I watched a lot of movies this year: 128 of them to be exact and 74 of those were ones I watched for the first time (or first time in a long long time).
I’ve never watched this many movies in a year before. Before, if we watched a movie at home, it was likely one of a few dozen that we’ve seen countless times. On mostly a lark, after the last year Oscar nominations were announced, Meghan and I made a point to see how many of the feature-length nominations we could make it through before the actual ceremony. With all the caveats that there is a world of cinema beyond the subjective popularity contest that are award shows, it was an easy way to watch a lot of good movies we otherwise wouldn’t and take the “oh what should we watch tonight?” guesswork out of a night’s viewing. We made it through half of them, mostly skipping some of the darkest of the dark ones out of need for escape.
After that and watching many more movies last year, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I’ve yet to watch a movie that didn’t make some mark on me. The mark didn’t have to be some soul-changing alteration — and many times it was simply a new example of “not everything is made for me” — but even deciding what I enjoyed or didn’t, took away from a movie or didn’t, or what landed or what missed told me more about what movies mean to me, or what a movie could be.
This has shifted the goal from picking the “perfect” movie — highly rated, mass-market appeal, familiar names, etc — with a very likely outcome of being a movie we’d enjoy for the usual reasons, to picking any movie and letting it tell me what it wants to tell me about movies and moviemaking. The joy is I’ve seen a lot of things I would have never seen and, in nearly every case, I got something out of it I wasn’t expecting.
Some of the highlights from the past year:
High and Low (1963, dir: Akira Kurosawa): While taking place in mid-20th century Japan, this movie still had the familiar layers and deeply human characters of his samurai movies (Rashomon and Seven Samurai are 2 of my favorites). The movie had suspense and mystery and moments of deep sadness that Kurosawa’s other movies possess, but set in a modern city with a very modern plot (eg, drug use, ransom notes, telephone games) while still presenting humans in their all their high and lows (no pun intended, I think) made this one one of the highlights of the year.
Do the Right Thing (1989, dir: Spike Lee): Ashamed to admit that this is the first Spike Lee movie I’ve sat down and watched in completeness and all I can say is that I’ve missed out. Set over the course of a single day in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, you feel as if you are watching a curated set of vignettes of what life is like from different people with different backgrounds in different stations in life each trying to do what is right but doing, like we all do, switching between seeing the humanity of each person and the “category” of person depending on who is around and what is at stake. I loved it.
Aftersun (2022, dir: Charlotte Wells): This one is a movie Meghan and I watched on a small hotel room TV in Copenhagen after a long day of walking on a just-me-and-her vacation without kids. The movie features a dad (Paul Mescal) and his daughter (Frankie Corio) on a vacation where the child captures, often on an old VHS recorder, a human who is also a father who is also a provider who also has anxieties about other people, money, who strives and fails and succeeds in being a good father. This one stuck with me as as a parent I’m often fixated on doing the “right” activities as I want to believe that’s what children will remember, but what I remember from my own family vacations is the dynamics of 4 humans stuck in a station wagon or a hotel room or wherever, and childhood memories are unpredictable in what they’ll capture.
Raising Arizona (1987, dir: Joel Coen): This is not a new movie for me but I re-watched it recently as part of reacquainting myself with Nicolas Cage’s character H.I. McDonnough as part of a Halloween costume and it’s possibly my favorite Coen Brothers movies. The writing is sharp, the plot is ridiculous, Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter are perfect, the set design, costume design, and cinematography pull together in a way to make this a peak comedy that I’d watch again and again.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985, dir: Paul Schrader): I randomly pulled this one off the (digital) shelf one night, knowing nothing about it and I was blown away. The plot is about the life of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, as shown through the lens of 4 different novels he wrote, each with their own colors and tone. Mishima himself was a complicated and problematic man, which made each scene have a tension beyond the simply push-and-pull on the screen. This was also one of the purely pretty movies I’ve seen. I watched it solo and made a point to rewind and show specific parts (the temple scene in the beginning!) to Meghan just because it was good enough to share. The ending (not spoiling anything) was haunting and felt like an appropriate ending for that life lived that way.
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These were just a few highlights of movies and moviewatching for the past year. I look forward to watching a lot more in 2025 — there’s a big world of cinema out there.