Let’s Look at the 2024 National Film Registry Selections

Santa’s not the only one compiling a “Nice” list in December. Each year since 1989, the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board has curated a list of up to 25 motion pictures deemed to be “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” for inclusion on its National Film Registry roster. The works–not just feature films, but also documentaries, short subjects, newsreels, experimental and student films, and even home movies–have traditionally been spread across a gamut of genres and themes from over 125 years of cinema. Last week a new slate of 25 titles was announced, and not surprisingly they range from ’30s crime dramas to ’60s cinéma vérité to ’80s pop culture favorites and more. Let’s take a brief look at each selection and what makes them stand out (with some random and often personal comments by yours truly), and see how many of them are available on home video:

 

Koko’s Earth Control (1928) – One of the popular “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons from brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, this innovative short mixed animation and live action for a truly cosmic comedy. Koko the Clown and his canine pal Fitz come across a “planetary control room: somewhere in the bowels of the Earth and proceed to wreak havoc around the world and across the solar system.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) – Was James Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan really yellow or merely acting at the conclusion of this gritty Warners crime drama, the third film featuring the Dead End Kids? You be the judge. No word yet if next year’s list will include the 1939 sequel The Angels Wash Their Faces, with the Dead End crew and Ronald Reagan.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942) – Simply put, one of the finest sports biopics ever made, with the added bonus of Babe Ruth appearing as himself alongside Gary Cooper’s Lou Gehrig.

Invaders from Mars (1953) – Aptly described during its 1970s re-release as “A Nightmarish Answer to The Wizard of Oz,” William Cameron Menzies’ extraterrestrial gem skillfully blended the Red Scare paranoia that permeated ’50s sci-fi cinema with the imagination of young protagonist David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt).

The Miracle Worker (1962) – Co-stars Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke took home the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards, respectively, for this biodrama about blind and deaf Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan. This was the second consecutive year that a film about Keller was selected, after the 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story made the 2023 list.

The Chelsea Girls (1966) – Three-plus hours of split-screen shenanigans at New York’s famed Chelsea Hotel and the Warhol Factory, courtesy of co-directors Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The “action,” chronicling the pseudo-documentarian doings of Factory regulars Brigid Berlin, Nico, Ondine, International Velvet, and Mary Woronov, switches between black-and-white and color and alternating soundtracks. I saw it in a revival house in London in 1984, and frankly the Madame Tussaud’s tour I skipped would have been shorter and livelier.

Ganja & Hess (1973) – Writer/director Bill Gunn’s African-American spin on the vampire genre stars Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones as an anthropologist who is transformed into a bloodsucker after he’s stabbed with a mystical ceremonial dagger.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – That makes two National Film Registry honorees based on the life of convicted killer and grave robber Ed Gein, after Hitchcock’s Psycho. Will Alan Ormsby’s Deranged make the cut next year?

Uptown Saturday Night (1974) – Director/co-star Sidney Poitier’s raucous comedy about two pals (Poitier and Bill Cosby) trying to recover a stolen winning lottery ticket boasts an impressive supporting cast that includes Harry Belafonte (doing a Marlon Brando Godfather impression), Roscoe Lee Browne, Rosalind Cash, Paula Kelly, Harold Nicholas of Nicholas Brothers fame, Richard Pryor, and Flip Wilson.

Zora Lathan Student Films (1975-76) – This collection of six short works artist/historian Adaora “Zora” Lathan shot during her time as a student at the University of Chicago focuses on the everyday activities of her family and community and was crafted by Lathan to “showcase filmmaking techniques available in the mid-1970s.”

Up in Smoke (1978) – Somehow I knew, right from the early scene where a half-awake Cheech Marin stumbles into a closet and mistakes a laundry hamper for the toilet, that weed-loving duo Cheech and Chong’s stoner comedy would someday make its way into the Library of Congress.

