Welcome to part 3 of the first annual Golden Hippo Awards, honoring the films of 2024, at the best time of year to stream all the good movies you missed. This installment honors my favorites in a couple of niche categories, dishonors the films that didn't live up to my high hopes, and (perhaps more damningly) notes the films I'm not giving any awards to at all.

If you're just joining me on this journey, here are the prior 2025 Golden Hippos posts:

Part One: Acting Categories

Part Two: Technical Categories

Films I’m Maddest At

Some movies just don’t work for me. Sometimes, I think the film is legitimately bad, or at least unsuccessful at what it’s trying to accomplish. Other movies are just so thoroughly Not For Me that I wish I’d known not to bother. This award serves as a venting session and as an explanation for why some films aren’t getting any other awards.

Between the Temples

I have a low tolerance for media that operates on the premise that people being mean to each other is funny. While this got a few significant laughs out of me – especially from Carol Kane, who is having an admirable late-career resurgence – it mostly felt like I was being forced to spend time with a bunch of jerks. The film isn’t implausible, exactly, but its plot relies on its characters making one rash, embarrassing decision after another. The ending, apparently intended as a bombshell, feels both obvious and unearned. This also holds up poorly in comparison with 2024’s bounty of films that explore Jewish and Jewish-American experiences and identities in intricate, thoughtful ways.

Emilia Pérez

This one was polarizing, and a lot of other people disliked it for the same reasons I did. I thought the portrayal of a trans woman was well-meaning but an annoying representation of the divide between what cis people think trans people want and what we actually experience. More troubling was the depiction of Mexico, so hilariously unrelated to the actual country that a group of Mexicans made a spot-on parody, and the appallingly wrong accents used by every actor speaking Spanish. (The director is on the record about literally not caring that some of his viewers are proficient Spanish speakers who can hear the difference among regional Mexican accents, let alone a Spaniard and a Dominican/Puerto Rican-American who aren’t receiving accent support.) And as a musical theater fan, I could not abide the lazy songwriting and the intrusive auto-tune. My problem with this film is that it happens to coincide with a number of my personal identities and experiences, to the point where I couldn’t perceive anything but its flaws.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

I’m glad I couldn’t find a good time to see this in the theater, because I would have been even madder at it. This film had so much going for it that didn’t pay off for me. I love a big, flashy action movie, and the worst crime an action movie can commit is being boring. There’s too much space between this film’s high-energy sequences, and too many of those sequences feel like retreads of scenes from other films in the franchise. Meanwhile, it plays fast and loose with the franchise’s lore, and worse, with the franchise’s worldview premise of resilience and fundamental humanity in an era of environmental scarcity and dehumanizing tribalism. Anya Taylor-Joy is fascinating as a TV star, but she can’t quite carry a film this big, and it seems like the filmmakers weren’t confident about centering a narrative around a female lead. I hate to say that a film deserved to flop financially, but this didn’t do what it needed to do to catch on as a hit.

 Problemista

Another one that appealed to me so much in theory: an absurdist comedy about a queer Latino immigrant, co-starring Tilda Swinton. Swinton is by far the best thing about this film, underpinning her bizarro Miranda Priestly-esque antagonist with scarred-over pain. But the film comes off as mean-spirited instead of witty, and its worldview is so bleak that I hope it’s untrue. This also illustrates how hard it is to pull off whimsy, especially when you’re swirling it with cynicism. Ultimately, the issues lie with director-writer-star Julio Torres, who is bitingly funny as a writer of comedy specials and short-form TV, but doesn’t have the acting or directing skill to headline a feature film.

The Room Next Door

I was so excited to see Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film. I wound up not mad, just disappointed. All of the director’s innovative instincts seem to have gone into working in a new language, and the premise and themes of the film feel like someone asked ChatGPT to pitch an Almodóvar movie. The dialogue, too, feels machine-generated, like Almodóvar fed a stylized Spanish-language script into a translation app and didn’t run it past a native speaker afterward. Huge respect to John Turturro for making most of his lines sound like something an actual human might say. As for the two luminous leads, Julianne Moore puts in some of the worst work of her career here, and it was just a bad year to be a Tilda Swinton fan.

