Tag Archives: 100films.co.uk

My Most-Read Posts of 2023

Posted on by
Reply

Normally I’d post my December “failures” today, but they’re not ready yet (it takes a surprisingly long time to write that column, you know), so I thought I’d crack on with my 2023 reviews instead.

According to my WordPress stats page, I published just 38 posts during 2023. In some respects, I’m surprised it’s so many, considering for most of the year each month consisted of just my monthly review and my list of failures.

Because I knew there were so few posts to work with, I considered not bothering with this post this year. I only started it (seven years ago) because 2016’s #1 baffled me so much. It’s part of the furniture now, but I’m always trying to question ‘the furniture’ so things don’t become staid for the sake of it (becoming staid because of the quality of my writing or whatever, that’s fiiiine).

In the end, I decided to stick with it (you probably guessed that, given that you’re reading it). Not because the results are anything special or interesting, but because… well, they’re not terribly uninteresting, as these things go. If nothing else, I had the idea to add the year’s most-read post overall to the below graph (in purple), for a sense of scale. That post is from just last year, my summation of the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time. It’s followed in the chart by a bunch of old TV columns, plus my post on the 2012 Sight & Sound list, before you finally find 2023’s #1 post at #14 overall. The other four are so far down the list, I couldn’t be bothered to count that far.

As for what those posts actually were…

My Top 5 Most-Viewed New Posts in 2023

5) Blindspot 2023

In the absence of actual film reviews, other posts have been able to sneak into this list — an unusual occurrence. Although, there were reviews published in 2023 that didn’t make this list, so… Perhaps it’s because of name recognition, perhaps it’s just a random fluke, but Blindspot beats out the similarly-themed “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” by two spots (i.e. WDYMYHS came 7th).

4) Silent Shorts Summary

Shorts don’t normally get a look in here either, but reviews are reviews, I guess. This roundup covered eight shorts made between 1900 and 1926, including the first-ever Sherlock Holmes “film”, the first adaptation of Frankenstein, some Georges Méliès trick photography, and a dancing pig. A really, really freaky dancing pig.

3) Archive 5, Vol.6

Remember Archive 5? It was supposed to be a regular feature, but in the last two years I’ve only managed six of them. This one — 2023’s only addition to the strand — featured reviews of 7500, Carefree, The Lie, Paris When It Sizzles, and The Rhythm Section.

2) The All-New 100 Films in a Year Challenge, Mk.II

The post in which I outlined the categories and rules of my Challenge for 2023. Considering this is linked to in all my monthly updates, plus on my Challenge Tracker page, it feels like it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see it being much visited. Well, “much” is a relative term: it came 84th overall, below even the same post about 2022 (who was so interested in 2022 during 2023?! He says, as he begins 2024 with a bunch of posts about 2023…)

1) 2023 | Weeks 3–4

Far and away my most-viewed new post of the year (something I could also say last year — is there always one “break out hit”? I can’t be bothered to go back to find out, to be honest). Feel free to guess which of the five included reviews was the culprit: 1926’s The Magician, 2022’s Glass Onion, Oscar-nominated short My Year of Dicks, then-recent release Shotgun Wedding, or The Banshees of Inisherin, another Oscar nominee. Maybe it was just that particular combination.

936 days late, it’s a new Directors banner!

Posted on by
Reply

So, for the benefit of those who don’t know, the header image at the top of my Reviews by Director listings page features the top 20 directors featured on this blog — not my 20 favourites, but the 20 with the most films I’ve reviewed — pictured in alphabetical order. Obviously, sometimes the lineup changes; but rather than modify the image every time it does, I’ve always intended to update it about once a year. The last time I did was May 2020, so a new one has been overdue for about two-and-a-half years — or 936 days (as I expect you’d already realised).

For what it’s worth, this is now the 8th version of the image — which, when you add in the skipped years, makes it the 10th anniversary of the first. How exciting. This time, there are five changes — or ten, depending how you count it. What I mean is, five directors have been removed, replaced by five different ones.

