Every year I take it upon my self to watch more movies I’ve never seen before than movies I have seen. I keep track of all those “new to me” watches and rank them for the end of the year. This year I found a lot of art therapy in these movies I’ve never seen before, and I think my Top Ten First Watches of 2024 will reflect that cinematic healing well.

Honorable Mentions

Fright Night (1985)

A frightful homage to the classic Dracula films but with modern (for the times) effects and gore. A really great romp featuring the late great Roddy McDowall.

The Alien Franchise

I’d only seen the first two installments before this year, but did a deep dive post-Romulus. Even the bad Alien films are good, and that is a hill I am willing to die on.

They Came Together (2014)

The most absurd movie I’ve seen this year. As a big fan of David Wain and the State, I can’t believe it took me this long to find this movie. You can say that again.

Head Office (1985)

I love a good comedy about the world of yuppies and there is a ten minute running joke to open this film that is my favorite joke maybe ever.

Eating Raoul (1982)

A couple strapped for cash starts placing ads in the paper looking for swingers for them to rob and murder. The main characters later cameoed in a much different and totally unrelated movie I coincidentally watched a few months later, Chopping Mall.

10. Chungking Express (1994)

Wong Kar-Wai films were my therapy this spring and summer. The longest relationship I’ve ever been in ended with me getting cheated on almost as soon as we went long distance. While Shrek 2‘s triumphant return to theaters got me through the initial shock, I needed movies to speak to me on a deeper romantic level. It was for this reason that I pursued the Wong Kar-Wai catalogue, and Chungking Express will not be the only one of his films to make this list.

This movie is a really moving exploration of loneliness and isolation, a romance that doesn’t play out between two people who move on and lose interest at different times.

9. Days of Being Wild (1990)

Speaking of Wong Kar-Wai…

This was the film that unintentionally started my Wong Kar-Wai dive. What I enjoyed about this watch was that I was already familiar with this film’s spiritual successor, In the Mood for Love, which made my Top Ten list last year. There was an interesting perspective to watching these films out of order and to seeing the very loosely connected elements out of place.

There’s a common sermon talking point about how the English language lacks the vocabulary for different types of love, making translation an issue when the Greek language has many words that we have all distilled down into one. Days of Being Wild is a film that explores all those different variations of love, taking a long and uncomfortable look at how we fall in love, get overwhelmed by it, get lost in it, and find the people who we either love or lose our love for.

8. The Naked Gun: 2 1/2- The Smell of Fear (1991)

I love the first The Naked Gun film, but I hadn’t seen its sequels since I was a kid. I love this movie and how well it manages to do the exact same thing as the first while also doing exactly the opposite. Leslie Nielsen is one of the funniest humans to have ever lived and he nails every line. It leans into absurdity and understands my favorite comedic troupe of saying something that isn’t that funny over and over again until it is.

7. Robocop (1987)

Another one of those movies I had vague memories of having seen in my youth, but couldn’t remember much of. It’s a super violent, biting satire of the corporatization of public services and the dangers of a society where profits negatively correlate with well-being. Coincidentally, Robocop is one of my favorite characters to play as in MK 11.

6. A King in New York (1957)

This is a really interesting movie that needs the context of its star’s real life drama to be fully appreciated. Ousted from US moviedom by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Charlie Chaplin made a movie to express his beef. A King in New York finds Chaplin playing a King become Pauper in the Greatest City in the World, going through all sorts of political and public antics to keep his status in a world of vultures.

5. Blithe Spirit (1945)

David Lean is another director I am slowly whittling my way through, chipping away at a few of his movies every year. Blithe Spirit is one of my favorites this year because it is much more mature than the status quo of comedies of the 1940’s; riddled with sex, affairs, and cynicism to a greater degree than I expected from a black and white. Yet it’s still cheeky and PG the entire time, despite being a movie about the spirit of a man’s ex-wife who haunts him and his new beau.

4. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

I’ve heard about this one for a while but never got around to it until this year. Eyes Without a Face is a surprisingly dark and gory film for its time, exploring the pursuits of a mad doctor kidnapping young women in an attempt to recreate his injured daughter’s face. There is some truly haunting imagery in this film and it is a must watch for anyone interested in horror through the decades.

3. Paper Moon (1973)

The very first movie I watched in 2024 sat at the top of my list until near the end of the year. This movie is about a Bible salesman who uses a girl who may or may not be, but definitely is, his illegitimate daughter to bolster his profits. It’s a really funny buddy comedy set in the backdrop of the Depression that explores involuntary fatherhood and how the grind of poverty often reduces a man to something less than himself.

2. The Martian (2015)

I know that I saw this in theaters back in 2015, but it was another one of those movies that I couldn’t remember much of. Since I’d done an Alien deep dive, I was already on my way to a Ridley Scott deep dive and figured “might as well.” The Martian is a really tense drama about the science of exploration, the cost, and the strings attached to the bureaucracy of it all.

1. 2046 (2004)

Cathartic is how In would describe my experience watching 2046. The film’s premise of the fictional utopia of 2046 is a little jarring upon entry, but after that exposition is laid the film is nothing short of being breathtakingly, heartbreakingly, beautiful. I went through actual therapy post-breakup, but the films of Wong Kar-Wai helped me find the universal truths behind those emotions. This is a film that stepped on my toes at times, but it was one that was instrumental in understanding and processing where I was at when I watched it. It’s a beautiful post-mortem on love that captures something even more somber than Kar-Wai did in Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love.

2024 First Time Watches

For a rundown of all my first time watches in 2024, check out my Letterboxd List.