Sing Sing

If I hadn’t heard such effusive praise from both professional critics and my friends, I probably would have enjoyed this movie. It’s well-made and well-performed – unlike most of the other films in this category, I think it’s quite good. But every year brings a film or two that is just Not For Sarahs to such an extent that I can’t get into it. I taught Shakespeare and composition to undergrads for years, and too much of this movie felt like watching people do my old job, and not particularly well. I’ve been active in volunteer work and advocacy for carceral reform, and the film’s avoidance of an abolitionist stance felt like capitulation. I’m also tired of films about incarceration that center around a wrongly convicted model prisoner, when all the people in the neighboring cells seem to have far more interesting backstories and inner lives. Colman Domingo does a great job with what he’s given, but he doesn’t get to show much range. He does a lot more in the anodyne Netflix series The Four Seasons, which I had just seen when I watched this, and his performance here suffers by comparison with his work in that so-so TV show.

The Wild Robot

This might be my most hated movie of the year, not least because it’s a breathtaking visual work. In terms of advancing the technical possibilities of animation, nothing else from 2024 comes close. The problem began with my decision to watch this with my wife, who also has a bachelor’s degree in English and also will shut down an entire creative work when the Unfortunate Implications overwhelm her. She was the first to start ripping into the film, calling for a pause thirty minutes in so she could lay out the strong evidence that this is an insidious kid-friendly infomercial for the wonders of AI. Only an artificial intelligence can teach the poor ignorant animals to work together, taming the savages into a society that appears liberated but is instead a strict hierarchy with the benevolent robot overlord at the top. I got exercised when the titular robot emerged as a Christ figure, and the rest of the film followed an arc straight out of the Gospels. I don’t mind – and often enjoy – when a film is up front about its Christian worldview, but I come from a long line of Jewish Communists who don’t really see resurrection and sacrifice as noble. Plus, there are troubling implications about hiring a Black woman to voice a character who is effectively an escaped slave, freeing her after she’s captured and returned to slavery while leaving all the presumably sentient NPC slaves to toil in agriculture, and killing her off beatifically after she’s mothered all the wayward forest creatures. Please keep this film away from children, and away from everyone, really.

Best Animated Film

I love animation, and I think I love it differently than most voters for major awards. Often, awards for animated films focus heavily on technical achievement, assuming that story and performance elements don’t matter in a medium widely perceived as kid stuff. Unlike most categories, this one has a clear winner and runner-up for me.

Flow

The unrivaled best animated film of 2024, and maybe the best film of the year, full stop. The art is intentionally lo-fi, turning the limitations of simpler forms of digital animation into beauty. The choice to use realistic animal sounds instead of dialogue makes the film accessible across cultures, ages, and abilities, which mirrors the universality of a flood catastrophe. It’s hard to imagine not getting immersed in the wonder and magic of this unique film.

Kung Fu Panda 4

Universal DreamWorks animated films, especially the franchise sequels, don’t get enough credit for looking great and punching above their weight. Sure, the story here is slight, but it’s genuine and kid-friendly. It’s also in service to extraordinary, kinetic action sequences that are a triumph of storyboarding and digital animation’s virtual cameras. Jack Black continues to put his whole jiggle into Po’s voice, and the character animation cleverly mirrors all the voice actors’ mannerisms.

Look Back

I didn’t have the chance to see several well-received new standalone Japanese animated features because it takes a while for them to get translated and released for Western audiences. But I did catch this trippy queer time loop, a feast of old-fashioned hand-drawn anime style and a lovely coming-of-age story about the hard work that underlies both art and friendship.

Memoir of a Snail

Stop-motion animation blows me away as a technical approach, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a film use it so adeptly to portray human expression and connection. It’s disturbing and sad but ultimately sweet, with a wry Australian sense of humor. The warm browns and reds in the palette are gorgeous, and I love the Maurice Sendak-esque character design.

Orion and the Dark

I’ve been recommending this hidden gem all year to my friends with kids, since it was unceremoniously buried in the Netflix algorithm. It’s a little sappy and a little didactic, but family films are allowed to be, especially when they’re balanced with timey-wimey weirdness from the mind of Charlie Kaufman. The Peanuts-influenced character design is a smart visual choice, and Paul Walter Hauser’s turn as The Dark might be 2024’s best voice performance.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Aardman’s stop-motion features are always a visual marvel, and it’s amazing how the studio continues to advance technically. The detail in this film astounded me, full of Easter eggs and in-jokes, as well as hints to the plot that reward a careful eye or second viewing. It’s very silly and very slapstick, and I had loads of fun watching it.

