2024 Consumed Pt 2

Film, Music, and Favorite books of the year

Yes, I know, we’re well into 2025. However, as always I had some movies to catch up on before I could share my final roundups. So, without further ado…

2024 on Film

(ordered in loose order)

Challengers

In a year when American cinema was defined by pulp, artifice, and self seriousness, none stuck the landing quite like Challengers. Where so much good pulp this year couldn’t escape the ironic, the humorous, Challengers imposed a rigid melodramatic camp that was wielded rather than simply revealed. It’s in the repetitive pulse of the music, the straight athlete Uniqlo drag per Jonathan Anderson (the first fashion designer costuming a film in a good while), and the dizzying camera work. It’s a totally enveloping experience.

After seeing Queer, another big swing where Guadagnino’s flourishes distract and obscure the film rather than serve it, I realized just how precarious Challengers really was. While the Burroughs biopic shows the benefit of bringing strange experiments to the big screen, isn’t it almost more impressive when those experiments effectively masquerade as mass?

La Chimera

I have a well documented love of pulp, which caused me to sometimes forget that this was one of the most well crafted, emotionally poignant, and stylish films of the year. Stands squarely outside the year’s razzle-dazzle as an earnest mourning, a folklore fable on humanity and memory, a dream. This film has been the hardest to summarize, to condense, and to coax longer sentences out of. Perhaps it is because of this dreamy quality, this quiet and sublime beauty.

Josh O’Connor gives a career defining performance, sure, but that filthy linen suit is easily the best outfit on film in 2024.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Time will be kind to Furiosa, a film that even in occasional drags and hiccups supersedes the attempts of most major studios and movie minds. Maybe it’s this film’s new proximity to doom that makes its complicating and filling of the Mad Max Universe™ so powerful. Constructs a strange sense of hope, of resilience, of terror, all while crafting more of the greatest action set pieces in 21st century film. 

Nickel Boys

Revived a fair amount of faith in movies. What else looks like this? What else feels like this? There was plenty of great cinematography this year, but could anyone call their attempts as revolutionary as Nickel Boys? I don’t mean to solely commend Nickel Boys on aesthetics. A film composed entirely in the first person can, on its face, seem like a gimmick, which this film certainly is not. What arises instead is inversely, a new naturalism and expressiveness. Once the shock of the decision fades, what emerges are the startling performances of actors so young, the precarious and collage like editing, the mastery of light, of such sprawling yet insular writing. Nickel Boys is the kind of film I dream of stumbling into in theaters, but never thought would be made.

The Shrouds

Comedy of the year. Sci-fi thriller of the year. Original, twisted, stupid, and brilliant. A film that stars someone who looks almost exactly like its director having lots of sex and solving international mysteries. It’s more complex than that, but certainly rooted in a boundaryless earnestness and a penchant for the ridiculous. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

After opining so much on the question of art as a radical force, watching this embarrassed me. Here is an impossibly taut, riveting thriller made in secret. Mixing real life footage from Instagram of the 2022-2023 riots in Iran, Sacred Fig takes on an incredible immediacy and rhetorical power. A testament to art’s necessity and creation in even the most hostile environments.

The Substance

The Substance defined and reflected the discourse of almost every major film in 2024, and serves as a fantastic model for understanding said films.

To explain: the debate around The Substance was split between those who felt the film was self aware about its shallowness, ridiculousness, and those who felt it unsuccessfully or offensively minimized important issues. The Substance is deeply dedicated to an aesthetic of supposed meaning and metaphor, gestures connecting the film to the art house, and a sense of heightened scale and ambition. All of these things build towards what is essentially a punchline - a descent into total genre bound pulp, a revelation that your eyes deceived you, and the film has never been what it was. The result destabilizes the ability of “prestige“ genre art to do much of anything with the serious topics they broach.

Conclave follows this pattern, as does Anora. To be simply pulp is unpopular, and genre pulp doesn’t quite exist in the same way it ever did. Replacing the old schlock is a new, self aware, powerful schlock. This is not a film to be read like a Nosferatu or modern Chronenberg, it is 21st century Russ Meyer through and through.

Conclave

I approached Conclave as it appeared in concept and in trailers: terse Oscar bait with prestige performances and period opulence. Not so, or rather, not all!

Conclave also pulls off a masterfully dry sense of camp high drama, what many have called a Mean Girls bitchiness, and an ending so gleefully silly it eschews all sense of serious introspection. Many confine this film to a meme of sorts, but it is just as much Conclave’s wonderful performances and maximalist design that have kept it fresh in my mind. Focus too much on the film as camp forray or serious drama and the whole thing disintegrates, but accept Conclave’s precarious tonal dance as acrobatically versatile, finely crafted period pulp and the work blossoms.

Love Lies Bleeding

Some of the year’s best pulp, if not the peak of 2025’s Lesbian pulp film renaissance. Filled with bodybuilders, 80s revival, Kristen Stewart with a mullet, and grizzled western crime families, Love Lies Bleeding feels like an unearthed gem of the late 2010s. It is deeply precise about its mood and tone, and evoking just the right kind of fantasy to splay itself onto.

