© Amazon MGM Studios2024 was a year of underwhelming blockbusters, patchy streaming movies and genuinely rewarding awards contenders.
But what caught the eye of Pomona over the past 12 months?
Pomona ranks 60 movies it watched - focusing on the good, the bad and the ugly.
Here's our countdown from 60 to 51.
60. CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT (Tyler Thomas Taomina)
Good Christmas movies are difficult to pull off.
For every 'It's A Wonderful Life,' 'Miracle On 34th Street' and 'Elf,' there's three or four turkeys like 'Santa Claus - The Movie,' 'Fred Claus' or 'Jingle All The Way'.
Now you can add Taomina's irritating comedy drama to the naughty list.
A feeble attempt to give the Festive movie an indie twist, Taomina's film thinks it's groundbreaking and is incredibly smug about its indie ambitions.
However it's a relentlessly unfunny tale about a large Italian American family celebrating Christmas Eve in Long Island.
Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, its hook is with the family matriarch now becoming more frail, this is probably going to be the last time everyone gathers at the home on Christmas Eve before it is sold.
However that's about it in terms of a plot because mostly it's a rambling, purposeless, bland cocktail of tinsel, bickering uncles, boring scenes involving dinner and a lot of inane conversation.
Executive producer Michael Cera and comedian Gregg Turkington appear periodically throughout the film but they seem to believe they are taking part in a project that involves a lot of exaggerated miming in oversized police uniforms.
The rest of the cast engage in amateur dramatics on the lower end of the amateur dramatics scale and are incredibly wooden on camera.
Meanwhile Taomina and his cinematographer Carson Lund conjure up images that even a high school teacher would reject in a student film - blurry, slow mo shots of festive fire engines while a child screams, anyone?
It's a disjointed mess of a movie about a family gathering you'd come up with any excuse to avoid, with characters you'd run a mile from if you ever had the misfortune of knowing them.
59. MEGALOPOLIS (Francis Ford Coppola)
This was one of these movies which at the start of the year you were convinced was either going to be a work of genius or an unmitigated disaster.
Unfortunately, it's the latter.
Coppola's film isn't so much a car crash but more like a multi vehicle pile-up.
It's bloated, self-indulgent, dull, poorly written with some ear scraping dialogue and it's hideously acted by a cast who have no excuses.
An attempt by Coppola to transfer the Catalinarian conspiracy in 63 BC Rome to New York (which he has rather gauchely renamed New Rome), it features the weakest lead performance Adam Driver has ever given as a Nobel Prize winning architect, Cesar Catilina.
Suspected of murdering his wife, Cesar has invented a new groundbreaking building material Megalon that enables him to manipulate time while reshaping the city.
Pitched against New Rome's unpopular Mayor, Giancarlo Esposito's Franklyn Cicero, his ability to manipulate time with this new material fascinates his rival's daughter, Nathalie Emmanuel's Julia.
With Cicero and others eager to plot Cesar's downfall, can he survive?
Driver struggles with an unbelievably leaden script by Coppola packed full of nods to Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis,' William Wyler's 'Ben Hur' and Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' but the actor you really should feel sorry for is Laurence Fishburne who plays Cesar's driver Fundi Romaine and is saddled with one of the most turgid narrations in the history of cinema.
If you think Fundi Romaine is an absurd name, how about Aubrey Plaza's ambitious TV presenter and mistress of Cesar called Wow! Platinum - a name that feels like it could only have been dreamt up by an elderly, out of touch geezer?
Driver, Esposito, Emmanuel, Fishburne and Plaza flounder but Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire, her son Jason Schwartzman, Balthazar Getty and others also have nothing to do other than to ham it up in the minor roles.
Their characters also sport ridiculous names that feel like they have could have come straight out of a Jackie Collins novel.
None of the cast, though, hits the levels of hamminess that Shia LaBeouf achieves, whose performance as Cesar's cousin Clodio Polcher is on a par with Jared Leto's worst work - not only is it frankly batty, it manages to be really annoying as well.
Coppola has been harbouring the dream of making 'Megalopolis' since 1977 and ended up self-financing the movie years later after selling some of his vineyards.
The final product tells you everything you need to know about why this flabby mess was in development hell for 47 years, with none of the studios willing to touch it.
It's script is so weak, it's hard to believe it's the work of the same director who gave us 'The Godfather' trilogy, 'The Conversation,' 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Rumble Fish'.
It's also hard to conceive that he has actually made a movie that is worse than his Robin Williams tearjerker 'Jack' but he has done just that and then some.
58. ROAD HOUSE (Doug Liman)
How do you totally wreck a so-so action movie?
Cast Conor McGregor in a hard man role, it seems.
