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Je n'aime pas dans les vieux films américains quand les conducteurs ne regardent pas la route. Et de ratage en ratage, on s'habitue à ne jamais dépasser le stade du brouillon. La vie n'est que l'interminable répétition d'une représentation qui n'aura jamais lieu.

My Favorite Movies of 2024: Regrets & Honorable Mentions

So, in looking at the movies I saw in 2024, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to essentially break them up into two tiers, so essentially a Top *insert number* and an Honorable Mentions. As a guy who likes to just talk about the art that I love, I have decided to basically free myself from the paradigm of keeping these lists to round numbers or what have you. I said last year that if there are nineteen movies that I think are great, I refuse to put a mediocre movie on the list just because I’m “supposed” to have a top twenty. Likewise, and this is the case this year, if there are twenty-one movies that I love, I’m not going to pit them all against in other in order to find the “worst” one so that I can have a top twenty by leaving one off.

So, this year, I have 5 regrets, 6 honorable mentions and 21 top movies.  

Here’s what those categories mean:

Regrets: movies from 2024 I haven’t gotten to that I suspect would have made these lists

Honorable Mentions: movies that had great moments or were even excellent overall, but also had flaws that held them back

Top Movies: movies that I absolutely loved, feel passionate about how great they are, and could talk about at length.

Let’s get started with the regrets and the honorable mentions.

Regrets:

The Brutalist

A Complete Unknown

A Different Man

Kinds of Kindness

Love Lies Bleeding

Honorable Mentions:

Alien: Romulus

An overall intense action thriller with some great performances, it was still a hair too long and at least one action set-piece should probably have been cut. 

Cuckoo

While the film doesn’t exactly come together, Hunter Schaefer’s central performance is brilliant and the film has a genuinely off-kilter, unsettling atmosphere and some great, memorable scares.

Late Night with the Devil

I loved the central performance from David Dastmalchian and the way the film committed completely to its premise, but it certainly had no idea how to end.

Longlegs

This movie had as unsettling an atmosphere as any I saw this year and Maika Monroe’s raw performance is just the anchor the movie needs, but I really disliked Nicolas Cage’s performance, so this falls to only an honorable mention based purely on his scenes.

Rebel Ridge

Another movie that stretched a solid 20 minutes too long and copped out with an overly neat ending, but the first half has some of the most suspenseful sequences I’ve seen in a long time and the chemistry between hero Aaron Pierre and villain Don Johnson absolutely crackles with tension.

Strange Darling

Smartly written and a lot of fun, this one could have used a better lead performance to ramp the intensity up but it’s still satisfying and features perhaps the strangest scene of the year with two characters sharing coffee and breakfast.

Okay, next time, I’ll get to my top tier.

My Favorite Books of 2024

I decided to do a quick update on my favorite books that I read in 2024 in, more or less, chronological order of when I read them.

This novella about lust, deception and murder was a re-read for me, but it's just still so startling in it's immediacy and I still find it's depiction of sociopathy deeply disturbing.

Went on a bit of a noir lit kick; this story of desperate people participating in a marathon dance contest is probably the bleakest book I read all year. Unremittingly grim with an incredible ending.

A corrupt investigative journalist is assigned to track down, well, himself in this fantastic mystery-thriller that is also a sharp satire on the journalism industry and an existential meditation on the way the big clock (aka time) is running out for all of us.

This book tracks the journey of a con-artist from the small time to the big and it's even better than the great movie adaptation from Guillermo del Toro; the main character is one of the great loathsome protagonists of all time and an amazing ending.

This almost 600-page epic is a multigenerational horror story of supernatural forces at play in a troubled Argentinian family set against the backdrop of Argentina's tumultuous political and social upheavals; bracing, deeply disturbing, beautifully written and translated.

The best graphic novel I’ve read in ages. A psychological portrait of a young woman with dreams of domestic bliss slowly coming apart at the seams; chilling and haunting.

The second novel in this great series of Brother Cadfael mysteries has a great premise based in real historical events; great mystery, great historical novel.

Part ghost story, part historical novel, part twisted romance, all morphed together into a beautiful meditation on grief; and all in less than 200 pages. Probably the most beautiful prose I encountered all year.

Phenomenal horror anthology with stories that demonstrate the wild span of horror sub-genres; one of the best anthologies I’ve ever read with only a couple of stories that were less than fantastic.

Methodical, beautifully written, deeply thoughtful time travel story that manages to have a completely unique sense of meditativeness and also surprising plot twists.

With this one completed, I’ve now read all five of Sarah Langan’s novels and she’s one of the most underrated authors ever in my opinion; this harrowing and incredibly scary book revolves around a cursed apartment building and it definitely kept me up for a few late nights.

Suspenseful & creative tale of a young woman and her encounter with a group of African immortals; great character work.

Often hilariously funny satire of academia and the university experience, this murder mystery also features surprisingly insightful exploration of mental disorders.

Superior even to the gripping film it inspired, this noir novel is a compelling, disturbing and ahead-of-its-time portrait of a misogynistic and rage-filled serial killer.

Closed the year out with a classic I’d never gotten around to before; Rosemary right up there with the best examples of a man writing a woman in all of literature; fast-paced, bracing, compelling even when you know what happens next.

Well, there we go; if I kept proper count, I read 45 books in 2024 and those are the 15 best. There were more that I liked or even liked quite a bit or found interesting, but these are kind of my top tiers, the ones I really loved.