The Movie Journal: 2024

I watched 32 movies in December. 22 of them were new to me. 15 were made before I was born.

That’s all I’ll say about December because this is mostly going to be a year in review.

I watched 471 movies in 2024. That’s an average of 39.2 per month or 9 per week. 360 of them were new to me. For the first time since 2019 the number of movies I watched in a year was less than the previous year. I watched an astonishing 529 movies in 2023. I don’t know if I’ll ever beat that record. 471 movies is a lot so you might not believe me when I say I intentionally slowed my watching down a bit last year. I made an effort to do a little more reading and watch some television shows.

My wife and I like watching TV on weekday evenings. We try to find one or two shows we can enjoy and watch together. This year we watched our way through Remington Steele and started watching Moonlighting. We also started Twin Peaks for like the third time. Maybe this time we’ll actually make it through (we like the show, but for some reason, we’ve always gotten distracted and paused it for a long time, and it is a show you really need to have fresh on your mind).

Anyway, I definitely slowed my movie-watching down just a little bit.

I kept up several monthly themes from the previous years, dropped a few, and added several new ones. I still very much like doing these movie themes. I still say it helps me focus my movie viewing and my writing. Though some themes work better than others.

I did not watch enough movies that were made in 2024 to do any type of Top 10 list but I wanted to mention a few of my favorites.

Rebel Ridge: Jeremy Saulnier’s film plays like an update of Rambo: First Blood with less over-the-top action but a terrific central performance from Aaron Pierre. Saulnier has solidified himself as one of our best genre directors and he gets top marks from me here.

Love Lies Bleeding: I love that Kristen Stewart has carved out such an idiosyncratic career after making those Twilight films. Here she plays a reclusive gym manager who falls in love with a bodybuilder and finds herself involved with some rough gangsters. It is a terrific little thriller and it takes some unexpected turns.

Thelma: June Squibb had a long career as a wonderful character actress and this was one of the last films she made before she passed and one of the few in which she got a starring role. She’s perfect as an elderly woman who gets scammed out of some money through a telephone call and decides to take matters into her own hands.

Classic Doctor Who dominated my most-watched actors categories for most of the year and it is they who remain at the top here at the end. The only change from last month is that Barbara Stanwyck slipped into a tie for fifth place with seven films watched.

Terence Fisher rose to the top of the directors list many months ago and he managed to stay there. He directed many of the Hammer Horror films and I watched a lot of those with my wife on Friday nights. Dario Argento bumped himself to third place mostly on the heels of me watching and reviewing a collection of his made-for-TV movies.

Overall it was a very good year in movie watching. I hope to do more movie writing in the coming year and do a better job of linking to Cinema Sentries when I review something for them. Either way here’s to another great year of movie watching.