Honorable mentions: 

• Nosferatu: I’m still digesting this one. A technical achievement, to be certain. Dreamlike in a hypnotic way, such that it almost lulls one to sleep in the same way that Suspiria does—yes. Marvelously composed and photographed, without a doubt. But did I like it? It’s been nearly a week since I saw it and I’m still not certain. I’m digesting it, but I think I may not have enjoyed it at all. I’ll have more thoughts, I think, by the time that we record our first Lagniappe podcast episode of the new year. In the meantime, read Brandon’s review here.
• She is Conann: An irreverent reimagining of the mythology of Conan (the Barbarian, the Destroyer, the Cimmerian, and more) as a series of reincarnated women, this one is going to end up on several of this year’s lists (and undoubtedly at the top of Brandon’s). It’s worth seeking out. Read Brandon’s review here.
• Madame Web: Look, I love this movie. I love every strange little moment of it. I love how awkward Dakota Johnson is with children, I love her bizarre relationship with canned soda, and I love her whispering “I hope the spiders were worth it, mom.” I shaved my face for the first time in over five years just so that I could portray this character for Halloween. I loved it so much on my first screening of it that I wrote a 5-star review, and then I also forced Alli and Brandon to watch it so that we could discuss it on the podcast (they were … less interested). This movie changed my brain chemistry, but I know what would happen to me in the street if I put this where I really wanted to on this countdown (hint: it would be number one). 

20. Civil War

For a long time, I viewed people who enjoyed clowning on Alex Garland as goofy weirdos lacking media literacy. With the release of information about his next picture, Warfare, which at this time appears to be yet another apologia for America’s practice of undermining the sovereignty of other nations, I may have to reevaluate. Alternatively, that film may end up being another subversion of what it appears to be, just as Civil War is. I did wait to see it until it would reap zero financial benefit from me due to the studio’s choice to use AI in generating posters for the film (I’m not going to give any ground on this front), and although I feared it would be too engrossed in “both sides” discourse about a potential future for the nation, I was pleased that it was nothing of the sort. In a movie for which politics is so solidly a part of its foundation, it isn’t about its onscreen politics as much as it is about the politics of observation. To paraphrase Brandon from one of our podcast episodes, this is a movie about the psychological complexity of those who document humanity in its moments of most extreme inhumanity. Decades ago, Frantz Fanon wrote “Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor,” which is something that feels more relevant now than it ever has before, especially in light of our ongoing rightward shift and the contemporary legacy media treatment of the brave souls putting their lives on the line for the liberation of Palestine. What Civil War does is explore that concept through the lens of photojournalism, following a group of people whose lives are spent in the pursuit of unearthing and exposing the worst things that human beings do to one another, while never taking direct action to prevent those atrocities. None of the characters here are cowardly, as they throw themselves into the worst situations imaginable in order to ensure that the horrors thereof are not occluded behind the fog of war, so we must ask if they are traitors, and if so, against what? Read Brandon’s review here.

19. Gasoline Rainbow

An unexpected gem that I managed to catch at SXSW, there’s nothing “new” about Gasoline Rainbow. In conversation with a much less meaningful and thoughtful picaresque that came out this year, this is almost the platonic ideal of a coming of age indie, but that lack of novelty doesn’t detract from the overall quality. This is a road picture about teenagers and starring teenagers, all unknowns, whose real lives seem to form and inform the characters that they’re playing. Their dreams are realistically small: to escape from their isolated home town for a part of the last summer that they have together before they enter the crushing adult life that they see around them. There are misadventures and setbacks, but not much in the way of tension; there’s never a moment where you fear for their safety on the road, there’s never a cut back to a concerned parent panicking about their child or trying to find them, and the question of whether they’ll get to the coast as they are trying to do is largely irrelevant. Even if there’s no one here who reminds you of who you were as a teenager, you’ll still recognize a time that you’ve left behind, and find both melancholy and triumph in watching a group of kids prepare to move on from it as well. Read my review here. 

18. It’s What’s Inside

This remains a film that is difficult to talk about without giving away too much of its premise, so in order to preserve the early-in-the-film narrative train-jump, I’ll try to explain its vibe. This is a film about how regret and envy so frequently lead to self-damnation, but also about how some amount of acceptance of those failures as part of human nature can allow us to vault over our failings into something different. It’s also frequently quite inventive, as one of the film’s recurring stylistic choices is to have multiple characters try to recount events from the past and have the visualization of the various remembrances, corrections, and fuzzy details be edited in real time to match the dialogue. It’s Rashomon for the generation of short attention spans, it’s Alice Sheldon’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” for those who are currently living through the dystopian reality of self-actualization via social media’s psychologically predatory algorithms, and it’s Bodies Bodies Bodies for those who want that same “trapped at a party you can’t leave” feeling but with an unexpected science fiction bent. Read my review here. 

