The films of 2024

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The past year lacked anything like “Barbenheimer” in more ways than one. No two films captured the cultural imagination like Barbie and Oppenheimer did in 2023, much less one. What’s more, most of the biggest films of the year were either remakes of some kind or additions to preexisting franchises. 

Looking back on the list of movies I saw in 2024, it was jarring how many contained a colon in their title. In alphabetical order, those were: A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus, Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. I couldn’t bring myself to watch Joker: Folie à Deux (since lead actors Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga themselves said it was garbage). 

The above list doesn’t include other prequels/sequels that I watched during the year, including Gladiator II and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Meanwhile, my kids saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, Moana 2 and Wicked without me. 

I can’t stomach Marvel movies, so I skipped Deadpool & Wolverine — though God knows I saw enough clips and promos and trailers and memes that I’m sure I got the gist. As for Twisters, I figured I’d see a more damaging wind rip through the Capitol Mall on Jan. 20.

My biggest regret was that I wasn’t able to catch Robert Eggers’ take on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu by presstime. Soon, dear readers. Soon.

To say that 2024 was a year of cinematic retreads is an understatement — even after more than a decade of theater offerings dominated by recycled intellectual property.

Courtesy photo.

Regardless, I viewed one truly original movie of 2024 that, after much consideration, made it into my top position: Civil War. Director Alex Garland’s stunning, grimdark rumination on near-term American civilizational collapse was a masterclass in teasing out the moral ambiguities of politics, the media and loyalty — and how different generations process those vagaries. Tightly written and paced, beautifully shot, harrowing and at times possessed of a certain gallows’ humor, it’s a must-see, especially going into 2025.

Of the prequels/sequels/reimaginings I took in during the year, Dune: Part Two and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga took the other top spots. 

Both depict ruthless, desperate struggles fought on desertified landscapes with seemingly unlikely young heroes at their core who go on to do big, bloody things. Both were visually arresting, expertly paced and left me wanting more additions to their respective franchises and revisiting past installments (which is almost never the case).

Everything else I saw either in the theater or streamed at home paled in comparison.

Alien: Romulus came closest to earning a spot on my best-of list, but it didn’t offer much to the constellation of related films dating back 45 years. While it provided a little more nuance to the kind of galaxy in which the Alien movies play out, it was yet another “haunted house in space” setup, complete with a few androids with inscrutable motives.

Good visuals and OK acting, but if you’ve seen Alien and Aliens, you don’t really need to see Alien: Romulus, unless you want to see how those movies would play out as a mashup. 

I enjoyed Godzilla x Kong, but only insofar as it was a mindless slugfest between “big dumb beasts,” as I put it in my review at the time. However, it’s the most lackluster of the franchise so far. In the Big-Smart-Beasts Department, I’d almost forgotten I saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes until I looked at a list of films that came out in 2024. That’s my “recommendation.”

Gladiator II was Gladiator with half the soul, 100% more rabid baboons and killer sharks, and a plot that becomes entirely predictable no later than the 25-minute mark. It’s still fun to look at, though not for theater prices. 

When I claim that I “watched” A Quiet Place: Day One and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I mean that in the academic sense: Their scenes played on a screen and my eyes processed their occurrence. I don’t think I made it past 20 minutes in either.

Other notables: Conclave and The Return — two Ralph Fiennes-led vehicles — left me lukewarm. The first was an overlong “thriller” about the selection of a new pope that forgot to add the “thrills,” and the second was a retelling of the myth of Odysseus that took itself so seriously that it forgot about the mythology. And also any real “thrills.” Plus a criminally underemployed Juliette Binoche.

Finally, my Oscar nomination in the “WTF Did I Just Watch?” category goes to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which is supposed to be “a fable” about the decline, fall and salvation of “New Rome” (a.k.a. New York City as the U.S. writ large). 

It features the kind of cast only Coppola could assemble, including: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, D.B. Sweeney, even freakin’ Dustin Hoffman. It also has the luminous Nathalie Emmanuel in a leading role, but somehow makes no sense at all until the very end, when that “sense” falls so flat it seems like a joke on the audience. 

Call it Mega-slop-olis or Mega-flop-olis — no matter, skip it and watch Civil War if you want a more intellectually honest vision for the American trajectory.