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2024 Annual Recap

Sorry this is so late. Pictured: The most Dan-core movie of 2024, Sweethearts.

2024 at the Movies

Unless I win the lottery and can quit my day job and hire a podcast editor, I will never have enough time or mental bandwidth to see and review every movie that catches my curiosity, so anything I write here has the built-in asterisk of “well, of what I’ve seen.”

My first instinct towards 2024’s film output is disappointment. One of its movies, The Substance, will make my best of decade rankings, but beyond that, I’m not so sure. A couple of films exceeded my expectations by quite a bit and will be in the mix, too (Here, Flow). For an hour or so, I really thought Snack Shack would get there, too.

But the older I get and the more movies I watch, the more my mind slips away from complete “best” works and towards flashes of personality and strange charms and surprising images. I think of Jeremy Strong’s humanity in The Apprentice, of the Psycho house in MaXXXine, of Taron Egerton running in Carry-On, and of Adam Driver saying “the riches of my Emersonian mind” in Megalopolis, and my heart stirs. I think of the rice cooker in All We Imagine as Light, of the diarrhea in Incoming, and of “Creature’s Love Theme” from Lisa Frankenstein, and I shed a small tear. Film may be more fractured and compromised as an art form than ever, but it still offers delights and surprises for those willing to watch.

Film may be more fractured and compromised as an art form than ever, but it still offers delights and surprises for those willing to watch.

If I had to draw some themes from the films I saw, here is what they would be: Run-times of art films and awards contenders are increasingly bloated. All of the Best Picture nominees eclipsed 2 hours, most by more than a half hour. The Brutalist stretched to more than 3.5 hours, though it at least gave us an intermission to stretch our legs and relieve our bladders.

On the blockbuster front, superheroes are less dominant than they have been in decades. Letterboxd cites only one film among the year’s 25 most popular that is a comic book movie; you need to go back almost 20 years to 2007 to replicate that feat (2010 if you limit it to DC and Marvel adaptations).

Late career bold statements from the the gray-haired generation of greats is another recurring theme of this year and the past couple: on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s Fabelmans and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon from the past two years, we experienced the astonishing works of Robert Zemeckis’s Here and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in 2024. I had varied reactions to these movies, but I’ll continue to celebrate our masters as long as I have the chance to.

2024 on the Site

In 2024, I completed a handful of director retrospectives (Alexander Payne, Jonathan Glazer, Denis Villeneuve, Matthew Vaughn) and kicked off another (George Miller). I also reviewed the filmographies of a few smaller-name directors either early in or towards the middle of their careers (Jane Schoenbrun, Radio Silence, Jeymes Samuel, Hannah Marks). Additionally, I ever-so-slowly continued my look at mid-1920s cinema via the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

Throughout 2024, I worked on overhauling my Review Index. I ultimately finished the overhaul in early 2025. This includes new indexes for Directors and Series as a more structured version of “Review Projects.”

The Goods welcomed back sci-fi author Andrew Milne as a contributor wrapping up his coverage of Gangs of London. We also had a new guest writer, JV, write about Red Rooms.

2024 on the Podcast

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future; and so does The Goods: A Film Podcast. We’re in our fifth year of recording mostly-weekly. We’ve passed 200 episodes as of this writing (in early 2025) and are coming up on 350 movies reviewed, as we sometimes hit more than an movie per episode. Our theme months in 2024 were “Debut Month” in February when we discussed noted directors’ first works, then “Month Month” in September when we discussed movies with months in their titles. Come give us a listen!

2024 Films in Review
Masterpieces Reviewed
Rankings and Lists
Site/Personal Milestones
Some Numbers
  • The Goods published 107 film reviews in 2024 (plus 1 film review by another author, plus several TV episode reviews by another author)
  • The average “Is It Good?” rating for those reviews was a 4.85 (or a low “Good”)
  • The Goods had 30k readers in 2024 (~7x more than 2023). Many arrived seeking out Andrew’s Gangs of London reviews. Thanks for stopping by!
  • And those readers left 261 comments (including my own)
    • Thanks especially to regular readers and commenters Hunter, ED, and Andrew. A comment, even a small one or a disagreement, makes my day.
  • The Goods: A Film Podcast released 45 episodes
  • The Goods: A Film Podcast had its episodes downloaded 4,378 times
    • We also picked up several hundred listeners on YouTube
  • According to my Letterboxd, I watched 278 feature-length films, 24 short films, and 2 mini-series in 2024.
A Few Memorable Reviews
  • Blade Runner (1982)
    • “Whether your creator is a god in the sky or a man in a tower, whether our lifespan is four years of several decades, we all perish. We are servants to mortality. True freedom is not hunting down your maker, like Roy does, but taking that limited time and making it into something beautiful and of your own vision, like plain paper folded into origami.”
  • Ham on Rye (2019)
    • “I’m hesitant to even publish this review with so high a score and such enthusiasm because Ham on Rye truly may have an audience of one in me. I am certain that this is a film that will not work for the large majority of watchers. But it is immediately a Certified Dan Classic, a cursed little gem I’ll watch whenever I’m in a teen movie rut and want to see the genre’s insides delicately scooped out and put on display.”
  • La Roue (1923)
    • “Beyond the dubious extancy of his ambitious opi, the reason that Gance is such a mythic figure is that his films are the ne plus ultra of grand ambition and tragic destiny: Each epic he directed is titanic in length, scope, and melodrama. Many of the creative forces involved in La Roue lived dramatic lives and died dramatic deaths, and the production swirled with its own mythology.”
  • Night Swim (2024)
    • “Q: What is Night Swim about?
      A: It is about a haunted pool.
      Q: Sorry, a what? I must have misheard you.
      A: A haunted pool. Like, a swimming pool.”
Looking Back
Looking Ahead

Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.

2 replies on “2024 Annual Recap”

Always good to know that I’m an amusement and not a mere peanut in the gallery – even better to see you keep posting your reviews.

Keep well and please keep up the good work!

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