With 2024 truly over and finding myself with the day off work, I want to take the time to write a retrospective of the media I enjoyed over the past year. I like "best of the year" decisions as a driving force for this sort of retrospective not necessarily because it matters all that much what gets chosen, but because putting disparate works of art that I like for very different reasons up against one another inspires me to focus on what specifically I value about each of them and how I prioritize my values.

In addition to picking favorites, I'm going to post my updated of-the-year lists for both films and games. These are living lists I've been curating for years in which I choose my favorite example of the medium for each year^[1]. This helps mitigate the problem that I don't ever see or play everything in a given year and so my "best of the year" at the time is never going to be fully-informed, and it gives me a better perspective into years long past as I explore what they have to offer. Historically, I've updated these lists throughout the year as I watch particularly good films, but for most of this year I've been saving the updates to do right now. It's a fun way to look back on what the year has brought to my doorstep and how my tastes have changed.

Film

I don't have concrete numbers prior to the first full year I was using Letterboxd, 2019, but I'm pretty confident 2024 was my lifetime high-water-mark for most films watched (so far) with fully 251 films under my belt. 2019 was my previous high point, in a year during which I was walking to Scarecrow every week and really starting to ramp up my independent theater attendance with Christa and Liz. The pandemic brought that all crashing down. In 2020, I only watched 139 films; in 2021 and 2022 I didn't even hit a hundred.

Part of this was just where my attention was at. I was more focused on video games in those years for my leisure activity, and in 2022 in particular I got deep into helping out with the Elden Ring wiki. But I missed film, and it felt like something else the pandemic—and the total lack of mitigating behavior on the part of the general public—had taken from me. Starting to dig back into film last year and going so deep this year has been a healing experience, especially since so many of the films I've seen have been with dear friends and a few have even been in the theater (with a heavy-duty mask on, of course).

There are a few focuses of my film watching this year. The director I watched the most of was Orson Welles (Othello, F for Fake for the third time, The Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil—almost all films that are brilliant in…