The Best (well, not the worst) Movies of 2024

2024 was terrible for a lot of people. I won't elaborate on why--you've probably got your own ideas about what that means. I have things that I could complain about, but I would rather look for reasons not to. Many of those reasons came from the movies. And I still believe that a theater is the best way to experience motion pictures. I saw about half of them that way this year. I think I'm up there with the national average--maybe even above it. In any case, Hollywood is doing its best to deal with that new reality in the moviegoing audience. And, like every time it comes to a crossroad--from projection to sound to color to 3D to Dolby--the answer the industry came up with was, Spectacle!

Well spectacle is all well and good, but sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. The spectacle--heroic running gorillas and such--didn't really connect with me this year, which is why three of my selections are documentaries (a record), only two are made from an existing property and six are non-IP original films. If you're counting, that means I have 11 on the list. You'll see what I mean.

As always, I am trying to make this *my* list, no one elses. I have tried to avoid award season talk. I don't even know what the Golden Globe nominees are, as of this writing. I have my reasons. In the end, I want to explore what I really think and feel about today's pop culture. So here I go again. On my own. Going down the only road I've ever known.

Remember, each film has a link to where you can watch it, or find out more about it. Just click the title. It's hotlinked. Check it out. Seriously, people always seem to miss that.


So: Best Movies (American, single-shot stories) of 2024:
#PPLLCTenBest2024 #TenBest2024 #TenBest

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The Fall Guy, 87 North and Universal Pictures, Directed by David Leitch

As light and forgettable as the TV show that inspired it, and just as much fun. Stocked full of cliches, like the secret recording of the bad guy confessing to everything, and fun surprises--even if we've seen those surprises before. A romantic comedy with explosions--I'm pretty sure there's a genre there somewhere. A bonus with this film was the way it reaffirmed my connection to my older brother. The two of us watched it on the same night separately in our own little worlds without realizing it until afterwards. Movies can do that.

Conclave, Indian Paintbrush, Directed by Edward Berger

At some fundamental level, every organization in the world is just like high school. Conclave is a slow-burn action movie. Seriously. The leaps of faith and mind games that Ralph Fiennes navigates are no less harrowing and complex than those that Tom Cruise takes on in his Mission Impossible movies. Every silent hallway was exploding with tension, every vote a leap from a cliffside. I'm not kidding. And like any action movie, I figured out pretty early what the big reveal would be and who the bad guys were, but getting there and watching Ralph get there too was riveting. And for good measure, there was a twist ending that came out of nowhere but connected cleanly back to the bread crumbs (and my original guess) that were left along the way.

Now....[looking it up]...how do you spell hermaphrodite?

Juror #2, Dichotomy Films, Directed by Clint Eastwood

There's nothing I enjoy more than a movie that keeps me thinking about it after the end credits have rolled. Many of the films I think about, are ones where I take apart the story. In 2009, before I even started making top 10 lists, I did an small blog post about what was wrong with the movie, "9." (And about my Grandma.)

I like doing that. Most great movies will have me gushing about them and their characters and structure, such as my 2015 review of The Revenant. But that's still me engaging with the film's writing, as a writer. The even better movies don't engage me that way. The better ones get me thinking, not about how I would handle the story, but about how I would handle *myself* if I were in fact in that story.

Clint Eastwood does moral dilemma stories better than anyone else. And in his best films, this being one of them, he poses the question without providing the answer. There were so many times I thought I understood what was going to happen next or what--if I were there--my responses would be, but I soon saw that I understood nothing at all. And Josey Wales, bless him, wasn't going to explain it to me.

Jim Henson: Idea Man, Imagine Documentaries, Directed by Ron Howard

When I first went into film, studying at BYU, I made documentaries more than I made any other genre, even though I was studying screenwriting. Fellow students, not to mention a couple of professors, thought I was mixing formats. They thought I should concentrate more on being a writer. But I instinctively knew that making a documentary was a fabulous lesson in writing: you don't just showcase a series of events when making a documentary; a series of events is simply a newsreel, but a documentary is storytelling. And you can't just point the camera to find it. You're a watcher, a waiter. Be patient, listen, and the story finds you. Often, it doesn't come until the editing room, when you reflect on everything, and see what it means. Documentary film is reflection, it's seeing the small moments where great things came to pass, after they have already passed.

Jim Henson took green cloth and a ping pong ball and did great things.

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Spaceman, Netflix, Directed by Johan Renck

I don't usually like "serious" Adam Sandler movies, or any Adam Sandler movies. But this isn't an Adam Sandler movie. This is a piece of existential art by the director of "Chernobyl," Johan Renck. Apparently he's Swedish, very Swedish. Somehow he convinced Isabella Rossellini to play the head of a Czechoslovakian Space Agency.

