The Best of 2024

Posted on January 6, 2025 by badblokebob

It’s time to finally let go of last year with my annual summation of what I liked best about it. Well, some of that, anyway. And then some more of that. And then a bunch of stuff I missed and so I don’t know if they were any good or not. Confused? Each bit will make sense when we get to it, I’m sure.

Anyway, before we get stuck in, my usual reminders. All the movies I watched for the first time in 2024 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. And this is a ‘top ten’ in the sense that it’s the top 10% of my 2024 viewing. I watched 131 films for the first time last year, which means this time it’s a top thirteen.

The Thirteen Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2024

I’ve called this “best films” because I always have, but this year I’ve definitely leant more into “favourites” in my decision-making. Maybe I always do, but when compiling this list, I was particularly conscious of choosing 4-star or borderline 5-star films I’d really enjoyed over 5-star films that I’d strongly admired.

13 The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

I love a good sword fight, and this packs seven superb ones into a tight 85 minutes, while still finding room for some honour-based moral conflict. [Full review.]

12 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

The perspective on drag- and trans-related issues feels ridiculously pertinent for something made 30 years ago, but it’s really the inherent joy, humour, and a degree of iconoclasm that makes this enduringly enjoyable.

11 The Menu

Some reviewers focused on the unsubtle social commentary, though I’d argue it’s only a significant problem if you disagree with it. Either way, set that aside and this is clearly an accessible edge-of-your-seat slow-burn thriller.

10 Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

In my Letterboxd review I commented that it’s “the kind of film I give 4 stars then put on my end-of-year top ten anyway” and, well, lookee here. I also said “it’s a stonkingly fun fantasy action-adventure flick whether you know the lore / rules [of D&D] or not”, and that’s also true.

9 Barbie

By all rights a live-action Barbie movie should be kiddie-aimed toy-advertisement slop, but put it in the hands of genuine auteurs (i.e. producer Margot Robbie and cowriter/director Greta Gerwig) and you end up with a movie that actually has something to say about women’s (and men’s) place in our world and how the toys we give to children have a role in reflecting and shaping — or perhaps distracting from — that reality. Lest that makes it sound like a lecture, it’s still a witty brightly-coloured entertainment. [Full review.]

8 Look Back

The only 2024 film to make my list this year is an hour-long anime about the evolving friendship between two girls as they develop from drawing manga for their school newsletter to producing it professionally… which is also kinda beside the point, but to say too much about where the story goes and what it’s really about would lessen its impact. It also serves a reminder that films don’t need an epic length to be powerful — let movies be as long as they need to be (and sometimes, that means let them be short).

7 The Best Years of Our Lives

This won seven Oscars and sits on both the IMDb and Letterboxd Top 250s, and yet I’d argue it’s underrated; by which I guess I really mean you never hear anyone talk about it, which lessens its significance. It’s one of the last films from the IMDb list that I’ve watched for that reason: it was never a movie others made me feel I had to see. But I’m so glad I got there in the end, because it might just be a masterpiece, which depicts the fallout for American servicemen and their families in the wake of World War 2, via a trio of compelling storylines and across-the-board quality performances.

6 The Good, the Bad, the Weird

This self-described “Oriental Western” remixes Sergio Leone (the title is no coincidence) with a dash of Tarantino-esque modernism and a sprinkling of Mad Max dynamism, powered by whatever incredible energy has made South Korea a breeding ground for remarkable cult-hit movies over the past… well, quarter-century, now. It might technically be derivative (as I said, the Leone allusion is deliberate, as are other obvious homages), but the result still feels fresh, exciting, and boundlessly fun.

5 Army of Shadows

My list almost swings from one extreme to another now, as the next couple of films are Very Serious. First, Jean-Pierre Melville’s truth-based thriller about the French Resistance. Time has perhaps diluted the Anglosphere’s view of France in World War 2, thanks to comedies like ‘Allo ‘Allo! and that one oft-repeated Simpsons joke about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (if you doubt the significance of one gag, it has a Wikipedia entry which summarises its impact), but Army of Shadows is a brutal reminder of the dangers faced and sacrifices made by the Resistance. It’s a fittingly tense and uncompromising film, at times even uncomfortable, but the cumulative effect is an unparalleled thriller.

4 Incendies

Similarly to Army of Shadows, Denis Villeneuve’s breakthrough film takes a real-life conflict (although here it’s anonymised into a fictional country) to examine the fallout of horrendous acts of violence, but in the cinematic form of an engrossing mystery thriller. Wanting those answers helps pull the viewer through the film’s bleaker sequences, including a bus-based centrepiece that is hellish, heartrending, and incredibly produced. And when we finally get the answers, they’re no less surprising and shocking than the rest. [Full review.]

3 My Darling Clementine

Westerns have never been a particular favourite genre of mine. I don’t think I even saw one until I studied them for an A level module (Back to the Future Part III excepted). When I do watch them, I assume my taste will err more towards the revisionism of Spaghetti Westerns or more modern takes. Perhaps it does overall, but that doesn’t mean a classic Western can’t still hit the spot — and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine most certainly does that. As one of the earliest cinematic depictions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, it may not be historically accurate, but that scarcely matters when the entire film is so on-point otherwise. Heck, even the day-for-night photography looks good. Day-for-night never looks good! Remarkable.

2 RRR

If all you’ve seen of RRR is the Oscar-winning Naatu Naatu sequence, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s about Indian bros overcoming colonial bullies with the power of dance. And, well, you’d be correct, partly. Loosely (oh so loosely) based on the life of two real revolutionaries, RRR is also an action movie with sequences of unleashed imagination — the kind of over-the-top reality-defying CGI-aided fun Western filmmakers seem to be incapable of conjuring. It’s also a first-rate bromance, full of big emotion in its undulations of friendship and betrayal. Emotion so big it can only be conveyed through song, because of course it’s a musical too. Is there anything RRR isn’t? Yeah: subtle. But who needs subtlety when you’re this badass?

1 Bottoms

Regular readers may be aware that I don’t rewatch films all that often (that’s why I’ve had various strategies over the past few years to prompt rewatches) and I certainly don’t rewatch things quickly — if I watch a film twice within about five years, it feels like a fairly quick revisit (for a somewhat-timely example: I feel I watched Home Alone on a recent Christmas. I checked: it was 2017). This background is to help you understand the significance of the fact that, after I finished watching Bottoms for the first time, I immediately put it on again. I can remember one other occasion in my life when I’ve watched the same film twice back-to-back (my third and fourth viewings of Serenity, when it was screened by my university film society). Is that reason enough to declare Bottoms my favourite first-time watch of 2024? Not really (any number of factors could influence such a decision, not just “that was so perfect I must break the habit of a lifetime and watch it again immediately”), and I did pause to consider if I was letting that one aspect influence my decision (I concluded not). But it does help indicate how much I enjoyed it, and that’s why it’s #1.

As usual, I’ll take a moment to highlight a few other films.

Traditionally I don’t list “some more films I almost put in my top list” in this section, because if I’m going to do that, why not make the main list longer and rank them properly? That said, ranking is an imprecise art — on a different day, I might’ve erred a different way and my top 13 would be in a different order and/or include some different films. So, with that in mind, the films that survived my long list of 46 to be among the final considerations were (in strictly alphabetical order) American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, Dune: Part Two, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Now, to recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t; either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Bottoms, RRR, My Darling Clementine, American Fiction, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Yi Yi, Army of Shadows, The Swordsman of All Swordsmen, Incendies, Rosemary’s Baby, The Cranes Are Flying, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. (The first three being my eventual top three of the year is a whopping coincidence, not some kind of bizarre conspiracy, I promise.)

Finally, as always, a mention for the 14 films that earned 5-star ratings this year. (In my stats post I said it was 13, because I slipped up. None of these ratings are truly locked until I post a review, anyway (sometimes the process of writing the review causes me to reassess), so I’ll leave it as it is.) Nine of them made it into the top ten, including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Army of Shadows, The Best Years of Our Lives, Bottoms, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Incendies, Look Back, My Darling Clementine, and RRR. The other five were American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films from 2024 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures — with the caveat that I’ve almost certainly forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy.

Abigail
Alien: Romulus
Anora
Back to Black
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Better Man
The Brutalist
Carry-On
Challengers
Civil War
Conclave
Deadpool & Wolverine
Despicable Me 4
Drive-Away Dolls
Emilia Pérez
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Gladiator II
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Here
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
I Saw the TV Glow
It Ends with Us
Joker: Folie à Deux
Juror #2
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Kraven the Hunter
Kung Fu Panda 4
Longlegs
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Love Lies Bleeding
Madame Web
Mean Girls
Megalopolis
Moana 2
Monkey Man
Mufasa: The Lion King
Nosferatu
Paddington in Peru
Queer
Rebel Ridge
Red One
The Substance
Transformers One
Trap
Twisters
Venom: The Last Dance
Wicked: Part I
The Wild Robot

Good golly, that’s another year over! In terms of the history of this blog, 2024 will be remembered as the year I completed my new-style Challenge for the first time. But I can’t rest there: it’s time to try to do it all over again for 2025.

The Best of 2023

Posted on January 7, 2024 by badblokebob

My review of the year reaches its end in the way it always does: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2023, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

For almost a decade now, my annual “top ten” has actually been my “top 10%”, the final total of entries taking its cue from how many first-time watches there were that year. Well, this year there were 103, and 10% of 103 is 10.3, which rounds down to 10 — so, for the first time since 2014, my top ten is actually a top ten. Huh.

The Ten Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

As alluded to in the previous paragraph (but I’ll spell it out again), all the movies I watched for the first time in 2023 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. In the past I’ve also provided a yearly rank for the films that were released during the previous year, but in 2023 I only saw 17 such films, and less than half of them were what you’d call “major” releases. More to the point, only one of them appears in my top ten, so there’s not much point providing a “2023 ranking”.

So, let’s crack on…

10 Confess, Fletch

Once played by Chevy Chase in a couple of ’80s films I’ve never seen, here Jon Hamm takes over the role of Fletch, a journalist who seems to have a habit of getting embroiled in mysteries. Hamm is one of those guys that Classic Hollywood loved but we don’t see enough of anymore: typically handsome fellas who can also be hilariously funny. That makes him perfect to lead this comedy thriller, which manages to be consistently bouncy fun while also unspooling a pretty decent mystery storyline. We deserve a whole pile of sequels, but I suspect we won’t get any. I guess I’ll have to see if those two earlier flicks measure up, or maybe even read the books.

9 Night and the City

The basic plot — small-time hustler with big ambitions gets in over his head — feels familiar from many a noir, but the devil’s in the details, which here include an absolutely superb performance from Richard Widmark as wannabe-somebody Fabian and first-rate direction by Jules Dassin, plus a post-war London setting that brings a different flavour than the genre’s usual LA/NY locales. Fabian may have only been “so close” to greatness, but Dassin certainly achieved it.

8 Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle’s debut tells a film noir narrative with a dose of French Nouvelle Vague style, which results in an unpredictable thriller with a kind of tragic beauty and casual existentialism you don’t often get from the genre’s hard-boiled American counterparts.

7 The Killers

The first screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story covers the original work in its opening sequence — and what a sequence it is — before spinning off into an entirely original narrative to explain the backstory to that opening. Following an insurance investigator as he pieces together one man’s life, it’s like noir’s answer to Citizen Kane; and, at its best, that’s a comparison it stands up to. Burt Lancaster’s swagger belies this being his screen debut; screenwriter Anthony Veiller juggles a nonlinear storyline to revealing effect; and director Robert Siodmak gets to show off with scenes like a single-take heist — and that opening, of course, which was so good, the two hitmen characters who briefly star in it earnt their own (radio) spin-off.

6 In a Lonely Place

One of the great things about film noir being a trend that was observed retrospectively, as opposed to a genre that had been codified and its makers were aware of, is that you can come across well-established and widely-agreed noir films that don’t feel much like anything you’d expect of the ‘genre’. That’s true of these next three entries in my top ten (yes, from #9 to #4 is a straight run of noir). In a Lonely Place starts out like a Hollywood-insider screwball comedy, with wry observations of the industry and amusing rat-a-tat dialogue. But then there’s a murder — suddenly, oh so noir. But kinda not really, because what follows is more of a character study. To say too much would be spoilersome, other than to add that Humphrey Bogart’s performance starts out as fairly standard fare for the star, but develops into something incredible.

5 Mildred Pierce

Even more so than In a Lonely Place, here’s a noir that’s almost (almost) one in technicality only. James M. Cain’s novel about a housewife struggling to make her way, while contending with a self-absorbed and demanding daughter, has been described as a psychological thriller, but plays on screen as a familial melodrama — except screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s adaptation adds a murder investigation framing device, sliding it sideways into noir. The end result runs all three simultaneously, to magnificent effect.

4 Sweet Smell of Success

At first blush, this might not look like your typical noir: it’s centred on a grifting New York talent agent (Tony Curtis, in what feels like the role he was born to play) and an influential newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster, also excellent), the former desperate for the attention of the latter to promote his clients. Hardly the world of private dicks and gangsters and femme fatales that you’d expect of the genre. But, really, noir is about the dark side of the American dream, and that can play out as well in the cutthroat world of Broadway as anywhere. Like every great dystopia, it’s made to seem so appealing you want to be part of it, even as we’re shown that to actually live it would be horrid.

3 Oppenheimer

There’s been a sense from some quarters that Oppenheimer represents writer-director Christopher Nolan finally realising his potential as a Serious Filmmaker, making this clearly his best film. I don’t know about that (I love Bond-type films at least as much as Nolan himself, so my taste still errs toward The Dark Knight and Inception and maybe even Tenet, and we can’t disregard The Prestige or Interstellar either), but there’s no doubting this is his most “mature” work to date. It is, to be clear, a stunning achievement — a three-hour partially-black-and-white character-driven drama, mostly told through scenes of men (and occasionally women) sitting in rooms talking, that is gripping throughout. But even that description is reductive, because there’s so much more going on in the way Nolan tells this story — the juggling of time; the use of montage. He’s always done that kind of thing to an extent (Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk foreground it), but here it feels less formalised, more intuitive, and that pays dividends.

2 Everything Everywhere All at Once

It took me a long time to get round to this, meaning it had been through multiple praise/backlash cycles, so I approached it with an odd mix of hype and trepidation. As it turned out, it’s very much My Kinda Thing: science fiction with big ideas; character drama with big emotions; action with a sense of fun; all cut with enough comedy and bizarreness to take the edge off any earnestness, but without undermining the heart. And when I say “bizarreness”, I truly mean it — it’s not just “ooh, a little quirky”, but tossed through with crazy, random concepts. I’m sure some people find that kind of thing off-putting, but for me, it just makes it all that much more fun.

1 Glass Onion

If Knives Out felt zeitgeisty in its pillorying of rich people, Glass Onion is full-on prophetic: the character the plot revolves around is a thinly-veiled spot-on parody of idiot-billionaire Elon Musk, but the film was only released as the depths of his stupidity were beginning to be publicly exposed. His disastrous reign at ~~Twitter~~ X has only further clarified the parallels. If Glass Onion has a problem, that may be it: its cast of influencers and wannabes are sometimes more caricatures than characters. Or maybe that’s just the fault of the vapidity of the modern world. Either way, it offers a murder mystery narrative full of clever reveals and reversals, rewarding both if you try to second-guess it (good luck) or just allow yourself to be swept along. [Full review.]

As usual, getting the 103 new films I watched in 2023 down to a top ten proved a challenge. Indeed, as the statistics ultimately revealed, this was a year of high quality, so it follows naturally that it would be hard to narrow it down to just a small number of favourites. Now, while I always include some “honourable mentions” at this point in my “best of” post, I don’t normally just list films that almost made it in to my top ten. I figure if I’m going to do that, I may as well just expand the list. But I’m making something of an exception this year, simply because the final list ended up so dominated by noir that I watched for WDYMYHS. Maybe that was inevitable when I put specific effort into watching a pile of highly-acclaimed movies from a genre I love, but it also feels kinda unfair.

So, other films that made it as far as my “top 20” list, but didn’t quite go all the way, included (in alphabetical order) The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Pied Piper, Remember the Night, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Shiva Baby. There were also a couple more noirs that didn’t quite make it: Nightmare Alley and Scarlet Street. All great films, but there’s only so much room.

Indeed, if my top ten was based on films’ best individual sequences rather than, y’know, the entire movie, there are some “almost made it”s that would actually top the chart — films like Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (for Revolting Children, a proper anthem of a song by Tim Minchin that Matthew Warchus directs the hell out of) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (for the whole train climax… or the Rome car chase… or even just the absolutely perfect cut into the opening titles) and John Wick: Chapter Four (for… oh God, I can’t even decide: it’s wall-to-wall extravagantly fantastic action set pieces). Some films from the actual top ten would feature in such a list too, like the opening diner sequence from The Killers, or the finale of Oppenheimer (so good, even the Linkin Park meme version is a banger).

