2024 in Film Part 2: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Now that the first part looking at the Studios is done, its time once again to talk about the favourites and turkeys of the movie year that was 2024.

And what better way to start than by taking out the rubbish and serving up some turkeys and there were a few doozies that will roast nicely this time around but before that list here are some dishonourable mentions after all it isn’t a turkey meal without some delicious sides:

Moana 2: A mess of a film that didn’t give fans the follow up they deserved and was clearly designed to be a streaming series before being retrofitted into being a film and boy does it show at times.

If Disney is going to reclaim the family entertainment crown it once held for so long it has to realise that they aren’t the major game in town anymore with this stuff, the Sonic trilogy, the Despicable Me films, the Paddington films and the TV series Bluey are the dominant family entertainment franchises right now and Disney needs to step up its game instead of serving up this kind of lazy sequel.

Kraven the Hunter: When the nicest thing you can say about it is “it’s not terrible” well something has gone very wrong.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson does his best but this movie is terrible to look at, dull to sit through and is Columbia’s desperate attempt number 510 to replicate the surprise success of the Venom trilogy and for the CEO of Columbia to say what he said in recent days well it reminds me of a recent quote from James Bond figurehead Barbara Broccoli: “These people are fucking idiots” and boy does it feel like that at times.

Ghostbusters Frozen Empire: I didn’t hate this movie but like Columbia’s Spider-Verse experiment, its time for this series to rest in peace once and for all.

The original film by Ivan Reitman was a work of genius and ideally that should’ve been it, a classic one and done but alas Columbia was desperate for a hit and we got the second film and then the 2016 film by Paul Feig and now the 2 recent films with Jason Reitman at the helm and while Afterlife was fine, this was a bit of a mess to sit through with very little humour or scares to go with it and after seeing this movie my feeling that I’ve had most of this year about the movies feeling old as a medium began to crystalize in my mind.

And now with those out of the way let’s cook some turkeys and number 5 is a real letdown for me:

Civil War:

I wanted to love this movie so much, it was about a charged political situation, it had journalists in a heroic role, it had tense action and an intriguing story.

But alas this movie was not anywhere near as good as I wanted it to be and I left the cinema feeling disappointed, the political situation is not well explained and the use of the journalist characters felt like a letdown, here was a golden opportunity for them to not only prove themselves as genuinely heroic (especially when so many journos put their lives on the line to report from dangerous situations like Ukraine and the Middle East in recent times) but also use their natural skills as question askers to ask the questions of the characters that the audience watching the film might have.

How did this all begin?

How do people feel about the world their currently in?

How can we fix things so that this fracturing never happens again?

Did the President do enough to stop this from happening?

And so and so forth but instead it focuses on photo journalism and doesn’t do it all that interestingly and it makes these characters played by good actors like Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny feel passive like their observing things from the distance of a camera lens as they photograph the events in front of them.

There is however one scene where it feels like this premise fufills the promise it held and that is the interrogation scene with Jesse Plemons who is both amusing with his pink sunglasses that wouldn’t be out of place at an Elton John concert and terrifying at the same as he wields a machine gun and shoots you dead if you don’t answer his questions correctly and it puts the journo leads in genuine danger and I wish the film had more of that in it, thankfully Kate Winslet’s Lee would come out a few months later and fufill my wants that this movie failed to deliver.

4. Alien Romulus:

The Alien franchise is an interesting beast, on the one hand it has two of the most iconic and celebrated sci-fi films ever made in the original Alien by Ridley Scott and the sequel Aliens by James Cameron who wisely figured out that the horror style of the original film couldn’t be done again as the audience would be ahead of you waiting for the thrills to start so he decided to do an action film with strong Vietnam undertones and it worked beautifully thrilling audiences and critics alike and becoming a celebrated sequel and equal to the original.

But everything after it, oh boy its either gone one of two ways, the first being this quasi religious storyline where the Alien is synonymous with the devil and those it preys on are in some kind of purgatory hell or its just hit the same old beats over and over again until the franchise falls apart under the endless piles of acid for blood.

And Romulus does both of these, it tries to have the religious angle with the Cain and Able undertones while also serving up doses of fan service so obvious and out of place that I just sat there cringing in my cinema seat and the characters in this movie are mainly dullards that you keep waiting to get killed off.

But the really offensive thing this movie did was to use digital technology to replicate the late Ian Holms character Ash albeit with a different name from the first film and every single time that thing came on screen I was immediately pulled out of the film and I began to think after a while “Wait a minute isn’t he dead?” and sadly he passed away in 2020 and I cannot tell you how utterly fucking sick I am of this shit being done regarding actors who have passed on.

