The year in movies and TV was a bit odd in 2024. Last year’s Hollywood strikes somewhat reduced the output of major movies and shows. Still, the studios, networks and streaming services released hundreds of titles — and I watched many of them.

It may have been a down year, quantity-wise, but 2024 certainly recorded a number of highs, quality-wise. Without further ado, here’s my list of six best movies and four best TV shows, in no particular order.

Movies

• Hit Man

Glen Powell is just so damn charming. He oozes magnetism in everything he’s in, whether he’s chasing superstorms in Twisters or going undercover as a fake assassin in the neo-noir romantic comedy Hit Man.

Powell even co-wrote the latter with director Richard Linklater, so he’s clearly a man of varied talents. Their collaboration yielded terrific results: an entertaining, sexy, fun and funny thrill-filled ride.

• The Substance

As satire, The Substance’s subjects feel broad and dated – a daytime aerobics show, and the ratings thereof, are the scaffolding upon which hangs our tale – but the result is a gloriously grotesque gobbet of body-horror camp.

Demi Moore plays a youth-obsessed TV aerobics instructor who takes a black market drug that grows a younger her (Margaret Qualley) straight from her body, in a yucky, squelchy fashion. It’s a funny, angry movie with absolutely no use for subtlety or nuance, and you just have to respect that.

• Dune: Part Two

Denis Villeneuve already proved he was the right hand to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic with the first film; the second is the spice on top of the cake.

Everything about the visuals of Part Two is bigger and bolder, from the stunning cinematography to the incredible special effects. It also exceeds its predecessor with deeper character development, both of already-introduced figures like Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Zendaya’s Chani to new faces like Austin Butler’s savage Feyd-Rautha. This is an epic that will be held up as the bar for years to come.

• Challengers

Erotic dramas have gone out of style in Hollywood, yet Luca Guadagnino keeps serving up ace after ace in the genre, including two in 2024, Challengers and Queer.

The former is a winner up the line thanks to the crackling chemistry between the three leads — Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist — and the nonlinear storytelling that slowly reveals how three tennis players ended up in a love triangle/tangle. Challengers is outrageous, thrilling, funny, and sexy.

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

There is just no living up to Mad Max: Fury Road; it’s too good. But George Miller’s Furiosa still contains some of the action best sequences of the year and very possibly Chris Hemsworth’s finest hour. Maybe it’s a little overlong, and Anya Taylor Joy’s performance lacks the punch Charlize Theron brought to Fury Road, but filmmaking like this is about as hard to come by as water is in the Mad Max wasteland.

• A Real Pain

Just as a romantic comedy relies heavily on the chemistry between its leads, so does this familial dramedy, which pairs Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer/director) and Kieran Culkin as Jewish-American cousins who go on a trip to Poland to honour their late grandmother. Their journey is marked by emotional reckonings — with their shared pasts, with their current estrangement, and with the weight of history. Eisenberg and Culkin feel like they are actually cousins in real life; the relationship between the buttoned-up David and free-spirited Benji feels that natural and effortless. They make a story that might feel heavy and ponderous instead come across as healing and profound.

TV Shows

• The Penguin

On the surface, it’s still yet another Batman-without Batman show. But spend even a few minutes with it, and it starts to reveal new, satisfying depths. The central performances of Colin Farrell (as mob underboss Oz Cobb) and Cristin Milioti (as the would-be head of a crime family) are given room to breathe, and complicate, and surprise. The world of Gotham is pulpy but psychologically complex in ways that have nothing to do with a weirdo who dresses up at night to punch crime in the face.

• Shōgun

This FX production — broadcast largely in Japanese with English subtitles, a rarity for mainstream TV — was ambitious on every metric one could use to evaluate television. Despite a vast narrative and visual scope, Shōgun never sacrificed the details: Its writers and directors depicted feudal Japanese culture with an eye toward ceremony and smaller gestures exchanged between sips of tea.

Its excellent ensemble was equally meticulous and restrained in its performances, exemplified by Emmy winners Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai, the latter whose quietly powerful performance as Lady Mariko served as the heart of the series. While progressing at its own deliberately measured pace, Shōgun, the second major TV adaptation of James Clavell’s literary saga following the successful 1980 miniseries, accomplished something reboots rarely do: It took a familiar story and told it with greater depth and a wider sense of perspective that felt entirely new.

True Detective: Night Country

Under the guidance of creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, the first three seasons of True Detective, especially its first, focused mostly on men and told their stories with an explicitly male gaze that minimised or sexualised women. Then Issa López came along and created Night Country, the fourth iteration of True Detective and the most mystical, genuinely frightening instalment.

Recontextualising story beats and themes from the Matthew McConaughey–Woody Harrelson season, López crafted a moody crime thriller that centres two female cops — Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, delivering equally fierce, complex performances — while exploring grief, spirituality, and the marginalisation of Indigenous women. She also sets the murder investigation in frigid Ennis, Alaska, during the longest, darkest days of the dead of winter, when all the natural shadows can be mistaken (or not?) for portals to the supernatural.

Where the first season of True Detective put metaphysical words in McConaughey’s mouth, each episode of Night Country immerses you in a liminal space on the edge of reality where the world and the otherworldly meet.

• The Boys: Season 4

Brutal and bloodthirsty, season four of the hit superhero series The Boys, burst onto screens this year and left us feeling a little queasy in the aftermath. The long-awaited fourth instalment of the Prime Video smash took viewers on a neo-political crusade, with the beleaguered team of anti-heroes tasked with taking down an impending regime.

With the evil Vought International gunning to get one of their own supes, Victoria Neuman, into the White House, it’s up to Hughie, Annie/ Starlight, and the awkwardly named Mother’s Milk to dismantle the campaign and reveal the intricate web of lies. Standing in their way, however, is Homelander and his legion of The Seven, who threaten to not only thwart their attack but destroy them in the process.

Admittedly, the political aspect of the latest season does feel like odd timing, and the overt violence stemmed into unnerving territory, but The Boys maintains its aura as an entirely unique concept. Antony Starr’s Homelander continues to be a brooding and captivating villain, while Jack Quaid established himself as a future Hollywood force to be reckoned with as Hughie.

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.