The Signal Watch Presents: Favorite Movies of 2024

This is part three of my yearly rundown of the movies of the prior year.  

Here's the movies I liked least of the movies I watched in 2024.  

Here's a breakdown of the films I watched in 2024.  

Before you ask me "Did you watch (name of movie)?", you can check this handy spreadsheet for what I watched and when.

So, here's the ground rules (before y'all start complaining):

These are The Best movies *to me*.  Thus, they were my favorite movies in 2024.  These used to be The Krypto Awards, but I got tired of photoshopping pictures of Krypto.

I'm not going to pretend that liking movies isn't subjective and/ or that something is objectively "the best".  This is not a timed foot-race with precision cameras.  What you see below is just what I liked, and, pals, what I think doesn't matter to anyone but me, so cool your jets.

These are movies I saw for the first time in 2024.  It doesn't mean the movies were released in 2024.  Watching only new movies is for chumps and dilettantes.  New releases are good, but my FOMO for being part of a cultural moment around a movie is non-existent in 2024.

Now, this year's list is not going to be mind-boggling.  I went down a path of seeking out movies that are considered classics and remain well known and well-liked.  And I did this across a few genres.  So, if you saw me saying "I think this Orson Welles is onto something..." you may be right in guessing that I am not breaking new ground here.

The Signal Watch Presents: Worst Movies of 2024

I liked how I structured this last year, so I'll do it again here in 2024.  But broken up into Worst and Best posts.  

Here's a breakdown of the movies we watched in 2024.  

I know folks like Simon and Stuart watch many more movies per year than me, but it was a big year of movies at my house.

I'd also say - I've found the healthiest way to watch movies is not to worry about awards shows, the zeitgeist or common consensus.  Like what you like, for whatever reason you like it.  Someone will always find a reason your opinions are bad or wrong, buy... yeah?  Well, you know. That's just, like, their opinion, man.

Let's start off by being hurtful.  You can ignore my feelings or argue with about Ember Days in the comments.

The Worst Things I Saw in 2024

2024 Watch: Movies By The Numbers

Movies By The Numbers - Previous Years

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

In case you didn't notice, this site is really my personal film-watching-journal.  Yes, it's available to you, because we're pals, but it's mostly for me to keep track of movies and jot down what I thought.

A few years ago now, I started compiling some numbers to get some metrics.  I believe it stemmed out of a concern I was re-watching too many movies and not checking out enough new-to-me films.  There is no right or wrong way of watching movies, exactly - though I will argue "that's not how movie watching works" from time to time when I get my dander up.

Anyway, our categories this year are:

• Decade of release
• Month in which movies were watched
• How many movies did I watch for the first time
• What genre does the movie represent best
• In what format did I watch movies
• Was the movie a new movie
• How many Godzilla movies did I watch

And, to start off - I watched movies 253 times in 2024.

If you want, you can check out the spreadsheet here.

Vampire Watch: Nosferatu (2024)

Watched:  12/29/2024

Format:  Cinepolis Theater

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Eggers

I am looking forward to seeing this movie again soon, which I believe I am planning to do with PalMrshl.

SPOILERS BELOW

As advertised, Nosferatu (2024) is a gloriously detailed, stylized retelling of the 1922 classic horror film.  That original film, in turn, was a copyright-infringing German production that liberally stole from the novel Dracula, changed some names, set the story in Northern Germany, and had a production company with weird, cultish origins.  

In general, I was looking forward to my third Robert Eggers film, having previously seen The VVitch and The Northman.  A big, studio remake of Nosferatu is something I think could go a lot of ways, but if anyone working now was going to do it, Eggers was one of the strongest choices.  I'd only seen two of his three prior films, but I think - and argue with me here - Eggers isn't so much concerned with telling wildly original stories, but telling almost primordial stories and relaying them in ways that show why those stories work, and that it's in the teller and telling that we get at what the stories are about in ways that declutter them from romanticism and remove some of the guard rails.  

Example:  The VVitch is the earliest Anglo North American arcana - it captures the old world fears we brought to the New World as we faced it's sprawling wilderness we couldn't quite tame. Against that backdrop, our concerns about the unknown were turned inward and metastasized.  Those concerns continue to manifest and mutate in paranoid American fantasies that go well beyond the scope of this post.  The Northman is a sort of proto-Hamlet, digging into Nordic tradition and beliefs, and bringing the brutality of the stories in the Eddas to life, exploring revenge in a world that relishes might making right.  With some promise of glory for the fallen warrior along the way.

For veterans of prior incarnations of Nosferatu, whether we're talking the 1922 film or the 1979 version by Werner Herzog, there's a mix of old and new in Eggers' vision.  It's certainly, at it's core, not too different from the original 1922 version, but expanded and...  really well considered.  

President Jimmy Carter Merges With The Infinite

Former US President Jimmy Carter, the President who was in office when I became aware of what a President was circa 1978-79, has passed at the age of 100.

He was proceeded in death by his wife Rosalyn in 2023.  They had been married since 1946.

President Carter was president in the post-Watergate era of the U.S.A., and oversaw challenges such as the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Three Mile Island, which included him walking right into the plant as someone with a background in nuclear engineering.  He opened up Camp David for the Egyptians and Israeli governments to meet, leading to the Camp David Accords.  

He lost the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, but would go on to show how one can be of service to a country, acting as a peace ambassador and representative for Habitat for Humanity.

President Carter will be missed.