Doug Liman's unnecessary remake of Patrick Swayze's cheesy 1989 thriller about bouncers reimagines Jake Gyllenhaal as a former UCF cage fighter hired by Jessica Williams' Frankie to restore order in her Florida road house bar.
With Billy Magnussen's drug kingpin Ben Brandt deploying biker gangs to drive Frankie's road house out of existence so his crime family can take it over, things escalate when McGregor's Mob enforcer is dispatched to out muscle Frankie and Gyllenhaal's Dalton.
All of this might have been barely watchable if McGregor's performance hadn't been so jarring.
Delivering his lines like a five year old participating in a Dublin nativity play, he struts around the screen - sometimes bare arsed - with all the grace of an elephant on roller skates.
Liman doesn't help matters by deploying some really shonky CGI effects in the fight sequences that make the movie feel like one long, boring PlayStation game.
Amazingly Amazon Prime are reported to be considering a sequel - although with McGregor ending 2024 losing a civil case in which he was accused of beating and raping a woman in a Dublin hotel, it'll be interesting to see if his brand is considered too toxic to continue his acting career.
That would be no loss because when you compare McGregor's screen presence to Michael Flatley's charisma free lead in his own movie 'Blackbird,' he actually makes the Irish dancing legend look like he's Al Pacino.
57. IRISH WISH (Janeen Damian)
No Irish cinematic cliche is left unturned in this toe curling Netflix vehicle for Lindsay Lohan.
There's plenty of begorrah, twinkly eyes and buckets full of blarney in a tale that centres around Lohan's book editor attending the wedding in Ireland of the man of her dreams, Alexander Vlahos' Paul Kennedy to her best friend, Ayesha Curry's Heather.
Hibernophile Jane Seymour augments the film's star power as Maddie's mum in a flimsy romcom that is mind numbingly dull and does exactly what you expect of it.
Ed Speelers is the alternative love interest in a Norwegian Blue of a film whose script is so poor and cliches so plentiful that you just can't be arsed getting worked up about them.
I'd rather drink a pint of Bailey's than blether on any more about a glorified TV movie that even President Joe Biden would dismiss as a load of malarkey.
56. MADAME WEB (SJ Clarkson)
The Sony Pictures Spiderverse suffered a huge setback when this spin-off flopped in multiplexes and drew critical opprobrium from reviewers.
It's not hard to understand why.
The movie features a weirdly detached lead performance from Dakota Johnson as a New York paramedic called Cassie whose mother died giving birth to her in the presence of a Peruvian tribe and who later discovers that she has clairvoyant abilities thanks to a spider that bit her mum during labour.
Essentially a revenge tale featuring Tahar Rahim's explorer Ezekiel Sims who betrayed her mother in Peru and acquired his own clairvoyant abilities by nicking one of the spiders, Cassie finds herself having to protect three teenage girls from him when he realises they will have a hand in his death - Sydney Sweeney's geeky Julia, Isabella Merced's Anya whose father was deported and Celeste O'Connor's rich kid Mattie.
Clunkily written by Clarkson, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker, it's a staggeringly boring, failed blockbuster that deploys the same deja vu storytelling techniques as 'Groundhog Day,' 'Edge of Tomorrow,' 'Source Code' and 'Happy Death Day' but in a far less convincing fashion.
Johnson looks throughout like she'd rather be anywhere else but so does everyone else in the film.
And who could really blame them because it's a movie that underwhelms on every level including in the way it deploys very run of the mill CGI effects?
On the bright side, though, at least it doesn't have Conor McGregor.
55. UNFROSTED (Jerry Seinfeld)
Apart from voicing the main role in 'Bee Movie,' Jerry Seinfeld hasn't really made a proper stab at movie acting.
However in the year he turned 70, the New Yorker finally gave us a comedy about pop tarts 'Unfrosted' - directing and starring in a tongue in cheek film that landed on Netflix.
Taking a supposedly zany approach to his subject, Seinfeld's fictionalised account of how Kellogg's famous toasted pastry came into being has a bit of a 'Mars Attacks! feel to it.
And with Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Amy Schumer, Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, James Marsden, Bill Burr and Hugh Grant on board and Jon Hamm and Jon Slattery sending up their 'Mad Men' roles, audiences could be forgiven for thinking there'd be a fair chance of some decent laughs.
Sadly, no.
Seinfeld's parodies of the Space Race, Oppenheimer's atomic bomb tests, 'The Godfather,' 'The Right Stuff' and 'Alien' works very hard for chuckles but the gags consistently fall flat.
Actors who really ought to know better ham it up in a creaky flick that has one of those blooper montages in the end credits.
That tells you everything you need to know.
Any movie that is so desperate to tell you what a fun time the cast had making it, usually isn't.
54. CHALLENGERS (Luca Guadagnino)
If you were to pick a contender for the most overrated and overblown movie of 2024, Guadagnino's ménage a trois tennis melodrama would be it.
Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist play doubles partners and childhood tennis proteges Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson who fall under the spell of Zendaya's superstar in the making Tashi Duncan.
After an initial threesome with Tashi, the lads end up battling for her heart and at various stages, either has the upper hand.
But friendships are tested when injury strikes one of the trio.
Guadagnino serves up a tiresome, souped up mess of a movie with a thin plot and hilariously overblown visuals.
After some ridiculous sweating by Faist and O'Connor during a final duel on the tennis court, the film reaches its nadir when Guadagnino decides to give viewers a point of view shot from the perspective of a tennis ball.
There have been much better tennis movies over the years like 'Borg versus McEnroe' and 'Battle of the Sexes' and much better love triangle films too like 'Casablanca,' 'The Age of Innocence' and 'Jules et Jim'.
This doesn't even come within a twentieth of their greatness, so why waste your time?
New balls please...
53. BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE (Reinaldo Marcus Green)
Fresh from the success of his Oscar winning biopic about the Williams sisters' father 'King Richard,' hopes were high that Green would be able to work his magic on the story of reggae legend Bob Marley.
However the final product is a bafflingly timid affair in which Kingsley Ben-Adir goes through the motions of lip-synching to the singing of Jamaica's best known musical export and mimicking his accent and mannerisms.
With several members of the Marley family producing, Green's biopic is too concerned about depicting Marley as a saint and is unwilling to look too deeply into his flaws.
Its weakness lies primarily with Green, Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers and Zach Baylin's script which is too perfunctory - it's as if they are ticking off mentions of significant moments in the music icon's life before quickly moving on to the next song.
As a result, Latasha Lynch's Rita Marley, James Norton's Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and Tosin Cole, Hector Lewis and Aston Barratt Jr as various members of the Wailers struggle to make an impact.
Despite decent box office, Green's biopic is a huge disappointment, even if it does provide a good excuse to marvel at Marley's music.
52. IN THE LAND OF SAINTS AND SINNERS (Robert Lorenz)
After spending the last 16 years dispatching bad guys in the US and parts of Europe in ropey action thrillers, Liam Neeson returned to his native land for a ropey period action thriller in which he dispatches bad guys during Northern Ireland's Troubles.
This time the Ballymena actor stars as a hired gun operating over the border in the Irish Republic, working for Colm Meaney's Co Donegal gangster.
After executing his victims for whatever sin they have committed, he buries them in a local forest.
When he is not carrying out hits, Neeson hangs out with his best mate, Ciaran Hinds' local Garda sergeant who is blissfully unaware of his friend's secret life.
However it all comes tumbling out when an IRA gang led by Kerry Condon's fanatic Doireann scarpers over the border after a bombing in Northern Ireland goes wrong.
It isn't long before her psychotic brother, played by Des Eastwood, falls foul of Liam.
A decent cast that includes Jack Gleason, Niamh Cusack, Sarah Greene, Seamus O'Hara and Conor MacNeill is wasted in a humdrum tale of revenge.
While director Robert Lorenz and his cinematographer Tom Stern make good use of the Donegal landscape, their faux Western is let down by a script from Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane that aspires to be Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven' but comes up significantly short.
Condon is saddled with a one dimensional character while Neeson, Meaney and Eastwood sleepwalk through their roles.
Only Hinds manages to imbue his character with anything other than cliche and as a result he steals every scene he is in.
With Neeson preparing to return to comedy next year as Frank Debin Jr alongside Pamela Anderson in 'The Naked Gun' reboot, maybe he'll finally put his guns beyond use and stretch himself once again as an actor who we all know is capable of much, much better?
51. IF (John Krasinski)
Written and directed by John Krasinski, it's easy to see what he was trying to achieve with this CGI effects driven comedy about imaginary friends.
A tale about Ryan Reynolds' grouchy grown up and Cailey Fleming's worn down 12 year old trying to pair redundant imaginary friends with new kids, there's the same sugar sweetness of the great family comedies like Penny Marshall's 'Big,' Kirk Jones' 'Nanny McPhee,' Zach Helm's 'Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium' and Disney Pixar's 'Toy Story,' 'Monsters Inc' and 'Inside Out'.
With its goofy sense of humour and Steve Carrell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Awkwafina, Bradley Cooper and Jon Stewart on board to voice the CGI characters, you'd think the film has surefire hit written all over it.
However it underwhelms, partly because its plot is over elaborate and the gags don't quite land in the way they should.
It's a well intentioned affair with spirited performances from its voice cast, Fleming, Reynolds, Krasinski as the girl's doting dad and Fiona Shaw as her grandmother.
However there's a reason it flopped with audiences and you can quickly grasp why.
The Cartoon Network's similarly themed and, at times, very irritating 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends' did it a whole lot better.
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