This is, I kid you not, a movie about an extraterrestrial trying to get a man to understand his feelings about the breakdown of his relationship with his wife during a mission to Jupiter. To tell you any more than that, particularly the nature of the alien, is to ruin it. It shouldn't work, not as entertainment. It should be as incomprehensible as the student project of my Norwegian classmate at film school. Instead, it is beautiful and haunting--despite sharing a very specific trait with said student film project. BUT DARN IT IF I SAY WHAT IT IS I'll RUIN IT.

This film tells the story of a man who doesn’t truly see the woman he married, he’s focused on himself--very shallow for being lonely in space and stuff--his journey to enlightenment is not only beautiful to watch but eye opening as well. AND DARN IT I WANT TO SAY MORE.

How about this: Frodo would not be surprised by what this Spaceman saw inside his claustrophobic spaceship.

Carry On, Dylan Clark Productions and DreamWorks Pictures Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

A new and fun entry in that ever so specific film genre of the Christmas Movie Action Film. I watched it uninterrupted the day it came out, and I can't tell you anything more about it than that, because I don't remember. That's okay. Movies should be fun, and don't have to leave you with anything more than a smile.

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Nosferatu, Universal Pictures and Focus Features, Directed by Robert Eggers

Every so often I will include a film in my list that I must admit I haven't seen yet. This is the one for this year. Because of the fact that I know I will not find a chance to see this one until after the new year, I also broke my usual "no spoilers" approach and read/watched reviews from people and publications I respect. It apparently is as simple and fantastic as a 1-1 retelling of the original film....with added bonus of the heroine doing what she does out of choice, not just out of desperation. And Count Orlok is pure evil, just so. No backstory or sympathetic childhood. Sometimes that's all you want.

And it looks amazing.

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Civil War, A24, Directed by Alex Garland

As far as I'm concerned this isn't a war movie. It's a disaster film. And it's a rare disaster movie that can make it personal. That is, feel like there are any stakes. Watching a film, when I speak to the screen then I know it has affected me. When Sammy died, and his colleague said he didn't die for anything. I immediately shouted out, "He died for you! He died for the girl!" In all the chaos, that was personal. That's not nothing, buddy.

Some people in critical circles questioned Alex Garland as to why he would make his main characters journalists. And why there wasn't some clear understanding of which side was right or wrong, good or bad. Seems pretty simple to me: the press is supposed to see both sides. And both sides did terrible things in this movie. A Civil War was not the way to fix it.

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Heretic, A24, Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

I'm a Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). This movie caused quite a stir among my people when it was announced. I wanted to be offended (admit it, it's fun); I was worried about the portrayal of something very dear to me. But then I told myself to get over it, because they've been making horror using nuns from here to eternity. Geese and Ganders and all that.

To the filmmaker's credit, I was happy to see that the heroines in this film endure their confrontation through their faith. Even as they stood in that basement surrounded by a hopeless situation, Sister Paxton looked around and said that she was there to help. And her courage was bolstered and echoed by her missionary companion, Sister Barnes, who helped her think of ways through the situation, and also encouraged her to act rather than to be acted upon. Sister Barnes, the obvious skeptic, seemed to find her faith in her response to the challenge, thinking through what she believed. Whereas Sister Paxton was a confident minister, but had always allowed herself to be led; this time she had to stand up and say for herself who she was and what she believed. Her testimony.

Oh, and Kudos to the producers for hiring an unknown to play the lead. I have no idea who that guy was, but he was brilliant. Sidenotes: I hope the magic underwear bit makes people stop using that phrase, and the classic shot of glasses caked in blood is always an effective one.

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DOUBLE FEATURE: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and Music By John Williams, HBO Documentary Films and Amblin Television, Directed by Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui, and Laurent Bouzereau

These two films remain intertwined in my head, and so I present them as a double feature entry.

The story of Christopher Reeve always seemed simpler than it was. He was Superman, he made an heroic show of it after his accident, and so on. Something I gleaned from watching this story of his tragedy, was that he wasn't so super in his personal life--until his wife Dana showed him what real love was. While playing Superman, Christopher basically abandoned his first relationship and his two kids for his career. I didn't see it when I was a kid, but there's a lot of cynicism in the way he expresses himself in those early press tours for the Salkind films. Then, after his body was broken, the relationship with his wife and his family changed for the better; blessed with a new perspective, he had ten years with his loved ones until his body just wouldn't let him stay any longer.

As for John Williams, composer of so many iconic films including "Superman: The Movie," it's hard to believe how much of American life, my life, is tied into the sounds that came from his head. The best part of the whole Williams documentary, was seeing a dad with kids stick with the daily slog of supporting his family, until he found his calling composing movies.

