From singing witches to horny tennis players, here’s what we loved at the movies this year.
Read The Spinoff’s favourite TV shows and music of 2024.
With the cost of living sky high and streamers doing all they can to keep us cemented to our couches, the idea of going out for a night at the movies felt like quite the luxury experience in 2024. This is reflected in declining cinema attendance around the world, with the local industry reportedly still 25% below what it was in 2019, and some smalltown independent cinemas struggling to keep the lights on. Still, there are glimmers of hope. Here are the movie experiences we loved this year, from the big, bold blockbusters that had us all singing in the aisles, the festival darlings that challenged and changed us, and the spooky serial killer flicks that scared the crap out of us.
Wicked
Let’s get the bad out of the way: yes, the lighting is horrendous and somehow everyone is backlit from every angle. It didn’t need to be nearly three hours long when it’s only the first part. And as much as I love her, Michelle Yeoh’s icon status is not enough to excuse the fact that her voice is three grades below her nearest co-star. There were enough mega famous names to justify casting an actual singer in every singing part.
But despite all of that, I went to see Wicked with virtually no knowledge of the material and it was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years. Ariana Grande is a true star with comedic timing that never ceased to amaze me. Cynthia Erivo is just a perfect voice. The weird press tour energy means their chemistry really, really works. And it’s all helped by being based on a musical that millions of people have adored already. If the lighting was even just decent, I’d pick it for Best Picture for sheer movieness. Unfortunately the lighting was horrific and therefore it will just have to be the only movie I’ve ever paid to see twice in its original run. / Madeleine Chapman
We Were Dangerous
Like any human with a beating heart, I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age story, and there were many parts of We Were Dangerous that felt on par with some of the very best of the genre. Set in the 1950s on a scorched golden Banks Peninsula outpost, the film follows a trio of rebel pals at Te Motu, an island school for “incorrigible and delinquent girls”.
Directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and written by Maddie Dai, the film delves into complex issues like colonisation, patriarchy and abuse of power, but all with an remarkably deft lightness of touch that leaves it a soaring celebration of misfits and girlhood, rather than another maudlin addition to our cinema of unease. In fact, parts of it are extremely funny and there’s a joyful scene that rivals the likes of Girlhood and How to Have Sex in its depiction young girls dancing like nobody is watching. Also, Rima Te Wiata as The Matron is surely the local film performance of the year. / Alex Casey
Didi
Speaking of coming-of-age charmers, Didi was my favourite from the film festival this year. Set in 2008, when your Myspace top eight was the defining social strata and YouTube was a place strictly for skate videos and lo-fi parody songs, Taiwanese-American kid Chris is flubbing his way through friendship and family drama. Although its a classic case of being caught between worlds – the cute kid brother making videos with his grandma at home and the suave skater boy trying to woo his crush online – Didi resists falling into cliche.
Instead, it manages to be surprising, deeply moving and hilarious while still feeling kinda downbeat and low-key. It is also a perfect rendering of the primitive social media age, and a treat to be a part of the firmly millennial audience who know the gravity of a <3 instead of a :) on your flip phone. / AC
La Chimera
My favourite film of 2024 was actually released in 2023 but I only discovered it via AroVision and the Italian Film festival this year. It is set in Tuscany in the 80s and stars Josh O’Connor (young King Charles in The Crown) as Arthur, a grieving archaeologist with a gift for divining Etruscan tombs for looting. O’Connor is sublime in the role: intense, sad, grubby and searching. The cast of fellow tomb raiders form a charming, surreal gaggle around him: they’re all shabby, grasping at a living by messing with the stuff of the dead. Isabella Rossellini is fantastic as a sharp, elderly voice coach; and Carol Duarte is beguiling as her wayward, lively singing student/maid who is hiding two kids in Rossellini’s run-down mansion.
The deeper story of grief in the film is gorgeous, heart-breaking and magical. Director Alice Rohrwacher has crafted a timeless piece of cinema that is worlds away from all the hollywood meh and everything a movie should be. / Claire Mabey
Challengers
The year’s sweatiest and horniest film, without any sex – just a whole lot of Luca Guadagnino-style erotic kissing and objects acting as symbolic genitals. It’s supposed to be a film about a woman whose promising career in tennis was shattered by an injury, and now she’s a mother and wife to a family she doesn’t care for, and would trade her tennis champion husband for her rookie lover in a heartbeat.
But mostly, it’s a film that feels like a tennis match – the camerawork is sharp, cinematography crisp, atmosphere dripping and the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wraps it up in a nice, sweaty and adrenalin inducing film. It also unfortunately gave us the Hot Rodent Man trend, and the ability to now look at any trio with a vague sexual tension between them and say “I’m telling my children this was Challengers”. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
Zone of Interest
Sometimes movies aren’t meant to be at all enjoyable and Zone of Interest is one of those movies. Rudolph Höss was the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He and his wife Hedwig live next door to the camp, growing vegetables, raising their children and hosting parties as thousands of Jews are executed over the fence. Their home lives and concerns are as mundane as any one else’s, which is the whole point.
