As we approach 2025, we at Vulture are reflecting on a year marked by innovation: in sport, in games, in vocabulary, and even in marketing tactics. With all this change, we took comfort in participating in one of our longest-held (and messiest) annual traditions: the making of our top-ten lists. Over the last several weeks, we grappled with all the media we consumed over the course of 2024, highlighted the very best across mediums, and packaged it all up for you here.
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Movies
People loved Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most importantly, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you’d expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times. What that meant, to me, is that audiences have been craving ambition, which is something that movies, caught forever between art and commerce, haven’t been in a place to deliver. There are big entertainments and small personal films, but to grapple with weighty ideas on a large canvas? You have to do what Coppola did and pony up $150 million of your own money (something I wouldn’t advise, personally). Or what Brady Corbet did with The Brutalist, making something grand and sweeping on $10 million by going abroad, making ethical compromises, and burning yourself out. The Brutalist also wasn’t one of my favorites, but I admired the hell out of what Corbet set out to do with his film, which in a coincidence is also about an architect trying to achieve his vision in a landscape of callous capitalism — an idea that seems to be very 2024. — Alison Willmore
The 17 Best Film Performances of 2024
For a person who loves movies, there are few things more satisfying than a performance that really takes you by surprise. Maybe it’s an actor or actress you’d previously dismissed, surpassing what had once seemed like their limitations. Maybe it’s a veteran movie star rediscovering their fastball. Maybe it’s someone completely new to you announcing their presence in spectacular fashion. The movie industry spent this year shaking off the dust of the 2023 strikes, grappling with existential threats like AI, and trying to figure out just what audiences even want out of movies anymore. But there’s still no substitute for the experience of watching an actor crawl into the skin of another person and take them out for a spin. — Joe Reid
John Waters’s Favorite Movies of 2024
The movie business as I knew it is now over. Except in New York City, where feel-bad, risk-taking, ratings-defying art flicks still play and I pay to see them in theaters. Thank you, distributors, from the bottom of my damaged little cinematic heart, for getting these films out there to the perverted public, who still demand to be startled and soothed by troublemaking directors from all over the world. Here they are — my ten best. See them and suffer … joyously. — John Waters
TV
Anyone who makes or consumes television knew the ever-swelling bubble of more and more and more TV would eventually burst, so it wasn’t exactly shocking when FX Networks CEO John Landgraf announced in February that Peak TV was officially dead with 2023 marking the first significant decline (14 percent) in new scripted series since 2009 (not counting 2020, when fewer shows went into production because of the pandemic). And yet it was surprising how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was so much more mid or meh television and far fewer exceptional offerings or moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series. Response to the third season of The Bear, one of the most beloved shows of 2023, was tepid and, in some cases, outright hostile. Shōgun and House of the Dragon both found audiences, but it never felt like those audiences were collectively discussing either drama at the same time. — Jen Chaney
The 12 Best TV Performances of 2024
Even in a year when so much TV was mid, creatives still managed to push the boundaries of this fickle and confusing medium. The actors in particular found fresh depths in characters with whom viewers were already acquainted or introduced us to new ones with confidence and style. Acting, at its best, holds a mirror up to humanity and shows us ourselves, the parts we recognize and the ones we wish we didn’t. Every performance on this list did this to a delightful degree. There’s nothing mid about that. —Jen Chaney
The year in anime got off to a running start. Three of 2024’s very best shows ran simultaneously with a bevy of lavishly animated and deeply considered high-fantasy series. That was only the beginning of some lovely bits of synchronicity. Next came several historical dramas playing with the real past and fictional alike. Later, old favorites made triumphant returns with Dragon Ball Daima and the pastel-colored remake of Ranma ½, comfortably sitting alongside a younger generation of exciting and idiosyncratic manga adaptations. As ever, there’s been so much great work this year that it’s almost impossible to narrow it down to a clear, decisive top ten, as some brilliant work still lies just outside those margins. Ultimately, it was the series that had the most creativity and depth to its fantasy world that came out on top. — Kambole Campbell
Music
The Best Albums of 2024 As cruelty reigned, the year’s top releases sought stability.
This year was one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward and looked backward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists and listeners while rock and roll and dance music stretched past their boundaries, occasionally co-mingling. With a keen awareness of what lies on both ends of the spectrum of human kindness and cruelty, 2024’s best music documented an unbreakable will to keep pushing past the worst days to get to wherever the peaceful ones were hiding. — Craig Jenkins
The Best Songs of 2024 A staggering amount of good music went mainstream this year.
The past 12 months of music felt like a return to a bygone era, when things didn’t seem quite as diffuse and we had more than one monocultural event to rally around. Charli XCX’s Bratmobile and Shaboozey’s bar-stomping anthem each made national headlines; everyone from kids to grandmothers were singing “Red Wine Supernova”; Kendrick versus Drake was litigated for months on end. Even our pop-star flops felt like tentpole events. The songs on our best-of list represent some of the year’s most notable artists (along with a few exquisite below-the-surface players). Popularity and peerlessness don’t always go hand in hand, but it was hard to ignore just how many good songs floated up to the mainstream in 2024. — Alex Suskind
Comedy
2024 in comedy specials was a year shaped by the work of established comedians, especially those whose specials are explicit or suggestive developments of their familiar artistic identities. As a result, the year’s most compelling specials are best understood as culminations or continuations. Anthony Jeselnik’s Bones and All is a 20th-anniversary achievement. Ramy Youssef’s More Feelings is a knotty sequel to Feelings. Those releases — alongside specials from Ali Wong, Adam Sandler, and Nikki Glaser — are stand-alone hours with their own motives and internal logic, but they’re much more striking when seen in the context of their previous specials and the comedic personas they’ve developed for years. — Kathryn VanArendonk
Comedy isn’t “jokes.” And it isn’t “humor,” either. Well, it is, but it’s so many more things, too. Comedy is the word to describe that amorphous, precious, sacred moment of connection between two parties in which a ridiculous but startling truth about the human experience is fully understood. That’s why we quickly expel air out of our weird little mouths when something is “funny” — on some fundamental level, we’re struck off guard by the profundity of it all. Yes, comedy is that, but it’s also a genre, a philosophy, a process, and an industry. It’s hard to figure out what comedy is, why things are funny, or why humans need to figure out what comedy is or why things are funny, and that’s why we have books. There’s never been a better long-form tool for exploring complex ideas than these rectangular objects made of thin wood slices (or imaginary bleeps and bloops on a Kindle). Books are particularly lovely when dealing with or delivering comedy, even more so than documentary films or podcasts, which is where most of the freewheeling, deep-dive comedy content seems to reside these days. — Brian Boone
Books
The Best Books of 2024 The novels and nonfiction that offered unique robotproof perspectives.
