🍿 Charade (1963) is what you get when the director of Singing' in the Rain want to make his version of North by Northwest: an absolute delight. Come for Audrey Hepburn’s fragile beauty, stay for all the shots of 1960s Paris set to Henry Mancini’s score.

🍿 Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the best live-action movie I have seen in years, and it wasn’t even close. In the topsy-turvy Monsterverse version Godzilla is a misunderstood hero. In Minus One things are as they should be: the reptile is a force of nature, the humans want to stop it, but the real battle is with the government inertia.

Caveats: it was the black and white version in a “4DX” theater which I thought meant a bigger screen but in fact involved motorized seats, strobe lights and gusts of wind blowing in my face. It was an unusual combination: the colorless, grainy images á la Kurosawa made into a theme park attraction. What would Scorcese have said?

I don’t care! The very first movie was also a thrill ride.

🍿 Toma (2023) is a biopic of a Serbian folk singer Toma Zdravković, and yes I’m biased but it was much more enjoyable than the more and less recent Hollywood attempts at the genre. Here is the problem: it is not available for streaming anywhere, there is little to no information about it online, and if you try to search for it you will get information about a 2023 TV show that is basically extra footage packaged into an 8-episode mini series.

So how many more international gems are out there, unavailable and unknown outside of their tiny target market? The internet is the first wonder of the modern world, but for all its greatness it also gives us a false sense of access to everything when there are in fact untold treasures disappearing at the margin.

🍿 The Father (2020) shows that the simplest of premises can make for the best of movies. Christopher Nolan, take note.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.

🍿 The first movie snow days bring to mind is, of course, A Christmas Story (1983). The second one is not its bloodless sequel but rather 8-bit Christmas (2021), the true spiritual successor. The snow day scene there is one of the best, but nowhere to be found online. Best to watch the whole thing!

🍿 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) was a delight, even at 2 hours. As the first Studio Ghibli movie it has been overshadowed by what came later, but its influence is obvious. Inside Ghibli itself, there is one-to-one mapping of characters (Captain Dola becomes Yubaba from Spirited Away, her husband becomes Kamaji) and plot points (a boy protecting a magical girl in Ponyo). Externally, the robots are echoed in The Iron Giant and Wall-E. Doesn’t the latest Zelda have a flying castle? And of course it is one of the first popular steampunk anime.

I will also note that the movie is almost 40 years old: it came out the same year as Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee. But good luck getting your kids to watch either. Incredible how much more gracefully animation ages compared to live-action.

Only six movies that came out this year made it to my watch list:

• Oppenheimer: three movies in one, and only one of them was good.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: forgettable.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: easily the best of the lot.
• Elemental: initially a disappointment, but has more depth the more I think about it.
• Barbie: better than Oppenheimer but also too long and not very good by the end.
• The Family Plan: a fun throwback to the 1990s, but also forgettable.

I did not see Killers of the Flower Moon yet, but I hope to do so soon. I did watch a bunch of older movies, some of which were quite good, but naming them all here would not mean much (and you can always go to the movies tag). Let me instead list the movies I rewatched this year, in the order in which they came out:

• The Godfather (1972)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended ed. (2001), and notice the 1980s and ’90s-sized gap there.
• The Ring (2002), the rare horror movie that is actually scary.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which is the parents' best friend when in need of a teachable moment.
• Gone Girl (2014), in which Ben Affleck is watchable (a rarity).
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and I still won’t forgive myself for watching this movie on the plane the first time around.

Every year I time myself that I should watch more movies, and every year television wins out. May 2024 be the same.

🍿 Klaus (2019) flew under the radar for us when it first came out, so kudos to the Netflix recommendation algorithm for resurfacing it for the holidays. It is a classically — and beautifully — animated family movie that’s not trying to be hip or edgy, and is all the better for it.

This time last year, Netflix scrapped the director’s follow-up project. Here’s hoping that Ember will find a new home.

🍿 The Family Plan (2023) features a milquetoast father of 3 who takes his family on a road trip to Vegas in a Honda Odyssey, so of course we had to see it as soon as it came out. It was… OK, for a dressed up 1990s action comedy. At least Wahlberg is slightly more believable as a boring white-collar schmuck than Schwarzenegger was in his day.

Still, kudos to Apple for embracing brainless entertainment and extending The Mitchells… sphere of influence to live action.