It’s time to finally let go of last year with my annual summation of what I liked best about it. Well, some of that, anyway. And then some more of that. And then a bunch of stuff I missed and so I don’t know if they were any good or not. Confused? Each bit will make sense when we get to it, I’m sure.

Anyway, before we get stuck in, my usual reminders. All the movies I watched for the first time in 2024 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. And this is a ‘top ten’ in the sense that it’s the top 10% of my 2024 viewing. I watched 131 films for the first time last year, which means this time it’s a top thirteen.

I’ve called this “best films” because I always have, but this year I’ve definitely leant more into “favourites” in my decision-making. Maybe I always do, but when compiling this list, I was particularly conscious of choosing 4-star or borderline 5-star films I’d really enjoyed over 5-star films that I’d strongly admired.

I love a good sword fight, and this packs seven superb ones into a tight 85 minutes, while still finding room for some honour-based moral conflict. [Full review.]

The perspective on drag- and trans-related issues feels ridiculously pertinent for something made 30 years ago, but it’s really the inherent joy, humour, and a degree of iconoclasm that makes this enduringly enjoyable.

Some reviewers focused on the unsubtle social commentary, though I’d argue it’s only a significant problem if you disagree with it. Either way, set that aside and this is clearly an accessible edge-of-your-seat slow-burn thriller.

In my Letterboxd review I commented that it’s “the kind of film I give 4 stars then put on my end-of-year top ten anyway” and, well, lookee here. I also said “it’s a stonkingly fun fantasy action-adventure flick whether you know the lore / rules [of D&D] or not”, and that’s also true.

By all rights a live-action Barbie movie should be kiddie-aimed toy-advertisement slop, but put it in the hands of genuine auteurs (i.e. producer Margot Robbie and cowriter/director Greta Gerwig) and you end up with a movie that actually has something to say about women’s (and men’s) place in our world and how the toys we give to children have a role in reflecting and shaping — or perhaps distracting from — that reality. Lest that makes it sound like a lecture, it’s still a witty brightly-coloured entertainment. [Full review.]

The only 2024 film to make my list this year is an hour-long anime about the evolving friendship between two girls as they develop from drawing manga for their school newsletter to producing it professionally… which is also kinda beside the point, but to say too much about where the story goes and what it’s really about would lessen its impact. It also serves a reminder that films don’t need an epic length to be powerful — let movies be as long as they need to be (and sometimes, that means let them be short).

This won seven Oscars and sits on both the IMDb and Letterboxd Top 250s, and yet I’d argue it’s underrated; by which I guess I really mean you never hear anyone talk about it, which lessens its significance. It’s one of the last films from the IMDb list that I’ve watched for that reason: it was never a movie others made me feel I had to see. But I’m so glad I got there in the end, because it might just be a masterpiece, which depicts the fallout for American servicemen and their families in the wake of World War 2, via a trio of compelling storylines and across-the-board quality performances.

This self-described “Oriental Western” remixes Sergio Leone (the title is no coincidence) with a dash of Tarantino-esque modernism and a sprinkling of Mad Max dynamism, powered by whatever incredible energy has made South Korea a breeding ground for remarkable cult-hit movies over the past… well, quarter-century, now. It might technically be derivative (as I said, the Leone allusion is deliberate, as are other obvious homages), but the result still feels fresh, exciting, and boundlessly fun.

My list almost swings from one extreme to another now, as the next couple of films are Very Serious. First, Jean-Pierre Melville’s truth-based thriller about the French Resistance. Time has perhaps diluted the Anglosphere’s view of France in World War 2, thanks to comedies like ‘Allo ‘Allo! and that one oft-repeated Simpsons joke about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (if you doubt the significance of one gag, it has a Wikipedia entry which summarises its impact), but Army of Shadows is a brutal reminder of the dangers faced and sacrifices made by the Resistance. It’s a fittingly tense and uncompromising film, at times even uncomfortable, but the cumulative effect is an unparalleled thriller.

Similarly to Army of Shadows, Denis Villeneuve’s breakthrough film takes a real-life conflict (although here it’s anonymised into a fictional country) to examine the fallout of horrendous acts of violence, but in the cinematic form of an engrossing mystery thriller. Wanting those answers helps pull the viewer through the film’s bleaker sequences, including a bus-based centrepiece that is hellish, heartrending, and incredibly produced. And when we finally get the answers, they’re no less surprising and shocking than the rest. [Full review.]

