10 Best Films 2024: Sam Sewell-Peterson
2024 will be seen as a year of successes and failures, of beginnings and endings, an industry changed forever and still fighting for relevance.
Disney, perhaps predictably, still dominated the box office with the likes of Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2, while Warner Brothers saw success with Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong, although George Miller’s Furiosa underperformed spectacularly and in doing so nixed any real hope of another Mad Max film. The combined financial and critical failures of Joker: Folie à Deux, Argyle and the long-awaited Megalopolis from Francis Ford Coppola all should have taught studios a variety of useful lessons, but they’ll probably just fall back on the relative safety of sequels and take fewer risks going forward. Need we mention the sad last gasp of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, perhaps best epitomised by Dakota Johnson’s torpedoing of the Madame Web promotional tour?
The A.I. debate in Hollywood has gained much-needed attention, as has, unfortunately, backlash against films and filmmakers with political opinions that don’t chime with those of the rich and powerful, and much less important perceived “culture war” issues given traction by toxic audiences and hate-fuelled social media algorithms. It’s a tough time to be making movies, especially anything that ruffles the feathers of the establishment and tells stories of forgotten or persecuted minorities, which is why it is more essential than ever that films like this are supported.
This year hasn’t quite been an all-timer for film, but it has provided a fair amount of genuinely exciting, thought-provoking and affecting additions to cinematic canon that will genuinely stay with me. These are what I, Sam Sewell-Peterson, consider to be the 10 Best Films released in the UK in 2024.
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10. Hundreds of Beavers
Being labelled the most unique movie of the year is usually a lazy description of anything with an out-there visual style or non-linear storytelling, but not here; there is nothing else released in 2024 much like Hundreds of Beavers, a $150,000 marvel. There certainly wasn’t anything else to rival the fun you could have just by telling people what you had just watched.
We follow an inept fur trapper’s (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) epic slapstick clash between various forest critters who consistently outsmart him, chiefly an army of dam-builders who become his mortal enemies in the harsh Wisconsin winter.
Talk about ultra low-budget moxie. When your finances only stretch to half a dozen animal mascot costumes, you have to get creative with the rest. Writer-director-editor Mike Cheslik’s resourceful film, which was shot over two winters, riffs on Looney Tunes cartoons, both retro and more recent survival crafting video games, silent-era comedy, and more surreal influences in a hugely pleasing, energetic and hilarious collage of moving images. Yes it’s childish, yes it’s a series of skits taken to the nth degree, but it’s incredibly bold in its way to set out to make something and produce exactly that.
9. The Wild Robot
2024 has undoubtedly been a banner year for animation of all stripes, and many of the most successful stories told in the medium this year have themes in common: celebrating families (whatever form they might take) and finding your place in the world.
Service robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) crash-lands on a deserted island during a storm and must reconfigure her programming to help the animal inhabitants, particularly the cynical fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) and orphaned goose Brightbill (Kit Connor).
Director Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) and his team at Dreamworks Animation continue to push boundaries with animated features that not only connect right to your soul but look like nothing else. Into the Spider-Verse echoed comic book art, now The Wild Robot uses CG techniques to evoke the brush-strokes of hand-painting the beauty of nature. The rendering of unspoiled natural environments and their inhabitants is wondrous, but even more stirring is the film’s portrayal of a highly unlikely and unconventional found family, and how the big emotional beats are shown rather than told (with little or no dialogue) and are all the more powerful for that.
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