Film
The Substance
Seeing Dune: Part Two in IMAX, with the floor shaking as Paul Atreides’s forces charged the palace was my second-best cinema-going experience of the year. Trumping it was watching a DC audience recoil every other minute at Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror The Substance, a film that nods to Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg while declaring itself the most original of 2024. Two-thirds of the way through, I stopped wincing and started laughing, probably because my body didn’t know how to react. The film is a brutal parable of female self-loathing and insecurity — exacerbated, of course, by a venal male-led system, which Dennis Quaid’s producer Harvey personifies in a manner as grotesque as any of the movie’s gross-out special effects. But this film is Demi Moore’s crowning glory: she dazzles as fading TV star Elisabeth Sparkle, who finds herself tempted into taking the experimental drug that produces a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley, who comes into her own as “Sue.”) Her lead performance earned her a first Golden Globes nomination since the mid-Nineties, which she’d better win: the balance must be respected…
—Matt McDonald
Hit Man
With Nosferatu, Babygirl and Challengers, horny cinema is back in a big way, and boy has it been overdue! One notch down are romantic comedies, a box-office staple until the superhero movie murdered them, and are finally creeping back too. I used my “movie of the year” slot last year to shout out Anyone But You, starring Glen Powell and buxom queen of the internet, Sydney Sweeney; and I’m repeating the move, highlighting an even better, sexier romantic comedy starring Glen Powell, which received far less attention and praise than it deserved. Co-written by Powell and director Richard Linklater, Hit Man is about Gary, a dweebish professor of psychology and philosophy who winds up working for the police as a fake hitman. In comical disguises, he meets with people looking to hire a hitman, gets them on the mic saying they want him to kill someone for them and then the police swoop in and arrest their perp. All is going swimmingly until Gary falls for Adria Arjona’s Madison; a potential client looking to take out her abusive husband. It’s a terrific premise, built up with the excellence you’d expect from Linklater, and our leading couple are funny, charismatic and jaw-slackeningly sexy. If you miss well-written, tightly structured, utterly charming films, this is one for you — and a great date movie too. The great pity is that Netflix bought the film, meaning it never got the theatrical run or attention it deserved, but you can make up for it now. Give it a watch!
—Ross Anderson
The Promised Land and Red Rooms
It’s fitting that few Americans have seen either of the year’s finest films.
For the first: Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land is an eighteenth-century Scandinavian western that celebrates traditional virtues — duty, honor, hard work and the courage to protect the weak and conquer new frontiers — virtues that, judging by award season buzz, Hollywood’s tastemakers seem less inclined to highlight than the aspects of masculinity deemed toxic. Anchored by Mads Mikkelsen’s masterful turn as Captain Ludvig Kahlen, a soldier-turned-settler determined to tame the desolate Jutland Heath while battling a tyrannical nobleman bent on his destruction, the film evokes the sweeping grandeur and moral drama of William Wyler’s The Big Country. With breathtaking cinematography capturing the stark beauty of the Danish countryside, The Promised Land offers a perfect response to those who lament, “They don’t make them like they used to.” They can — and really should, more often.
My second recommendation is based on a depressing thought experiment: how would the O.J. Simpson trial play out in the age of outrage clicks and social media influencers? Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms offers a chilling answer, centering on Kelly-Anne, a Canadian model and online poker savant who becomes consumed by the trial of a serial killer accused of murdering children for a dark web audience. Juliette Gariépy delivers one of the year’s most mesmerizing performances, portraying Kelly-Anne as a narcissistic voyeur whose unnerving allure is heightened by claustrophobic close-ups. With its elegant restraint, hypnotic score, and exploration of humanity’s darkest obsessions, Red Rooms may just be the ultimate David Fincher movie that Fincher didn’t direct — haunting, provocative and eminently rewatchable. With its sharp critique of the media’s role in fueling our collective madness, the film also feels disturbingly prescient in the aftermath of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder and the grotesque fascination with his killer. Yet perhaps its true brilliance lies in its haunting afterlife, forcing us to confront unsettling truths about ourselves long after the credits roll.