Moving away from the top ten itself, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month — some of which have already been mentioned in this post, but some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Glass Onion, Ace in the Hole (another great noir!), Everything Everywhere All at Once, Scarlet Street, The Shiver of the Vampires, In a Lonely Place, Night and the City, All the Old Knives, The Pied Piper, Alien Love Triangle, The Killers, and Mildred Pierce.

Finally, as always, a mention for the 17 films that earned a 5-star rating this year. All ten of my top ten made the grade this year, but the other seven were (again, in alphabetical order) Ace in the Hole, The Banshees of Inisherin, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Pied Piper, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Scarlet Street.

With the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2023 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Anatomy of a Fall
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Asteroid City
Barbie
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Cocaine Bear
The Creator
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
The Exorcist: Believer
Expend4bles
Extraction 2
Fast X
Ferrari
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Flash
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
The Killer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Knock at the Cabin
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Little Mermaid
Maestro
The Marvels
May December
Meg 2: The Trench
Napoleon
No Hard Feelings
Past Lives
Plane
Poor Things
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Saltburn
Saw X
Scream VI
Silent Night
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
Wish
Wonka

So, that’s it for 2023. All wrapped up within the first week, same as last year. I feel like I’ve got this down to some kind of science. (Oops — fate: tempted. Next year I’ll probably wind up having to post this stuff throughout the whole of January.)

And with a new week — the second of the year, already — beginning tomorrow, I feel like there’s no time to waste: onwards to 2024!

The Best of 2022

Posted on January 6, 2023 by badblokebob

And so my review of the year reaches its end in the usual fashion: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2022, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

Regular readers may have noticed there’s no “worst” list this year. As I wrote last year, the idea of singling out a list of bad movies has become highly unfashionable in recent years, especially when big-name publications do it. I don’t think such lists are wholly without worth (they acknowledge that, as a film viewer, it’s not all sunshine and roses), and there’s a big difference between a major publication slagging off some recent releases (which may affect those films’ continued financial success and their makers’ careers) and a one-man blog picking a couple of lesser films from what he happened to watch that year (which rarely includes recent releases, and wouldn’t have an impact on them even if it did). Nonetheless, in the spirit of celebrating what you love and staying quiet about the rest, I’ve decided to ditch my “worst” list. (If you want, there’s still the “Least Favourite” award in my monthly Arbies.)

With that said, it’s on with…

The Eleven Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2022

Continuing with the methodology I’ve used since 2016, this list features the top 10% of my first-time watches from the year. In 2022, the total was 111, which means there are 11 films on this year’s “top 10”.

As ever, it’s not just 2022 releases that are eligible for my 2022 list. Consequently, in recent years I’ve included a ‘yearly rank’ for films that had their UK release during the previous 12 months. However, I watched so few of the year’s big hitters in 2022 that I felt to rank what I did see would be misleading. There are too many acclaimed films omitted only because I’m not able to consider them, not because I don’t think they’re worthy. Hopefully I’ll get back on top of seeing new releases, so a yearly ranking can return in the future.

11 Mona Lisa

Take a noir storyline then run it through gritty “kitchen sink” British sensibilities, and you get this: a film that works as both a neo-noir gangster thriller and a character study of a man revising his views of the world. [Full review.]

10 Prey

Studios keep trying to rehash their ’80s sci-fi/action IPs, and they keep producing mediocre results. Thankfully, someone has finally bucked the trend. Prey works in part because it abandons continuity and takes a back-to-basics approach to its alien menace. Setting it in a completely different time period adds more opportunities for fresh perspectives and developments. It’s such a seemingly simple idea that works so well, and one that’s eminently repeatable. Predators vs knights? Predators vs samurai? Predators vs cowboys? Yes, yes, and yes, please, and anything else you can think of. [Full review.]

9 Ambulance

Michael Bay has always been a divisive filmmaker. His brash, bombastic style isn’t for everyone. But I think there’s a method to his madness (even when it results in trash) and so, when he’s on form, he remains one of the most exciting action filmmakers. Ambulance shows he’s still got the goods. You could imagine the storyline — after a bank heist goes wrong, two crooks escape in an ambulance, along with the cop they shot and a paramedic trying to save him — being from a 1940s film noir; a grim character study of men under pressure. That side of it is still in there, just dressed up with all the wildness of only-semi-restrained Bayhem. [Full review.]

8 The Ghost Writer

A thriller about… writing a book? Ah, but when the book in question is the autobiography of a disgraced, potentially criminal former Prime Minister, and the book’s new ghost writer has been brought in because his predecessor died under suspicious circumstances, well, you begin to see where there are questions to be answered. Pierce Brosnan is perfect for the role of a former politician who is 50% charming and 50% believable as a scheming villain, while Ewan McGregor leads us through the twisty plot as an everyman who needs the money but still has a conscience. Will the truth out? [Full review.]

7 West Side Story

Spielberg, man. If you’d told me a remake of West Side Story would end up in my top ten of the year, I’d have given you a funny look. I didn’t love the original film version, but I also didn’t think it could be bettered — it’s a classic for a reason. Surely any remake was doomed to be lesser? But ah, here comes Steven Spielberg, a director whose style clearly chimes with my taste (in fairness, his work helped define my taste, thanks to watching the likes of Indiana Jones, and Spielberg-produced/-emulating movies such as Back to the Future, at a formative age). His version screams Movie in a way so few films do nowadays, and the changes he and his team have made to the material elevate it even beyond the ’61 film, for my money. [Full review.]

6 High and Low

Toshiro Mifune plays a man presented with a life-changing moral dilemma in this thriller from director Akira Kurosawa. It’s a film of two halves: the first, contained almost to one room in near-real-time, sees Mifune’s business executive grapple with a conundrum that could ruin his career; the second becomes intensely procedural as it follows the police investigation and fallout from Mifune’s actions. With its precision attention to detail and healthy dose of mundanity, Kurosawa conjures an intense realism — the film could almost be a documentary; only, a documentary could never be this finely controlled. [Full review.]

5 Mass

Disappointingly relegated to “Sky Original” status here in the UK (usually a dumping ground for low-quality genre movies), Mass is a film that deserves to be more widely seen (the story of too many films buried on random streaming services nowadays, I fear — how many people have actually seen Best Picture winner CODA when it’s locked away on Apple TV+?) The less you know going in the better to be hit with the film’s full emotional weight. And it is a heavy film, but only in a way the befits its subject matter. Made up almost entirely of four people sat round a table talking, it is nonetheless “a blisteringly emotional gut-punch … but, with that, it’s ultimately cathartic.” [Full review.]

4 Encanto

I do enjoy a Disney animation, but one has never broken into my top ten before (Zootropolis was 15th in 2016 and Moana was 16th in 2017). That’s partly the luck of the draw (I watched over 50% more films in each of those years), but also something about how well Encanto works — which, frankly, I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, all the obvious elements are there: catchy songs, likeable characters, impressively fluid animation, a strong message about what matters. But there’s something else, too; a sprinkling of magic that, for me at least, elevates the film to be something even more special. I say I like a Disney film, but I don’t revisit them too often. I’ve already watched Encanto twice. In one year? That’s not like me! So, hopefully you see my point. [Full review.]

3 Top Gun: Maverick

I feel the need — the need for actors doing their flying stunts for real! Striking usage of the IMAX aspect ratio! Memorable callbacks to the original movie! Cheesy music that fits the tone perfectly! Actual humour! Proper subplots! Top Gun: Maverick is old-fashioned blockbuster moviemaking done with modern sensibilities (can you imagine them actually putting actors in jets back in the ’80s? For one thing, where would they have put those great big film cameras?) Actor/producer Tom Cruise has spent decades now perfecting this brand of big-screen entertainment, and here he shows the next generation how it should be done — both in-film, as a pupil-turned-teacher trying to get a class of the best pilots to be even better, i.e. as good as he is; and in real life too, rocking up in an era when the box office is dominated by previz- and CGI-driven superhero theme-park-rides-as-cinema, and giving us a done-for-real spectacle that kicked all their asses at the box office. The movies, and movie stars, are only dead when Tom Cruise says they are.

2 Les Enfants du Paradis

According to IMDb, when Children of Paradise (to use its translated title) was initially distributed in the USA, it was promoted as “a sort of French-made Gone with the Wind”. It’s not a bad comparison. Not in a literal sense — this isn’t about a spoilt rich girl getting caught up in a civil war on the wrong side — but as an epic, years-spanning romantic melodrama? There are some similarities. It’s the story of a courtesan-turned-actress and the four men in her orbit — a mime artiste, an aspiring actor, a wannabe crook, and a moneyed gent — in and around the theatrical scene of 1830s Paris. It’s told with a style that feels adapted from a novel — it’s got that kind of scope, with its timespan and array of characters, and depth, which feel more like literature than something conceived directly for the screen. In fact, most of the characters are based on real people, which I suppose is neither here nor there, but does add another layer of interest. Whatever makes it work is enough to keep it thoroughly compelling even with a running time over three hours.

1 Manhunter

I first became aware of Manhunter many moons ago, as a piece of footnote trivia in the history of movies: “did you know there was a Hannibal Lector film before Silence of the Lambs?” What a crazy idea! How bad it must have been to be so thoroughly overshadowed by Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning version. Well, the history of the movies is rarely so straightforward; and as the immediate acclaim for Lambs has died down, and its various sequels and prequels have petered away, Manhunter has been able to reemerge somewhat. And so it should, because this is a great movie. Maybe not a great Hannibal Lector movie (Brian Cox is very good in the role, with less of the ticks and tricks that made Hopkins so memorable, but he’s not the focus of the story), but a superb “hunt for a serial killer” thriller. It’s dripping with ’80s style thanks to a director who helped define what that even meant (via his involvement with Miami Vice), while the hero cop, played by William Petersen, feels ahead of his time, struggling with the mental toll of previous cases as he tries to do the right thing and stop another killer. Such a mix of style and substance makes for an all-round fulfilling film; one that I think deserves every bit to be celebrated alongside Jonathan Demme’s more widely-acknowledged movie.

To celebrate it topping my list, Manhunter is on BBC Two tonight at 11:05pm, and on iPlayer for 30 days afterwards.*

As usual, I’d like to highlight a few other films.

Firstly, I wrote this little paragraph not sure where to use it, but here seems a good place. That’s to say: I love a minor film noir. Just a solid, competently made, usually 60-to-80-minute programmer. The highly-regarded Classics are all well and good — I appreciate their quality; why they’re ‘better’ — but, in many respects, I get more actual enjoyment (certainly in a relaxed, easy-viewing sense) from a run-of-the-mill type film. Not bad ones, you understand, just average fare. And here seems a good place to say that because 2022’s Challenge compelled me to watch a few noirs of that ilk. All of them were on the long list for my top ten, but none quite made it. I’m talking about the likes of Christmas Holiday, He Walked by Night, Killer’s Kiss, My Name Is Julia Ross, and Repeat Performance. (I also liked The Killing, but that’s in no way a “minor” noir.) Mr. Soft Touch grew on me as it went on, too, but that’s probably one to only be watched in December.

Next, here’s a recap of the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some have already been mentioned in this post, but some haven’t… In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Mass, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, West Side Story, High and Low, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Ghost Writer, Ambulance, Repeat Performance, Top Gun: Maverick, The Mission, Manhunter, and Les Enfants du Paradis.

Finally, something I’ve always done in this section is list every film that earned a 5-star rating during the year. In part that’s because there’s normally far too many to include in my list, even if it weren’t for the fact 4-star films usually sneak in too. But this year, there were only six films that received full marks, and all of them made the top 10%, too. Nonetheless, they were Les Enfants du Paradis, High and Low, Manhunter, Mass, Top Gun: Maverick, and West Side Story. Additionally, there were also full marks for my rewatch of the original Scream.

I’ve been creating these “50 Unseen” (as I call them for short) lists for 16 years now, and it doesn’t get any easier to choose what to include — or, rather, what to exclude.

It became a little easier in the past few years, because I was watching so many movies that the number of wide-release titles I’d missed fell, leaving room for more arthouse-y ‘hits’ — films the masses didn’t see but Film People were chatting about. But I watched very few new films this year — just 18 with a 2022 UK release date, down from 30+ in the last few years (with a high of nearly 60 in 2019). Those are small numbers compared to people who watch multiple brand-new films every week, but it had been enough to cover a significant percentage of ‘major’ releases. 18 is… well, not.

With an initial long-list of almost 150 films, I did consider increasing this list to 100 titles. It would be in keeping with the site’s theme, after all. But 100 is such a big number… I mean, history suggests I won’t manage to watch the 50 listed films within the next decade or two, so how long would 100 take? No, 50 simply feels about the ‘right size’ for a list of this type, whereas 100 feels excessive. Besides, something is always going to get left off, it’s just how far down the list that cutoff comes.

So, with the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2022 that I haven’t yet seen. They were chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and hopefully represent a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Aftersun
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
The Batman
Black Adam
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Blonde
Bullet Train
Crimes of the Future
Decision to Leave
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Don’t Worry Darling
Downton Abbey: A New Era
Elvis
Empire of Light
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Halloween Ends
Jackass Forever
Jurassic World Dominion
Lightyear
Men
The Menu
Minions: The Rise of Gru
Moonfall
Morbius
Nope
The Northman
Pinocchio
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical
RRR
She Said
Smile
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Strange World
Thor: Love and Thunder
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Turning Red
Tár
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Uncharted
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Wendell & Wild
The Whale
X

And that’s another year over.

I gotta say, I’m quite pleased with how quickly I wrapped it all up — I haven’t got my “best” list out by January 6th since 2017. It shouldn’t feel like a rush to get this stuff online, but when many people are sharing their lists before the end of December (or even earlier, in the case of some publications), a week or more into January feels “late”.

Anyway, I’m going to leave a couple of days to let the end of 2022 finally sink in, and then I’ll start waffling on about my targets for 2023.

* Obviously it’s not actually because of my list, just a coincidence. ^

The Best of 2021

Posted on January 9, 2022 by badblokebob

Finally, for the last time (not really the last time): what I consider to be the best (or, more accurately, my favourite) films I saw for the first time in 2021 (that bit’s correct).

This year, I tried to make a start on my list early (I began pondering it and pruning my long-list back in November, whereas normally I don’t even start that until January 1st), all so I could post it fairly promptly once we reached the new year. Well, it’s now the 9th, which is one of the latest dates I’ve ever posted my ‘best of’ list, so that didn’t really work, did it?

Anyway…

The 21 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2021

No, it’s not 21 for ’21 — it’s 10% of whatever my final total is (as it has been since 2016). This year that total was 207, of which the appropriate percentage is 20.7, but I can’t very well include seven-tenths of a film, can I, so it rounds up to 21. (If you think that’s too many for a list like this, feel free to scroll down and start wherever you like.)

As always, all the movies I watched for the first time in 2021 are eligible, not just brand-new releases. However, I did watch 31 films that had their general UK release in 2021, and five of them made it into this list, so I’ve noted their ‘2021 rank’ too.

21=
Holiday Affair
Happiest Season
Anna and the Apocalypse

Reader, I have cheated! After 15 years of sticking to (my own self-imposed set of) The Rules, I have caved and broken the proscribed number of films allowed on this list, and also allowed a tie (I don’t think I’ve allowed a tie before, although one year I did comment that the top 4 were all effectively in first place — but I still sorted them). Why has this happened? As I’ll talk more about in the Honourable Mentions, I got stuck at 32 films for the longest time. I managed to whittle it down to 23, but after days of being stuck there I just gave in. If I could have decided which of these were #22 and #23, they could’ve been taken off the list; but as I can’t, here are all three, tied. At least they’re connected, by being overtly Christmassy films, which is kinda why they’ve all got stuck together — “which of the many Christmassy films I watched this year did I like the most?” Turns out, that’s a three-way tie (unless you also include the one that’s at #9…)

20 Carol

Okay, this one’s quite Christmassy too. Indeed, it’s practically “Holiday Affair but with lesbians”, a comparison I’m sure would’ve come up more if Holiday Affair was better known.

19 Spontaneous

High schoolers begin mysteriously exploding in this sort-of-horror cum comedy cum teen romance, which I found both hilarious and surprisingly emotional.

18 Daughters of Darkness

An erotic horror movie — sounds like schlocky trash, but mixed through a European arthouse sensibility it comes out the other side as a dreamy, surreal experience.

