With 2024 winding down, it is time for my 9th annual list of the best movies at least a decade old that I watched this past year. Once again, the list is somewhat random and arbitrary, based on the movies I just so happen to choose to watch (or re-watch) over the course of the past year. (In case you missed it, I made a separate list for the best horror movies I watched in 2024.) As always, check JustWatch.com to see where the following films may be currently streaming.
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My annual list of the best movies 10 years or older (and the list for newer movies I’ve seen) was growing long this year—partially because I watched so many horror movies in October1—so I decided to take the horror movies from those lists to create a new compilation of every horror movie I watched this year. (The films are separated into five tiers and listed alphabetically within each tier.)
I’d been wanting to see this film for a while because it is within one of my favorite subgenres of folk horror. The Wicker Man is one of the original movies of that sub-genre and the best, inspiring later films like Midsommar. A police officer goes to a secluded Scottish island in search of a missing girl, but the townspeople act oddly with weird customs. He comes to learn they are part of a pagan cult, and the girl was possibly part of a ritual sacrifice. The final twist (which I will not spoil) is iconic. What is most impressive is how they were able to make a chilling horror film without any darkness or blood (most of the film takes place in broad daylight).
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Stories can be great, and video games can be great, but video games are not the greatest medium for stories. This realization came to me after seeing the television adaptation of The Last of Us. I played the post-apocalyptic video game around the time it first came out in 2013, when it was hailed as one of “the best video games ever.” While I had some fun playing the game, I thought it was overrated and undeserving of its massive hype. The gameplay itself didn’t feel all that fun or inventive. Instead, what was so critically acclaimed was not the gameplay but the story.
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Most movies are ninety minutes to two hours. Some are longer, veering toward three hours, but those tend to be more epic in scope, from established filmmakers and/or blockbuster franchises. However, for screenwriters trying to break into the industry, it is strongly recommended—if not required—to write spec screenplays between 90 and 120 pages (with one page of screenplay roughly equating to one minute of screen time).
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The great screenwriter William Goldman had a famous quote about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” His full quote elaborated: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Goldman meant that, beforehand, nobody (neither the producers, studio executives, directors, actors, or critics) could accurately predict which movies would be breakout hits or which would be box office duds. There are always surprises in both directions: movies everyone thinks will succeed end up bombing, while surefire flops become smash hits. At least that’s the way the movie industry used to work. Now Hollywood thinks they know everything.
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This continues to be one of the most uniquely brilliant shows on television. It blows my mind how John Wilson is even able to create this show, what his process must be, constantly filming his daily life and somehow editing it all into something cohesive and interesting. There is nothing else like it on TV. It’s almost like an entire show built around synchronicity. He follows serendipity wherever it takes him, around New York City and the entire country. He finds the weirdest people, and like Nathan Fielder, isn’t afraid to get super awkward. But the show is also quite heartfelt at times. Sadly, this is the final season, but I will eagerly watch whatever John Wilson does next.
I wrote about all four seasons of Succession here (and a fictional fifth season here).
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I already did my annual list of the ten best older movies I saw in 2023, so here is a list of the newer movies I saw this past year. They are separated into five tiers based on quality and listed alphabetically within each tier. (Check JustWatch.com to see where they are currently streaming.)
I sat stunned as the credits rolled, amazed at how great this low-budget indie horror film was. It is an absolute masterpiece, maybe my favorite horror movie ever—at least of the new millennium. I was on edge throughout, legitimately frightened—all without a single jump scare. It is an occult horror movie about black magick and rituals, but they take the subject matter extremely seriously and clearly did research to make it seem realistic—which makes it all the more haunting. [Slight Spoilers Ahead] The story is about a grieving mother who hires an occultist to perform a ritual to summon her guardian angel to ask a favor so she can speak to her murdered son—and get revenge against his killers (who used him to perform an occult ritual). The ritual in the film is based on an actual ritual from The Book of Abramelin, which the famous occultist Aleister Crowley performed in real life. I find the world of occult ritual magic fascinating but also frightening. Occult horror scares me more than most other subgenres because the type of dark magic portrayed in the film might actually exist. Whether such dark forces are real or not doesn’t matter, because there certainly do exist occultists who believe them to be real and actually perform these magical rituals—but to what end?
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With 2023 winding down, it is time for my annual list of the ten best movies (at least ten years old) that I watched this past year. As always, this is not a list of the best movies ever, just those I chose to watch in 2023. I ranked the top ten, but the order doesn’t matter as much as the “tiers,” which I separated into five groups: I) Cinematic Masterpieces, II) Great Films, III) Just Good, IV) Flawed But Watchable, and V) Disappointing (Don’t Bother). The ordering of films within each tier are interchangeable. [Use JustWatch.com to see if/where these films are currently streaming.]
This is an amazing piece of cinema. It feels like a documentary following actual Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century searching for El Dorado. The opening shot is stunning, as hundreds of people descend a steep mountain trail carrying all their supplies. With so many of today’s movies shot on green-screen using CGI, the verisimilitude of this film was a breath of fresh air—literally. You feel like you are there in the verdant jungles of the Amazon with the actors—because the film was shot on location in the jungles of the Amazon. As a result, you feel the same constant dread that the crew felt, of trekking into the complete unknown, not knowing what danger may be lurking in the thick forest or around the next river bend.
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In honor of spooky season I will be exploring the Exorcist franchise. The 1973 original is a classic horror movie I had never seen until this year. Actually, I’d seen bits and pieces, specifically the infamous scene of the possession in Regan’s bedroom. That is part of the reason I avoided seeing the film for so long. As I’ve detailed before, I was not a fan of horror movies when I was younger, but even when I got into horror I avoided the demonic possession subgenre, perhaps because I found it particularly horrific. Demons seemed more realistic than zombies or vampires, and—if real—being possessed by an evil entity is probably the most terrifying horror scenario of all. Demonic possession movies could even be a case of “hyperstition”—or a piece of fiction that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and manifests itself in reality. Demons like those depicted in The Exorcist may not have existed before, but after the popularity of the movie, they surely exist now—at least in the imaginations of the viewers. I also avoided The Exorcist because there have been so many copycats over the years, vastly inferior retreads that further pushed me away from the possession subgenre as a whole. Plus with all the parodies and references that have permeated pop culture, I felt like I had already seen the movie. But because The Exorcist is so highly rated, and I am a horror fan, I finally saw the film in full for the first time this year, and I can confirm it is more than worthy of its high praise.
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I used to work at a job where I had to watch cable TV all day. (It sounds more fun than it was.) One of the networks I had to watch would often replay the same movies over and over again. At that time I was studying screenwriting and wanted to write movies myself, so it was instructive to watch a single movie multiple times to deconstruct it and figure out what the filmmakers did right or wrong, how and why. I tend to avoid rewatching movies unless it’s one of my absolute favorites, and even then, only years later when I don’t remember it too well. But for this job, I wound up seeing the same movie multiple times in a single day, or two days in a row, or several times over the course of a week/month/year. I saw both good movies and bad movies this way—and some movies that I thought were good when I first saw them, but by the fifth or tenth time realized it wasn’t very good in the first place. One movie (or group of movies) that I repeatedly watched at my job was the Indiana Jones franchise.
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