This is an ongoing list – includes older movies I watched for the first time in the kinos. Making this is still in progress and will keep adding any other movies that I missed this year in this list over time.

• Longlegs: A measure for a good horror movie is for how long your butt stays planted in the seat after the curtains come down and Longlegs ensure that time is longer than the end credits sequence. The first words that came out of my mouth were, “wtf did I watch?”. And indeed, wtf did I watch? The horror is the kind that breathes on your neck in the shadows and makes you look at the corners of the screen and away, the tension simmering and managing to persist even after the screen fades to black. Nick Cage delivers a performance of the lifetime, a literal crawling under the skin of the character. One of 2024's favorite watches, going to see this again to deconstruct it's making because it wasn't apparent at all in the first viewing.
• Love Lies Bleeding: Rose Glass takes her inspirations seriously and crafts a taut romantic thriller of two lesbians played by dependable Kirsten Stewart and the absolute force of nature that is Katy O’Brian in this movie. Doesn’t waste any time in setting up the characters and gets the story on fire till the last frame. A thriller to revisit again the coming years.
• The Substance: Demi Moore is Margaret Qualley and Margaret Qualley is Demi Moore in this extreme body horror thriller from Coralie Fargeat. With a pulsating soundtrack and eye searing effects, chicken legs aren’t the same after this movie. Saw it slinking sideways and with one eye open in the kinos, not for the weak hearted but if you aren’t, the reward is fantastic.
• La Chimera
• La Cochina
• The Holdovers: The early January release seemed a bit off considering the movie is a perfect Christmas movie, part happy and part Paul Giamatti tearing you up, this movie is going to be my Christmas trump card for 2024, has a lot of rewatch value. Can Paul Giamatti stop being the Patron Saint of Adorable Losers? It’s getting a bit too much.
• Zone of Interest
• Poor Things
• Challengers: For two months in the summer, the OST by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was on repeat all day, everyday. Watched the movie itself four times and the story gets even richer with every subsequent movie. A near flawless tennis threesome, this is the movie I think I’ll remember well into the future when I think of 2024.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Kismet, Kismet (1987)
• Anora: Sean Baker refines his form further and presents a chaotic comedy with almost surgical skill. I find writing about Anora hard (and have another longer essay on the way) because the movie had me absorbed for its entire duration and made me want to watch it again and again. My top choice for 2024 with Challengers coming a close second.
• All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL): During my first viewing the film flowed over me, with its complexity of structure and character a dizzying experience. Payal Kapadia is a poet with a camera and extracts so much from her characters and the movie’s lead, the City of Bombay. A treat for the eye, the soul and the ear, the praise for AWIAL is well deserved. Needs another rewatch to deconstruct the full meaning of the movie and for me to form an opinion.
• The Outrun

#movies #bestof