For the third year running, I rated each film or show according to my assessment of its quality and my level of enjoyment. The best ones are the ones that have the highest combined rating of quality and enjoyment. You can see these in the graphic below.

The best movies I watched this year

  1. Oppenheimer

Won enough plaudits (including Best Picture) that I won’t waste time extolling it as a movie. Everyone knows it’s good! And according to my rating system over the years, it has been beaten only by Shrek 2 in my combined quality/enjoyment measure. One day a film may arise that can best Shrek 2, but that is not this day.

  1. American Fiction

A funny, brilliant film. And the main message is important too: when telling Black stories (or Jewish stories or pick any other historically marginalized group), tell all kinds of stories, not just the stories of desperation that resonate with White guilt.

  1. Chinatown

A classic that I finally got round to watching, and which lived up to the hype. Jack Nicholson was exceptional as the sleek, greasy PI who nevertheless has his own particular moral code. Lots of wonderful, unexpected moments too like getting caught telling a dirty joke, confronting someone over his line of work in the barbershop, and nearly been washed away by a sudden flood. The depiction of early 20th century Los Angeles reminded me of how San Francisco was treated in Vertigo; that is – the setting really shines, almost becoming a character in its own right.

Dishonourable mention:

The Vourdalak

Critics raved about this film, but I found it very slow, rather dull, and not at all scary. Part of this is admittedly a problem of expectations, if I’m watching a movie about a vampire, I expect to be spooked. A horror movie with no horror is like a comedy movie where you don’t actually laugh. It doesn’t matter how good the film is, it doesn’t live up to what you think you should be watching.

Rotten Tomatoes

With another year’s data, did the relationship between my enjoyment and Rotten Tomato scores hold up?

Same as it ever was; a marginally positive relationship. Look at the regression line for evidence, as the Rotten Tomato score goes up on the x-axis, so does my enjoyment on the y-axis (rescaled from 0 to 100).1 A one unit change in the Rotten Tomato score is associated with a 0.22 change in my enjoyment score. So, a subtle difference. Consider this: the difference between two movies that are 20 points apart on Rotten Tomatoes is about a 4 point difference in my enjoyment. Another way to think about this is that Rotten Tomato scores are still only explaining about 10% of the variation in my enjoyment scores; other factors appear to matter much more than the Rotten Tomato scores in determining whether I enjoy a movie.2

Year of Release

What about year of release? With another year’s data, how does the age of a movie affect my enjoyment of it?

Interesting. The regression line is flat, indicating that there is little to no change in my level of enjoyment by year, but look at the observations. It’s like a funnel going from left to right. Newer movies have much more variability in terms of whether I will like them or not. This makes sense given that I’m more likely to try a random new movie that I know nothing about (and may love it or hate it), whereas with old movies I’m pretty much only watching stuff that is well-regarded.3 I also watch a lot more newer movies, to be fair, so there is a greater chance to see this variability (2019 is the median release year for the movies I watch).

You can kind of see this when I filter by decade below.

The size of the dots are proportional to the number of movies I’ve watched within each 10 year time span. This graphic makes it look more like I enjoy newer movies slightly, but look at the 70s. There are only 2 movies I’ve watched from that decade since I’ve been keeping track though (Chinatown and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh). Two very different movies, but each a classic in its own right!

Using the same display logic, the graphic below sorts movies by genre, but arranged left to right based on how much I enjoy them.

Unsurprising that horror is lowest (I have to watch horror to indulge my wife’s penchant for the genre), but a little surprised by some of the ones at the top. I don’t feel like I’m a big documentary guy, but there you go. “Reality” is pretty much made up of Survivor seasons, so I suppose I should have guessed that one.

  1. By way of further explanation, the scatter plots I’m showing in this post all come with a regression line plotted using a basic bivariate ordinary least squares regression. That line is a line of best fit; it tries to predict the relationship between the two variables (shown on the Y and X axes). I’m not going to be tedious and present the regression tables (this is for fun!), but you can just eyeball the relationships or simply look at the regression line. A negative relationship will be shown as the line sloping down from left to right, and a positive relationship will slope up from left to right. The steeper the slope, the more correlated the variables. In the case of the scatter plot above, the steep slope indicates that the two variables are well-correlated. I’m also not going to bother reporting p-values. I don’t think they’re appropriate for several reasons. First, the observations are definitely not independent (how can they be when movies have sequels?) And secondly, the data generating process is not random at all. I deliberately chose which movies to watch and which movies to avoid based on some system, which may not even be entirely clear to me. ↩︎

  2. Rotten Tomatoes audience scores give an even more subtle effect suggesting I should pay more attention to the critic scores rather than the audience scores.↩︎

  3. Although wouldn’t that push the older scores higher? One would think. I think I just have a harder time watching older movies generally, so even the classics struggle in my rating somewhat.↩︎