My 50 Favorite Films: Prep for the 2024 Edition

Last weekend, in between calculated periods of doing nothing and Thanksgiving leftovers, I started work on my biennial Favorite Films sort.

I’m a lifelong movie buff and have watched literally thousands of movies. Not all of them are good. Some of the good films are, nonetheless, not my favorite films. Behold the “Cine-Venn” diagram!

The entire stack of films I sort through every few years numbers around 500 films or so. There’s usually something of a lag between when a film comes out and when we get to see it. No longer can I see every film when it first comes out in the theater (even more so this year) and I’m also no longer a film completionist. This is one of the reasons I term this a list of “favorites” not a “best of.”

Another major reason comes from the criteria by which I rank the films. If you want the nitty-gritty walkthrough of the pairwise comparison and the criteria, especially if you want to perform your own version of the exercise, I have a more granular explanation from 2016.

As a reminder, the criteria are:

Quality: A cheesesteak is not filet mignon with delicious, balanced sides — and it’s silly to pretend otherwise… but it’s also silly to pretend there is no such thing as a really good cheesesteak, which leads to…

Watchability: An integral Munson movie-ranking criterion for over 40 years. One of the interesting aspects of doing the biennial sort is that my tastes of what is watchable shifts. For example, Casablanca was not watchable at all at age 10. Now, I get a lot more out of it… which leads to

Resonance: Some films just speak to you, often in unfairly subjective ways. Fantasia and Star Wars were the first films I saw in theaters. I was dragged to There’s Something About Mary and laughed myself hoarse. Some films make a particular impact that make them your favorite films. Don’t discount those moments. A film’s particular resonance means it might rate higher on your list than other films Very Serious Film Critics will frown upon. They can go make their own damn lists.

To make the sort manageable, I try and start forming a list of 500-odd films in October, so that if there are films that have been in the Favorite 50 that I know I haven’t seen in a while, I have time to revisit them. For instance, I saw The Adventures of the Baron Munchausen multiple times in the theater when it came out, but I hadn’t seen it in ages. Any new film, no matter how I’m pretty sure it’s already mentally in the Venn diagram above, deserves a chance. I’d rate this pool of films as rigorous, but not precise — and so another reason I term these favorites and not a “best of.”

Here are films I’ve either watched anew –or for the first time in a long time– and made sure were in the sort as part of the 500-odd films:

I can guarantee you many of these films did not make the first cut, but for the past few years, some new films make it into my top 50 because they strike me “just so.” And there are often massive changes of other films, that spent years over 100, that now leap forth. What will happen? We’ll find out.

Expect this year’s list right around Yule.