Then again this shit started with the replication of Peter Cushing as Governor Tarkin in Rogue One in 2016 and that still looks creepy like he’s been transplanted from a video game and only a small group of film fans kicked up a fuss about this at the time and once again nerds either not caring because they’ve got their beloved characters back on screen or demanding that certain characters be sold to somewhere else has created another bad precedent, hopefully the actors guilds will start to put their foot down and say “enough is enough” with all of this because it has to stop as this too is making the movies as a medium feel old and too wedded to the past to move forward.

Okay that’s off my chest here’s number 3:

Madame Web:

Her web connected us all alright, into a bad joke.

Now I didn’t hate this movie as much as others did but it is so utterly emblematic of the laziness that has infected the movie business like a cancer in the last 5-10 years, the storytelling in this movie is a mess, half of the dialogue sounds like it as re-recorded in post production because the initial cut was such a disaster those in charge tried to wave that editorial magic to try and fix it when the problem was the fucking script to start with.

And then there is the cast, Dakota Johnson looks and sounds bored out of her brain and would much rather be anywhere else (this attitude was clear as day on her press tour for this thing), Sydney Sweeney a rising star is probably thankful she doesn’t have to do this anymore since Anyone But You became a big hit and gave her proper negotiating power over future projects while the other actors are just boring especially the villain who is one of the very worst of any Marvel comics adjacent film and trust me there have been some real duds in this department.

And then there is the ties to the Spider-Man lore which are so predictable and obvious it feels like the movie is hitting you over the head with them be it Uncle Ben being in the film and talking about “someone serious” in his life to the Baby Parker Shower doing a guessing game about the baby boy’s name and you sit there screaming in your head “IT’S PETER” to the ending joke about Uncle Ben and a “oh that could happen” wink.

Give me a fucking break then again this comes from the same studio who’s CEO thought he could blame the fans and critics for this mess and sorry Bucko YOUR IN CHARGE, THIS IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AND THE BUCK STOPS WITH YOU!!!!!!

No wonder Barbara got frustrated regarding Bond and MGM/Amazon recently, dealing with such buffoons must be endlessly frustrating and yet with this kind of “it’s only content WHO CARES IF IT WORKED OR NOT” Dick Jones mentality at the studio executive wing is it any wonder the movies aren’t as culturally relevant as they once were and to see my list of remedies for how this can change go back and read Part 1 of my look back.

2. Argylle:

Now there was a time when Matthew Vaughn was one of my favourite emerging directors, he had made Layer Cake (which helped make Daniel Craig James Bond), Stardust, Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class and Kingsman the Secret Service a really good run of films across a range of genres.

But ever since Kingsman 10 years ago it feels like Vaughn has been doing the same thing over and over again ever since and with increasingly worse results be it a mess of a Kingsman sequel, a fine but nothing special Kingsman prequel with Ralph Fiennes and now this movie.

And this movie is a real spaghetti bowl of a mess to sit through with so many twists and turns they wouldn’t look out of place in a bowl of spaghetti with sauce all over them, a waste of a great cast where their given so little to do it feels like a waste (Ariana DeBose and Henry Cavill come to mind) or their just playing themselves in a different variation (Katherine O’Hara, Samuel L Jackson and Bryan Cranston come to mind.)

And then there is Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell who try (Howard in particular tries) but just are dull leads and the use of the Cat was equally unforgivable, there is not one single scene where the Cat interrupts Bryce’s book writing wanting some company nor does it get a single cuddle or fuss or pat instead its just lugged around in a goddamn backpack and at times it looks like the Cat is a CGI cat as it sometimes shows that digital smoothness in its movement.

By contrast A Quiet Place Day One used real cats (named Nico and Schnitzel) and the filmmakers there let Frodo get cuddles and fusses and pats and you sit there as a Cat person hoping like hell the Cat survives (even the studio got in on the fun setting up a hotline you could call if you were in the US to find out if it survives before seeing the film.)

And lastly Matthew Vaughn’s direction feels tired and lazy like he’s going through the motions and doesn’t care anymore to do this type of film as he’s done it so often now in the last 10 years he could probably do it in his sleep (and it feels like that at times with this movie) hopefully his next project is something different as he really needs a change of pace.

