2024 Year in Review: Movies

I hope you’re been having a marvelous 2025! Here I am to make it even better by blabbing about movies to you. You’re welcome.

This seems to have been The Year of the Animated Movie for me, since towards the end of the year I watched a lot of them. Some of which I have unusual opinions about, so if you are here for the Drama and the Controversial Opinions, stick around for that.

(Before I start, I want to make the quick disclaimer that while most of the movies here are G or PG and fine for family viewing, not every single one of them is, and there are several items here I wouldn’t show to younger children/wouldn’t want to have watched myself when I was a bit younger than I am now. If you want to know more about content for about any specific movie, feel free to ask!)

All right, let’s get into my 2024 year in review: movies!

1. Living with Tigers (2003)

“When dealing with tigers, I’ve got to be dominant. If I practice by taking meat away, then hopefully, if the tigers do grab a person, I should be able take that person away from the tigers without getting killed.”
~

It feels funny including this, but hey, it is a film, even if it’s not like my usual movie-watching fare. This is a documentary following a bloke who’s trying to introduce Bengali tigers to Africa. Serendipitously, he has a male and female tiger on hand who have been in captivity, so he brings them to Africa to try to acclimate them to living there and just to living in the wild in general. It’s quite an interesting time.

2. The Road Home (1999)

“I’ll be waiting for you.”
~

Watched in original Chinese with English subtitles

This was a really well-made movie. I had somehow gotten the impression that it would be mostly light and happy, though still in a well-made, non-fluffy way, but that impression soon proved to be wrong. The parts of the story happening in current time were absolutely heartbreaking. Even the flashbacks, though some were really cute, also had a lot of lonely yearning and sacrifice and such. (In fact, I feel that it wouldn’t have hurt the story to give us just a little bit more lightness and happiness. If they were married for decades (not a spoiler, since we know this at the beginning of the movie) couldn’t we at very least have gotten a scene of her finally giving him the dumplings?)

The movie is also absolutely beautiful to look at. It really takes its time and lets us soak in the atmosphere and the setting and the culture, and I loved that. The dialogue, too, felt very understated and real, the themes (such as holding on to traditions and old ways of life in the face of progress, the sacrificial nature of love, &c.) were really interesting and thought-provoking, and on the whole…yeah, this was a really, really good movie.

3. Our Mutual Friend (1998)

“Since Miss Wilfer rejected me, I have never again urged my suit with a spoken syllable or look. But I have never changed in my devotion for her, except that it is deeper than it was and better founded.”
~

I enjoyed this one quite a lot! I reviewed it in full here.

4. Playing Shakespeare (1982)

“Playing Shakespeare – not reading him or writing about him, but playing him. Over a thousand books or articles are written about him every year. … And yet, very little is put on paper about how to act him. Well, I think I can guess why. I was once urged to write about him, but I just couldn’t do it; I thought that the sort of points that need to be made could only arise truly in the context of working with actors.”
~

I only saw the first two episodes out of nine, but I really enjoyed what I saw and would love to watch the rest of it!

This is, in short, a group of great Shakespearean actors (some now quite famous, like Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen) headed by Shakespearean director John Barton, sitting around in a room and talking about Shakespeare (and sometimes reciting him). It’s really fascinating stuff. The visual/audio quality isn’t great, and obviously it’s not trying to do anything interesting cinematically, but that is okay. For something like this, I think advanced visual effects could be more of a distraction than anything.

5. Lilies of the Field (1963)

“Eine kleine Kirche. A cha-pel. We build a chapel right here.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You.”
“Lots of luck. I ain’t gonna build you no chapel.”
~

I had mixed thoughts on this one. It was enjoyable, but I felt like something was lacking somehow. I read the book some years ago, and I had mixed thoughts on the book to start with, but somehow the movie felt a little shallower than the book – like it had captured the external story but not its under-the-surface messages and conflicts and such. But perhaps I should read the book again before I give any definitive opinions.

6. Stuart Little 2

“She’s in terrible trouble, and I have to help her. I mean, what am I, a man or a…mouse?
“Uh… is that a trick question?”
~

Movie watched for Hugh Laurie #1

This isn’t fine art, nor is it a perfect children’s film, but it is very sweet and endearing and a great comfort movie. I think that (as is often the case with sequels) the script and direction and overall energy and flow were improved from the first film, but it fell a bit more into stereotypical kid’s film tropes and didn’t have all the heart and sincerity of the first film. It was still really cute, though.

