As the year comes to a close, we all love to reflect on what’s come over the past twelve months. We check out our Letterboxd stats to see what actors and directors we’ve been enjoying the most (our weekly digest covering the race for the gold). But while Hollywood and company are firmly focused on Anora, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys and others that rank among the best of 2024’s new releases, every year for movie lovers is also loaded with discoveries of amazing work from decades past.

It’s never too late or too early to cross something off your watchlist (or add more!), and so we rounded up some of Letterboxd’s staff and contributors to share our favorite first-time watches of 2024 that weren’t released in the past year.

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Philip Yordan, from a novel by Roy Chanslor
Selected by Mitchell Beaupre

I’ve long held the assumption that the western genre wasn’t really for me, but 2024 I tested that belief and discovered to my surprise that it might just be my new favorite. The top of my list of first-time watches this year is jam-packed with gunslingers and cattle drivers traversing the American frontier, chief among them the collaborations of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart, whose work exemplified the way this genre is ripe for unpacking the repugnant, blood-curdled rot at the core of America itself. But my number one discovery this year was Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s gender-bending showdown between a dazzling Joan Crawford and a vicious Mercedes McCambridge. The queer-coded women do battle as the men of this small town bend to their whims, saddling Johnny Guitar up nicely right alongside Ray’s catalog of subversive pictures breaking down American conventions.

Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary (1997)

Directed by S.R. Bindler
Selected by Annie Lyons

If Survivor took place in rural East Texas, it might feel something like Hands on a Hardbody. Shot on Hi8 video, this endlessly quotable and endearingly no-budget documentary follows a local competition with deceptively simple rules: whoever can keep their hand on a ​​pickup truck the longest gets to drive it home. As physical and mental limits hurtle toward the brutal brink, homegrown filmmaker S.R. Bindler stays true to one front-runner’s observation that “it’s a human drama thing,” favoring an open heart over condescension as contestants muse about Snickers, cowboy boots and the prize vehicle’s merits. Rolling up to a New Beverly Cinema screening with a fleet of seven fellow Texans, I’ve never felt more instantly at home.

Nowhere (1997)

Written and directed by Gregg Araki
Selected by Ariel LeBeau

I’ll 2024 as the year I fell in love with Gregg Araki. I had seen a few of his movies before, but to tell the truth, I didn’t really “get” Araki’s whole deal—until I caught a screening of the new 4K restoration of Nowhere, his 1997 feature that had previously only been released on VHS in the United States. An odyssey of teenage agony and ecstasy, pitch black even as it leaps off the screen in kaleidoscopic color, Nowhere was a skeleton key that unlocked Araki for me in under 80 minutes. Not only did I suddenly understand the offbeat tone, I adored it, and the more I went out of my way to learn about Araki as a filmmaker, the deeper my iration grew for his punk-rock ingenuity and sheer artistic guts. I gained more than just a new favorite film, I gained a creative idol. As ever, I sing the praises of those who work in film restoration and repertory programming: their efforts are what make such epiphanies possible.

Alma’s Rainbow (1994)

Written and directed by Ayoka Chenzira
Selected by Adesola Thomas

Films about green-gilled youth and the peculiarity of blooming into adulthood have centered more Black characters in recent years. But thanks to the Academy Film Archive’s restorationist work and the programming savvy of Atlanta’s Audio Video Club, I saw Ayoka Chenzira’s foundational coming-of-age gem Alma’s Rainbow for the first time this summer. The color-rich character study centers Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), a Caribbean American teen girl whose self-actualization, gender expression and sexuality are shaped by her adoration of two differing matriarchs: Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), her poised, couth mother, and Ruby (Mizan Nunes), an eccentric artist aunty recently returned from Paris. Chenzira developed Alma’s Rainbow as a 1984 Sundance Directors Lab fellow. It was one of the first 35mm features made by an African American woman and one of many indie features (Just Another Girl on the I.R.T, comes to mind) helmed by a Black woman director that received its flowers decades after its initial release.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes
Selected by Samm Ruppersberger

This year, I finally had my Cassavetes epiphany while Gena Rowlands’ performance as Mabel Longhetti cemented her as the queen of one of my favorite subgenres; unpalatable women characters deserving of love and access to care. Unlike any love story I’ve seen before, A Woman Under the Influence is authentically complex and tangible. Reminiscent of a suppressed memory or a shameful secret, it leaves you with nowhere to hide. Studios refused to fund or distribute a movie about “a crazy middle-aged dame,” and even the film crew, who cared deeply for their work, were apprehensive that audiences would want to see it. While its #58 placement on Letterboxd’s Top 250 proves otherwise, many glowing member reviews do express a sentiment of, “I love it, but I never want to see it again.” As for me, I’d share a night in with Mabel anytime.

