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Most Overrated Films of 2024

2024 was a pretty good year for movies and for the most part I agreed with what most critics and audiences found to be the best films. Still, some movies I did find it to be overly praised and nowhere near as strong as most would state they were. This is the list of five most overrated films of 2024 with some honorable mentions as well.

5. Saturday Night

Rarely have I seen a film with more limited appeal than Saturday Night. A story about the very first SNL broadcast and how it came together, this movie can only appeal to older people who remember the show from its earliest era. It has nothing of substance to say about the television of the period and this particular show. It is an annoyingly shot, terribly edited and frustrating movie that was ultimately too inside baseball for me. I realize why critics loved it, but for me it was very boring and just plain unnecessary, so it gets the fifth spot on this list.

4. I Saw the TV Glow

This is the smallest movie on this list, but I just had to include it as everybody who watched it apparently loved it. I Saw the TV Glow is one of those overly ambiguous, lifeless and boring arthouse films that are intended for the tiniest of audiences and have no universal appeal whatsoever. Visually, it was interesting, but the character development is poor, the genre elements are not well explored at all, and worst of all – gender dysphoria and the trans experience, the themes that most somehow find in this movie, are actually entirely absent from this text as the film is too cowardly and lazy in its extreme ambiguity and vapid insignificance.

3. Inside Out 2

I have to put a Pixar movie on this list sadly as the studio is in that state of perpetual and needless sequels that nobody asked for, so they deserve this type of response. Inside Out 2 is definitely funny and adventurous at times. Anxiety as a character fully worked in concept, design and voice. But other new characters were underdeveloped and the core emotions were also inferior this time around. The movie has excellent animation and score, but it lacked the strong world building, sophistication and imagination that the original possessed in spades. This sequel is about teenagers, so it should have been more complex and more emotional, but it ended up being the complete opposite, which was its biggest issue. If Pixar continues on this path of uninspired sequels, they are going to continue losing Oscars and deservedly so.

2. A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown easily gets the second spot on this list for being one of the most boring movies of 2024 (or non-movie I should say). Yes, the bulk of this film is just Bob Dylan singing and everybody else swooning over him and that’s pretty much it. We do not get to learn anything about him or the people that he was surrounded with. Timothee Chalamet is undoubtedly a great actor, but this is by far his worst performance to date and it’s not his fault as he was given nothing to work with. I am getting sick and tired of these music biopics that are just made to garner awards and to boost the egos of the musicians depicted. Not every single celebrity deserves a biographical film treatment, which is something that Hollywood refuses to learn. The fact that this movie got such strong reviews and awards recognition is baffling to me.

1. The Brutalist

The Brutalist is not just the most boring and overly praised movie of 2024, but it’s also the biggest Oscar-bait that we’ve seen in quite a while. Everything about this movie felt carefully orchestrated to illicit the biggest possible response from awards bodies, which sadly worked. The artificiality on display was overbearing, which left me feeling cold throughout. The technical aspects are undeniably strong – the cinematography is excellent, the production design is very good and the score is fantastic. But the screenplay is quite mediocre and this is yet another one of those movies about Jewish suffering and the immigrant experience. Another issue is Adrien Brody’s character, who was very uninteresting. Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones stole the film from him, which was a terrible development in a film that was supposed to be his. Watching this needlessly overlong and painfully self-important movie I did not feel admiration, but only immense boredom and emptiness. Thus, it’s the most overrated film of 2024.

Honorable Mentions:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lacked the vigor and uniqueness of the original in favor of a tiresome sequel that never reached the heights of the first film.

Sing Sing – Sing Sing is one of those modern dramas where characters talk in very slow and whispering voices and nothing of substance happens. It’s a slog to sit through.

A Quiet Place: Day One – This prequel is fine, but it really should have been better. It’s well acted and very well made overall, but lacking the thrills of its predecessors.