Stop the Lists! 2024

Musing Outloud about Memorable Movies and Women Directors

Still from Rumours

I started tracking the movies I was watching again in 2023 just to see what would come from it, and to be honest it didn’t do much for me. What it taught me is that there’s a distinction between remembering you’ve seen a movie and wanting to remember movies, and the more movies you see the harder it is to do either.

I had actually set a goal in 2024 to watch no more than 100 feature films rather than watch a lot of movies. I failed, I actually watched 115. However if I want to move the goal posts, I only watched 92 new-to-me movies, the rest were rewatches.

Speaking of rewatches, 2024 was unusual in that I watched movies multiple times the same year, sometimes even in cinemas. Twisters, I Saw the TV Glow, and Hundreds of Beavers I watched multiple screenings of, The Holdovers I watched twice in a couple of weeks, and I Saw the TV Glow and The Substance I rewatched at home after seeing in cinemas. Twisters¹ and I Saw the TV Glow I watched three times! I haven’t done that since I was a kid.

Still from Hundreds of Beavers

Also this year I stumbled across movies I didn’t like very much, and a couple I outright hated. Normally I’m good at avoiding stuff I don’t like, but this year a couple-few movies blindsiding my expectations. I won’t list them because I follow a policy of not driving attention to bad work.

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The list, in chronological order. Bold are theatrical screenings, italics are rewatches, asterices I saw in festivals and not sure about commercial distribution. Dates are included if they’re older releases, in other words from years previous to 2024 or 2023:

1. American Fiction

2. Portrait of a Young Man (1925-1931)

3. Occupied City

4. Saltburn

5. Reminiscence (2021)

6. The Internship (2015)

7. I.S.S.

8. Tótem

9. How to Have Sex

10. Strays

11. Lisa Frankenstein

12. The Taste of Things (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant)

13. Past Lives

14. Streets of Fire (1984)

15. The Five Devils (Les Cinq Diables) (2022)

16. Ava (2017)

17. Problemista

18. Black Sun (Sol Negro) (2016)

19. Shrek (en español) (2001)

20. Stopmotion

21. Drive-Away Dolls

22. Love Lies Bleeding

23. The Sweet East

24. Club Zero

25. Hundreds of Beavers

26. Antz (1998)

27. The Old Guard (2020)

28. La Chimera

29. The Blob (1988)

30. Alice in Wonderland (en español) (1951)

31. The People's Joker

32. The Beast

33. Made of Honor (2008)

34. Coup de Chance

35. Before the Volcano Sings (2022)

36. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something has Passed

37. The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

38. Red Earth

39. I Saw the TV Glow

40. The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske) (2021)

41. Miller's Girl

42. Civil War

43. ClearMind

44. Downtown Owl

45. Shiva Baby (2020)

46. The Movie Teller (La Contadora de Películas)

47. Challengers

48. Near Dark (1987)

49. I Saw the TV Glow

50. Invisible Nation

51. I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil) (1994)

52. I Used to Be Funny

53. Office Space (1999)

54. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover (1989)

55. Finding Nemo (2003)

56. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)

57. Aftersun

58. Kinds of Kindness

59. Team America: World Police (2004)

60. Thelma

61. Paint

62. Twisters

63. Point Break (1991)

64. House of Waltz *

65. Twisters

66. Bottoms

67. The Fifth Element (1997)

68. A Wonderful Way with Dragons *

69. Last Summer (L'été dernier)

70. I Saw the TV Glow

71. Dude, Where's My Car?! (2000)

72. Crystal Swan (Khrustal, 2018)

73. Monsters (2010)

74. Sing Sing

75. Sometimes I Think about Dying

76. Between the Temples

77. EuroTrip (2004)

78. Slums of Beverly Hills (1998)

79. Close Your Eyes (Cerrar Los Ojos)

80. Drive (2011)

81. My First Film

82. Twisters

83. Scary Movie (2000)

84. Winter's Bone (2010)

85. The Substance

86. Frankenhooker (1990)

87. Megalopolis

88. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

89. The Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

90. The Slumber Party Massacre (2021)

91. Rumours

92. Blood Tea & Red String (2006)

93. Death Becomes Her (1992)

94. Revenge (2018)

95. Memoir of a Snail

96. The Holdovers

97. Empire Waist

98. Emilia Pérez

99. Bird

100. The Fabelmans (2022)

101. The Substance

102. Tropic Thunder (2008)

103. Anora

104. 13 Going on 30 (2004)

105. Werewolf (2016)

106. River of Grass (1994)

107. Down with Love (2003)

108. Flow

109. The Holdovers

110. Hundreds of Beavers

111. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

112. The Family Man (2000)

113. My Old Ass

114. Queer

115. The Brutalist

Still from The Brutalist

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What I did last year that I think was more helpful was realizing the movies I never wrote a Movie Recommendation for, but I don’t want to forget.