17. Wicked Little Letters

In interbellum England, the friendship between staid, repressed, religious busybody Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman) and her neighbor, the recently-arrived Irish migrant Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), has fallen apart. Although the younger woman’s brusque, vulgar manner initially brought a refreshing air that loosened Swan’s uptight rigidity, a misunderstanding and underhanded action on Swan’s father’s part has soured their relationship to the point of bitterness. And it’s based on a true story! You might be wondering why a film with a plot summary that reads like thirty percent of the content of BBC’s iPlayer app is on this list; it’s because this movie is filthily hilarious. In this little community, someone is posting “poison pen” letters to various upstanding (and not so upstanding) citizens that are riddled with the most inventive invectives that would make even the late Jerry Springer blush. In his review, Brandon nominated the film as a kind of John Waters movie for the Downton Abbey crowd, and I had a very similar thought during my screening, as I couldn’t help but think about the title character’s obscene phone calls in Serial Mom. Of course, Edith is the recipient of a large portion of these letters and Rose is blamed and set up to take the fall, while the film also follows Anjana Vasan as the officer attempting to solve the mystery despite an obstinately patriarchal justice system, the incompetence of which is an impediment at every step. Definitely worth the watch. 

16. Strange Darling

This one has gotten a pretty mixed reception, and I can see the validity in the complaints. Told in an anachronic order, Strange Darling is, on the one hand, a film predicated on “subverting expectations,” as its various twists rely upon the viewer entering the narrative with certain preconceived notions about who commits violence against whom. The problem is that those “preconceived notions” are simply an observation about violence against women in our society, and which are thus not biases so much as they are statistics. It could be argued that this is entirely the wrong time and social climate for a movie that trivializes violence against women; it would be uncharitable but arguably accurate to call it incel-adjacent. What I’m trying to say here is that no one who is calling this movie sexist is inherently wrong, even if my reading is different. On the other hand, Strange Darling as a film is something that I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of. Former actor JT Mollner has a keen eye for what works that was no doubt honed by his years on the other side of the camera (along with fellow actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi), and every bit of this is a technical achievement, from sound design to the decisions of where to cut each nonlinear chapter to ensure maximum engagement and interest to the casting. Willa Fitzgerald’s performance as “The Lady” is stunning here, and all of the potential that viewers saw in her in The Fall of the House of Usher is on full display as she alternatively plays cunning, confused, abused, and malicious, often all on top of one another. (Confession: I did watch some of the Scream MTV program that she was apparently the star of, because of my long-documented love of Scream, but if you put a gun to my head and demanded that I remember a single detail from it other than that it featured Tracy Middendorf, I’d just have to say “shoot me.”) Kyle Gallner is also quite fun here, as he’s demanded to play malice at points and vulnerability at others, and manages it with aplomb, even if he is outshone by his co-star. It’s funny, scary, and sexy. For an alternative opinion, check out Brandon’s review here. 

15. I Saw the TV Glow

I came to be a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan through a fairly roundabout way. For my 2002 birthday, I got an Xbox, which came with a yearlong subscription to the official Xbox magazine, which in turn contained a demo disc with every issue. Sometime that summer, I got the disc with the demo of the upcoming Buffy video game on it, and I enjoyed it enough that I saved up to buy the game itself when it came out. I was completely out of the loop on Buffy, the characters, and the associated lore, but I loved the game so much that when I discovered that the show was in late night syndication on our local Fox affiliate, I started recording it every weekend. Growing up in an incredibly strict Christian household, my ability to watch it depended upon my ability to keep this newfound love a secret from my father, who had already had a conniption about the BtVS video game’s Game Over screen simply using the word “Resurrecting” as it reloaded to your last savepoint. This is one of the few instances in which my love for something “feminine” wasn’t contentious because of that femininity, but there were plenty of other examples of my being punished for having insufficiently masculine interests which I could detail but we’ve already come this far without talking about the actual film on the list, so I’ll try to move a little faster. In the winter of 2007, my bandmate, neighbor, and friend Alicia and I were living in the same fourplex, and we would often convince ourselves to get out and get some exercise by “going on patrol” like Buffy did, complete with stakes that we hid up our sleeves; when we didn’t have gas that winter because of our slumlord, we would pool our money together so she (who was of age) could get us a bottle of Southern Comfort, which we would drink until we weren’t cold anymore and fall asleep watching my Buffy DVDs, including the same box set that TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun posted a photo of on their Twitter. The show meant a lot to me, and I dearly wish that I had the opportunity to craft the kind of love letter for it that Schoenbrun has with I Saw the TV Glow, especially since, if I tried to do it now, it would only read as a ripoff of their film. I see so much of myself in Justice Smith’s Owen: my secrecy, the constancy of self-denial while living in the shadow of an ignorant and rage-fueled father, the discovery of an escapist fantasy through associated material rather than the text itself, and the escape to within the fantasy of not being alone in the world and how sharing that fantasy world with another person mitigates that loneliness, even over great distance and after great time. I understand that this blurb isn’t really about the movie as much as it is my relationship with the metatext, but here we are. I saw I Saw the TV Glow, and in so doing, I saw both myself and the me that might have been. Read Brandon’s review here. 

14. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

I don’t have a lot to add to my thoughts on this one, as we talked about it so recently on a Lagniappe episode of the podcast. Check out our conversation about it here.

13. The People’s Joker

At Thanksgiving with friends this year, one of my closest companions was venting about how much he hated this one. Earlier in the year, I reconnected with an old lover (whose opinions I greatly respect) over coffee who asked me “Did you really like The People’s Joker?” with great incredulity. And look—I get it. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of images from this film that, taken out of context, would look like a feverish nightmare or a badly rendered student film. But film is more than images, and I’ve rarely seen Roger Ebert’s adage that films “are like a machine that generates empathy” come true so clearly in a director’s work. If there’s anyone in this world who’s earned the right to be sick to fucking death of Batman and Batman-associated products and projects, it would be me, a man who spent this entire year watching so, so, so many DC animated films. And yet, after getting so sick of typing the word “Batman” that I was convinced I would have an aneurysm if I ever had to do it again, I’m here, doing just that. Writer/director/star Vera Drew has made something truly transformative here, taking pieces of the narrative surrounding one of the most well-known characters in Western fiction and thus one of the most widely shared common cultural touchstones and using those building blocks to craft one of the most personal, confessional, and intimate portraits of the self ever committed to film. It’s a marvel. Read my review here. 

12. Dune: Part Two

From my review: “This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there[….] Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more.”

11. Last Things

From my review: “Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet).” 

10. Monkey Man

From my review: “Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well[….] The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.”

9. Love Lies Bleeding

From my review: “Where this film picks up the torch from [director Rose] Glass’s earlier work is in the way that we are once again made privy to the internal life of an emotionally and mentally unwell person. Jackie is a fascinating character. When we first meet her, she’s using her body to get what she needs, and is at peace with that. She has history, but no origin; the earliest part of her life that she mentions is being adopted at age thirteen (by parents that no longer speak to her and who call her a “monster”), and she tells Lou that she turned to bodybuilding as a way to change her body due to fatphobic bullying. Like Maud [from Glass’s earlier film St. Maud], she’s running from something, but unlike her, she also has a goal in mind and is relying on herself to get there, self-actualizing where Maud turned to a hollow, false spirituality. […] There should be no mistaking that this is still a brutal movie. It’s not one for those with queasy stomachs, and I’m not just talking about all of the disgusting mullets (of which there are … many), […] but just in case you’re somehow floating around out there with the idea that this is more romance than grit, I want to make it clear that this is a ferocious, vicious piece of work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

It’s a genuine puzzle to me why this movie isn’t more fondly remembered. Was it simply that all the love that people had for Fury Road had died down in the near-decade interlude between that film and this one? Do people have Anya Taylor-Joy fatigue? (Couldn’t be me.) Is it that, as we get closer and closer to a potential future that’s as apocalyptically brutal as this one, the appeal of this kind of film is sputtering out like an engine that’s nearing an empty tank? This movie was a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that was easily the equal of Fury Road. I love this Furiosa bildungsroman, the way that she had as close to a luxurious experience as possible after her childhood capture, the way that she narrowly avoided becoming one of Immortan Joe’s sex slaves and instead found herself among the rabble and forged her way up through talent and ingenuity. It’s truly epic, a Ben-Hur filled with mutants that trades in chariots for chrome. Read my review here.

7. La Bête

I’ve been recommending this to everyone that I know with the description that it’s “like a mean-spirited Cloud Atlas.” That film (and David Mitchell’s novel of the same name from which it is adapted), spans six stories across an array of different time periods: near-future Seoul, an ocean voyage during the era of American chattel slavery, 1930s Belgium, a future post-society Hawai’i, etc. In each one of these times and places, the same group of actors portray different characters, an indication to the audience that these scenarios are occupied by the same souls which are destined to reunite in some way in every reincarnation. It’s a beautiful thing there, this eternal recurrence. In La Bête (aka The Beast), this constancy and continuity of being tethered to the same “soulmate” throughout all of time is instead a source of horror, a kind of damnation in which one could find themselves trapped in an eternal, recurring loop of being forced to deal with the same shitty man for every foreseeable lifetime. Léa Seydoux does phenomenal work as a woman who, feeling stuck in a rut, finds herself digging into an even more existential hole when she undergoes a procedure to “cleanse” her DNA, which only serves to expose her to her past lives and the choices thereof. A intriguing recurring concept of “dolls” appears throughout; her husband in the 1910 timeframe is a dollmaker, the 2014 version of herself housesits at a place with a strange animatronic doll toy, and the future version of herself is given a companion in the form of a fully adult human woman who acts as her “doll.” This is a dense text, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Read Brandon’s review here. 

