Well, another year has come and gone and I’ve watched 369 movies. That number is lower than my actual total because of festival programming I did and it’s only December 20th (when I wrote this). I fully intend to spend the last eleven days of the year bundled up on my couch with my dog just watching movies. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

I wasn’t consistent with my monthly Best First Watch lists in 2024. I promise to do better in the new year! Look, I don’t know if you know this, but time is a flying social construct and I got quite sidetracked. However, tomorrow is a new day and a new year, so let’s reflect on the past twelve months of movie-watching with this little list of my favorite first watches.

Go Fish

One of the first queer movies I ever watched that I felt I could see myself in was The Watermelon Woman. It’s about a twenty-something lesbian working at a video store in the ‘90s. It’s a crime that my high school job couldn’t have been at a video store. Anyway, The Watermelon Woman is written and directed by Cheryl Dunye. She also stars as the lead, Cheryl, who is awkward yet charming and movie-obsessed. She meets Diana (played by Guinevere Turner) at work and immediately develops a crush. I, too, immediately developed a crush on Turner, and that’s how I finally ended up watching Go Fish this year. Turner wrote and starred in Go Fish, which became one of the seminal ’90s gay movies. It holds up extremely well. So many of the mumblecore indies of the aughts that I love can clearly be traced back to Go Fish and The Watermelon Woman.

The Kid Detective

Support your local library. Above all else, above being a film critic, I am an Adam Brody fan. The O.C., specifically Brody’s Seth Cohen, was fundamental to my existence. Not to be gatekeepery, but I didn’t need Nobody Wants This to become reinvested in his career, unlike everyone else. I’ve been here all along! Nobody loves a straight man like a lesbian who built their entire personality based on said straight man in their teenage years! Anyway, the reason I bring up your local library is because I was never able to find The Kid Detective on a streaming service, but my library had a physical copy. If you’re a longtime Brody fan, or if you’ve just discovered him, check out The Kid Detective.

Paris Is Burning

Yet another seminal queer film from the ’90s that took me an embarrassingly long time to finally watch. It’s a documentary about ballroom culture in New York City. I never watched Pose (essentially the fictional, serialized version of the doc). The world of ballroom is extremely foreign to me as someone who only dances to dad rock’n’roll, so Paris Is Burning was revelatory. I was immersed in something I knew nothing about. In a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint/Museum of Fleeting Wonders

One of my favorite interviews I’ve done this year was with Tomás Gómez Bustillo, who wrote and directed Chronicles of a Wandering Saint. It’s a wonderfully weird movie about religion, spirituality, and the miracle of existence. In preparation, I watched Bustillo’s short film, Museum of Fleeting Wonders. It feels like a precursor to what would become Chronicles of a Wandering Saint because of the way it celebrates the inexplicable oddities that exist in life. Not everything is explainable, even with the technological advances that exist in the world, and Bustillo’s works are a celebration of that.

The Thing

Maybe The Thing was the friends we made (and killed) along the way.

No Way Out

I went through a Kevin Costner phase last year and this year. I have no idea what it is, but that man is magnetic. It started with Bull Durham last year, then the rest of his baseball movies (sorry, but Field of Dreams is my least favorite), and then I ended up in his ’80s-political-thriller era. No Way Out is a fun movie on its own, but what I really want to talk about is his wardrobe. Every outfit that’s not a military uniform is something I desperately need for myself. It’s mid-Atlantic preppy mixed with classic Americana and it’s for me.

Those are some of my favorite first watches! Come back tomorrow when I reveal my favorite 2024 releases.

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Best of 2024 - First Watches

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