—Giancarlo Sopo
The Wild Robot
There was no Oppenheimer-style titan this year, and many of the best films I saw, such as The Holdovers and American Fiction, were, strictly speaking, last year’s releases. I’m writing this before several intriguing-sounding titles such as The Brutalist, Nosferatu and Better Man come out where I live, but after a decent amount of reflection, I’m going to say that I didn’t see a more affecting film all year than Chris Sanders’s The Wild Robot. Generally when I go to animated films, it’s as a favor to my eight-year old daughter, but The Wild Robot manages to be many things at the same time. A carefully measured and never sappy ecological parable that’s genuinely funny; a thrilling and inventive adventure; and, most of all, a film about surrogate parents and children that starts to become incredibly moving about halfway through (“I could use a boost”) and then doesn’t really stop until the end. I loved it.
—Alexander Larman
TV
English Teacher and Mr. & Mrs Smith
2024 has been a year with some exceptional television and a lot of highly forgettable bilge, but two shows shone out more than any others despite having unpromising premises.
English Teacher is a sitcom about a gay teacher at an Austin high school, made by (and starring) a group of comedian friends who used to live together in LA. So, it ought to be utterly unwatchable. Instead, it’s the funniest sitcom I’ve seen in years. The characters are effortlessly likable; it’s irreverently non-“woke” but not hectoringly “anti-woke;” and it’s intensely funny in a way that few sitcoms are. It’s comforting, well-made TV that made me laugh hard at least once an episode, and my only disappointment is that the first season was only eight episodes long. If FX doesn’t renew it for a full-length, twenty-two-episode second season, I’m rocking up at Disney HQ and making January 6 look like a day out at the park.
Speaking of gruesome, over-the-top violence: Mr. and Mrs Smith. This, facially, is a TV adaptation of the 2005 “Brangelina” romcom, where the happily married John and Jane Smith learn they’re both secret assassins and their bosses tell them to kill each other. It’s fine, but a nineteen-year-later TV adaptation seemed like a terrible idea; and Donald Glover and co. clearly agreed as they kept the basic core premise (professional assassins married to each other) and threw out everything else, making their own, new story.
Here, Maya Erskine and Donald Glover play the titular leads and are only married as part of their cover story, as they go around completing missions for their mysterious boss. The world-building is superb, each mission is gripping and surprising, the action is fantastic, the writing is witty as hell and Hiro Mirai (director of Atlanta) sets the style of the show, meaning it looks incredible. Plus, Glover and Erskine have fabulous chemistry, and his outfits are the best menswear looks I’ve seen in a TV show in ages. In a year packed with espionage shows, this was by far the best.
Slow Horses
Now that we are in a post-Succession universe, by far the best and most enjoyable thing to watch is Slow Horses, which has just finished its fourth series. “Series” is something of a misnomer here, as each six-part installment is based on one of Mick Herron’s superb blackly comic spy novels, focusing on the gaggle of misfits and losers who populate Slough House: the dumping ground for MI5 agents who have erred in some way. This season was particularly rich and exciting, not least because it introduced the recurring figure of ex-CIA mercenary Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), the show’s most compelling antagonist yet and, if all goes well, a Moriarty-esque figure for the Horses to battle against. But nothing comes close to Gary Oldman’s grunting, hard-drinking, flatulent performance as Jackson Lamb, head of Slough Horse and a brilliant spy underneath his dyspeptic exterior.
—Alexander Larman
Ted
In Ted, Peacock’s prequel series to the 2012 film of the same name, Seth MacFarlane has rediscovered the magic of the American sitcom. Scott Grimes and Alanna Urbach steal the show as the parents of John, a Massachusetts boy whose teddy bear comes to life in a thunderstorm. Earlier seasons of MacFarlane’s animated show Family Guy were inflected with signs of his exhaustive knowledge of late twentieth-century American television and film; but the creator has not been involved in the production of his breakout show for over a decade, and the writing has declined in quality as a result. Ted suggests that MacFarlane has been saving up his best jokes ever since; the Nineties setting will also help you get away with racier lines than other 2020s shows might attempt. For a while it seemed like the best new sitcoms needed a foreign influence to give them the edge — just look at What We Do in the Shadows, which finished triumphantly this month. Perhaps that’s not the case — Ted will return for a second season next year.
—Matt McDonald
Music
Kendrick Lamar, GNX
Kendrick Lamar didn’t just have the album of the year; it was his year in music.
In March, he had the best feature of the year with his surprise verse on Metro Boomin and Future’s “Like That,” where he slapped down any idea that there was any better rapper than him. In his words, no, there wasn’t a “big three” of himself, J. Cole and Drake; “it’s just big me.”
