My Favorite Films of 2024

2024 might have sucked in lots of ways, but at least I watched another 150 or so more movies as civilization continued its slide into the abyss! Anyway, as usual, this list isn’t made up of the “best” ten flicks from 2024 that I watched — it’s made up my favorites among the movies that I saw in 2024 for the first time. I think that’s more reflective of how people actually watch movies these days anyway. Who knows what year something came out — when did it start streaming? With that explanation aside, here are ten awesome movies:

American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron)
One of my best friends has been haranguing me for years to see this flick, and after finally getting around to it, I feel pretty, pretty dumb for waiting this long. As most everyone else on earth already knows, it’s a pitch-black comedy with Christian Bale as a smooth-talking Wall Street up-and-comer who dabbles in serial killing. The film stands as one of the most brutal takedowns of toxic masculinity and “bro” culture ever made, depicting Bale’s Patrick Bateman as a soulless façade of a human whose occasional outbursts of insane violence seem to be his only way of connecting with the world. His rants about oddball topics like Huey Lewis and the News aren’t just oddly funny, they’re simultaneously really pathetic attempts by Bateman to connect with the folks he’s speaking with—or about to kill. And the ending is just perfect. The fact that modern incels look at this guy as some kind of manly role model is more chilling than anything in the film itself, frankly, and once again proves that you can always count on a certain percentage of Americans to miss the whole point.

Belly (1998, Hype Williams)
I vaguely remember this coming out, but really heard nothing about it and grouped it in with all the other hip-hop inspired gangster flicks that seemed to pop up in the 90s. It’s much more than that, though. Director Hype Williams brings every bit of the visual panache and energy he brought to videos by Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott to what could have been an overly familiar story of childhood friends whose paths diverge on either side of the law. From the first moments of the film, a strip-club heist under black lights, Williams creates a visual spectacle that’s as original as it is gorgeous. Just about every shot in the film looks fantastic, and the director gets the most out of every camera set-up and funky angle. You could say that having Nas and DMX play the lead roles is stunt casting, and you’d be right. Their acting chops aren’t exactly the greatest, but their mumbled, unconvincing line readings somehow lend an air of authenticity and unpolished charm to the whole spectacle – at least for me. Ultimately, Belly is the result of a director just going for it from start to finish and bringing a truly unique vision to the screen. Pity that this flick’s flop pretty much killed any chance he might have had to try it again.

Eega (2012, S.S. Rajamouli)
There’s a moment that I won’t spoil about 45 minutes into Eega that had me laughing harder than anything I’ve seen in a movie in years. Up until that point, I was on the fence about this frankly bizarre bit of cinematic insanity from RRR director S.S. Rajamouli, but from that point on, I was right in tune with it. The film’s tone is understandably all over the place as it sets out the story of Nani, a young man who’s beaten to death by the wealthy creep who’s been lusting after Nani’s sweetheart Bindu. He vows vengeance with his dying breath and is promptly reincarnated as a housefly—a housefly with revenge on its mind! Once this ridiculous plot is put in motion, the flick really finds its way as a wacky black comedy/romance/revenge thriller, as unlikely as that sounds. The film really revolves around Sudeepa’s performance as the murderous businessman who the fly sets out to destroy, wringing laughs and pathos out of the man’s descent into paranoid madness, swatting at imaginary flies and unable to sleep for fear of being assaulted by the tiny pest. I can’t recommend this crazy flick highly enough, a one-of-a-kind rollercoaster that’s as entertaining as it is outlandish. (Streaming on Netflix)

Happy New Year (2014, Farah Khan)
A fun, ridiculous mash-up of several genres. Shah Rukh Khan stars as a thief with a requisite tragic backstory, who cooks up a plan to steal a cache of priceless diamonds from a Dubai luxury hotel. And what a plan! For a variety of less-than-convincing reasons, the only night he can stage his heist is the same night that the hotel is hosting an international dance competition that’s broadcast worldwide.
So. He first has to recruit his heist team, THEN find a suitable dance coach to train them, THEN somehow win the preliminary round in India, THEN travel to Dubai and engage in an insanely high-tech heist with clockwork precision. What could go wrong? There’s a lot of fun to be had as the flick morphs from heist flick to dance flick to romance to “underdogs at the big competition” flick. SRK is solid as the mastermind, delivering a brash star turn that makes the most of his natural charisma.
Deepika Padukone is as gorgeous as ever as the bar dancer who is hired to help them choreograph their dance routines, and manages to navigate her character’s constant reversals of fortune and emotion quite well. The heist relies a bit too much on the “magical hacker” trope, as the team’s computer expert is able to do everything from change vote totals on televised dance shows to infiltrating the hotel’s security system — all at the touch of a button. None of this is meant to be taken too seriously, though, and the film is a fast-moving, entertaining way to spend three hours or so. (Streaming on Amazon Prime)

