The best video essays of 2024

2024 saw politics, culture, and the overlap between them grow ever stranger, and that’s reflected in our picks for the year’s top video essays. Videos about artificial intelligence, abuses of authority, mass hysteria, weird corporate trends (and weirder corporate collapses) fill out these ranks. Lest that make this year’s list sound like too much of a downer, know that most of these works are also supremely fun. It has now been six years since I first did a piece like this for Polygon. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of novice video makers become pros, the pros refine their craft to increasingly fascinating ends, and more and more promising new talent arise. I think this ranking reflects all those strands.

On making this list: With this style of video continuing to grow in popularity, one way I’ve made keeping up with things manageable for the purposes of articles like this is abiding by stricter, more traditional parameters for what “counts” as a video essay. If there’s a notable video from 2024 that’s not present here, it may be because, as great as it was, it strayed too far from that definition. Additionally, each year, I’m conscious of trying to keep things fresh by not including too many essays from creators honored in earlier iterations. This time around, I decided to take it a step further by imposing a firm prohibition against including work by anyone who’s already appeared in these annual roundups more than once. Apologies, then, to consistently great essayists like Yhara Zayd and Jacob Geller. Finally, I will admit that I cheated last year by using double features and honorable mentions to include 15 videos in the “top 10”; I was more disciplined this time around. As always, these videos are presented in order of publishing date.

Mina Le has become one of my go-to resources for keeping up with and comprehending the vast ecosystem of online commerce, influencers, style, fads, and how these elements all feed into and off one another. The title of this video seemingly name-checks three distinct things. Le argues persuasively that viral shopping crazes like the one around Stanley bottles early this year are partly a way for people to feel a sense of belonging in an increasingly atomized and alienated society — even if they can only realize this feeling through consumption.

The shortest video on this year’s list is also its most formally inventive. Zecchi has constructed a collage of scenes from film and television that capture moments of female rage. But rather than a supercut, the shots are presented through a continually expanding (spiraling outward, in fact, which feels appropriate, given the subject matter) grid pattern. The essay ultimately transitions from these shots of isolated figures to ones of masses of women working together, illustrating the progression from individual grievance to collective action.

This is a sequel to an experiment Dal Dosso released last year. For the uninitiated, “corecore” is a nebulous emergent genre of social media videos that can perhaps most succinctly be summed up as assemblages of melancholy vibes — ambient music, dark footage, countless shots of Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049, etc. Dal Dosso strives for an especially pure corecore (corecore… core?) experience by juxtaposing unreal-seeming moments from the news and socials with actually unreal AI-generated images. It’s both a tribute to and a parody of the work of Adam Curtis, replete with an AI Curtis narrating. It’s one of the few genuinely artistic uses of the technology I’ve seen.

Secret Base launched a Patreon this year with the most welcome news possible: the resurrection of Jon Bois’ long-dormant, deeply beloved series Pretty Good. (Catch up with this episode about Lawnchair Larry, this one about an epic bodybuilder forum argument, and this one about 24.) Appropriately for an election year, Bois created a holistic three-part look at the brief life and embarrassing times of the Reform Party. In the backbiting and wheeling/dealing between the likes of Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura, and Pat Buchanan, the essay draws out the broader challenges of trying to disrupt the entrenched political system of the United States.

For a change of pace, here’s a film that appeared in festivals and theaters before becoming available via Netflix this year. Director Yance Ford is best known for his highly personal 2017 debut Strong Island, for which he became the first openly trans man to be nominated for an Oscar. He’s come back to feature filmmaking with this critical look at the evolution of policing as an institution in the United States. Wielding archival materials to devastating comparisons between past and present, Ford tracks an unmistakable surge of authoritarianism in America.

Tetris is one of the greatest works of art (video game or otherwise) made in the past 50 years because of how its initial simplicity opens up to infinite possible variations. A similarly expansive competitive community has built up around the game. It’s Tetris; how much could there possibly be to getting good at it? There’s no better YouTuber to answer this question than Summoning Salt, the Ken Burns of speedrunning. This video gets you fully invested in these escalating struggles of one-upmanship, making people looking at screens and their investment in falling blocks and numbers going up extraordinarily compelling. The result is that one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in any film this year is a simple left-to-right tracking shot of a chart.

Jenny Nicholson’s work might seem more vloggy than essayistic, but that’s only if you aren’t paying attention. There are plenty of YouTubers who do nothing but talk to a camera at length, but people aren’t watching the entirety of this four-hour video just to get the nitty-gritty on Disney World’s short-lived, now-shuttered immersive Star Wars-themed hotel. Nicholson has an uncanny gift for making highly structured arguments and narratives feel informal and off the cuff. She has also probably forgotten more about theme park history, design, and logistics than most of us ever learn. This is one of the most impactful YouTube videos released this year, garnering news attention and reviving widespread discussion about Disney’s questionable business practices.

Each year, the streaming service Mubi and the Filmadrid film festival collaborate to release a series of video essays. By far the standout in 2024 was Maria Hofmann’s “desktop horror documentary,” which uncannily replicates the way that simply existing online in the modern day can expose you to a constant stream of awful imagery. Different desktop windows — one for email, one for research, one displaying sobering news on the Mediterranean migrant crisis — shuffle about the screen, illustrating how much of modern life is compartmentalizing atrocity to the point where it becomes routine. In 2024, this feels especially apt.

Life in 2024 also means that seemingly every other week, you learn about an alleged disturbing trend or stack of how-to tips that turns out to have originated from a lot of gullible and/or grifty people playing a game of telephone over social media. It is disquieting to see, in a supposedly technologically enlightened age, how much sites like Instagram and TikTok facilitate and perpetuate almost primal superstitious thought. Sarah Z (like Nicholson, a strong practitioner of direct YouTube address) traces the junk science and fraudulent dime-store psychology seen in the myriad videos about the dangers of “narcissists” and traces them back not just to our petty need to find excuses to demonize others, but also to a literal belief in demons and spiritual warfare. Modernity is very odd, and I am frequently tired.

The Substance was one of the big lower-budget success stories and a notable engine of controversy in film this year, the latter due both to its grossness and to its ideas about womanhood, fame, and body image. Maia Wyman puts the movie in the historical context of body horror and “hagsploitation,” and how the duel between Demi Moore’s and Margaret Qualley’s characters acts out the broader cultural terror of aging and decay.