There were 21 directors who qualified for the 20 slots, with a four-way tie for the last three places. For such occasions, I have an informal rule that I should make as many changes as possible, so out went the only one of the four who was already on there, Bryan Singer. Also dropping out of qualification were the Coen brothers, Ron Howard, George Miller, and Robert Zemeckis.

Joining in their place, we have three filmmakers who were on the list sometime before, but dropped off, and have now returned: Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, and Fritz Lang. They’re joined by two first-timers who seem likely to stick around, Kenneth Branagh and Denis Villeneuve.

And that’s that for… well, I would say “another year”, but we’ll see.

A new era begins…

Posted on by
7

100 Films in a Year is dead.
Long live 100Films.co.uk

Welcome to my new-look blog!

Don’t worry, you’re going to find a lot of it familiar — I haven’t changed the underlying template, and all the old posts are still there, looking like they always did. Well, almost like they always did: I’ve chosen a new font for headings, so that’ll change. But, primarily, it’s a new name and a new logo, which is showcased on the front page in dozens of randomly-changing header images. (The old header and logo endured for seven years, and that was only a tweak & rearrange of the one I’d had for several years before that, so I think a redesign was about due anyway.) There are 20 new banners in total — can you catch ’em all?

More substantively, along with the revised aesthetics comes an adjusted focus.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been pondering “what to do about the blog” for a few years now, but the need for change was really brought to a head in 2021, when I spent most of the year only posting my monthly summaries. There were a couple of things going on that needed addressing. One: what to do about reviews? I wasn’t posting them regularly even before they ground to a total halt, and my ever-increasing backlog of unreviewed films — allowed to mount up over the past couple of years — numbers almost 500. Two: what to do about my eponymous challenge? Reaching 100 films every year has become a relative doddle: the last time I fell short was almost a decade ago, and in four of the last seven years I’ve reached 200 films in a year. Was that unchallenging challenge really still a fitting thing to base my blog around?

The easiest answer to the latter: move the goalposts. But to what? Another easy answer: stop doing it. But I didn’t want to give up blogging entirely. So, a new blog? Nah: a blog is a ‘brand’ (for want of a better word), and I wasn’t in the mood to start from scratch.

Ultimately, the inspiration for change came from the easiest of places. I’ve always referred to this place as 100 Films for short, including using that handle on Twitter and registering the domain 100films.co.uk — previously that just referred you on to my WordPress URL, but last week I moved the site over to it properly. (All the old WordPress URLs should still work, which is handy because otherwise I’d have a lot of link-fixing to do…) So, I could ditch “in a Year” and just go with the shorter title. But why that name? Oh, who needs a why? Though, to justify it at least somewhat, I intend to start a new occasional series about various 100-film lists — you know, like the Sight & Sound poll, or all those AFI ones. Plus, the “coming soon” page is going, to be replaced by an ever-changing list of the last 100 films I watched.

Which brings us back round to the other issue: reviews, and/or what other kinds of posts will appear. In short, my plan is to go back to the blog’s roots, with roundup posts every week or couple of weeks that review what I’ve watched in short capsule-like form. If I have more to say about a film, and the time to write it, I’ll still post separate full-length reviews. How often that will happen, only time will tell. (This “review as I go” approach is part of why the “coming soon” page is being retired.)

There are a few other ideas I have up my sleeve, but I don’t want to overwhelm with too much forward planning right now. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, the new and revised features of this fresh era will become apparent. Plus, some changes have had to wait until the ‘new’ site was live, so only now am I going to begin rethinking the menus, for example. And, to be honest, I’m still unsure of some of the details myself, so there may be aspects of the ‘old site’ that hang around for a bit before being discarded, or change and develop over time. We’ll just see how things go.

Also, there’s the small matter of wrapping up the last year of the ‘old’ blog, because I still have to post the statistics and my best (and worst) films of 2021. All that will be coming — complete with familiar graphics and imagery — over the next few days (as usual, a specific timeframe is hard to nail down. I haven’t even chosen a lot of it yet, never mind written it).

But first, later today I’ll explain how reports of 100 Films in a Year’s death may have been grossly exaggerated…