The Long Good Friday (1980, John Mackenzie)
Don’t know how I missed this one until now, its reputation as one of the great gangster flicks of the 80’s is pretty well known. It more than lives up to that rep, with Bob Hoskins turning in one of the all-time great mob boss performances. Hoskins stars as Harold Shand, an up-from-the-streets gangster who wants to transition into legitimate business. He invites an American mafia don to London to regale him with his plans to take over the waterfront, but on the day of the American’s arrival, Harold’s associates and businesses start getting bombed. After years of gangland peace, it seems someone is out to ruin Harold’s plans – but he has no idea who it is or why.
We then follow Hoskins as he tries to piece together what’s been going on, calling in every favor and lowlife character in London as his increasingly frantic search goes on. It turns out he’s in considerably more hot water than he can imagine, but his arrogance and hubris won’t let him take the easy (or smart) way out. This is a really great flick, full of fantastic actors at the top of their game, including Helen Mirren in one of her first big, splashy roles as Hoskin’s wife and partner in crime. The whole thing revolves around Hoskins’ towering performance, as he delivers a fully-rounded, sympathetic yet brutal character who pretty much defines the term anti-hero – and this was in 1980, long before Walter White or Tony Soprano were a glimmer on an MS Word doc.

The Nile Hilton Incident (2017, Tarik Saleh)
I was blown away by this one, a tense, terrific thriller set in the build-up to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The story follows a chain-smoking detective as he tries to unravel the murder of a pop star in the titular Nile Hilton hotel, a case which (in the finest Chinatown tradition) leads him into a maze of official corruption, police disinterest, and personal dilemmas. What I loved the most about the film was its attention to detail, the way it doesn’t so much focus on but reveal the everyday habits, details, sights, and sounds of Cairo at the time. The city seems as much a character as any of the actual people sometimes. It’s a really great modern noir that manages to successfully place its intimate personal dramas right in the middle of momentous historical change, without diminishing the importance of either one. (Streaming on Kanopy)

The Parallax View (1974, Alan J. Pakula)
A perfect example of the paranoid 70s political thriller, with Warren Beatty as a crusading reporter who stumbles on evidence that a recent assassination wasn’t the work of a “lone nut” as the government has claimed. Beatty’s descent into paranoia is perfectly played, and the web that the high-level players weave around him comes together bit by bit quite dramatically. You feel that Beatty is in over his head even before you really even know what’s going on. Once the contours of the plot come together, it builds to a truly shocking but satisfying ending. The distrust of official explanations in the 70s post-Kennedy era resonates through the whole film, creating a palpable feeling of a man being pulled here and there by events that are completely out of his control. Overall, this is a really fantastic, dark thriller that makes the most of Beatty’s somewhat blank slate of an acting style. He comes across as just smart enough to see that something’s wrong, but not smart enough to actually do anything about it. Good stuff.

Samurai Cop (1991, Amir Shervan)
How have I missed this one for so long? As a fan of terrible movies, this should have crossed my path many years ago. That said, I’m glad it took me so long, because watching this ridiculous spectacle renewed my faith that there really are still lots of insane films out there that I haven’t seen. This one’s in the absolute pantheon of bad movies, alongside Miami Connection, Waterworld, and Never Too Young to Die. Former Sly Stallone bodyguard Matt Hannon stars as a lush-maned San Diego cop who’s inexplicably transferred to Los Angeles to get a handle on a burgeoning yakuza crime wave. We’re supposed to accept him as an expert on the yakuza, but he does literally nothing throughout the course of the film to establish that he knows anything about them. This kind of silliness and slapdash plotting is pretty much standard in this flick.
The flick’s low budget results in a lot of cheap sets and bad takes – most of the actors here turn in some pretty wack performances, but they were clearly only getting one take most of the time. One of my favorite tropes in the film is the way the director cuts away from people speaking to show silly reaction shots of folks listening. It’s as if he doesn’t trust the audience to know how to react to his script, so he has to show them what they should be feeling. The result is some hilarious cross-cutting. Eventually, the “samurai” cop gets to exact his justice on the yakuza members in a series of fights in which the most compelling element is figuring out how the cop’s wig is staying on. They’ve also tacked on some of the least sexy sex scenes you’ll ever see; the samurai cop and his ladies like to spend a lot of time sloooowly tongue kissing in a way that makes the whole thing seem quite unpalatable. Dumb fun for anyone who appreciate a truly bad flick. (Streaming on Amazon Prime and PlutoTV)

Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin)
Wow, was this ever fantastic! After storming Hollywood with the success of The French Connection and The Exorcist, director William Friedkin could pretty much write his own ticket. He chose to make it a ticket to oblivion, by delivering a remake of the French classic The Wages of Fear, transforming it into a continent-hopping adventure flick with no real good guys and then giving it the oddly non-descriptive title Sorcerer. The film may have flopped at the box office and ended Friedkin’s brief run as the hottest American director around, but it more than delivers the goods as a gripping story of men driven to extremes.
Roy Schieder stars as one of a quartet of criminals, hustlers, and losers who find themselves on the lam in a run-down, grimy South American shanty town. The film gets off to a strong start as it tells the story of how these guys ended up there, ranging from a terrorist bombing to white collar financial misdeeds. Once they all end up at rock bottom, they’re given one last chance to earn enough money to free them from their situations. All they have to do is haul two truckloads of unstable dynamite through 200 miles of dense jungle!
Their perilous journey takes up the bulk of the second half of the film, highlighted by a harrowing scene in which they try to maneuver a truck across a rickety wooden bridge in the middle of a driving monsoon. It’s a crazy scene that works so well due to some incredible stunt work. If this scene was shot today, it would be green-screen CGI and would lose about 100% of its intensity and power. The fact that you know real people were actually trying to move a truck across that bridge lends a whole new level of insanity to the scene.
Friedkin sanded down many of the anti-capitalist edges from the French original, but the film still serves as a scathing indictment of what big business forces desperate people to do in the name of survival. This is powerful, ambitious, unique storytelling of a sort that simply doesn’t exist in Hollywood anymore.

The Three Muskateers: D’Artangnan/Milady (2023, Martin Bourboulon)
For fifty years now, the early 70’s Richard Lester-directed films have been the gold standard of “Three Musketeers” adaptations. (Although I do have a soft spot for Paul W.S. Anderson’s insane 2011 retelling, which dispenses with most elements of both the novel and objective reality, introducing flying clipper ships instead.) After 50 years, it’s time for Lester to step aside. These two films offer up a riveting, fantastic version of the novel that does the best job of telling the story of any adaptation. It lays out the players clearly and it’s easy to figure out what the stakes are for each of the players. Better yet, it’s a lavish production with fantastic costumes and eye-popping sets, but with a grounded, grimy, and realistic look that doesn’t lie about how dirty most everybody was. The fight scenes are great, often done in single takes that bring home the chaos of an actual battle. Whether you’re already a fan of the material or not, this is first-class staging of the classic story, and one that fans of historical fiction or swashbuckling action shouldn’t miss. (Streaming on Kanopy)

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)
Talk about a movie that hit me in my sweet spot. It’s a fast-paced action thriller set inside Hong Kong’s legendary Kowloon Walled City, a ramshackle, lawless city-unto-itself that existed outside the official jurisdiction or control of the HK government until it was torn down in 1994. The film isn’t just set in the 80’s, it’s a conscious throwback to the wild action films that put HK cinema on the map during that decade. Sharp-eyed genre fans will spot lots of subtle (and not so subtle) callbacks to classics from the golden age of HK action, but this flick is nobody’s nostalgia trip. It’s a thoroughly modern action stunner filled with long, intricate set pieces that put to shame most of what passes for “fight scenes” these days. The story revolves around a refugee who finds himself inside the Walled City with a satchel full of accidentally stolen cocaine (oops!). He promptly finds himself in the middle of another gang war, this time inside the walls. About an hour in, the whole flick gets turned on its head by a ridiculously improbable coincidence that is, in its own way, another throwback to the 80’s classics when you think about it. HK legend Sammo Hung gets one of his meatiest roles in a while as a scheming gang kingpin, and Louis Koo is fantastic (as usual) as his walled-in rival. Great stuff for HK action fans. (Streaming on Amazon Prime)