17 Who?

This is a pretty obscure sci-fi spy flick: it has under 700 ratings on IMDb; I hadn’t heard of it before Indicator’s Blu-ray release — but it deserves more. It’s almost like a Le Carré thriller in its slow-burn intellectual depiction of Cold War plotting, but with a dose of just-beyond-the-possible SF mixed in.

16 Futureworld

Another ’70s sci-fi thriller that I think deserves better. This widely disparaged sequel to Westworld is very in keeping with other films of its era: it’s a paranoid thriller about a pair of journalists investigating a corporate conspiracy — in this case, Delos’s attempt to rehabilitate their robot theme park after the disaster in the last film.

15 Love Affair

A prototypically romantic melodrama (it’s been explicitly remade twice, not to mention the other films that have borrowed from it), I was expecting a bit of fluff but ended up finding it surprisingly affecting. It dodges the clichés I thought it was bound for, in addition to being beautifully shot.

14 Strictly Ballroom

Another one that confounded my expectations. As Baz Luhrmann’s debut feature, I expected a dry run for where he’d go stylistically in Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! But to regard Strictly Ballroom as anything less than a fully-fledged member of the Red Curtain Trilogy is to do it a disservice. Its ludicrous, over-the-top treatment of a ludicrous, over-the-top world is both absurdly hilarious and totally captivating.

13 Godzilla vs. Kong

2021 #5 Big monkey punch giant lizard! No one’s going to call this movie high art, but goddamn if it isn’t entertaining pulp-SF gubbins with giant-size fights thrown in for good measure. Honestly, I don’t know what some people expect from movies like this when they go about criticising them. If giant animals having a brawl isn’t to your taste, fair enough, but if you were expecting a meditative character-driven insight into the human condition or something, more fool you.

12 The Invisible Man

The fourth feature from Universal’s genre- and studio-defining run of horror films in the early 1930s. Dracula and Frankenstein may have become more iconic, but, for my money, this is the best movie from the bunch (and I’d rank The Mummy second). The special effects are more extensive than you might expect for the era, and even hold up pretty well today, while Claude Rains is superb as the cackling villain, James Whale’s direction is highly effective, and there’s a nice vein of humour to balance the darkness.

11 Captain Phillips

That Tom Hanks wasn’t even nominated for most major awards for his performance here is a crime against cinema. He’s extraordinary as the eponymous captain of a cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates. Paul Greengrass brings his usual edgy tension to proceedings, but it’s Hanks’s humanity that ultimately elevates the piece. The final scene is one of the greatest single pieces of acting we will ever see.

10
The Hound of the Baskervilles

Hammer does Holmes. Peter Cushing is a note-perfect incarnation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Detective in what was, sadly, the famed horror studio’s only attempt at filming Sherlock. Personally, I’ve never thought The Hound of the Baskervilles was a particularly good detective mystery novel — but it is quite a good gothic adventure, which makes Hammer the perfect studio to have brought it to the screen. As that, this version doesn’t disappoint, with Terence Fisher’s direction leaning hard into the appropriate atmosphere, plus a superb cast — alongside Cushing, André Morell is a peerless Watson. I wish they’d done a whole series with the pair.

9
The Green Knight

2021 #4 Some people seemed surprised when this film delivered exactly what its trailers had promised: an arty-yet-fantastical interpretation of the Arthurian myth. It’s a moody, earthy take on the material, but one that also has room for magical realism, fairytale-esque fantasy, and flights of inexplicable oddness. The measured pace and off-kilter tone (plus the pitch-dark cinematography) was never going to be to everyone’s taste, but for those on its level, it’s intoxicating. And if you think Die Hard counts as a ‘different’ Christmas movie…

8
Nomadland

2021 #3 I was worried that I’d find Nomadland a bit boring and “not my kind of thing”. It seemed like the kind of film where you hang out with the characters and their landscapes, rather than a piece of clear narrative storytelling. And it is that — but, for once, it worked for me. It’s almost like a TV travelogue, visiting places worth seeing and unusual people worth meeting. You watch to appreciate the scenery, to understand the people, to experience a different way of life. It’s a film to escape with — to get away from ordinary life and spend time in these captivating places. Within and alongside that, it creates a beautiful, deeply humane, quite powerful experience. [Full review.]

7
Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Having grown up reading sci-fi magazines, I’m very aware that, when it comes to Star Trek movies, “even ones good, odd ones bad”. And this first one has a particularly poor rep — “slow” and “boring” seem to be commonly-attached adjectives (which I can’t help but feel stems back to expectations on its original release, which came in the wake of the success of Star Wars, so presumably people expected a fast-paced action-adventure). But as I settled down to begin watching all the Trek movies from the beginning, I found myself in for a very pleasant surprise. It’s not even trying to be a Star Wars-style adventure, but something different entirely; almost more akin to 2001 in its sense of wonder and exploration, digging into an imagining of a genuinely alien lifeform rather than running about blasting rubber suits with laser guns. Engaged with on the right terms, I enjoyed every minute of it.

6
WolfWalkers

The third film in Irish animation outfit Cartoon Saloon’s Folklore Trilogy — and Wolfwalkers really does feel like an authentically-told folktale, not a Disneyfied modern reimagining. A big part of that is the animation style. Even if you think you’re becoming inured to it from the studio’s previous work, it has surprises in store; moments of additional innovation or beauty. It’s constantly impressive and regularly breathtaking. Combined with the magical story, the result is a simply gorgeous film.

5
Dune: Part One

2021 #2 Frank Herbert’s Dune is probably one of my favourite novels, and previous attempts to film it have either been interesting but fundamentally flawed (the 1984 film) or faithful but limited by format (the 2000 miniseries), so when it was announced a new version would be masterminded by Denis Villeneuve — one of only two directors to top my year-end best-of list twice, once with another tricky-to-pull-off re-envisioning of a sci-fi masterpiece — well, my hopes were high. Suffice to say, he delivered, albeit in a film that is ‘very Villeneuve’. That is to say, it’s a rather brutalist take on the material, lacking the fanciful, weird interpretations of Lynch, Jodorowsky, or even (to a lesser extent) the TV version. In some ways that’s a shame, but it’s also true to the filmmaker. That the film has to abandon the story halfway through, forced into a rather low-key cliffhanger, is merely a factor of the length of the material rather than a fault of the filmmaker — some have taken serious issue with it, but, personally, the film ended where I always expected it to. And, as a fan, I’d rather this two-part adaptation, giving the story the necessary screentime, even if that means a limp end to Part One, rather than have the whole book in a rushed three-hour single shot. That said, this might be why it’s at #5 on my list rather than becoming Villeneuve’s third #1. I’m optimistic that, once we get Part Two (and, possibly, a Part Three adapting Herbert’s first sequel), the whole will be even greater. [Full review.]

4
The Kid Detective

This is one of those high concepts you wonder why someone hasn’t thought of sooner: what would a ‘kid detective’ (you know, like the Hardy Boys or the Famous Five or whatever) be like grown up? One answer to that would likely fuel a CW-esque YA series, but here we get a more real-world treatment: the detective who was exalted as a kid, a quirky story for the local paper and whatnot, is now a washed-up has-been as he tries to follow the same career as an adult. Like several other films on this year’s list, here was a film that looked like it would tickle a particular itch of mine, and delivered — it was everything I expected it to be and more. It’s both an amusing extrapolation of its central premise and a solid mystery in its own right, with a surprisingly moving conclusion. One part in particular gave me goosebumps, and you’ve got to love anything that can elicit such a physical reaction. [Full review.]

3
Joint Security Area

Before Oldboy or The Handmaiden, director Park Chan-wook gained international attention for this 2000 military thriller about a shooting in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After a South Korean border guard apparently kills two North Korean soldiers and wounds a third on their side of the border before fleeing back to the South, heightened tensions between the nations rest on an investigation by a neutral investigator. As the Swiss Army major tries to find the truth of what happened amidst conflicting accounts, the obvious point of comparison is A Few Good Men, but JSA also made me think of Paths of Glory in its ultimately-tragic message about the wasteful futility of war. But although these point towards its tone and effect on the viewer, it outshines simple comparisons to be its own magnificent thing.

2
David Byrne’s American Utopia

I’m not a music critic — heck, I don’t even listen to all that much music on a regular basis, if I’m honest — and yet what is essentially a concert film has made it almost to the top of my favourite movies this year. What gives? I wish I could explain it properly, but, I confess, I don’t quite understand why I loved American Utopia, all I can say is that I did. It had an almost profound impact on me that I can’t quite account for. Of course that’s mostly down to the music and staging by Byrne and his fellow performers, but Spike Lee’s direction and editing transform the theatrical show into a near-perfect cinema version. My only unfulfilled wish is that this had been made during the world’s 3D phase, because movement in a three-dimensional space is a key part of the show’s staging, and I’d love to be able to watch that in 3D.

1
The Matrix Resurrections

2021 #1 This belated return to and continuation of the Matrix trilogy has divided critics and audiences alike. You’ll find plenty of people online prepared to slag it off at the slightest prompt. But for others of us, it’s a borderline masterpiece. Personally, it’s not just a film I enjoyed, but something I’ve almost been waiting for — and by “almost” I mean that I never expected to actually get it. This isn’t a by-the-numbers attempt to recreate the adrenaline highs of an enduringly popular action movie. Instead, it’s the kind of wild-swing hyper-meta self-deconstructing take on a popular franchise that I’ve always longed for a legacy sequel to attempt, but no one has been bold enough to try (or, possibly, no one’s ever been able to convince the suits to allow it). Sure, if all you want from a Matrix movie is people looking cool in sunglasses while they engage in precisely-designed epic action sequences, then Resurrections will leave you disappointed. If you appreciate a film that has something pertinent and meaningful to say about our current entertainment culture, there’s a lot to like.

As usual, I’d just like to highlight a few other films.

Normally I’m loathe to mention any films that just missed out on the top list — it is what it is, and if I wanted it to be longer I should just find an excuse to make it longer. That said, this year my “top 21” was stuck at 32 films for the longest time — as I mentioned back at #21, you may remember. So, it feels like those 11 almost-rans deserve a mention; except it’s nine almost-rans, because I couldn’t even get it all the way down to 21. I’m not sure these are truly #24–32 (for that distinction, I’d have to properly reconsider some others from my 89-film long list that I’d eliminated earlier), but, nonetheless, there were (in alphabetical order) The Father, Festen, The Mummy (1932), My Fair Lady, My Man Godfrey, Official Secrets, The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, Psycho Goreman, and The Quatermass Xperiment. In other years, maybe they would’ve been luckier.

That said, they’re not the only films that might feel aggrieved to have missed out (if films had feelings), because, while there are 4-star films in my top 21 (even in my top ten), there are 5-star films that didn’t make the cut. I awarded 25 films full marks in 2021, and 13 of them made it into my top list — namely Captain Phillips, Carol, David Byrne’s American Utopia, Dune: Part One, The Green Knight, Joint Security Area, The Kid Detective, Love Affair, The Matrix Resurrections, Nomadland, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Strictly Ballroom, and WolfWalkers. The less fortunate (but still great) ones were The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Cinema Paradiso, The Father, Festen, Kind Hearts and Coronets, My Fair Lady, My Man Godfrey, Official Secrets, Sansho Dayu, A Single Man, When the Wind Blows, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There were also full marks for the original King Kong when I gave it the Guide To treatment.

Additionally, let’s recap the 12 films that won Favourite Film of the Month at the Arbies, some of which have already been mentioned in this post and some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards): WolfWalkers, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, David Byrne’s American Utopia, Captain Phillips, Official Secrets, The Invisible Man (1933), Strictly Ballroom, The Kid Detective, The Green Knight, Dune: Part One, Nobody, and The Matrix Resurrections.

This year I watched 31 movies that had their general UK release in 2021, but that means there were a considerable number I missed. So, here’s my annual alphabetical list of 50 films from last year that I’ve not yet seen. In the past I’ve used IMDb’s dating to settle what was eligible for inclusion as “a 2021 film”, but nowadays I’ll allow in something that’s listed as 2020 if it’s only due to festival screenings or (as was the case with one film this year) its own premiere.

The main downside to watching so few big new movies is that there’s not much room here for the stuff that’s smaller but still significant, which is a shame. And where I did make space for those films, some of the year’s big-but-not-huge movies lost out. That said, in some ways it made selection easier: normally I begin with a long-list of something like 120 titles, in which I typically find 20 to 30 ‘must includes’, then I weed through the rest to choose the remainder. This year, the ‘must includes’ numbered 46. I could easily have doubled this list and still been featuring films everyone’s heard about, not least because I did leave out some multiplex fillers in favour of artier-but-acclaimed films. Maybe next year I’ll finally go all-out and make this a list of 100. That would fit the site’s name, after all.

For now, it’s 50 once again. As ever, the included films were chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and designed to include a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Army of the Dead
Belfast
Candyman
Censor
CODA
Cruella
Dear Evan Hansen
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Encanto
Eternals
Fast & Furious 9
Finch
Free Guy
The French Dispatch
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
House of Gucci
In the Heights
Judas and the Black Messiah
King Richard
The King’s Man
The Last Duel
Last Night in Soho
Licorice Pizza
The Lost Daughter
Luca
Malignant
The Many Saints of Newark
The Mitchells vs the Machines
Mortal Kombat
Nightmare Alley
Old
Petite Maman
Pig
The Power of the Dog
A Quiet Place Part II
Raya and the Last Dragon
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Shiva Baby
The Sparks Brothers
Spencer
Spider-Man: No Way Home
The Suicide Squad
tick, tick…BOOM!
Titane
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
West Side Story
The Worst Person in the World
Wrath of Man

And that, ladies and gents, is officially the end of 100 Films in a Year — not just for 2021, but for ever.

Well, you already know that’s not exactly true. But it’s the end of the challenge as I’ve been attempting it for 15 years, replaced by a new take. In 12 months’ time, when a new “best of year” list is due, it won’t be drawing from ‘the challenge’ in the same way… though, that technicality aside, I rather suspect it won’t be too different from this post. And if, once again, I’m so spoilt for choice that I struggle to get it down to whatever number I decide the list should include, well, is that actually such a bad thing?

The Best of 2020

Posted on January 9, 2021 by badblokebob

And so, we reach the end of 2020.

I don’t know about you, but this feels like a, “what, already?!” moment to me. Putting my year-in-review posts together used to seem to take ages, but this year it feels like I’ve barely begun and now it’s over. But that’s enough about my subjective perception of time — let’s talk about movies in 2020, like Tenet, which is partly about… um, never mind.

This final year-in-review post does what it says on the tin: it’s a list of my favourite films that I saw in 2020 (normally my least-favourites would be here too, but I did those already). A note for newcomers and/or reminder to the forgetful: rather than just 2020 releases, I select my list from all 264 movies I saw for the first time during 2020. That’s partly because there are tonnes of new releases that I never see in time — which is also why this post contains a list of 50 significant films I missed.

Compiling this year’s lists has taken a lot of thinking, rearranging, cutting, reflecting, re-adding, re-rearranging, and a certain amount of “oh, that’ll do, what does it matter anyway” to actually get them out the door. Here’s what I ended up with…

The 26 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2020

Since 2016, I’ve replaced the usual “top ten” with a “top 10%”. As I watched 264 films in 2020, that means this year’s list has 26 films. (If you think that’s too many, feel free to scroll down and start from wherever you like.)

Although all the movies I watched for the first time in 2020 are eligible, I did watch 57 films that had their UK release in 2020, so I’ve noted the ‘2020 rank’ of the eight that made it in. (I also saw a couple of 2020-UK-release films at FilmBath Festival in 2019. As they were already ranked as 2019, I’ve not factored them in here.)

26 Klaus

The animation is absolutely gorgeous in this Oscar-nominated BAFTA-winning Netflix original about a disaffected postman who helps originate the legend of Santa.

25 The Looking Glass War

The mundanity of real-life espionage; conflicted morals; the futility of the whole thing — this John le Carré adaptation is full of all the things that made his work so great.

24 Dial M for Murder

As intelligent and tense a thriller as you’d expect from Hitchcock; so good it even manages to make you overlook its obvious stage-bound roots. Superb in 3D, too.

23 The Invisible Man

2020 #8 This #MeToo-era reimagining of the HG Wells / Universal Horror classic could hardly be more timely. But even leaving that aside, it’s a chilling exercise in ratcheting tension.

22 The Last Black Man in San Francisco

From its astounding opening to its hard-hitting final act, Last Black Man is an astonishing cinematic experience about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. [Full review.]

