways few other films this year even tried, and much of that dread is owed to Perkins’ exacting direction and pure visual sense of style. Throw in absolutely insane and chilling supporting performances from Nicolas Cage and Alicia Witt (how are these two not in the awards conversation?), and you’ve got a horror classic whose reputation will only grow over the years.
Thankfully, “The Substance” is in the year-end awards conversation, as well it should be, because it is one of the great screenplays of 2024, matched by some of the most brilliant direction (Coralie Fargeat) and daring performances by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Many films tease greatness but stop short of the gate. This film kicks the gate open and says, “Who’s buying me breakfast, lunch, dinner, and fourth meal?”
“Late Night with the Devil” isn’t necessarily a great movie or a great horror movie, but what it is is an excellent little low-budget B-movie with a fun premise that executes its concept in a brilliant, tight fashion. More films should learn the lesson of “make your point in 90 minutes and get out while the getting is good.” Any longer, this film would have lagged, but it hangs around just long enough to leave you willing to recommend this little horror gem to your friends.
Not every horror film I watched this year ended up on my nice list. Here are a few that were too naughty for my taste.
“Salem’s Lot.” This horror adaptation of the 1975 novel by Stephen King was shot in 2021, reshot a bit in 2022, and has been kicking around on the shelf for the past two years. There were some griping complaints that the film was unceremoniously dumped onto MAX instead of hitting theaters around Halloween. I was one of those griping. Then I watched the movie. I don’t know what it is about Stephen King’s books—for some unknown reason, only a few directors have been able to crack the code and make a good adaptation. Unfortunately, “Salem’s Lot” goes down with 2022’s “Firestarter” remake as two of the worst King film adaptations in many years.
On paper, and in the movie’s trailer, “In a Violent Nature” sounds like an amazingly original take on the “force-of-nature” slasher genre. This film’s premise is a first-person vantage point of Johnny, the dead woodsy being who comes to life after a talisman locket is removed from hallowed ground. We spend most of the film’s run time with Johnny, slowly stalking his prey, a cabin filled with obnoxious and annoying young adults ready for the picking. Hey, if your idea of a good time is watching Johnny sneak up behind an unsuspecting woman performing yoga by the lake and watching him literally turn her inside out, this movie could be for you. But the direction is weak, and any occasional good moment feels like an accident the director lucked upon. Even the 1980s teenage me would have found this boring after a while.
“Strange Darling” isn’t even a film I’d call horror, although its many fans do. Okay. “Strange Darling,” you horror wanna be, I did not like you. Because it isn’t strong enough to work on its thin plot in a linear format, the movie decides to jumble its narrative, a la “Pulp Fiction,” to keep the audience guessing. Well, guess what? It doesn’t work. Unless you haven’t seen many movies, you’ll be ahead of this movie every step of the way. It does get a few nice points for its beautiful cinematography (shot on 35mm film) by actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. Still, it is not enough to save it from the naughty list.
Speaking of films where the director spends far too much time trying to surprise an audience who will, no doubt, already guess every plot twist way sooner than the filmmakers think, “The Watchers” directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana Shyamalan. The only nice thing about “The Watchers” is that it’s slightly better than M. Night’s film from this year, “Trap.”
“Trap” is so profoundly awful that you’ll be scratching your head as to how the same person who made this film was the same person who made “The Sixth Sense.” From shoddy AI backdrops subbing for a concert audience to ridiculous plot actions that no one in an actual situation would ever do, just so the film can play out to the conclusion Shyamalan wants, this is a film so bad it would easily be my worst film of the year if only I had not seen even worse films.
Useless sequels and reboots
2024 saw several naughty film reboots and sequels. I’ve already mentioned “Salem’s Lot,” which was already done as a two-part mini-series by Tobe Hooper in 1979 and then again in 2004. Add to the list of naughty the makers of “The Fall Guy,” a supposed action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, based on the 1980s T.V. series. The trailer made it look funny. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. I don’t think I laughed a single time. The movie is an overlong mess, with a convoluted plot that gets so exhausting as it goes along; at some point, you just give up and wonder how much more time you have to spend with this turkey. Gosling and Blunt are supposedly into each other, and that drives the thrust of miscommunication throughout the movie. Still, we never get a scene that establishes they were ever a couple. This puppy’s a rough one. Just stay away.
No film insulted my intelligence quite like the reboot of “Twisters.” The shock here is it’s directed by the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker of Minari, Lee Isaac Chung. While the original 1996 film boasted then revolutionary new CGI effects and an earnest effort in the script to confront the forces of nature with technology that could potentially help humans understand the nature of tornadoes and generate better storm prediction models, this new film is a Red state vs. Blue state affair where the winner is most decidedly the red states, and the CGI may give the tornadoes a more realistic look, but they don’t add anything to what I can already watch on Reels or TikTok. Carefully crafted by the algorithmic geniuses of a Hollywood studio bean counter, this “Twisters” does not mention climate change’s effects on the rise of intense and unpredictable deadly weather incidents. Nope. Instead, the fine American scientific ingenuity can solve climate change and stop tornadoes dead in their tracks. Is it magical thinking or alternative thinking? I had a hard time making up my mind over the blaring anthems of country music continually running over the soundtrack, reminding every audience member this film is on the “right side” of American history.
