SJ
stevejames.me

2024 End of Year: Movies

It's been a little while since I've written anything here, for various reasons, but with the end of 2024 sailing off into the past, what better way to get back on the proverbial horse than with some good old fashioned end of year lists! (I never did see why people publish these articles at they start of December, when there's still a month of stuff to go…)

Let's start with a Films of 2024 list. I'm not the biggest film buff, and my movie-watching habits tend be to rather sporadic, having phases of watching films regularly, and then maybe nothing for months. I really should get into the habit of having something like a 'Friday night is film night' schedule.

2024 was a bit of a washout film-wise for me. I didn't really watch all that much (18 films), and of what I did watch, not much really stood out. That said I didn't really seek out much that was out of the mainstream, as I often I was watching late into the evening, and generally wanted something that was pretty on they eye and easy on the brain. Oh, and there's a few kids films in there, because you do sometimes have to sit and watch with them.

Of the few films I watched, the standouts from an eye-candy perspective were problem Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Alien: Romulus. I'm still patiently waiting for them to do the movie where an xenomorph queen makes it to Earth, but until then Romulus was the best entry in the Alien canon from some time, maybe since Aliens?

The best of the rest, and my favourite film of the year (although it was released in 2023) was Past Lives, by director Celine Song. A very different film to the Apes or Alien, which probably tells I need to watch more like this next year.

The worst? Well, that's was probably a tie between the utter mess that was Argylle (the only film on this list I didn't manage to watch all the way through), and the overblown nonsense of Kong x Godzilla: The New Empire.

Anyway, in reverse chronological order, here are the films I watched in 2024.

I use the Letterboxd service to log and track the films I watch - you can see my Letterboxd profile here.