The movies that turned me out in 2024
Body-melting horror, Irish rappers, and Ariana Grande left their marks on me
Some people are put on this earth to cure disease, or to rescue people in peril. As for me, my best guess: to watch hundreds of movies every year and then make it everyone else’s problem.
Saw a lot this year! Loved a lot! Like most of it! Hated a couple, especially the devil “Emilia Perez”!
Here are 24 films that really turned me out in 2024, ranked-ish. For the purposes of year-end list culture, I counted anything that I saw over the course of the calendar year in some sort of “new” capacity — a theatrical release, a festival premiere, or an advance screening of something released in one of those ways elsewhere.
(And ICYMI: my list of performances I loved in movies that missed the cut.)
“Else,” directed by Thibault Emin
What starts as a pandemic-themed dark comedy (and we’re full up on those for the next century or so) warps and melts into the most perversely beautiful body horror I saw this year. Sorry, “The Substance.” In Fantastic Fest highlight “Else,” a mysterious diseases causes people to fuse with their inanimate surroundings. As time dilates and bodies become buildings, it starts to feel like the story’s infecting you, too. (Watch the trailer.)
“Universal Language,” directed by Matthew Rankin
My crush on our northern neighbor holds strong. Aside from “Canada’s Drag Race,” nothing fueled that fire more in 2024 than “Universal Language” at Fantastic Fest. The deadpan, humanist comedy follows several characters’ daily lives in an alternate universe where Tehran and Winnipeg are the same city, somehow. Rankin’s ice-seized, concrete aesthetic dazzled me; it’s like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” for brutalist architecture. I love a gently surreal ode to what we all have in common. Bonus: master-class acting by a turkey. (Watch the trailer.)
“Dead Mail,” directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy
Recognizing the most apparent influences on this chilling South by Southwest neo-noir — Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and Rob Reiner’s “Misery” — only reveals how, well, peculiar it all is. An alarming piece of mail draws a small-town post office investigator into deadly mystery involving synthesizers, a home dungeon, and a squirrelly maniac (played by John Fleck). Lovingly crafted with spooky VHS-style, “Dead Mail” is no zig, all zag. (Watch the trailer.)