“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is the naughtiest form of fan service. Rather than provide any reason to exist other than to try and make a buck off nostalgia, “Frozen Empire” offers some of the laziest re-tread callbacks to a film I can remember. “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” from 2021 already had enough callbacks to the original 1980s movies that one might expect, but this second installment got cringy after a while. This film shouldn’t have happened, but it did. America, can we band together to agree on one thing: let’s make sure a third film in this new series never happens?
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” The entire family sat down to watch this one. Within a half hour, we had lost the oldest child, and he slipped away for the comfort of his upstairs bedroom. A few minutes later, the wife was scrolling on her phone. Forty minutes in, the youngest slid off the couch and backward crawled out of the room, trying to go undetected. It was me, the last man standing. At forty-five minutes, I said, “Life’s too short for this,” and shut off the film. Was “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” the worst movie I saw in 2024? No, but it was boring. Nonstop CGI action isn’t exciting. The apes look great—almost real. But somewhere in that uncanny valley, it isn’t enough. I’m not convinced. The fourth time out was not a charm for these apes.
Okay, how about a little nice?
2024 did have a lot of nice offerings, and some films were very nice. If you’ve read my reviews since October, you’ll know I’m a fan of “Anora,” “A Different Man,” and “Conclave.” These films are some of the best of the year, and when you can see them, I suggest you do so.
“Kinds of Kindness.” My favorite film of 2023 was Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things.” From top-to-bottom, I loved every moment of that movie. I’m a Lanthimos fan. From his early work in films like “Dogtooth” and “Alps” to his more mainstream offerings, “The Lobster” and “The Favourite,” I like the kinds of films Lanthimos offers. So, it’s not a big surprise that I am a fan of “Kinds of Kindness,” a nearly three-hour triptych of a film starring Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Defoe, playing multiple roles in three thematically-related stories. The tales are strange, uncomfortable, and risqué. They challenge the audience to think. It’s also darkly comic and a throwback to Lanthimos’ earlier film work. I don’t believe this is a film for everyone, but it is on my nice list.
“Civil War.” What worked for me in this film was writer/director Alex Garland’s decision not to provide the audience with easy answers. In our current nation-divided, left-right, liberal-conservative, “let’s agree to disagree on everything” country, Garland makes you decide what is going on in the story. Who is this insane president who suspended the Constitution and granted himself a third term? Are all these various factions different political ideologies or variants of a standard strain? This film is a thinking person’s drama with an unsettling journey. At the film’s conclusion, it’s easy to imagine that a larger conflict will soon arise. A brief sequence with Jesse Plemons as the kind of American patriot you hope never to run into provides the single most intense few minutes of film in 2024.
Naughty and nice
Here are a few films that were naughty but oh so nice: “Hundreds of Beavers.” The beavers in this movie a naughty, and there are hundreds of them. The fur trapper in this movie is naughty as well, but because the beavers are even more naughty, he becomes the nice guy you can’t help but root for. Director Mike Cheslik’s innovative shoe-string budgeted, mostly silent, black & white ode to the WB cartoons of Tex Avery and the brilliant screen antics of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin come together in a dizzying array of endless imagination. A 19th-century applejack salesman gets high on his own supply, loses it all thanks to some spiteful beavers, is hellbent on retribution, and in a creative video-game-like strategy, finds his way back to solvency through trading up at the fur-trapper mercantile. Cheslik stretches a 15-minute premise into nearly two hours of nonstop hilarity. Hands down, this movie was the funniest film I saw in 2024.
“The Bikeriders.” This film is about naughty people, much in the way “Goodfellas” was about naughty people. No one saw it when it came out in June. I saw it at the now-shuttered Roxy Cinema in Burlington, and I was glad I did. When audiences finally catch up with this little gem of a movie, they realize they were the naughty ones for missing it.
The naughtiest of them all
“Regan” is a crime of a movie with a sorely miscast Dennis Quaid. Quaid’s brother Randy used to do a decent parody of Regan in the mid-80s on Saturday Night Live. I don’t know what Dennis is doing with this version, but it ain’t good. The movie is a bizarre fever dream that imagines Ronald Regan as a super crusader battling the evil threat of communism in the final stages of the Cold War. He starts off as a young Hollywood crusader, rooting out the evil of communist spies in Tinseltown. To believe this film, blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was a sinister communist spy. This film is so bizarre that I almost continued watching it to see how crazy it could get, but I have to confess–after 20 minutes of this drivel, I was out. I couldn’t. It was too naughty for me.
“Madame Web” is the pinnacle of Marvel at its most cynical. This film is what happens when a studio believes its audience is so stupid it will watch anything with a comic superhero tagline on it. There isn’t a moment in this film that works. It’s an embarrassment for all the actors involved. It’s lazy, sloppy, and filled with plot holes that even its moniker as a Marvel movie can’t forgive. I said “Twisters” was the film that most insulted my intelligence in 2024. That was a lie. No film can match the depths of loathing, disgust, and anger I had towards any film quite like I had watching “Madame Web.” The term “hate watch” was invented for movies like this. I wanted to shut this thing off after ten minutes but was compelled to continue because I couldn’t believe the film could get any worse. And then it did. It was like The Terminator—It just kept coming and coming.
Thankfully, several year-end movies are still awaiting me that will wipe the naughty taste of the “Madame Web’s” of the world out of my mind. Here’s looking at you, “The Brutalist” and “The Nickel Boys.” Don’t let me down. I’m counting on you.
James Kent is the publisher’s assistant at the Mountain Times and the co-host of the “Stuff We’ve Seen” podcast at stuffweveseen.com.
