Continuing my look at notable 2024 films, today I’m covering the Horror movies.
Every year I seem to have 11 titles vying for my list of top ten movies — 11 films I can’t imagine not making the cut. But one always has to drop to the ranks of the runners-up.
This year that movie is Strange Darling, writer-director JT Mollner’s devilishly clever cat-and-mouse thriller about an encounter with a serial killer.
Continuing my look at notable 2024 films, today I’m covering the Action movies.
The only film of this batch I seriously considered for my top ten isn’t really an action movie, but I included it here because, as a pulpy crime thriller, it’s different enough from the dramas I mentioned yesterday.
That movie is Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, a lesbian noir that pairs up the great Kristen Stewart with bodybuilder turned actress Katy O’Brien in a breakout performance. The two lovers get caught up in an organized crime ring run by Stewart’s character’s father (Ed Harris) and — naturally — things spiral out of control.
Continuing my look at notable 2024 films, today I’m covering the Dramas.
A few of these nearly cracked my top ten, including writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. The fact that this movie might have just as easily fallen into the Comedy category is a testament to his excellent screenplay, which is alternately hilarious and touching.
A Real Pain follows two cousins who were once very close but have become estranged as their lives moved in different directions. They reunite to visit their recently deceased grandmother’s childhood home during a Holocaust tour through Poland. Eisenberg’s David is painfully reserved while Kieran Culkin’s Benji is an unpredictable extrovert.
The film gets a lot of mileage out of exploring the way these two personality types frustrate and reward each other. This is a lovely character study and a real feather in the cap of Eisenberg as a filmmaker.
Before I get to my top ten movies of 2024, I want to acknowledge some of the other worthwhile films I saw last year. I watched more than a hundred 2024 movies, and over the rest of the week I will mention the ones in the 11-50 slots on my ranked list.
I’ll also single out the titles that had a real shot at the top ten but didn’t quite make the cut.
To cover so many titles, I’m splitting things up by genre, starting today with Comedy.
Today I’m offering up one more ‘If I ran the Oscars’ post, identifying some nominations in below the line categories I wish had made the cut.
In each of the five categories I’ve chosen, I will also identify the actual nominee I would drop to allow room for my substitution.
I’ll start with Best Original Song, a category that almost always ignores the year’s best songs and instead focuses on Best Picture contenders plus the latest lazy effort by Diane Warren.
Meet Me In Montauk 