Early in the film there is a scene where Hedwig tries on a fur coat that was confiscated from a Jewish woman, posing in the mirror and frowning at her slightly protruding stomach. It’s a quiet and horrifying scene. After seeing the movie back in March, I opened up a social media app on my phone and watched an IDF soldier standing in a home in Gaza, holding up “gifts” for his wife that he’d found among the Palestinian owners’ belongings. Zone of Interest is a must-see movie, if only to remind us of what is currently happening over our own fences. / MC
Longlegs
I want to be clear that this movie makes absolutely no sense, but boy did it provide one of the most fun cinema experiences I had this year. Nicolas Cage plays a terrifying satanic Mickey Rourke lookalike who goes by the name of Longlegs, a freaky fellah who has long evaded law enforcement in his decades-long staging of murder-suicides with huge occult vibes. While Maika Monroe is great as the detective trying to crack his code, Longlegs lives and dies on Nicolas Cage, whose rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ has to be the scariest thing I’ve seen this year.
While Longlegs is essentially hollow horror homage all the way down from the director (who is Anthony Perkins son), to the clear Silence of the Lambs setting, to the Zodiac flourishes, the sold out Terror-Fi session was still a bloody good time. I challenge anyone not to flinch in the opening sequence. / AC
All We Imagine As Light
All We Imagine As Light is an incredibly dreamy film set in monsoonal Mumbai, where central characters Prabha, Anu and Parvati work together in a big hospital. Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, is a gentle and capable nurse, slightly bemused by her husband moving to Germany and stopping the calls back home. She’s a compassionate roommate to Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger nurse who is controversially in love with a Muslim boy, and whose quick efficiency – for example, prescribing birth control pills to a worried patient – is offset by her love of sauntering around Mumbai, trying on sunglasses and kissing in the rain. Prabha and Anu work together to help their colleague Parvati, a cook, move after a lack of documentation means she is forced from her home by property developers.
As the characters shift between speaking Malayalam, from their home state of Kerala, Marathi and Hindi, the film investigates what women’s freedom looks like in extremely unequal contemporary India, and how there is space for playfulness and intrigue even within restrictive social codes. With lush shots of monsoon downpours, apartments at night and sprawling beaches, the movie has a total confidence in the beauty of the world. After a festival run, it’ll be back in cinemas from Boxing Day. I’m planning to go and see it again with my sister. / Shanti Mathias
Twisters
The past few years have seen big tent pop culture become increasingly coded toward a Democrat worldview, whether through messaging (the feminist awakening of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie) or outright endorsement (Taylor Swift). As the last election proved, that was on some level alienating to at least half of the US voting population. Hollywood remains a hits business, and after multiple years with multiplexes trading down double digits, Twisters suggests that Michael Jordan’s famous “Republicans buy sneakers too” truism is being reabsorbed at an institutional level.
The film is a reimagining of the 1996 original, and features an extremely on-the-nose pair of cyphers for each side of the political aisle. The Democrat-coded crew are all science and climate change and secretly working for a dastardly corporation. The Republicans are YouTubers who look unserious but deep down have a heart of gold. It’s so silly, but undeniably entertaining in its naked financially-motivated pandering. It also took in US$371m against a budget of US$155m – so expect many more movies with country soundtracks venerating middle America in years to come. / DG
Letterboxd’s Four Favourites
Not strictly a movie, but in many ways a series of short films entirely regarding movies. Film review site Letterboxd is an incredible local success story, now with millions of users around the world nattering about what movies they have been loving and loathing. But perhaps even more importantly than that, Letterboxd has created a great interview format that endlessly delivers gorgeous insights into the rich and famous: four favourites. It’s a very simple question – what are your four favourite films? – that provokes staggeringly different answers, interpretations, energies and pronunciations. How else would we know that Halsey has a huge tattoo from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or that Anne Hathaway loves Dancer in the Dark, or that Nicholas Galatzine loooooves Shrek 2? Take four favourites to the family gathering this Christmas and let the good times roll. / AC
American Fiction
Justice for pop culture released right at the end of the year! American Fiction technically came out in mid-December 2023, but I watched it in January and have been thinking about it all year. Adapted from a 2001 Percival Everett novel, American Fiction concerns an academic who, frustrated by the white acclaim poured onto books with a very narrow vision of Black American experience, writes what he intends as a ludicrous parody of the genre, only to have it become a huge hit.
Director Cord Jefferson spent years writing for Gawker, and American Fiction has some deeply funny elements of the site’s unblinking eye for the phoniness of US cultural elites. But it has this thread of un-Gawkerish empathy for all participants in the system too, helped by a deeply felt performance from Jeffrey Wright. Few pieces of pop culture have even attempted such a sophisticated analysis of the intellectual banalities of this era – to achieve a bullseye while also being so consistently entertaining is truly remarkable. / Duncan Greive
A Real Pain
If you want to see Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg playing thee most Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg characters that could ever be conjured upon a silver screen, I would run as fast as you can to see A Real Pain when it opens here on Boxing Day. The pair play cousins who were joined at the hip growing up, but have grown apart in adulthood. Eisenberg’s David is a straight-laced family man and Culkin’s Benji a loose unit in a tie dye hoodie, clearly now polar opposites when they reunite at the airport to embark on a trip to Poland to honour their late grandmother.
What begins as a truly hilarious misfit road movie slowly peels back the layers of family tension and intergenerational trauma, and ends up something else entirely. Written and directed by Eisenberg himself, the script sometimes explains a tad too much, but both the lead performances (particularly Culkin’s, which has mega Oscar buzz already) made this one of the more memorable movies of 2024 for me. / AC
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