2024 wasn’t the banner year for film that 2023 was, or 2019 before it, or countless other years before a global pandemic altered the business, perhaps irreparably. Last year’s necessary labor actions from the Hollywood trade guilds led to significant gaps in this year’s calendar for mainstream releases, so there’s a tendency for people to categorize the year as an “off” one for the movies.
But this year, like every year, there are great films worth taking the time to see. You have to look a little harder for them, or in the case of this year’s duds, work harder to save yourself from them.
The Best
“Rap World” / “Stand-Up Solutions” / “Coreys”
Comedian Conner O’Malley has produced transgressive, short-form digital content for several years. When he’s not pushing YouTube as a platform to its artistic limits, he’s turning to posting on social media as performance art. But this year, he released a trio of projects that are his most must-watch efforts yet. “Rap World” is a feature-length mockumentary about a trio of suburban white dudes in Pennsylvania trying to record a rap album over a single night in 2009. Shot on old-school, prosumer camcorders, it is both a hilarious distillation of a moment in time and a haunting time capsule for the beginning of the Obama years.
O’Malley’s feature-length stand-up special, “Stand-Up Solutions,” follows that thematic line to the present day, performing the entire set as Richard Eagleton, a tech bro doing a TED Talk on how AI is the future of comedy. The jokes all kill, but it is such a stirring parody that it feels like a satirical knife to the gut at how profane consumerism has doomed us all.
But his latest short, “Coreys,” stands out the most. At only eleven minutes, this disturbing look at a suburban family man lured to Vegas when he sees a doppelganger on social media is the best horror film of the year. O’Malley stuffs this short full of more traumatic imagery than every other spooky flick released this year combined.
“Let’s Start a Cult”
Baltimore’s Stavros Halkias (stand-up comedian, podcaster, and dedicated Ravens fan) has co-written and starred in his first feature film. Set in 2000, this micro-budgeted comedy centered around a botched cult is a major throwback to the 1990s. It’s a strange comparison and perhaps a backhanded compliment, but as the dumb but lovable protagonist, Stav calls to mind Pauly Shore in “Jury Duty.” There’s something so comforting about watching a movie made today that would have reliably replayed on Comedy Central thirty years ago, given how rare new comedies that aren’t also action blockbusters featuring Kevin Hart and The Rock are these days.
“The Apprentice”
Few cinematic prospects inspire less interest on face value than the “Donald Trump biopic,” but “The Apprentice” was the biggest surprise of the year in terms of underpromising and overdelivering.
Principally concerned with the relationship between Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his mentor, crooked lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the film feels like watching the “Star Wars” prequels if you were a citizen of Alderaan, seeing how Darth Vader and The Emperor came to power in the first place.
Stan’s performance is impressive for its restraint, seeing the man slowly take on more of the conversational tics we’ve gotten all too used to. Visually, shifting from the 16mm graininess of the ’70s to the muddy digital video of the ’80s, we watch the Trump myth birthed into existence as two corrupt men come to realize that there is no limit to what you can gain if you commit to brute forcing your reality on others, no matter the consequences.
“Challengers”
I have already reviewed this for the Beat, but all these months later, “Challengers” remains one of the year’s most thrilling and rewatchable moviegoing experiences. Prisoners of the moment may have felt this was a lucky hit coasting off the power of memes, a “brat summer” for tennis movies. But, no, it had the goods, and this three-way love story resonated for a reason: great performances and memorable moments.
“I Saw the TV Glow”
“I Saw the TV Glow” has grown more beloved to me since first seeing it. It’s a harrowing wake-up call, first and foremost, from the perspective of the trans experience, at a time when that demographic is more known to the public and thus more under fire than ever. But despite being dark and strange and, at times, terrifying, it is ultimately infused with so much love and compassion that it can speak to those outside of that specific experience. It will feel vital and nourishing to anyone stuck in their lives, unsure if the life they truly want will ever be anything more than a fleeting daydream.
The Worst
“Joker: Folie à Deux”
Todd Phillips’s first “Joker” film made a billion dollars selling a revenge fantasy to lonely incels but perhaps driven by a dissatisfaction with the audience he attracted, his highly anticipated sequel seems specifically designed to piss those same supporters off. Fans expecting to see Joaquin Phoenix in clown make-up living out their chaotic and violent fantasies were instead treated to a strange and often off-putting musical about accountability.
Suppose the last movie was an easy and shortsighted call to arms aimed at the ever-growing demographic of disaffected young men longing to belong. In that case, this, in its finest moments, is begging them to take a look in the mirror and accept some personal responsibility for the craven and selfish ways they’ve acted out due to that pain. I might even respect the vindictive, hollow rug-pulling a little more if I thought Philips himself didn’t belong among the crowd he’s so gleefully dunking on.
These films are gorgeous but so hollow and pointless because the man behind them has no ideas of his own.
“Madame Web”
It’s hard to put into words how disappointing this film was. Not because I or anyone else went into it thinking it might be good, but rather because it was touted as a masterpiece that might be entertaining for how galling in its terribleness it would be.
Instead of something so bad it’s good, so awful it’s a riot, we’re treated to a movie that is so barely a movie as to be insulting. Sony will keep trying to make Spider-Man movies that don’t have Spider-Man in them, but this flat, lifeless, and confusing mess doesn’t even pass the low bar of being fun to laugh at with your friends.
“Bob Marley: One Love”
In the months since first seeing it, I’ve grown to loathe this film more and more whenever I see an ad for it streaming on VOD or am reminded of how Tyler Perry-ian Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Bob Marley locs look. In an era of hollow, consumerist cash grabs masquerading as meaningful portraits of historical figures, “One Love” is uniquely shortsighted and unambitious.
It reduces Marley to the peace-loving, weed-smoking cipher college students who bought his poster from Spencer’s have always seen him as, and little else.
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