But now we get to number 1, the biggest movie turkey of 2024 and for a long time that was Argylle and I thought to myself “if there are 5 films worse than Argylle this year then it’s been a BAAAAAD year for film” but thankfully it was Good year for film and there was only one film worse than Argylle.

Joker Folie a Deux:

Oh boy oh boy where to start,

Now I was someone who didn’t rave about the original Joker film in 2019 but I enjoyed it fine enough, it was well made, had good performances, used Gotham really well and had some interesting ideas regarding mental health services and how people who rely on them can fall through the cracks when its taken away from them and they decide to lash out at those they feel were responsible.

But this movie doesn’t have any of that at all and feels like a cock up that gives Wonder Woman 1984 and Highlander II a run for their money in terms of a creative team making a surprise success with the first film and then totally fucking it up on every level when they get to do a sequel.

And the first way it does this is by having this movie for some strange reason be a musical and it isn’t even a musical where Arthur Fleck has a song where he goes “Look at that sun, isn’t it neat, wouldn’t you think my trial is nearing, wouldn’t you think I’m the man, the man who pleads innocent,

I wanna be where the people are,
I wanna see,
Wanna see em lined up,
Outside the Court,
Out of the Streets,
Out where they watch all this on TV,
Wandering free,
Where they can be,
In that free worrrlllddd,

What would I give if I could live out of this prison,
What would I give to spend a day,
Warm on the beach,

WHEN’S IT MY TURN,
WOULDN’T I LOVE,
LOVE TO EXPLORE THOSE STREETS OUT OF HERE,

Out of this prison,
Where I can be,
In that free worrrlllddd”

But no we get another jukebox musical where a bunch of old songs are plugged into the soundtrack and grind the film to a fucking halt and every single time those numbers came up on screen I went to myself “What the Fuck” every time and it got worse and worse as the film went on to the point where the 2 people sitting behind me in my session got up and left and needless to say I don’t blame them.

And look I’m all for a director taking a swing up at bat, I don’t recoil from it like some fans do nowadays where they only seem to want the exact same thing over and over again like a broken record and the franchise that record is on breaks for good but sometimes the ball the pitcher throws hits you right in the nuts like it does here and OUCH did it hurt.

And then there is the second big problem this movie had which is properly interrogating the themes and ideas of that first film and whether people were right to support Arthur in his actions or whether he was wrong to lash out the way that he did causing untold property damage and loss of life and instead there is so little of it and what little there is feels unsatisfying because Arthur as a character feels like a bystander IN HIS OWN FUCKING MOVIE and may I remind you all for the record that Joaquin Phoenix won an Academy Award playing this role the last time around which makes this decision feel 100,000 volts worse than it already does.

And this movie deserves to sit on the same rotten shelf that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker currently sits on and both of these films should also serve as warning signs when you try to please certain online narratives be they “Rian Johnson changed too much and that’s not my Luke and he made the men look like idiots while the women are superior and have purple hair” or “Tood Phillips was wrong to idolise this person, he’s a terrible incel white man who will inspire murder sprees among other white men.”

And the result of all of this is a movie for very very few at best and nobody at most, it doesn’t work as a musical and it doesn’t work in examining the themes and ideas of the first film just as the Rise of Skywalker was a film for no one as well, hopefully this shit stops because I’m sick of it up to my back teeth.

But lastly I have to talk about Lady Gaga’s role in all this because once again the Joker/Harley Quinn relationship is sanewashed because god forbid those in charge get cold feet about doing this relationship properly for the SECOND TIME IN A ROW (the first being the 2016 Suicide Squad film) and all this creative team had to do (along with Margot Robbie and David Ayer respectively) was look at the Mad Love storyline from the New Batman Adventures where Harley Quinn was a doctor at Arkham Asylum attracted to the glamour of the super criminals of Gotham and them the Joker twists her mind and their relationship turns abusive.

That is gold sitting right there especially when we as a society are only now starting to grapple with the problem of domestic abuse and how we can try and put a stop to it once and for all but alas we don’t get any of that just a boring love story that also serves no purpose at all.

That felt good now we can feast on the good of this year in film and like with the turkeys we have some honourable mentions to talk about first:

Wicked: A delightful surprise for me, going into it I wasn’t sure how I would respond to it as the trailers felt like it was hiding that it was a musical and I’ve had mixed feelings about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.

Well I was very happy to be proven wrong as both are simply wonderful in this movie, Erivo should be in the conversation for Best Actress at the Academy Awards she is that good while Grande proves herself to be a great comedienne with her physical humour and comic timing, a shame that Disney didn’t make Snow White after this movie with her in the role, no disrespect to Rachel Zegler she too is very talented but Grande would’ve been a better choice.

