2025 - A Year in Film

 

I hope you enjoy the video. 

Outside of the movies themselves, two events will seem to define the year in film 2025 for me: The New York Times poll of the best 100 movies of the 21st century and the impending takeover of Warner Bros. by… well, we don’t know just quite yet. The former is looking back, a celebration that, despite the disruption of seemingly every industry since the turn of the century, proves movies are still great. The latter though leaves anxiety for the future, the subsuming of an iconic movie studio–the legacy studio of all legacy studios–potentially by a company whose entire modus operandi seems to be the elimination of movie theaters altogether or potentially by another company that appears to be steadily morphing into the media apparatus of a fascist regime.

For what it’s worth, here’s my NYT ballot (in ranked order from left to right, top to bottom). While there are some expected entries, I find it interesting that in a few cases, I swerved with the consensus on some of the expected directors. I have the lowest ranked movie from the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson–Inside Llewyn Davis and Punch-Drunk Love, respectively–and a Spielberg (Minority Report, a movie I feel like I’m way higher on than just about anyone I know) that just sneaked onto the top 100. And while lists like these raise as many questions as they do ire amongst its readers, what can be certain is that there will always be great movies, you just have to know where to look for them. This list is a decent start. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t quickly conduct a brief in memoriam. The year began and ended with the deaths of David Lynch and Rob Reiner, two directors who couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, yet impacted the culture all the same. Two acting stalwarts of the New Hollywood era and beyond, whose stardom was matched only by their talent, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford also passed. But of course the one that hit me the most was the passing of Diane Keaton, whose face has graced the top of this very site since its inception, and whose performances are as fundamental to my understanding of American cinema as anyone who has ever stepped in front of a camera. La-dee-da.

 

 

 

2024 - A Year in Film

 

Not a movie year goes by without many lamenting the state of the art form. That, despite the occasional huge box office weekend, cinema is in dire straits, awash in endless IP, while good-to-great adult fare gets buried amongst the pile of "content" housed in the basement of the streamers. But for me, and many others, who try to take stock of the recently-passed calendar year, end up with a glut of great movies to discuss. Are movies really dead (again)?

Well it depends where you look. Hollywood kind of does suck right now. This is endemic to the industry and to the people who run it. The crevasse between the two parts of the term show business has never been wider and reflects the culture and infrastructure of a country whose defining characteristic in middle of the 2020s is its intent on tightening that very stranglehold. When a great Hollywood movie comes out, it's a miracle--a bug, not a feature.

But movies outside that system (or at least ones that are created mostly outside of it and only entering it for marketing and distribution purposes) flourished as it always does. Because, as it turns out, there are still artists out there and, when left mainly to their own devices, turn the movie year into another great movie year.

And here's another thing about the term "movie year." It's too nebulous. My favorite movie of 2024 is technically a 2023 movie. Sometimes that's not a concern for this kind of list--movies often get, say, festival releases one year only to get legitimate distribution the following year. But La Chimera, though it only got released locally in my area in early 2024, was a wide enough release that many considered it a 2023 release and eligible for Oscar consideration that year and made many year-end lists. Had I seen it in 2023, it would have been my #1 of that year too. But outside of the big markets, it only came out in 2024 and even some of the bigger critics and publications included it in their 2024 lists. Once I started to notice that, rather than let it vanish into the ether, I decided it would be included here. And while the other top choices on my list were outstanding, La Chimera was always going to stand alone.

I hope you enjoy the video. 

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Full list: https://boxd.it/EeKbS

2023 - A Year in Film

 Another deep roster of movies that made it difficult to rank them for this year's list. As always, there were some notable omissions due to not being able to see them in time--chief among them, The Zone of Interest and The Boy and the Heron, not to mention a slate of domestic and foreign art house titles that received no distribution in my neck of the woods and will have to wait until a streaming release later in 2024. But that said, still a terrific year for movies.

Enjoy!