St.Ofle Watchlist
2024 Edition
Every end of year, my students ask me for a list of films to watch, and every year, I typically just sort of rattle off from the top of my head and promise myself that I’ll do better next year. Well, it’s next year, and I’m going to anticipate the question with a list.
This list.
It’s not of this past year, just things that I’ve seen in the past year and loved.
This is not a definitive list, and there are a lot of runners-up (This is The Zodiac Speaking, Black Narcissus, and A Secret Love, to name a few), but these are the ones I wanted to talk about.
---
Les Magnétiques (2021) – Vincent Maël Cardona
This is a love letter to misfits on the edges of everything: small towns, shifting political tides, and fleeting friendships. In 1980s small town France, a group of young people anchor themselves in pirate radio, transmitting something raw and alive as their world collapses and rebuilds around them. The soundtrack, as you might imagine, is nearly perfect.
---
The Worst Person in the World (2021) – Joachim Trier
Julie is everyone’s best and worst self: radiant, selfish, brilliant, and messy. Trier’s film captures existential ache with such honesty that it leaves bruises. Set against Oslo’s winter glow, it’s about love, ambition, and all the messy pieces that define us until they don’t. Watching this feels like skimming through an old journal—cringing at your younger self but yearning to feel that alive again.
---
Vortex (2021) – Gaspar Noé
Noé’s exploration of aging and dementia feels more like an elegy than a film. It’s just amazing. Presented in split-screen, it watches the final days of a couple in their Paris apartment, loneliness and confusion eating them alive, while still intertwined. There’s something sacred in the fragility of it all.
---
Birdman (2014) – Alejandro González Iñárritu
Your laughter was part of the tragedy all along.
---
Goodbye to Language (2014) – Jean-Luc Godard
Godard’s final film is a fractured, poetic masterpiece. I love him so much. It’s in 3D—wildly, but this is no Avengers movie, this is Godard weaponizing the tech to create something jagged and disorienting. A fitting goodbye to the master of obscurity.
---
Blood and Black Lace (1964) – Mario Bava
This is Giallo horror in its purest, most stylish form: vivid, violent, and eerily beautiful.
---
TV: Baby Reindeer (2023)
Based on Richard Gadd’s real-life experience, it’s about a man haunted by a stalker, but it’s also about the ways we let ourselves be haunted, the reasons we don’t let go, and the better selves waiting in the wings. Awful, but in the best of ways.
---
TV: Beef (2023)
This is a collision of raw nerves and broken people, a broken mirror of rage, humor, and vulnerability. Ali Wong and Steven Yeun play two strangers whose lives spiral out of control after a road rage incident. It’s messy, brutal, deeply emotional, and ends on an emotionally tender note — kind of like my 2024.
---
These don’t just ask to be watched—they ask to be felt. Each one is a small rebellion against bullshit that leaves you a little more awake than it found you.