I talked at more length about both Stuart Little films here.

7. The Unsellables (2008-2013)

“Curb appeal is vital if you want to entice a buyer. Your house might be perfect on the inside, but if it looks poorly maintained or run-down on the outside, you’re not going to get people through the door.”
~

(I had already seen multiple episodes of this, but I watched a few new ones this year.) This is an oddly addictive HGTV- style show about trying to renovate houses that have been on the market awhile without selling, and turning them from “unsellable” to sold. My family does tend to notice that Sofie (the star of the show, the real estate expert who decides what needs to be changed in the houses she sees) seems to contradict herself if the situation requires – for instance, saying one house with artwork and hand-painted pieces has too much personality and the house should be like a blank slate filled with neutral colors, then in another episode examining a house which is full of clean surfaces and neutral colors and saying it needs more personality because it looks cold and inhuman. But hey, maybe that’s just what real estate is like.

Also, half the time they don’t actually say at the end whether the house sold or not, which seems highly suspicious.

8. The Young Visiters (2003)

“So many ancestors, Bernard!”
“And many more of the same ilk scattered throughout my domain.”
“How glorious to have so many ancestors all of the same ilk!”
~

Movie watched for Hugh Laurie #2

I was really excited to watch this from reading Miss Laurie’s review of it at Old-Fashioned Charm (which is also how I discovered the original book), but unfortunately I didn’t like this anywhere near as well as the original story. The trouble, you see, is that they tried to give the characters motivations, and that made them singularly unlikeable. I thought there was something sort of charming about the lack of logic in the original story. While the makers of the movie were obviously trying to preserve the spirit of the original in many ways, and the whole thing was very quirky and felt like it was through a child’s eyes, I think they should have gone the whole way and kept her little-kid-logic. If you’re going to make a movie based on a story written by a nine-year-old, don’t even try to make it make sense.

There were a few scenes that I felt kept the endearingly bizarre, what-is-even-happening-right-now quality of the book (most notably Alf’s meeting with the Prince of Whales and the proposal scene), but they were sadly few.

9. Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist (2024)

“Jesus as Love is made present through the Eucharist. He didn’t want to leave us orphans. He left us Himself in the Eucharist.”
~

This was the first time I went to see something in a movie theater since The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out, so I really enjoyed the experience of being in a theater again! The film itself was sadly not as good as I had hoped it would be. The content itself was all good and solid, but it didn’t feel like it was organized super cohesively. (Also, this is a minor thing, but there are a few short bits re-creating scenes from the New Testament, and I didn’t like the actor for Jesus. But naturally enough, that is something that I tend to be very picky about.)

10. North and South (2004)

“I’m sorry.”
“For what? That you find my feelings for you offensive? Or that you assume because I’m in trade I’m only capable of thinking in terms of buying and selling? Or that I take pleasure in sending my employees to an early grave?”
~

This was hyped a lot, but I wasn’t disappointed! It was very well-done, well-produced, well-acted, &c., and in some ways I may have preferred it to the book (though not in every way – I felt that the reasons behind both Mr. Thornton’s and Margaret’s actions were more clear in the book, for instance). I’ve heard some complain about the last scene, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I didn’t find the historically inaccurate aspects to be enough to ruin my enjoyment of the scene.

The main things that annoyed me were that they did a mild character assassination on Henry Lennox, who I found to be a decently likeable (if not perfect) character in the book, and SPOILERS I really didn’t like how they added in the weird thing with Mr. Bell liking Margaret. It was very gross and creepy. END SPOILERS I also don’t think the actor for Mr. Hale was well-cast (and I didn’t like how his whole sub-plot at the beginning of the story was handled).

11. All Creatures Great and Small Series 4 (2024)

“Seems I may have put my foot in it with Helen.”
“Just the one? Progress at last!”
~

This was fun, but somehow this season seemed less cohesive than the previous ones; it felt more like separate unrelated episodes strung together than one overarching narrative. More importantly, I didn’t like how they handled Mrs. Hall’s and Gerald’s storyline for a couple reasons. For one thing, I am always uncomfortable with romances in which one member is divorced, and this was even worse because Mrs. Hall herself was obviously uncomfortable with the the romance because of that. It was a little strange, too, that after they have Mrs. Hall explicitly mention being uncomfortable pursuing a relationship with Gerald because she had stood before God and promised to spend her life with her husband, they never actually did anything to try to answer that objection. SPOILERS Also, though of course it wasn’t deliberate, the way that she led poor Gerald on so far just to change her mind at the very last minute kind of seemed like the cruelest way she could have possibly handled things. END SPOILERS

The introduction of Carmody as a character was fine, I guess. I suppose they needed someone to fill the void left by Tristan (I’m very curious as to whether Tristan will come back in the fifth season…but please no spoilers if you know). He reminds me a lot of Steggles from that one episode of Jeeves and Wooster, though. Couldn’t stop thinking about it once I’d noticed.

