Home for the Holidays (1996). Holly Hunter, a mid-30s single mother and museum curator, flies home to visit her family on Thanksgiving and finds her family is painfully weird, and she doesn’t fit in. But then everything clicks for her.

I saw this movie when it first came out and once or twice more in the late 90s, but not since then. This time, I had the insight that this is a coming-of-age movie about Holly Hunter’s character leaving her young adulthood behind her. By the end of the movie, she is no longer an adult trying to fit into her childhood home. She’s just an adult visiting her family.

The movie has great writing, direction by Jodie Foster, and is well-acted by a wonderful cast: In addition to Hunter, we have Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr., Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin and middle-aged Steve Guttenberg.

I could do a scene-by-scene discussion of this movie. But I’ll stop here.

Tombstone (1993). Val Kilmer gets praise as Doc Holliday, and he deserves it, but also spare some praise for the late great Powers Boothe, who chews the scenery magnificently as the villainous Curly Bill Brocius.

Another main villain of the movie, Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn, is a nihilist. Ringo hates himself and the world. Curly Bill loves the world and loves life and takes joy in cruelty.

In that way, Curly Bill is a lot like Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Wolfs (2024) George Clooney and Brad Pitt are two mob fixers called to cover up a crime scene. They are lone wolves, forced to work together. The ending is confusing at first, but I gathered later that this movie was intended as the first of two parts. And now, the second part will never be made because of a dispute with Apple. Still worth watching.

The Big Sleep (1946). Bogey, as detective Philip Marlowe, solves crimes and sparks with Lauren Bacall. The storyline of this movie is legendarily complicated and confusing; at one point, the director called author Raymond Chandler from the set to find out who committed one of the murders and Chandler responded lol idk.

The Fabelmans (2022). Supposedly a fictionalized autobiography by Stephen Spielberg, but he later said everything in it is true.

Interstellar (2014). Matthew McConaughey in spaaaaaaace. A rare movie where he does not say “alright alright alright.” Now I know where this meme comes from.

Fall Guy. Comedy-drama starring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman called on to do something involving solving a crime. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember the movie was fun.

Batman Begins. I saw this one on a plane years ago and hated it. We watched it on the big TV in the living room in 2024, and I liked it. It turns out that watching a movie on a six-inch screen while slightly nauseated is not the best way to appreciate cinema.

White House Down. Die Hard in the White House starring Channing Tatum.

The Accountant. Ben Affleck is a forensic accountant and lethal mercenary. Ridiculous premise, but surprisingly good and occasionally even heartwarming.

Which reminds me: I forgot a book on my 2024 favorite books list: The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, the second in his Marty Hench series, which also features a hardboiled forensic accountant.

It turns out that “hardboiled forensic accountant” is a genre.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. 2024 Sequel to the popular Eddie Murphy movies of the 80s. It does what it says on the tin.

Farewell, My Lovely Robert Mitchum is Philip Marlowe in this 1975 movie with Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jack O’Halloran (most famous for Superman II) as Moose Malloy.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes. But not Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which didn’t click for me.

Road House. Jake Gyllenhaal beats people. Fun, great music and scenic Florida locations. You did not think remaking the bad 80s Patrick Swayze original would be a good idea, but you were wrong.

American Fiction. Comedy-drama about a Black, button-down professor fed up with woke culture who uses a pen name to write a super-woke fraudulent memoir and is caught up in a maelstrom when the book becomes a runaway bestseller.

I hate saying “woke,” but I can’t think of anything else here.

The trailer does a good job of capturing the movie’s intelligence and humor but does not capture the story’s surprising heart.

This is not an anti-woke movie, despite the premise. I would not recommend an anti-woke movie.

Mr. Holmes. Ian McKellen plays an aged Sherlock Holmes, struggling with dementia, living in the country, tending his bees and reconstructing the specifics of a case that drove him away from London and into retirement three decades before.

The Emperor’s New Clothes. What if Napoleon escaped from exile on St. Helena and returned to France to raise an army and reclaim his throne, but instead failed to contact his underground network of supporters and had to go undercover as a common grocer?

American Fiction and The Emperor’s New Clothes are testimonies to the value of committing to the bit. You take a slight premise — something that by rights should be nothing more than a Saturday Night Live skit — take it seriously, follow it through to its conclusion, and it can come out great.

Stage Door. 1937 comedy-drama starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou and, in a small role, Lucille Ball, about young struggling actresses living in a boarding house in New York.

The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. I think I saw this only once before, on a little kitchen-table black-and-white TV around 1980. I missed so much. Much of the action is in the characters' faces and body language.

The Six Triple Eight. A Black Women’s Air Corps battalion during World War II is called on to sort millions of pieces of personal mail for soldiers. The mail has been stored in warehouses since the beginning of the war. The movie makes it clear that personal mail is not a luxury; it is essential to keeping up morale for soldiers and their families.

As one of the heroes notes, these women are fighting two wars, one against Hitler and another against flagrant white racism.

Kerry Washington gives a great performance as Captain Charity Adams, who commands the platoon with an erect spine and stentorian voice. Her goals are two-fold: To deliver on the mission of delivering the mail, and prove that Black women are up to the task. Her nemesis is General Halt, a fat, bald racist Southerner who seems to despise Adams and her battalion more than he hates Hitler. Halt is portrayed with delicious awfulness by Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. I could barely stand to look at him by the end of the movie.

Desk Set. Katharine Hepburn heads up the research department of a TV network and is threatened by Spencer Tracy, a consultant hired to bring in a computer. I was delighted to see that the computer in this 1952 movie behaved exactly like a 2024 LLM: give it a question in plain English and you get an answer that’s clear, credible and likely to be wrong. Spoiler for a 73-year-old movie: Tracy’s character explains at the end that the computer is not there to replace the researchers but to free the researchers up for more valuable work. This is exactly what AI companies tell us here in 2024.

The set for the computer is brilliant — so many blinkenlights! The pieces of the computer, including the blinkenlights panel, were later used in the movie and TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. This computer is my mental ideal of how computers ought to look.

Woman of the Year. Hepburn and Tracy again. There were a couple of moderately racist gags in the beginning that threw me off for a bit, and I never quite recovered because Tracy’s character is a dishrag. Still, it makes my favorites list because of the snappy dialogue and cinematography and because it’s Hepburn and Tracy.

His Girl Friday. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in a heartwarming romcom about two awful people who find true love with each other.