context: bcj and richard and i came up with a bunch of award categories as an excuse to talk about films we watched in 2024. (sorry, but… none of mine actually came out in 2024.) i possibly went too hard and wrote an "i ain't readin all that" amount of text in response to these prompts, and while this list covers an awful lot of movies that i liked and why, there are still a bunch that didn't even make it on here! did you know that there are simply so many movies. wow!
movie that i specifically most needed to see: Persona (1966) #
I had previously been told that I had to see Persona and, not at all shockingly, people were correct about this. Basically required viewing for anyone as preoccupied with the malleable boundaries between self and other and the performance and enactment of identity as I am. (Also there's a voluntarily (?) nonverbal actress so, uh, I can see maybe why people would think of me.) Persona is so clearly influential on probably every film dealing with themes of performance and identity in a post-Persona world — Inland Empire immediately comes to mind, and there are probably so many more I'm not aware of because I am still a little baby when it comes to watching movies.
On top of that… there's also so much about film, photography, memory, history, femininity, motherhood, … – many symbols and ideas that I noticed in passing on my first watch, but that I've barely begun to really think about. An incredibly dense yet approachable (imo?) film with some of the most stunning film-as-material manipulations I've ever seen. Honestly I specifically also need to see this at least three more times to start speaking at all intelligently about it.
Honorable mention: Very tempting to list like 10 movies here but instead I will just say The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, as it was my introduction to Raúl Ruiz, an incredibly prolific director with a really interesting philosophy around filmmaking. I have only watched this one other film by him, and they are both somehow the most simultaneously oblique and straightforward films I've ever seen. This film is also the one that led me to Last Year at Marienbad, which could itself also be an honorable mention… but I am not listing like 10 movies here.
movie that i felt most seen by: We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) #
I was stumped on this category until I re-read my Letterboxd review, in which I literally wrote "i feel So Deeply Seen" — haha! This was a rewatch, but also rewatching a movie is like seeing it for the first time after all the other times you've already seen it. There's not much more I can say other than there are some very specific and particular ways that I relate to Casey, and also if you're me, sometimes you see a strip of highway that probably strikes others as dead and miserable nothingness, which it is, but it also hits really weird because your family drove through there hundreds of times when you were growing up. (#geoguessr experts eat your hearts out, etc)
Honorable mention: Wings of Desire, not the entire movie but specifically the scene with the trapeze artist in her trailer around the half-hour mark. The depiction of her inner monologue is so uncannily resonant with how I experience myself when I am alone that it actually freaked me out a little. (I've also rewatched this scene twice since then to confirm that I'm not making this up.) I brought this up with one of the people that I watched this with and was a little surprised that they did not relate at all!! So apparently this experience is not universal and that, I guess, makes me feel all the more seen by it.
most honest movie: Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974) #
Chantal Akerman really went ahead and wrote, directed, and starred in a movie in which she included 10+ minute scenes of her eating sugar out of a brown paper bag and having sex with an ex-girlfriend (in the film, as a character. I do not know the actual personal circumstances outside the universe of the film). This is raw as hell and also the kind of shit where I am 100% convinced that it is grounded in some extremely personal experience because, well… because.
Honorable mentions (annoying): For a little while I could not figure out what this category meant to me, so I had F for Fake (1973) and David Holzman's Diary (1967) written down as my top candidates.
Honorable mentions (sincere): Pretend That You Love Me (2020) has a pretty intense metanarrative that, while it does not go as hard as Chantal Akerman, is definitely Up There in terms of visceral vulnerability with some of the performance work that Nathan Fielder has done. Cameraperson (2016) is the most deeply personal look through oneself that I've ever seen committed to film.
coolest practical effect: Phase IV (1974) #
Is "tons of extremely cool macro shots of ants" a practical effect? I'm saying so. Although I'm sorry and RIP to all the ants that died in the making of this film (sincerely).
Honorable mention: Eva's horse tail in Piaffe (2022). Because her horse tail was extremely fucking cool. Also if all the foley counts then also the foley!
best long take: Vive L'Amour (1994) #
2024 was my year of discovering that I am sooo into "slow cinema", and one of the first movies that brought me to this realization was Vive L'Amour. The ending sequence is five straight minutes of a woman experiencing very big emotions and to sit with her in this time is… really an experience. My heart aches just thinking about it.
