Top 10 Lists

For critics, every year-end review of the movies is an exercise in both celebration and consternation. We praise the art form and also lament its inexorable degradation. We highlight our favorites while bemoaning that they didn’t make enough money. We applaud the industry’s democratization and kvetch about studios’ entrenched homogeneity. We rhapsodize about the stuff we adore and snarl that there’s so much else to despise. We write about what’s good and still find a way to feel bad.

And look, I get it. It’s hard not to survey the medium’s financial landscape without shuddering in despair; total grosses seem unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic levels, and of the 22 movies that did make $100M domestic in 2024, exactly one was a bona fide original (the Ryan Reynolds vehicle IF). The endangered mid-budget drama continues to dwindle with alarming speed, as corporations would rather churn out four-quadrant sequels than finance nominally riskier fare. Higher ticket prices discourage audiences from visiting theaters, especially when they can remain home and gulp down the anodyne content fed to them by streaming algorithms. Teenagers seem more interested in perpetually scrolling through bite-sized videos on their phones than in immersing themselves in dark auditoriums for two hours, and also they won’t get off my lawn. Read More

Was 2023 the year that saved the movies? It’s a question that stems from a false premise; any prior suggestion that cinema was imperiled—that the multiplex is homogenized, that streamers are destroying theaters, that studios don’t make films for grownups anymore—ignores the immutable fact (or at least this critic’s fierce opinion) that artists have spent the past decade stubbornly churning out high-quality motion pictures. Still, it’s difficult to deny that something happened on July 21, 2023—a moment that, depending on your perspective, either signaled a seismic shift in audience behavior or vindicated your long-held insistence that movies remain alive and well.

I am speaking, of course, of #Barbenheimer, that ungainly portmanteau of two of the year’s most critically and commercially successful pictures, which arrived in theaters on the same day. Rather than cannibalizing each other, they complemented one another, sparking a craze of double features and breathing fresh life into the industry. Here were two movies that, in empirical terms, had nothing in common; one was a brightly colored fantasy inspired by a doll, the other a sober and intense three-hour epic about the birth (and aftermath) of the atomic bomb. Yet people flocked to Barbie and Oppenheimer alike, and in the process they reminded everyone that the simple act of going to the movies remains a cherished pastime—a sacred ritual in which art and commerce need not be mutually exclusive. Read More

Are movies better than they’ve ever been? This isn’t a rhetorical question, nor is it a trolling provocation. Concordant to the annual list-making ritual—the absurd and irresistible exercise of reducing a year’s worth of cinema to a discrete number of worthy titles—is the compulsion to take stock of the industry at large. This is frequently a demonstration of despair: a lament that movies are dying, are childish, aren’t what they used to be. The perpetuity of these vague assessments—that they invariably allude to some unspecified past in the medium’s history, a golden age when Then was indubitably superior to Now—would seem to diminish their accuracy. But critics are creatures of grievance, and there is always some new cataclysmic trend—the decline of originality, the prioritization of commerce over artistry, the lack of visual and narrative audacity—for us to complain about.

2022 was no different, even if the particular breed of doomsaying it invited was a familiar species. Once again, the box office was dispiritingly ruled by franchises, sequels, and spinoffs; of the 12 pictures that grossed $150 million domestically, only one—Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, whose subject matter isn’t exactly novel—wasn’t rooted in existing intellectual property. (Last August, I bemoaned the financial failures of three largely original movies that simultaneously landed in theaters with a collective thud.) Conversely, many bracing and adventurous films—the barreling excitement of Athena, the silky suspense of KIMI, the dastardly twists of Fresh—virtually ignored theaters altogether, instead requiring a subscription (or at least a friend or family member’s password) to a boutique streaming service. Cinema may not be dead, but in terms of production and distribution, it is undoubtedly changing, and that constant state of flux inspires grave uncertainty about the art form’s future. Read More