Edited by Alejandra Benavides Valcarcel

The New Year is upon us and many of us have written down our life-changing goals for this year, but have you considered any film-related New Year’s resolutions? Some members of the Reel Talk editorial team share their Film Resolutions for 2024. We’d love to hear your resolutions too – Warwick Film and Television students can share their New Year’s Film Resolutions here.

“Stop and Smell the Flowers” – Ben Barnett

This year, my initial New Year’s film resolution was a basic “watch more films.” I had been severely slacking towards the end of last year, and there are still many classics I have yet to see. However, I realised that to truly get something out of that resolution, I would also need to change some of my attitudes towards film viewing in general. Simply watching more films is only helpful if I have a reason for doing so. If I just watch them for the sake of crossing them off a list, then there would be little enjoyment and few true benefits. I would likely forget the films within a week! 

So, as my New Year’s film resolution, I aim to not only watch more films but to appreciate them in their entirety as well. To think critically about why they make me feel a certain way, why I like or dislike them, their aesthetics, place in cinematic history, choices in character and narrative structure, and so on. Taking inspiration from the structure of seminars and lectures in the FTV department, I want to “stop and smell the flowers” this year and allow my film-watching journey the space it needs to breathe. As an avid screenwriter myself, I know this will help me improve my own work, and better see how it will translate onto the screen. I can’t wait to see where this approach takes me and what this year holds!

“Watch More Documentaries” – Dae Grabham

My New Year’s film resolution is to watch more and increasingly varied pieces of documentary filmmaking. I have always favoured narrative cinema in my usual viewing habits, but a few particularly interesting documentaries I saw last year piqued my interest in this specific mode of motion pictures. Those features include Toshio Matsumoto’s spectacular Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and Orson Welles’ tour de force, F for Fake (1973), both of which blur the lines between the real and unreal and challenge the very concept of documentary filmmaking through their construction and techniques. As such, I would like to not only watch more documentaries, either meta like the aforementioned examples or more typical ones but also understand the theories and concepts associated with documentary filmmaking, as that feels like one of the areas my film knowledge is particularly lacking. In a similar vein, having watched They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (Morgan Neville, 2018), I have become increasingly enamoured by the concept of the ‘making-of’ films, which can be pigeonholed into the documentary genre.

Some documentaries I would like to watch in 2024 are Document Love & Pop (Company Matsuo 1998), whose urtext is essentially as close to a documentary as a purely narrative film can be; The New God (Yutaka Tsuchiya, 1999), from the director of one of my favourite films of all time, Peep “TV” Show (Yutaka Tsuchiya, 2003); and The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein, 1995), due to my fascination with queer cinema history.

“Watch My Friends’ Favourite Films” – Nikki Wilks

Going into 2024, I would like to watch a wider range of films and television shows. Much like ordering food at a restaurant, when choosing a film to watch it can be very tempting to just stick to what you know, to give in to the fears that your time could be better spent elsewhere or that you might not enjoy something. Personally, I feel that a solution to this would be to watch my friends’ favourite films or television shows. Not only will this (hopefully) widen the range of genres and styles I watch this year, but it will also open the door to some great conversations with my friends about these texts. There is always joy in listening to someone speak about something that they are genuinely passionate about and, reflecting on my favourite films and television, much of my enjoyment of them has been inherited from reading or listening to others talk about why they love them. 

So, this year, I’m going to make it my mission to engage in conversations about people’s favourite films – or simply films others have something to say about – and to watch as many of these as I can!