The Esquire team’s favourite books, TV shows, films and memes from 2024

FOR THE EXTREMELY online among us, 2024 felt like a gift that continued to give, with viral moment after viral moment sandwiched between some excellent pieces of culture. From an album that defined an entire aesthetic (Brat green, you win Q3) to a TV show about two brothers and convicted murderers that premiered on Netflix at the same time as their resentencing hearing was taking place, 2024 has been a wild ride, yet one we’ve ridden (and written about) with enthusiasm.

Polling the Esquire team for their favourite pieces of 2024 culture, as I did in the final week of our working year, was like taking a fun little trip down short-term-memory lane. These past 12 months have moved so fast, I’d almost forgotten that Dune: Part 2 premiered in February, with Challengers redefining the tennis film genre just a month after. But my colleagues’ culture nominations go beyond blockbuster recommendations, to favourite books, memes you may have forgotten, and a TV show about hot London bankers doing questionable things.

Without further ado, here, we select the best pop culture moments that defined 2024.

Dune: Part 2

Okay, this isn’t exactly some low-key recommendation of an underground indie movie – this is currently the fifth highest grossing film of 2024 after all – but as a cultural artefact and as a film, Dune 2 is easily the best thing to come out of the year, in my opinion. After the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi epic left me only moderately enthused, Dune 2 forcefully pulled me in to the point that I was ready to follow our Lisan al Gaib Timothée Chalamet into battle. Dune might just be the most impressive film franchise since The Lord of the Rings. Its scope is staggering, its score and cinematography are A+ material, and its storytelling is worthy of the Oscar for best picture – although it almost certainly won’t get it.Bring on Dune 3. – Cayle Reid, Content Producer

The Substance

There were a lot of really great films out this year, but two remain the most salient in my mind: Challengers and The Substance. The former was unsurprising, because the Zendaya and Luca Guadagnino of it all; but the latter – a body horror that investigates our obsession with beauty and fear of ageing – well and truly caught me off-guard. I’m not into horror, but I’d seen a lot of good reviews, so I decided to give it a whirl, and I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure that I’ve ever watched something so equally nauseating, moving, and funny. I cried, I laughed, I squirmed. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both deliver brilliant, evocative performances, and director Coralie Fargeat so deftly and unflinchingly captures the visceral, violent, ridiculous sides of so many women’s (and men’s!) quests to stay young and beautiful. I thought about it for days afterwards – in fact, I’m thinking about it still. – Dani Maher, Senior Writer

Moo Deng

I was late to the Moo Deng party, off-brand for me because I usually have my ear to the ground when it comes to animals doing silly things on the internet. But my devotion to following her every move since then has been tight; she currently appears in my algorithm every two-to-three posts. For the uninitiated (how lucky you are!), Moo Deng is a five month old pygmy hippopotamus living in Khao Kheow Open Zoo, Thailand, who went viral after the zoo started posting videos of her online, her name translating to ‘bouncy pork’ in Thai. And she bounces, but she also slides and moonwalks and climbs all over her mum, all the while looking hydrated, moisturised and glowing. But my favourite thing about Moo Deng might be observing her zoo hands. While the internet watches on in awe as she wreaks chaos on her enclosure, her carers look completely un-phased, if not annoyed at her antics (such as the bite above, a signature Moo Deng move). Escapism!!! – Amy Campbell, Features Editor

Industry season 3

Season 3 proved to be a coming out year for Industry, a show that clinically exposes the corrosive effects of global capitalism through the lens of fictional London hedge fund, Pierpoint. With a broader canvas and reshuffled decks after season 2’s finale, in which key players Harper, Eric and Rishi struck out on their own, the show’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, didn’t miss their opportunity to splash cash on exotic locations, lavish set design and big-name actors – Kit Harington playing an ayahuasca-swilling toff, anyone. At the same time, they retained the essence of what made the show such a glorious showcase for talented young actors: the chance to hurl financial jargon and ear-bleeding creative invective, across the trading floor. – Ben Jhoty, columnist

The cinema program at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

I’m grateful to the folks curating the cinema program at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It’s a little known subsidiary of the Art Gallery’s roster, but it’s three levels downstairs in the Domain Theatre where I’ve been able to spend some Sunday afternoons watching 4K restorations of old works like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (there are screenings available on Wednesday nights when they’re open late). Whatever’s on, the screenings are thematically linked to the major exhibitions happening at that moment. Free cinema is a true gift to a city. – Tyler Dane Wingco, Junior Writer

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

If you had told me Millie Vanilli would top the charts and the Menendez case would resurface in 2024, I wouldn’t have believed it. Yet Ryan Murphy’s Monsters has captivated audiences with its raw retelling of the 1989 crime. In episode five, “The Hurt Man,” Cooper Koch gives a standout performance as Erik, recounting his abuse in a gripping 32-minute, continuous shot. It’s a harrowing, emotional scene that makes this episode one of the hardest – and best – I’ve ever watched. – Arielle Katos, Head of Social

Playboi Carti

He started off the year by taking the hip hop world by storm, unofficially-officially releasing various singles through his burner Instagram and YouTube without any of the songs actually making it to DSP’s such as Spotify or Apple Music. Regardless, Carti had rap fans in a frenzy and feigning for more, with promises of breaking his music drought by releasing an album in 2024 named I Am Music. 