Honorable mentions: Restraining myself from listing every Tsai Ming-Liang movie I watched this year here, but Days (2020) is simply a movie composed from top to bottom of some of the most beautiful and moving long takes I have ever seen in cinema, including one that was so subtle that I both had to check that my video had not frozen and also made me gasp when I finally noticed the movement. I already talked about Je, Tu, Il, Elle and mentioned some of those long takes in passing; Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles also ends with a fucking incredible long take of all time.
best on-screen piss: The Piano Teacher (2001) #
When Erika goes to the drive-in and squats and pisses next to that car? Yeah. I will watch Isabelle Huppert piss anywhere (not weird (Isabelle would understand)).
Honorable mentions: The piss in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is the most anticipated a piss has ever been in the movies, I think.
pervert movie month (ongoing) pervert movie of the year: Crash (1996) #
Honestly? The movie that taught me that actually I can get really into pervert movies. It's just awesome is the thing. Also I got to see this in a theater and definitely felt A Way about all the banged-up cars I saw while walking home. It took a week or two for me to actually admit to myself how much I like this movie and it also retroactively changed my feelings about The Piano Teacher and now I am glad that Pervert Movie Month never ends thanks to this movie.
Honorable mentions: The Piano Teacher, Piaffe… Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) but in a totally different way. There are all sorts of ways to be a pervert and that's great.
best reflection, indirection, doubling, or mirroring: Certified Copy (2010) #
I struggled so much with the "mirror" categories because how am I supposed to choose!!! Early on in Certified Copy, there is a scene where the two leads are driving out of the city, and the shot is through the windshield of the car, with the reflection of the moving buildings around them cast superimposed on their faces with the great big sky separating them, and this visual combined with the conversation they are having drove me Fully Insane (extremely complimentary).
Honorable mentions: The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting for sheer amount of conceptual and literal doubling and indirection??? In a sense that is the entire movie? Don't get me started on Last Year at Marienbad.
best in-theater movie experience: Irma Vep (1996) #
This was a blast because of course the theater was filled with people who were big fans of Irma Vep to begin with. I really wanted to go in a black catsuit but I don't own a black catsuit but I did wear as much skintight black stuff as I could and that was fun! But this actually wins because, although I had seen the movie before and knew what was coming, I was not expecting at all to be so moved by the ending sequence when seeing it on The BIG! Screen, to the point where I was crying and just completely consumed with the concept of "movies are so awesome".
Honorable mentions: As mentioned before… I saw Crash in a theater!!! I think it's awesome to sit in a big room full of people you don't know and watch people get extremely kinky with cars in the most cold and detached way possible. What a special and great experience.
Note: This category can be fairly traded with Best In-Movie Movie Experience.
best in-movie movie experience: Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) #
Would that I had gone and seen this in the theater (I had the opportunity! 😭) so that I could have it win both this and the above category. Alas! The thing is this movie is what going to the movies is all about. Which is to say, uh. People can do anything at the movies. Or something.
Note: This category can be fairly traded with Best In-Theater Movie Experience.
movie that i'm most frightened by the idea that i almost never watched it: Drive My Car (2021) #
In terms of "becoming a cinephile" or "developing my taste" or whatever, this is hands-down the most important movie that I watched in 2024. It takes this category because I saw it early in the year, I came across it kind of serendipitously (i.e., it was not recommended to me personally by anyone I knew — one night when I couldn't sleep, I happened to watch another film by the same director just because I found the title intriguing, and liked that one so much that I decided to check this out next), and it led me down so many other roads with regard to What Kind of Film I Like — both the kind of dialogue that I'm most interested in, and also all the quiet moments. This is the whole reason I went Éric Rohmer mode (although he has not shown up on this list, he is actually my most watched director of 2024!), and is also a factor in me paying a lot more attention to slow cinema (although I would say Hamaguchi is working adjacent to rather than within that style).