Kendrick then proved this in the following brutal multi-track rap beef with Drake, where he repeatedly called Drake a phony pop star who ripped off Southern and West Coast hip-hop. Oh, and that he was a former child star turned child predator.
Kendrick’s opening track in the beef, “euphoria,” remains my most listened-to song this year. “Meet the Grahams” is perhaps the most brutal diss track ever. He then closed it out with “Not Like Us,” the biggest song of 2024.
All this time, there were murmurs of a new album and at the end of November, we finally got it: GNX. It’s a short, tight album but one of the most diverse of the year, with punchy West Coast bangers like “squabble up,” “gnx,” “peekaboo,” and “tv off”; smooth, R&B-influenced grooves like “luther” and “dodger blue”; epic conceptual poems like “man at the garden,” “gloria,” and (the album highlight) “reincarnated”; and long, retrospective tracks like “wacced out murals” and “heart pt. 6.”
It’s not as clever as his previous album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, but he knows that; in his opening track, “wacced out murals,” he explicitly says, “This is not for lyricists, I swear it’s not the sentiments / Fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit.” And it works, being Lamar’s best album since To Pimp a Butterfly, which remains in the top five greatest rap albums ever. GNX isn’t as complex and layered, but it’s his proof that you can make authentic, rich hip-hop that is true to the culture that this art came from but still catchy and commercially successful. I listened to the album twenty times in the first week, then ten more the next, yet returning to it to write this item, I was still excited to hear it. And I can’t wait to see his Super Bowl show next year.
—Ross Anderson
49 Winchester, Leavin’ This Holler and Zach Top, Cold Beer & Country Music
An album I had on repeat this year was Leavin’ This Holler by 49 Winchester. 49 Winchester doesn’t stray far from the sound that made them famous with plenty of Americana and southern rock influences. The title track is the real standout here, as the narrator bitterly says goodbye to his hometown of “heartache” alongside a steady, driving beat and the backing vocals of Maggie Antone, another up-and-coming Virginia native who has been making her mark as of late.
Another must mention: Cold Beer & Country Music by Zach Top. Zach Top is stealing the hearts of classic country fans with his Nineties country sound and traditional voice. He was nominated for a CMA for New Artist of the Year and his album features plenty of juicy earworms, like “I Never Lie”, “Sounds Like the Radio”, “Use Me” and “Bad Luck,” that feel like they could be cuts from the likes of Alan Jackson, George Strait and Joe Diffie.
Finally, Riley Green should get his flowers for releasing arguably the country song of the year with “Jesus Saves” off of his new album, Way Out Here.
—Amber Duke
The Last Dinner Party, Prelude to Ecstasy
A tough one here as the new Nick Cave album, Wild God, was a particular marvel too — the sexagenarian Cave has the energy, stamina and brio of a man a third of his age — but I’m going to be faintly controversial and pick the Last Dinner Party’s debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. The band established themselves as a thrilling proposition when their first single, “Nothing Matters,” launched itself into playlists the world over last year, and set an extraordinarily high bar for the first record to reach. Which, surprisingly, it manages to. The influences — Abba, Sparks, Blondie and, above all else, Bowie — are clear, but the genius behind the Abigail Morris-fronted band is that it never feels derivative or calculating. Instead, the steampunk Victoriana that their live shows major in is counterpointed by classic songwriting largely devoid from the modern era. If they haven’t quite cracked the US yet, assiduous touring and an eagerly anticipated sophomore album should change that.
—Alexander Larman
Charli xcx, brat and brat and it’s completely different but also still brat
Album of the year? Yes, I’ll take the anxiety-riddled early-thirties Brit who goes out too much. 2024 was the year Essex’s Charli xcx came good, with her sixth album brat. A refreshing mix of the best of European club music, hooky and introspective lyrics and autotune vocals, Charli offered wall-to-wall “Club Classics” in June — then reinvented her opus throughout the year through new versions of the songs featuring Lorde, Ariana Grande and Julian Casablancas, among others. “My four-year-old daughter dances to it constantly, I just hope she’s not paying attention to the words,” is how a friend of mine introduced me to this record. Kamala may not have proved brat, but Charli converted the rest of us. Honorable mentions to Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia, All Hell from Los Campesinos! and Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal mixtape.
—Matt McDonald
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