GQ Best of Culture 2024: Our 30 Favorite Things We Watched, Listened to, and Read in 2024

It’s that season again: There’s a chill in the air. The days are growing darker. And the end-of-the-year lists are coming for you.

Here at GQ, we do things a little differently. Instead of serving up straightforward top 10 lists and rankings, we’ve invited our staff, contributors, and friends to tell us about their favorite piece of culture they discovered in 2024. It can be from any epoch of human history, so long as it captivated, surprised, or delighted them in some way.

And so we’ve got Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes recommending serial-killer manga. GQ’s Samuel Hine tipping you onto the fin de siècle style chapbook that’s still startlingly relevant and Frazier Tharpe on the mid-aughts procedural that makes for perfect escapism. There’s Grayson Haver Currin on the Canadian detective novels that kept him sane during cross-country walks, Hunter Harris entering the reality-TV vortex, Shea Serrano on the mysterious musician he can’t stop playing, and many, many more.

Here’s hoping our recommendations help you cut through the noise and discover something you love too.

Monster

Courtesy of VIZ

Monster, Naoki Urasawa’s serial-killer manga masterpiece, is pure storytelling. Within a few minutes of opening volume one, I knew that until I finished all nine volumes of the “perfect edition”—a couple thousand pages of text and panels—I would not know peace. And so, for a few days, reading Monster became my job. Relentlessly engaging, getting deeper and darker, more horrifying and beautiful with every turn, this is a perfect example of a story that operates as a machine for making the reader want to know what happens next. To know Monster at all is to become obsessed. —Justin Kuritzkes

Why a Man Should Be Well-Dressed by Adolf Loos

(Eingeschränkte Rechte für bestimmte redaktionelle Kunden in Deutschland. Limited rights for specific editorial clients in Germany.) Adolf Loos *10.12.1870-23.08.1933+Architekt, Kritiker, Oesterreich- um 1930 (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images) ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images

Adolf Loos is the godfather of modern architecture. He also had a lot of thoughts about pants, ties, footwear, hats, underwear, dandyism, English tailoring, the loathsome habits of Germans, and much more, which he shared in regular tongue-in-cheek screeds as if he were the Menswear Guy of fin de siècle Vienna. Some of the debates over things like top hat height seem like they were vicious, and Loos’s own devotion to dressing in a contemporary fashion was amusingly radical. (The chapbook of translated essays opens with Loos declaring that if he lived in the age of togas rather than trousers he would surely be driven to suicide.) And though his takedown of the Viennese Association of Hat Fashion might not hit today, the architect’s insights into how clothing was modernizing during a time of rapid social upheaval still resonates. Above all, Loos reminds us that dudes have been arguing about clothes for hundreds of years, and will for hundreds more. —Samuel Hine

Adam Driver, as a concept

Courtesy of Lions Gate / Everett Collection

I had a lightbulb moment when Adam Driver walked away unscathed and, in fact, more famous than ever from the Megalopolis experience. I was watching yet another TikTok fan video of the “Emersonian mind” routine—stuck in my head like an old T-Pain hook at this point—when I realized Driver had done the impossible. He’s taken the auteurist ’70s New Hollywood playbook and miraculously ret-conned 21st-century Hollywood status, consistently able to manufacture virality through his uncompromising “nearly every decision is for me” movie stardom.

Every choice is seemingly made to appeal directly to antiquated taste dinosaurs like me, and yet time and time again, be it raising his puppet baby, or singing Sondheim karaoke, or booming Coppola’s brain-melting dialogue, even the most jaded, screen-microwaved Gen Z and Alpha cultural arbiters recognize they’re in the presence of something strange and brilliant. A few weeks ago I got to see him off-Broadway playing a cousin-fucking country music star in a revival of the Kenneth Lonnergan classic Hold On to Me Darling. He blew me away and reminded me why all these great directors keep investing in and building their late weirdo masterpieces around him. The man simply has magic dust wafting off him that crosses all generational and cultural lines. In this context, who even needs box office success? —Abe Beame

Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Anthony P. Tully and Jonathan Parshall

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I didn’t even know you could give an audiobook as a gift inside of the native iPhone app until early last winter when, two days after my first kid was born, Shattered Sword showed up on my phone, sent by my friend Jake. “This is for 3 a.m. with one AirPod in and you’re just swinging a bassinet,” he wrote. It felt like a gag gift: a 640-page (or, rather, 25-hour) history of the World War Two battle at Midway, the clash of Japanese and American aircraft carriers that took place six months after Pearl Harbor. You’re a dad now, so of course you’ll get into military history.

I forgot about it for two months, until the only way to get my baby daughter to rest was by pushing the stroller on repetitive laps of the park near our apartment, at all hours and in all February weather. I learned which specific strips of asphalt reliably settled her to sleep (the rougher, the better, to my surprise) at the same time as I learned about the glory and hubris of Japan’s Combined Fleet—at 1.5x speed, of course. It turned out that the standard account of Midway had been engineered for maximum patriotic drama: Plucky underdog Uncle Sam only stumbled to victory through a little American grit and a lot of luck. Shattered Sword, published by two obscure dudes, convincingly challenged that narrative by making extensive and novel use of Japanese sources. The book is now considered a classic—sometimes there is more drama and pathos in the truth—but it raised more questions than it answered about the broader war, and I immediately moved on to Ian Toll’s absolutely spectacular Pacific War Trilogy (2,240 pages, 86 hours). —Chris Cohen

T.Rex

Jorgen Angel/Getty Images

In January, I'd thought Longlegs would be my favorite cultural object of 2024. After seeing the film, I didn’t love it. However, it did draw me into a newfound obsession with T. Rex, namely the band’s biggest hit, “Get It On (Bang a Gong),” which is referenced from the opening title card of the film until the credits. Director Osgood Perkins said that he hadn’t previously had much of a relationship with the group until it was suddenly “in [his] space,” shown to him by the universe. It’s one of those wholly familiar songs that has similarly crept up behind me, both an everyday fun rock classic and an ominous meditation on erotic paranoia. —Magdalene Taylor

Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Series

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I go on very long walks—sometimes for five months or more, each day made different by geography’s dazzling variety. But on a recent 1,200-mile trek across Wisconsin, the glacier-carved landscape became instantly repetitive, a daily commute that lasted 12 hours. I wanted to be somewhere else; thanks to Canadian whodunit mastermind Louise Penny, I was soon in Three Pines, her imagined and idyllic village along the Quebec-Vermont border that must have the world’s highest per capita murder rate.

Through 19 books in 19 years, Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series has created a complete landscape of interwoven comfort and cruelty, where fictional neighbors familiar from beers at Olivier’s blissful bistro become suspects in heinous and all-too-human acts. As I moved across Wisconsin and through Penny’s first half-dozen novels (confided to me in audio form by late actor Ralph Cosham), I sometimes felt I was really there, considering evidence by a fire with Gamache rather than walking half-frozen along some busy highway shoulder. But it wasn’t just escapism. Gamache is magnanimous and flawed, great at his job because he knows that everyone (himself included) possesses an evil underbelly and the ability to overcome it. That constant tension is why, now happy and warm at home, I’m a few hundred pages into Penny’s seventh book—and so absorbed I had to pry myself out of Three Pines to write this. —Grayson Haver Currin

Ren Faire

Everett Collection

The age of streaming has inspired countless negative trends in entertainment, many in the documentary space specifically. Arguably one of the positive ones is making the average couch potato conversant in contemporary documentary. And it's hard to find a documentarian doing anything more instantly recognizable as “art” than Lance Oppenheim. His latest, a niche subject-matter docuseries about the succession drama at a Renaissance festival in Texas that debuted on Max in June, could've easily been the usual fact dump stretching a 100-minute documentary into 12 infuriatingly padded streaming episodes. Instead it gave us a Shakespearian tragicomedy in three acts: an impressionistic study of three or four unforgettable characters, all living at the increasingly arbitrary whims of an aging leader who steadfastly refuses to relinquish one iota of power, even at the cost of destroying everything that he’s built. Metaphor alert! —Vince Mancini