21 Aniara

A space ship full of colonists is sent irretrievably off course in this Scandi sci-fi that’s driven by big ideas about human behaviour in extremis. [Full review.]

20 Paris When It Sizzles

William Holden and Audrey Hepburn are clearly having a whale of a time in this marvellously cine-literate ’60s romp about a struggling screenwriter. [Full review.]

19 Philomena

Judi Dench is extraordinary and Steve Coogan is a revelation in this intensely affecting drama about a wronged woman searching for her son who was taken decades earlier.

18 Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman described this as “the sum total of [his] life as a filmmaker”. Blending familial drama with a dash of magical realism and the supernatural, it’s a masterful work.

17 Belladonna of Sadness

Delicate watercolour artwork and medieval folklore smash against a storyline fuelled by rape and a penis-shaped devil in this astonishing animation full of psychedelic imagery and experimental music. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

16 Patrick

2020 #7 It’s “Agatha Christie meets the Coen brothers in a nudist camp” as the eponymous handyman searches for his missing hammer in a world full of wobbly bits, where anyone might’ve taken it. [Full review.]

15 Tenet

2020 #6 If you let go of the need to fully understand the mechanics of the film’s time-reversal conceit, Christopher Nolan’s latest is an audacious and exciting spy thriller. It’s a shame real-world arguments have come to overshadow what is actually a suitably thrilling spectacle.

14 Soul

2020 #5 Pixar have often been praised for making films for grown-ups. That’s not something I’d wholly agree with, until now. Not as cutesy as the rest of their output (largely), Soul asks big questions about what makes us who we are. All wrapped up in a buddy-quest storyline, of course.

13 Knives Out

Rian Johnson’s tribute to whodunnits a la Agatha Christie pulls off something that genre can’t always manage: rewatchability. It barely matters who actually dunnit when it’s this much fun spending time with the outrageous suspects and Daniel Craig’s implausibly-accented detective. [Full review.]

12 The Old Dark House

As amusing as a droll comedy and as atmospheric as a creepy old-school horror, James “director of Frankenstein” Whale’s genre classic is just a lot of fun.

11 Laputa: Castle in the Sky

If this anime were live-action, it would be an action-adventure blockbuster. It’s got it all: thrills, humour, emotion, wonder… That makes it so accessible, it would be a perfect starting point for any Westerner new to anime. [Full review.]

10
Rocketman

Taron Egerton stars as Elton John for this unusual biopic of the singer. Part traditional musician biopic, part jukebox musical, director Dexter Fletcher remixes John’s music into some imaginatively staged sequences, while Egerton and his supporting cast (in particular Jamie Bell) give thoughtful, nuanced performances. The cumulative effect is a movie that is highly enjoyable but not without depth. [Full review.]

9
The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock is probably most renowned for his Hollywood movies (Pyscho, Vertigo, Rear Window, etc), but we shouldn’t forget his British output — these are the films that got him Hollywood’s attention, after all. The director’s second appearance on this year’s list is one of the last films he made before that jump across the pond. It’s a mystery thriller about an old lady who somehow disappears from a moving train, and a couple of youngsters who try to find out how and why. It’s witty, it’s clever, and it’s exciting — all the things for which Hitch is best known.

8
Judgment at Nuremberg

This fictionalised account of the military tribunals that took place following the Second World War sets its sights not on the trials of major Nazi leaders, but on the subsequent trials that assessed the guilt of people further down the chain — here, four judges and prosecutors who helped facilitate the Nazi’s crimes. For such weighty material, this is an appropriately weighty film — a long, complex, methodical, harrowing account. Boldly directed by Stanley Kramer, and with an incredible cast all giving first-rate performances, this remains a powerful, brilliant film.

7
Tim’s Vermeer

Computer graphics pioneer and inventor Tim Jenison is an art enthusiast, fascinated by the work of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, in whose work his engineer’s brain sees a near-impossible photographic accuracy. So, he sets out to prove and expound upon existing theories that Vermeer painted with the aid of some kind of optical device. What unfolds is an astonishing story of obsession, dedication, and art historiography, which challenges your idea of where the line lies between art and technology.

6
1917

2020 #4 Sam Mendes’s single-take(-kinda) World War One adventure ended up losing many of the big prizes to Parasite last awards season (FYI, they both count as 2020 films here due to UK release dates in January and February, respectively). But that doesn’t mean it’s any less of an extraordinary experience. I love a long single take (fake or not), and I love stories that unfold in real-time, and I feel World War One has been under-represented on screen — so when Mendes takes all of those things and executes them brilliantly (having Roger Deakins on cinematography helps), you get a film that’s right up my street. [Full review.]

5
Bait

If 1917 uses all the skills of modern tech to craft an almost old-fashioned epic, Bait is practically the polar opposite: old-school techniques (a wind-up camera; hand-developed 16mm film; post-sync sound) to tell a very modern story (broadly, about the economic plight of Cornish fishermen). It could be pretentiously arthouse or an insufferable polemic, but it’s neither. Instead, the story is told with genuine heart, drama, and humour, and the handmade aesthetic adds an appreciable, beautiful texture. [Full review.]

4
Parasite

2020 #3 If you use Letterboxd, the latest film from acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon Ho comes with a heavy millstone round its neck: according to that site’s users, it’s the greatest film ever made. Like Citizen Kane before it, such a label can be a distraction, and makes some people want to push back against it (is that why I’ve only ranked it at #4? You decide). “Best film ever” or not, the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar is a timely deconstruction of class systems — just who are the eponymous parasites, actually? Even aside from big societal questions, it’s a thrilling piece of filmmaking; tense, exciting, and surprising.

3
Hamilton

2020 #2 Can a filmed stage production be the year’s best film? Um… Well, that’s a major reason why Hamilton is in 3rd place for my 2020 viewing and 2nd place for 2020 releases: it’s not really a film, right? Well, it’s definitely some kind of historical record — not of the life of Alexander Hamilton, but of a theatre production that took the world by storm. Here we get to witness the original Broadway cast in the show’s original staging, allowing us all the chance to witness a genuine cultural phenomenon first-hand. But this is not merely a couple of cameras plonked into the audience for the sake of posterity: director Thomas Kail users multiple cinematic techniques to make a film that truly feels like a film. Yes, it’s still theatrical, but it feels like this is how this story is meant to be (cf. something like Dogville: also very theatrical; also definitely a film). Theatres will reopen and we’ll be able to see Hamilton in the flesh again; and someday they’ll inevitably make a ‘real’ movie adaptation; and even still, this film will stand as a legitimate, magnificent experience in its own right. [Full review.]

2
Never Rarely Sometimes Always

2020 #1 Writer-director Eliza Hittman’s story of a Pennsylvanian teenager forced to travel to New York for an abortion is told with documentary-like subtlety and understatement, but the result is incredibly moving and powerful. Without ever explicitly stating it, the film is an eloquent condemnation of US systems that force poor and struggling individuals to jump through hoops to access care that those of us in the rest of the developed world might consider basic rights. It’s a potent reminder that, for all its claims of being a highly-developed world-leader, for many of its citizens the US is as regressive, prejudiced, and unequal as the ‘Third World’ countries it so often seeks to demonise. [Full review.]

1
Do the Right Thing

If there’s one feature that links many films on this year’s list, it’s timeliness: films that connect with some of the big sociopolitical issues of our day. Do the Right Thing was made over 30 years ago, but in its subject matter — a stiflingly hot day in a Brooklyn neighbourhood causes tensions to boil over into white-on-black violence — it could scarcely be more 2020. But this is not about “which film best encapsulates the year”, and so Spike Lee’s film tops my list because of all its other qualities, too. It’s a portrait of a place; a day-in-the-life hangout movie, where we follow myriad characters as they go about their business; 90-or-so minutes in which we get to understand the neighbourhood, to know its inhabitants… before the powder keg explodes and everything changes. Except, as we now know, nothing’s really changed at all.

As usual, I’d just like to highlight a few other films.

First, the cinematic masterpiece that is Love on a Leash. If you’re unfamiliar with this feat of cinematic excellence, may I recommend my review. It’s not exactly #27, because at various points while curating my list I had it in the top ten, the top twenty, in 26th place… but, eventually, not in the list at all. As I discussed in my review, it’s a film that’s hard to categorise: it’s simultaneously a one-star disaster and a five-star artistic experience. It’s an object lesson in why criticism of art can never be objective, because it’s unquestionable that it’s terribly made in every respect, and yet it’s nonstop entertaining, even thought-provoking, and certainly unique. (Of course, some people would say it’s objectively bad. Those people are wrong.)

I’m someone who believes “best” and “favourite” can be different things: in 2020, I saw some movies I would acknowledge as great but that didn’t make the Top 26 because they didn’t really entertain me; equally, some films got in that are indeed great but I may never rewatch, whereas I left out simpler fare that I’m sure I’ll revisit. In a ranking of the “best” films I saw this year, no way does Love on a Leash get close; but in terms of my “favourite” films, it might’ve been pretty damn high. My final Top 26 falls somewhere between those two stools, but does carry the “best of” name, and so it felt insulting to any other film in the list (or, indeed, to those that tried but failed to squeeze in) to rank Love on a Leash above them. So here it is instead: first among my “honourable mentions”, with two solid paragraphs dedicated to it — more than any film in the actual list. So who’s the real winner, eh?

Next, let’s recap the 12 films that won Favourite Film of the Month at the Arbies, some of which have already been mentioned and some of which haven’t. In chronological order, with links to the relevant awards, they were Laputa: Castle in the Sky, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Lady Vanishes, Aniara, Belladonna of Sadness, Paris When It Sizzles, Hamilton, Bad Boys for Life, Fanny and Alexander, Tim’s Vermeer, An American Werewolf in London, and Klaus.

Finally, I always list every film that earned a 5-star rating this year. It’s especially pertinent this year, given how few reviews I’ve actually posted; although, as I noted in my stats post, it’s possible some of these ratings will be revised when I come to write a full review. But, for now, the 39 films with full marks are 1917, All About Eve, All Quiet on the Western Front, An American Werewolf in London, Anand, Aniara, Bait, Belladonna of Sadness, Dial M for Murder, Do the Right Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Fanny and Alexander, The French Connection, Hamilton, Harakiri, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, In the Mood for Love, The Invisible Guest, Judgment at Nuremberg, Knives Out, Lady Bird, The Lady Vanishes, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Little Women, The Looking Glass War, Love on a Leash, The Lunchbox, A Man for All Seasons, Man on Wire, Marriage Story, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Parasite, Paris When It Sizzles, Philomena, Rocketman, Safety Last!, Soul, and Tim’s Vermeer. Plus, this year I also gave five stars to Mission: Impossible – Fallout in 3D, and (earmarked for the ‘Guide To’ treatment at some point) Tim Burton’s Batman and Monty Python’s Life of Brian. There were also several short films that merited the accolade, namely Flush Lou, The Last Video Store, The Monkeys on Our Backs, and The Starey Bampire.

It may have felt like 2020 was a year bereft of movies, as blockbuster after blockbuster got kicked into 2021, but plenty of stuff still came out — both major releases that took the streaming plunge, and smaller titles that probably wouldn’t’ve seen huge theatrical box office anyway; not to mention stuff that’s going to count as 2020 due to festival screenings but won’t really be released anywhere until 2021; and, of course, all the streamers’ own original movies.

Even though I did watch 57 movies that had a UK release in 2020, there were a considerable number I missed. So, as always, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films from 2020 that I’ve not yet seen. (I normally use IMDb’s dating to decide what’s eligible for inclusion, but I’ve allowed a handful that are listed as 2019 only because of festival screenings.) These have been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety. There are many more I want to see that I could have included, but I always attempt to feature a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

An American Pickle
Ammonite
Another Round
Artemis Fowl
Bill & Ted Face the Music
The Call of the Wild
Da 5 Bloods
David Byrne’s American Utopia
The Devil All the Time
Dolittle
The Eight Hundred
The Father
The Gentlemen
The Half of It
Happiest Season
Hillbilly Elegy
Host
The Hunt
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Kajillionaire
The King of Staten Island
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
The Midnight Sky
Military Wives
Minari
Miss Juneteenth
Mulan
My Spy
The New Mutants
News of the World
Nomadland
One Night in Miami…
Onward
Peninsula
Possessor
Promising Young Woman
Rebecca
Saint Maud
Scoob!
The Secret Garden
Shirley
The Social Dilemma
Sonic the Hedgehog
Supernova
The Trial of the Chicago 7
True History of the Kelly Gang
The Witches
WolfWalkers
Wonder Woman 1984

And that is 2020 over and done with — hurrah!

Ignoring for a moment all the news that’s currently telling us how 2021 will be just as bad, if not worse, one thing to look forward to is that it’s my 15th year writing this blog. 15 years! I feel old… The actual date of the blog’s 15th birthday is at the end of February 2022, so I’ve got a little time yet to prepare some kind of celebration.

In the meantime, let’s watch some more films…

The Best & Worst of 2019

Posted on January 10, 2020 by badblokebob

As it’s January 10th, what better date to post my top 10 from last year’s viewing? (Yes, I know: “an earlier one.”)

As well as my favourite films I saw during 2019, this final review-of-the-year post also includes my least favourite films, as well as a list of 2019’s most noteworthy releases that I missed.

Before we begin, a quick reminder that these lists are not selected from films released in 2019, but from all 151 movies I saw for the first time during 2019.

The Five Worst Films I Saw For the First Time in 2019

“Worst of” lists are very unpopular on Twitter nowadays (there was a whole to-do about them when the pro ones started popping up last month). I do kind of agree that they’re of dubious value, but it remains an unavoidable fact that some films are poor or disappointing and therefore, as part of an overall review of the year, it seems only fair to remember the weaker side of it too. (Especially as I’ve been so tardy with reviews this year, and therefore haven’t shared my negative opinion of all of these elsewise.)

So, in alphabetical order…

Cosmopolis
With Robert Pattinson being cast as Batman, there was a lot of commentary about how he’d done so much good work since Twilight — and I realised I hadn’t seen any of it. Someone described this David Cronenberg film as basically being a Bruce Wayne movie, so that seemed as good a place to start. Sadly, it proved nothing about Pattinson’s acting ability, nor Cronenberg’s enduring ability to make good movies. I found it confusing, cheap-looking, and boring.
[Full review]

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead
Talking of boring, here’s the most recent work from director Ben Wheatley. I’ve had mixed feelings about his previous films, but they were all at least interesting in some way. Colin Burstead is not. In the review I’ve written but never got round to posting, I describe it as “like an art house EastEnders” and say “it’s really slow and frequently abstruse.” Over a year after it first aired it’s still available on iPlayer, but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out. [Full review]

Holmes & Watson
I don’t rank these, but if I did Holmes & Watson would come last. A movie so shockingly inept it’s a wonder that it’s a studio movie made by seasoned professionals — I’m no fan of Will Ferrell, but you’d think at this point he’d be in movies that are at least competently produced. Weak filmmaking wouldn’t really matter if it was funny, because that’s the sole and defining purpose of a comedy, but there are no laughs here either. A total disaster. [Full review]

The Saint
Made as a pilot for a TV series, then retrofitted into being a movie after that failed to get picked up, it might seem like I’m kicking this when it’s down to name it a “bad movie”. The thing is, it would’ve been a bad TV show too. Its biggest problem is that, stylistically, it feels 25 years older than it is — like mid-’90s syndication filler, rather than the slick, contemporary, spy-actioner I think it wanted to be. The Saint is an IP with potential, but this does not utilise it. [Full review]

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Okay, Episode IX probably isn’t one of the five worst films I saw in 2019 (I gave it 3 stars after all, though I was being generous), but it was certainly the most disappointing. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve had hope, but I enjoyed both Episodes VII and VIII, so I thought there was a reasonable chance they could stick the landing. I was wrong. And it makes the preceding Sequel Trilogy films lesser with it, because it exposes the lack of overarching point to any of it. [Full review]

The 15 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2019

Where others may do a top ten, or twenty, or fifty, nowadays I do a top 10%. This year I watched 151 films, so my ‘top ten’ has 15 films.

Although this list is selected from all the movies I watched for the first time in 2019, I did watch 34 films that had their UK release in 2019… plus four that will have their UK release in 2020, which is a first. So I’ve lumped those in with the 2019 lot and noted their ‘2019 rank’ in case you’re interested.

15
Brigsby Bear

Moviemakers like to make movies about people who set out by themselves to make movies — think Son of Rambow, Be Kind Rewind, or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Brigsby Bear follows in their tonal vein, as a quirky story about a young man freed from a lifetime of imprisonment who’s determined to complete the story of the TV show his captors used to make just for him. Think Room written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. [Full review.]