Oh, Canada

Cheating, but I wrote about this amazing and melancholy late-Schrader masterwork already! Read my review here.

Special Mention

Hard Truths - Basically the single reason this post is so late: so I could gape and sob for this gorgeous, devastating movie.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint - Another film I reviewed! Great scrappy and unique indie filmmaking. Read more here.

Flow - If you like animal videos, the bible, and/or indie Steam games you will like this.

Monkey Man - Another great pulp entry from this year that I can’t get out of my head. Also gay!

Drive Away Dolls - So unbelievably stupid, and better than almost any other film at being as stupid. Makes Bottoms look like a 50s melodrama.

First Time Viewings

(Ordered alphabetically)

All That Jazz

After waiting so many years to see the “behind the scenes of Chicago masterpiece” (as it was known to me) I found myself pretty gutted by All That Jazz. A spiraling, terrifying musical that I have incredible difficulty imagining being made.

The Birdcage

A film in which Robin Williams plays, of all people, the straight man. Not literally of course, as The Birdcage entered my personal canon almost exclusively for the comedy of Nathan Lane attempting to walk, sound, and be straight. What a way to approach the closet.

Certain Women

I was craving the euphoria and beauty of my experience early this year with Reichardt’s Showing Up, and instead was met with one of the most tender and heartbreaking films of the year. Actually upset my partner with how unexpectedly sad it was.

Cube

Demonlover

Assayas does William Gibson with Chloe Sevigny in Ghesquiere Balenciaga. A perfect sliver of a lost genre.

The Fifth Element

The Gaultier costumes have been mood boarded to death, but everything about the way this film looks and feels holds up as so entertaining.

The Handmaiden

The Hudsucker’s Proxy

Dazzling, and a reminder that old Hollywood pastiches are a lost art. Even minor Coen Brothers works are worth celebrating, and yes, that does include Drive Away Dolls.

Hustler White

Lair of the White Worm

My first Ken Russell film, and the first of many. I saw Altered States on my birthday and The Devils on a dark October night, but Lair of the White Worm was the one that stuck with me. Russell’s flashes of phantasmagoric religious visions are as rich and striking as young Hugh Grant’s outfits. A modern pulp romp.

Little Men

Minute and perfectly contained. A great film with a discussion question at the center. In this sense (and some uncomfortable other ways) a very American Reform Jewish film.

Ms .45

Mysterious Skin

One of the most devastating pieces of art I’ve ever seen. Chose this as my last movie of 2024 without knowing what it was about and had to watch Wallace & Gromit afterwards as a palette cleanser.

My Winnipeg

A documentary about home and memory that lies without telling you how, or when. Totally transfixing and made even more magical by a Guy Maddin Q&A at IFC center.

Night on Earth

Possession

Querelle

I chose to pair this with the Jean Genet book beforehand, which helped me focus more on how gorgeous this film looks, and how well it works. The most fantastical Fassbinder film I’ve seen, set entirely on a theatrical soundstage lit in warm oranges, purples, and reds. I’ll remember this film by the swing of Querelle’s giant high shouldered coat, his wrestling match at the wharf, and that delicious artificiality.

Party Girl

A seminal text for New York transplants, 90s fashion fans, newcomers to the birth of house music, and friends of wannabe librarians.

Pecker

Totally holds up as an indictment of coastal elite art scenes, the difficulty of maintaining artistic authenticity, and the ramifications of fame. Made me yearn for suburban gay bars, neighborliness, and abandoned buildings. Seeing Waters get so critical shows just how much his voice is missing from modern discourse. A new favorite.

Perfect Blue

First Time Reads

(Ordered chronologically)

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis

Fundamentally altered the way I see my home. In being so meticulous about the layers of power, the mythologies, and the histories that define Los Angeles, Mike Davis disrupted and informed much of how I situate myself in the city. Inspired me to try and find more critical/historical work that could be similarly personal, but what’s more personal than home?

The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris by Alicia Drake

Initially chosen as a companion to Dana Thomas’ Gods & Kings, the Beautiful Fall was fascinating because of my own ambivalence towards the work/lives/reputations of Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld. What the story reveals of this era in which most high fashion existed in a handful of cliques, was how these men (and their industry) was/is defined by ego, insecurity, and frankly, a great deal of hate for anything deemed ugly. Unlike Thomas, who is more tender with her subjects, this book stands in opposition to the myths Lagerfeld/Saint Laurent constructed of themselves, and at the time Lagerfeld actually tried to halt the book’s release.

Before fashion was defined by modern capitalism via Arnault, it was ruled by damaged, deluded magicians up against ego and an abstract ‘beauty’. Spoiler alert, they fall. But do they…?

Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti

As I freelance and attempt to sell my writing, work, art, this was a fascinating way of examining the unclear boundaries between selling sex, self, art, and labor. It’s incredibly personal, and for me in a year navigating a full time job and a creative practice, deeply affirming.