12. Encanto (2021)

“The miracle is not
Some magic that you’ve got;
The miracle is you.”
~

I guess I’m just late to the party in discovering this, but this was absolutely delightful! Visually it’s absolutely beautiful, and it was a lovely story as well. I love character-driven stories with lots of interesting and layered people in it, so obviously I ate this up with a spoon. And I really loved its themes of forgiveness and new beginnings and looking beneath the surface of things to see how they really are. It was great.

The movie also does a great job of taking advantage of its medium as a musical and an animation; the songs and their corresponding visuals have an important and necessary part to play in telling the story. And the songs are great songs in their own right, too. They’re not the genre of music I usually listen to (the soundtrack is composed by Lin Manuel-Miranda) but I genuinely loved them. Of course “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is absolutely iconic, and I love “Waiting on a Miracle” and especially “Surface Pressure” as well.

13. The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

“Peggotty? Peggotty? Peggotty? You mean to say a human being went into a church and had herself named Peggotty? Did your mother sneeze when you were christened?”
~

Movie watched for Hugh Laurie #3

I have mixed feelings on this one. I did enjoy it, you see, and it had an undeniable charm, but it also…wasn’t…well, good. I was fortunate enough to find a review of it that succinctly describes my feelings:

I understand that they were trying to do something a little different from your regular Dickens adaptation. There have been a lot of movie versions of this story, so it makes sense to to try to bring something new to the table. And I’m not per se against the whimsical, vibrant, musical theater kind of feel they were going for, but quite frankly the script was not on the same level as Dickens’ original writing. Which is a shame, because the sets/costumes/&c. were gorgeous, and they had assembled some really great actors. I think Tilda Swinton could be perfect as Miss Betsey (and was very good as it was; we just didn’t get to see enough of her soft side), Dev Patel could have made a great, endearing David (though unfortunately as it was he felt like a character in a modern rom-com), and I really liked Rosalind Eleazar as Agnes until they started making her do very un-Agnes-like things like making fun of Uriah Heep behind his back and flirting with David so hard I wanted to cringe for her.

I do have to say, though, that although of course I expected him to be good, I was a little blown away by just how good Hugh Laurie’s Mr. Dick was. Mr. Dick is an easy character to turn into a caricature – especially in a larger-than-life kind of adaptation like this – but that didn’t happen here at all. Mr. Dick was still very humorous, of course, but with an underlying sincerity and vulnerability which really layered out the character and made it clear he’s not meant to be seen as just a comic relief. And it felt completely real and not at all contrived. It was so great.

I’m realizing I should probably do a full review of this one at some point, since I have a lot of thoughts about it!

14. Wall-E (2008)

“Name?”
“WALL-E.”
“WALL-E? EVE.”
“Eeee…”
“EVE.”
“Eeeee… aah.”
“EVE! EVE!”
“Eeeee… va?”
~

Very cute and sweet! I will say that this is one was so hyped (it’s in the Criterion Collection, for goodness’ sake) that it didn’t quite live up to the expectations for me. I suppose I expected it to go deeper somehow…though don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. (And I’m not saying at all that it was completely shallow with no deeper meanings or character development, because that’s certainly not true.) Maybe part of the problem is that it felt like too much of the movie was focused on the superficial conflict of chasing robots around and retrieving the plant, and if they had focused more on the character and relationship-building aspect of things, that would have been better. Or maybe it’s just that I expected to feel a personal attachment to it because so many others did, and felt disappointed when that wasn’t the case for me.

Wall-E himself was very cute, though (his little noises and reactions to things were absolutely adorable), and EVE was great too. And I loved the human romance in the background going on at the same time as the robot romance. I also thought it was very cool how much was expressed without words – it was almost like a return to the silent movie genre, but in a kids’ movie, and how cool is that?

