In her brief tenure as the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969, Renata Adler carved out a memorable blip in the annals of criticism. Adler’s rebelliousness towards contemporary film was sometimes reticent, often oblivious, writing as she was during the infancy of the New American Cinema movement and an influx of international cinema was embraced by a growing interest in the arthouse. But in the film world, Adler might be best remembered for her unexpectedly daring roundhouse kick to film criticism’s sacred cow, Pauline Kael. In her infamous review of Kael’s When the Lights Go Down (1980), Adler dragged her colleague for filth, as it were, dismissing the collection as worthless, and writing what many were too reluctant to say in characterizing Kael as a bully.
Not to compress Adler’s impressive body of work into what really serves as a footnote on her resume, she represents an increasingly rare sense of film criticism prizing authenticity and eschewing hyperbole. While sometimes bordering on ambivalence, her viewpoint was perhaps best summed up in her observation: “Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.”
A remembrance of Adler and her sobering approach to movies is the segue to this annual consensus regarding the best and worst cinematic endeavors as we close the doors on 2024, a year with a straggling cinematic crop, desiccated by the previous year’s industry strikes. And yet there was still no way to keep up with an onslaught of “content,” most of which is dumped onto a myriad of streaming services which seem more interested in absorbing an audience’s time rather than challenging or invigorating them. Thus, while 2024 was a year like any other with a handful of sterling cinematic joys, there were far more plentiful offerings of movies that just weren’t very good. But a lot of people saw (some of) them anyway.
10. Megalopolis
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
There are few daring enough (or wealthy enough) to finance their own $120 million passion project, but Francis Ford Coppola’s anxiously anticipated labor of love Megalopolis was certainly one of the most notable arthouse cinema moments of 2024.
This year’s biggest swing was also one of the worst misfires, with early screenings prior to its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival portending critical and financial doom. Coppola, who directed some of the most notable American films ever made, goes the way of Icarus with labor, which finds Adam Driver shackled to a parallel Ayn Rand-ian universe where New York is now a crumbling empire known as New Rome, and only the tepid accomplishments of a boring architect can save the city from being swallowed in ambiguous political machinations. Driver (who seems keen on starring in questionable films directed by aging male auteurs who have lost interest in necessary details, such as Ridley Scott and Michael Mann) doesn’t have anything to navigate as a po-faced genius forced into tiresome exchanges with Nathalie Emmanuel (who suffers the most under the weight of Coppola’s ponderous, pretentious dialogue). But if there’s a saving grace we have a delightful Aubrey Plaza in camp mode as a gold digging news correspondent named Wow Platinum, sleeping her way to the top of a banking empire by bedding her crossdressing stepson Shia LaBeouf, eventually crowned with a death kiss by her decrepit husband, Jon Voight, who anoints her a “Wall Street slut.”
9. Here After
Dir. Robert Salerno
Producer Robert Salerno has worked with a wide variety of notable directors, including Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, Tom Ford, Brady Corbet, and Lynne Ramsay (not to mention the Smile films from Parker Finn). But his directorial debut, Here After, is formidably fallow faith-based nonsense masquerading as a horror film. While the always effortless Connie Britton is serviceable as a divorced expat teaching English in Rome as she raises a teenage daughter following the dissolution of her marriage, even she cannot overcome the tidal wave of hokum in the third act. When her kid dies after being struck by a car, it would seem all has been lost. After her profuse prayers, the daughter is revived, but now behaves as if she took a nap in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Britton’s hand wringing leads to an explosion of exposition which sets up a finale of divine intervention and forgiveness. Tepid until it becomes agonizingly preposterous, it’s unclear what Sarah Conradt’s script is attempting to say, seeing as it takes an effort to punish the sins of a mother while raggedy husbands are continually recused from cosmic or spiritual retribution.
8. The Union
Dir. Julian Farino
Like countless so-called films before it, Netflix’s generically titled The Union seems to be daring one to remember what it’s about after watching, which seems sacrilegious considering its headlined by Halle Berry (who, arguably, seems to increasingly choose her projects for all the wrong reasons). It would seem Ms. Berry was most interested in working with Mark Wahlberg, and some cute pictures of the two celebrities from the early ’90s might be worth fast forwarding to the end credits to view.
In their first on-screen union, they play ex high-school sweethearts who are reunited when Berry’s clandestine titular agency decides to recruit Wahlberg, a construction worker in New Jersey, against his will for their latest nonsensical mission in London. The agency wants to hire a dependable “nobody” after a recent bungled operation claims a red herring played by Mike Colter. Director Julian Farino, who works mostly in television, proves to be as inept at comedic espionage as he is cliched suburban ennui in his last feature, 2011’s The Oranges.
Somehow, despite laying considerable groundwork for the rekindled romance between Wahlberg and Berry’s characters, the script either forgets or willfully neglects anything resembling chemistry, platonic or otherwise. Somehow, Wahlberg seems less like a fish out of water playing up Jersey blue-collar stereotypes while a poorly styled Berry bops around with a head of hair which looks like a wilted potted spider plant.
7. Elevation
Dir. George Nolfi
As Oscar Wilde posited, imitation may indeed be the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness, but in the case of films like Elevation, some barely camouflaged narrative derivation seems more of an insult.
The third outing from director George Nolfi is from one of the producers of A Quiet Place, which is clearly the template borrowed for this feature, replacing the noise-sensitive insect aliens of that franchise with invading entities with a sensitivity to high altitudes. Though Nolfi is hardly alone in his generic sci-fi foray (this year we also had Stefon Bristol’s blandlytitled Breathe, similarly suffering from nebulous copycat syndrome and an egregiously banal script), it’s a film which curiously squanders the more intriguing set up of its human characters. Anthony Mackie (who starred in Nolfi’s The Banker, 2020) plays a single father who must stray beneath the line of demarcation to procure medical supplies for his asthmatic child. He’s joined by two women, Morena Baccarin (who also serves as executive producer) and Maddie Hasson, whose sparring suggests a bizarre love triangle might have given the actors something to sink their teeth into (much like the sleazy 1977 Jaws ripoff, Tintorera: Killer Shark, in which a sexually enthusiastic throuple also happens to be terrorized by a deadly shark).
6. Trigger Warning
Dir. Mouly Surya
Indonesian director Mouly Surya (Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, 2017) makes her English language debut with the spiritless Trigger Warning, a Netflix release headlined by Jessica Alba. It would appear Ms. Alba continues to be oblivious to what screenwriters can actually contribute towards storytelling, but truth be told, it’s the headlining star who really scuttles this rudderless endeavor.
Playing like any number of recent Z-grade Megan Fox films, this Roadhouse-like narrative follows a skilled CIA military combatant (yes, Jessica Alba), who must return to her troubled hometown in New Mexico to investigate her father’s suspicious death. Once there, she must contend with a villainous arms dealer named Elvis and a corrupt senator played by Anthony Michael Hall. If John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996) was overhauled with a frontal lobotomy, it might play something like Trigger Effect. Somehow, Alba’s ineptitude makes Megan Fox’s Rogue (2020), where she attempts to convey a pouty mercenary in the African hinterlands, suddenly conceivable.
5. Tarot
Dir. Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg
Based purely on their resumes, it’s no surprise Tarot, the directorial debut of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, is the worst kind of debacle: it’s utterly forgettable. Together, they assisted in penning The Expendables 4, while Cohen was co-writer on Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, all of which exist on the same schlock spectrum of films which seem to have been written without desiring to be entertaining or memorable.
Much like 2014’s Ouija, a group of tedious teens unleash an evil entity haunting a specific set of tarot cards. A Hungarian astrologer from 1798 cursed the cards, which is related to us in a bit of painstaking, cliched exposition from an online expert in tarot cards played by Olwen Fouéré (who also stars in another 2024 misfire, The Watchers, the directorial debut of Ishana Shyamalan). The teens are dispatched in expected succession until the La Llorona-like entity is defeated. The box office success of Tarot suggests we’ll be blasted with an unnecessary sequel.
But perhaps hope is not lost if someone innovative, like a Mike Flanagan, gets free reign to attempt something intelligent, as he did with the surprisingly effective Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016).
4. Atlas
Dir. Brad Peyton
While she remains incredibly prolific, one wonders if Jennifer Lopez will ever realize that less is more. In an incredibly busy but troubled year for the celebrity, including another high profile divorce, a canceled tour, two bizarre and phenomenally out-of-touch docu-hybrid projects (The Greatest Love Story Never Told and This Is Me…Now), plus the awards-hungry sports drama Unstoppable, reflect a dizzying schedule but with formidably diminishing returns.
Nestled in the jostled mix of all these endeavors was a forgettable but foolish B-grade sci-fi flick from Netflix, Atlas. Lopez plays an ambiguously aged analyst who must overcome her disdain for artificial intelligence if she is to succeed in a mission to terminate an AI terrorist named Harlan (Simu Liu), who leads a crusade against humans. Cringey dialogue and the kind of sloppy special effects which have come to define the era of films made solely for streaming purposes do little to assist Lopez, who brandishes her usual shrill disposition to bulldoze her way to the all’s-well-that-ends-well finale.
3. The Crow
Dir. Rupert Sanders
In the endless plundering of past franchise properties, the tortured reboot of The Crow at long last came to fruition. The goth-mystique of the 1994 original, which was enhanced by the tragic death of lead Brandon Lee, also arrived before comic book adaptations became Hollywood’s formulaic staple.
In a series of remakes similar to the trajectory of something like The Punisher, this dark fantasy circles a pair of angsty addicts who are murdered by a criminal underlord posing as an elitist cultural connoisseur who just so happens to be immortal thanks to a pact with the devil, to whom he sends troubled souls in order to remain forever middle-aged. Even the appropriately villainous Danny Huston seems bored as he gnashes his way through a sluggish plot wherein he must hunt down Zadie (FKA Twigs), who has footage of his murderous shenanigans (a dramatic catalyst also quite similar to Brad Anderson’s 2024 title The Silent Hour). She escapes capture by entering a drug rehabilitation facility styled like a color-coded cult from a cheaply designed futuristic dystopia, and meets the equally troubled Eric, played by Bill Skarsgård (who, with the It and Nosferatu remakes under his belt, seems to be studio lackey for genre reboots). They’re both murdered, but Eric ends up in purgatory, where a spirit guide explains a titular bird took pity on his tragedy, giving him the chance to return from the dead, kill his assailant, and be reunited with Zadie.
Unfortunately nothing really works with Sanders’ latest version, including a languid script and lack of chemistry between the leads, who, sans supernatural assistance, would be doomed to toxic codependency, whose meet-cute feels like the prologue to The Panic in Needle Park (1971).
2. Mea Culpa & Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black
Dir. Tyler Perry
Since there’s no real way to differentiate the ineptitude and absurdity the two ersatz adult erotic thrillers Tyler Perry sidelined streaming services with this year, Mea Culpa and Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black are tied—at least regarding their level of odious storytelling.
Making waves on Netflix with Mea Culpa, Kelly Rowland stars as a criminal defense attorney who finds herself attracted to a sexy but sinister client played by Trevante Rhodes, an artist accused of murdering his girlfriend. Then, Amazon Prime unleashed Divorce in the Black, Perry’s second (of three) releases this year wherein Meagan Good is abandoned by an abusive husband only to be romantically rescued by an equally attractive man from her hometown who checks all the boxes…until her estranged husband and his formidably dysfunctional kinfolk have something to say about it. Debbi Morgan and Richard Lawson wobble around in the background as Good’s well-to-do but implausibly written parents.
The real problem with Perry’s prolific output is his resistance to improving his craft as either a writer or director—it’s clear he regards the process of filmmaking with some contempt and doesn’t realize his audience has evolved in many ways he himself has not.
1. Joker: Folie à Deux
Dir. Todd Phillips
Speaking of ersatz, director Todd Phillips followed up his lauded 2019 origin story of Batman’s nemesis Joker with a woefully ungainly sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, a cinematic exercise so tiresome it’s difficult not to question the motivations of all involved. Joaquin Phoenix reprises the character that won him an Academy Award, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival (where the Lucrecia Martel-led jury awarded it the coveted Golden Lion), landing with a thud. The project was hotly anticipated thanks to the stunt casting of Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, the psychotic girlfriend of Arthur Fleck (aka Joker), given a backstory which sounds an awful lot like the performer’s own experience as a privileged socialite turned celebrity.
The majority of the film is set within the confines of an asylum and a courtroom, with Fleck being held accountable for the handful of murders committed from the last film. What follows is an oddly paced slog of endless musical numbers shared by the leads, off in their own little worlds to showcase the narrative subtexts about dual personas and the compartmentalization of trauma, which segues into one of the most mundane courtroom dramas ever written. Earnest supporting turns from Catherine Keener and Zazie Beetz fulfill writer Scott Silver’s attempts to hold on to the empathetic collateral damage which made the first film seem oddly human for a contemporary graphic novel property, while those who are cruel or inhumane (Brendan Gleeson, Steve Coogan, Bill Smitrovich) are cartoonish in their vileness. But we spend so much time with the leads, who share a ruinous chemistry, which really turns the film into an endurance test.
Phoenix, who doesn’t seem accustomed to singing, much less very interested in it, is forced to warble his way through song numbers while Gaga refuses to lay down a dichotomy between what’s real versus fantasy concerning her character’s musical talents. In other words, it seems like she’s constantly trying to outshine her co-star with the sole element she’s allowed to bring to the table.
Absurd behind-the-scenes tidbits from the crew reveal Gaga approached the role like a Daniel Day-Lewis acolyte who refused to break character. But, amusingly, there’s really no characterization at all. One single solitary soundbite from the film suggests a subconscious self-awareness, when, at long last, after two hours of drivel, Phoenix whinges to Gaga, “I don’t want to sing anymore.”