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Ranking Every Movie of 2024 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Lupita Nyongo in A Quiet Place Day One; Daisy Edgar Jones in Twisters; Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding; Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge; Willa Fitzgerald in Strange Darling

Last week, we exhaustively ranked and wrote about every TV show we watched in 2024. Today, we’re doing the same thing with movies—but not really. I spend most weeks reviewing individual films in detail, so beyond publicizing yesterday’s Top 20 list, I’m not undertaking some massive cinematic year-in-review project. Instead, this annual exercise is more designed to serve as a personal recordkeeping function, allowing me to memorialize all of the 2024 releases that I watched and to assign them relative levels of caliber—not in the form of a literal ranking, but by dividing them into qualitative tiers.

What do you get out of this? In theory, two things. First, for each movie listed, I’m including a parenthetical detailing which streaming service it’s currently available on, if any. (Obviously this information is subject to change, especially given the parsimonious whims of our studio overlords, but it’s accurate as of today.) Second, if you ever find yourself asking the age-old question, “What movie should I watch tonight?” then in theory this piece gives you a hefty bank of data, allowing you to make an informed decision rather than just surrendering to the almighty algorithm. Read More

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Speak No Evil, Beetlejuice 2, and Movies Nobody Asked For

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; James McAvoy in Speak No Evil

One of the most common rhetorical questions you’ll find on the internet, posed in response to the green-lighting of a new movie, is “Who asked for this?” It’s a derisive expression meant to impugn the upcoming film’s artistic integrity and belittle its commercial viability, even if it really functions as a statement of personal taste; the literal answer to the question is invariably, “Lots of people, just not you.” It’s also correlative of asking whether a picture is “necessary,” which is equally foolish. Strictly speaking, no work of art is necessary because we’re talking about entertainment, not food or shelter; philosophically speaking, art is absolutely necessary because it provides us with pleasure, anger, knowledge, and the opportunity to get mad at people online when they disagree with us. We may not need movies to survive, but to quote the captain from Wall-E, I don’t want to survive—I want to live.

And yet: In our era of perpetual IP churn, it’s occasionally worth pondering why certain pictures are made, and whether their cinematic execution can transcend their facially dubious justification (which is, of course, that studio executives hope they might make money). The two movies currently atop the domestic box office, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Speak No Evil, inspire this sort of metaphysical musing, given that they’re typal cousins: the long-delayed sequel to a beloved classic, and the English-language remake of an acclaimed foreign work. They both have their virtues; they both also raise questions about whether they should exist at all. Read More

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Blink Twice, Strange Darling, and the Third-Act Problem

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Channing Tatum in Blink Twice; Willa Fitzgerald in Strange Darling

Movies are built for catharsis. Regardless of genre—the romantic comedy’s race through the airport, the murder mystery’s unmasking of the killer, the sports picture’s big game—cinematic endings are designed to cash the checks that their films have spent the past two acts writing. The paradox of this construction, at least when it comes to the modern thriller, is that most directors are more skilled at building tension than unleashing bedlam. Auteurs such as Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, and M. Night Shyamalan (to name a few) are all capable craftsmen, wielding their razor-sharp technique to amplify our unease, but while they’re skilled at manufacturing suspense, they often struggle to pay it off in ways that are genuinely unpredictable or exciting.

Last weekend saw two new releases acutely vulnerable to this common pitfall. One tumbles into it. The other does its best to evade it, partly by rewiring its chronology. At the risk of evoking that head-tapping “Roll Safe” meme, your third act can’t ruin your movie’s ending if it arrives in the first 15 minutes. Read More

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Sasquatch Sunset, Ungentlemanly Warfare, and the Risk of Originality

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Eiza González in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare; a scene from Sasquatch Sunset

When it comes to intellectual property, cinema doesn’t operate in absolutes. There are great superhero movies and also terrible ones; there are great original movies and also terrible ones. Still, the franchise boom of the 2010s created an uneven playing field that lent a certain luster to smaller-scale films which weren’t rooted in comic books or young-adult literature. In fact, the continued survival of these types of pictures is what makes me confident that the medium isn’t on the verge of collapsing, despite the constant industry doomsaying about A.I. or tax write-offs or Netflix giving Zack Snyder a billion dollars to make seven different versions of an off-brand Star Wars rather than releasing any of its #content in theaters. The movies have been at death’s door ever since their birth over 100 years ago. They just never seem to die.

Currently, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe dwindling in dominance and audiences rewarding more ambitious storytelling like last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, there seems to be an opportunity for studios to pivot away from the IP craze and toward more original movies. But again, the mere fact of a film’s putative originality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s, y’know… good. This past weekend featured two new releases that don’t feature masked heroes, magic wands, or talking animals. At last, real movies for adults! Except, well, suffice it to say that both have their flaws. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2023 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Thomas McKenzie in Eileen; Rosamund Pike in Saltburn; Keira Knightley in Boston Strangler; Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre; Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

You know how this works. Having recently published our list of the best movies of the year, it’s time to rank the rest. And by “rank” I mean clump them into semi-arbitrary tiers. But don’t worry, even though they aren’t individually ranked, nothing’s to prevent you from kvetching that the comedy I slotted into Tier 3 actually belongs in Tier 5, and that the thriller I placed in the “Underrated” tier is Overrated, Actually. That kind of griping is exactly why we have the internet.

Per usual, in addition to identifying each movie’s director, I have also appended the specific service it’s currently streaming on (if any). Note that, given the vagaries of streaming and the gluttony of assholes like David Zaslav, this information is necessarily impermanent. In other words, stream ’em while you got ’em. (Remember, I have stopped including Rotten Tomatoes data because Rotten Tomatoes is trash.)

Here’s the full list of all 134 new releases I watched in 2023, split into tiers that are cogent and precise and totally rigid (where applicable, the hyperlink leads to my review of that particular movie): Read More

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