15. The Barchester Chronicles (1982)

“I am safe because the church has more money than the reformers. And because of a fine legal quibble, I’m safe.”
“Yes.”
“Does Sir Abraham say anything about the morality of the situation?”
“Certainly not! The legal profession does not concern itself with morality.”
~

I enjoyed this! It is a 1980s BBC mini-series, so it is a bit stiff and stagey and not super high-budget, but I found it quite watchable nevertheless. I’ve never read the Anthony Trollope books that this is based on, but Noddy has read the first one and says he personally preferred the mini-series version. I will say, though, that the break between where the first book ended and the second began felt a bit jarring. People died and new people were introduced with startling rapidity.

The acting was a mixed bag; some of it was good, some was not so good. It was fun to see a baby (comparatively, not literally) Alan Rickman in here.

16. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

“Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”
~

I’ve realized this year that I really appreciate a movie having a consistent tone, and one which fits with the kind of movie it is. And this movie definitely has that. It revels in its cheesy ’80s action movie vibes, and has a great tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

Also, it was fun to see a baby (comparatively, not literally) Jeff Goldblum in here.

17. Flight of the Phoenix (2004)

“Most people spend their whole lives hanging on to hopes and dreams that are never going to come true, but they hold on to them. Why are you going to give up on them now when you need them most?”
“You are assuming I’m one of those people who has hopes and dreams.”
“I find it hard to believe that a man who learns to fly never had a dream.”
~

Movie watched for Hugh Laurie #4

Well…I enjoyed some things about it. I think what is most frustrating to me is that it had a lot of potential (“latent potentialities” as Lady Florence Craye would say) that it really didn’t live up to. It was a fine movie as it was, but it had a (mostly) charismatic cast and a lot of potential for interpersonal drama which could have made it something really special. The movie shined the most when it focused on the characters, and focused on how being in such a dire situation brings out both the worst and the best of people’s personalities. I think that Giovanni Ribisi is the only one where the script really allowed him to bring out the complexities of his character, though some of the others were doing what they could with what they had.

Also, though the movie didn’t exactly pick sides, it annoyed me that they always had Rady have the last word when he argued with Sammi about religion. (I could have thought of much better things to say than the few comebacks Sammi came up with, by-the-by.)

18. Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

“I think I just got hit by a meteorite.”
“Oh, Susan. Every bride feels that way on her wedding day.”
~

Movie watched for Hugh Laurie #5

I didn’t have high expectations going in, but I genuinely loved this? It has a great sense of humor (apart from some obligatory bathroom humor, though that was a lot less noticeable than I thought it would be from hearing about it beforehand) – understated, tongue-in-cheek without being cynical, and with a good dose of random, which is just exactly my sense of humor. The movie is poking fun at 1950s monster movies in various ways, but it does so very affectionately, so it really feels like an homage at the same time.

I also really liked the characters and story, and once again the tone: it knew exactly what kind of movie it was and played to its strengths. From what I’d heard before I watched it, I thought that the “girl-boss” message would make me cringe a bit, but it really didn’t. I think the reason I usually dislike female-empowerment type stories is that they tend to contain two common tropes which I really hate: 1) portraying it as being somehow empowering for a girl to be a jerk and a selfish human being (which is in fact not empowering for anyone) and 2) portraying men as all either stupid or evil. I didn’t find either of those tropes to be present here. Susan continues to be a sweet, compassionate girl who cares about other people throughout the whole movie, and while yes, it’s true that her male counterparts are (understandably, under the circumstances) less physically powerful than she is, they are very likeable characters who form a real relationship with Susan and by the end of the movie have all shown their individual strengths and that they are all essential members of the group. I think the themes of the movie are more about believing in your own worth, forming healthy attachments instead of toxic ones, having your friends’ backs, and not judging people based on appearance than anything else.

IT’S JUST REALLY CUTE, GUYS.

19. Ratatouille (2007)

“Where are you going?”
“Back to the restaurant! They’ll fail without me!”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I’m a cook!”
~

And here come the controversial opinions…because I didn’t care for Ratatouille. While the premise of the story is certainly an interesting one, somehow the story itself just didn’t really captivate me. I have never liked the trope of the parent who’s supposed to seen as restrictive and hindering our talented young main character’s dreams…especially when the parent actually has a good point, which is the case here (and which I don’t think was ever really acknowledged in the story). I didn’t really find Remy that compelling as a protagonist; he came across as rather selfish. I’m all for following your dreams, but you have to care about other people too, and we didn’t really see Remy do that beyond a brief bout of feeling sad when he thought he would never see his family again. Colette was also highly abrasive (as aforementioned, I really hate the trope of “it’s okay to be a jerk because ✨girlbossery✨”) and Linguini wasn’t super endearing either…again, he came across as a bit selfish. Awkwardness by itself is not enough to make a character endearing unless you pair it with some other quality like sweetness or integrity or some such.