So consider this as something of a chronological best-of, these are the newly seen movies I saw in 2024 that I really want to remember, revisit in the future, own on Blu-Ray, not have lost to the whims of time:

Occupied City

Ava (2017)

Stopmotion

Love Lies Bleeding

Hundreds of Beavers

The People's Joker

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something has Passed

I Saw the TV Glow

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover (1989)

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)

House of Waltz

A Wonderful Way with Dragons

Close Your Eyes (Cerrar Los Ojos)

The Substance

Megalopolis

Rumours

Blood Tea & Red String (2006)

The Holdovers

Flow

The Brutalist

Still from Flow

That comes to 21 movies or a little more than 1/6th of the movies I watched. Not bad. Also that’s about how many movies I listed as wanting to remember in 2023, when I watched far more movies, so maybe a person can only take about 20 feature films’ worth of inspiration a year.

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One area where actively listing the movies I was watching actually became useful this year was in tracking directors. Let’s talk about gender equity in the film industry.

A Facebook post from a friend of mine somewhere near the end of 2023 pointed out that recent gains in women directing films may have reversed. After a surge of improving numbers from 2016 to 2021 to roughly about 20%, there was a retraction to roughly about 12%. Historically the numbers hovered between about 2.5 and 5%.

I don’t personally see any substantial reason why women aren’t given the opportunity to direct movies as often as men except historical and embedded sexism. If there’s any industry where clearly women and men are on equal footing in terms of skill, ability, and merit, telling visual stories through the production of motion pictures seems like it should be a pretty even playing field.

After my friend’s post I looked at my 2023 list and saw that roughly 12% of the movies I watched were directed by women, and that list was skewed because I watched the full Nina Menkes filmography on the Mubi retrospective that happened that year. So I decided to set a goal of doubling it, watching 25% of movies directed by women in 2024. The goal launched pretty well the first couple of months, so I upped it to 50%, just to see what would happen.

The risks here are that I’d miss out on a lot of movies I wanted to see because I was pursuing statistics rather than taste; that it would be rather difficult to maintain my weekly excursions to the cinema if there weren’t enough releases; and that it’s tough to balance when deciding what to watch with other people and following other interests.

The first risk proved not to be a problem at all. Really, I not only found great movies that served my taste, but I never felt like I was missing out on other movies in the process. None of the movies I disliked this year were directed by women.

The second risk wasn’t a problem either. It turns out that there are so many movies released a year that even if proportionally few of them are directed by women, still a good couple-three dozen movies are. I even missed quite a few releases I hope to catch up on in 2025.

The third was a little more difficult, and my goal absolutely collapsed right at the end of the year, during the holiday season, when I was watching more movies with family. In fact, name a Christmas classic movie directed by a woman. There’s plenty of like, Hallmark and Netflix originals and straight-to-streaming productions that are, but off the top of my head the stalwart classics aren’t. Yet.

Anyway, 47% of the feature films I watched in 2024 were directed by women.

Still from Love Lies Bleeding

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Am I going to keep up the 50% goal? I don’t like statistical viewing. I don’t have Letterboxd and I’m still, two years into the project of Stop the Lists!, wondering if I’m even going to keep recording what I’m watching. I’m gonna try it for one more year and see if it’s working out.

The 50% goal did result in me having to do a little more research and work in selecting movies rather than drifting wherever whim and fancy took me. And sometimes I just don’t want to do that. I’d rather land the goal probabilistically from the fateful alignment of my taste and the options merely being 50/50 with no weird historical suppressions of talent due to gender. In other words I wish it wasn’t even an issue, or remarkable. “50% of the movies you watched were directed by women? How did you even notice? 50% of everything is done by women. They’re 50% of the population.”

It’s still important to show up, because success begets success and there are plenty of women directors who deserve to be successful.

All this is to say I think I’m going to lighten my discipline on this goal for 2025 but we’ll see how it goes. It helps that I’ve already developed a habit for it, lists, am familiar with more directors, etc.

Still from The Substance

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I will end on this note:

I like contemporary movies a lot.

I went through the period where I dug into the canonical classics and checked off the best of all time lists and followed the updates of the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? list and had the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book and all that kind of stuff. I have deep reverence for the classics and I still find them deeply important to continue watching and discovering.

But man, cinema these days rules too. There’s some really fun, visually spectacular, deeply meaningful, aesthetical strong, well performed and crafted pieces of art being released all the time.

Both/And.

The one thing I am taking away from all my little viewing projects is that the delight is never ending. There’s more great movies in the world than any individual can possibly see in their entire lives, and yet there’s still infinitely more great movies waiting to be made.

Still from Stopmotion

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To read more Musing Outloud posts:

1. It should probably be noted that watching Twisters was all about the 4DX experience with the moving chairs and the ambient lighting and fog effects. I enjoyed it more as a ride than a movie, which is why I went back a couple of times with other people. As a movie it’s a fine film, but I don’t necessarily intend to see it on home viewing. Also fun fact, Twisters was the one franchise film I elected to see in theatres this year.