All of the new releases I saw in 2024 ranked in order from most best to least best:
The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)
There once was a girl from the sticks
Her DC trip with school goes amiss
A kindly sympathizer
A film crew who spies her
Hidden, unhidden, abyss
Anora (Sean Baker)
A dancer finds a Russian mark
He takes to her on a lark
A whirlwind romance
The delicate dance
His parents not feeling the spark
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Journalists forming a crew
Unstable lands to roam through
Jam themselves in
To lose is to win
For the shot, nothing they won’t do
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Two young men; so fit, so supple
Old squabbles leech and quintuple
One bottom, one top
At the finals they pop
Bodies, they meet, to couple
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Amidst abuse, two boys become friends
Locked up in the school like a pen
Reflecting on the past
How to survive, how to last
The school wasn’t closed until the 2010s
Ghostlight (Alex Thompson & Kelly O’Sullivan)
A father, no longer whole
Loss, taking its toll
But through his distress
A new way to express
The body, the mind, and the soul
Problemista (Julio Torres)
A labyrinth of dastardly design
Moving one step at a time
A sliver of hope
Some eggs and a dope
The mountain, the journey, the climb
The Seeds of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)
A regime feeling their control slip
A man whose promotion heeds no lip
His gun doth disappear
His daughters doth fear
A less than ideal family trip
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
There one was a kind-hearted man
Then the police came up with a plan
Dress him up in disguise
Lure people like flies
Until with on, a fire began
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
A career at the end of its glory
Replaced by youth, classic story
A dose and a twitch
New body, a switch
Then things get quite gory
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
Two cousins embark on a trip
One measured, one tending to slip
Sadness abound
Family around
Emotional band-aids to rip
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
A murder most foul, or maybe…
Tons of evidence, or were the cops lazy?
One man realizes
The case is full of surprises
Who wins, who loses, it maybe hazy
Babygirl (Halina Reijn)
She’s a powerful CEO, but beware!
That intern, he has quite a stare
Their bodies, they meet
Not always discreet
Make sure to lap the milk from the dish with great care
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
A Count, quite persnickety and mean
Buys a house, brings a plague, makes a scene
Three nights and three days
With a fair maiden he lays
He regrets not bringing sunscreen
Abigail (Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin)
There was an innocent youth
Who transforms to something uncouth
They think they’ve kidnapped
But the zappers get zapped
And she greets them all by nail and tooth
Resynator (Alison Tavel)
A young woman searching for her dad
Probing the past for the good and the bad
A unique take on a machine
All the details she can glean
What you have doesn’t have to be what you had
Lisa Frankenstein (Zelda Williams)
A companion brought from the dead
In touch with the world left unsaid
Angsty at mom
A fun date for prom
Some gravestones are best left unread
We Grown Now (Minhal Baig)
Two friends come of age in Cabrini-Green
The cement as warm as the streets are mean
No longer lilliputian
When they flip there’s no disputin’
A move will leave futures unseen
Wicked (Jon Chu)
The green woman has everyone shook
But wow can she sing the verse and hook
Malfeasances about
The monkeys love to shout
Off she goes with the broom she took
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)
Vrrrr veommm scrrr BANG tick-click BOOM
Rrrr Rrrr bwaaaaaa GET HIM tick ZOOM
Water, we need water!
Let go of my daughter!
Whoosh THUMP bip-bip-BING vv-vv-vroom
Longlegs (Oz Perkins)
A strange man going out and about
Elicits some screams and maybe a shout
Leave a code easy to crack
But the FBI can’t even do that
And once again, it’s quite a rout
The Fall Guy (David Leitch)
And old flame, a second chance
One big movie, one last dance
Hooked up to a rig
The scene is big
A crazy plan works, perchance
Drive-Away Dolls (Ethan Coen)
Two young women, out for a lark
Get a car, need to park
But the package within
Brings them to sin
Shadows emerge after dark
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
A great set up, a great excuse
For his daughter’s songs to get some use
But the police flail
As the killer sets sail
Not enough thrills doth produce
Your Monster (Caroline Lindy)
Falling for your anthropomorphization
Can only begat more consternation
But if you’re into hair
Then explore if you dare
Begin the decontamination
Rumors (Guy Maddin)
A group of flat characters to adore
In implausible settings galore
They babble and bicker
And wander through thicker
It all ends up being quite a bore
Lift (F. Gary Gray)
A heist movie in the sky, make haste!
Where they steal NFTs from a base
And in case you can’t guess
Actually it’s for the best
Please save yourself from this waste
Slam Zuckert is a municipal bureaucrat. He sees a lot of movies and reads a lot of books and sometimes writes about them. His favorite movie is There Will Be Blood, his favorite mathematician is Georg Cantor, and his least favorite mathematician is Leopold Kronecker.
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