14
Gunman’s Walk

A very much overlooked, nigh-on forgotten minor Western, which I’m sure I never would’ve seen were it not for Quentin Tarantino including it in his pre-Once Upon a Time in Hollywood movie marathon (as an example of the kind of Western programmers that film’s actor hero would’ve starred in). But I’m glad he brought it to my attention, because I found it be a well-told, well-performed study of toxic masculinity and parental influence, with a splash of gun control rhetoric to boot. This may’ve been made in 1958, but it has a heckuva lot of accurate stuff to say about our society six decades later. [Full review.]

13
Hereditary

This is the kind of movie I’m not sure I’ll ever watch again, because living through its terror once was enough. I watched it back in February but there are images that still pop into my head to chill me. A masterful work of horror. [Full review.]

12
The Report

2019 #4 This is a movie not to everyone’s taste, as some middle-of-the-road reviews, and Amazon’s lack of backing for it in awards season, attest. It’s easy to dismiss it as a filmed Wikipedia article, because it’s obsessively accurate and methodical in the way it lays out the facts of its case — about the CIA’s ineffective use of torture post-9/11 — but, in fact, that fits both the style of its lead character-cum-hero, and the purpose of its existence, which I think is to help expose the truth more widely. After all, we know what went on, but who’s actually had to face any consequences for it? In apportioning blame, writer-director Scott Z. Burns is strikingly nonpartisan, refusing to let the Obama administration off the hook for their part. So it’s a shame it hasn’t connected more widely, because its message is important; and even besides that, it’s an absorbing thriller… about someone doing paperwork.

11
Mandy

I probably saw better films than Mandy during 2019, but I saw few that were as aesthetically striking — and certainly none with a header pic that could equal this shot of star Nic Cage. It’s a nightmarishly surreal journey of revenge, with plot points and visuals that can’t be described, they just have to be experienced. And oh my, what an experience. [Full review.]

10
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

This overlooked ’30s-set rom-com boasts a starry cast and a likeable bounce, and I guess that’s where many people’s assessment of it stops — if they’ve even bothered to assess it at all. But what really worked for me was the way it feels like an actual movie from its era, with the quick-talking wit of screwball comedies, the slight earnestness of a simpler age, and the confidence to throw in some more serious undercurrents without the fear it will ruin the fun. Instead, they elevate it. As a throwback to classic cinema, it’s delightful.

9
Eighth Grade

2019 #3 On Letterboxd I simply stated this was “the most truthful movie about what it’s actually like to be a teenager I think I’ve ever seen,” and that just about sums up why its here. The milieu of its story is very Now — teenagers locked to their phones, living their lives through Instagram and YouTube — but look past the ultra-current specificity and there’s a universality in the experience of shy, insecure thirteen-year-old Kayla. Most of us have been there, and Eighth Grade captures just what it was like. (Before anyone asks/complains: this counts as a 2019 film because its UK release wasn’t until April ’19.) [Full review.]

8
BlacKkKlansman

The premise of Spike Lee’s detective movie sounds like a joke — “what if a black man joined the KKK?” — but it’s a true story. With that in mind, you may expect a deadly serious, heavy-going movie. Instead, Lee mixes in a lively humour that keeps the movie entertaining even as it hits you with serious points. And very timely ones, as the controversial (but, in my opinion, merited) closing moments make clear. [Full review.]

7
La Belle Époque

2019 #2 Reading reviews, I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this French romantic comedy-drama — it looked like it might be nice, and that’s about all. A pleasant surprise, then, to find there’s so much more to it than just a pleasantly diverting couple of hours. The story of a man who attempts to relive the day he met the wife who no longer loves him, it’s sharply witty, surprisingly beautiful in places, and genuinely emotional by the end. Surely it’s destined for an inferior American remake. [Full review.]

6
Searching

There are several true-story crime thrillers close-by on this top ten — if you watched them back-to-back with Searching, they might show it up a little bit, because it does get a little Movie Logic in its final act. But that’s worth letting slide because of the very particular way it tells its engrossing story. The entire movie takes place from the POV of a computer screen, as a desperate father tries to work out what’s happened to his missing teenage daughter. Pleasingly, the film doesn’t break its own rules, but uses the limitations to its advantage to create a new, timely way of viewing a narrative. And while the final act may be a bit grandiose compared to real life, its array of twists are satisfying. [Full review.]

5
Memories of Murder

Director Bong Joon Ho is attracting a lot of attention this awards season (heck, this year) for his latest, Parasite, and made my top ten last year with his long-delayed-in-the-UK sci-fi parable Snowpiercer. This surprisingly-hard-to-come-by (someone do a good Western Blu-ray release, please!) film wasn’t his first, but was what initially garnered him some attention outside Korea. A true-story-inspired crime thriller, it invites comparisons to David Fincher’s Zodiac in the way it follows obsessed investigators as they try to uncover the truth behind an unsolved wave of murders. Zodiac is one of my favourite films, but Memories of Murder is strong enough to withstand the comparison. (Also, yes, it predates Fincher’s film. I’m not claiming one copied the other, they just approach the same genre from a similar headspace.) [Full review.]

4
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

If I’m honest, I was prepared to dislike Scott Pilgrim — I mean, there’s a reason it took me almost a decade to get round to it. It always looked Too Cool; kind of too hipster-ish, though I guess in a geeky way. (Well, “hipster” and “geek” have been more closely linked than ever this decade, haven’t they?) I remember distinctly when it went down a storm at Comic-Con and so everyone believed it was The Next Big Thing, only for it to flop hard at the box office (providing a much-needed course correction on everyone’s view of the power of Comic-Con). But here’s the thing: it’s directed by Edgar Wright, and I should have trusted that. And so the film is everything you’d expect from the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver — deep-cut references (this time to video games), piles of humour, but also a dose of genuine emotion. Best of all is how it’s ceaselessly, fearlessly, creatively inventive with its cinematic tricks. No other film on this list is so overtly Directed, but in a good way.

3
Sherlock Jr.

Sherlock Jr. is almost 100 years old now, but it still plays as fresh as a daisy. That’s the wonder of Buster Keaton, who mixes daredevil stunts with genuine movie magic to produce an unforgettable farce with more laughs per minute than [insert your comedian of choice here] and more I-can’t-believe-he-just-did-that stunts than one of Tom Cruise’s impossible missions. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. Heck, they probably wouldn’t let ’em. [Full review.]

2
Rififi

This methodical French crime thriller is famed for its centrepiece — a half-hour heist that takes place in virtual silence — and that is indeed an unforgettably effective, edge-of-your-seat piece of cinema. But the film around it is so good, too: the events and plans that lead up to the heist; and the fallout of what occurs after. If you want to be a pedant then film noir “can’t be made outside America” — but even if that’s true, well, tough, because this is noir at its absolute best.

1
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

2019 #1 If my end-of-year #1s had a reputation, it would probably be for choosing recent movies. Every year I theoretically have the entirety of film history to choose from, but only once have I given my #1 slot to a film that was more than 18 months old. But this year takes that to extremes: I’ve given #1 to a film that isn’t even out yet (in the UK). Never mind Skyfall or Blade Runner 2049 only being 2 months old when I picked them — here, Portrait of Lady on Fire is currently -2 months old (its UK release is scheduled for 28th February). Still, it’s screened at plenty of festivals and had a few international releases, and received plenty of acclaim — well deserved, I think (obviously). It’s the kind of film that casts a spell, with its remote setting that isolates us with its characters, absorbing us into this vital moment in their lives; its thoroughly gorgeous photography, which is appropriately painterly; and a very particular pace, which some would dismiss as “slow” but I thought was just right. It also has a healthy, perhaps surprising dash of Gothic in how its narrative plays out, which particularly appealed to me. Basically, it’s an all-round stunning work. [Full review.]

As usual, I’d just like to highlight a few other films.

I’m always loathe to mention “films that almost made my list”, because that feels like cheating (I may as well just make the list longer and include them). However, because I only included four films released in 2019, I thought I’d flag up a few more of my favourites from the year itself. These aren’t #16–19, then, but they are 2019’s #5–8, because they’re the four 2019 releases that came closest to getting in. But I’ll leave their exact ranking to your imagination and just list them alphabetically: Deadwood: The Movie, Jojo Rabbit, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Personal History of David Copperfield. Of course, there were dozens of acclaimed and/or popular 2019 films that I didn’t see, so take this ranking with a large pinch of salt — if I revisited yearly rankings after I’d caught up on more movies, they’d change entirely.

Another honorary mention I want to make is more for a person than a film: Thomasin McKenzie, who almost single handedly earnt Leave No Trace a place in my top 15. I mean that as no disservice to everyone else involved — their combined work put it in contention, but it was McKenzie’s superb performance that almost tipped it in. (So, I guess that is #16.) And the other reason I’m mentioning her rather rather than just the film is because she was also excellent in Jojo Rabbit — easy to overlook among that film’s showy cast, but a pivotal and well-played part nonetheless. She’s definitely one to watch.

Now, let’s recap the 12 films that won Favourite Film of the Month at the Arbies, some of which have already been mentioned in this post and some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant monthly update), they were The Player, Memories of Murder, Isle of Dogs, Searching, The Meg, Deadwood: The Movie, Sherlock Jr., Rififi, The Red Shoes, For Sama, La Belle Époque, and Eighth Grade.

Finally, I never end this without mentioning all the films that earned themselves 5-star ratings throughout the year — especially as I haven’t reviewed most of them yet, so they merit their moment in the spotlight. During 2019 there were 25. 13 made it into my best list, so rather than name them again I’ll let you have fun guessing which were the two to only get 4-stars (hint: only one of them is in the actual top 10; and the other has a review, so you can easily find it out). The remaining twelve were Les diaboliques, The Favourite, For Sama, Isle of Dogs, Jojo Rabbit, The Killer, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Player, The Red Shoes, Roma, Rope, and Waltz with Bashir.. Finally, I also gave full marks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which will be the subject of a “Guide To” at some point) and three short films, Pleased to Eat You!, Hey You, and Facing It (all reviewed in this roundup).

I watched 34 films from 2019 during 2019, which means there are plenty of noteworthy releases I didn’t see — so here’s an alphabetical list of 50 I missed. (Why it’s 50, I’m not quite sure; but I’ve been doing it for 13 years, I’m not changing it now.) They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety; plus I’ve made an attempt to include a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

As usual, I’ve followed IMDb’s dating in my selection process, which means there are movies listed here that haven’t actually come out in the UK yet. And some films have likely fallen through the cracks because they’re listed as 2018 but I wasn’t aware of them in time for last year’s list (though I’ve made one exception in that regard). But there are always more films worth noting than can be included, anyway. I mean, this year my starting list was 119 films long (maybe I should increase how many I include…)

1917
Ad Astra
Aladdin
Alita: Battle Angel
Apollo 11
Bait
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Booksmart
Cats
Doctor Sleep
Dolemite is My Name
The Farewell
Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw
Frozen II
Gemini Man
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Hellboy
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Hustlers
It: Chapter Two
Joker
Jumanji: The Next Level
The Kid Who Would Be King
Klaus
Knives Out
Last Christmas
Le Mans ’66
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
The Lighthouse
Little Women
Marriage Story
Men in Black: International
Midsommar
Parasite
The Peanut Butter Falcon
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu
Rambo: Last Blood
Rocketman
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Shazam!
The Souvenir
Spider-Man: Far from Home
Terminator: Dark Fate
The Two Popes
Us
The Wandering Earth
Wild Rose
X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Yesterday
Zombieland: Double Tap

Whew, another year over!

Time to do it all over again…

The Best & Worst of 2018

Posted on January 8, 2019 by badblokebob

Later than planned, here it is: my picks of the best (and worst) films I saw in 2018! Plus, as usual, a list of some major titles I missed, thus explaining why they’re not on my top list (i.e. because I haven’t seen them).

I’d hoped to have this up by Sunday morning, but life increasingly got in the way, not helped by it being a more mammoth task than usual. You’d think picking a top 26 would be easier than picking a top 10 (there are more slots!), but you end up with the same dilemmas, just further down the scale. And, of course, a longer list means there are more films to sort into order — I mean, how do you decide which is ‘better’ between a dystopian sci-fi parable, an excoriating relationship drama, and a groundbreaking action movie when you love them all? And that’s just one example…

Anyway, this is what I ended up with. And just a final reminder before we get going: these films are selected from all 261 movies I saw for the first time in 2018, not just new releases.

The Five Worst Films I Saw For the First Time in 2018

This year I watched some films so bad that The Snowman hasn’t made the cut. Perhaps The Snowman is worse than some of these films, and certainly everyone involved in it should’ve done better; but it seems something went wrong during its production (15% of the screenplay wasn’t even shot!), so I feel like those involved can’t be wholly to blame. However, the following five films are (to the best of my knowledge) just bad. So, in alphabetical order…

The Cloverfield Paradox
The third film in J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi anthology series was dumped on Netflix at short notice, presumably in the hope people would watch it before hearing how terrible it was. Its sci-fi concepts are internally inconsistent, while the Cloverfield connections were clearly retrofitted with reshoots. [Full review.]

Geostorm
Talking of nonsensical sci-fi, this is even worse — not only is the science stuff implausibly done, it can’t create plausible character logic either. Big dumb popcorn fun shouldn’t be this dumb, because it stops it being fun. [Full review.]

Lost in Space
I avoided this movie for two decades because I heard how bad it was, but then caved when the Netflix reboot came along. Sadly, its reputation is fully deserved — it’s bad in every way you’d care to consider. Even Gary Oldman’s no good in it. And, 20 years on, it also looks incredibly dated. [Full review.]

Phantasm
This is a cult favourite with some people (known as “Phans”, I believe), but I thought it was awful. None of it makes any sense, from the mythology to the way characters behave, and it’s not very well made, either. [Full review.]

Skyline
Another sci-fi movie! I clearly made some poor genre viewing choices in 2018. Anyway, even his is Cloverfield meets Independence Day filtered through the minds of the directorial brothers behind Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, and is every inch as terrible as that sounds. [Full review.]

The 26 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2018

Rather than end the year with a good ol’ top ten, since 2016 I’ve been doing a “top 10%”. This year’s record-obliterating tally was 261, so it’s my biggest top “ten” ever too, with 26 films. Think that’s too many? Feel free to scroll down and start wherever you like.

As I said at the start, all the movies I watched for the first time in 2018 are eligible for this ranking, not just new releases. However, I did watch 50 films that made their UK debut in 2018, and nine of them made it into my top 10%, so I’ve noted their ‘2018 rank’ too.

26 April and the Extraordinary World

This French steampunk adventure features gorgeous animation to render a creative alternate history. A sharp turn into pulp sci-fi almost lost me, but it’s too wildly imaginative not to enjoy. [Full review.]

25 Sholay

Probably the most iconic Bollywood movie of all time, Sholay’s 3½-hour running time has something for everyone: it’s an action adventure comedy romance musical thriller! [Full review.]

24 The Lives of Others

This German Cold War tale is tense and thrilling like a spy movie, but emotionally and politically loaded like an art house drama. [Full review.]

23 Teen Titans Go! To the Movies

2018 #9 The year’s best fourth-wall-breaking superhero comedy. It’s a kid-friendly cartoon, but there are plenty of jokes aimed at adult superhero fans too. [Full review.]

22 Das Boot: The Director’s Cut

A rounded portrait of life and combat beneath the waves, with one of the most effective surround sound mixes I’ve ever heard. [Full review.]

21 Network

A newsroom satire so insightful and timelessly pertinent, you could remake it virtually word-for-word set today. [Full review.]

20 Fight, Zatoichi, Fight

The blind masseur-cum-swordsman turns babysitter in this atypical but excellent instalment of the long-running series. [Full review.]

19 Creed

Rocky returns to train his dead friend’s son in this spin-off that honours the series’ legacy to emotive effect. [Full review.]

18 Call Me by Your Name

The kind of movie that makes me nostalgic for a time I never experienced (and, to be honest, wouldn’t necessarily actually enjoy). [Full review.]

17 Muppet Treasure Island

Our felty friends take to the high seas for one of their best movies, packed with swashing buckles and superb musical numbers. [Full review.]

16 Suspiria

Dario Argento’s seminal shocker was remade this year, which led me to finally see the original. It’s a masterpiece of uneasy atmosphere, with striking colours and music. [Full review.]

15 Game Night

2018 #8 Hilariously funny, with some of the best line deliveries of the year (or ever), and cleverer than it has any right to be, this is so good it makes up for the bait-and-switch of the cute dog being prominent on the poster but not in the film. [Full review.]