Soft Spot by JMSN

Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

Here are the pieces of the backstory that I know about JMSN, a brilliant musician that I was unaware existed until two months ago: nothing. And here are the things I want to know about his backstory: also nothing. And that is by design. It’s fully intentional. Because I just want the music. And the mystery. Only the music. And only the mystery.

More specifically, I just want his 2023 album Soft Spot, which has quickly become my favorite album of 2024. It’s a collage of sounds that a moody vampire would listen to: seductive and dangerous. Fat with emotion, and fatter still with allure. “Love Me,” the album’s first (and best) song, and “Soft Spot,” the album’s beautiful breakout hit, have crawled inside my bones, hollowed them out, and filled them with sexy lava. JMSN, as it stands now, is a pure music entity for me; a mysterious figure whose only purpose is to sing and be sweaty and shirtless. And I fully intend to keep him that way, and to only consume him that way, especially as we all rush to learn every single thing about every single person, good or bad, silly or serious, in earnest or in irony. —Shea Serrano

Gore Vidal’s Novels

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For obvious reasons, the hot thing this year has been the death rattle of the American Empire. Wanting to get a firmer grasp on this phenomenon and mark myself as ahead of the curve on all cultural trends, I decided to move forward by going backward and finally delving into Gore Vidal's five-book “Narratives of Empire” cycle, which documents the death of the American Republic, from its founding to the end of World War II. I started at the beginning with his 1973 novel, Burr, about the life and career of the most forgotten and maligned of our founding fathers, Aaron Burr. It was time to confront the big question. What was this guy's deal and why did he kill Alexander Hamilton? The answer is (spoiler alert): because Hamilton implied he had an incestuous relationship with his daughter, Theodosia. Before reading this wonderful work of historical fiction, I used to think it was bad that he got killed in that duel, but now I'm glad he got what was coming to him.

Once I figured that out and realized the lofty ideals of our Republic were more or less instantly sold out to form parties and with each successive president invest even more power in an executive branch with its eyes ever to the horizon of expanding the franchise of American liberty to the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the entire hemisphere, I decided to break ranks and go even further into the past with Vidal's Julian. This is a novel about the Roman emperor Julian, often called Julian the Apostate for his unsuccessful attempt to re-Hellenize the, by then, Christian Roman empire. From there, I listened to the audiobook of Vidal's second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, read by the man himself. I'm currently working my way through Lincoln, and am really hoping the Civil War turns out okay. I hear Vidal's voice every day, and would encourage all who read this to seek it out. —Will Menaker

Manifestation Videos on YouTube

I have been Manifesting Miracles every night before I go to bed. Initially I wanted to try out meditating, but meditating felt rather unproductive, and if I’m going to be awake and my eyes are going to be closed, I’d like to be working on something. And what work I’m doing! A sweet part about being mentally unwell on the internet is that there are always a bunch of other mentally unwell folks on other ends of the internet to match you and your instability. The community of commenters on these manifestation videos on YouTube are one supportive bunch! The narrator of Manifesting Miracles has a smutty voice, which can remind you just how alone you are (practically speaking, no one in a relationship can listen to these videos before bed)—but for the most part, she makes me feel like I have a shot at becoming a later-in-life housewife. Truthfully…I get so bored “manifesting” that I fall asleep in 10 minutes. Whether you’re looking for something to believe in, or just looking to hit the hay, these videos are for YOU. —Annie Hamilton