Also, I felt like Ratatouille didn’t know what kind of movie it was. A movie about a rat who wants to be a cook has to portray its message with a certain amount of whimsy and tongue-in-cheekness – though not at the expense of its sincerity – and I didn’t really feel that. Some of the scenes were played so dramatically, in fact, that they felt a little cheesy to me. The climactic scene with Anton Ego, for instance. I don’t think it was a bad concept, but the execution felt so over-the-top, with the slow-mo and loud banging sound effect and everything.

20. Despicable Me (2010)

“Are these beds made out of bombs?”
“Yes, but they are very old and highly unlikely to blow up. But try not to toss and turn.”
“Cool!”
~

If you had suggested to me a year ago that I would watch Despicable Me and like it, I would likely have scoffed in disbelief. And yet, here we are. For years I had the vague impression (when I thought about the Despicable Me universe at all, which wasn’t often) that it was all just the minions being dumb and making potty jokes, and that didn’t sound terribly appealing. But while the franchise has unfortunately veered more in that direction over time, I think the first movie is legitimately really good. Its focus is more on character motivations and development than anything, sometimes shown in obvious ways, but also in some surprisingly subtle ways. (For instance, I think Vector is the perfect antagonist for Gru, because he’s the perfect figure to fuel Gru’s insecurity – Gru feels like he’s worked all his life for recognition and still hasn’t won the praise he wants, and then sees this young upstart who looks like he’s never worked for anything and yet somehow has everything handed to him on a silver platter. This dynamic isn’t ever explicitly stated in the movie, which makes it even better. I appreciate when kids’ movies don’t try to spell everything out for the audience.)

While the storyline is in a way one of the most basic and cliched you could think of, the way that it’s told and the characters themselves make it feel very fresh and unique. After all, I don’t think it’s a problem to tell a story “that’s been told before,” I just think you need to bring something new to the table to make it worth telling again, and in my opinion Despicable Me absolutely did that. It managed to tell a cliché story without feeling the slightest bit cliché, and it made me feel all the warm fuzzies, which is always a plus. I’m not sure I’d actually show this movie to real live children, since there is more toilet-type humor than I would like and one or two bits that could be a little dark depending on a child’s sensitivity level, but I enjoyed it a lot for myself.

Also, for the record, I actually found the minions to be reasonably cute and amusing in this. I think that their proper role in life is to be secondary minor characters – it’s once you try to expand them to major parts of the story that they start to become A Bit Much.

(You know, I’m thinking I should just start a blog post series in which I wax eloquent on kids’ movies, because I seem to have quite a lot to say on the topic.)

21. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

“Frank Towns is probably one of the few really great pilots left in this push-button world of yours.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, ‘Oh, really!’ He was flying by the seat of his pants in planes that were nothing more than bits and pieces before you even went to school!”
“That’s precisely what is wrong – he has remembered everything and learned nothing!”
~

So yes, this was objectively a better movie than the 2004 remake. It took me a little while to get into it, but by the time they started making us feel really sorry for Ernest Borgnine’s character I started to get engrossed. Its focus was on the characters, and the subtleties of how they interacted and clashed in the situation, which was really fascinating to see. Jimmy Stewart’s Captain Towns was a very different character from Dennis Quaid’s – whereas Quaid’s was cocky and arrogant and the crash shook him a little bit from that, Jimmy’s had deep-seated insecurities about the new ways of flying and engineering leaving him behind and leaving him useless. Dorfmann’s new techniques and engineering experience and very blunt way of expressing his views on Towns’ inadequacy sparked a very antagonistic relationship between the two because of those deeper feelings, which obviously in turn sparked a lot of conflict during the story.

I won’t say that the original was perfect, though. I had thought you’d get a much better sense of everybody’s personalities as compared to the remake, and while we did get a closer look at many people, there were still some who we didn’t get to know very well at all. I also really hated the soundtrack – whenever there was anything dramatic or tense happening on screen the music would come in with this loud “da-DUUUUNN!” as though we wouldn’t be able to understand otherwise that what was happening was important. (And the choice of playing the opening credits as everyone was panicking and the plane was about to crash was a strange choice for sure. It took me out of the mood rather.)

Well, there you have it! Do you disagree with any of my thoughts on these movies? What new movies have you discovered this year? Would you like to see full-length reviews of any of these movies?