14 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

2018 #7 Fantastic performances colour in all the shades of grey for some complicated characters in this dark (but, at times, surprisingly funny) drama. [Full review.]

13 Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage

Once eyed by Tarantino for a remake, this instalment sees Ichi attempting to atone for all his killing… only to get drawn into protecting a village from a vicious gang boss. [Full review.]

12 Black Panther

2018 #6 The Marvel formula, now available in black. But there’s more than that to this film, which plays like an Afrofuturist Bond movie. [Full review.]

11 The Warriors

A gang must fight their way home across a city out to get them in Walter Hill’s actioner, which is thrilling thanks to an almost-mythological simplicity and directness. [Full review.]

10
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

2018 #5 Netflix attracted a lot of attention by suddenly announcing and releasing this “choose your own adventure” movie at the end of December. Unlike when they pulled that stunt in February (see my worst movies list, above), Bandersnatch merited the hype. It could’ve been a gimmick, but, in the hands of Charlie Brooker and the Black Mirror team, content mirrors form, and we’re treated to a paranoid sci-fi story that couldn’t’ve been told as well any other way. [Full review.]

9
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

2018 #4 Spider-Men other than Peter Parker have been a fixture of comic books for yonks now, but here they make it to the big screen, accompanied by a powerful message about who can be a hero. Realised with startlingly inventive animation, it’s destined to be a genre classic. [Full review.]

8
Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie is best known for its bootcamp first half, with the abusive drill instructor played by R. Lee Ermey, who brought his experience of having done the job for real. Nonetheless, I was impressed to find the second half (set in Vietnam itself) was equally affecting. [Full review.]

7
Phantom Thread

2018 #3 I’d rather gone off the work of Paul Thomas Anderson in recent years, and a drama about a London fashion house in the ’50s didn’t particularly appeal either… but blow me down with a feather, the combination has produced this work of exquisite beauty. Maybe not “beauty” in the traditional sense, but as a character study of two very particular souls, with more than a touch of Gothic melodrama about its style and story, it’s my kind of beauty. [Full review.]

6
Avengers: Infinity War

2018 #2 This year, the superhero movie went full comic book, with both Spider-Verse and this bringing the storytelling style of a team-up event series to the big screen. In the case of Infinity War, it was the (beginning of a) culmination of ten years’ work that has revolutionised the blockbuster movie business. But even leaving that aside, what Marvel produced here is a film with a scope, scale, and narrative style not quite like any other. [Full review.]

5
Heathers

The darkness that’s barely concealed beneath the pleasant veneer of American high schools is exposed in this pitch-black comedy, which mixes violent teen wish fulfilment with a certain degree of societal satire to boundary-pushing effect. It’s not as transgressively shocking 30 years on as it might’ve been back in the ’80s, but it’s still so very.

4
La La Land

Yes, I only got round to seeing La La Land this year. The Best Picture winner that wasn’t, you can certainly see why everyone thought the tradition-led Academy Awards would pick this as their winner — it is, in part, a love letter to classic Hollywood musicals. But the songs are better than just pastiches, there’s a realism to the storytelling and performances that’s more modern, and the whole film sings with the joy of moviemakers dedicated to producing something beautiful. [Full review.]

3
Snowpiercer

If La La Land is about beauty, Snowpiercer is about human ugliness. Its setup may stretch credulity (following an apocalyptic event, the remnants of humanity all live on one long train that constantly circles the globe), but just go with it and you’re treated to an insightful commentary/allegory about class divides and interdependence, wrapped up in a pulse-pounding action thriller with the relentless forward motion of… well, you know what. [Full review.]

2
Before Midnight

The third film in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy catches up with Celine and Jesse in middle age, after years of togetherness, with two kids (plus his kid from a previous relationship) and a host of problems bubbling under the surface. Midnight is notably different from the lovey-dovey-ness of Sunrise and Sunset, but it’s a powerful examination of the tension in a long-term relationship, and all the more so because we’ve connected with these characters on and off in real-time. The first two leave you feeling warm and fuzzy; this is more like being punched in the gut. And yet, together, they are one of the greatest trilogies ever made. (I really hope they do a fourth one, though.) [Full review.]

1
Mission: Impossible – Fallout

2018 #1 I have the whole history of cinema to choose from, but, once again, a new release tops my top ten. Sometimes, with hindsight, I wonder about my picks for #1; other times, I’m pleased to see I was right many years later, as my top film stands the test of time. I suspect this will be one of the latter, because the lengths to which writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and, especially, star Tom Cruise have gone to show us something we’ve never seen done before, and to entertain us with cleverly conceived and astoundingly executed action sequences, is really above and beyond the call of duty. It’s resulted in one of the best action movies ever made. As the first film I felt compelled to see twice on the big screen for nearly a decade, not to mention that I listened to over six hours of podcast interviews with McQuarrie as he dissected it every which way, there couldn’t really be any other pick for my film of the year. [Full review.]

As ever, there were lots of films I liked a lot that there simple wasn’t room for (my original long list, which I add to throughout the year, had 93 films on it). If I just listed a bunch more films I liked that would be kinda cheating (why not just do a longer list?), but, nonetheless, there are a few I’d like to highlight for specific reasons.

While compiling my top 10%, I hit on two kinds of movie that I felt should be eliminated from consideration but that I still really wanted to mention in some way. In other years, any or all of these films might’ve made the “best” list, but it was a tough year and something had to go! Well, that’s exactly what “honourable mentions” are for, right?

The first are movies that were not traditionally “good”, but I still got a lot of enjoyment out of them; what some people might call “guilty pleasures”, I guess. In particular I’m thinking about Gods of Egypt (my review explains all about that) and the 1975 Zorro, which was an entertainingly chaotic romp. Also Happy Death Day, which I really enjoyed as a tonal throwback to turn-of-the-millennium teen horror movies, and Benji, which is a young kids’ film through and through, but with a loveable doggy star to ‘aww’ over.

The latter crosses over somewhat into the second category: films that were only fairly good overall, but I bloody loved one element of them — so, Benji in Benji, for example. Also: Winnie the Pooh in Christopher Robin, the Live Aid sequence in Bohemian Rhapsody, and all the action sequences in The Villainess. If I did lists like characters or scenes of the year, they’re the kind of the thing that would be right near the top.

Now, let’s recap the 12 films that won Favourite Film of the Month at the Arbies, all of which have already been mentioned in this post, one way or another. In chronological order (with links to the relevant monthly update): La La Land, Black Panther, Happy Death Day, Avengers: Infinity War, The Warriors, Sanjuro, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Christopher Robin, Heathers, Suspiria, Creed, and Snowpiercer.

Finally, I never end this without mentioning all the films that earned 5-star ratings in the year. There were 39 in total during 2018, including 22 that made it into my top 26. Those were Avengers: Infinity War, Before Midnight, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Black Panther, Das Boot: The Director’s Cut, Call Me by Your Name, Creed, Fight, Zatoichi, Fight, Full Metal Jacket, Heathers, La La Land, The Lives of Others, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Network, Phantom Thread, Sholay, Snowpiercer, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Suspiria, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Warriors, and Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage. The remaining 17 were The 400 Blows, Big Fish, Compulsion, The Director and the Jedi, The Elephant Man, The Hunt, Laura, Paper Moon, Princess Mononoke, Ran, Sanjuro, Scarface, The Shape of Water, Strangers on a Train, Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D, They Shall Not Grow Old, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Plus I also gave full marks when I wrote about rewatches of Blade Runner 2049 (in 3D) and Superman: The Movie.

I watched 39 films from 2018 during 2018, which leaves a considerable number of notable releases that I’ve not yet seen. Therefore, as is my tradition, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films that I’ve not seen which are listed as 2018 on IMDb. That means some of these ‘missed’ films are awards-y movies that aren’t actually out in the UK yet, but that’s the way this goes. (I have included one film that’s listed as 2017, because it only had a handful of festival screenings that year. But there was another that I was going to put here which was actually released in several countries at the end of 2017, so I decided it shouldn’t be allowed. That was, ironically, You Were Never Really Here. Oh how I laughed at the accidental pun. Now you can too, readers.)

As always, the films in this list have been selected for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety. There are many more I want to see that I could have included, but I always make some attempt to include a spread of styles, genres, successes, and failures.

Aquaman
Bad Times at the El Royale
Bird Box
BlacKkKlansman
Bumblebee
Cold War
Crazy Rich Asians
Creed II
Early Man
Eighth Grade
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
The Favourite
First Man
First Reformed
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
Green Book
The Grinch
Halloween
The Happytime Murders
Hereditary
Holmes & Watson
If Beale Street Could Talk
Isle of Dogs
Johnny English Strikes Again
Leave No Trace
Love, Simon
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
Mandy
Mary Poppins Returns
The Meg
Ocean’s 8
Pacific Rim: Uprising
Peter Rabbit
The Predator
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Rampage
Roma
Searching
Sicario 2: Soldado
A Simple Favour
Skyscraper
A Star is Born
Suspiria
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Tomb Raider
Upgrade
Venom
Vice
Widows
A Wrinkle in Time

Whew! That’s that over for another year. (Well, aside from the insane number of reviews I still have left to post…)

The Best & Worst of 2017

Posted on January 6, 2018 by badblokebob

Having listed all I watched in 2017 and analysed it thoroughly, it’s time for the finale: what I thought were the best films I saw last year.

After that, a list of major new releases that I missed, thus explaining why they’re not in my best selection (i.e. because I haven’t seen them).

But first, the less honourable list: the five worst films I saw in 2017.

The Five Worst Films I Saw For the First Time in 2017

In alphabetical order…

Into the Wild
Youthful Pretentiousness: The Movie. That it was written and directed by a 47-year-old, but seems to have gained none of the perspective maturity should afford, makes it even worse. It’s also a true story, and we should maybe feel sorry for the guy involved, but… well, he kind brought it all on himself, didn’t he?

London Has Fallen
You can just about enjoy this unwelcome sequel as a dumb actioner if you switch your brain off, but you really have to try to have a good time with it thanks to the cheap production values, rampant xenophobia, and furious American patriotism. If you still need putting off, consider this: I bet Trump loves this movie.

Space Jam
Last year Space Jam was recommended as one of the 50 “Must See Movies Before You Grow Up”. I disagree. It’s not funny, it’s not clever, and, even allowing for the limits of mid-’90s technology, it’s not very well made. It’s joyless and flat; a waste of time and effort. Also, one of this year’s two one-star films.

Vehicle 19
This is the other. It’s a low-budget thriller starring Paul “the one from Fast & Furious who died” Walker as a regular guy who gets in the wrong rental car and finds himself embroiled in a political conspiracy. It’s also all shot from within the car. That’s the kind of filmmaking conceit I enjoy, but Vehicle 19 provides nothing else entertaining to go with it.

Warcraft: The Beginning
Writer-director Duncan Jones, who showed such promise with Moon and Source Code, wasted several years of his career making this. Apparently he was keen to live up to what fans of the franchise expected, not just produce a generic fantasy movie with a brand name. Maybe for those guys he succeeded. For the rest of us, it’s… well, to be frank, it’s just crap.

The 17 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2017

This is the top 10% of my viewing from 2017. I saw 174 new films this year, which means this year’s “top 10” has 17 films. Should you think that’s excessive, just scroll on down and start reading wherever you please.

As always, this list is culled from all the movies I watched for the first time this year, not just new releases. However, I did watch 44 films that had their UK release in 2017, and seven of them are on my list, so I’ve noted their ‘2017 rank’ too.

17 Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

2017 #7 Luc Besson’s gorgeous-looking Euro-comic space opera is a strange, sometimes messy movie, but somehow it keeps getting better the more I think about it. (Full review.)

16 Moana

Disney’s Polynesian princess has fantastic tunes, exciting adventure, hilarious gags, and, of course, a lot of heart. Also, a storyline that isn’t at all about finding romance. (Full review.)

15 Kingsman: The Golden Circle

2017 #6 Matthew Vaughn’s spy sequel endured a pretty mixed reception back in the summer, but I loved it. It’s inventive, provocative, irreverent, and fun. (Full review.)

14 Train to Busan

The zombie subgenre should be played out ten times over by now, but then you get something like this. As with the best zombie flicks, it’s more about the humans than the monsters. But also it’s about the intense and suspenseful action sequences.

13 Long Way North

This French-Danish animation delivers understated beauty in its deceptively simple visual style, and an equally subtle but strong feminist streak in its story of one girl’s mission to reach the North Pole.

12 What We Do in the Shadows

If there’s any horror creature more played-out than zombies, it’s vampires. Unless you’ve got a new angle, of course, and this fly-on-the-wall ‘documentary’ about a gang of Kiwi vamps imbues its subject with hilarity and new, er, life. (Full review.)

11 Contact

Grown-up sci-fi in this thoughtful and plausible exploration of man’s first contact with alien life. Would surely make a great double-bill with Arrival. (Full review.)

10
Kong: Skull Island

2017 #5 The latest attempt to bring the giant ape to the big screen is a creature-feature B-movie writ large, emboldened with all the CGI modern Hollywood can afford. Despite the marvellously pulpy story, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts brings a surprising amount of class to the endeavour, with some gorgeous cinematography and strikingly staged sequences. This may be 2017’s most underrated blockbuster. (Full review.)

9
Dunkirk

2017 #4 Christopher Nolan’s first non-sci-fi/fantasy movie for 15 years is ambitious in other ways, trying to condense a massive military operation into a single movie — with the added pressure of it being a story both not often told and of immense importance: it represented a massive turning point in the Second World War. He carries it off with bold filmmaking that focuses on the intensity of the experience for the men in the thick of it, which is where he places the viewer. It’s 90 minutes of non-stop ratcheting tension, with a bit of well-earned patriotic catharsis at the end. (Full review.)

8
Nightcrawler

Dan Gilroy’s neo-noir thriller foregrounds Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as a guy looking to make his fortune by racing around nighttime L.A. filming bloody crime scenes. There’s a state-of-the-nation element in the satirisation of trashy TV news and its bloodthirsty producers, but the real star is the, er, star: Gyllenhaal’s well-measured turn as a driven, unpredictable, possible psychopath. (Full review.)

7
Sing Street

The director of Once delivers another fable about people finding love through music. This time it’s about a gaggle of school kids, lending a coming-of-age universality and a kind of nostalgic melancholy — you don’t have to have been in a band, or grown up during the film’s 80s setting, to relate to the bittersweetness, the horrors and the wonders, of young love. (Full review.)

6
It’s a Wonderful Life

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life out of a sense of duty: it’s an iconic Christmas film, well rated on polls like the IMDb Top 250, but (obviously) I’d never seen it. I set out merely to rectify that, expecting to find something a bit saccharine and twee… but, blow me down, it’s not that at all: it’s a beautiful, brilliantly made, genuinely moving film. I even got something in my eye during the (inevitable) conclusion. My only regret is I didn’t watch it sooner.

5
War for the Planet of the Apes

2017 #3 I don’t think many people (if anyone) expected much when they rebooted Planet of the Apes back in 2011, but what’s followed is one of the great movie trilogies of our time. This concluding instalment could’ve lived up to its title and been an epic battle extravaganza, but that probably would’ve been a soulless disappointment. Instead, it remains focused on its characters — primarily Andy Serkis’ remarkable performance as the apes’ leader — to tell a tale that’s as much about internal battles as external ones. (Full review.)

4
Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Empire magazine picked this as their best film of 2016, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them (even though, today, I’ve ranked another one higher). The story of a young delinquent bonding with his reluctant foster father, it features the kind of quirky comedy, but with heartfelt dramatic undertones, that you only tend to get from small countries and their indie movies. It manages a perfect tightrope walk that renders it both sidesplittingly hilarious and sweetly moving. (Full review.)

3
Kubo and the Two Strings

I watched Kubo and Wilderpeople back to back all the way back in January, and felt at the time they were dead certs for my top ten — and here they are, almost a full year later, side by side again in the very upper echelons of my list. I thought long and hard about that, dear reader, because I didn’t want to be placing them here on the autopilot of 12-month-old suspicions. Now, I’m sure I’m not. Kubo is a majestic adventure movie, with truly stunning stop-motion animation and a powerful story, that deserves to be recognised outside of the confines of “animation” or “kids’ movies”. (Full review.)

2
Baby Driver

2017 #2 This is the third movie in my top ten driven by music (the others were Kubo and, of course, Sing Street) — which is neither here nor there, merely a connection I literally just noticed. In this instance “driven” is the operative word, because it’s about a brilliant young getaway driver who choreographs his escapes to music blaring from his iPod. Writer-director Edgar Wright extends that conceit outward into the entire movie, with almost every key sequence perfectly underscored by an eclectic soundtrack. The action is thrilling, the dialogue is snappy, and the whole concoction is pure movie-magic entertainment. (Full review.)

