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The Wild Robot.   Photo: Universal Pictures/DreamWorks Animation

Can ten bullet points contain 2024? Every year, New York’s cultural critics absorb dozens upon dozens (or hundreds upon hundreds) of works from their chosen field, and every December we punish them for their enthusiasm by pushing each to boil down 365 days of exploration into a puny list of favorites. The process can be either clarifying or maddening, especially for those writers like Bilge Ebiri. “I see 200-plus new movies a year and I still end up having missed tons of important stuff — so a top ten just seems very insufficient to me!” he says. (Bilge is also one of the few cinephiles I’ve met who will tell you that, in fact, there are too many good movies out there to watch.) “I even hate putting them in order, frankly,” says theater critic Sara Holdren. “Like, if you're gonna make me pick ten, at least don't make me rank them!”

This week, we published the results of this process — and they’re as fun to read as they are painful to write: On Vulture, critics shared their favorite movies, TV shows, albums, songs, podcast moments, comedy specials, books, theater, art shows, and more in our Best of 2024 series. (Do not miss the legendary John Waters’s top-ten movies of the year! We’re so delighted that he now publishes this famous list with New York.) Normally, our very wise editors discourage writers from trying to tack on runners-up to these lists. But being less wise myself, I asked a few of our critics to share what they would have included if they had been allowed to do a top 11, or even a top 12. ’Tis the season to indulge.

Aside from some of the big ones, like Charli XCX or Sabrina Carpenter, this was a choose-your-own-adventure year in music. My editor Alex Suskind and I compiled our Best Songs of the Year list together, and we had almost no overlap. I wasn’t as willing to fight for “Prep-School Gangster” as much as some other songs, but Vampire Weekend is a top-five artist for me. Only God Was Above Us is their first album in five years. I listened to the first few singles and was like, Okay, they’re doing something different. The electronic stuff felt very maximal and it wasn't quite hitting for me. Then this song kept coming up on autoplay before I got the chance to change it. I realized that while this album has a lot of new sounds, it’s also playing with our perceptions of what Vampire Weekend has sounded like forever. Their bright, solid, glittery guitars show up on this song in a more delicate way. You can hear these yelps in the background that are just classic Ezra Koenig, the lead singer. It’s gentle, thoughtful, slow-simmering. Plus: It was named after a New York story!

Vulture won’t let me do a top 20 for my movies list, so I publish that on social media. Every year I get tons of people who are like “I’ve never heard of any of these movies.” I can understand how you might not have heard of, say, Universal Language, but you didn’t hear about The Fall Guy? Anyway, the top four or five are the movies I know have to be there, and beneath it are a bunch of titles that keep moving spots. The Wild Robot was in the top ten at one point. It’s meant for kids to enjoy, but it’s also something that grown-ups will connect to — especially parents. It was directed by Chris Sanders, who created Lilo & Stitch, a movie that I have spent a lot of time with over the past few years. It's very much in that vein of finding or creating a makeshift family. Lupita Nyong’o voices the robot, who goes from a task-oriented, machinelike thing to basically a mother, and it’s one of the all-time greatest voice performances. Because the robot has no human face and can’t show any kind of emotion, Nyong’o has to do all of it with her voice. It’s also visually gorgeous: It’s a computer-animated film, but the individual characters were drawn with brushstrokes so they look as if they were hand-animated within a CG form. I just think it’s marvelous.

I have two runners-up. One is Antigone in the Amazon, which was at NYU’s Skirball Center, the first production I've ever gotten to see by Milo Rau, who’s Swiss and one of those big European provocateur directors. It was both a show about a show that had already happened and a beautiful piece of theater in its own right. Rau wanted to explore Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, which was started by people demanding to be more than, essentially, serfs who were taken advantage of by the government. In the ’90s, they staged a protest that ended in a horrible massacre. Rau took his company to Brazil specifically because he wanted to talk to people about this, and do a kind of documentary theater — to learn about what happened and use Antigone to reflect on it. They worked with local people who were survivors of the massacre. The thing that they made at Skirball wove back and forth between recounting what they had created in Brazil and bringing the play Antigone into the theater space. There was a lot of film from what they had done in Brazil, but the screen was so beautifully incorporated and theatrically knit with the bodies that were physically present. Frankly, Skirball Center has been killing it this season, but the shows run for such a short time that it’s difficult to tell people before they’re over. This one ran for two days.

Karin Coonrod’s King Lear was at La MaMa in June. Coonrod, who runs Compagnia de' Colombari, was a professor of mine in grad school. I’ve had varying opinions about her work, although I really admire her as an artist. I saw this when we already knew there was this other Lear coming up in the fall: Kenneth Branagh’s, at the Shed. Lear has famously been called impossible, with its grandiosity and scale, and that was so easily dispensed with this in this production. The overarching conceit was that all of the actors started as Lear, everybody wearing these large paper crowns. Then each person eventually stepped out of that, identifying themselves as Goneril or The Fool or another character. As the show went on, more and more Lears were stripped away. By the time you got to the incredible moments of Lear naked against the storm, it had been whittled down to one actor, Tom Nelis. I’ve never seen in a Lear such a simple, beautiful, effective visualization of what is happening to that character, who goes from being the state — literally the embodiment of the whole society — to becoming this singular, lonely, frail, naked body.

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