So far I have talked about this movie in terms of its influence on my movie watching, but at a much deeper level, it was also the most personally affecting movie that I watched the entire year. There are many, many lines from it that I jotted down, that stuck with me, that I referred to over and over again in my own self-reflection and struggle with being a person in the world. (I rewatched this a few days ago and there are three sticky notes right next to me with more quotes from this movie.) And it also brought me to finally reading a bunch of Chekhov's short stories and plays!! I own three different English translations of Uncle Vanya now. Normal :)
most interesting adaptation: Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) #
This one is kind of complicated! Funeral Parade of Roses is a very loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the world of queer Tokyo in the late 1960s — which on its own is such a wild-and-out concept, right?? It's extremely interesting in that… it just never would have occurred to me to tell a story like that, at all. The parts that are most explicitly derived from this adaptation are also the ones I found the most troubling when watching the film itself, but also, what would Funeral Parade of Roses be without that particular narrative structure? Plenty, and yet…
Honorable mention: I have been trying not to repeat any movies on this list and also I have not even read Haruki Murakami's short story Drive My Car, but I really do believe that the movie Drive My Car transcends its source material in a very special way. However, this does not necessarily make it "most interesting". I think I just wanted an excuse to keep talking about it.
best use of mirror (literal): Last Year at Marienbad (1960) #
It's finally happened, I've finally gotten to the movie that I feared I would not be able to shut up about when I was first looking over this list of categories. (I could absolutely find a way to make this the answer to every single category without even trying too hard.)
There is a scene early on in this movie where the camera appears to be trained on a couple having a conversation. As the camera pulls out, we see that not only have we been seeing this couple through a mirror, but that there is yet another couple outside of the mirror, and the conversation is no longer in sync with the couple in the mirror but rather with the couple outside the mirror. Maybe this sounds mundane but trust me, the experience of it is like, what. This kind of shit is happening constantly in Last Year at Marienbad and I go completely insane for it because of course I do. (Also: if there are any inaccuracies here, it is because I am writing all this from memory and must avoid the rabbit hole of opening up the movie to find this scene and get it perfectly right.)
Honorable mention: Very annoyingly… the actual best use of mirror (literal), emphasis on the literal, may have also been in Drive My Car. There is a mirror between the apartment foyer and living area, and some crucial plot information is delivered via this mirror, and I simply think it's extremely well done.
movie that taught me something: Dead Slow Ahead (2015) #
Sure, I could go read up about container ships and gain an intellectual understanding of them — but this movie offered me a particular affective experience of a container ship, the incredible enormity of the ship as an object as well as a specific instancing/presencing/marker of global capitalism, at once the most human and inhuman of things. I think there is something incredibly important about what this film is doing stylistically… I have yet to work out my thoughts here, but something to do with nonrepresentational material depictions of phenomena that feel beyond comprehension — Dead Slow Ahead does something to bridge hyperobjects with actual objects, and humans. I really need to watch this one again actually.
Honorable mention: In my notes I have written "the goddamn plastics short" because this taught me about how styrene is great made. I also wrote Last Things (2023) because it taught me some real information about theories of abiogenesis and mineral evolution (rocks are also evolving!!), but also I unfortunately cannot say I retained any of it in such a way that I can really talk about it!
most ill-advised drug or recreational experience that i would still try after seeing the movie: Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) #
In particular, the "1966 goop". I'm not sure what would happen but I bet I would be pretty fine and normal afterwards? It might be a harrowing and traumatic experience but in theory I am very willing to practice experiential intensity so it might be good for me actually. I don't think I would become evil anyway. I simply have too pure of a heart.
Honorable mentions (annoying): One of my constraints for this was not being allowed to pick the drug from Altered States (1980). My most annoying answer does not even involve a particular movie, but is just "talking to other human beings", because I presume this is a recreational activity and some of the movies that I have seen make it seem pretty ill-advised. But also one could argue that it's not even true that I would still try it because (long pause) (end of sentence).
bonus categories! #
Best product placement: The goddamn plastics short. Honorable mention that came in just under the wire: the Marlboro car in Every Man for Himself (1980).
Best mime/clown: How could I choose any one particular mime in Blow-Up (1966)??? They are all perfect. Honorable mention: the clown that drives by William Hurt for like 2 seconds in Body Heat (1981).
Best chair: I still don't have an answer for this, time to scramble for one! OH — Toys (1992) must have had some kind of great and stupid chair. It just must have.
wow that was a lot of words and movies!!! if for some reason you thought this was fun and made it all the way down here, feel free to follow me on letterboxd. i had a great time finally getting into movies in 2024, shoutouts to my friends who got me into movies and showed me movies and watched movies with me and invited me to watch movies with them! movies!!!