1
Blade Runner 2049

2017 #1 Talking of placing things on autopilot, here’s another I made sure to have a good think about. When I first thought, “I wonder what my #1 movie will be this year?”, my mind immediately fired back with, “Blade Runner 2049.” But I made sure to think it through, in ways I won’t bore you with, and I came fairly close to putting Baby Driver here, but in the end I settled on Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi sequel (meaning the Canadian director tops my list for the second year in a row). I’m not even sure where to begin praising or explaining why this film is my favourite of the year, there’s just so much about it that’s perfect: the numerous thought-provoking sci-fi concepts that are carefully explored; the endlessly gorgeous cinematography (if Roger Deakins doesn’t get that Oscar now…); the way it builds out of the first movie but doesn’t entirely rely on it (as Drew McWeeny put it in his top ten article, “Blade Runner 2049 stands as a work of science-fiction that is so packed with ideas and invention and character that the single least interesting thing about it is that it also happens to be connected to another movie”)… I could go on (but that’s what my full review is for). It’s an incredible piece of work that can stand proudly alongside the classic original — which is perhaps its greatest achievement.

As usual, I’d just like to highlight a few other films.

Firstly, I can’t end this without mentioning the 31 films that earned themselves 5-star ratings this year. Already included in my top 17 we had these 13: Baby Driver, Blade Runner 2049, Contact, Dunkirk, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, It’s a Wonderful Life, Kubo and the Two Strings, Long Way North, Nightcrawler, Sing Street, Train to Busan, War for the Planet of the Apes, and What We Do in the Shadows. The remaining 18 were: The 39 Steps, Black Swan, City of God, The Conversation, Drive, The Exorcist, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Girl with All the Gifts, Her, In the Loop, It Follows, Manchester by the Sea, A Matter of Life and Death, Moon, Moonlight, Nocturnal Animals, Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno, and Yojimbo. Plus there was also full marks for the Black & Chrome version of Mad Max: Fury Road, and for two films I reviewed after watching them during my Rewatchathon, Jaws and The Terminator.

Additionally, let’s recap the 12 films that won Favourite Film of the Month at the Arbies, some of which have already been mentioned in this post and some of which haven’t. They were all in contention for my top 17, but obviously they didn’t all make it in. So, in chronological order (with links to the relevant monthly update): Kubo and the Two Strings, Fandango, Long Way North, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Nightcrawler, Baby Driver, War for the Planet of the Apes, Shin Godzilla, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Blade Runner 2049, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

Finally, a special shout-out to several of this year’s big superhero movies, which I enjoyed a lot but didn’t quite make it into my top 17: The LEGO Batman Movie, Logan, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok. I liked most of the others too (even Justice League, as my review attests) but, unlike those four, they were never seriously in the running for my top 17.

I watched 36 movies from 2017 during 2017, including most of the big blockbusters, but that still leaves a considerable number of notable releases that I missed. As is my tradition, then, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films that I’ve not seen and are listed as 2017 on IMDb (with a couple of exceptions for films that are really from 2017 but happened to screen at a festival or two in 2016). In many cases these ‘missed’ films are awards-y movies that aren’t actually out in the UK yet (there are “2017” movies scheduled through until at least July 2018).

The films in this list have been selected for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety — some of these are films I have no intention of watching!

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

All the Money in the World
American Made
Battle of the Sexes
Baywatch
Beauty and the Beast
The Big Sick
The Boss Baby
Call Me by Your Name
Cars 3
Coco
The Dark Tower
Darkest Hour
The Death of Stalin
Despicable Me 3
The Disaster Artist
Downsizing
The Emoji Movie
Fast & Furious 8
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
The Florida Project
The Foreigner
Geostorm
The Greatest Showman
Happy Death Day
The Hitman’s Bodyguard
I, Tonya
It
It Comes at Night
Jigsaw
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Lady Bird
Lady Macbeth
The LEGO Ninjago Movie
Logan Lucky
The Lost City of Z
Molly’s Game
mother!
Okja
Phantom Thread
The Post
Power Rangers
The Shape of Water
The Snowman
Their Finest
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Transformers: The Last Knight
Victoria & Abdul
Wonder

…and many more.

And that’s 2017 all wrapped up. Well, apart from the fact I’ve got 54 reviews left to write. That’s the worst it’s ever been. I’ll be a while getting through them yet (even if I posted one a day from tomorrow, I’d still be going in March).

Anyway, a belated Happy New Year to you all. May 2018 bring you the viewing of many films — at least 100, amiright?

The Best & Worst of 2016

Posted on January 6, 2017 by badblokebob

I watched so many films in 2016 that I’d forgotten I saw some of them so recently. Going back over the list, there were films I watched as late as March that I was amazed weren’t things I’d seen a couple of years ago. I don’t know what this signifies, really, other than that watching almost 200 films in a year has warped my perspective.

Anyway, it’s now time to consider the quality of that viewing: which films were the worst? Which the best? And what did I miss?

So without further ado…

The Five Worst Films I Saw For the First Time in 2016

This year I saw some films so bad that Home on the Range hasn’t made my bottom five! In alphabetical order, they were…

300: Rise of an Empire
300 was hardly the height of cinematic class, but this makes it look like an accomplished work of auteurism (though, considering how Zack Snyder has continued down a similar aesthetic path, perhaps it always was). It’s just poorly made, with flat performances, cheap direction, aimless violence, and CGI that wouldn’t look great in a computer game.

Cool World
Maybe if director Ralph Bakshi had got his way Cool World would be a masterpiece. Maybe not, too. Torn between conflicting interests (it’s a kid-friendly movie with adult content) and with distractingly poor technical aspects (the animation and live action often seem mismatched), it’s an unappealing mess.

Home
DreamWorks’ animated movies never quite achieve the crossover acclaim that greets almost anything Pixar spit out, which is sometimes a shame… and sometimes it really isn’t, like with this irritating movie about an irritating alien and his irritating human friend. Pixar have never made anything this annoying. Not even Cars.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
“Is this even worse [than The Rocky Horror Glee Show]? Well, that’s a bit like someone forcing you to eat a dog shit and a cat shit before asking you which tasted nicer.” Most accurate review I’ve ever written.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
New Moon contains the single funniest scene in any movie I’ve seen this year. Unfortunately, New Moon is not a comedy (not deliberately, anyway) and that scene is not a comedy interlude (not deliberately, anyway). For all the Twilight saga’s other sins, I will forever love it for giving us Face Punch. (Oh, but the rest of the film is pretty terrible.)

The Twenty Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2016

Last year I commemorated the fact I’d doubled my titular target by also doubling the size of my top ten, joking about having never done a percentage increase before. But that got me thinking: what if I did? So from now on my “top 10” will be a “top 10%” — which this year means it’s a top 20 again.

My guiding principle when ranking this year’s picks became films that excited me — not in the adrenaline-pumping sense of having fantastic action sequences, but in the sense of films which left me feeling thrilled by their cinematic achievements. Not that I’m saying every film here is some wonder of Cinema, just that the notion guided some of my choices. It’s ended up with some very good, perhaps even better, films slipping down the chart. But never mind: as is usually the case with lists like this, it’s only a snapshot of my thinking right now.

Finally: as always, this list is created from the movies I watched for the first time this year, not just new releases. However, I did watch 38 films that had their UK release in 2016, and six of them are in my top twenty, so I’ve noted their ‘2016 rank’ too.

20 Ex Machina

An intelligent, considered sci-fi movie that ponders artificial intelligence and its potential right to life, but also a gripping psychological thriller about three individuals locked in a bunker. And there’s Oscar Isaac’s dance scene too.

19 Tokyo Tribe

Sion Sono’s comic book epic mixes battle rap, comic grotesques, ultra violence, gratuitous nudity, more barmy notions than you can shake a stick at, and probably the kitchen sink too, into possibly the most batshit-crazy movie I’ve ever seen. Is it trash or art? It can be two things.

18 Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson described his typically-idiosyncratic young-love adventure as “an autobiography about something that didn’t happen”, which is possibly my favourite description of a film ever. A movie for the romantic adventurer in every childhood bookworm.

17 The Martian

The best comedy or musical of 2015 is neither of those things, but it is one in a pleasing run of intelligent sci-fi movies Hollywood is offering these days. Trust Ridley Scott and Matt Damon to make a movie about using science to grow potatoes into a gripping adventure.

16 The Russia House

An underrated le Carré thriller starring Sean Connery as a book publisher coerced into helping MI6 and the CIA bring over a defector, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer as his Russian contact. Strong performances enliven a typically le Carré plot: grounded, plausible, unguessable, with a surprising conclusion.

15 Zootropolis

2016 #6 A neo-noir crime thriller about racism featuring nudism and drug abuse… from Disney! It’s still a kid-friendly animated comedy, of course, but one that functions particularly well — arguably even better — for adult fans.

14 Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

It looks like such a boilerplate indie movie that I kinda expected to hate this, but it caught me off guard with characters I related to and a story that I found affecting without being saccharine. Probably the most emotional a movie has made me feel this year.

13 Lincoln

Famed for Daniel Day-Lewis’ awards-scooping performance that is arguably one of the greatest of all time, there’s actually much more to Spielberg’s biopic. Playing like a gorgeously-shot period version of The West Wing, if you like men politicking in gaslit rooms, this is heaven.

12 Road Games

Now we move into my Top Ten. Yeah, I know it’s #12, but I really thought these two would make it. I guess they’re kinda =10th, then; though that would be cheating… Anyway: I hadn’t even heard of this movie before this year, but the coincidence of a blog post and a Blu-ray release led me to purchase it and I was so glad I did. It’s Rear Windscreen meets Duel Down Under in a superb Ozploitation thriller.

11 The Nice Guys

2016 #5 Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling reveal rarely-seen comic talent as a pair of not-actually-that-nice guys who nonetheless have some morals in Shane Black’s spiritual sequel to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. This has just as convoluted a plot, and it matters just as little — its major asset is that it’s frequently hilarious.

10
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Ultimate Edition

2016 #4 Yes, really. And, just so we’re clear on what’s going on here, neither Civil War nor Doctor Strange are in my Top 9. Is BvS ‘better’ than anything Marvel Studios put out this year? Hm. But is it a more interesting movie? I thought so. Zack Snyder made a dark, morally ambiguous, imperfect movie that reflects the dark, morally ambiguous, imperfect days we live in. Perhaps it’s just too timely for its own good? People don’t seem to want a movie that questions our heroes and our relationship towards them in a world where real-life heroes feel in short supply. It’s clearly not the movie a lot of people think they need, but maybe it’s the one they deserve right now.

9
Cold in July

Of all the films on this list, Cold in July has arguably the most surprising plot: it takes sharp right-angle turns at several points, never breaking the style and genre it sets itself in, but instead shuttling the viewer off in entirely different directions than expected. By the time it reaches its action-packed climax, you have no idea quite what it’s going to do — and how better to end a neo-noir thriller than that?

8
Deadpool

2016 #3 This may be all the way down in 8th place, but in some respects it’s #1: I’m not sure I’ve had more pure fun watching a movie this year than I did during Deadpool (The Nice Guys would be closest). Okay, so it’s a little puerile really, but the humour comes thick and fast, and the regular fourth-wall breaking undercuts not just the film but the whole superhero genre. Having talked about the excitement of great Cinema at the start, this isn’t that, but it is a fantastically good time.

7
The Limey

Steven Soderbergh transforms a pretty straightforward revenge story into an elliptical narrative that has you constantly questioning what you’re watching — is it flashback, flash-forward, a dream, a plan, a fantasy…? In the end it’s probably none of those things, but Soderbergh’s unusual editing techniques create an arthouse/mainstream mash-up that is a uniquely querying, mystifying, yet satisfying experience.

6
Arrival

2016 #2 In an era when Hollywood considers “science-fiction” a byword for “action-adventure”, it’s all the more remarkable that an intelligent, adult drama like this was backed by a major studio. It’s partly a timely message about the need for mankind to understand each other across nations and work together, but it’s also a thoughtful meditation on the human condition — what it means to be human, what it costs us, and if it’s worth it. Director Denis Villeneuve paces events sublimely, imbuing the alien spacecraft with a wonder and fascination that you’d’ve thought lost in modern “anything is possible” cinema, but the film really belongs to Amy Adams and her layered, affectingly real performance.

5
Predestination

Another thought-provoking science-fiction movie (for those not keeping count, it’s the fourth in this list), Predestination has been less heralded but deserves to be better known. Adapted from a short story by genre giant Robert A. Heinlein, it’s satisfying both as a tangled time travel mystery (with some great twists, whether you guess them or not) and as a consideration of human and historical issues about things like identity and feminism.

4
The Revenant

2016 #1 I’m as surprised as anyone by how much I liked The Revenant, having not been particularly enamoured of the previous Alejandro G. Iñárritu films I’d seen, but this gruelling survival-story Western oozes excellence from every frame. Leo’s pretty good, as are the rest of the cast, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is the highlight: appropriately crisp depictions of wintery nature, an incredible use of natural light, and single-shot sequences that blow Birdman out of the water. By telling the story primarily with these visuals, Iñárritu has created a work of true cinema.

3
Steve Jobs

Like Lincoln, this is a beautifully-shot biopic about people stood around in rooms talking. The big gun it has in its corner, however, is an actual West Wing writer — its creator, no less — Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin’s screenplay is a precisely constructed marvel, brought to the screen by a quality cast capable of wrapping their tongues around his magnificent dialogue, and in Danny Boyle a director with the right visual sensibilities to make the material sing. What could have just been an Apple fanboy’s wet dream is instead a gripping character drama with a surprising corporate thriller vibe at times.

2
The Raid 2

An orange to The Raid’s apple, this sequel is bigger and grander in every conceivable aspect. A sprawling crime epic, spanning many years, many locations, and many characters, it’s the antithesis of the tightly-focused first film — but all the better for it. Even with the more intricate plot, there’s still plenty of time for elaborate action sequences, crafted with even greater skill and inventiveness than the first movie. It’s surely one of the greatest action movies ever made.

1
Sicario

In a top twenty filled with crime thrillers (see: #15, #11, #9, #7, #2), gorgeously-shot movies (see: #13, #6, #4, #3), and remarkable female leads (see: #20, #15, #6, #5), it’s only fitting that a film which does all of these so skilfully should top my list. Emily Blunt is the powerhouse FBI agent who finds herself out of her depth in a complex cross-agency investigation that leads her, and us, to some dark and morally questionable places. It’s all incredibly shot by the reliably amazing Roger Deakins. Between this and his other entry in my top ten, I think Denis Villeneuve has marked himself out as one of the most exciting directors working right now.

I always want to include this section of my post, but sometimes I’m not quite sure what to put in it — if it was just some more ranked films, I’d’ve included them above. But this year I have something concrete to begin with, because there were several films that I surprised myself by not including in my top twenty. They were films that I really liked — and, perhaps even more so, lots of other people really liked and include in their lists — but which, for some reason, when I was sorting through my options, fell by the wayside in favour of… well, in favour of the films that did make it in. I’m talking about films like Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (maybe that’s not on many other lists, but I really enjoyed it), The Iron Giant… and, of course, Rogue One. My already mixed feelings about the latest Star Wars movie were massaged by happening to read Andrew Ellard’s Tweetnotes and Film Crit Hulk’s dissection of the film while preparing this list, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything they have to say, between them they managed to clarify and illuminate some problems I already had with the movie, and that kinda put me off its inclusion.

A shout out, too, for those less-widely-loved films that I really, really liked but couldn’t quite justify being in this top twenty — films like Crimson Peak, Dragon (Wu Xia), The Good Dinosaur, Grand Piano, Lost River, Pan, and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. And despite all those Shaw Brothers movies I watched, none ended up charting — but One-Armed Swordsman came close.

Finally, I can’t end this without mentioning the 26 films that earned 5-star ratings this year — especially as I haven’t actually published reviews for nine of them yet! So, 15 made it into the top twenty, but as they’re spread throughout the list I’ll name them again: Arrival, Cold in July, Deadpool, Ex Machina, The Limey, Lincoln, The Martian, The Nice Guys, Predestination, The Raid 2, The Revenant, Road Games, The Russia House, Sicario, and Steve Jobs. The other 11 were: 12 Years a Slave, Barry Lyndon, Hamlet, The Iron Giant, Macbeth, Napoleon, The Pianist, Spotlight, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Witness for the Prosecution, and Wuthering Heights. Additionally, short film The Present also got full marks.

