The 2024 Airplane Mode Movie Awards
A recap of this year's moviegoing trends, plus my top 25 movies of the year!
2024 was not a good movie year.
Which is not to say that great movies didn’t come out in 2024, because great movies come out every year—2024 was no exception. There were well-made movies to suit every persuasion: from Challengers to Dune: Part Two to Anora to Megalopolis to The Substance, everyone could be damn sure to find something they’d enjoy—just as you can be damn sure that those crying the death of cinema simply aren’t looking hard enough.
But great movie years are not defined by Great Movies so much as they are defined by Great Movie Moments, and in 2024—a year beset by franchise fatigue and a dearth of original ideas in the mainstream—those moments were few and far between.
This isn’t a COVID problem. Yes, ticket sales are still down compared to pre-pandemic numbers, but each of the last two years had back-to-back stretches of cinematic excitement that this year lacked, pointing the cause towards something other than that global pandemic. In 2023, we had both the Barbenheimer extravaganza, the creation of the “buy-opic” subgenre, and an amazing awards season that included releases from old masters like Martin Scorsese and Hayao Miyazaki. In 2022, we bore witness to the glory of Top Gun: Maverick’s record-breaking domestic run, the breakout international success of S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, and the out-of-this-world oddity of Everything Everywhere All At Once’s dominant Oscars run.
In each of those years, there was at least one extraordinary Movie Moment per season. In the spring, an indie film or two would rise unexpectedly from obscurity to cult-hit status. In the summer, a better-than-average blockbuster would dominate the zeitgeist. And in awards season, audiences would for the briefest instance treat movies as an art form worthy of conversation.
Apart from an unexpectedly strong slate of spring releases—Dune: Part Two, Love Lies Bleeding, Civil War, Challengers, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and I Saw the TV Glow released from March to May in quick succession—the Movie Moments of 2024 felt pale compared to what came before. The summer season was a sequel-heavy dead zone. Some of it was good (Inside Out 2), some of it deplorable (Deadpool & Wolverine), none of it original. And sequel fatigue continued into the fall, most prominently with Glicked, a Gladiator II-Wicked double-bill that couldn’t shake off the stench of being a Barbenheimer rip-off with worse movies.1 It didn’t help that both Gladiator II (a twenty-four-year-late legacyquel to Gladiator) and Wicked (the first of a two-part film series; Wicked: For Good is to come next fall) are franchise films par excellence, and reinforced just how dominant IP filmmaking was in 2024. For the first time ever, the top ten highest-grossing movies of the year were comprised entirely of sequels, prequels, Part Ones, and Part Twos.
It’s easy to be apocalyptic about a scenario like this. One could easiliy claim that cinematic creativity is in total decline, that the moviegoing economy is inching towards sterile failure—and indeed many have. I don’t like to use language like this, much as I would sometimes like to; I believe that you can always find examples of genuinely good films—franchise films included—in any given year. This is as true now as it ever has been, and I hope you’ll discover some movies you hadn’t thought to watch later on in this post. But I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that 2024—a film year overwhelmed by IP garbage like Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Venom: The Last Dance—made it much easier to be pessimistic about the state of the industry than normal.
Still, Airplane Mode isn’t about pessimism. Here, we’re all about celebrating The Movies, which is why I am returning once again with the 2024 Airplane Mode Movie Awards (woohoo!!!!). As with last year’s entry, I’m here inventing a series of bogus categories designed to appeal to the trends of this year. I plan to continue in this vein, with the caveat that I’d like to begin establishing a basic structure that I can use for year-in and year-out consistency. Thusly, Best Film, Worst Film, Most Overrated Film, Most Underrated Film, and Best Blockbuster shall remain fixtures of this awards series forevermore. If you have any thoughts about what would make for a good awards categories, whether they be permanent staples or specific to 2024, I’d love to see suggestions in the comments!
In my view, an awards system like this is more fun than a conventional Top 10 post, and a better way to overview the year’s trends and zeitgeists (though if you’re curious, I’ve included my top 25 films of the year at the bottom of this post anyway). Enjoy!
The Best Film of the Year: Challengers
The crown jewel of 2024 is Challengers, a sex-crazed tennis drama of homoerotic proportions. I suppose that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, a man who traffics in sexual intensity at operatic scale. But Challengers isn’t just Guadagnino’s most propulsive film to date, with a razor-sharp love-triangle screenplay; tremendously sweaty performances from Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist; and the year’s best musical score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a perfect collection of four-on-the-floor club bangers. Challengers is also vying to be the most entertaining romance film of the century.
The Worst Film of the Year: Deadpool & Wolverine
I’d love to call Deadpool & Wolverine an all-time low for franchise filmmaking, but that might be giving it too much credit: to call this a film at all would be to discredit the art of filmmaking itself. That’s because Deadpool & Wolverine is more corporate product than cinematic experience. It has little to no interest in telling a human story; it bases its central appeal on Marvel’s inbuilt expectations rather than on genuine human characters. Deadpool and Wolverine are less individuals with motivations than vehicles for dick jokes, and while I won’t deny that some of those dick jokes were funny, a film needs to have more than sly winks at the camera to be a complete experience. It needs to be a film, and Deadpool & Wolverine—a wind-up action figure taking the guise of a two-hour movie—exhibited this year’s most pernicious use of filmmaking form.
Most Underrated Film: Megalopolis
It’s easy to hate Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating cinematic rumination on the intersections between the United States, Ancient Rome, cultural decay, and going back to the club is one of the most deranged moviegoing experiences to have ever received a nationwide release. Batsh*t crazy scenes, including one in which Jon Voight proudly asks “What do you think of this boner I’ve got?” to his mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) before shooting her to death with a miniature bow-and-arrow, litter a film that flits between tones of childlike sincerity and screwball comedy quicker than you can say “Pick up my hat!”
It’s easy to hate Megalopolis, but even more worthwhile to love. I’d like to add my name to the list of that vocal minority of critics who defend this sometimes unintelligible cinematic vision of what is and what could be. At a time when $100 million-plus budgets are spent consistently on IP garbage rather than personal visions, Megalopolis is a towering achievement. Not just because there is something noble in watching an 85-year-old filmmaker’s burn $120 million of his own wine money in the pursuit of artistic achievement, but because the result is transcendently personal. Megalopolis feels alive.
Most Overrated Film: The Substance
I don’t want to use the phrase “this movie hates women” lightly, especially since The Substance has received so much acclaim from feminist critics proclaiming it a subversive body-horror masterpiece that, while lacking in subtlety, is a tremendous satire of women’s beauty standards and the psychological cudgeling it causes them. But The Substance treats its protagonist—Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging TV-workout star played self-reflexively by Demi Moore—with such one-note violence, it’s impossible to see how this movie doesn’t hate women. Here is a movie that spends the better part of its 2 hour and 20 minute (!!!) runtime brutalizing its protagonist whilst pretending to uphold the autonomy of women’s bodies—a film, in other words, that misconstrues technical craft with intelligent satire.2
Best Blockbuster: Dune: Part Two
Political intrigue, psychedelic religion, and big-ass sand worms: blockbuster filmmaking doesn’t get better than this, folks. (Read my original review here.)
Best Film About Being an Egg: I Saw the TV Glow
I’m going out on a limb here that might send me to Twitter jail, but I’d like to award Jane Schoenbrun’s incredible I Saw the TV Glow the award of Best Film About Being an Egg. An Egg is a term that refers to “a trans person before they have self-accepted,” to quote Emily St. James, a trans critic who writes brilliantly about representations of transness in cinema. Egg Cinema, according to St. James, is not necessarily made by trans folks; she argues instead that “most egg cinema is made by cis people who accidentally stumble into a field rife with Gender Interpretations and Trans Readings.”
I bring all this up because I Saw the TV Glow—an astonishing, mesmerizing work of cinematic dissociation—is made by a trans filmmaker, and at a time when trans-authored cinema is achieving newfound cultural prominence. Unlike some its contemporaries, the focus of I Saw the TV Glow is not on characters achieving a state of self-acceptance, but on a character who fails to cross the threshold from Egg to Self-Actualization—a fascinating twist on the tropes. The film recounts the story of Owen (Justice Smith), an alienated teenager who discovers and becomes obsessed with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque teen show called The Pink Opaque. Owen’s obsession quickly spirals into existential uncertainty as his identity becomes enmeshed with the woozy otherworld of late-90s television. In the process, director Jane Schoenbrun creates a landscape that is alien, nightmarish, and filled with terrible wonder.
Best Musical: Emilia Pérez
If there were a guiding ethos these awards (and to be clear: there isn’t), it might be something like, “This movie year wasn’t all that great, but the movies that stood out the most were the ones that just f*cking went for it.” This is why Megalopolis wins the award for Most Underrated Film, and it’s why Emilia Pérez—a French-produced, Spanish-language song-and-dance film about a Mexican lawyer who helps a cartel leader disappear and undergo gender reassignment surgery in secrecy—is winning the award for Best Musical.