Will (1981) – The first independent feature film directed by a woman, Jessie Maple’s urban drama stars Obaka Adedunyo in the title role of a former college hoops standout struggling to overcome his drug addiction as he coaches a girls’ basketball squad. Meanwhile, Will and his wife Jean (Loretta Devine) have taken in a homeless 12-year-old boy and are trying to keep the youth from making the same mistakes Will did.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – “You have been, and always shall be, the best of the Trek films.”

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) – One cannot help but wonder if the Eddie Murphy-led action/comedy about a Detroit cop trying to adjust to life in Southern California while on a case would have made this list of either Mickey Rourke or Sylvester Stallone–the two actors originally considered for the tile role–had stayed with the project.

Dirty Dancing (1987) – “Nobody puts Baby in a corner”…unless, apparently, that corner is in the Library of Congress. The Catskills-set drama starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey joins such ’80s musical features as The Blues Brothers, Fame, Purple Rain, Stop Making Sense, La Bamba, and Hairspray on the NFR’s roll call. Be patient, Flashdance and Footloose fans.

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) – Made during the height of the country’s AIDS crisis, this emotionally charged documentary examined the life stories of five people memorialized on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was shown during its 1987 inaugural display on the National Mall in Washington. Already larger than a football field and made up of over 1,900 panels then, the quilt would go on to comprise over 48,000 panels honoring 94,000 lives lost to AIDS in its last full public exhibition in 2012.

Powwow Highway (1989) – “It’s a good day to be Native American” in director Jonathan Wacks’ seriocomic illustration of everyday life on a Cheyenne Indian reservation in southeastern Montana. Two childhood friends–one trying to stop the passage of a strip-mining contract that will destroy the reservation, the other seeking to find the “warrior’s vision” in a beat-up ’64 Buick he names Protector–set off on a chaotic quest across the Great Plains and Southwest.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) – Leave it to writer/director Gus Van Sant, who scored a critical success with his thematically similar Drugstore Cowboy two years earlier–to update three plays from Shakespeare’s historical Henriad series to a tale of modern-day male street hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific Northwest.

American Me (1992) – The directorial debut for star Edward James Olmos, this unflinching look at four decades of Latino street life in Southern California and the evolution of the Mexican Mafia within California’s prison system was not well received by the drug lords whose lives formed the basis for the film’s fictionalized characters. In fact, several murders and an extortion plot against Olmos were said to have resulted from the production.

My Family (Mi Familia) (1995) – A dramatic chronicle of Mexican-American life as seen through the eyes of three generations of an immigrant family who settled in Los Angeles, Mi Familia is the third picture to be honored by director Gregory Nava, after his earlier El Norte and the subsequent Selena.

Compensation (1999) – Indie filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, a UCLA grad who was part of the film school’s “L.A. Revolution” collective of African-American students, directed this drama of parallel love stories, both set in Chicago a century apart. Each featuring the same leads, the twin romances follow a deaf woman (Michelle A. Banks) and a hearing man (John Earl Jelks) and depict the opposition each couple encounters.

Spy Kids (2001) – Four sequels and a 2023 reboot later, director Robert Rodriguez’s original action/comedy about two adolescent siblings who discover their parents are actually secret agents for the Organization of Super Spies and must rescue them from a children’s TV host/supervillain makes its way onto the list. The family-friendly film certainly offers a contrast to Rodriguez’s other selected work, the bullet-riddled cult fave El Mariachi.

No Country for Old Men (2007) – To be perfectly honest, the most I ever lost on a coin toss was getting the smaller of two remaining bedrooms in a house I shared with schoolmates my junior year of college, so all things considered I’d say I got off fairly easy. This makes three selections for the brothers Coen, after Fargo and The Big Lebowski.

The Social Network (2010) – For me, the best line in writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s chronicle of the stormy origins of Facebook came not from Jesse Eisenberg as the website’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, but from Armie Hammer in his dual roles of twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Proposing violence as a reaction to Zuckerberg’s alleged theft of the siblings’ idea, Tyler gives his qualifications for the job as “I’m six-five, 220, and there’s two of me!”

Which of the Registry’s 2024 honorees is your favorite? Also, what film do you think should be added to the complete National Film Registry list in 2025 or beyond? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.