As for the film itself I got a big X-Men vibe watching Glinda and Elphaba in this movie as they reminded me a lot of Professor Xavier and Magneto, two friends who drift apart because of their outlook on life and how the world perceives them for who they are, I hope Wicked for Good the second part of this film adaptation is as good.

The Wild Robot: A very moving and charming animated film about a found family excellently directed by Chris Sanders.

The film first and foremost has great animation combining traditional hand drawn animation with digital animation in a lovely blend, at times I thought I was watching both but it’s a great testament to Sanders’s firm hand on the directors chair, the film also has a lovely story about how a family can come from the most surprising of circumstances and how families can learn from each other in different ways, Lupita Nyong’o is particularly good as the shipwrecked robot who comes to care for a geese and the rest of the cast is good as well.

Furiosa a Mad Max Saga: After nearly a decade director/creator George Miller returns to the wasteland of the Mad Max series with a prequel about the breakout character from 2015’s Fury Road Furiosa this time played by Anya-Taylor Joy.

And what a fun ride this was as Miller’s direction is as confident and assured as ever, building on the lore of this world with new characters, chase scenes and a great villain played by Chris Hemsworth channelling his inner Ocker to play Dr Dementus and it is clear he is having a blast doing so though poor Furiosa while only 10 already has 2 mortal enemies.

The film also has more of a story to it than I felt Fury Road did which I did not love as much as others did (it was more of a 2 hour chase scene than an actual story with chases on top which the first 2 films did masterfully) and it did that while also delivering the chase scenes the series is famous for, one with a truck is particularly good.

Transformers One: Between this movie, Rise of the Beasts and Bumblebee the Transformers film series is going from strength to strength.

But sadly each of these films hasn’t found much of an audience at the box office and sadly I think this is due to Michael Bay overstaying his welcome with the franchise after Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction and I can’t help but think that had Bay departed after either of those films the series would be having a much better time at the box office.

But Transformers One also with Chris Hemsworth as Orion Pax/Optimus Prime is a great look at how he and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry in excellent form) would later go from friends to enemies and how that would lead to the war that would destroy Cybertron and cause both the Autobots and Decepticons to seek refuge on Earth.

Speaking of Cyberton this movie treats it like how the best Batman films treat Gotham City: As a character in and of itself and like Gotham in its pre Batman days this movie shows the inherent rot at the heart of Cybertron and how that came to corrupt that world and the people living in it and how that corruption led to its ultimate destruction and how those at the centre have to choose between either freedom or tyranny in the vein hope that Cybertron will be great again.

And with those out of the way, let’s dive into the favourites and number 5 was a late addition but hey sometimes the best can be saved for last:

Sonic the Hedgehog 3:

This was a delightful surprise to be sure as I had been a fan of the first 2 Sonic films but third time around I was mightily impressed.

Mainly because this movie took the best elements of the previous 2 films (the tight storytelling and Jim Carrey comedy of the first and the character expansion and lore of the second) and melded them together into a tight story that balances heart, humour, emotion and action very well.

And it is a credit to this creative team (Jeff Fowler the director and Pat Casey, Josh Miller and John Wittington the writers) that they are able to build on their successes and top themselves with each film in this series and that guiding hand is felt throughout this movie and in an era where so many big movies don’t have that sense of direction or vision of a creative team that knows what it’s doing to the point where the studio backs off is very refreshing and we need more of it.

What this movie also does well is explore darker themes of grief and loss and how we respond to those when they happen at a young age can help shape us as we grow up while also combining it with high energy action and fun comedy, a tricky blend to get right but this movie does it well and you get both Keanu Reeves as Shadow and 2 Jim Carrey performances and what is not to like on both fronts.

4. My Old Ass:

Another delightful surprise with another tricky blend of different ideas and tones.

This time those are heart, comedy and time travel but writer/director Megan Park manages to pull that off really well as I really loved how the time travel segments worked as well as laughing quite a bit at the humour which is very foul mouthed for sure but that didn’t bother me.

The film also has 2 great performances by Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza who play the current and future versions of the same character and they have very good chemistry together with Plaza really coming into her own as an actress with this roles and some others the last few years, the film also has some great moments of “what if” in them in terms of what if you could change things but also like Doc Brown in Back to the Future being careful to not know learn too much about your future.

