1. The Phoenician Scheme — The violence is Looney Tunes, the business negotiations are Three Stooges, the religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of this for any other director’s work. Another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.

2. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both.

3. The Plague — The scariest movie I watched all October was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a water polo summer camp. I don’t know if it qualifies as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Kids are monsters, man; be thankful you never have to be one again.

4. Weapons — Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.

5. One Battle After Another— 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline felt like a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before being chopped up and sold for parts). I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio action spectacle at this point in my life, but it’s encouraging to know the genre can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. It’s funny & sexy too, improbably.

7. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. He may be an annoying twerp, but lil Timmy Chalmette really is going places.

8. The Ugly Stepsister — A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the neverending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.

9. The Shrouds — Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.

10. Dead Lover— Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Dead Lover pairs some of the most gorgeous, perverted images of the year with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates each punchline with ADR’d fart noises.

11. Fucktoys — A low-budget, high-concept horror comedy about a sex worker struggling to earn the cash needed for a ceremony to lift the mysterious curse that’s constantly derailing her life. The fantastical Trashtown setting will likely earn this a lot of comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously, garishly bratty.

12. Rats!— A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but I don’t know that any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.

13. The Surfer — An Ozploitation throwback in which a workaholic yuppie drives himself mad trying to prove his manliness to a beachful of toxic, brainwashed bullies. As the Aussie sun wears him down, it gradually transforms into Nicolas Cage’s version of The Swimmer, retracing Burt Lancaster’s surreal heat-stroke journey into his own macho psyche and hating everything he sees.

14. Sirāt — When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.

*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke

15. Sister Midnight— A Mumbai-set horror story about what happens when a live firecracker gets married off to a dud, quickly going insane with the boredoms & frustrations of isolation as a housewife. It would make a great pairing with Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love in that respect, although I dare say it’s got a cooler look and its story takes more surprising turns.

16. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man— A microbudget, based-on-a-true-story comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers like that. What’s even more surprising is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all the biggest laughs; it’s the custom-made parody songs about piss & shit, all of them comedy gold.

17. The Naked Gun— There was something infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pam Anderson’s tabloid romance that made this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise. It was already a generous enough gift that the PR power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85min comedy with my friends, but it was also fun to get worked by their kayfabe love affair in the headlines outside the theater. They made me their snowman.

18. Grand Theft Hamlet — Starts as a document of an absurd, highly specific art project (staging a community-theatre production of Hamlet entirely inside GTA Online), then quickly becomes a broader story about how hard it is to complete any collaborative art project. The circumstances are always stacked against your success, in this case literalized by people firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to rehearse.

19. Boys Go to Jupiter — Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City. I’m still amazed that it screened in neighborhood art houses instead of premiering on Steam Deck consoles.

20. The Colors Within— Exceptionally quiet for a story about the formation of a rock ‘n’ roll synth pop band, and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. When all that restraint melts away during the final performance, though, it feels good enough to make you cry.

HM. Mr. Melvin — A new edit of Toxic Avengers II &III, (both initially released in 1989), now Frankensteined together into one unholy monstrosity. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, but I can’t help but admire this one as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of III, not a single frame from IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board.

-Brandon Ledet