Real Housewives of New York

Courtesy of Bravo TV / Everett Collection

Real Housewives of New York—the original, not the pigeons (or whatever they’re calling themselves) of today—called to me the way a siren song stirs the soul of a bearded longshoreman. Reality TV is my pop culture blindspot; I’ve only watched one Bravo show (Atlanta Housewives) and have only been occasionally curious about the others. But when people said how bad the new RHONY was, I decided to give the old a try. Enter: “Scary Island,” Aviva Drescher throwing her prosthetic leg across the dining room at Le Cirque, Kelly Bensimon running in traffic, Countess Luann telling Dorinda “She’s startin,” Heather Thomson fighting with a woman and ethering her with “Who even invited you here?” Ramona Singer says and does things on reality TV that I didn’t even know were allowed. At the crux of it all, though, are a lot of long and complicated friendships, where you love your friend but also know why her husband cheated on her. Fans of this show still know the best episodes by heart, like the way a man with a podcast mic knows the Bulls ’96 roster. Watching it a decade late has been a dream. —Hunter Harris

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel

Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images

I spent pretty much all of 2024 listening to Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel—a big group biography of five women of the Abstract Expressionist movement: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. It’s got lots of gossip (in the way that only books about dead people do), tips for how to help your friends get famous, and descriptions of long-closed New York City bars that sound so perfect you could cry. But when I dropped into the book, usually on days when The Daily was too bleak, I ended up being interested in the political roots of American postwar art. Some of the artists in the book met through Depression-era WPA projects and the Artists Union—signing open letters, fighting about murals, and debating whether American art could respond to Hitler. It was reassuring to listen knowing that, at the depths of all that dread and infighting, the breakthrough of Abstract Expressionism was just around the corner. —Kat Stoeffel

Triple Seven by Wishy

Courtesy of Audiotree/Winspear

My How Long Gone cohost Jason Stewart sent me the first single from this album, assuming I would love it (“This is some Chris shit”), and he was right. It has great melodies, lots of shoegaze-y texture, a dash of current genre du jour Midwestern emo, and just the right amount of ’90s big-budget alternative radio nostalgia. The vocals switch between male and female (Kevin and Nina), a trick that keeps things fresh. It's always great to hear young people making music with real instruments that remind you of Built to Spill and Juliana Hatfield without sounding derivative. —Chris Black

Mothra

MOTHRA, (aka MOSURA), 1961Everett Collection

It’s not that I regarded Mothra, that most elegant and poised of kaiju, with anything less than respect prior to 2024. But this past spring, I took my then eight-year-old daughter to see Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Having enjoyed her presence in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, my kid hoped that Mothra might rejoin the action for the latest sequel. Based on the trailers and prereleased toys, which betrayed no hint of her majesty, I was more skeptical. But lo, my daughter’s faith was rewarded when Mothra made a crucial third-act appearance in Godzilla x Kong, psychically pressuring Godzilla to cooperate with Kong in facing an existential giant-ape threat. (I loved this movie.) GxK really leans into the idea that Mothra is an immortal goddess, which was just what my mythology-loving, Pokémon-obsessed daughter needed to hear. Some months and a variety of Mothra toys later, I brought her to see the original 1962 Mothra film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and when Mothra emerged from her cocoon in full-color splendiferousness, we started a round of applause by the Astoria audience. At a time when most destructive monsters have no honor, greater utility, or ethereal beauty, I’m now Mothra-loyal for life. —Jesse Hassenger

Charm by Clairo

Courtesy of Republic Records

It’s true that summer is a time for bpm-raising flings. For the past couple of years, though, hookup culture fostered a culture of disposability that was difficult to stomach. Clairo’s Charm is for people opting out of the Machiavellian mind games. On her third album, Clairo hesitates to open herself up to another potentially self-esteem-eroding situationship. “Most of these days I don't get too intimate. Why would I let you in?” she begins, on album standout “Juna,” but her vulnerability pays off. “With you, there's no pretending. You know me,” she whispers over smooth jazz-R&B grooves. That sense of security is overwhelmingly intoxicating. It makes your guard disintegrate. It makes Clairo want to shell out a couple of hundred dollars for a dress just to slip it off for her lover. In this economy, that’s saying a lot. —Heven Haile