This wasn’t a great year for the movie musical, but between high-profile releases like Mean Girls, Joker: Folie à Deux, Moana 2, and Wicked, it was at the very least a prominent year for the movie musical, especially compared to recent years. Emilia Pérez stands above the rest for, well, being a movie that just f*cking went for it. Here is a movie in which Zoe Saldaña asks about mammoplasty to a Thai doctor in 4/4 time, in which Selena Gomez breaks out into an abstract dance number concerning the invasion of her “cousin” Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) into her family’s home, not knowing that Ms. Pérez is actually her presumed-dead mafioso ex-husband. Emilia Pérez is bonkers in the Megalopolis mode: a creative endeavor by an old master uninterested in adhering to cinematic convention. As such, there are more than a few mistakes to be found in the film’s conception and execution. But Emilia Pérez stands out for its boldness of vision and its desire to push the boundaries of genre—a worthwhile endeavor.
Best Action Film: Rebel Ridge
Jeremy Saulnier needed a hero. That’s how the director of zeitgeisty, philosophically crushing action thrillers like Green Room and Blue Ruin described his approach behind his new film Rebel Ridge in an interview with The Big Picture Podcast. “I needed a break from my filmography, which is quite brutal,” he recounts. “I wanted to try something else, with a competent protagonist—someone who has a skill set.”
In Rebel Ridge, Saulnier found his hero. A high-concept and politically-savvy action thriller that deliberately fuses First Blood and Michael Clayton, Rebel Ridge is the perfect star-making vehicle for up-and-comer Aaron Pierre—and the best action film of the year. Pierre stars as Terry Richmond, a Marine veteran who, after having $30,000 stolen from him in a hit-and-run police operation known as Civil Asset Forfeiture, embarks on a revenge tour involving court proceedings, corruption conspiracies, and a pulse-pounding shootout at a Louisiana police precinct. Taut as a drill sergeant’s training module, Rebel Ridge allows Pierre the room to display his muscular combat action chops that belies a kindly, patient character seeking to do right by his family.
Best Horror Film: Nosferatu
This reimagining of the 1922 silent classic from director F.W. Murnau is the fourth film from Robert Eggers, and continues in his career-long project of procuring emotional intensity out of historical immersion. In the case of Nosferatu, that means thrusting audiences into the fictional German town of Wisborg in the year 1838, where winter is cold and an evil Romanian Count threatens to move into the neighborhood. The undead Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is intent on visiting Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman of means desperately seeking companionship. Orlok is the man who haunts her dreams, except that Ellen doesn’t react to the Count with shrieks—instead, she moans in pleasure.
Nosferatu is the most psychosexual vampire film in recent memory, a parable of repressed sexual desire in a world utterly devoid of feeling. Appropriately, Wisborg is shot in totalizing gray by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who renders a prototypically European atmosphere of drab—the perfect setting for the invasion of a foreign predator like Count Orlok. Orlok himself—a magnificent confluence of Eastern xenophobia, unrepressed sexual desire, and domineering nobility—is the ultimate nightmare for the aspiring lawyer Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), newlywed to Ellen. Orlok’s journey into Wisborg is tremendously sinister, and profoundly terrifying. I loved it.
Have a spooky new year.
The 25 Best Films of the Year
Challengers
Janet Planet
I Saw the TV Glow
Nickel Boys
Dune: Part Two
Love Lies Bleeding
Between the Temples
Close Your Eyes
Megalopolis
A Different Man
The Brutalist
Anora
Nosferatu
Evil Does Not Exist
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
Juror #2
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
All Shall Be Well
The Bikeriders
Civil War
Universal Language
A Real Pain
Rebel Ridge
Memoir of a Snail
Here I’m going to have to admit to not really understanding the appeal of Wicked. I enjoyed the film to extent, but found it bloated; I also couldn’t stand its paper-thin depiction of encroaching fascism, metaphorized by humans oppressing a race of talking animals rendered in overbearing CGI. On the other hand, I’m not the film’s target audience, and that’s fine. The film has great performances and fun setpieces, and that’s worth celebrating.
On the other hand, Gladiator II is terrible. It’s a legacyquel that worships its predecessor with cloying nostalgia, with a miscast Paul Mescal, unintelligible plotting, and action setpieces that miss the mark—the one thing you’d think you could count on in a Gladiator sequel. Denzel Washington is tremendous in a role that allows him to be both a queer-coded gladiator coach and a power-hungry politician within the same breath, but his performance can’t redeem a fundamentally purposeless film.
I should note that The Substance basically checks every box that I would normally assign to a Great Movie Moment: unepexcted box office success, comeback story for an elder statesman movie star, and possible Oscar chances still on the table. But I really, really didn’t like The Substance, lessening my personal Movie Moments of 2024 one less than for someone who really loved it. (The same could be said for Wicked, which apparently blew everyone’s minds except mine.)
Thanks Jim, Second time reading you fine appraisal of this years movie offering, it does appear to be a slow year, your insight will prevent spending time where it will not be beneficial to me.
Keep up the good work!