It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024, a 20.8% increase over 2023, steadily climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2024 that were officially 2023 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It also doesn’t include the 2024 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle.

Of those 29 releases, 16 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. Only five were superhero films because Marvel sent themselves to the penalty box. Two were animated. Five had scenes during or after the end credits (again, blame the low tally on the MCU hiatus). Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. On with the countdown!

29. Madame Web. Rather than bringing gender parity to big-screen superheroes, the genre reached a new 21st-century low with the most expensive fan film ever, a relentlessly nitpickable contraption that its own stars have freely dissed since release. It’s the kind of unchecked yes-man drek Adam Bourke might’ve made during the Vought Corporation’s “Girls Get It Done!” campaign.

28. Joker: Folie à Deux. The last five minutes are a great episode of “How It Should Have Ended” that supports Todd Phillips’ thesis that Harley Quinn was a spoiled-blasé brat who was rich enough to afford medical school but threw it all away for anarchic thrills, not out for the allure of twisted codependence. The other 130-odd minutes are a trough filled with William Hung karaoke, Lady Gaga fulfilling a contractual obligation for an all-covers album, the depressing debut of Dark Chief O’Hara, and utter contempt for anyone who liked the first Joker. That wasn’t me, but I resent sitting through Phillips’ practical joke aimed at them.

27. Alien: Romulus. One cool-looking scene in zero-G with questionable physics isn’t nearly enough to secure this desperately nostalgic midquel set in the 57-year gap between the first two classics, like a jump-rope bridge that collapses into the yawning chasm between them. Fede Alvarez flies us all the way to Space Branson for an Alien tribute band whose best character is a huggable android with a flippable “plot-needs” personality switch in his neck, The Year’s Worst Character is an android played by a dead actor not given the chance to decline his ghoulish CGI reincarnation, and the rest are six characters in search of a canceled CW series, one of whom was also in Madame Web and should ask herself some hard questions.

26. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. If the Ghostbusters can make a comeback, why not the biggest ghost they never busted? Fresh off his passable return as Old Batman, the next stop on Michael Keaton’s self-revival tour is Old Betelgeuse, whose shtick hasn’t aged well on any level. Tim Burton mashed multiple sequel pitches into a single meandering retread that turns Lydia the former Gen-X icon into a pathetic sucker, recycles Corpse Bride‘s frenetic final act, doesn’t cater much to Wednesday fans who followed him and/or Jenna Ortega here, and might be an even deadlier “chug every time you spot a callback!” drinking game than Alien: Romulus. Skip the full runtime and wait for someone to post a “Catherine O’Hara supercut version” on YouTube for a purer dose of gracefully aged comedy.

25. Kraven the Hunter. Sony execs pinned the last remaining hopes for their Spidey Minus Spidey pocket dimension on a superhero actor from the likes of Kick-Ass and Age of Ultron whose best achievements to date have all been chameleonic supporting turns where it wasn’t his job to carry an entire franchise on his shoulders. “What if the Punisher did parkour and let his nails grow out” wasn’t their worst idea, but that didn’t make it a good one. It’s a safe bet Deadpool will not be inviting Kraven to his next super-flop comeback party in twenty years.

24. Godzilla x Kong: The New Kingdom. With a famous IP better held aloft in the Academy Award-Winning Gozilla Minus One, Michael Dougherty’s art-brute Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the Apple+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters that raised the bar for human stories amid the collapsing skyscrapers, and that undefeated modern-era champion of so-bad-it’s-awesome guilty-pleasure kaijurama, Kong: Skull Island, it’s less fun to watch Adam Wingard continue regressing to MONSTERS FIGHT basics. If you just want to watch giants pummeling each other, I understand wrestling has better plots and more surprises.

23. Venom: The Last Dance. Sony’s least worst Marvel film of the year bids a fond, probable farewell to Academy Award Nominee Tom Hardy by throwing one last soiree, overflowing with ripped-from-comics symbiotes and meaningless CGI space bugaboos pushing the envelope of PG-13 grindhouse camp. Writer/director Kelly Marcel’s trilogy finale is the sort of last-hurrah why-not? popcorn flick that keeps salting and buttering itself as it goes, and will air someday on MeTV hosted by Grandson of Svengoolie. Maybe by then we’ll know how Marcel and Sony resisted the urge to call this V3NOM.

22. Sheepdog. I didn’t want to be too harsh toward any of the Heartland entries I caught, especially since the subject of veterans struggling to reintegrate into their postponed lives back home is a sensitive one that deserves a lot more discussion and action. (That was clear well before this very week’s calamitous headline tragedies in New Orleans and Las Vegas involving military men who apparently needed some kind of help.) But this post-discharge drama about soldiers from two different generations learning to lean on each other hits hardest whenever it focuses on Vondie Curtis Hall’s searing turn as the elder of the two, but its well-meaning fledgling writer/director/star fell into the classic rookie trap that’s rarely gone well for anyone since Orson Welles: “The best possible star for my movie is ME.” It’s a nice try that’d fit well into Netflix’s mainstream programming bent of late, but after Hall’s arc resolves halfway through, the leaden lead performance maybe could’ve used more meddlesome producer notes.

21. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD WAS SUPER AWESOME AND THIS SHOULD’VE BEEN AWESOME TOO! WITH THE EXPLOSIONS AND THE RACING AND THE POST-APOC MONSTER TRUCKS AND DEATH BIKERS AND WHATNOT, AND oh noooo we’re slowing down for prequel origin stuff and Anya Taylor-Joy only plays Young Charlize Theron for like half the movie at most and there’re lots of perfunctory connect-the-dots between Tom Hardy and Mel Gibson with a faux Mad Max and uhhhhh okay cool I guess NO NO NO PUT THE PEDAL BACK TO THE METAL! THERE, THEY TOTALLY DID IT IN THE SECOND HALF AND EVERYTHING’S SPEEDY AND FLIPPING AND MURDERY AND EXPLOSIONS AGAIN! WOOOOOOO! So now we know what it’d be like if they ran the Indy 500 but kept red-lighting all the cars every ten minutes for interviews about their childhood traumas.

20. Late Night with the Devil. I love me some solid character actors who value-add with their every supporting role or cameo. David Dastmalchian has been in as many big-budget superhero films as the star of Kraven the Hunter and stood out in so many other roles that I was excited to see him as #1 on the call sheet for in this, a found-footage horror flick constructed as a “lost” episode of a forgotten talk show that abruptly ended after an attempted exorcism went violently awry live on-air. Writers/directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes resurrect the ’70s chitchat circuit with exacting detail and without fetishizing their nostalgia as mishaps befall one Tonight Show homage-guest after another, though perhaps a little too by-the-numbers. The last 10-15 minutes are the most outrageous and the most predictable at the same time, not quite the killing joke this needed, but Dastmalchian pulls off a pretty great, flop-sweat-coated Dark Mike Douglas.

19. Dune: Part Two. Congrats to Denis Villenuve, future winner of another round of second-tier Oscars for the next exotically shot chapter in Frank Herbert’s space-drug-war saga. Happy sensory overload resumes where it left off, generating enough One Perfect Shot moments to fill a coffee-table phone book, but the second half tries to juggle far too many space tenpins at once. Several big-name actors mill around in the backgrounds, presumably promised way more lines in the next one but eye-catching distractions in the meantime. A critical, jolting heel-turn falls on the wrong side of the thin line between underplayed and drowned-out. But we get the potential foreshadowing of Zendaya murdering Paul Atreides and taking over the series and one day becoming the empress of space drugs, so there’s that. No, I haven’t read the books and refuse to try again, why do you ask?

18. A Quiet Place: Day One. If you love those Walking Dead spinoffs whose premises are “What if the same apocalypse with different people and places?”, replace the zombies with aliens, hit the reset button, and have another prequel that adds nothing to the mythos except a bigger setting on a bigger budget. The same chaos reigns except the monsters no longer lurk in offscreen shadows and their Kryptonian super-hearing is more inconsistent than ever for plot’s sake. Ignore the Independence Day infantry and treasure the real story in between: another lovely character-driven piece from Pig director Michael Sarnoski in which Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn are two complete strangers leaning on each other to overcome invasion shell-shock and find moments of elegance and grace along their Family Circus-style Manhattan journey to recover meaning in their shattered worlds.

17. Deadpool & Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds rides the multiverse bandwagon straight outta Foxville and into the most money-making issue of Marvel Team-Up in history. Once again his F-bombs outnumber his bullets, his motormouth quips cover up a thin layer of tragic feels, and every scene is a Highlights for Children puzzle called “Spot the Callbacks” for ultra-geeks to freeze-frame and name every single IP or artifact they recognize. (Call them “Easter egglords”.) That said, and setting aside Hugh Jackman’s return as a Wolverine who barely counts as a variant, I’m not made of adamantium: yes, I got a kick out of the Very Special Guests who show up in packs and form their own one-hit-wonder supergroups, and Emma Corrin’s take on Cassandra Nova is underrated. It’s exhaustingly smug but still better than the three worst X-Men films. And to this day I still cackle whenever I think back to Channing Tatum.

16. We Strangers. Our second Heartland entry shines a deserved spotlight toward Kirby Howell-Baptiste (The Sandman, Sugar, Barry, Cruella, etc. etc.) as a cleaning-service employee who begins taking side gigs for rich families, which escalate transactionally when she convinces two Karens she can also do psychic readings, which she quickly learns how to fake with the right blend of smooth-talking and code-switching. More tasks-for-cash keep piling on like she’s the Black Shary Bobbins. Writer/director Anu Valia (Marvel’s She-Hulk) promises some amusing class/racial satire, but the middle act veers off the path of farce and yields to a dissatisfying self-seriousness that shuts everything down a bit too civilly…but that’s sort of the point. Valia opts for a more mature denouement as if to remind us some things are more important than an audience’s cheers.

15. Inside Out 2. Yet another of Pixar’s best films is stuffed into the Disney grinder to make sequel sausage. Riley’s next life phase is reduced to a Nickelodeon dramedy as she and her original cast of emotions have to vie for screen time with the newcomers and for some reason her brain’s unexplored regions are defined by more Dad-jokes than ever. With patience, though, two of the anthropomorphic feels each strike a nerve: Amy Poehler’s Joy copes with subconscious teenage demotion and Stranger Things‘ Maya Hawke dominates the headspace as Anxiety, yet another animated character moving at Robin Williams Genie-speed (though this makes more sense for Anxiety) whose frantic plan to cure Riley’s mental health issues becomes a vividly realized case of terminal second-guessing that targeted me personally and scored a bullseye.

14. Moana 2. I’ve forgotten the entire soundtrack, and I’m mildly annoyed it took a sequel to bring me back to non-Pixar Disney theatrical films after skipping Strange World and Wish. What began on the drawing boards as a soon-to-be-forgotten Disney+ series was smartly upgraded into a phenomenally rendered high-seas adventure whose core concept remains “more of the same”. That doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, lower-ranked contenders on this list notwithstanding.

13. Twisters 28 years later, killer weather is back…and this time, it’s PERSONAL. YES, AGAIN. I have a soft spot for Jan de Bont’s cheesy, breezy natural-disaster flick and was perfectly happy with Lee Isaac Chung’s use of subsequent advancements in CGI and Hollywood wind machines to create intimidating variants (TWINNADO! FIRENADO!) strung on a thin-as-fishing-line “Stormfront of the Century!” premise that sure manifests an awful lot of sunny weather every few hours. Chung’s sequel shows faint flourishes of what made the understated naturalism of Minari an Oscar contender while pretending it’s more scientifically grounded, which isn’t fooling anyone who recognizes his real secret weapon: the impossibly clean-cut and charming Glen Powell, future A-lister and The Year’s Best Cowboy Who Didn’t Get Murdered Offscreen in His Own TV Show. The highest compliment I can pay: of the 29 films on this list, it’s the only once I’ve already seen twice.

12. Micro Budget. In the tradition of other satires such as The Player and Living in Oblivion, the funniest of our Heartland competitors is a wee indie mockumentary about a deluded Midwest schmuck, convinced that indie filmmaking is the get-rich-quick scheme he’s looking for, moves his pregnant wife to L.A. and cons a group of young actors into helping him make a meteor disaster flick in an Airbnb on borrowed cash even though he’s never actually made a movie before, unless you count the making-of featurette that he’s also directing at the same time. Director Morgan Evans (Best Week Ever, Teen Titans Go!) and co-writer/star Patrick Noth clearly know that world and skewer its pretensions and shallow aspirations, allowing for judicious use of cameos for perfect boosts. (Chris Parnell! Maria Bamford! TV’s Hal Linden! Bobby Moynihan as the Worst CGI “Artist” Ever!) A few punchlines hew a little too closely to Dunder Mufflin rhythms, but I enjoyed pretending this was an insightful exposé of the fictional auteur who might just be campaigning to helm Threat Level Midnight II for even less than what Michael Scott spent on the first one.

11. ReEntry. One more Heartland screening for the road: Emily Deschanel (TV’s Dr. Bones herself) is the Concerned Wife of an astronaut (True Blood‘s Sam Trammell) assigned to undergo America’s first trip to an alternate Earth. In this far more modestly budgeted and low-key take on the multiverse bandwagon, the sci-fi transport isn’t an entire ship but just a lit-up doorway in an otherwise empty room. Our man is gone for over a year, then suddenly returns one day unharmed…but Bones can tell something’s different. No, it isn’t a horror film where he comes after her with a cleaver at the end, but a more emotionally mature piece free of histrionics and composed almost entirely of levelheaded conversations. As a longtime happy couple, my wife and I appreciated the underlying notion at hand: when you’ve been around someone day-in-day-out for decades, you can absolutely tell when something’s changed, sometimes even down to the subatomic level.

To be concluded!