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Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part One (2015-2019)

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In one of our end-of-the-year podcast episodes last year that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Come along with me for part one: 2015-2019.

2015: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Crimson Peak – Watched February 1, 2026

Upon review: Crimson Peak has all of the strengths of Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein adaptation with none of its weaknesses . . . although it admittedly has other weaknesses of its own, mostly in regards to casting. A gorgeous period film with beautiful costumes and sets that all act in service of a Victorian gothic romance that also happens to be a ghost story, this is del Toro at his best and also his most unabashed. As his main character, an aspiring novelist, says of her own work, “It’s not a ghost story; it’s a love story. The ghosts are metaphors for the past.” The film is almost cringe-inducing in the nakedness with which it comments upon itself, but that same open and unabashed sincerity is what makes it so meaningful and worthwhile. The casting of 2010s Tumblr’s favorite “woobie” it-boy Tom Hiddleston is a miss, and although there’s nothing wrong with Jessica Chastain’s performance, doesn’t it just feel like Eva Green should be playing Lucille? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tangerine – Watched January 22, 2026

Upon review: I wouldn’t consider myself an Anora hater per se, but I certainly wasn’t enamored of it in the same way that others were. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to a film that I considered solid but not necessarily remarkable made me somewhat hesitant to revisit director Sean Baker’s earlier work, as I felt fairly certain that I would fail to connect with it in the same way that I had with Anora. I was pleasantly shocked by this one, a film that I remember mostly as part of the discourse for the fact that it was shot entirely on smartphones, a brand-new trick at the time. This story of two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella (who recently completed a prison stay on behalf of her pimp/boyfriend Chester) and her best friend Alexandra is an absolutely hilarious, heartbreaking, and overwhelmingly humane piece of narrative cinema. A true slice of life in the day of two women struggling, not to “have it all,” but just to have some little thing, whether it be a sad Christmas Eve singalong that’s barely a step up from a private karaoke room or the pathetic human specimen of Chester (R.I.P., James Ransone). Anora may have had the budget, the big release, and the acclaim, but this earlier outing blows it out of the water. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2016: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Kubo And The Two Strings – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon review: I was a latecomer to appreciating the animation studio Laika, as I didn’t get around to seeing Coraline, arguably their most famous film, until 2021. I also remember the discourse that surrounded Kubo when it first came out, mostly in the form of criticism of the film’s casting of mostly white voice actors for a story set in and inspired by feudal Japan. While that’s definitely worthy of discussion, I also found Kubo to be an unexpected delight, a gorgeously animated stop-motion film about a boy with magical, musical powers who finds himself thrust into a conflict with his mother’s family following her apparent death, after years of raising the boy in secret. The quest Kubo finds himself upon isn’t the most novel one, but the film takes an interesting twist at the end by having the protagonist forsake the items acquired during his journey and find a more humane way to deal with his evil grandfather. Dark but not too dark, this is one that I would recommend for any child or adult. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tale Of Tales – Watched January 25, 2026

Upon review: A fantastic fantasy film! When Brandon and I discussed this one while recording our Beast Pageant episode, he mentioned that it had one of the highest hit rates for a horror anthology, and I can’t help but agree. I’ll always think of this one first and foremost as a fantasy/fairy tale picture (it is an adaptation of multiple stories by Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile) before I think of it as a horror film, but don’t be fooled by the Italian poster that makes it look like a collection of episodes of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller; there’s plenty here that aligns more with horror as a genre. A queen (Salma Hayek) eats the massive heart of a giant sea dragon, a dye-maker finds a man who will flay her alive in the misguided belief that it will make her appear younger, a young princess is given to an ogre as a wife and is brutalized by him, and when the last of these escapes, the ogre hunts her down and kills her companions with the ferocity of a slasher. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2017: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lure – Watched January 13, 2026

Upon review: I loved this movie. A bizarre horror musical fantasia, The Lure follows two sirens who are lured onto land by the songs of an eighties Polish pop band called Figs & Dates, then become part of the band’s act before turning into stars of their own. Their eel-like mermaid tales, which only appear when they get wet (Splash or, depending on your generation, H20: Just Add Water rules), don’t prove to be much of an imposition, but when one of the girls starts to fall in love with the Evan Peters-esque moptop bassist of F&D, her more worldly-wise sister tries to get her to break it off. If she doesn’t, she’s in for a Little Mermaid ending, of the Hans Christian Anderson variety, not the Disney one. Running the gamut from club music to pop to thrash, the soundtrack is excellent, and the moments of horror are genuinely chilling. Not to be missed. 5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2018: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Cam – Watched some time in 2019. 