It has been a rough year for makers of original media, with the increasing use of generative AI threatening the livelihood of writers, editors, and artists of all kinds as well as the intelligence of readers. What a joy it is, then, to consider the books of 2024, the best of which have a specific point of view that is robotproof: a unique perspective on what it’s like to experience the world in all of its sorrow and wonder. — Maris Kreizman
Podcasts
A strange thing happened with podcasts in 2024. After a year from hell, podcasting was repeatedly thrust into the spotlight over the past 12 months owing to a preponderance of head-turning moments and a presidential-election cycle that radically foregrounded the medium’s consequential nature. This state of affairs is undoubtedly connected to a broader trend that saw podcasting become further integrated with digital video, specifically YouTube, which allowed shows to achieve viral attention and reach even bigger audiences. Indeed, this more than any other was the year that demonstrated how podcasts as a whole bleed into the real world and play a huge role in American culture, for better or worse. To reflect this, we’ve carved out a list of ten big moments from the year as refracted through the medium. — Nicholas Quah
Online Culture
All the Internet Words We Added to Our Dictionaries in 2024 The year English went full brain rot.
Before 2015, the average person wouldn’t be caught dead using internet slang. To be fair, back then slang was “LOLcopter” and “epic fail.” It’s not that phrases like “Show me. To me, please” are any more comprehensible but, rather, that now enough of us are online to make the inside joke go mainstream — even if we’ll still regret it in five years. “Our language is influenced by what we see: The more you see a certain word, the more you’re gonna say it as well,” says linguist Adam Aleksic. The internet, however, is creating and changing words faster than ever before, leaving a shorter time frame for them to stick. The most important part of an internet word, however, is that it comes from the people. “If you try to impose a word top down, it doesn’t work,” Aleksic says. To commemorate the end of 2024, a year as rich in words as it was disappointment, we rounded up the terms that were coined, reinvented, or found mainstream success this year and used Aleksic’s criteria to see if they’ll remain in our dictionaries … or fade into brain rot. — Kate Lindsay
Theater
As it turns out, 2024 has been a year of successful straight plays, even measured by the metric at which they traditionally do poorly: ticket sales. Partially, that’s thanks to the influx of Hollywood stars who have come to Broadway to prove themselves with “serious” work as the film and television industries contract. Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons (twice), Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most impressive stage debut of the year), Rachel Zegler, and more have all touched down in New York for limited engagements, some more artistically successful than others but all doing pretty good business. More impressive, however, have been the plays that became hits based on the strength of their actual work and sustained long runs. Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s reimagining of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sessions, which transferred to Broadway early in the year, has succeeded in the marketplace without any celebrity names attached, and Oh, Mary! turned Cole Escola, previously familiar only to cabaretgoers and internet-comedy fans, into the talk of the season, principally through the power of Mary Todd Lincoln’s curls. — Jackson McHenry
Video Games
The Best Video Games of 2024 Multiplatform titles asserted themselves in thrillingly weird style.
With a lack of major console exclusives, 2024 presented an opportunity for multiplatform games to assert themselves. They did so in thrillingly weird style: this year, we entered into the mind of a conflicted nun, descended into a well populated by a menagerie of killer animals, cracked yakuza skulls in Hawaii’s sunny climes, and ventured across an unforgiving ocean floor as a hermit crab attempting to retrieve its stolen shell. In addition to such delightful, offbeat strangeness, a handful of games felt in tune with the current tumultuous moment in which, more so than facts, it is narrative and perception that appears to shape reality. The likes of Metaphor: ReFantazio (bad name, great game) and Indika used metafictional flourishes to explore the stranglehold stories and fantasies have over our lives, and the means by which we might decisively break free of them. The video game industry might be a mess right now (layoffs continued in 2024 unabated), but there’s no doubting the burning, white-hot talent of its creatives. — Lewis Gordon
Art
The Best New York Art Shows of 2024 Outsiders, Renaissance masterpieces, crazy quilts, and more.
In November, Sotheby’s made history when it sold a painting made by artificial intelligence for a million bucks. Ai-Da robot, “the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,” created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembled nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, Sotheby’s described the sale as “a new frontier in the global art market.” As I look back on the year in art in New York, in which big claims were made for found art and appropriation and scraps of things being sewn to other scraps of things, I feel there is much, technically speaking, that an artificial intelligence could copy. But what AI is missing (besides, you know, real originality or human consciousness) is the ability to deliver that electric hit of what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” From the Renaissance all the way up to the scrappy capers of Jamian Juliano-Villani and Klara Lidén, we saw that humans continue to go where no machine has gone before. — Jerry Saltz