To Carti fan’s frustrations, by December this year he still hasn’t dropped the album. But that doesn’t mean his cultural impact has fallen back in the slightest. He released a variety of huge features this year with artists such as Ye, Future, The Weeknd and Camilla Cabello which have all been extremely well received. Carti also has his influence over the fashion world. Every fit pic he drops seems to break the Instagram and Twitter algorithms. My personal favourite trend of his is wearing NBA jerseys backwards, which had fans from all over the world copying his poses and outfits. Carti, please drop the album soon. – Jasper Karolewski, Videographer and Video Editor

Luigi Mangione, UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter turned folk hero

There are rabbit holes, and there’s the wild warren I went down when researching and writing about the rapid internet folk hero-isation of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old that shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of a large American healthcare company. It’s now been weeks since the arrest of Mangione in a Pennsylvania McDonalds, and as he pleads not guilty to New York state murder and terror charges, the meme machine continues to cook – the #menswear accounts I follow are going particularly hard (examples here and here). Two friends recently sent me a reel by a professional eyebrow artist, who declares that Mangione’s brows are every eyebrow artist’s dream, before breaking down how to get the look. No irony. Incredible. – Amy Campbell, Features Editor

Holding Space, Defying Gravity, and Brat Green

The Wicked press tour was a bit unhinged from the get-go, thanks to the unwavering sincerity of lead stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, but it was elevated to a whole new level when a snippet of their interview with Out reporter Tracy Gilchrist went viral. You know the one, but I’ll quote it anyway to jog your memory: “people are taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space for that,” “I didn’t know that was happening,” “I’ve seen it on a couple of posts . . . I’m in queer media, so . . .” These words – with their total lack of clarity, their inane buzzwordy brilliance – have been ringing through my brain nonstop for the past month.

In a year of brat and demure, Gilchrist had the delusional courage to simply hold space – and in doing so, remind us all we have no clue what holding space really means. And after all the emotional Wicked interviews we’d been fed at that point, it felt so right for one to skip right past “moving” and head straight to nonsensical. It got even better when Erivo and Grande later confessed they too had no clue what was going on during the interview either, but were simply along for the ride. – Dani Maher, Senior Writer

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

This is the first novel of Hari Kunzru’s I’ve read, and despite not being one to jump at Covid novels (it shifts back and forth between London’s art scene in the ’90s and a property in upstate New York at the beginning of the pandemic), I really, really enjoyed it. Revolving around two erstwhile artists, a gallerist in need of paintings, the gallerist’s younger girlfriend, and Alice, the ex-lover of one artist and the wife of another, it’s beautifully written; with vivid interior worlds, each character is consumed by their own fears while walking on eggshells around one another as relationships fall apart and rekindle, the world beyond the woods around them crumbling. Also, Kunzru’s word choice is enviable. A great summer read if you’re into character-driven novels that are unsettling one moment and nourishing the next. – Amy Campbell, Features Editor

Challengers

The horniest sports movie – maybe movie, full stop – of the year, Luca Guadagnino’s exhilarating tennis romp centres around a trio of top players: Tashi (Zendaya), Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), as they navigate a cloistered love triangle. The structure of the movie is essentially an allegory for an orgasm, a stupendous score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, helping ratchet up the tension and aching sense of longing, before delivering an ambiguous climax that leaves the viewer feverishly worked up – yet somehow satisfied. Game, set and match, Guadagnino. – Ben Jhoty, columnist

I Always Knew: A Memoir by Barbara Chase-Riboud

After reading three heavy books in a row that almost put me off reading altogether, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s I Always Knew, a collection of letters sent to her mother over five decades, brought me back from the brink. If you don’t know, Chase-Riboud is a brilliant sculptor and writer, known for her towering abstract sculptures of cast-bronze with veils of wool and silk spewing out of them. Dispatched from wherever she is able to stop for a few days in Italy, France, or Egypt, there is a new boyfriend in every letter – a count, a distracted architect, a powerful photographer – and a list of clothes to buy or clothes bought. Letters have symmetry, order, hope, and comedy; the perfect balm to get back into it after a truly heinous read. – Tyler Dane Wingco, Junior Writer

The Bullet Swallower, by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

As a sucker for a good Western (film, novel or otherwise), the last few years have been tough. Thanks to the inherently problematic themes of the genre’s classics (rampant racism, nauseatingly macho characters and general parochialism), Westerns are in dire straits. Luckily, a new wave has started to cut through. The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James is one of these breakouts, opening a more inclusive frontier by focusing on those previously sidelined, villainised and victimised. Set primarily around the Texas-Mexico border in 1895, the novel centres on struggling bandido Antonio Sonoro. After a train robbery gone wrong, a shootout with Texas Rangers leaves Antonio permanently disfigured after sustaining a bullet to the jaw, earning him the nickname ‘El Tragabalas’ (the bullet swallower). Antonio embarks on a quest for revenge, ultimately leading him to weigh the value of violence against repentance. Unputdownable. – Cayle Reid, Content Producer

The Swiftocracy

---

Related:

The best TV series, movies and documentaries to stream in December

All the JAW dropping new fits from the set of ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’