Films
By far my favourite film released in cinemas this year was Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024). While it confused mainstream viewers who expected a postapocalyptic action adventure, the totally sober approach to a plausible breakdown of society pushed all my buttons. I loved the passivity of the journalist protagonists, I loved the non-specific, non-partisan background to the conflict. And I loved the soundtrack, particular the early double-whammy of ‘Lovefingers’ by Silver Apples and ‘Rocket USA’ by Suicide, and the abrupt introduction of De La Soul’s ‘Say No Go’ to undermine an atrocity was one of my favourite moments in any film this year.
Another recent film I adored was The Beasts (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 2022), a very adult and considered drama about a French couple far out of their depth in the Galician countryside in Spain. The tension is taut throughout, and I loved every minute of its long running time.
I loved Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024), a more garish film than Rose Glass’s previous one, Saint Maud, and a lot more fun, though equally squeamish. I really liked Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024), which continues Luca Guadagnino’s stellar run of successes while maintaining arthouse complexity. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023), also starring Challengers’ Josh O’Connor, is an oddball delight, and it’s the film I’ve recommended to others most often this year. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023) may turn out to be less of a puzzle box than it appears to be, but Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are both excellent. Similarly fantasy-adjacent and reliant on a strong lead is The Five Devils (Léa Mysius, 2022), which is as watchable as it is due to the presence of the amazing Adèle Exarchopoulos. Hoard (Luna Carmoon, 2023) is the sort of straightforwardly excellent and downbeat British drama that people claim aren’t being made nowadays. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023) is as compelling as I’d hoped it would be, and likely to be more memorable than any other film listed here, but unlike Glazer’s other films I’m unlikely to watch it again.
Alongside Civil War, my favourite blockbusters were The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Martin Bourboulon, 2023) and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball, 2024), particularly the early non-plot-related scenes of ape society.
As for slightly older 21st-century films, the one that’s stuck with me is Holiday (Isabella Eklöf, 2018) which I believe was quite controversial upon reliease, and it really is repellent, but constantly thought-provoking. I finally watched It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) on the recommendation of several writer friends, and I liked it very much, though like many modern horror films the final act doesn’t hold up too well. Another film I’ve been meaning to watch for years is La Antena (Esteban Sapir, 2007), which is far more wondrous and inventive than I’d imagined. I loved two films with similarly rambling, Twin Peaks-lite tone: Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018) and The Kid Detective (Evan Morgan, 2020). My favourite family film was Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer Camp, 2021).
I’m a little ashamed that I haven’t delved very deeply into cinematic history this year. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932) was the most affecting and humanistic film I watched, and I’m certain I’ll watch it again before long. Another film I considered a known quantity and was surprised by was Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), which is far more snide and funny than I’d anticipated.
Other films I ticked off the list included the bitter classics The Draughtsman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982) and Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993. Kes (Ken Loach, 1969) was far less about a kestrel than I’d expected, and far more about the school system, and Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) was a great deal less saccharine than I’d supposed, though it was undermined when my wife and I noticed that method actor Dustin Hoffman contrives to pick up and play with a prop in every scene. My most pleasing archive discovery this year was Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine, 1977), an effective, low-budget ghost story starring Mia Farrow that deserves to be better known than it is.
TV
I adored Ripley, the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. While some elements were a little off (Andrew Scott’s age, Johnny Flynn’s lack of charisma), the show came into its own after the central murder, when screenwriter Steven Zaillian was able to increase the tension to an unbearable level. And the whole production looked gorgeous. It’s a real shame it’s unlikely to be recommissioned, as I’d love to have seen an adaptation of Ripley’s Game with the same cast and crew.
Another show that was bittersweet due to prompt cancellation was Kaos, which hewed far more faithfully to Greek mythology than I’d imagined, while stretching and humanising the stories to suit modern TV tastes. The fifth season of Fargo was the best since the first couple, with a simpler tale of a woman on the run which often had me genuinely on the edge of my seat. My guiltiest pleasure was watching both seasons of Outlast, a survival reality TV show which encouraged amoral behaviour in its contestants. My favourite comedy shows were both second seasons: How to With John Wilson and Colin From Accounts, both of which were almost as wonderful as their first seasons.
Videogames
My favourite videogame was one I played only at the very end of the year: Dragon‘s Dogma 2. It’s the most likeable open-world game I’ve played since Assassin‘s Creed: Odyssey, but the fact that it’s considerably less bloated gives it extra points. Travelling with a party of AI followers is jolly rather than frustrating, and the giant enemies and emergent gameplay are out of this world, with ogres and harpies and dragons wrestling and often ignoring the player entirely. The Gigantus sequence, in which you’re tasked with preventing a giant stone statue from trudging out of the sea and destroying a city, is like an interactive Ray Harryhausen film – which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I want out of a game like this.
The other games I particularly enjoyed this year were relatively small ones. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a cheerful Metroidvania that knows when to stop, with the result that I’ve played it three times over. Animal Well is similarly short, though markedly less sweet, and its pixel graphics are wonderfully eerie. I loved the quasi-retro minigame collection UFO 50, though actually I’ve only unlocked a handful of the games because I became obsessed with Party House and stopped there. I’m currently playing Rise of the Golden Idol, which is as good as the first game in the series and which features puzzles that make you feel insanely clever when you solve them.
