My 23 favorite first-time watches this year

Fran Magazine: Issue #134

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No Sunday Dispatch from last week

“Did I miss the Sunday Dispatch?” “Where’s the Sunday Dispatch?” “Substack forgot to send out the Sunday Dispatch!” — wrong. I was hungover.

Housekeeping

Barring difficulties — mugs will go out next week. Also next week: the last regular Fran Magazine issue of the year before I take a couple weeks off to rest and recharge for 2025.

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My 23 favorite first-time watches from 2024

Last year in late November, I made a list of my favorite first time viewings of the past year.

Watching old movies for the first time is a great supplementary education in film-going and movie-watching, and it also grants you to the opportunity to have some relief from the unyielding spam of modern-day streaming cinema. People will say something like, “Have you seen Disclosure?” No, I haven’t seen Disclosure. I am too busy watching Unfriended. Whenever I reflect back on my year in cultural outings and art appreciation, I’m always more inclined to consider older work I finally came to that new, zeitgeisty stuff. Who’s to say if that will stand the test of time? It’s all too soon to say. Consider this year’s list of first-time watches a list of recommendations with room for discovery and improvement, each a opening to a new world or series or genre or filmmaker.

Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass (2007)

Phil and I spent all of the Thanksgiving long weekend watching or rewatching the original Bourne trilogy. I’d seen the first one when I was in high school — my maternal grandfather was a big fan of the series — but not since, and none of the sequels. The first film is probably the neatest (that Doug Liman promise), and I know many fans of the franchise are a little less keen on the events once Paul “shaky cam” Greengrass took over for the second two. While I agree that Bourne Supremacy is a weaker film, Greengrass’s style really clicks into place with Ultimatum. This is quite a satisfying movie, along the lines of the good Mission: Impossibles and even the Tony Gilroy-written Michael Clayton, of a guy who is constantly smarter than the villains the whole time. You’re not watching and enjoying the movie thinking Bourne will mess up. You’re watching and thinking, “How is he gonna outsmart them now?” Slick and funny with great action. This series was great to watch in full for the first time, reflecting back on both a different… and not altogether dissimilar political atmosphere. Sort of made me want to watch “Woke Reacher” though I know that’s a different kind of thing…

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch (1992)

I was liking but not loving Twin Peaks, the second season of the show a predictable and frustrating slog. Though I was often finding it inspired and original in short bursts, I was mostly exhausted by it when I finally finished my run of the show. I approached Fire Walk with Me with some trepidation: did I really want to watch Laura Palmer suffer? I’d sat with her suffering long enough. Well — not according to Lynch, who explodes the character’s final days in the final two-thirds of this film. The haunting, brutal nature of the film, led with grace and horror in Sheryl Lee’s performance, made me completely rethink everything I’d just seen of Lynch and Frost’s television show, opening my heart up to the tragedy of Twin Peaks and the violence at its heart. More on The Return (with some spoilers) here.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, James Ivory (1990)

Covered for the magazine with original art by Scott Howard!

Love, respect, decency: Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge

Unfriended, Levan Gabriadze (2014)

Matt’s writing on this film really says it all, but I was charmed and delighted (and only a little frightened) by this “screen-life” horror film that mostly served as a jarring memory of what 2014 internet looked like: Facebook messenger, old Spotify playlists, pirating the Miley Cyrus SNL episode. Take me back!!! (Don’t take me back.)

Problemista, Julio Torres (2023)

I long admired Torres’s writing on Saturday Night Live, but I bounced off Los Espookys and never really looked back. Phil and I started watching Fantasmas on a whim, and we had so much fun with it that I threw on one of my most overlooked films of last year, Problemista. What is most compelling to me across Torres’s work is his fascination with labor and care — who gets jobs, who keeps jobs, who “earns” jobs. There is a broad slapstick element to Problemista — in which Torres himself plays the haphazard assistant to a vaguely insane artist, played by Tilda Swinton — but I found the crux of the partnership deeply moving. These are two characters who are altogether abandoned by systems, moving through the world with equal though opposite naiveté and optimism. Swinton, like Jason Schwartzman, has been on a great roll the past several years, each new performance more enriching than the last. While the movie is often funny, the shrill heartbreak of her character really sells the whole story and grounds it in an emotional reality.

Still Life, Jia Zhangke (2008)

My favorite and the best new movie that I saw with my own two eyes this year is, alas, a 2025 release: Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides. In preparation to watch his latest film at this year’s New York Film Festival, I studied up on this feature which plays a key role in his latest work. Do you need to have seen Still Life to “get” Caught by the Tides? Probably not, but I loved sitting with and in this film, moved by how Jia depicts an ever-changing world.

Dig!, Ondi Timoner (2004)

I’m always mad at my one Dandy Warhol.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Ivan Dixon (1973)

I was lucky enough to see the restoration that played at BAM this summer having wanted to watch (and read) this for a long time. The reputation of this work loomed large, especially in recent years marked with civil unrest. Lawrence Cook’s turn as Dan Freeman — a Black CIA agent who uses his training to arm and plot a revolution — is at once steely and decidedly human. This isn’t necessarily a film about one special person who figures out how to fight back, but about the ways in which just about anyone can use the tools we’re taught against those who teach us. These days, it feels as though the most “important movies” lack a stylish immediacy; Dixon’s film is just as aesthetically enviable as it is urgent.

