I see over 300 movies each year, and every time, I am hoping for an especially rewarding experience. Here are my favorite movie-going experiences of 2024.
- A special screening of Four Friends at the Cambria Film Festival with stars Craig Wasson, Reed Birney and Jim Metzler. Critics loved this 1981 Arthur Penn film, and I loved it, and almost nobody else saw it. A film about an aspirational blue-collar young man in the turbulent Vietnam Era (like me), this film deeply resonated with me in 1981 and continues to do so. Grievously underrated, Four Friends isn’t available to stream and is very hard to find. It was wonderful to see it agaon, this time with an audience and the filmmakers.
- Noir City: In recent years, Eddie Muller and team have been introducing me to international film noir. This year, they came through with the French Symphony for a Massacre and the British Across the Bridge. I attended Noir City in-person in Oakland, and I’ll be returning in January 2025.
- Slamdance: This blog loves directorial debuts and world premieres – and that’s what Slamdance is all about. This year, the best two films were Italian: The Complex Forms and The Accident.
- Cinequest: The film festival that launched this blog was once again rich with world premieres. The best were The Invisibles, Pain and Peace, and The Island Between the Tides, and the North American premiere of Human Resources. presented the remarkable In the Summers.
- Nashville Film Festival: NashFilm has become one of my favorite film fests, and this year introduced me to In the Summers, which made my year-end top ten.
- SFFILM: This time, SFFILM delivered two surprises of surrealism and absurdism: Mother Couch and The Practice.
- San Luis Obispo International Film Festival: This year, the SLO Film Fest soared with its unique and very deep surf/skate program, and two indie charmers, Tokyo Cowboy and Chasing, Chasing Amy.
- Frameline: San Francisco’s major LGBTQ fest brought us Gondola, another charming, dialogue-free comedy from German writer-director Veit Helmer, this one set in Georgia.
- San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: The SFJFF is a major Jewish cultural event held against the backdrop of current events in Israel and Gaza, and the SFJFF leaned right into what would otherwise be the elephant in the room. I’ve been covering the SFJFF since 2016, I’m not Jewish and I can attest that this attitude is nothing new. I’ve seen SFJFF films with Palestinian voices, by Palestinian and Israeli Arab filmmakers, and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- Not for the first time: I re-experienced Man on a Train, The Day of the Jackal, The Valley of Elah and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
- Palm Theater: My hometown arthouse delivered The Taste of Things, La Chimera, Wicked Little Letters, Ghostlight, How to Come Alive, Didi, The Outrun, Anora, A Real Pain, Queer and A Complete Unknown.
- Sweetheart Deal: I’ve reviewed fifteen documentaries this year and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival. Sweetheart Deal is the best documentary I’ve seen this year.
- The Bikeriders: Jeff Nichols has written and directed six films, and I have loved all five that I have seen, including this latest one with Jodie Comer’s fine performance.
- Netflix: I expected Richard Linklater’s Hit Man to be good (and it was), but I was totally surprised by The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
TO TOP EVERYTHING ELSE
This is not technically movie-GOING, but it topped my movie-RELATED experiences of 2024. The Wife and I were joined by our friends Keith, Cynthia and Nisan on a bucket list pilgrimage to the 105-year-old Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank Grill. The Wife and I sat at the bar where William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett imbibed (and where Hammett wrote). We dined at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s regular booth and passed by Charlie Chaplin’s regular table by the front window. (The old-school martini and the sweetbreads were the best I’ve had.)
THE WORST
I usually don’t have a “ten worst movie” list because I only choose to watch movies that I hope will be exceptionally good. After all, I don’t have an editor assigning me to review soulless franchise movies, predictable rom coms and cheesy horror flicks. And, I generally just choose NOT to write about a bad indie – indie filmmakers have invested years of their lives in their films, and they just don’t need snark from somebody like me. But EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, some film crosses the line.
This year, that film was a world premiere at Slamdance, the Japanese high school coming of age film House of Se, where one of the main characters is a menstruophile who swipes all the used sanitary napkins in the school. Anyone who makes a film this transgressive really must deliver a movie with some minimal production values and a coherent story, which House of Se fails to do. Of the 300+ movies that I watched in 2024, House of Se is unquestionably the very worst.
I did despise Kinds of Kindness and The Dead Don’t Hurt, but at least they were competently made.