Of more recent films (i.e. from the last decade), my absolute favourite was The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019), which I couldn’t stop thinking about for all sorts of reasons, and the knowledge that there’s an upcoming second part is tantalising. Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) was delightful in all respects, the best film about film that I’ve seen for a while. I found Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar, 2019) surprisingly affecting, particularly Antonio Banderas’ performance. The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci, 2019) was the most fun I’ve had with a recent film, in part due to the pleasure of spotting favourite TV character actors. I loved Aniara (Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja, 2018) – exactly my sort of setup, about a Mars migration that turns into an endless voyage – the intertitles signalling greater and greater timescales alone were powerful. And though I loved A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015) in every respect, Ralph Fiennes’ creepy dancing remains its most memorable moment.
I watched a lot of classic films this year, partly as a response to lockdown, but also partly because I’ve developed new habits: I no longer fret about not finishing a film in a single session, and I’ve been watching them via BFI Player and MUBI on my (admittedly large-screened) phone, often starting at 5.30am after being woken by my youngest son. Watching films like this, with chunky headphones, in bed in the dark, has been the closest simulation of a cinema setting.
My immediate response to the announcement of the first lockdown was to panic-read substantial classic novels I’d always intended to read. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1872) worked as intended: I found it totally absorbing and entirely reassuring. I suspect that Candide (Voltaire, 1759), Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925) and Lanark (Alasdair Gray, 1981) and The Third Policeman (Flann O’Brien, 1967) will each be influential on my own writing in the coming years. My favourite horror novel was Thérèse Raquin (Émile Zola, 1867), which packed a punch partly because I didn’t realise it was going to be a horror novel. My most important reading discoveries in 2020 were the novels of Richard Yates, my favourites so far being The Easter Parade (1976) and Revolutionary Road (1961), the latter being as great a Great American Novel as The Great Gatsby. My most exciting discovery of 2020 was the Jorge Luis Borges-endorsed, proto-SF novella The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940).
In terms of more recent works, my favourites were A Cosmology of Monsters (Shaun Hamill, 2019), which has one of the most absorbing first chapters of any book I’ve read, Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer, 2014) which I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to reading, and The Wall (John Lanchester, 2019) which made me seethe with envy. I read a lot of non-fiction for writing research purposes, but the factual books I enjoyed most for ‘fun’ were High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter by Kristen Gallerneaux (2018) and Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse: What You Urgently Need To Know (Nina Schick, 2020).
It’s been a great year for TV drama. My wife and I binged both series of the hysterical (in all senses) Succession, I was entirely won over by the calm pace of Normal People, and the decidedly more frenetic I May Destroy You seemed to redefine the possibilities of TV drama with every episode. Staged was an impressively comprehensive and complex response to the first coronavirus lockdown, and was very funny to boot. Upright was the TV show that most upset me, offset by all the tremendous joy, and was probably my favourite TV show of the year. Armando Iannucci’s space workplace comedy Avenue 5 turned out to be far better than expected, and I hope there’ll be more to come. The most exhilarating TV I saw this year was World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji, closely followed by the meticulous, gorgeous and subversive Anaïs Nin adaptation Little Birds. And, likeeveryone else, I thought The Queen’s Gambit was staggeringly good all round.
After around eight years without videogames, purchasing a half-decent laptop this autumn has allowed me to dabble in games I’ve missed in the interim period, though anything particularly open-world or particularly recent stutters like crazy – for which I’m grateful, as I’m terrified of losing too much time to gaming at the expense of work. Still, I managed to work through Portal-esque puzzle game The Talos Principle (2014), Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) (the latter better than the first in the new trilogy but representing an almost unsurmountable graphical challenge for my PC). I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (2014) far more than expected, appreciating the slow pace. I admired a huge amount of What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), which as well as providing a compelling story, acted as a showcase for the possibilities of videogames – particularly the scene involving slicing the heads off fish on a production line whilst simultaneously guiding a prince around a kingdom whilst also learning about the fragile mental health of the factory worker in question. But the only game that I truly loved was Firewatch (2016), in which the player fulfils a patient role as a lookout in a Wyoming forest, whilst developing a relationship with your supervisor over walkie-talkie. The landscape is stunning, the nudges along the path of the narrative subtle, and the story is deeply affecting, perhaps partly because the game is over within three hours or so.
2010 was a year in which I noticed a change in my attitude to videogames: I became more interested in the principles and mechanics behind videogames rather than particular titles themselves. Increasingly, I used games as time-fillers, distractions and OCD tasks rather than as prime-time entertainment. Also, I completely tired of game narratives.
Far from the expansion pack that many expected, this is the definitive Assassin’s Creed game so far. It’s as beautiful as the series has always been, and the character animation is superb – but this time Ubisoft have layered dozens of game types on top of the basic quests. As many reviewers have noted, it’s easy to become happily waylaid in sidequests, en route to main story locations – in fact, this is the only game I can remember where I’ve begun to rinse the remaining sidequests immediately after completing the main story.
I already posted about this game on my 
Tim Major 
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