In 1913, the Biograph Company and Klaw and Erlanger cast Bert Williams, the top Black comedic actor of his generation, as a love interest, who, as part of a field day sponsored by a local fraternal club, attempts to woo the actress Odessa Warren Grey. Brimming with jubilant dancing and swooning kisses, Lime Kiln Club Field Day makes a statement through its mere existence. In the movie, backed by a white film crew and an all-Black cast, Williams not only shines as a rom-com lead, his employment of Blackface provides context for how Black performers artistically wielded the appearance. Before the film’s completion, the producers, unfortunately, shelved Lime Kiln Club Field Day, obscuring its existence until the footage was recently rediscovered by Museum of Modern Art curator Ron Magliozzi. The unfinished work is now on Criterion Channel, and the footage is incredible. Replete with two separate scores and outtakes, its reemergence as the oldest surviving Black-cast musical fills an immeasurable gap in the history of Black filmmaking.

The Red Shoes (1948)

Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen
Selected by Noreen Plabutong

I credit my favorite first-time watch of 2024 entirely to my dear friend Lauren, whose hip at the Museum of Moving Image (where I saw this film with her) I take full advantage of. Going into The Red Shoes without any expectations, I was completely won over by its impressively beautiful and utterly dreamy style. A dramatic Technicolor fantasia following a talented young ballerina (Moira Shearer), an obsessive impresario (Anton Walbrook) and an idealistic composer (Marius Goring), the film is so lush, entrancing, kind of insane and absolutely meant to be seen on a big screen. It’s an imaginative blend of traditional stage performance and all that the aesthetic pleasure of cinema has to offer. I left the theatre thinking what Patrick laments in his review: “It’s frankly inexcusable that movies don’t look like this anymore.”

Walking and Talking (1996)

Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
Selected by Mia Lee Vicino

Warning: if you are a city-living woman aged 28-34 (or relate to s Ha), this underseen indie dramedy will induce paranoia that Nicole Holofcener has been spying on you. Whether you’re chronically single with an elderly cat like Catherine Keener’s Amelia or both happily and unhappily engaged like Anne Heche’s Laura, there will be an eerily specific detail about this stage of life to set off your neuroses. Maybe it’s when Amelia goes on an awkward date with the body horror-obsessed guy that works at the video rental store, then laments that now she can’t rent movies anymore. Maybe it’s when Laura is haunted by her fiancé’s (played by TÁR director Todd Field?!) refusal to get a suspicious mole checked out. Or maybe it’s Liev Schreiber’s leather pants. Either way, prepare to feel exposed and validated in a way you’ve never been before.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Directed by Tobe Hooper, written by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
Selected by Siddhant Adlakha

Tobe Hooper’s influence on horror is unavoidable—it’s hard not to have come across a descendant of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, whether parody, homage, or remake—but watching the slasher urtext in all its glory is an irreplicable experience. This was the right year to take the plunge, given its 50th anniversary screenings. Unsurprisingly, it’s a disorienting and deeply anxiety-inducing experience, shot and edited as if assembled from found snippets of a snuff film. Brian describes it as “a chilling, ghoulishly entertaining watch… that has way less blood than its title and reputation suggest.” However, for those who only know it by that reputation, Hooper’s unrelenting melancholy creeps up unexpectedly.

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)

Directed by Dorothy Azner
Written by Edwin Justus Mayer, from a story by Cleo Lucas
Selected by Stevee Taylor

While every year features a lot of pre-Code for me, 2024 has seen me catching up on the work of both Dorothy Arzner and Sylvia Sidney, bringing me to 1932’s Merrily We Go to Hell. The film is essentially what the title suggests: what starts off as a merry romantic courtship between newspaperman Jerry (Fredric March, in a precursory role to his Norman Maine in 1937’s A Star Is Born) and heiress Joan (Sidney) devolves into a tragic portrayal of the hell of alcoholism. Like many of Arzner’s films, Merrily We Go to Hell also somehow operates best as a progressive, feminist-lensed critique of marriage, owing heavily to Sylvia Sidney and her ‘saddest eyes in Hollywood.’ Pre-Code truly has it all!

