Most Anticipated Movies (and Press Tours) of 2024
Plus, revisiting and updating my resolutions
Happy Golden Globes day to all who celebrate! (They air at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on CBS, not NBC, this year.)
Before the clock runs out on being able to say “Happy New Year!” (it’s coming soon), I figure it might be a good time to look back on my 2023 resolutions.
Commitment. Continue to look for ways to improve offerings through this newsletter, including by offering more features around community and curation. While quantity and hitting my 2x/week goal will be a large part of this, I also want to measure this in quality. This means not just getting #content out the door but thinking about how to make posts meaningful. RESULT: This was going great until the fall wrecked me professionally.
Efficiency. The classic “work smarter, not harder” for me in writing means not procrastinating on assignments and deadlines, working ahead in quiet periods, and tackling things I dread (namely, interview transcription) within 48 hours to avoid the mental anguish of knowing I have to rush. RESULT: I did alright on this, especially the interview transcription, but can still improve.
Targeted blindspot treatment. Rather than make a blanket vow to be better at catching up on classics, I’m going to pick a filmmaker, genre, and country to better verse myself in for 2023. I resolve to get to know Eric Rohmer (shamefully have never seen a single one of the French director’s films yet have faked my way through multiple interviews as if I had), the classical rom-com/screwball comedy, and Japanese cinema. RESULT: An absolute flop as I watched 0 Rohmer and made no particular effort to seek out Japanese films. Maybe a blanket vow IS better after all.
Write outside the box. I will push myself to write things that do not just fall into familiar categories and templates I can churn out like clockwork (those being the review, the Q&A interview, and the streaming blurbs). RESULT: I managed to do this a few times! I was particularly proud of the deep dive on “Titanium” in M3GAN, the career of Rachel McAdams, and a feature involving an interview with Fingernails director Christos Nikou.
Read more. I felt my attention span shrink to tweet-length when it came to consuming criticism this year. If I want anyone to read all that I write, I need to extend the same courtesy to others and get a better sense of the great stuff floating around out there. (And then I’ll share more of it here!) RESULT: I did OK, but I can do better. If you saw my 2023 reading goal for GoodReads, however, no you didn’t.
A few 2024 resolutions:
Don’t let fall destroy everything. Clearly, the last two years have been derailed by busy fall festival seasons (and this year, a particularly bruising final quarter of work). I’ve got to avoid burnout again and prepare better for what’s coming once again.
Cover more truly under-the-radar films. Not just A24 and Neon titles — look for films to support that truly need real champions to compete for any sort of attention.
Talk to more legends about other careers. Some of the most satisfying conversations I had all year were with people who’d spent decades in the industry: Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Godfrey Reggio, Cheryl Dunye. There’s so much to learn from them, not only about art but also about life itself. I want to keep garnering their wisdom.
Find ways to build community around cinema. All these things are better with company! I want to better about bringing people in and thinking about ways to inspire conversation and community rather than just making it feel like an act of consumption.
Write and watch more classics. Step out of 2024 to appreciate the past, both in its own right and in terms of how it informs what is being made today.
Onto the show!
2024 will certainly be an odd movie year, with output marred by the lost productivity as writers and actors collectively struck for a contract that valued their labor. But there’s still a lot to be excited about all the same. My thanks to the good folks at The Playlist, Little White Lies, and Vulture who put together exceptional (and much more comprehensive) lists that are worth perusing if you want a fuller picture of the year ahead.
For me, however, here are the top 24 titles I’m excited for in ‘24:
Anora: Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket) is one of our last true renegade indie filmmakers. Curious to see what he’ll do with this rom-com about Brooklyn sex workers.
Babygirl: Very curious to see if the discourse can remain normal for hot The Intern as Nicole Kidman’s She-E-O starts an affair with her intern, played by Harris Dickinson.
Bird: Andrea Arnold, we will GET YOU the Palme d’Or you deserved for American Honey here! If she can corral Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, that’s gotta count for something. (U up, Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig?!)
Blitz: Glad to see Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) making his first standard narrative feature since 2018! And with Saoirse Ronan in tow, too, for a story about the bombings of London during WWII. Is Oscar nomination #5 incoming?
Challengers (trailer): NA NA NA COME ON! Save us, horny tennis love triangle movie.