Yep. There's always more to every story than what you see with your eyes or hear with your ears.

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Okay, as Delmar says in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" That's all I got.

But if you'd really like something extra, how about one of mine?

Stay With Me, Panther Pictures, Directed by Graeme Finlayson

Stay With Me is a story of love, loss, and love lost. We all think we've gone too far; we all think there's no going back. But it's never too late to let love be your legacy.

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Eric C. Player is an independently poor filmmaker, and the president of Panther Pictures, LLC, in Fargo, North Dakota. He is a father, fan, storyteller, "Picker," Corvair driver, and Super8 camera fan. A graduate of BYU and Chapman University film schools, his films have played in theaters all across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and movies to which he was a contributing writer or producer are available on Netflix, Amazon, and Roku. He has written and produced film and video content for over thirty years, and has been writing chapter-fiction since the sixth grade. His 2007 production, Nothing But The Best, was an Official Selection of the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival. His 2016 short, Moment of Anger, received multiple honors including Best Short and Best Director at the Road House International Short Film Festival in Santa Monica, California. His 2023 short film, Stay With Me was an Official Selection of the Boston Film Festival. He currently has two shorts in post-production, a feature in pre-production, and a half dozen feature scripts just waiting for him to finish them already. Eric Player on Imdb.

That's Not A Bad Sandwich, DaveNotDave - The Long Germination of a Short Film

“Moment of Anger” is meant to be a tale about a man forgetting what is good in life, and life itself helping him remember. The process of creating the movie was in turn a “remembering.” We each of us found what was best in our talents and put them on the screen. This is the story.

All of my film ideas percolate for a long time, before pouring out of me in a rush, like a cook leaping to take care of a stove that is boiling over. The first germ of “Moment of Anger” starts in 2005, with my divorce. Not that I would have recognized that at the time. I had absolutely no self-awareness that there was anything about myself that would make me hard to live with. All I knew was that I had been hurt and I couldn’t understand why someone would be so cruel. You know, to me.

Flash forward ten years, and I am married again to another fantastic woman. (How do I attract these Mighty Aphrodite? All I know is it must be what Opus the Penguin once described as the “Billy Joel/Christie Brinkley Syndrome.”) I am only slightly less self-aware of my personal faults than I was then, which means a lot of frustration for the people who love me. But ten years also means that the screenwriting degree from BYU I held in 2005 has been PHD’d (Piled Higher & Deeper) with a Film & Television Producing degree from Chapman. So while I may not be (I may never) fully equipped to engage in an emotional relationship, I am completely qualified to entertain the masses about my shortcomings!

It was around Valentine’s Day 2015 (ah, romance) that I determined my hands had been idle long enough and it was time for me to make another feature film. In my film career, which I chart starting in 1995 with my first semester at BYU, I have been involved with 2 features that have made it all the way to theaters. At Chapman, I had been engaged in the production of several short films as well, but the features, the big projects, have always been the ones that excited me, so I said, “I want to do that again.” I spent the next year reminding myself why my 21 years in the business working for myself have resulted in a grand total of 2 features: Wow, it’s HARD. My first was a coattail kind of thing, anyway. And my second almost never saw the light of day. 2016, and that third one is still a script, a dream, and a Facebook page, but it will come.

I told you about that project because it, too, led to “Moment of Anger.” It was in the face of another schedule stall, yet another pushing back of the goal post, that I was contacted by an actor friend who wanted to know if I could help him “put something together for his reel.” He was thinking of some mock commercials. Stuff that could be done quick, without renting a lot of equipment, just whatever was on hand. He had an idea or two, and he asked me to improv some for him. That sounded super . . . super. But he was a longtime friend and I honestly had the time, so we set a date. Then as I started to gather the crew for THAT shoot, I stood in the shower and asked myself: Given the opportunity of working with one of the best actors I knew (seriously, Gary, you’re awesome) and doing whatever I wanted . . . was this what I wanted to do? If not, what did I want to do? What was my story, and where did I want to tell it?

Porterville, CA, is, and used to be widely known as, the “Gateway to the Sequoias.” There is an old motel here in town of the kind they sing about in the movie “Cars.” Long ago but not so very long ago the Palm Tree Inn was known as the Paul Bunyan--complete with statute of the Legend Himself and Babe the Blue Ox--it was a bustling tourist stop, restaurant, bar, and dance hall. Today, it is thriving on business of a different sort. (Seriously, a week after we shot our movie the place was raided.) The subtext for great potential squandered . . . well, it couldn’t be LESS of a subtext, it is so RIGHT THERE. That was where to set the story. The story of a man who takes a wrong turn in his life. A man who has gotten in his own way, and could lose everything if he doesn’t face up to it. Will he? Or will he run away?