3. The Substance:

Initially I was reluctant to see this movie as it had so much hype surrounding it and looking at the brief clips I saw of it before seeing it I thought it didn’t have much appeal to me but an opportunity to see it came up and I decided “sure it’s worth a $10 ticket.”

And boy am I glad I did as Coralie Fargeat has crafted a fantastic film here, one of the best in the horror genre that I’ve seen in recent years and first the film has some great body horror/makeup effects that at times reminded me of Paul Verhoeven’s work especially Kuato in Total Recall plus there’s plenty of nice gooey blood on show as well.

Secondly the film has 3 great performances in it, Demi Moore has rarely been better than she is here and I suspect that some of the films commentary about being an aeging woman in an industry like movies and television rung true for her, Margaret Qualley is also good as Sue the “better version” of Moore’s character that comes out of her when she takes the Substance while Dennis Quaid is fantastic as the slimy TV executive who in one scene takes shrimp eating to highs that should earn an Oscar nomination.

And lastly the storytelling here is very good, combining the body horror aspects with the aeging commentary very well and Fargeat’s direction keeps a firm hand on the wheel to stop the whole thing from going off a cliff and hopefully she lands a Best Director nomination at the Oscars for her work.

2. Super/Man the Christopher Reeve Story:

You’ll believe a grown man can cry.

Watching this documentary was a very emotional experience as for so many of us of a certain age Christopher Reeve didn’t just play Superman he was one in the years after his equestrian accident in 1995 which left him paralysed from the neck down (I was talking about this accident with a friend of mine and he said something I’ve never forgotten since and that was if you fall off a horse try and tuck your head into your chest as then you’ll do a roll and land on your back instead of your neck.)

And while this documentary touches on that it also isn’t afraid to delve into other sides of Reeve’s life be they his frustration to escape the shadow of the Superman role and his early attempts at advocacy for those with conditions like his and how that required a change to the current Today’s Care, Tomorrow’s Cure mantra his foundation carries now.

Also part of the emotion watching this documentary is seeing the late great Robin Williams as the 2 were close friends since their days at Juilliard Drama School and he too is no longer with us and oh boy did it add to the many many emotions I felt watching this doco.

But what this documentary also did was reaffirm why I feel as strongly as I do that whoever plays Superman on film after Reeve doesn’t just have to be good they have to prove themselves to be worthy of that mantle because of what it represented when Reeve held it both on film and in life, Brandon Routh failed while Henry Cavill did prove himself to be worthy and so far David Corenswet shows promise, I hope he too is proven to be worthy of playing Superman.

And now we come to number 1 and it is no surprise what it is as it has been in the top spot ever since I saw it back at the end of February and it is:

DUNE PART TWO:

Yes, Dune Part Two exceeded every expectation I had for it and those were very high as the first part in 2021 was very good and did a fantastic job bringing the world of Arrakis to film courtesy of director Denis Villeneuve.

And like Dune Part One every aspect of the filmmaking process is operating the highest level it can possibly be, the direction/performances/storytelling/music/editing/sound/cinematography it rarely gets better than it does here.

Plus this movie has truly fantastic villains in the Harkonnens and the arena scene with Feyd-Rautha is truly amazing and watching it the first time on a big cinema screen I was grinning from ear to ear so much that my cheeks began to hurt and hearing that chant of “FEYD-RAUTHA, FEYD-RAUTHA, FEYD-RAUTHA” only added to my smile.

Also Villeneuve’s storytelling here is so on point that like Part One it brings you back into this world so effortlessly and with such ease that it doesn’t feel alienating or jarring to watch the cast mouth long sections of dialogue which was sometimes the case with the Lord of the Rings films as good as those are, here everything feels crisp, tight, to the point with no fat on the bone and it is simply awe inspiring.

Also this movie has incredible battle scenes and character moments that are captivating to watch, the battles are enormous in scope and I so wish I got to see this in IMAX (it was planned but life got in the way and I don’t regret that) while the characters here are wonderfully thought out and those scenes are equally as good.

And lastly I really do not envy Villeneuve having to try and top this with Dune Messiah the next book in the series and the last to focus on Paul Atreides, these two films along with Avatar the Way of Water are big studio filmmaking at their finest and they are proof that big films don’t have to feel like a hit and miss Maccas burger but can be something very special that inspires young ones to want to love movies and want to maybe make movies someday as we need that now more than we ever have.

And so that is my look back at 2024 in film, hopefully 2025 is a good year as well but as they say in the classics, we wait we see.