Columbo

Everett Collection

I’m a sucker for capers and whodunits of every stripe, from cozy mysteries to hard-edged noir. But Columbo’s crime-in-reverse approach—wherein you see the homicide happen first, then the scheme unravels as the episode goes on—makes for such an ingeniously twisty watch that I found myself getting pulled back into the cult ’70s show constantly this past year. With episodes clocking in at about an hour and a half, each season is practically a series of short films; they're enrapturing but move at a refreshingly unhurried clip as the whimsical Lt. Columbo (played brilliantly by the late Peter Falk) eventually cracks the case, cigar permanently attached to his hand. It’s thrilling to watch the gradual unraveling, and especially to see the oft-underestimated Columbo outwit the guilty (and usually snooty) parties who initially dismissed him and his disheveled trench coat. But it’s also a visual feast if you, like me, can't get enough of seeing the glamorous squalor of ’70s-era Los Angeles onscreen. Oh, and just one more thing: Speaking of feasts, The Columbo Cookbook (written by a fellow superfan) is delightful, and features episode guides alongside recipes for the likes of Peter Falk’s veal scallopini and white wine. It might be a charming gift for the Columbophile in your life. —Paula Mejía

“Sushi Glory Hole” by the Lonely Island

Hear me out: The Lonely Island’s “Sushi Glory Hole” is the goddamn song of the year. There is the viscerally funny premise, of course, which is laid out bluntly in the track’s opening seconds and then expounded upon in extreme detail throughout the ensuing two minutes. But like all of the best Lonely Island joints, the key to “Sushi” is that it succeeds so thoroughly as a genuine bop outside of that premise. The slithering beat, produced by Jurassic 5’s DJ Nu-Mark, wouldn’t have felt the least bit out of place on GNX. Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer’s flows have evolved with the times, the former flaunting some legitimately impressive vocal dexterity at the top of the third verse. It all goes down smoother than a toro nigiri fed directly through a hole in a stall wall—to the point that you might find yourself listening to the song on repeat for an hour like an absolute lunatic until your partner comes into the room and firmly demands you shut it off, as I may or may not have in the days following its debut on SNL in October. The Lonely Island’s delightful Seth Meyers–assisted podcast, which emerged unexpectedly this spring, already felt like enough of a gift to fans following a few years of inactivity; to get a brand-new Digital Short this sharp, hysterical, and eminently replayable is just the uni on top. —Yang-Yi Goh

Bona

One of the best films I saw this year was Lino Brocka’s 1980 classic Bona, a stunning new restoration of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in April and is now playing in theaters across North America (in New York, it’s playing in Metrograph). While Brocka’s name is unlikely to ring a bell for the average American moviegoer, the names of some of the legendary Filipino filmmaker’s devotees will—Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon-ho, Sean Baker and Martin Scorsese have all professed admiration for Brocka’s work. A story of false gods and blind devotion, of the thin line between submission and oppression, Bona is about a starstruck fan who decides to shed all the trappings of her middle-class life in order to subjugate herself to Gardo, a handsome but charmless bit actor who’s both her domineering, increasingly violent oppressor and the closest a girl can get to the movies’ promise of blissful escape. —Raymond Ang

The Closer

Courtesy of TNT / Everett Collection

A few weeks ago, one of my big homies explained to me why he rarely keeps up with movies: At the end of any given day running a high-powered company, then doing the wife-and-kids thing, the most time he could spare was the 50 minutes of whatever Sunday-night HBO had to offer before the edible kicked in and he knocked out. (At the time that was, regrettably, The Penguin.) My job is not so high-powered and I have no kids, but regardless, more often than not free time comes at the end of much exasperation, and you just want to watch something simple—even simpler than HBO or its prestige counterparts. I love a good procedural, the junk food slot on the TV food pyramid; sadly most new offerings are trash. Thank God channel surfing brought me to a random cable station playing The Closer. Surely you remember TNT’s long-running aughts Kyra Sedgwick vehicle, where she stars as a prickly Georgia peach and police investigator extraordinaire Brenda Leigh Johnson, capable of figuring out a case so thoroughly that she almost always extracts a confession.