Upon review: I have to admit that I don’t remember this one too well, although I do recall that I enjoyed it. It’s not possible to legally watch this film anywhere anymore, as it was a direct-to-Netflix feature that the platform no longer hosts and it never got a physical media release, so I don’t have the option to go back and review it again to get a fuller, clearer picture than the one in my head. I remember not caring for actress Madeline Brewer very much at the time, mostly based on her performance on Hemlock Grove; since then, I’ve come around on her, especially when I came to like her quite a bit as the protagonist of the final season of You. This was one that hit with a lot of the Swampflix group based on the predisposition toward internet-based horror, and it went over fairly well in my house with me and my roommate of the time. Too bad I can’t confirm that anymore. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? 2018 had some clear leaders of the pack with Hereditary, Annihilation, and Black Panther, but the lower rankings on the list aren’t as solidly defensible. Verdict: Possibly, lean toward yes.

Mandy – Watched January 29, 2026

Upon review: Back when we watched Beyond the Black Rainbow as a Movie of the Month years back, I remember reading that as a child director Panos Cosmatos would walk down the horror aisle at the video store and imagine what a movie would be based on the poster alone. Looking back on that, I do wonder if the abyss didn’t gaze back a little, since he has a tendency to make movies that sometimes linger on a single image for extended periods of time, as if the film is the poster. That bothered me much less in Mandy than it did in Rainbow, possibly because it’s driven by yet another in a long history of butterfly fearless performances from Nicolas Cage, or because this one’s nostalgia for VHS-era horror is more textual than referential. The evil gang of demonic bikers who help a cult subdue and torment the titular Mandy are almost exactly what one might imagine from sneaking a peak at the horror aisle at age eight and seeing the cover of Hellbound: Hellraiser II while an overhead TV played Psychomania. The psychedelia and too-familiar narrative structure are unlikely to please plot essentialists, but as a chainsaw duel enthusiast and a King Crimson fan, I liked this despite the soporific nature of its back half. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? I think that I would have overlooked this one or taken it for granted during the year of its release, especially given my cool reception to Black Rainbow. So no, it would not have made my list, but that would have been an error on my part. 

Eighth Grade – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon Review: Most online sources would say that this is a coming-of-age dramedy, but that would be incorrect; this is a horror film. Our young protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is growing up during a time in which social media use is essentially compulsory, while she’s also trying to navigate a world that, to the adult viewer, is largely alien, all while her hormones surge amidst a peer group whose treatment of her ranges from cruel to apathetic. That strangeness of the world in which children reside “now” (given that the film itself is nearly a decade old at this point) is made manifest in a scene during which Kayla spends some time with an older girl and her high school friend group, all of whom seem infinitely older and wiser to Kayla than herself despite the fact that they themselves are still children (and not that their youth stops one of them from being a predator). These older teens marvel at the idea that Kayla had SnapChat, a messaging app that their contemporaries use almost solely for exchanging nudes, when she was in fifth grade, and it blows their minds in the same way that I often marvel that there are entire generations now that have grown up on YouTube, a site that launched the summer after I graduated from high school. Kayla’s entire life is inscribed by the age-old pubescent need to be seen and acknowledged, filtered through a world in which validation is a currency that exists entirely within one’s phone. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

In Fabric – Watched April 4, 2025

Upon Review: An absolute marvel of a movie, I just happened to miss this one when it appeared, despite the affection I already held for Peter Strickland’s earlier giallo-adjacent psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio. Featuring an excellent turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, one of our greatest living performers, this spooky feature about a red dress that torments its owners is an absolute delight. Briefly discussed at the time of viewing in our Buddha’s Palm episode at about the seventy-two minute mark. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely.

