The top movies of 2024, led by the luminous 'Tuesday' — and a look at my 'worst' list for the year.

I genuinely enjoy the annual movie criticism tradition of compiling a top 10 list.

It’s a very clarifying process, which lets me look back on a year of movies and pick out what I was immediately infatuated with and see if that opinion holds up a few months later. Usually, it does, but with varying degrees.

This year, once I saw Dania O. Pusic’s luminous drama “Tuesday,” I knew it would take something even more amazing to knock it off the top spot. That never happened.

Here’s my list, which appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune.

What didn’t appear in The Tribune was my list of the 10 worst movies of 2024. That list is clarifying in a different way – because it’s an opportunity to have one cathartic push and mention them before purging the bad stuff from my memory bank.

It’s instructive, I think, that many of the titles on my “worst” list are franchise extensions. It’s not that I have an inherent bias against sequels or borrowed IP — my top 10 includes a sequel, and my honorable mentions feature a sequel and a remake. It’s that these movies on the “worst” list (which include five sequels, one reboot, a video game adaptation and a book adaptation) did it badly.

1. “Joker: Folie à Deux” • Director Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix return to their twisted take on Batman’s nemesis, only to discover they had nothing new to say.

2. “Despicable Me 4” • In a year loaded with movies that existed only to expand franchise branding, this was the worst — a recycling of Minions jokes that were barely funny the first time.

3. “Borderlands” • Here’s a thought experiment: Write every action movie cliche on an index card; throw darts at the cards; film the results in that order. Never mind, it looks like director Eli Roth (or someone after him) already did it with this chaotic video game adaptation.

4. “Rebel Moon, Part Two: The Scargiver” • The second half of director Zack Snyder’s bloated attempt at making his own “Star Wars” movie for Netflix is a hodgepodge of bad ideas and characters nobody could be made to care about.

5. “Hitpig!” • Didn’t hear about this undercooked animated adventure about a bounty-hunting pig trying to recover a trained elephant? You didn’t miss a thing.

6. “Red One” • The year’s other overhyped, overly expensive Netflix action movie — which not even J.K. Simmons’ muscular Santa Claus could rescue.

7. “Harold and the Purple Crayon” • A strange animated/live-action hybrid that turns the child Harold into an adult-sized manchild played by Zachary Levi — a travesty for anyone with fond memories of Crockett Johnson’s classic children’s book.

8. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” • Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return to the buddy-cop action franchise that made them stars nearly 30 years ago, but the years haven’t been kind to them or the genre’s macho sensibilities.

9. “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” • With the exception of McKenna Grace’s presence as Egon Spengler’s granddaughter, this franchise extension is too dependent on nostalgia to be worth the effort.

10. “The Garfield Movie” • When you hire Chris Pratt to voice your cartoon, you’ve already run out of ideas before you’ve started.