When the Movies Strike Back: 2024 in Review

Just about every traditional Hollywood genre since the 1950s was reasserted in 2024, as if to defy the often-repeated claim that cinema is dead, or at least at death’s door. Although the $8.72 billon total at the domestic box office was still $2-3 billion below pre-COVID levels and 3% shy of the $9 billion dollar total from 2023, it surpassed predictions by $720 million dollars. Call it a case of “When the Movies Strike Back.”

After advertising sought to conceal the musical identities of Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls, perhaps in response to the string of musicals that underperformed commercially in 2021, here we are looking back at a year when musicals dominated the holiday box office. Mufasa: The Lion King climbed to first place in the Christmas Week box office charts, outpacing the hotly-anticipated musician biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, if falling a hair behind the non-musical Sonic the Hedgehog 3 over the weekend. With the success of Wicked (in North America, the highest-grossing film adaptation of a stage musical) and Moana 2, the domestic box-office intake of the long Thanksgiving weekend reached an all-time high of $425 million dollars. For my money, the musical event of the year was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for its totally loopy “MacArthur Park” number.

The year’s biggest hit, however, was Inside Out 2, also the highest grossing animated film to date, and the first animated film to exceed profit of a billion dollars worldwide. Released in June, it turned the tide in a year that was facing a box-office slump. Despicable Me 4 and Kung Fu Panda 4 were among the other animated-children’s films to score major profits. Like most recent years of Hollywood filmmaking, seriality was an overriding trend across genre, be it sequels, prequels, spin-offs, crossovers, remakes, or “requels.”

Some might say 2024 was “a banner year for horror movies,” with The Substance, Longlegs, and Alien: Romulus, to name a few of the most buzzed-about examples, or the year that saw the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first R-rated film, Deadpool & Wolverine, “save” the apparently expended superhero genre and become the highest-grossing R-rated film to date.

For others, 2024 might be remembered as a year of old-fashioned, grand-scale extravaganzas that began with Dune Part II as “a sweeping, soaring space epic,” Twisters bringing “back the big-budget disaster movie,” and Gladiator II‘s “epic spectacle that harkens back to 1950s and ‘60s sword-and-sandal flicks.” Even Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in more than a decade—a self-financed, 120-million-dollar passion project that spent nearly four decades in development— was promoted as “a Roman epic” despite its futuristic utopian setting.

How about post-apocalypse films? “From The Omega Man to The Road Warrior and practically all of George Romero’s oeuvre,” writes Harrison Abbott of Bloody Disgusting, “storytellers have, for decades, been using the end of days as a canvass for exploring our ugliest impulses. To show us what people are capable of when the chips are down and the rule of law is abandoned. And it’s a tradition that continues to this day.” Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and A Quiet Place: Day One followed that convention. Then there’s Alex Garland’s Civil War, which, as Jesse Hassenger of Decider observes, “seems more interested in the process of the apocalypse itself, whether it’s coming slowly, with increasing velocity, or tumbling down all at once – before the dust settles on a longer-term dystopia.”

Not all of the year’s science-fiction fare had such lofty ambitions, though. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest film from Legendary Pictures’s MonsterVerse franchise, “builds on a long history of a serious monster turning seriously silly,” suggesting that we are getting Hollywood’s answer to the Japanese kaiju films, or giant-monster films, of the Heisei Era.

Whether these films are any good is a separate and, of course, subjective issue, but the evidence is clear: even in a streaming-media landscape of personalized recommendations driven by content algorithms, traditional genres still function as effective production categories, marketing strategies, and frameworks for comprehending and appreciating films. Here are some highlights of the genre films, multi-generic films, and films that self-consciously work against generic formulas and expectations.

Adventure and Fantasy

An animated-fantasy entirely without dialogue, the Belgian-French-Latvian co-production Flow achieves an almost watercolor look with computer animation and yet extraordinarily lifelike detail in the behavior and expressions of its animal-characters. The film focuses on a black cat, who survives a tsunami that destroys its home, and forms an unlikely family with a yellow lab, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, and a secretarybird as they commandeer a sailboat and journey to higher ground. Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis has made one of the hands-down best animated features I’ve seen, full of mystery, wonder, and overwhelming beauty. It’s everything I could have wanted in a film from last year—or, for that matter, any year.