The Wild Boys – Watched December 21 and 22, 2025

Upon Review: I was not looking forward to disappointing Brandon when I watched this one and did not care for it. So much so, in fact, that I watched it again the following day to see if there was something that I could connect with and care for. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. A mostly monochrome fantasia about boys becoming women on an island full of erotic flora, I felt in my bones how strongly this would connect to Brandon, but it just didn’t with me. The moments I loved most were when the film would suddenly turn almost Technicolor, bright and vibrant, and then would be disappointed when we went back to black and white. There must have been a reason for not shooting the whole thing in glorious color, but I couldn’t pin down exactly what the reasons were despite two viewings. It is, as Brandon wrote in his review, “decidedly not-for-everyone-but-definitely-for-someone.” 2.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Alas, no.

2019: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lighthouse – Watched January 11, 2026

Upon Review: I was a big fan of The VVitch, so much so that it was my number one movie of 2016. Despite that, I let both of director Robert Eggers’s following films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, slip past me in the stream. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being up to grappling with the film and its presaging of the madness of isolation when the film came to home viewing in the early days of lockdown. Having now seen The Lighthouse, this was a huge miss on my part. An utterly captivating story about two men on an island together tasked with maintaining an apparatus that captivates them like it were an unknowable elder god, the film is as rich with symbolism as it is dense with the old-timey dialogue for which Eggers continues to demonstrate his uncanny ear. An unpleasant delight. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 10.

The Beach Bum – Watched January 20, 2026

Upon Review: Matthew McConaughey plays the worst person in the world, a very famous (Florida specific) poet named “Moondog,” who floats through life on little more than military grade marijuana, beer that’s barely fit for swine, and a garden of sun-dried poontang. This life of luxury is not sustained by his poetry, but by the fortune of his wife Minnie, who loves no man but Moondog but has taken to shacking up with R&B artist Lingerie (Snoop Dogg) in the “civilization” of Miami during Moondog’s long hiatus in the Keys. When Minnie tragically dies, the plot, such as it is, kicks in, as Moondog must now finish his current writing project in order to get the inheritance that will continue to fund his degenerate hedonism. Along the way, McConaughey as Moondog gets to spout the occasional fragment of genuinely decent poetry broken up with narcissistic phallocentric drivel that believably charms whatever constitutes the literati of Jacksonville and, less convincingly, the Pulitzer board. It’s all good fun with great editing, delirious neon, and a practiced eye for composition, but I could see this turning into a red flag favorite long term in the same genus as Fight Club or Scarface. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Not this time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025

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1. 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. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

2. 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. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.

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

4. 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. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.

5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented 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 promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).

7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.

8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.

9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.

10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful 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.

Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Britnee’s Top 15 Films of 2025

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1. When Fall Is Coming – The one and only François Ozon blew me away yet again. Moral dilemmas wrapped in a melodrama following two elderly women in the French countryside feels tailor-made for me to devour. The dark secrets and mysteries in these women’s lives set against a cozy autumn backdrop completely won me over.

2. The Ugly Stepsister – A brilliant dark take on Cinderella that focuses on the “villain” who really isn’t a villain but a victim of circumstance. Complex characters and violent body horror born from unrealistic beauty standards and body image pressures come together to create nothing short of a masterpiece. 

3. Misericordia – Very French, very horny, very gay, and very funny. Claude Chabrol would have loved this one. The village priest is delightfully unhinged, and I just can’t get him out of my head. 

4. Marty Supreme – So many unlikeable characters who are endlessly entertaining. I simultaneously wanted Marty to fail and succeed at all of his insane schemes. Totally warped my brain. 

5. KPop Demon Hunters – My most re-watched film of the year. I adored the story, the energy, the vibrant animation, and the soundtrack packed with bangers. Everyone’s talking about it, and the hype is completely deserved.

6. The Plague – A coming-of-age nightmare that instantly proves that Charlie Polinger is a brilliant filmmaker and needs to keep making movies. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about bullying in boyhood that I’ve ever seen. 

7. Frankenstein – Another botched literary adaptation that I vibed with hard. I love a tall, brooding man and when it’s Jacob Elordi as The Creature, roaming along in search of human connection, I’m 100% on board.