Dune Part Two (trailer): My #2 movie of 2021 gets a much-deserved sequel! Word on the street is that it’s better than the first. Consider me seated at AMC Lincoln Square’s IMAX at the earliest possible opportunity.
The End: I simply do not understand how a musical about the end of the world featuring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay directed by the guy who made The Act of Killing is going to work. And yet I have no doubt it will. Heck, even a failure would be such a fascinating spectacle.
Gladiator 2: I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Best Picture-winning original. But late period Ridley Scott brought together swole Paul Mescal and sage Denzel Washington, and I can’t wait to see the result.
Hedda: Good for Nia DaCosta for transferring whatever caché she got from doing a Marvel movie into making a big-screen adaptation of the Ibsen play Hedda Gabler with Tessa Thompson.
Immaculate: Sydney Sweeney doing religious horror, very much up my alley.
Juror No. 2: Clint Eastwood continues cranking out new movies at 93! Incredible. Curious to see what he does with a legal thriller involving a cause célèbre of this newsletter, Nicholas Hoult.
Kinds of Kindness: New Yorgos Lanthimos reunites him with the screenwriter behind his earlier, weirder stuff from Greece. And continues the Emma Stone partnership!
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: One of our most underrated franchises of the past decade gets another go. We’ll see how they do without Andy Serkis, the undisputed master of mo-cap.
Megalopolis: Francis Ford Coppola has been building toward this entire career. If you aren’t following his Instagram where he’s hyping the project up, you’re missing out.
Mickey 17: I think there’s no way we’re getting this movie at the end of March without a trailer, but I’ll be there with bells on whenever Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Parasite (that enlisted Robert Pattinson, no less) with bells on.
Mother Mary: I can’t say I ever though there’d be an “epic melodrama” with music by Charli XCX … that would also be directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight). Will it be camp? Casting Anne Hathaway indicates perhaps, but Michaela Coel muddies the waters.
Oh Canada: Late period Paul Schrader (First Reformed, Master Gardener) has been a real treasure of reflectiveness. I’m curious how that will extend to this tale of a draft dodger played in his younger days by Jacob Elordi and present day by Richard Gere.
The Order: I can run hot (The Snowtown Murders) and cold (Nitram) on the Australian director Justin Kurzel, but I always respect that his films feel as brutal to watch as a bare-knuckle brawl. This sounds like a project very up my alley as it involves Jude Law as an FBI agent trying to bust a series of bank robbers led by Nicholas Hoult’s charismatic domestic terrorist (see above for a reminder on this newsletter’s position).
Polaris: I’m in utter awe of director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, You Were Never Really Here) and her command of montage. I don’t need to know much about whatever she’s making to get hyped up, but it doesn’t hurt that this concept involves a 19th-century Alaskan ice photographer meeting the devil … and stars real-life couple Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara.
The Shrouds: David Cronenberg is another filmmaker who’s doing some of the most interesting work of his career in his twilight years. After Crimes of the Future ranked #7 in my best movies of 2022, I’m fascinated by him once again returning to a supernatural realm to explore grief and loss. That first still, too!
The Shrouds, 2024. © SBS Productions The Way of the Wind: Hope springs eternal that maybe THIS will be the year that Terrence Malick finishes his Jesus movie.
We Live in Time: Florence Pugh-Andrew Garfield romantic drama. Need I say more?
Wizards!: Given how long ago this movie shot, it probably should have come out by now. But any concern I might have is canceled out by my fascination over how the distinct energies of Pete Davidson and Franz Rogowski will collide.
Y2K: With 2017’s Brigsby Bear, Kyle Mooney got such a great showcase for why his wacky brand of comedy deserved a larger canvas than short bits on SNL. Here, he steps behind the camera for a high-school party movie set on the final night of the last millennia. Ready for things to get zany!
A little extra treat for paid subscribers…
As fun as the movies themselves are, sometimes a great promotional cycle to hype it up can be just as good. (Or, in the case of not very good movies, even BETTER!) There are a number of 2024 movies that promise a lot of good extracurricular antics, so I decided … why not rank my most anticipated press tours of 2024?
These are the casts I’m most excited to see on Hot Ones, most likely to go viral from an absurd moment with Fallon, most inclined to make headlines from a wild red carpet quote. Here’s where I think the silver screen stars will have us glued to the small screen.
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