The 10 Best Movies of 2024 (D.C. area version)

While sequels ruled the box office (again), this list celebrates filmmakers with originality, vision and boundless DIY spirit.

(Originally published in the Washington Post December 13, 2024)

(Note: In making this ten-best list for the Washington Post, I was constrained by the release calendar to films that came out in 2024 in the greater Washington D.C. area and/or were available on demand. Before the new year, I will post my own Watch List version, which will cover the same calendar year but reflect all the movies available nationwide. There will be plenty of overlap but it won't be 100 percent – stay tuned.)

The IP wars of the 21st century are over, and the studios have won. This year, for the first time ever, the 10 highest-grossing movies in America were all sequels.

Technically, “Wicked” is a prequel, and “Dune: Part Two” is the second half of one long movie, but there’s still a “two” in the title, and intellectual property is intellectual property — the saga of Paul Atreides exists as a presold, pre-mulched commodity. The late film critic Manny Farber’s theory of white elephant art vs. termite art — where termite art consisted of unpretentious B movies oblivious to greater meaning and therefore more alive — has been reversed; genre has not just won but become bloated and cautious, coasting on the self-congratulatory snark of “Deadpool” and “Venom” movies and afraid to sell us something we haven’t already consumed. When we watch a studio sequel, or reboot, or remake, we are eating our own waste.

So the great entertainment corporations sell us what we want, and we want what they sell us — or at least, that’s all we find at the multiplex. In an inversion from the previous century, you frequently have to turn to TV for original ideas, and in fact, some of the year’s very best movies landed on Netflix or Prime Video after a pro forma genuflection in the direction of a theatrical release. Others were independent films that toured the art houses and are now available for $3.99 on a streaming platform near you. Maybe you miss the unique experience of seeing a rascally roller coaster ride like “Hit Man” — a movie made to be shared with an audience — in a roomful of strangers, but at least you get to see it.

True, some of those box office champs gave us our money’s worth. Denis Villeneuve is a ponderous visionary, but he is a visionary, and his “Dune” films are rich toffee, micromanaged down to the last megapixel. “Twisters” was fun, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” muscular and engrossing. A fellow I went to college with started the studio that invented the Minions; he’s a really nice guy, and I’m happy for his fortune.

But I’m tired of franchises and pixels, and maybe you are, too. It’s been a rough year for many of us, and while you have every right to numb yourself with a big, empty studio confection like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I found sustenance in tales of human connection, disaster, survival — dramas of getting through the day and comedies of making peace with the flawed people in our lives and our own flawed selves.

There’s this, too: A revolution may be underfoot, tiny mammals with big ambitions to tip over the dinosaurs on their way out. One of the movies in my 2024 Top 10 is a home-brewed slapstick comedy made by a bunch of nobodies in the Upper Midwest; it arrives on Blu-ray this month after knocking them dead at local film festivals across the country. An even more daring outlier, Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it may be the most important, a proudly kitchen-sink repurposing of “Batman” iconography in the service of a freewheeling trans coming-out comedy. (The lawyers over at Warner Bros. are doubtlessly not amused, but Drew has claimed fair use, and the film is available for streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.)

The mere existence of these movies gives me hope for a new people’s cinema, a cargo culture to plunder corporate IP for a million private, jury-rigged needs. The promise of the digital revolution has always been that anyone can afford to make a movie and get it seen by everyone. The studios, and the conglomerates that own them, still hold the keys to the kingdom, but streaming TV and pandemics have loosened their grip and made them overcautious, doubling down on our need for nostalgia in the face of an uncertain future. You want “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” or “Kung Fu Panda 9”? Don’t worry, you’ll get them. But some nobody in nowhere-land may be making a movie that could rock your world with entertainment — or challenge everything you hold to be true. Let a thousand provocations bloom.

A few caveats: Because this list is restricted to films that played theatrically in the D.C. area in calendar 2024 or are available on streaming platforms, a handful of titles that would otherwise make my Top 10 are ineligible, specifically “Nickel Boys,” adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel by sophomore filmmaker RaMell Ross (it comes to local theaters in early January 2025); “September 5,” a stark lesson in journalistic ethics set during the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks (ditto); and “No Other Land,” a powerhouse documentary about a tenuous alliance between two young men, Palestinian and Israeli, as the former’s village is destroyed by government bulldozers (it has played at festivals but has yet to find a U.S. distributor).

I also have several runners-up. In no particular order and with some awaiting local opening dates, they include “Conclave,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Dahomey,” “The Substance,” “Thelma,” “All We Imagine as Light,” “Hard Truths,” “The Room Next Door” and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.”

Other than that, here’s my list.