There is a lot of me and my experience in “Moment of Anger,” because I have more than once stormed out of the presence of people who love me, unable to say how I feel and unwilling to strike out physically; I could never be that guy. Of course, being adverse to the bad side of things sometimes means you’re not very good at the positive side, and so I am either too clingy or inarticulate with the people who matter--much like Dave, in “Moment of Anger,” who screams, leaves, and then instead of returning and apologizing goes off and gambles with a stranger, losing his sandwich. And as that plot swirled in my head, bizarrely, I began to hear the haunting lyrics of Dolli Grace mixed with the upbeat sound of Cordwood.

And so I stepped out of the shower and contacted Gary. By the time I proposed the idea to him it was almost fully formed: A man who storms out on his woman, but then has a very bad day, culminating with being trapped by drug dealers. He has this day because she had been the best thing in his life, and after 5-10 (my timeline is unspecific) years with her he is unable to really handle his life without her. People are only happy in pairs. (“Enchanted April,” 1991).

Gary was on board almost immediately, as was the rest of the pre-production crew I had originally begun to form for the “commercials project.” My co-producers Kanarose (my producing partner on literally everything over the last ten years) and Matthew (new to my usual team, but fantastic) helped immensely by being interested in the story and offering their own takes on the material. Kanarose has always been great for bringing up things that need to be done in pre-production that I usually forget, and always pointing out where I’m being stupid or boring. Matthew would contact me at random times with story ideas, good ones, some that made it to the screen.

Our main snags were 2 things: I wanted a professional cinematographer, I knew I didn’t want to shoot it myself. And we had to shoot the entire script in one day. I am a screenwriter, a producer, and a sometime director. I am also and mostly a dad, and one day in March 2016 was all I had for this one. As it happened the schedule constraints affected the search for a cine. Initially, a friend of mine whom I’d worked with on several projects was on board, then he called and said he was having Oral Surgery the day of the shoot. After an intense search (I believe I talked with a dozen different DPs) I had the good fortune of stumbling across the work of Adrian Sierkowski. And not just the work, but the man.

Adrian was a joy to work with because HE found the work to be a joy. He has filmed on all sorts of cameras from Big Budget to Garage Band (for lack of a better term) and what mattered to him was getting the most out of what he had--as opposed to some DPs where all they seem to want is to “get the most” (as in toys). Even so, our original DP still provided a great light package on top of what Adrian brought to the table, so I really believe that our production was able to look 100x more expensive than it really was. Good DPs matter.

So, that second problem: a one day shoot. How do you make that work? Well, after securing the locations, the #1 way to keep on point with that is a good Assistant Director. Personally, I always think women make the best ADs, particularly 1ADs. You may not believe this, but a strong woman commands attention, and everyone listens to her. I spoke to a couple of women in the run up to March, some that I had worked with before, but nothing was gelling. So we were very, very fortunate to have the schedule open up for one of the best in the business in this regard, Sharmane Franklin Johnson. Sharmane kept us on point, on time, and while we originally worried that our shoot would run overtime, working with me in the Director’s chair and her as my co-pilot on set, she had us wrapped 2 hours early.

I can’t end this without saying something about my lead actors. First of all, Gary Klavans, my star and the spark for the project, was a trooper and true professional. Everything he did was practically without me telling him. “Let’s do that again” meant more to Gary than a straight repeat, and he always found ways to give me exactly what I asked for in every take, making every one seamless, but at the same time there were subtle differences that would allow me to change entire tones if I re-arranged what he had done in the editing room. He is like the Algebra Actor.

Stefanie Halstead did so much with so little, I am humbled. When I cast her, I told her, “You speak hardly at all, but you are the center of this film. You have all the power here. His reaction to you. Whether he will go back to you. Whether you will TAKE him back. It is all you.” She really played with that. It is all up there on her face.

Bruce Allen Green was having so much fun. In life, he is a retired substance abuse counselor, and he channeled some of that experience back to his character--with, you can see, a bit of a wink at the screen. The production really rested on his shoulders, and not just as a character. At one point, we lost a location HALF AN HOUR before we were supposed to film there. Instead of taking his lunch break, Bruce was on the phone, and by the time we were ready to shoot we had a place to shoot in, and better than the old location.

I could go on, even about my support actors, but you need to go. (Have a sandwich.)

“Moment of Anger.” A Film by Eric C. Player. A love letter to life, marriage, frustration, commitment, and sandwiches. Enjoy.