Most Notable Snubs

My Letterboxd diary confirms that I watched the following eleven films, none of which made the cut for any of my award categories. They are listed in descending order from “I rather liked this, actually” to “I can’t work up enough feelings to be mad at this.”

Hit Man

Mufasa: The Lion King

The Bikeriders

Ganymede

SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)

Love Lies Bleeding

The Fall Guy

Moana 2

Nosferatu

Didi

Black Barbie

Best Soup

When I was in college, Katherine Glover used “Soup” to describe creative works that don’t hold up to conventional standards of artistic achievement and should be assessed on their own terms, especially how they make you feel. This category honors the films that I had fun with and appreciated for their entertainment value.

Deadpool and Wolverine

One of the things I love about comic books is that they teeter on the point of narrative incoherence. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film come so close to capturing that spirit. The gags are much more rewarding if you’re into the franchise and have a solid grounding in comics nerdery. Everyone seems to be having a grand time, from the supporting cast to the music coordinator to the visual effects team, but nobody’s having more fun than Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

Inside Out 2

As a technical achievement, this doesn’t hold a candle to my Best Animated Feature roster; it’s frustrating how stale the Pixar house style has gotten. But the first Inside Out film is my favorite Pixar movie, and this is a sweet and satisfying follow-up, even if it’s mostly a retread of its predecessor’s greatest hits. The character design on the new emotions is impeccable – my wife owned an Anxiety sweatshirt within weeks of seeing this – and the depiction of preteen mental chaos rings true.

My Old Ass

A sweet, clever teen movie with a fun, if underused, fantasy element. I wasn’t as impressed with the performances as some others were, but they were all competent and charming. Sometimes you just want your heart warmed and your bisexuality affirmed.

The People’s Joker

This had zero budget and is intentionally ugly, with seat-of-the-pants vibes that are equally Mystery Science Theater 3000, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and self-insert fan fiction. In other words, it’s extremely relevant to my interests, and that’s not even getting started on how it subverts DC Comics as a cultural mythos, including and beyond a re-subversion of how the franchise is trying to subvert itself. Trans and geeky and punk as fuck, as I like to imagine I am.

Venom: The Last Dance

There’s no way to assess this film objectively because I saw it at a late-night theater screening with a group of 30 other nerds. We had an awesome time, because this is not art, but it is constructed for maximum fun. The cast was actually given some space to act, and most of the effects look and sound great.

Wicked Little Letters

Cozy is absolutely a genre, and this film is most satisfying as a genre piece. Some elements are very strong indeed, especially the acting: Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley get to go all-out theater kid, and Anjana Vasan is an actual revelation. But this is a bunch of ahistorical nonsense with a mystery that any keen viewer has figured out in the first five minutes. In other words, a delight.

Will and Harper

Probably the MVP of this category, in that it’s a film with some historical importance that I hope has staying power. The filmmaking is fairly standard, and some scenes are contrived, more reality TV than documentary. But it’s a heartfelt and plainspoken way of explaining trans experiences and the need for trans rights, one with the potential to sway minds toward compassion and justice.

Further Reading

• Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, two legends of popular music, both died a few weeks ago, within days of one another. I'm a big Sly and the Family Stone fan but have always been lukewarm about the Beach Boys, so I thought that was why I was frustrated about the asymmetry in how the two artists were memorialized online and in the press. This article helped me make sense of my feelings and dug into the double standard, which is rooted in race but goes beyond that.
• Fewer prisons, more kittens. We don't have enough data on how the best deterrent to violence is giving people something to care for, but there's so much evidence once you're attuned to the idea.
• One of my current work projects involves improving community college programs in the trades. This is what they're up against: predatory for-profit trade education that puts people in debt and doesn't prepare them for the job. It's especially upsetting to see the level and extent of fraud in cosmetology schools, which attract large numbers of women, queer and trans people, and people of color - and then don't teach them how to work with clients in their own communities.

And a cat photo!

Momo has been especially weird and photogenic this week. Tiny human? Part orangutan? Legendary cryptid of the Great Lakes region? No matter what, she's my little buddy.

Join me and Momo next week for the final installment of this year's Golden Hippo awards: lifetime achievement and the best films of 2024!