Door III (1996)

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Written by Chiaki J. Konaka
Selected by Aaron Yap

One of the most pleasurable aspects of diving into filmographies as vast as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s is stumbling upon the lesser-seen, but illuminating, contextualizing gem. Serving as the connective tissue between his early straight-to-video period and his later established horror masterpieces such as Cure and Pulse, Door III is a little grungier around the edges, but if you’re already a Kurosawa-head accustomed to his genre-fluid temperament, this one offers a plum 90-minutes of J-horror fun. It combines his ability to wring overwhelming dread out of the most mundane of spaces with the addition of Cronenbergian parasite terror. A better dry run than most.

Four-Sided Triangle (1953)

Directed by Terence Fisher
Written by Terence Fisher and Paul Tabori, from a novel by William F. Temple
Selected by Rafa Sales Ross

I shooed away the January blues by making a dent on Martin Scorsese’s 50 Best British Films list, which is how I stumbled upon Terence Fisher’s Four-Sided Triangle. This blend of romance and sci-fi about a man so consumed with unrequited love that he invents a cloning machine is so vividly realized I could feel myself moving towards the edge of my seat even after the conclusion became clear halfway through. Plus, Fisher’s film offers a poignant parallel to Barbara Payton’s tragic story in how it places her quite literally within a glass dome, deprived of privacy and agency all because of a man’s searing sense of entitlement.

Prime Cut (1972)

Directed by Michael Ritchie
Written by Robert Dillon
Selected by Dan Mecca

“Every frame of this movie is disgusting (in a great way),” Woody writes of Prime Cut. Directed by Michael Ritchie, this is a gnarly piece of work. The film stars Lee Marvin as an enforcer sent to Kansas to collect a debt for his bosses. Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) is running the crime in Kansas City, doing everything from stealing from the mob to sex trafficking. There’s an unforgettable opening sequence in a slaughterhouse, a shocking scene in which young women are literally sold like cattle, and an impossibly cool chase in a wheat field involving a combine. Prime Cut literally has it all.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Selected by Kadija Osman

On a random Saturday in March, I decided to press play on Singin’ in the Rain, curious about why a 1950s movie musical was so beloved every time clips of it circulated on social media. Now I understand: it’s truly one of the greatest films ever made. For starters, it falls into my favorite subgenre—movies about movies. Watching the evolution of filmmaking unfold on-screen is fascinating to me. Then there’s the sheer energy and elegance of the musical and dance numbers. The ‘Good Morning’ sequence alone is something I could watch on repeat. What really surprised me, though, was how well the humor still holds up decades later—a rarity for films from the golden age of cinema. And finally, let’s talk about the Technicolor: vibrant, unforgettable, and deeply missed.

Summertime (1955)

Directed by David Lean
Written by David Lean and H. E. Bates, from a play by Arthur Laurents
Selected by John Forde

If, like me, your invite to the Venice Film Festival got lost in the post, or you just want a Ripley-inspired Italian adventure without the body count, look no further than David Lean’s gorgeous travelogue romance Summertime. Katharine Hepburn gives one of her greatest performances as a lonely secretary who spends her life savings on a trip to 1950s Venice, falling in love with the city, a foxy antiques dealer (Rossano Brazzi) and life itself. Filmed on location in glorious Technicolor, Lean and cinematographer Jack Hildyard capture Venice in all its staggering beauty, with an amused side-eye at the banalities of American tourism. Lean’s sensitive direction gives Hepburn room to run the gamut—whether she’s sparring with Brazzi over the purchase of a goblet or silently drinking in the beauty of St. Mark’s Square at sunrise, she’s as vivid and enchanting as La Serenissima itself.

Four White Shirts (1967)

Directed by Rolands Kalnins
Written by Gunārs Priede, from his own play
Selected by Jack Moulton

My favorite Madamborges that you can watch for free. Four White Shirts has a compelling meta-narrative: we follow a songwriter combating the censorship of his work by the communist occupation, and then the film itself got banned for twenty years by Soviet censors. It’s a vital reminder of the importance of art that speaks truth to power, which we need now more than ever. If you’ve been rooting for Latvian Oscar contender Flow to go all the way this awards season, the madam and I urge you to give Four White Shirts a go, too.

