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