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

As good as people say it is. Very raw, so visceral and so real it hurts. There's something powerful about seeing the editors and writers of theoretical work that can seem purposefully averse to affect and emotion in their work succumb to the messiness of love, gender, and life. I firmly believe if I understood every reference to art/theory/film/culture embedded here, I would be set for life.

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

I feel silly for only discovering Butler now, but then I suppose her predictions have never felt quite as realizable as today. A bizarre comfort amidst doom not simply in its articulation of a worst case scenario or of a faith in change, but because of the book’s faith in community and humanity. Immediately after finishing Parable, almost every friend I spoke to the following week had also read and loved it, and had read even more of Butler’s work. I hope to do the same in 2025.

Music

(Ordered alphabetically)

Anysia Kym - Truest

The future! Anysia Kym has a way of combining the energy and pulse of jungle and overlapping synths with distorted lyrics and a homemade, earnest scrappiness. In a similar vein to the last two Liv.e albums, many of Kym’s songs feel like diary entries, stray thoughts at their rawest, and well considered couplets that serve as a powerful logic of their own against the production. 

Brittany Howard - What Now

A solid mixture of old school, raspy soul and quieter showcases of Howard’s vocal range. The production veers from muted support to more modern reflections of Howard’s rasps and brightness alike. An album I discovered through, and mostly for mornings and rainy days.

Helado Negro - PHASOR

I remember this album very fondly as very softly and tenderly beginning my 2024.

Jadasea - Too Many Tears

Jadasea, an English entry of MIKE’s prolific 10K, released his best album this year. While Jadasea’s writing is always incredibly sharp, it was brightened here by a particularly sharp, vintage, boom bap inflected production.

Jahari Massamba Unit - YHWH IS LOVE

The only Madlib release of the year (not featuring T*lib Kw*li), and one of his best jazz albums. The second collaboration between Karriem Riggins and Madlib, this iteration features

Kehlani - While We Wait 2

While We Wait 2 is just great R&B. Is it pretty pop forward? Does it sometimes lean towards commercial radio inclinations? Sure. But for whatever reason I kept returning to this album’s great 90s inspired tracks like “S.I.N.G.L.E” and “Love Like.“

Laila! - Gap Year!

First encountered Laila’s “Not my Problem” when Earl Sweatshirt played it as a joke at his Young World set this summer, and I quickly found the song permanently lodged in my head. When the album released, I found it to be one of the best modern R&B releases of recent years. The production bubbles with early aughts Kelis synths and wandering melancholic vocals. It’s tenderly written, other times funny, goading, and always free.

Liv.e - Past Futur.E

Maybe a mixtape? I don’t care. Here is Liv.e embracing the dance floor at its most moody, freaky, and strange. Past Futur.E takes on the affect of a glittering vintage video game soundtrack, pulsingly bright, while Liv.e plays the part of final boss - goading, muttering, and shrieking us in strained tones. The urgency and doom permeating tracks like “Bad Girl,” “Poor Daddy,” and “Haunted Disco” culminate in my favorite: “$$$$ $.” There’s a minimalism, a finality, and an incredible build to this track unlike the constant tones of the others. Its groove is melancholy, repetitive, almost minimal, while Liv.e shouts intermittently into an echoey mic with the hint of a British accent. 

Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven

Even while embracing more complex production, synths, and genre experiments, Mannequin Pussy sacrifices none of its rawness. A mature, confident next step for what was already one of my favorite indie acts. Hope to be able to catch them in concert next year.

Matt Martians - Matt’s Missing

All Matt Martians albums make me happy, homesick, and entertained. Even at his sometimes faltering or uneven, his music is groovy and often unexpectedly funny.

Moses Sumney - Sophcore

Also technically a mixtape, but Sumney is such a talented vocalist it doesn’t matter. Harnesses the intimacy of a nightclub, a dance floor, or a lonely studio. Will forever regret not attending his surprise New York show this year.

Mount Eerie - Night Palace

I spent a solid week listening to this album on my commutes to and from work as winter began to set in, and it felt profoundly melodramatic and soul wrenching (more than going to work usually is at least). Such a patient, sad, beautiful album.

Sideshow - F.U.N T.O.Y

Yes, another 10k release. Sideshow has a great flow which pairs well with such dense, diverse production.

Total Blue - Total Blue

Gorgeous synth landscapes groove and sway in Total Blue’s self titled album. It sounds like the soundtrack to a syrupy neo noir or a techno erotic thriller. Meditative and deeply enjoyable.

Tyler the Creator - Chromakopia

I’m still wondering why our hyper-judgmental, conservative lilting culture never made jokes about the Tyler, the Creator song about being pansexual, but maybe I’m still stuck in 2018. 

I find it fitting that this album landed at the end of my alphabetically ordered list, a small cosmic taunt about where so much of my taste began. Because Tyler so stridently redefines the norms of production, album rollouts, promotional imagery, merch, and stage performance, the frankness with which he writes and conceptualizes his work gets frequently ignored. His aestheticized, deconstructed versions of radio hits are always special (Sticky, Thought I was Dead, Balloon) but often supersede more experimentally honest, raw work (Like Him, Mask Off, Hey Jane)