8. Boys Go to Jupiter – This feels like getting a foot massage while taking an edible. Killer music, cute animation, and genuinely hilarious characters. This one feels like medicine for depression.

9. Bugonia – A thought-provoking, sometimes silly, very violent achievement for Yorgos Lanthimos. It takes aim at a lot of things I personally despise, which makes it an absolute delight. 

10. Sinners – The movie that made non-movie people go to the movies. There’s usually at least one each year, but Sinners became a full-blown cultural phenomenon. It’s an unbelievably cool vampire movie packed with stellar character-building.

11. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – This made me feel physically suffocated to the point of sweating. Navigating the complexities of being a sick child’s caregiver with no help from a significant other in a judgemental world just seems like hell, and Rose Byrne’s performance made me feel that pure terror.  

12. Weapons – The way the narrative structure revisits the same moments through multiple perspectives added so much depth to those small moments that usually go by unnoticed. I’m also forever grateful for the birth of the pop culture icon that is Aunt Gladys.

13. Hedda – I absolutely adored Hedda, inaccuracies and all. It may stray from Henrik Ibsen’s original play, but I would happily watch a chaotic, bisexual Tessa Thompson wreak havoc in a decadent mansion anytime.

14. Companion – A romcom sci-fi slasher with a feminist soul that is essentially this generation’s version of The Stepford Wives. I had a ton of fun watching this one.

15. Bring Her Back – I love a horror film that makes me cry and evokes an uncomfortable sense of empathy, because that emotional discomfort only deepens the disturbance. Hereditary has done that for me better than any other film, but Bring Her Back almost takes it to that same level. 

-Britnee Lombas

Brandon’s Top 20 Films of 2025

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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

Boomer’s Academy Ballot 2024

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I have a deep and abiding love for watching old Siskel and Ebert reviews. You can find a lot of them on YouTube where people’s VHS copies have been cleaned up as much as possible, and there’s an even deeper back catalog on a dedicated site. Many of the episodes on the latter, like their 1983 “If We Picked the Oscars Special,” contain the commercials from the broadcast, which can be fun. In their honor, and so that I can highlight elements that I found fantastic even in works that I didn’t otherwise care for, I have begun to do this myself, annually. Feel free to check out my list from last year, and see below, the winners and the nominees, if I picked the Oscars. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2024

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1. I Saw the TV Glow – A pastel kaleidoscope of teen angst, gender dysphoria, Buffy the Vampire Slayer nostalgia, and general melancholy. It’s impossible not to read Jane Schoenbrun’s VHS-warped horror of persona as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche media obsession instead.

2. The Substance – Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.

3. Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller is not one for those with queasy stomachs. It’s a hot, sweaty, ferociously vicious work that’ll have you swooning over its synths, sex, and biceps until you’re feeling just as ripped, roided, and noided as its doomed but determined lovers.

4. She is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a violent lesbian fantasy realm, this time reshaping the Conan the Barbarian myth into a grotesque fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. A cosmic swirl of glitter, swords, gore, fetishistic fashion, and deconstructed gender, nothing about it is logical, but it all makes perfect sense.

5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude made a three-hour, fussily literary art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.

6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen, George Miller’s latest manic blockbuster is a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that’s easily the equal of Fury Road. It’s truly epic, a mutant-infested Ben-Hur that trades in chariots for chrome.

7. The Taste of Things – A sweetly sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals. It’s absurdly cozy & warm, likely the best movie about food since Pig. Also, Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s easy fall in love with a movie when Juliette Binoche is in it.

8. Mars Express – This is a great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. A noir thriller about an alcoholic detective pursuing the assassin of a “jailbreaking” hacker who liberates robots from synthetic lives of servitude, it’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood isn’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Blade Runner or Minority Report anymore, but it also distinguishes itself from those obvious reference points through futuristic speculation and sheer dazzlement.

9. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” Deborah Stratman’s apocalyptic hybrid doc finds infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations. It recounts the story of our planet’s geology through an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life, aggressively anthropomorphizing ordinary rocks until an obscured origin myth emerges. It looks to the future as well, crafting a Chris Marker-esque sci-fi narrative about rocks taking over the Earth after humans end our current, destructive reign. Good riddance.