Local Legends (2013)

Written and directed by Matt Farley
Selected by Katie Rife

When the awards are collecting dust and the best-ofs fade from memory, I’ll 2024 as “the summer of Farley.” Matt Farley is a DIY auteur from Massachusetts, making movies for his friends, family and a small cult of obsessive weirdos. I’m acquainted with the latter, which is how I found myself in a barely air-conditioned room in Brooklyn this past June watching Local Legends, Farley’s tragicomic magnum opus on the life of a small-time artist. As a statement on creativity, Local Legends is casually profound and heartbreakingly pure. The jokes are stupid, but playfully so, and the characters’ circumstances are played for self-aware pathos. There’s a moment where Farley’s lead is playing a concert in his friend’s basement; his buddy’s mom comes downstairs to change the laundry mid-set, and the deadpan humanism would make Aki Kaurismäki cry. Call Matt Farley and he’ll tell you about it: (603) 644-0048.

The Scenic Route (1978)

Written and directed by Mark Rappaport
Selected by Justin LaLiberty

New York filmmaker Mark Rappaport, who is arguably most well-known for his queer revisionist documentary Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, turned the well-worn ’70s road movie on its head with The Scenic Route. Simultaneously aggressive, surreal, eccentric and sad, it exists as an inherently American social commentary on the pitfalls of consumerism and whatever constitutes (or at least constituted) the American Dream. In a sense, it’s the closest the US came to mimicking whatever Godard was doing in the previous decade’s Weekend. For fans of Alex Cox, Richard Kern, Marguerite Duras and nihilism.

Lenny (1974)

Directed by Bob Fosse
Written by Julian Barry, from his own play
Selected by Aimee Knight

If you’d told me in January that my favorite first-time watch this year would preach free speech, deviance and male genius, I would have said, “Tell me more about that ‘deviance’ thing.” Bob Fosse, true to form, delivered. I’d been meaning to watch Lenny—the philosophizing biopic about controversial comedian Lenny Bruce—ever since I first saw All That Jazz. Both films tap to similar story beats and visual rhythms, rendering Lenny a dress rehearsal for Fosse’s self-flagellating masterstroke. But with its flinty aesthetic, white-hot anti-moralizing, and Dustin Hoffman’s finest portrayal of an autistic (coded) character, Lenny is not fucking around.

The Wailing (2016)

Written and directed by Na Hong-jin
Selected by Slim

I know everyone is expecting me to pick some Steven Seagal direct-to-video slop, but I contain multitudes. I had heard whispers of The Wailing for years and when the time was right to cover horror movies for my podcast 70mm, I pulled the trigger. Possession? Good vs. evil? Jesus and the Devil parallels? Vague explanations open to interpretation? Count me in! Not since Lake Mungo was I left sitting on my couch wondering what the heck I just experienced. Thankfully, Letterboxd and Reddit exist, so I could eat some Pringles and read online theories for hours until I ed out.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Directed by Paul Schrader
Written by Paul and Leonard Schrader, based on work by Yukio Mishima
Selected by Matt Goldberg

As an American director telling the story of author Yukio Mishima, there was the likelihood that Paul Schrader would come off as an interloper into Japanese history and culture. Instead, with the help of co-writers and family Leonard Schrader (Paul’s brother) and Chieko Schrader (Leonard’s wife), Schrader brings us not only into Mishima’s life and his shocking end but, more importantly, makes his novels come alive through gorgeous vignettes. I’ve never seen a movie show such consideration and engagement with an author, and Mishima is now easily one of my favorite Schrader movies.

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)

Directed by Shûsuke Kaneko
Written by Shûsuke Kaneko and Kazunori Itô
Selected by Claira Curtis

Watching Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy in rapid succession might take the cake for my favorite film experience of the year, and if I wanted to cheat, I’d pick all three films as my favorite first-time watch of 2024. I won’t cheat, though. Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris takes top spot as my favorite of the year because it beautifully concludes the trilogy, bringing all the best pieces of the previous installments together into something that is especially reflective. It’s not just the action and special effects that make the film so special, it’s the way it portrays its characters as nuanced individuals capable of immense kindness and staggering hatred. Also, Gamera is just the coolest. Love him to bits.

Harold and Maude (1971)

Directed by Hal Ashby
Written by Colin Higgins
Selected by Marcie Neubert

Harold and Maude is the story of two misfits that find each other in the most unlikely of places and times. Together, they get into all kinds of shenanigans and discover the meaning of real friendship. It is such an incredible gift when we find our people, and Harold and Maude shows all the magic that comes with that. This movie is a perfect reminder that we can survive the most terrible challenges. And after, there will be time for adventures, love and joy. An incredibly fun film filled with the most beautiful messages.