Damian Writes About Stuff

Welcome back! It’s time for some regularly scheduled movie content. It took awhile, but I finally watched enough 2024 movies to feel like I can make an informed top ten list, making it just in time before the Oscars. 2024 was another great film watching year for me, in which I watched a total of 143 movies, beating out the previous year’s total of 122! Honestly, up until around November I wasn’t sure that there were enough movies worth putting in this years list, but after marathoning through the awards season, this year’s field of movies is just as strong, if not stronger than last year.

Since there are no rules but the rules I make for myself, I’m ranking my favorite 12* movies of the year. As well as including some of the more memorable ones of the year that I want to highlight, which I’ll dive into now:

Memorable Movies:

Twisters: I was looking for a popcorn movie to watch with my brothers, and this absolutely delivered. Despite there being increasingly more damaging tornadoes caused by anthropogenic climate change in this movie, the main villain is a stereotypically evil MIT founder bro —10/10. Anyways, it had enough heart to make a Kansas boy shed a tear, and my only regret is not seeing it in an immersive 7D theater.

Madame Web: Legitimately one of the funniest movies I have ever watched. It was insane how little sense anything made, but I’ll never know how it ends because my flight landed with 15 minutes left in the movie. Someone else on the flight watched this back to back with Aftersun, which is a different kind of insanity.

Megalopolis: This was supposed to be Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus, a story about an architect putting everything on the line to bring his vision to reality. Somehow, it ended up being more baffling than Madame Web but much less funny, except for the line where Adam Driver is ranting and says “So go back to the Clurbbbb“. It attempts to be deep about what it means to make art, leaving a legacy, and offering social commentary, but everything feels so surface-level and artificial (the CGI goes crazy in this). The highlight of the urbanist utopia constructed at the end of the movie was a moving sidewalk, like the people movers we have at airports now. I gotta respect Coppola for putting so much into this, I just wish it was better.

No Other Land: An incredibly powerful documentary about what its like to live under settler colonialism in the West Bank, in a village slated for destruction. Filmed by young activists who are putting their freedoms and lives at risk to show what they go through every day.

Top 12 Movies:

12. The Brutalist[First Half]: I want to start with the positives first, this has amazing cinematography, bomb music, and it portrays the immigrant struggle and the feeling of being unwanted so well. Its long, a four hour commitment, but the first half made me excited, only for the second only to be a disappointment. There were glimpses of greatness, but it just feels messy and unresolved, leaving me wondering what the point of it all was. I think it needs a rewatch, but that probably wont happen anytime soon.

11. A Real Pain: A movie about how people deal with their grief and the emotions evoked tracing back their roots differently. Two cousins take a guided tour through Poland culminating in a visit to their recently deceased grandmothers childhood home. This movie was beautifully shot, portrayed each of the locations in a very picturesque way.

10. The Sweet East: This is a surreal movie about a student escaping her life and embarking on an odyssey-like journey up the East Coast. She encounters a bunch of strange characters along the way who try to control her in different ways, each sorta representing a different archetype of Internet personas.

9. Look Back: An anime film about two girls working on comics together and what it’s like to grow up. There’s a lot more to it than that but I don’t want to spoil it, you have to watch it for yourself. I’ve read a bunch of Fujimoto’s work and was excited that this was getting adapted, and it blew my expectations out of the water with the animation and music.

8. Nickel Boys: This might be one of the more divisive movies of the year because of how the entire movie is shown from the first person perspectives of the two main boys. It was a bit hard for me to follow at first, especially when they started swapping perspectives, but once it clicked I understood why it’s a very effective way of presenting this story of injustice. I almost didn’t include it on this list, but the more time I’ve had to think about it, the more I’ve liked it.

7. I’m Still Here: An incredible story about resilience when fighting against fascism and faceless government bureaucracy. It follows a family in 1970s Brazil where the father is arrested by the military, and the rest of the family does everything they can to bring him back home.

6. Conclave: Set in a contemporary-day Vatican, it centers around the election of the new Pope after the sudden death of the current one. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited to see this one, but I thought it would be cathartic to watch the week of the presidential election. I ended up laughing so much during this. There were so many absurd juxtapositions (the vaping anti-woke cardinal was my personal favorite) and the way all these grown men acted so catty was hilarious. Shout out to all the Gossip Girl and Brat edits I saw of this.

5. A Different Man: This is a very surreal-feeling movie. It starts out feeling grounded in reality, exploring the life of a man with an abnormal appearance, but becomes more absurd as he transforms to appear more normal. Eventually unrecognizable, he starts a new life, leaving everyone in his old one to believe he’s dead, but he cant stay away. There’s a meta aspect of losing a role playing his former self in a play, to a different man who looks like his previous self. Its strange, sometimes confusing, but thought provoking.

4. Challengers: In the most reductive way, this can be distilled down as “the tennis threesome movie”, and while accurate, it doesn’t capture how freaking good it is. The story bounces back and forth in time during a tennis match between the Pat and Art showing how their lives and relationships with Tashi lead up to this moment. It’s absolutely criminal that this didn’t receive any award nominations, especially for the soundtrack. Shout out to Queer, Luca’s other movie from this year. I personally didn’t enjoy it as much, but Daniel Craig really committed to the bit.

3. Anora: I really love The Florida Project so I was excited to see what Sean Baker could do with a larger-scale movie. Mikey Madison plays a sex worker who after a Vegas getaway, marries the immature son of Russian oligarchs and then has to deal with the consequences. The middle third of this movie is probably the funniest sequence I watched this year, after Madame Web of course. The ending was emotional, and I really think it will benefit from multiple watches.

2. Dune Part Two: Seen in IMAX 70mm, twice, an experience I will not forget. Its crazy how well this was made and it just feels right, every character, scene, and song is iconic. This is the kind of movie that will still sell out theaters when they show it again in 20 years. No Idea how Villeneuve will pull of Messiah, but ill see you there opening day.

1. Sing Sing: There was no doubt this year what my top movie would be after I saw this. At a high level, it’s about prisoners in a Rehabilitation Through the Arts program putting on a production of a play. We see how doing this helps them regain a sense of humanity in the face of a system that is set up for you to fail and give up. I went in blind, so I wont spoil the ending, but the reveal left me jaw-dropped, like it was in front of you the whole time but so it didn’t even cross my mind. I also watched this twice; the second time I had the absolute pleasure of watching it as part of a double feature with Emila Perez. I wish I had time to talk about that movie but gotta wrap this up.

Last Category: “Movies I haven’t watched yet due to not being available or just because I was lazy, but I probably would like”:

The Apprentice: Sebastian Stan really killed it this year, between A Different Man and getting nominated for his performance in this movie portraying Trump.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies: Not that many of Asian films on the list this year. It sometimes feels like it takes some extra time for the good ones to be discovered and shared, this, seemingly, being one of them.

Final Thoughts:

I was comparing my top three from last year, and unintentionally, or maybe subconsciously, it’s spiritually similar to this year’s:

We have our big budget IMAX epic: Oppenheimer / Dune Part Two

Sex positive story with a female lead by a male director: Poor Things / Anora

An emotional driven drama involving the legal system: Anatomy of a Fall / Sing Sing

Thanks for reading! If you want movie updates from me more than once a year check out my Letterboxd. There’s a ton of hyped up movies coming, and I’m excited to see what lands.