The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2024

As always, this is a list of the best films I watched for the first time in 2024, regardless of when they came out. In alphabetical order:

Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey (2022)

A brilliant, honest, and thoughtful portrait of an artist, his families and communities--both those he remained part of, and those he broke away from--and the way his art and life, in some ways (but not all), affected a reconciliation between both. For Mormons like myself and artists of a certain stripe, this short documentary is one of the best films of its type that anyone is ever likely to make.

Excalibur (1981)

Pulpy, melodramatic, surreal, gorgeous, over-the-top, with gross mud and ugly tortured bodies standing alongside brilliantly shining armor, sumptuous heraldry, and almost-but-not-quite porn-quality nudity--40+ years on, this has to remain the definitive D&D approach to the Arthurian legend. I loved it.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

87 minutes of silliness, wit, delightful verbal jousting, fine physical comedy, and of course, awesome music by 4 demigods. Seeing it for the first time in a proper movie theater only made it more of an experience. It's not surprising that Ringo went on to do the most in front of the camera; he may not have ever become a great actor, but the guy was a natural, a delightful comic presence throughout the whole film. Some segments look sharper when you think about them afterward than when you actually watch them (Harrison's encounter with youth-obsessed advertisers has some great darkness to it, but it probably needed to play out a little longer), but overall, this movie is an absolute gem.

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

An insanely creative, low-budget, goofball, straight-out-of-Looney Tunes comic masterpiece. I laughed, I laughed, and I laughed some more. Its mixing of satiric wit and straight-up cartoony farce was equal to the best of Monty Python. I hope beaver Sherlock and beaver Watson survived for the sequel.

The Iron Claw (2023)

A remarkable, powerful, and believable story of a family that I can, in a few ways, profoundly relate to (I have six brothers, and we're all close), but in most other ways is utterly unfamiliar to me (we weren't athletes in our family in any sense, and the world of professional wrestling, especially the low-rent wrestling world of the 1970s and 1980s, was utterly outside of my experience). The masterful acting, pacing, and cinematography of the movie did what the best sort of movies always do: invite us in to a story which is not our own, which is totally foreign to us, and make us identify with the characters and their fates. This move drew me in, shutting off the critical voice always operating in my head, and made me care for these sad, stupid, doomed, but mostly enormously decent characters. I didn't weep for the Von Erichs, but their story weighed on me, and not in a manipulative way. Truly, this is the best kind of middle-brow movie: find a powerful story, and then tell it well.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

This is a fabled British gangster flick from the very early 1980s that I've missed up until now. The expert plotting of the film makes it a delight, but also puts us, as viewers, into surprising historical and moral waters. Can this bad guy also actually be the beleaguered hero of the story, the toxic yet necessary agent of English masculinity as the Age of Thatcher gives birth to a new Britain? Watch to learn the answer, and see why Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren should have made a dozen films together; what an awesome pair.

Nosferatu (2024)

A brilliant piece of gothic art. Not really a horror movie, though there is much that is horrifying in it; this is Nosteratu with the obsession with foreigners and the plague replaced with a very 19th-century obsession with the dark and mysterious forces of sexuality (particularly of the female kind) and the occult, and the challenges both pose to a rational, patriarchal order. I loved the cinematography, the dialogue, and the interesting twists Eggers took with vampire lore. Maybe not the best straight-up Dracula story I've ever seen on the screen, but absolutely the most stately, most seemingly authentic. Someone online said that if Merchant Ivory had adapted Nosferatu or Dracula back in the 1980s, it would have looked like this, and I fully agree (and consider that high praise as well).

O.J.: Made in America (2016)

A brilliant documentary. The long, slow build through the first four episodes were insightful and often frankly astonishing. The contemporary interviews with lawyers on the defense and the prosecution, with Simpson's friends and enemies (the rueful, unapologetic Mark Fuhrman was particularly fascinating to watch) and hanger-ons and more, all of it was impressive and very well used, but really it was just the amount of revealing footage--from the crime scenes, from Simpson's daily life, and more--which the filmmakers found which really astounded me. I suppose the omnipresence of phones recording everything today had accustomed me--like everyone--to certain assumptions about the quality and character of the surveillance all around us, but watching this I was reminded, in a way I shouldn't have needed to be, of the near-equivalent omnipresence of hand-held video recorders which I can remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet had somehow forgotten. Anyway, tremendous story-telling. I initially thought the final episode was a little weak, a little anti-climactic; given the focus on the murder trial, I was bothered that there was comparatively little analysis given to Simpson's civil trial, and why that played out so differently in cultural and popular terms (the reasons aren't hard to guess--the lack of television in the courtroom being an obvious one--but still, it wanted to see those reasons laid out). And I do think they could have done more to continue the interpretation which guided the first four episodes: namely, that Simpson's career and trial reflect the deeply disturbing fruit of how media-saturated and addicted Americans have internalized racial divides, prejudices, and resentments. But with a couple of brilliant sequences, they brought that back in at the very conclusion of the last episode, with Simpson's conviction for robbery in 2008 becoming a troubling coda, making me forgive everything.

Quand tu liras cette lettre [When You Read This Letter] (1953)

This almost impossible to find French classic is both compelling and kind of horrifying, as well as surprising. A marvelous but in some ways opaque drama, the real lesson of which probably is what was said by the old lady on the train near the end: "There is so much [unstated: "which we can never understand"] in every person's heart." I loved the way it closed with exactly the same shots it opened with, only in reverse; perhaps the whole thing is a kind of moral parable, a just-so story--only its message is that people's choices can only ever be observed, never understood.

Uncut Gems (2019)

This movie is incredibly foul and frenetic, the story of an addictive and hyper and undisciplined individual throwing himself into risks that he constantly hypes up, until it collapses messily--but still, everything is right there in the way the story is told, nothing more. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that there was something more to the story here, something that Adam Sandler, of all people, manages to key the audience into: his character's confusion and even disbelief at his own sadness, at the emptiness he doesn't know how to deal with, was encapsulated in one moment (when he searches through the empty apartment he shared with his lover) which, in a way, haunts all the rest of the film. The dead, staring, disbelieving form of Sandler at the end, finally at rest, makes us think about how impossible such a life of complete madness, complete addictive activity, truly is--which perhaps makes the visuals of the tiny, eternal, unchanging perfections of the gems which started and ended the film completely appropriate.