6. Problemista

Not a week goes by that I don’t think about this movie. Julio Torres is a delight, both behind and in front of the camera, and his main character here is just awkward enough to be lovable and delightful, meek in a way that generates empathy rather than frustration at his inability to stand up for himself. As his mentor/nemesis, Tilda Swinton is an utterly terrifying MegaKaren, the likes of whom would send shivers down the spine of any person who’s ever worked in retail or food service; her completely scattered attention and deep lack of self- or situational awareness coupled with a hair-trigger temper and an infallible sense of being correct make her one of the best realized human beings I have ever seen in a film. A truly wonderful debut feature. Read my review here. 

5. The Substance

People seem to have really turned on The Substance in record time, but you won’t find me among their number. A fun little fable about self-hatred, the fear of aging, the intersection of ageism and sexism in the dominant culture, and obsession with the past, this is a perfect mixture of many elements that synthesize together into something new and fresh (and monstrous). We have no term other than “body horror” to describe something like this, and while that’s not an incorrect way to describe this gem, it’s more about how being alive and made of meat is disgusting, and the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and the things that our self-hatred can drive us to do to ourselves are stomach-churning. My estimation of this one has only gone up since I saw it, and I think that its penetration of the cultural zeitgeist will make it the 2024 film most likely to be revisited in the years to come. Read my review here. 

4. Kinds of Kindness

The Swampflix crew at large went gaga over Poor Things last year (I, unfortunately, was not able to catch a screening until after the start of 2024), and I’ve seen comparatively little love for Kinds of Kindness out and about in the world. Perhaps it came too closely on the heels of Yorgos Lanthimos’s most recent triumph, but this little triptych of oddities was right up my alley. These three stories all appealed to one of my favorite things. “The Death of R.M.F.” feels like Lanthimos’s take on Richard Kelly’s The Box, wherein we see people’s lives manipulated by forces that they could resist but which their loneliness and insecurities lead them to subject themselves to. “R.M.F. is Flying” reads like an Outer Limits episode written by Oliver Sachs, in which a man is convinced a rescued woman is not his missing wife, to tragic ends. Finally, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” is all about a cult running all over Southern Louisiana trying to find the messiah, which is so up my alley it feels like it came out of one of my dreams. Read my review here.

3. Longlegs

I’ve been meeting a lot of Longlegs haters in my real life. In November, I visited New Orleans and reunited with an old grad school buddy who was virulent in his hatred of it, and at a recent Christmas party, everyone was fairly shocked that I had such fond feelings for this one. The truth is, I don’t care that this one lifts so much from Silence of the Lambs. I don’t care that there were people laughing at Cage’s performance. I don’t care that the totemic dolls and their associated powers were left as an element of narrative ambiguity. I love horror movies, and there are so few that manage to shake me so much that, when I was home alone later, I had to turn the lights on. I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Read my review here. 

2. Hundreds of Beavers

From my review: “Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie.”

1. Mars Express

There was a moment during the early part of my screening of Mars Express where my viewing companion mentioned how much the film reminded him of Westworld, and I mentioned that the plot (to that point) was more reminiscent of Blade Runner, only to learn that he had never heard of the 1982 classic. Luckily, our local arthouse was screening Ridley Scott’s take on android independence the following month, and it was a delight to see that film again with my friend and through his fresh eyes. Not everyone is lucky enough to have this opportunity, but if you want a similar experience, I can’t recommend Mars Express more highly. The film, which is animated and French, opens as a noir thriller about a recovering alcoholic detective and, for all intents and purposes, a cybernetic ghost of her late partner; the two of them are in pursuit of the killer of a “jailbreaking” hacker—that is, a person who uses their computer skills to liberate robots (both androids and less humanoid mechanical beings) from the servitude for which they were designed. From there, it dives into a world in which man and machine “live” side by side, in which the mechanisms that outlive (and serve as host for the minds of) their creators are just as fallible as flesh. To cease being made of meat and replace synapses with silicon doesn’t fix the mistakes of the past, and true change may require the rejection of the material world altogether. This was absolutely my favorite movie of the year. Read Brandon’s review here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond