Angelina Jolie

Top Ten Movies of 2024

2024 wasn’t as top-heavy as some years, but there was a wide variety of good movies. Here’s a look back at my favorites from those movies I was lucky enough to view this year. Despite my best efforts there will always be some not included here if access was limited, the film wasn’t released in time for review before the end of 2024, the film wasn’t made available for awards consideration, or I simply ran out of time. Likely some of those other films you’ll see reviews for later in 2025 but they are not in consideration here. Here then, is my list of the best movies of 2024.

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Maria

  • Title: Maria
  • IMDb: link

Maria explores the final days of renown opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) looking back on her life in a self-medicated haze that blurs fantasy and reality in her quest to rediscover the voice she lost years ago. The standouts here are Jolie’s performance, for which she trained 7 months to learn to sing opera (a mix of both Jolie and Callas’ voices are used throughout the film), and the film’s amazing look courtesy of cinematographer Edward Lachman, set decoration by Sandro Piccarozzi, and costumes by Massimo Cantini Parrini.

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Hackers

  • Title: Hackers
  • IMDb: link

Newly released on 4K, 1995’s Hackers is a very silly movie about a group of “innocent” high school hackers who despite breaking multiple laws throughout the film are the victims and heroes of the plot when another hacker (Fisher Stevens) decides to frame them for his crimes. The film stars Jonny Lee Miller as a child prodigy banned from using computers until his 18th birthday where he returns to the world of computers and takes up with a group of local hackers which include the hyper-competitive girl (Angelina Jolie) he has a crush on.

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Eternals

  • Title: Eternals
  • IMDb: link

Eternals is ambitious as hell. It may be the most ambitious movie Marvel has attempted since weaving together various threads into a single story in The Avengers. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as successful. With an opening crawl, monologues aplenty, and flashbacks, Eternals struggles to introduce and flesh out a dozen characters, their purpose, their backstory, and their place in the MCU.

I’ll give writer/director Chloé Zhao credit for assembling a talented and diverse cast, but with so many characters to keep track of (many of who disappear for large amounts of screentime) more than once I forgot an actor was even in the film.

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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

  • Title: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
  • IMDb: link

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil movie reviewHonestly, other than the look of Angelina Jolie as the title character, I could remember almost nothing about 2014’s Maleficent walking in to view its sequel. In five years, I’m betting I’ll remember even less about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

Jolie and Elle Fanning return as the sorceress Maleficent and the Queen of the Moors, Aurora. The film opens with a proposal by Prince Philip (Harris Dickinson) to wed Aurora and unite his father’s human kingdom with the magical realm that Maleficent turned over to Aurora at the conclusion of the first film. While Philip’s father (Robert Lindsay) is quite taken with the idea, neither Maleficent nor the prince’s mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) think much of the pairing as both hold bigoted views towards the other kingdom and the races that inhabit them.

The crux of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn’t really about Maleficent. Nor is it about Aurora and her love story. Instead, the film is focused on the evil machinations of Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer) as she works to spur on a war that antagonists on both sides are more than willing to fight once she lights the spark.

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