For three or four seasons, The Closer excels within the standards and clichés of its genre; the quality inexplicably dipped lower and lower shortly after a fun two-part episode that played out what happens when Brenda doesn’t get her confession and the squad has to go trial.

But that first half of the series? Man. I don’t know what it says about my mental state or the state of the world that my comfort show is a cop series with cases that fully revel in the seediness of LA, but more often than not this year, Brenda was there. Chalk it up to Sedgwick’s steely but endearing performance, outsmarting criminals who mostly end up being entitled rich Angelenos, and the mostly male bureaucrats insecure about her being the smartest person in any room. These shows are only as good as their twists; there’s one that hinges on a restaurant valet that still makes me wonder who’s doing what with my car anytime I hand the keys over. —Frazier Tharpe

The Women in Theatre Series

There’s a captivating moment in this interview series when the actor Zoe Caldwell recalls a scene from a play she did. As she describes the scene, she turns her head slightly and it’s as if she suddenly sees it all in front of her. And because she sees it, we see it too. It’s magic. It’s theatre! It showed me that acting is about being such a close, intimate friend to your imagination that it’s always right there with you. I love these interviews. —Cole Escola

Heist: An Inside Look at the World’s Greatest Heists, Cons, and Capers by Pete Stegemeyer

Boston Globe/Getty Images

I blame myself and my Thief T-shirt. Over the past year or so, my two sons—eight and five—became intensely curious about robbery. I did not dissuade them. After some light searching, the algorithm delivered me a book from 2021 called Heist: An Inside Look at the World’s Greatest Heists, Cons and Capers. Granular, and mostly gentle enough for young crime enthusiasts, Heist is essentially Now That’s What What I Call Burglary! Black-and-white sketches accompany cases from the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist to D.B. Cooper. It became my 2024 bedtime go-to, but not, of course, without consequences. My older son can now vividly describe how a fence works and my younger one has fallen in love with locks and keys and cameras. —Evan McGarvey

The Bear, Season Three

Courtesy of FX Networks / Everett Collection

I’m not one of those people who takes pleasure in a minority opinion, but every now and then some people show up with a take so absurdly, comically wrong, you're forced to dig in, lest you lose grip on your sanity (or the rest of the world, their good taste). And so: I'll fight anyone who thinks The Bear's third season somehow isn't on par with the previous two. It’s utterly fantastic. One hill I’ll die on is that storytelling shouldn't be a democracy, that God leaves the room whenever fan service is involved, and that we should be especially thankful whenever anyone making mass media has the pluck to not feed the animals. Appeasement is boring. The third season of The Bear was anything but. It spent time developing characters, spent time with them spending time alone, let single shots linger, let whole conversations play out, let the characters cook. Instead of going all-gas-no-brakes on plot like some shows did (see: Industry), The Bear took a leap, placing faith in the patience and intelligence of people who watch TV. Not exactly a bet that's always paid off—usually, the opposite's true. But if you were interested not just in plot, or flatly big themes and ideas but their depths and complexities, you got served something astounding and phenomenal: a richly rewarding, funny, occasionally heart-wrenching, and dynamic 10 episodes of TV that stay with you long past that “Next Up” countdown, serving up whatever binge-bait comes your way next. This was better, and we're all better for having it. —Foster Kamer

