The 20 best films of 2024 (part two)
It's time to have one final look back at 2024, featuring squelchy body horror, an animated robot, and a very sweaty tale of tennis and threeways...
Back in the summer, I wrote about my favourite films of the year at the halfway point of 2024 and, last week, I revealed the first part of my top 20 films of the year. Here’s the rest of the list, based on UK release dates. Poor Things was on top in the summer, but has it been knocked off its perch since?
7. Love Lies Bleeding
I saw the Nicole Kidman thriller Babygirl this week and found it completely devoid of any sort of heat or desire.1 That just put into even sharper focus my affection for Love Lies Bleeding, in which Rose Glass builds on Saint Maud with a sweaty, red-hot thriller of passion and violence.
Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are fantastic as, respectively, a bored young woman working at a gym and the outsider body-builder with whom she becomes infatuated. The violence builds and the magical realism builds with it, but it’s the sheer chemistry between the two leads that makes this genuinely special.
Read my full review of Love Lies Bleeding.
6. Late Night with the Devil
David Dastmalchian is spectacular as a TV host willing to dabble with the occult to make his late night show a success in the Cairnes’ brothers remarkably scuzzy horror movie. It’s a truly evil film, which feels as if it has been dragged on to screens from a battered video tape at the bottom of a skip — in the nicest possible way.
Like Ghostwatch for America, it’s a terrific exercise in slow-building tension and conjuring an atmosphere of pure dread. I’m a huge defender of the cinematic experience, but I don’t think this one could’ve hit any harder than it did watched alone on my TV in the dead of night. I had to check the entire house twice before I could go to bed afterwards.2
Read my full review of Late Night with the Devil.
5. Red Rooms
In part one of this list, I briefly mentioned Jane Schoenbrun’s fascinating trans allegory I Saw the TV Glow. Their movies touch upon subcultures in compelling and terrifying ways, which is something I also thought about a lot while watching Pascal Plante’s beguiling thriller Red Rooms. It tells the story of a young woman who, for reasons that aren’t quite clear, attends the trial of a man accused of committing horrible murders while streaming on the dark web.
Juliette Gariépy’s central character is infuriating and completely engrossing. Is she one of the accused killer’s groupies, someone determined to see him locked up, or a rubbernecker drawn in by the thrill of the mystery? Red Rooms withholds the answers, but immerses the audience into the bleak, extreme, and very real world of online obsession with true crime.
Read my full review of Red Rooms.
4. Challengers
The phrase “kitchen sink filmmaking” evokes Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But the phrase “everything and the kitchen sink filmmaking” could be invented for Lucsa Guadagnino’s fiery tennis movie Challengers. The music throbs and pulses throughout and the script whirls rapidly through time, while Guadagnino’s camera perches on net cords, racquets, and tennis balls in search of the most kinetic way to depict the action on and off the court.
Challengers was sold to audience’s on the back of an is-that-a-threesome scene between ultra-hot leads Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, but it’s surprising how much the movie actually is about tennis — albeit tennis as a conduit for white-hot, sweaty sexuality. All three leads are amazing and it’s criminal that this appears to have dipped out of the awards race.
Read my full review of Challengers.
3. The Wild Robot
I could write an entire thesis about the various ways DreamWorks animation The Wild Robot completely broke me, but perhaps I’ll save those for another day. In short, this is just a children’s book animation about a discarded service robot who bonds with an orphaned goose and a morally dubious fox. However, in the hands of director Chris Sanders, it soars as a meditation on parenting, chosen family, and the plight of our natural world.
The themes hit hard, and that’s doubly true given the exceptionally beautiful animation, which evokes watercolour paintings. I’m not the world’s biggest Spider-Verse fan, but you have to credit those films for showing the major studios that animated movies don’t always have to look the same.
2. Poor Things
Top at the halfway point of the year, Poor Things still remains one of the best things I saw in 2024. Emma Stone’s performance is committed to the nth degree and she brings comedy, heart, and tragedy in equal measure to the role of Bella Baxter, proving that she’s the perfect star for the Yorgos Lanthimos universe.
Throw in career-best work from Mark Ruffalo and several sequences of Willem Dafoe belching out gastric-juice bubbles and you have the recipe for one of the most unique major movies of the last decade. Stone’s Oscar win was richly deserved and the film should, if there’s any justice, continue to grow in esteem as the years go by.
1. The Substance
Me in July 2024 in this newsletter: “It’ll take a hell of a film to affect me so much that my love of Poor Things has to take a back seat. Bella Baxter is too important not to win.”
Me in September 2024 on Twitter: “I don't think I want to watch films any more. I think I just want to watch The Substance over and over again until I die a very happy man.”
I was already primed to expect great things from The Substance. I had loved Coralie Fargeat’s previous movie Revenge and adored the central idea behind her new film — a fading Hollywood star, played by Demi Moore, takes an illicit drug to create a younger and hotter version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. But I could never have predicted the levels of insanity the film finds.
Seeing the movie at an Odeon Scream Unseen event definitely made a difference in terms of how I reacted to it. Some of those in attendance were clearly baffled and upset by the movie, especially during its hog-wild third act, and that just made me love it more. I spent the entire last half an hour grinning at the sheer audacity of the thing.
If Demi Moore does go on to win an Academy Award for this movie, it could well go down as my favourite Oscar win ever. It would certainly be deserved and true recognition of a movie that has a lot to say, but has the courage to say it via two hours of flying viscera and bits of flesh.
Read my full review of The Substance.
So that’s it. We can now put 2024 in the rear-view and start looking ahead to the films of 2025. I’ve already been terrified by Nosferatu, impressed by Timothee Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, and ever so slightly underwhelmed by Nickel Boys.
I wrote about it over at Yahoo UK.
Some great choices here. Particularly happy to see Red Rooms getting credit