End of Year Review 2023 (Part 4) – The 25 Best Films 10-1

Park Ji-Min in Return to Seoul When I started writing this final part in this year closing series like I do every year it struck me that this will be my 300th post on this site and while I have definitely been sporadic in my posting with life and work and everything getting in the …

End of Year Review 2023 (Part 3) – The 25 Best Films 20-11

Tom Cruise and Esai Morales in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 Usually my lists have a certain rhythm to them but this year there doesn't seem to be a set section when last year there was an action section, a romance section and then some heavy hitting dramas to round it off. The thing …

End of Year Review 2023 (Part 2) – The 25 Best Films 25-21

Anaita Wali Zada in Fremont When I started this year, I thought I'd know what the years best film was already. I didn't know how anything could beat something I had already watched in October of 2022. I had a kind of tunnel vision and thankfully over the course of the year I opened myself …

End of Year Review 2023 (Part 1)- The 10 Worst Films

Every year around this time comes the inevitable Christmas/New Year's arguement, one that happens every year in corners of the internet where whoever it is that debates this stuff debates this stuff. Every year people discuss the merit in looking at the worst films of the year, in publicly shaming pieces of art for views …

Review: Subject (2023) – Truth or a Good Story?

Subject Early on in Subject, there is a sequence that tries to decide the true aim of non-fiction and the changing landscape of the genre due to companies such as Netflix and HBO. The question being, is the real aim to tell a story that fits what the filmmaker wants or what is truthful to …

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Sheila Vand in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night When I started thinking about writing this I wanted to entitle it 'A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and a 30 Year Old Desperately Tries To Stay Awake' but for many different reasons I decided against that. For one, that title is longer than …

Review-Lite: Hong Kong Family (2023)

Teresa Mo, Tse Kwan-ho, Edan Lui and Hedwig Tam in Hong Kong Family When teenager Yeung's (Edan Lui) Chinese family gather for a winter solstice dinner everything goes disastrously wrong fracturing the family leading to eight years of estrangement and resent. However in the build-up to the winter solstice a visit from a distant cousin …

Review: Alcarràs (2023) – Waining Summer

Ainet Jounou in Alcarràs There is a almost perfect simplicity to Carla Simón's Alcarràs, a film that makes a promise in its opening moments and never detours or dodges its inevitable conclusion. It's in this self assured storytelling that writers Arnau Vilaró and Simón manage to tell a story of family that feels both unique …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 4: The 25 Best Films (10-1)

When the year started, we were coming out of a cinematic dead zone, one that didn't seem to be catching up to reality all that quickly. The upcoming blockbusters seemed dire and the selection for the first half of the year was few and far between. Although my top 10 includes one of the first …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 3: The 25 Best Films (20-11)

This section of the list goes from musicals to murder mysteries to a horror film that bucks conventions. Each is on here for the way it expounds upon its genre to add something new. This includes a romance that builds upon the novel it is based on by making a romance more about social issues …