Westerns have never been a particular favourite genre of mine. I don’t think I even saw one until I studied them for an A level module (Back to the Future Part III excepted). When I do watch them, I assume my taste will err more towards the revisionism of Spaghetti Westerns or more modern takes. Perhaps it does overall, but that doesn’t mean a classic Western can’t still hit the spot — and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine most certainly does that. As one of the earliest cinematic depictions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, it may not be historically accurate, but that scarcely matters when the entire film is so on-point otherwise. Heck, even the day-for-night photography looks good. Day-for-night never looks good! Remarkable.

If all you’ve seen of RRR is the Oscar-winning Naatu Naatu sequence, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s about Indian bros overcoming colonial bullies with the power of dance. And, well, you’d be correct, partly. Loosely (oh so loosely) based on the life of two real revolutionaries, RRR is also an action movie with sequences of unleashed imagination — the kind of over-the-top reality-defying CGI-aided fun Western filmmakers seem to be incapable of conjuring. It’s also a first-rate bromance, full of big emotion in its undulations of friendship and betrayal. Emotion so big it can only be conveyed through song, because of course it’s a musical too. Is there anything RRR isn’t? Yeah: subtle. But who needs subtlety when you’re this badass?

Regular readers may be aware that I don’t rewatch films all that often (that’s why I’ve had various strategies over the past few years to prompt rewatches) and I certainly don’t rewatch things quickly — if I watch a film twice within about five years, it feels like a fairly quick revisit (for a somewhat-timely example: I feel I watched Home Alone on a recent Christmas. I checked: it was 2017). This background is to help you understand the significance of the fact that, after I finished watching Bottoms for the first time, I immediately put it on again. I can remember one other occasion in my life when I’ve watched the same film twice back-to-back (my third and fourth viewings of Serenity, when it was screened by my university film society). Is that reason enough to declare Bottoms my favourite first-time watch of 2024? Not really (any number of factors could influence such a decision, not just “that was so perfect I must break the habit of a lifetime and watch it again immediately”), and I did pause to consider if I was letting that one aspect influence my decision (I concluded not). But it does help indicate how much I enjoyed it, and that’s why it’s #1.

As usual, I’ll take a moment to highlight a few other films.

Traditionally I don’t list “some more films I almost put in my top list” in this section, because if I’m going to do that, why not make the main list longer and rank them properly? That said, ranking is an imprecise art — on a different day, I might’ve erred a different way and my top 13 would be in a different order and/or include some different films. So, with that in mind, the films that survived my long list of 46 to be among the final considerations were (in strictly alphabetical order) American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, Dune: Part Two, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Now, to recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t; either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Bottoms, RRR, My Darling Clementine, American Fiction, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Yi Yi, Army of Shadows, The Swordsman of All Swordsmen, Incendies, Rosemary’s Baby, The Cranes Are Flying, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. (The first three being my eventual top three of the year is a whopping coincidence, not some kind of bizarre conspiracy, I promise.)

Finally, as always, a mention for the 14 films that earned 5-star ratings this year. (In my stats post I said it was 13, because I slipped up. None of these ratings are truly locked until I post a review, anyway (sometimes the process of writing the review causes me to reassess), so I’ll leave it as it is.) Nine of them made it into the top ten, including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Army of Shadows, The Best Years of Our Lives, Bottoms, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Incendies, Look Back, My Darling Clementine, and RRR. The other five were American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films from 2024 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures — with the caveat that I’ve almost certainly forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy.

Abigail
Alien: Romulus
Anora
Back to Black
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Better Man
The Brutalist
Carry-On
Challengers
Civil War
Conclave
Deadpool & Wolverine
Despicable Me 4
Drive-Away Dolls
Emilia Pérez
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Gladiator II
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Here
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
I Saw the TV Glow
It Ends with Us
Joker: Folie à Deux
Juror #2
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Kraven the Hunter
Kung Fu Panda 4
Longlegs
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Love Lies Bleeding
Madame Web
Mean Girls
Megalopolis
Moana 2
Monkey Man
Mufasa: The Lion King
Nosferatu
Paddington in Peru
Queer
Rebel Ridge
Red One
The Substance
Transformers One
Trap
Twisters
Venom: The Last Dance
Wicked: Part I
The Wild Robot

Good golly, that’s another year over! In terms of the history of this blog, 2024 will be remembered as the year I completed my new-style Challenge for the first time. But I can’t rest there: it’s time to try to do it all over again for 2025.