iShowSpeed and Kai Cenat’s Marathon Minecraft Stream

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Minecraft noobs often begin by peacefully crafting and marveling at cute wolves, not shrieking with rage. That’s unless you’re iShowSpeed and Kai Cenat. This summer, they locked themselves in Minecraft-themed rooms and played Hardcore (a mode that deletes the game-world and makes you restart if you die) until they won. They streamed 24/7, even when they were sleeping. It began optimistically before quickly degenerating into a screaming match as they died and died and died. Their rooms morphed into demolition zones with Speed smashing the walls and Kai keening like he wanted to Ctrl+Alt+Delete his life. I was baffled by how dogwater they were—Minecraft isn’t rocket science, and they’re proficient gamers. The attempt stalled on for days, and it became a nightly ritual for me to check in on their progress. At one point, a therapist came in to provide emotional support. Later, a friend slowly coached them through the game’s final boss, the Ender Dragon, like he was explaining volleyball to middle schoolers. Finally, after 100 hours and 42 deaths, the duo slayed the dragon and seized victory. They cheered like they’d won the Olympics. —Kieran Press-Reynolds

The Daily Skate Clips Twitter Account

My biggest regret in life is never learning how to skateboard. It is my personal belief that the coolest any person can look is when they're landing a buttery trick. This year, I rediscovered my love for watching old skate clips—something the boys and I did on the regular in high school—mostly thanks to the Twitter account Daily Skate Clips. This video of Toby Ryan gets me particularly stoked—but then again, so do most of their posts. —Matthew Roberson

Red Rooms

Everett Collection

There are movies from this year that I've been obsessing over for months now—The Brutalist, Nickel Boys—but a new contender slid in just under the wire when I watched it during the Thanksgiving break. It's Red Rooms, a deeply fucked up French Canadian movie. I wouldn't say Red Rooms is a horror film so much as just a disturbing portrait of a woman drawn to the darkest corners of the internet. She's Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a model who happens to be obsessed with the trial of a serial killer accused of kidnapping teen girls and broadcasting their torture and deaths on the dark web. Spending time with Kelly-Anne is a fascinating and chilling place to be. Her beauty gives her an allure, but the more you look at her the more unsettled you become. —Esther Zuckerman

Flipside

The passage of time is both the hero and villain of Flipside, a documentary that ruminates on how creative aspirations can grow, stagnate, and/or die. Pretty heady stuff for a movie about a used- record store in New Jersey that smells faintly of smoked meat! Flipside’s director, Chris Wilcha, first found underground success in 1999 with his documentary The Target Shoots First—a Gen X condemnation of corporate culture and selling out. In the following years, he had rewarding experiences like making the short-lived This American Life TV show and a behind-the-scenes doc about Judd Apatow’s Funny People, but there were far more unfinished projects, as well as hundreds of TV commercials he directed to pay the bills. As Wilcha tries to finish his film about the overstuffed vinyl dumping ground that shaped him as a teenager, he grapples with all the things he didn’t do, while still realizing he’s happy with how his life ended up. As a dude in his mid-40s who predictably questions many of his own decisions and compromises, I hope to soon get the clarity that Wilcha seems to find by the time the Replacements play over the credits. —Eric Ducker

Jenny Nicholson's four-hour YouTube treatise on the failure of the Star Wars hotel at Disney

Historically speaking, my YouTube viewing habits consist of drunkenly watching music videos after a night out or Destiny 2 content creators telling me what weapons are best for the game. Needless to say, I don’t view anything longer than about five minutes—until I saw Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour-and-five-minute long (!) video about the failure of the Star Wars hotel at Disney Parks. Not since Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers has an extended watch flown by as quickly as this did. All of that is due to Nicholson’s steady hand, guiding watchers through the chaos in a profoundly entertaining and searing critique of the hotel’s failure that also doubles as a macro observation about the franchise’s recent creative stumbles. If only all YouTube videos were this good! —William Goodman

The Jackson State Marching Band cover of “Sticky”