10. The People’s Joker – An impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture, Vera Drew’s fair-use warping of copyrighted comic book lore to illustrate her own gender identity journey is pure brilliance and pure punk. Direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the secret batcaves of its director’s brain, it’s a marvel . . . except that it’s DC.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Alli’s Top 5 Films of 2024

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1. Love Lies Bleeding

I love this queer, 80s bodybuilder crime thriller. It’s got such a subtle horror and fantastical style to it that just builds and builds until you get a truly magical ending. Both of the main characters are terrible people who you know are super toxic for each other, but you want them to have a happy ending anyway. Kristen Stewart plays another lurking weirdo of a character, Lou, who becomes a Renfield for Katy O’Bryan’s manipulative, aspiring bodybuilder, Jackie. It’s a hot, sweaty, violent mess of a movie. I’m glad we have a movie about terrible gay women getting away with murder. 

Also, there’s a cat named “Happy Meal.” Enough Said.

2. Last Things

I love a good geology documentary, okay? Then you add in a Chris Marker-esque narrative about rock beings taking over the Earth after humans have had their destructive reign. There are so many beautiful images of rocks, so many interesting experts talking about geological evolution (absolutely fascinating!!), and so much hypnotizing French narration. 

Rocks were here before us, and they will be here long after we’re gone. Yes, we’ve gradually changed each other but, ultimately, they’re winning the “How bad can everything get while still surviving?” game.

3. I Saw the TV Glow

This movie is a kaleidoscope of nostalgia, gender dysphoria, teen angst, and general bad vibes. For some reason, in my head, I want to call it pastel angst-core, which is a cringy phrase that I hope never catches on. Two misfit teens, Owen and Maddy, bond over a show called The Pink Opaque (yeah, it’s a good Cocteau Twins reference), a supernatural teen horror featuring a protagonist named Mr. Melancholy. As Maddy and Owen’s friendship progresses, the line between the show and real life blurs. Maddy, having completely taken the show as true, abandons her life and runs away. Owen stays. He lives a boring “real” life: dead end job, boredom, depression. The Pink Opaque is not what he remembers, or has Mr. Melancholy trapped him?

4. She is Conann

Okay, I think when making this movie Bertrand Mandico entered my brain and just picked out the cool parts where I think about swords, glitter, gross gore, and amazing clothes. It truly is the movie that most encompasses my style goals. (Although, there’s a glitter ban in my house per my partner’s request. *sigh*) Conan the Barbarian is reimagined through the ages as a woman. She fights through other Barabarians to claim her place at the top, becoming a stunt woman with no regard for safety, a war criminal, and finally a rich billionaire patron of the arts with investments in mines, oil, and everything evil. Having a female main character strips the Barbarism concept of masculinity and boils it down to its roots: unimaginable cruelty by human hands, which has no gender. Also, there’s a paparazzo dog demon named Rainer who wears really cool jackets, and pants after Conann through it all. It’s a fever dream of blood, once again glitter, and really cool fashion. 

5. Hundreds of Beavers! 

Jean Kayak makes Apple Jack. In a beaver related accident his entire apple orchard burns down, and his distillery explodes. He is left to fend for himself during a brutal midwestern winter, eventually becoming a fur trapper, who falls in love with a shop keeper’s daughter. Then, he hunts down and gains a grudge against, yes you guessed it, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. All of this is done in the style of early silent slapstick comedies, while also mixing in some more modern jokes and videogame references. Oh yeah, no animals were harmed in the making of this movie, because literally every animal is played by people in mascot costumes. Basically, this is a movie full of silly madness and Looney Tunes style visual gags. It goes so many places and not a single one is somber or serious. Truly a movie that exists to just be a silly adventure, and I appreciate it for that.

-Alli Hobbs

Britnee’s Top 15 Films of 2024

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15. Last Summer – This was such an uneasy experience, yet I couldn’t look away. I found myself completely absorbed by the drama, the stunning scenery, and the overall French vibe of it all. Catherine Breillat doesn’t hold anything back, nor does she depict anything taboo with judgement, which I always appreciate.