During 2016 I watched 38 movies that were released in 2016, but of course that means there were plenty I missed. As usual, then, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films that are listed as 2016 on IMDb (unless IMDb got it glaringly wrong) that I’ve not yet seen.

They’re chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety — though I’ve decided to not include any more bloody Ice Age films on these lists, because they keep making them, they keep doing pretty well at the box office, and I keep not watching them.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Allied
Assassin’s Creed
Ben-Hur
The BFG
Blair Witch
Bridget Jones’s Baby
Don’t Breathe
Eddie the Eagle
Everybody Wants Some!!
Finding Dory
Ghostbusters
The Girl on the Train
Gods of Egypt
Hail, Caesar!
The Handmaiden
Hell or High Water
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
I, Daniel Blake
Independence Day: Resurgence
Inferno
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
The Jungle Book
Kubo and the Two Strings
La La Land
The Legend of Tarzan
Live by Night
London Has Fallen
The Magnificent Seven
Manchester by the Sea
Me Before You
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Moana
A Monster Calls
Moonlight
The Neon Demon
Nocturnal Animals
Now You See Me 2
Passengers
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Sausage Party
The Secret Life of Pets
Silence
Sing
Sing Street
Sully: Miracle on the Hudson
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
Warcraft: The Beginning
Your Name

…and many more.

And that’s 2016 over… apart from the 36 reviews I still have to post, of course. I think that’s one of my worst ever. That’s what comes of not doing my advent calendar.

It’s also the end of 100 Films’ first decade, which I intend to make even more of a fuss about than I already have when the official birthday rolls around at the end of February. I’m thinking lists, and probably statistics. Any excuse for some statistics.

But, for now, all that remains is for me to thank you for reading and wish you all the best with your own film-watching endeavours. Let’s hope 2017 is a better one for us all.

2015 In Retrospect

Posted on January 4, 2016 by badblokebob

2015 was, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, the largest ever year of 100 Films — or 200 Films in a Year, as it’s currently known. For 2015 only, I think, because I have no intention of trying to replicate that feat next year (see here for more on that topic).

How better to finally wrap up a year than with a look at the best and worst, right? As always, my picks are not culled from films freshly released in 2015, but from this list of my personal viewing. (For what it’s worth, that list includes 22 releases from 2015, as well as 37 from 2014, some of which others would count as 2015 titles… and some of them have indeed made my best-of list.)

You can also vote for your favourites from my pick, and find out which 50 most noteworthy new films I didn’t see. There might be a few surprise along the way, too.

So without further ado…

The Five Worst Films I Saw For the First Time in 2015

In alphabetical order…

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher
Marvel may dominate the live-action superhero arena right now, but DC has the edge in animation — and work like this is going to do nothing to change that. An uninteresting story that’s blandly told in every regard, this is a total waste of time.

Blitz
There are a lot of very, very good actors in this Jason Statham vehicle, but it’s a terrible film that’s even below standard for the star, let alone his supporting cast. So bad it feels like a spoof, there is no good reason for anyone to watch this movie.

Jack the Giant Slayer
X-Men’s Bryan Singer is the latest filmmaker to take a fairytale and give it the Lord of the Rings treatment. That formula doesn’t work here, unfortunately. The result is a flat, cheap-looking, overlong bore. Another waste of good talent.

Parabellum
Alfred Hitchcock once said that “movies are real life with the boring parts cut out.” I guess this isn’t a movie, then, because it’s not real life and it’s boring as can be. My least enjoyable viewing experience this year.

Runner Runner
Again, talented stars (Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton) slum it in a poorly-constructed thriller with no thrills. That it’s from the director of The Lincoln Lawyer, an excellent thriller that made my top ten a couple of years ago, only makes matters worse.

The ~~Ten~~ 20 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2015

Given the extraordinary personal achievement in my viewing this year — doubling my titular goal — I’ve decided to also double my year-end top ten. It seemed appropriate.

Obviously I haven’t done such a percentage-related increase (or reduction) of my list before now, but then no previous year has seen quite so remarkable a change in my viewing total. In other (smaller) years, these additional films may well have made the cut, so this is a way of giving them their due. (Besides which, my list is numbered, so you can ignore #20 to #11 if you want.)

Final point: although this list isn’t limited to 2015 releases, there are six included, so I’ve noted their ‘2015 rank’ too.

20 Ant-Man

2015 #6 After all the behind-the-scenes kerfuffle, Ant-Man probably had the lowest audience expectations for any Marvel Studios movie since Iron Man. Perhaps that’s what allowed it to become the mostly purely entertaining Marvel movie since Iron Man, too.

19 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The Mission series here reconfigures itself as the modern equivalent to classic Bond, washing down espionage thrills with gadgets and humour. The result is fantastically enjoyable, and only so low on this list because of a certain other film a bit higher up…

18 Grosse Pointe Blank

John Cusack and Minnie Driver have never been more likeable as a guy and the prom date he jilted, brought back together by their high school reunion. Oh, and he’s now a hitman, in town on a job. Consitently funny, this is first-rate action-comedy entertainment.

17 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

An idiosyncratic crime drama from writer-director Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog stands alongside the otherwise-peerless Léon as a hitman movie that may not deliver enough action thrills for some, but is seeped in distinctive qualities of its own.

16 Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese’s best-regarded works may hew towards the mainstream-intellectual, but here he sets his sights on genre material — specifically, a psychological mystery thriller — and produces a corker. Heavily Gothic in tone, it’s the first of several such films on this list.

15 North West Frontier

A British-made India-set ‘Western’, this beautifully shot Boy’s Own adventure is rollicking old-fashioned entertainment from start to finish. It’s buoyed further by a cast of top-drawer British character actors, topped off with Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall. Magnificent.

14 The Passion of Joan of Arc

One of the most acclaimed films of all time — if we’re talking “the history of cinema”, it’s certainly more important than anything else on this list. Almost 90 years old, it remains surprisingly accessible to modern eyes. An exceptionally affecting experience.

13 Kingsman: The Secret Service

2015 #5 In a year overloaded with spy thrillers, this Bond pastiche stood out by, a) getting in early (it was released last January in the UK), and b) being a helluva lot of fun. Thematically questionable it may be, but the filmmaking verve is a joy to behold.

12 Jurassic World

2015 #4 2015’s highest grossing film, this sequel/reboot of the beloved franchise has proved somewhat divisive. It certainly has flaws in characters and plot, but director Colin Trevorrow has bottled genuine Spielbergian awe and wonder, and that counts for a lot.

11 Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

If this were only a top ten, I’d’ve slipped this in higher up, as much to recommend it as anything. In many respects it’s a familiar mismatched-people-fall-in-love rom-com (hence why its position dropped), but the uncommon melancholic tone makes it feel unique.

10
The Grand Budapest Hotel

I’d wager it’s impossible to describe a Wes Anderson film without recourse to words like “quirky” and “unique”, both wholly apt epithets for The Grand Budapest Hotel, naturally. Others include hilarious, clever, inventive, controlled, and delightful. The last may be the most appropriate of all: this is a film full of delights, from the performances, to the dialogue, to the locations, to the design, to the camerawork. Anderson is the kind of filmmaker who has a cult following, which can sometimes be a bad omen. Based on this evidence, his fandom might just have the right idea.

9
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

2015 #3 There has been an awakening — have you felt it? Well, of course you have. Everyone outside of China has. Half of them twice. The J.J. Abrams-led return to a galaxy far, far away may have received a mixed reception, due to it essentially being the cinematic equivalent of a greatest-hits cover album, dealing in nostalgia more than it does originality… but it’s clearly been made by fans with an eye to crafting something that’s both enjoyable and recognisably Star Wars-y — two balls the prequel trilogy less dropped, more hurled to the ground. It’s a thrilling adventure with likeable new characters and, in my opinion, interesting new villains. There’s scope for the makers of Episodes VIII and IX to produce something even better off the back of this, and that’s exciting.

8
Brazil

Terry Gilliam’s 1984 for 1985 is set in a dystopian Britain almost as bad as our current one, where mindless, faceless bureaucracy rules the day. It’s the kind of film where a typo can lead to a man’s death; where Jonathan Pryce fantasises about being a sword-wielding angel fighting a giant silver samurai; and where Robert De Niro turns up as a terrorist plumber. You know, if Wes Anderson is “quirky” and “unique”, I don’t think we’ve yet invented words to describe Terry Gilliam…

7
Stoker

I promised you more Gothic and here it is. Director Chan-wook Park places 7th on my top ten for the second year in a row with this dark psychological thriller about a reclusive teenage girl who meets her uncle for the first time when he comes to stay following her father’s death. He’s charming, but mysterious — what are the secrets that everyone seems to know but her? Dripping with style and atmosphere, Stoker is a feast for the eyes and ears; a beguiling, sensuous, classically Gothic thriller.

6
Mad Max: Fury Road

2015 #2 Director George Miller returns to the Mad Max series after a 30-year hiatus for the stand-out action movie of… well, “the year” seems to undersell it. Once upon a time he was bold enough to make a chase the entire third act of a film; now, the chase is the entire movie. This is action filmmaking elevated to a genuine art form — literally, if the award season buzz is anything to go by. While the done-for-real stunts are busy boggling your mind, there slips by a story that’s surprisingly rich in theme and character. It gives added weight to a type of storytelling that could only be achieved on film — there’s a reason Miller started with a storyboard and only bothered to write a screenplay when the studio insisted.

5
Byzantium

A third dose of Gothic now, this time with a heavier dose of the “horror” element that’s so often attached to the term. Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan are mother-and-daughter vampires on the run, hiding out in a seedy seaside town, where Ronan tries to lead some kind of normal life as a perma-teen while her mother’s busy doing what she’s always done: whoring. These vampires aren’t glamorous or sparkly, but damaged and discarded. Byzantium is not a very popular film, but its tarnished charms and fatalistic stylings, powered by two strong central performances and atmospheric direction, made me love it.

4
Supermen of Malegaon

Selecting these 20 films was tough, then putting them in order was just as hard, but one thing was a lock from the start: these are my top four films I saw in 2015. The only question was the order they went in, which on another day may have been completely different — any one of them could’ve been #1. This little-seen documentary (Channel 4 premiered it in the middle of the night a few months ago, although it’s available on YouTube) takes us to a small, poor town in India where the locals make their own movies, and they’re a roaring success. It’s an inspirational film about living your dreams even when the world won’t let you, though undercurrents of reality stop it from becoming too tweely self-congratulatory. I’m not overstating it when I say I believe this is an absolute must-see for any lover of film, and probably a good many people besides.

3
The Guest

I feel like I’m being in some way Awkward with many of this year’s choices, because there’s a notable strand of films that aren’t particularly well regarded by viewers en masse (see: #11, #7, #5, now #3). Well, I’m not being awkward, dear reader: I loved all of them, and I loved this one most of all. Like several of those others, it crafts a unique mood with lashings of style, in this case inspired by ’80s movies and music. Dan Stevens is a mysterious ex-soldier who enters a family’s life and brings a load of trouble in his wake, but is he (anti-)hero or villain? Even by the end, you might not be sure. Witty, exciting, stylish, idiosyncratic, this is one guest I want to stay forever. (Sorry — it seems I can’t end any piece about this film without a terrible pun.)

2
Mad Max 2

34 years before Fury Road, there was The Road Warrior. A post-apocalyptic Australian Western, it sees Mel Gibson’s titular drifter drafted into defending an oil-rich community from a violent gang of fetish-attired marauders. While the film has much to offer throughout, the real joy is the third act: a balls-to-the-wall multi-vehicle chase, as Max and co attempt to escape in a heavily-armoured oil tanker and the gang give chase in a fleet of vehicles. Maybe it’s not as slick or extravagant as Fury Road, but it was done without a lick of CGI (for all Fury Road’s “done for real” claims, there’s an awful lot of computer work across that movie) and that added tangibility gives it the edge for me. Not to mention that it did it first — without Mad Max 2, we wouldn’t even have Fury Road.

1
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

2015 #1 Not as life-affirming as Supermen of Malegaon. Not as stylish as The Guest. Not as groundbreaking as Mad Max 2. Certainly not as ‘significant’ as a host of films further down this list. But from the moment the familiar beats of the famous theme tune begin to pulse over the company idents at the top of the movie, Rogue Nation engages you in a perfectly-crafted entertainment. It delivers sequence after sequence of finely-tuned action-thriller excitement, both from Tom Cruise’s crazy stuntwork and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s Hitchcockian control of espionage scenes. The plot may only be solid rather than any great shakes, but it’s supported by likeable heroes, a menacing villain, and well-pitched humour. It’s all topped off with Rebecca Ferguson, who could hold her own in a stand-off with Daisy Ridley and Charlize Theron for 2015’s most kick-ass heroine. Mission perfected.

As ever, I welcome your opinion on my top ten — not just in the comments section, but also in the form of a lovely poll. Multiple selections are allowed, so feel free to pick several favourites.

And if you feel I’ve made an unforgivable omission, I welcome your scathing criticisms in the comments.

Despite doubling the size of my selection, this was still a really, really tough year for picking favourites. Competition was harder than ever, not just because I watched 200 films (47% more than even my next biggest year) but because I made a conscious effort to watch fewer time-killers and more things I’d really been intending to see. As a result, films that I enjoyed immensely or admired intensely fell by the wayside, leaving several big guns to duke it out for the limited slots.

As if doubling my top ten wasn’t enough, the tightly-fought race got stuck for a while at 30 titles. The closest to making it in was my 1,000th film, Mark Cousin’s epic 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey (so epic that my review draft is still in the form of 4,300 words of notes). It hurt to leave it out, but something had to go. The remainder of those 30 (which I guess would be #22 to #30, then) were, in alphabetical order, The Babadook, Gone Girl, High Noon, Looper, Paddington, Scanners, Spectre, Stranger by the Lake, and Wings. In most other years, any of those could’ve found themselves comfortably in my top ten.

I can’t end this without mentioning the 38 films that earned themselves 5-star ratings this year. 17 of them made it into the top 20 — I won’t list those again, so you can go find the three four-star imposters for yourself (clue: they’re right at the end… or start, in the order I’ve written it). The remaining 21 five-starers were Argo, The Babadook, Boyhood, Boyz n the Hood, Dreams of a Life, Filmed in Supermarionation, Fury, The General, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, High Noon, Interstellar, Looper, The Philadelphia Story, sex, lies, and videotape, Shallow Grave, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Stranger by the Lake, Whiplash, Wings, and The Wrestler. Reading through those again, there are several I feel should’ve been in my top 30… or 20… but what would I take out in their place? This year’s been too good, clearly.

Finally, on the same topic, there was one five-starer from each of my additional kinds of reviews (I love it when that happens — so neat). They were: non-list review 2001: A Space Odyssey, extended cut X-Men: Days of Future Past – The Rogue Cut, and short Feast.

Naturally, there were a considerable number of notable releases this year that I’ve yet to see. In my annual tradition, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films — chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety — that were released in 2015 and that I’ve not seen.

As is so often the case, it’s a funny old mix, because there were some films that seemed too ‘significant’ to leave out. This is why, despite recording my progress with these in my statistics every year, I’ll never, ever see 100% of them. For a current example, Minions is the 5th highest grossing film of 2015, so on the list it goes; but I didn’t really like Despicable Me and haven’t watched Despicable Me 2, so what are the chances I’ll ever decide to spend some of my time on Minions? Pretty darn slim, I reckon.

Anyway, the 50 I’ve chosen to highlight — some of which I do very much want to see — are…

Amy
Beasts of No Nation
The Big Short
Black Mass
Blackhat
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Carol
Chappie
Cinderella

Creed
Crimson Peak
The Danish Girl
Everest
Ex Machina
Fantastic Four
Fifty Shades of Grey
Furious 7
The Good Dinosaur
The Hateful Eight

Home
Hotel Transylvania 2
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
In the Heart of the Sea
It Follows
Joy
Legend
Macbeth
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Martian

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Minions
Pan
Pixels
The Revenant
Room
San Andreas
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Sicario
Snoopy and Charlie Brown…

Spotlight
Spy
Steve Jobs
Straight Outta Compton
Suffragette
Taken 3
Ted 2
Testament of Youth
The Visit
The Walk

And so, after all that verbosity, the largest ever year of 100 Films comes to an end.

Apart from the 21 reviews I still have to post, of course. (In that respect, 2014 isn’t even finished yet.) But no matter, it will be done.

For now, all that remains is for me to thank you for reading, to wish you all the best with your own film-watching endeavours (having spent several days shut away in my own world of statistics and lists, I’ve a few people’s posts to catch up on!), and to say “see you soon” for 2016 — the 10th year of 100 Films! I have some stuff planned…