Nate Jones made his choice, and he will give you his reasons: “There are Satanists. Someone gets lit on fire. Everybody dies at the end. People open their hearts. It’s a metaphor for grief. It’s weirdly funny.” He had a feeling it could be a contender. Top ten, certainly. Top three, maybe. The middle had been easy — Nate, a Vulture writer, has “a good nose for gradations of mediocre” — and the worst, merely painful. The best, though? That was harder. He knew which movie he loved the most, the career-minter, the Best Picture winner. But these lists can’t be too pat. “Ideally, a Vulture No. 1 is going to be a little bit unexpected, then after you see it, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the perfect choice,’” said Nate. “That’s the effect you want.”

And that’s why — spoilers ahead — when Nate published his 113-blurb-long list, “Every A24 Movie, Ranked,” he put Hereditary at No. 1. Did he hit the mark? Depends whose tweets you’re reading.

One of the things I find most impressive (if troubling) about my Vulture colleagues is their desire to make epic ranked lists. Each of these takes hours, days, weeks of labor as they haggle their way toward a ranking that all involved can be proud of — with the knowledge that any order they choose will be attacked online as soon as they hit publish. Sometimes an act of service is an act of self-harm. But Nate, who did this A24 list alone over more than two years, insists it was chill: He started watching the films on this list back in spring 2020. Suddenly, he was in his parents’ suburban home with nothing to write about: “Once it was 6 p.m., you’re like, ‘Well, what the fuck do I do with myself?’” A24 was already a phenomenon, having gone from film distributor to studio to Online Ceramics–shirt shiller. There was the buzz. There was the back catalog. There was nothing but time. Nate started watching, and soon, he started ranking.

Here’s what he came up with. Everything Everywhere All at Once is No. 23. Midsommar (No. 10) is lower than Under the Skin (No. 7). Men is No. 69. Under the Silver Lake is No. 90. Lady Bird is No. 3. U mad, bro? It’s all part of the game — Nate thinking he’s right, you convinced he’s wrong, me pissed that Greta Gerwig made the top five twice (once as director, once as actor … I hope you’re all embarrassed when we finally see Barbie). The special pleasure of reading an A24 list is knowing that, unlike, say, Sony Pictures Classics, this particular scented-candle store has a rabid following that will be discussing these choices for days. Nate wrote about that this week in a piece interviewing both the studio’s stans and the skeptics. He discovered that the A24-fan stereotype of “24-year-old fuckboys who hang out on Canal Street” was far from the norm. “Some of them were like, ‘Oh yeah, I love the merch. It’s fire,’ and some of them were like, ‘I have zero interest in the merch. I’m just about the movies,’” he said. “That made me feel a little less gross about the whole thing — this is something that, at the end of the day, is about people’s relationship to art.” Even when that art is Bodies Bodies Bodies.