14. Mothers’ Instinct – This isn’t your typical 1960s housewife drama. It’s wild and totally twisted in the best way imaginable — the psychological melodrama that I’ve been waiting for. Douglas Sirk would be so proud.

13. Immaculate – 2024’s standout pregnancy horror film. An exciting watch that had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Truly terrifying — the sense of being trapped by your surroundings and body was so intense.

12. Babes – I know its unexpected-pregnancy concept isn’t anything new, but wow, this was one of the funniest and most endearing movies to come out this year. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau are absolutely hilarious.

11. Nightbitch – Although I was hoping it would go even further and get even weirder, this ended up being a surprisingly great film as-is. Marriage and children are two of my biggest fears and, in a way, this made me feel validated. Also, it’s hands-down Amy Adams’s best performance. Fight me.

10. The People’s Joker – Vera Drew is a true legend in the making. Using Batman comic lore to represent a gender identity journey is pure brilliance and very punk. It’s both deeply moving and ridiculously funny. This is art.

9. The Front Room – The filthiest film of 2024. It’s batshit crazy, unsettling, and absolutely hilarious. I had so much fun with it. Hagsploitation at its finest.

8. Love Lies Bleeding – This is a gripping, intense lesbian erotic thriller. I gasped and screamed so much — it was absolutely fierce! Kristen Stewart was great of course, but my god, Katy O’Brian was the standout star for me. 

7. MaXXXine – The much-anticipated third installment of Ti West’s X series took an unexpected giallo turn that some folks didn’t like, but I absolutely loved it. The handful of gruesome scenes had me covering my face in the theater while chuckling from how surprising they are. Also, the soundtrack is killer.

6. Anora – This kicks off as a fun, high-energy party movie, but deep down, you know it’s all too good to be true. When the second act rolls around, the energy and humor still carry through, but the story takes a turn towards sadness and frustration. I just want Ani to have it all. Spoiled mama’s boys suck. 

5. Wicked Little Letters – The witty script and charming storyline had me hooked from start to finish. It’s Serial Mom meets Downton Abbey. I just adore foul-mouthed women, especially when they’re Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley.

4. Monkey Man – I was completely captivated by Dev Patel’s directorial debut. The raw, gritty storytelling and powerful, action-packed performances stuck with me all year. I’m so glad that Jordan Peele recognized its brilliance and pushed for it to get the theatrical release it deserved. 

3. She Is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a captivating fantasy realm full of lesbians, but this time, we’re joined by a dope-ass dog demon in a leather jacket. The re-telling of Conan the Barbarian through six reincarnations was brilliant. Nothing is logical, but it all makes sense; it’s one of those experiences that defies explanation and simply has to be witnessed.

2. The Taste of Things – I absolutely adored this movie. Its sensual, intimate exploration of food and desire was both visually stunning and emotionally profound. It beautifully captures the complexities of human connection through the art of cooking. And Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s impossible to not fall in love with any Juliette Binoche film.

1. The Substance – Demi Moore is back and finally getting the recognition she deserves. This is undoubtedly the best film of 2024. The striking visuals, the perfect performances, the body horror, the psycho-biddy moments . . . It’s perfection. 

-Britnee Lombas

Podcast #229: The Top 12 Films of 2024

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Welcome to Episode #229 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss their favorite films of 2024.

00:00 Welcome

02:30 Wicked Little Letters
05:41 Monkey Man
08:56 Mars Express
12:38 Longlegs
20:48 How to Have Sex
27:21 A Different Man
33:19 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
44:30 The Taste of Things
51:45 Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
1:01:22 She is Conann
1:11:19 The Substance
1:23:56 I Saw the TV Glow

James’s Top 20 Films of 2024

  1. I Saw the TV Glow
  2. A Different Man
  3. How to Have Sex
  4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
  5. The Taste of Things
  6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
  7. The Substance
  8. Sometimes I Think About Dying
  9. Trap
  10. Last Summer
  11. Smile 2
  12. The Beast
  13. Civil War
  14. Kinds of Kindness
  15. Love Lies Bleeding
  16. Conclave
  17. Cuckoo
  18. Anora
  19. Hundreds of Beavers
  20. It’s What’s Inside

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Boomer’s Top 20 Films of 2024

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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