In France, The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady were released in April and December of 2023, respectively, with Part II picking up right where Part I left off. Director Martin Bourboulon shot the two films back-to-back, and together they comprise the first French film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century novel since 1961. Staggering their releases in the U.S. between December 2023 and April 2024—in only select theaters, no less—just about doomed them for stateside obscurity. Now that both films are available to stream, the ideal way to watch them is in quick succession. Fans of swashbuckling adventure will relish every minute of the spectacular derring-do, but Part II also offers a fascinating reinterpretation of Milady de Winter (played by the always magnetic Eva Green) that sets this version apart from previous retellings of the classic story

Comedy

Technically a 2023 release but not widely distributed in the U.S. until 2024, American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as African-American novelist and academic Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who is dismayed by the perception that his new book isn’t “Black enough.” As a joke, he writes a purportedly autobiographical book under a pseudonym and exploits the sorts of Black stereotypes that white liberal publishers and readers seem to expect from Black authors. The book’s meteoric success allows Monk to afford the costs of the new care facility for his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, following the sudden death of Monk’s sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), who had been Agnes’s caregiver. This reversal of fortune, however, also requires Monk to keep up the ruse, especially when the book attracts attention from Hollywood. Adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001) by first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson (the director, writer, and co-producer of American Fiction), this incisively funny satire is also a warm and understanding film about very human people. Rounding out the excellent ensemble cast is Erika Alexander as Monk’s new girlfriend, who is unaware of his deception, and Sterling K. Brown as his recently divorced brother who has come out as gay.

Drama

Set in 1936 Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson is a scorcher of a family melodrama, with flickers of the supernatural, following Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) as the latest stage-to-screen adaptation from August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle under the auspices of co-producer Denzel Washington. The 1987 play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama after opening on Broadway in 1990, and the film reunites cast members of the 2022 Broadway revival: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington (Denzel’s oldest son), and Ray Fisher, all of whom reprise their roles with explosive power. The revelation, though, is Danielle Deadwyler as a woman whose family heirloom—a piano engraved by her enslaved ancestor—becomes a flashpoint of domestic conflict when her brother from Mississippi pays a visit. Denzel Washington’s youngest son, Malcolm Washington, makes a promising directorial debut here and co-wrote the script with Virgil Williams.

Another 2023 release that didn’t receive wide U.S. distribution until 2024, The Zone of Interest is a U.K.-U.S.-Polish co-production, liberally adapted from the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. According to The Hollywood Reporter, writer-director Jonathan Glazer sought to make a film about the Holocaust that demystified the perpetrators as “mythologically evil.” Instead of resorting to the “emotional manipulation or heavy-handed moralizing” of Holocaust dramas, with the same graphic depictions of brutality conventional to the genre, Glazer confines viewers to the quotidian life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Höss and his family who reside next to the concentration camp. Glazer never tries to evoke sympathy for the “other side” by shifting to the Nazi perspective. To the contrary, he makes the environments in which atrocities are carried out horrific in their very ordinariness. Relying on natural light exclusively, Glazer shot primarily in an abandoned house only few hundred yards from where the real family actually lived. He used ten stationary digital cameras that ran simultaneously from different angles, operated by focus pullers in the basement of the house, capturing the action in ten-minute long-takes. When possible, the cameras were hidden from the actors, among whom included Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, allowing Glazer to surveil them as he viewed the playback footage in a shipping container outside the house. The actors, in turn, had the freedom to improvise without the distraction of a crew on set. In this observational quality, The Zone of Interest is unlike any film about the Holocaust I’ve seen, and more disturbing than most.

Horror

Robert Eggers’s remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), is actually the second remake of the silent-horror classic. Werner Herzog got there in 1979 with Nosferatu the Vampyre and, in my perhaps unpopular opinion, made an even greater film from the material. This new version may be constrained by its understandable reverence for the original, dutifully following the beats of a now very familiar story, but the devil is in the details. While Murnau worked in German Expressionism and Herzog took an uncannily naturalistic approach, Eggers goes for the aesthetic of an illustrated fairy-tale. The nineteenth-century European setting, where darkest December is broken only by the pale intrusions of snow, flames, and moonlight, serves a holiday feast for the eyes. Rather than the pathetically withered vampire we have seen before, Bill Skarsgård’s Transylvanian Count appears through the shadows as a huge, guttural-voiced orc, an interpretation that never really clicked for me, especially when the jump scares undermine the film’s storybook qualities. In any case, Eggers’s Nosferatu is less about the Count than about Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), the newlywed woman whom he targets in the fictional German town of Wisborg. When you have someone as strong as Depp in the role, that’s not a bad thing. She gives a practically operatic performance, stealing the show not only from Skarsgård, but also from co-stars Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, and Simon McBurney.

If Ti West’s X (2022) derived from 1970s slasher films and his far superior prequel Pearl (2022) borrowed from the “woman’s film” melodrama of Classical Hollywood, MaXXXine, his alleged conclusion to his retro-horror trilogy with Mia Goth owes a debt to the Giallo, neo-noir, and exploitation films of the 1980s video era. Set on the backdrop of the real-life “Night Stalker” murders in 1985 Los Angeles, we find ex-porn star Maxine Minx (Goth) trying to make it in Hollywood as the lead in a new horror production. The self-reflexivity of MaXXXine goes beyond merely imitating the sleazy ‘80s thrillers that West seems to love. Driven by Goth’s live-wire performance, the film is ultimately an inversion of the a-star-is-born story, revealing the Hollywood star-machine as a monster that preys on ambition, coopts the talent and success of Tinseltown’s hopefuls, and encourages their complicity with their own objectification. The last shot brings these themes into focus with a kind of absurd clarity.

Of all the horror films I saw in 2024, none filled me with a deeper sense of dread than The First Omen, the feature directorial debut from Arkasha Stevenson, a former photojournalist and television director. This strikingly shot prequel to the horror classic The Omen (1976) almost stands as a self-contained film about an American novitiate (Nell Tiger Free), who comes to work at a Catholic orphanage in Rome, where a conspiracy is afoot to incarnate the Antichrist. Even when the film predictably leads into the events of The Omen, it ends in a different narrative and thematic place, opening an entirely new direction for the series. Free is an absolute force of nature, giving the performance of the year.

Science Fiction

Bertrand Bonello’s French-Canadian sci-fi film The Beast, a loose adaptation of Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903), begins in the year 2044, when artificial intelligence has been able to perform most jobs that used to be held by humans. A woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) undergoes a process to purify her DNA and enter her past lives, ostensibly to purge herself of emotions and make her more competitive for more rewarding jobs. First in 1910 Paris and then in 2014 Los Angeles, she crosses paths with another subject of this purification process, a man named Louis (George MacKay). I wouldn’t dare spoil the twists that their pas de deux takes over the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, but I will say I haven’t been so haunted by a film in a long while.

Sui Generis

Part documentary on film exhibition in the city of Recife, Brazil, during the 1970s and 1980s, and part cinematic essay on how growing up in Recife shaped cinephile-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, Pictures of Ghosts most definitely isn’t a genre movie. But as a film about place, memory, and popular moviegoing, it’s a celebration of genre films as much as any other form of cinema. The historian in Mendonça Filho sees value in “Hollywood’s trash,” the “high-quality American posters, trailers, photographs, lobby cards, pressbooks,” and other ephemera that theaters would discard, and street vendors would resell. The detective in him finds “secret messages” communicated to the public in theater marquees. And the poet in him offers an elegy for the decline of purpose-built theaters, where something akin to a religious experience could occur in the sacred space of communal film-viewing. Combining archival material with original footage, Pictures of Ghosts is a nostalgic reflection on a local film culture before shopping malls assumed control of film exhibition and movie theaters, ironically, were repurposed as evangelical churches.