The Elephant Man, David Lynch (1980)

Everyone who said “[threatening] you’ll like this one because it’s normal” was right — I did like this one because it’s normal.

Twister, Jan de Bont (1996)

Didn’t know this was about grad school. RIP Bill Paxton <3

Summer Stock, Charles Walters (1950)

Tessa and I saw Summer Stock as a part of a series programmed by Annie Baker at Lincoln Center in promotion of the excellent Janet Planet. What Summer Stock and Janet Planet have to do with one another is tenuous — these are both summertime movies? But if you gave me a chance to program a series based around something I made, you can bet I’d stretch the limit of how everything relates. Summer Stock — starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly as a farmer and a musical theater director, respectively, who have to put on a big show in a barn — is decidedly average as far as mid-century musicals go, but 1) Tessa and I had a great time watching it and 2) Judy wears overalls and drives a tractor and 3) it’s fun to say something is kind of a “Summer Stock situation” — which can really mean about anything, having to put on a show in less than ideal circumstances or even just wearing overalls.

Missing, Costa-Gavras (1982)

Wrote a bit here over the summer (pre-mono moment):

Fran Magazine: Issue #110

I’ve seen a few Costa-Gavras films at this point, though this attempt to “go Hollywood,” in a sense, doesn’t undermine his work so much as it does explode it outwards with greater, more clear-hearted language around the indecency of national governments and that which they expect the average citizen — regardless of views — to put up with.

Vengeance Is Mine, Michael Roemer (1984)

Brendan Boyle

recommended this upsetting, beautiful, ghostless ghost story ages ago, and I finally got around to it on a balmy night this past summer. We don’t really get a ton of movies about “normal people” “being regular,” even if that “regular” is “crazy,” because every movie now is either a biopic or about World War Two. I’ve come to enjoy these mid-80s, early-90s domestic dramas that are robust and frightening in the way that real life is robust and frightening. There are lots of movies about “how women are” but few as daring and unnerving as this one. If nothing else, a cautionary tale about hanging out with your neighbor too much!

After Hours, Martin Scorsese (1985)

Scorsese’s run in the 1980s had been a big blindspot for me prior to this year. I still haven’t seen Last Temptation, but I’m otherwise caught up. To my surprise, After Hours — his borderline wacky, manic all-nighter starring Griffin Dunne — came out ahead of a few other more beloved works, even though Alex and I saw it at IFC where two zoomers sitting in front of us kept taking out their phones to take pictures of the screen (I see this all the time now — not just at nonsense like Wicked, but even NYFF press screenings… what gives). Perhaps After Hours isn’t the “best” of these films, but it might have been the greatest surprise to me because I’ve long heard lesser films described in the vein of After Hours. Is After Hours “like a Safdie brothers movie”? Is it “like Climax”? No, not really — it’s mostly like Looney Tunes.

What A Way To Go!, J. Lee Thompson (1964)

My favorite, favorite, favorite new-to-me movie of the year. Anyone can watch this and love it! Parents, friends, siblings, randos, whoever!!! Run, don’t walk!

Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders (1984)

Sometimes it’s worth holding out on a classic you’ve never seen if you can see it on a giant screen, as I did at the Prince Charles in London this past spring with Ella.

House of Tolerance, Bertrand Bonello (2011)

I am standing stronger than ever in my dislike of The Beast, no longer blaming it on “being hungry” or “not liking when stuff is compared to David Lynch.” But I’m not — and never was — out on Bonello, who has made entrancing films for the past decade or so, most especially this one, which might also be his scariest.

A History of Violence, David Cronenberg (2005)

If Eastern Promises is about real life becoming a fairytale, then this is about a fairytale dissolving into the horrors of real life. I prefer the former to this one, but only one of these movies has William Hurt saying “broheim.”

We Own The Night, James Gray (2007)

We Own The Night and The Yards were the last two James Gray features I’d yet to see — I was lucky enough to catch them both when they were up on Criterion earlier in the year. Of the two, I prefer this one, which feels classical and romantic the way that many of Gray’s films feel classical and romantic.

For All Mankind, Al Reinert (1989)

It is good to remember every 12-18 months that we went to the moon. That was crazy!

The House of Mirth, Terence Davies (2000)

I love this novel far more than I love Davies’ adaptation of the material, but as a standalone work, it’s a staggering, beautiful film, meticulous and sharp in its design and execution, with a fantastic Gillian Anderson performance. Davies’ work is rarely cruel — but it is mean in the way the world is mean — and he seems to understand the strain of cruelty that runs beneath every interaction in Edith Wharton’s excellent novel about what it’s like to be 29 years old. Or consider: Eric Stoltz as Lawrence Selden! Wowie zowie!!!

3 Women, Robert Altman (1977)

I saw this at MOMI the same day I saw The House of Mirth — can you imagine!

Charade, Stanley Donen (1963)

I like when people are rude to Cary Grant in movies and I like google image searching “james coburn smile.” It’s not more complicated than that.

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What were your favorite first-time watches this year? What do you think of Judy Garland in overalls? Does Bradley Cooper’s inability to talk seriously about being in The Elephant Man on Broadway ever get old?