There are many introspective moments on Tyler, the Creator’s eighth album, Chromakopia, but the song “Sticky” is not one of them. “Sticky” starts with Tyler rapping over syncopated shouts and the kind of eerie whistling Ennio Morricone would have laid under a shot of Old West townspeople scuttling to safety before a spaghetti Western gunfight. Then the beat—Young Buck’s “Get Buck” inflated to kaiju proportions—comes in impossibly heavy, as if Tyler and guest rappers Lil Wayne, Glorilla, and Sexyy Red are running through a reference library kicking metal filing cabinets with steel-toed hiking boots. On headphones the auxiliary percussion clatters menacingly in the high end, like someone’s sneaking up behind you with a knife and is also sharpening that knife while they do it. At the very beginning of this TikTok of Tyler in the studio working on “Sticky,” there’s a brief shot of some guys playing a big bass drum and a set of marching band snares; clearly the intention here was always marching band music. And on November 16, when the Jackson State Tigers played the Alabama State Hornets for the Southwestern Athletic Conference’s East Division title at ASU Stadium in Montgomery, that’s what “Sticky” became. This was in the hands of bandleader Dr. Roderick Little and the Jackson State marching band, an ensemble known since 1971 as the Sonic Boom of the South. Tyler, obviously moved to hear his music magnified to stadium size by one of the most elite HBCU bands in the country, tweeted “THIS IS WHY I MADE STICKY!!!!!! THIS IS WHY I ARRANGED IT THAT WAY…THIS BEAUTIFUL MY HEART IS FILLED” one day after the game, along with a clip of the performance.

This clip is one minute and 55 seconds long; the moment when it becomes the best piece of music I’ve heard all year hits three seconds after the one-minute mark. Anybody with access to a powerful marching band could extrapolate “Sticky” to its logical ground-shaking endpoint while playing up the way the horns on the original track dart and weave like a swarm of angry bees—but at that one-minute mark in this version, the Jackson State band takes a piece of background action you barely notice in the original, the very Tyleresque melodic synth-pad line that sneaks in behind the second part of Tyler’s verse, and pulls it to the foreground. You are listening to a group of 275 people playing incredibly loud drums and horns—at least 10 of them are playing tubas!—and yet suddenly it’s like the song isn’t stomping but floating, gliding up and down the scale, a storm giving way to pink sunset clouds. Just typing this, in a room where the song is not even currently playing, I am getting teary thinking about the literal meaning of “in concert,” of how huge a sound normal-size human beings working together can make—how huge, and then how delicate. —Alex Pappademas

Richard Thompson

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It’s recently come to my attention that I’ve become so washed that attending concerts, a regular source of joy and entertainment in my 20s, feels more like an obligation than any kind of voluntary fun. (You want me to stand around a loud and sweaty room for two hours on a Tuesday night?) Nonetheless, I wanted to check out Richard Thompson when he came through New York this fall. It ended up being the dark horse contender for my favorite show of the year. Thompson, at 75, sounded fantastic. His stage banter was as wry and on point as his lyrics. His grandson was, sweetly, in his band. Everyone in the crowd stayed seated. And like a truly good show will do, it opened the door to more discovery—I spent the days afterwards reading old Consumer Guide reviews and playing old Thompson albums I was less familiar with. And the best part? I’m pretty sure I was the youngest person in the room. —Gabriella Paiella

The Saluting Emoji

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Over the course of its two-year existence and particularly in 2024, the saluting face emoji has become an inextricable force in my personal lexicon. To me, that little yolk-yellow guy—his visage inexplicably bisected and unnervingly stoney—has become not only my catchall reaction in much of my digital communication, but also a visual manifestation of what frequently seems to be my frayed state of mind. That tiny graphic face conveys a whole host of emotions I felt this year, ones I rarely like to express with my own actual human face: dutiful, resigned, subservient, proud. Its range is complex, able to demonstrate the passive reassurance of The Bear’s Carmy Berzatto murmuring “Yes, chef” just as easily as the unruffled viral Shein confidence activist nodding her head and saying “Okay.” — Eileen Cartter