This morning, before the coffee hit--at which point I would no longer have an excuse to procrastinate from the writing I'm supposed to be doing -- I scratched out two lists: one of my favorite new movies of 2024, and another of my favorite older films that I watched for the first time in 2024. On the former, the caveat is that I don't have much time to watch new movies, and usually when I do I feel like my time has been wasted. So there are many things I haven't seen. If your favorite film is not on this list, maybe I haven't seen it! (Or maybe I thought it was garbage, in which case, I will never speak of it). On the older films list, I left off anything I watched in research for the upcoming season of You Must Remember This, because you'll hear all about those soon enough (new episodes coming January 14!). Enjoy!
Favorite new movies of 2024 (in order of preference):
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)
Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
Maria (Pablo Larrain)
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
My Old Ass (Megan Park)
A few more that I liked, just not quite as much: The Beast (Bertrand Bonello), A Traveller’s Needs (Hong Sang Soo), Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 (Kevin Costner), Challengers (Luca Guadanigno), Babygirl (Halina Reijn), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg), Anora (Sean Baker)
Favorite first-time watches (in chronological order of when in the year I saw them):
Mahjong (Edward Yang)
Smog (Franco Rossi)
The Damned Don’t Cry (Vincent Sherman)
Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl)
Intermezzo (Douglas Sirk)
Party Girl (Nicholas Ray)
The House By the River (Fritz Lang)
From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophuls)
Yoru no Kawa/Undercurrent (Kōzaburō Yoshimura)
City For Conquest (Anatole Litvak)
Lady for a Night (Leigh Jason)
Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack)
The Outsider (Bela Tarr)
Gone to Earth (Powell & Pressburger; I had seen it on YouTube, but watching it on 35mm made me feel like I had never seen it before)
The Lady in Question (Charles Vidor)
The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)
Lucky to Be a Woman (Alessandro Blasetti)
The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak)
The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn)