I am of course mortified to discover that only twenty of my choices went unnamed by any of those other 838 respondents
Furthermore, my taste has become so mainstream and debased that a further 27 made it onto the A-list, and that my other 53 selections were mentioned 181 times by others in (that’s 3.4 times each).
How vulgar and commonplace I’ve become!
My orphan films Movie Crazy (Clyde Bruckman 1932) First A Girl (Victor Saville 1935) The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer 1935) The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason 1938) The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass (Seijun Suzuki 1961) Bushman (David Schickele 1971) Hapkido (Feng Huang 1972) Death Line aka Raw Meat (Gary Sherman 1972) Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee 1972) The Soul of N***** Charley (Larry G Spangler 1973) The Terminal Man (Mike Hodges 1974) The Trial of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin 1974) Queen Kong (Frank Agrama 1976) Diggstown aka Midnight Sting (Michael Ritchie 1992) Fish Story (Yoshihiro Nakamura 2009) Animal Factory (Steve Buscemi 2000) The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden 2006) Crumbs (Miguel Llansó 2015) Rams (Grímur Hákonarson 2015) Keanu (Peter Atencio 2016)
My A-list films (with total number of mentions) The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh 1924) 12 The Italian Straw Hat (René Clair 1928) 8 Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin 1928) 8 Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair 1930) 7 Emil and the Detectives (Gerhard Lamprecht 1931) 4 Le Million (René Clair 1931) 22 La kermesse héroïque (Jacques Feyder 1935) 7 The Million Ryo Pot (Sadao Yamanaka 1935) 22 Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944) 13 Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem 1955) 15 Rififi (Jules Dassin 1955) 75 The Deadly Invention (Karel Zeman 1958) 9 Plein Soleil (René Clément 1960) 34 The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara 1966) 29 The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich 1967) 10 God Told Me To (Larry Cohen 1976) 11 Violent Cop (Takeshi Kitano 1989) 10 King of New York (Abel Ferrara 1990) 33 Matinee (Joe Dante 1993) 23 True Romance (Tony Scott 1993) 21 Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng 2000) 6 Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker 2001) 12 Primer (Shane Carruth 2004) 22 My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin 2007) 50 The Raid (Gareth Evans 2011) 12 The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn 2016) 20 Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi 2016) 18
My non-orphan, non-A-list films (with total number of mentions (including mine)) The Black Pirate (Albert Parker 1926) 3 The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy 1933) 2 Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz 1935) 5 The Talk of the Town (George Stevens 1942) 4 Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk 1947) 7 The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich 1955) 4 Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (Tomu Uchida 1955) 3 Ilya Muromets (Aleksandr Ptushko 1956) 3 The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden 1960) 2 The Damned (Joseph Losey 1962) 7 Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara 1962) 9 It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo 1964) 2 How to Steal a Million (William Wyler 1966) 5 Support Your Local Sheriff (Burt Kennedy 1969) 3 Bone (Larry Cohen 1972) 5 The Longest Yard aka The Mean Machine (Robert Aldrich 1974) 6 Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston 1978) 7 Bush Mama (Haile Gerima 1979) 10 Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges 1980) 6 The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy 1985) 6 Celia (Ann Turner 1989) 8 Roadkill (Bruce McDonald 1989) 3 Highway 61 (Bruce McDonald 1991) 2 Suture (Scott McGehee and David Siegel 1993) 4 Three Kings (David O. Russell 1999) 9 Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer 2000) 7 The Grudge aka Ju-on 3 (Takashi Shimizu 2002) 5 A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto 2002) 9 Blind Shaft (Yang Li 2003) 6 Big Man Japan (Hitoshi Matsumoto 2007) 3 The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson 2008) 2 Frozen River (Courtney Hunt 2008) 3 JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri 2008) 3 The House of the Devil (Ti West 2009) 6 Stingray Sam (Cory McAbee 2009) 2 Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn 2009) 8 Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli 2011) 2 Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers 2011) 2 The Angel’s Share (Ken Loach 2012) 3 Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin 2012) 12 Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce 2015) 3 Men & Chicken (Anders Thomas Jensen 2015) 2 Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven 2015) 6 Creepy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2016) 5 The Nothing Factory (Pedro Pinho 2017) 2 Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada 2018) 4 Mandy (Panos Cosmatos 2018) 9 Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019) 6 Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg 2020) 7 Earwig (Lucille Hadzihalilovic 2021) 2 Summer of Soul (Questlove 2021) 9 Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King 2021) 5 Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022) 4
so while watching Barbara Loder’s materialist-feminist road movie Wanda (1970) last night, I came up with the idea for a new module, Socialism or Barbara-ism: The Cinematic Critique of Capitalist Patriarchy, focusing on: Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert 1977) Barbara Bel Geddes in Caught (Ophuls 1949) and Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958) Barbara Carrera in Embryo (Nelson 1976), Barbara Eden in The Feminist and the Fuzz (Paris 1971) Barbara Flynn in A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–88) Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha (Scorsese 1972) Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) Barbara Loden in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (Green 1933), Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944) and Cattle Queen of Montana (Dwan 1954) Barbara Steele in Shivers (Cronenberg 1975) Barb(a)ra Streisand in The Way We Were (Pollack 1973) Barbara Windsor in Carry On Girls (Thomas 1973) and Comrades (Douglas 1986) oh, and Barbara Bain in Commander Xenophobe and His Rogue Moon (1975–77) plus Barbie (Gerwig 2023) Barbara (Petzold 2012) Bubbara Ho-Tep (Coscarelli 2002) Barb Wire (Hogan 1996) Barbara-ian Queen (Olivera 1985) Barbaraella (Vadim 1968) Nights of Carbarbara (Fellini 1957) Major Barbara (Pascal, French and Lean 1941) The Winning of Barbara Worth (King 1926) and Barbaraship Potemkin (Eisenstein 1925)
To be honest, I thought I was going to have a lot more to say about this film, but it seemed even thinner on a rewatch, and I’m not at all sure I’ve managed to satisfactorily express the difficult-to-express point I wanted to make. But here goes, anyway…
Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020), set on a slave plantation during the Civil War, opens with a long tracking shot that culminates in the beating of a captured runaway and the fatal shooting of another. For the next half hour, the often poorly-scripted film wallows in images ‘enact[ing] black suffering for a shocked and titillated audience’,[1] but with little of the insidious visual artistry of the always picturesque and thus superficially more palatable 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen 2013). (That said, it does contain three striking shots: the long opening tracking shot through the plantation; the final shot of the abduction sequence as the other Uber carrying Veronica’s friends passes and turns away; the closing slow-motion shots of an axe-wielding Eden, riding on horseback through Confederate lines.)
As with Don’t Worry Darling and Barbie, something is clearly amiss in this fictional world. Is it just budgetary constraints that make the cotton field so small, the slaves’ labour in it so unhurried? Why are the slaves forbidden to speak? Did Confederate soldiers really run ‘reform’ plantations, or chant about ‘blood and soil’?
The illusion of this world breaks definitively when Him (Eric Lange), the confederate officer who repeatedly rapes Eden (Janelle Monáe), receives a call on his hitherto concealed cell phone.
Is this an alternate history, like CSA: The Confederate States of America (Willmott 2004)?
A time-travel story, like Sankofa (Gerima 1993) or Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979)?
Spoiler alert: no.
The middle section of the film follows celebrity scholar–activist Veronica (Janelle Monáe). Away from home promoting her latest book, she is abducted by white supremacists and transported to the plantation from the opening section of the film – which exists in the present, adjacent to a Civil War theme park and battle re-enactment site, owned by Senator Denton (Eric Lange). There, carefully targeted and abducted Black people are forced into the role of slaves, so white supremacists can play at being Confederate soldiers and, unhindered, visit racist and sexual violence upon them.
In the final section of the film, Eden/Veronica orchestrates her escape, taking murderous revenge on her captors and bringing in police and FBI to shut the place down.
Often clumsy, Antebellum attempts to address the way America’s racial history continues to play out in the present. Perhaps its sole innovation, whether intentional or not, is in the first section to position the audience to sympathise with the slave characters, but then in the second section to depict Veronica, and her friend Dawn (Gaborey Sidibe), as (at least potentially) really irritating characters.
Veronica’s relentlessly bourgeois life – fabulous fashion, sentimental motherhood – helps to normalise the image of Black people being wealthy and middle class, something with which microaggressive minor white characters – a concierge, a waitress – are disgruntled. But it also really drives home how her avowed Black intersectional feminism, which consists of shallow clichés and therapeutic affirmations, has a major blind spot: she mentions ‘class, race and gender’ but (surprise!) class is completely absent from anything she says or does.
Dawn is self-consciously loud, quick to express appetite and desire and – in contrast to Veronica – to put down microaggressions. But she sails awfully close to the stereotype of a pushy Black woman.
The two women’s different kinds of outspoken-ness (or perhaps merely spoken-ness) is clearly intended to contrast with the silence and (performance of) subservience forced upon the ‘slaves’ in the face of macro-aggressions.
Some audiences will rejoice in the depiction of such strong Black women; others will accept them as comic exaggerations intended to drive home the film’s admittedly unsubtle point. And, of course, while it is not incumbent on filmmakers to present uncomplicatedly positive images of Black women, other audiences will find Veronica and Dawn considerably less sympathetic than Eden and the other the slave characters.
It is for this last group that the film presents the greatest challenge: it does not matter what Veronica and Dawn are like, it does not matter whether you sympathise/identify with them or not. Nothing can validate this slavery re-enactment or, more importantly, slavery itself and its ongoing legacies.
But in that uncertain zone of (potential) irritation, one must face up to the possibility/extent that one’s negative response to these Black middle class women is in some way structured by racism and sexism.
[1] Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014. 90
The sense of relative privilege is perhaps nowhere clearer than in contemporary retrotopian tendencies, since such evocations of mythical pasts as models of utopian futures hinge upon hierarchical differences of class, race and gender. Zygmunt Bauman[1] identifies four interwoven tendencies in contemporary real-world politics which offer some kind of utopian sensation by focusing on (1) tribalism, which can mediate between the individual and wider forces in a world imagined as a (2) Hobbesian war of all against all while also offering some kind of (3) return-to-the-womb consolation, even if it means (4) perpetuating, reinforcing and increasing existing inequalities.
Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde 2022) appears initially to be set in the Victory Project, a wealthy 1950s American suburb, moderately and monogamously debauched, given over to libidinal–consumerist pleasures and rigid gender roles.
Something is clearly amiss, though. The world is too brightly lit, the colours too vibrant, to be true. The houses are show-home immaculate; every surface gleams or invites sensuous tactility. The women are too content as housewives, and their husbands too prompt to initiate and perform expert cunnilingus. There is no trace of discontent, of restriction, of suffocation. It is as if Betty Friedan never existed, as if the feminine mystique were true.
Also, the setting is (slightly) more ethnically diverse than it would actually have been, with suburbanites of Asian, African American and Jewish descent in supporting and background roles.
It is the dream image of the white suburban 1950s – that ‘emblem of happier times, when family values and small-town American were concrete manifestations of the triumph of capitalism and the “end of ideology”’ – but adjusted to take some account of the period’s ‘repressed [racial, patriarchal and sexual, but never class] realities’[2] and of more contemporary blandly middle-of-the-road liberal sensibilities.
In this way, Don’t Worry Darling ‘calcifies the current state of affairs in America and presents it as a future that we should be excited for’, as Clark Seanor writes of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series of novels (2014–21), and it is not alone in doing so. For example, Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) surrounds stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) with ethnically diverse, albeit mostly light-skinned, Barbies and signals a queer presence in the-sexless-because-they-have-no-genitals Barbieland through Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Allan (Michael Cera); the Kens are similarly diverse.
Moreover, Barbie is careful to put the key speech about ‘the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy’ into the mouth of Gloria, played by America Ferrara, a Honduran American with Indigenous (Lenca) ancestry. Powerful and affecting as her delivery is, the speech is cast in terms so broad and vague as to seem inclusive, but really just (once more) presents white bourgeois liberal feminist plaints as if they are universal. There is no sense of women’s differential material experiences of patriarchal (and other intersecting) systems of oppression. Gloria’s daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) is right to dub stereotypical Barbie ‘white saviour Barbie’, even if she demurs in favour of Sasha’s mother who just delivered the speech and thus found a way to deprogram the other Barbies, who’ve been brainwashed into subservience through the Kens’ plot to institute patriarchy in Barbieland (‘It’s like I’ve been in a dream where I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League’).
Just as Barbie begins to realise something is rotten in the state of Barbieland when she wakes up tired and headachey with bad breath and ‘irrepressible thoughts of death’, to a cold shower, a burnt waffle, milk that’s gone off, gravity, flat feet and traces of cellulite, so Alice (Florence Pugh), the protagonist of Don’t Worry Darling, begins to experience glitches in the Matrix. There are flashes of traumatic images within the glossy Victory Project and from the desert outside; brief moments of anamnesis, coded through lighting, colour and design to suggest some other locale, but always in close-ups that to deny Alice (and the viewer) sufficient information to make sense of them; and black-and-white glimpses of corseted dancers, choreographed in some eerie Busby Berkeley-style reduction of women to interchangeable elements in a machine. Moments of crisis end unresolved, with Alice waking up later and elsewhere, not knowing how she got there and uncertain about the reality of what she witnessed. When she is distracted by a stubborn speck of dirt on the window she is cleaning, the wall behind glides forward to crush her against the glass; and in the film’s most Phildickian moment, she opens a box of eggs only to discover that each one is just an empty shell.
She is, of course, in a virtual world.
In real reality, Alice is an overworked surgeon, even more exhausted than usual from having to take on additional shifts since her husband lost his job. Jack (Harry Styles) whines about how Alice, who is constantly working, neglects him and their relationship, and has no luck finding employment – but he is drawn to the ‘philosophy’ of Frank (Chris Pine), an online tech-millionaire guru partly based on Jordan Peterson. Without Alice’s knowledge or consent, he signs them up to the real Victory Project, which inserts them both into the virtual world and suppresses her memories and identity to prevent her from realising the truth. In exchange, when Jack and the other husbands head off to their top-secret engineering work every day, they actually exit the virtual world for jobs in the real work that pay enough to sustain their illusory existence (the details of this are unclear, but it looks a lot like the indentured servitude Elon Musk seems to have in mind for his Martian colonists).
In the virtual world, variations in costume design and the mid-century modern architecture and décor emphasise, although less overtly than the wryly synchronised departure of husbands for work each morning, superficial differences within uniformity. This can probably be extended to variations in ethnicity, body shape and so on; like Barbie, Don’t Worry Darling often seems to intersectionality-wash cherry-picked elements of second-wave and post-feminist liberal feminisms; like Barbie, it possesses no actual vision.
This is not, however, to dismiss the significance of these movies, whether they flop (Don’t Worry Darling took $87.6 million off a $35 million budget) or are global blockbusters (Barbie took $.144 billion off a $145 million budget, the biggest domestic, foreign and worldwide box-office of the year). The outraged responses to such films indicate the extent to which the anti-feminist backlash, often tied to ethnonationalism, is entrenched in mainstream political and alt-victimhood[3] discourses, and thus the extent to which even such modest acts of liberal feminism (Alice is often barefoot, her friend Peg (Kate Berlant) continually pregnant) and anti-racism are necessary portals to a better world.
[1] In his rather mediocre Retrotopia. John Wiley, 2017.
[2] Peter Fitting, writing about Pleasantville (Gary Ross 1998) in ‘Unmasking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Film’. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Routledge, 2003. 155–166. 163.
[3] See David M. Higgins’s rather good book, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy and Alt-Victimhood. University of Iowa Press, 2021.
I’ve been using the last couple of days of our Cornish holiday, after Andrea abandoned me for work, trying to make some progress on an essay on contemporary dystopian cinema, which is due in ten days time. I still only have the vaguest sense of what I want to say, my books are 150 miles away, and the notes I took from them in December are either uninspiring or make no real sense to me now. So I’ve switched things up and started rewatching the films to see what they say to me – and as an extra incentive to actually write things down, I thought I’d begin posting draft sections here. I have no idea which of them will make it into the final version, or in what condition.
Let’s begin with 65 (Beck and Woods 2023), Adam Driver’s addition to the humans-versus-dinosaurs canon, which still lacks a definitive film (mainly because Hammer never actually made Zeppelins vs. Pterodactyls).
‘Prior to the advent of mankind’, the opening of 65 (Beck and Woods 2023) tells us, as a disembodied viewpoint drifts through gaseous computer-generated nebulae and past bright revolving galaxies, ‘in the infinity of space other civilizations explored the heavens’.
However, having established the magnitude of space and the depths of cosmic time, the film promptly gives way to statistical absurdity: an alien spaceship returning from a long-range exploratory mission collides with the debris around the K-T asteroid and crashlands on Earth two days before the extinction-level impact will occur.
And if that is not sufficiently improbable, two survivors evade numerous dinosaurs and other perils as they locate the other half of the wreckage, which contains an undamaged escape vessel, and launch themselves back into space even as the asteroid is entering the atmosphere.
Even more absurd than this, though, is the film’s premise that on the planet Somaris, over 65 million years ago, a species evolved that is in every respect identical to middle class North American human beings. No physiological element distinguishes them from humans, and they have no distinctively alien social structure or culture. Their technology, while more advanced than our own, fits within the paradigms of contemporary design or a conventional near-future imaginary. Their emotional lives consist of an utterly familiar affective repertoire. They form monogamous nuclear families, with the gendered and generational dynamics, repressed tensions, beach holidays and comfortable-but-stylish casualwear one expects of a liberal, middle-class family. As a spaceship pilot, Mills (Adam Driver) is often away from home for up to six weeks at a time, but he nonetheless enjoys a special relationship with Nevine (Chloe Coleman), his daughter. (His wife, who is Black, is merely credited as Nevine’s Mom (Nika King)).
However, Nevine is sick with one of those never-actually-named debilitating movie diseases that, if untreated, is fatal. And since Somaris has evolved not only a species of fantastical bourgeois Americans but also a US-style healthcare system and a gig economy that now includes spaceship pilots, Mills must sign up to pilot a long-range mission that will take him away from home for two years to pay for Nevine’s expensive treatment.
In fact, the only thing that distinguishes these non-humans, with their capitalism, patriarchy and reproductive heteronomativity, from actually-existing suburban Americans, with their capitalism, patriarchy and reproductive heteronomativity, is that aliens’ holiday beach has unusual giant rock formations that look like fossilised wave crests.
If, as XXX suggests, ‘all sf falls between the poles of utopia and dystopia’ (find this fucking quote), what is one to make of such sf films as 65, which lack both hope and vision and anger and despair, and display no trace of sociopolitical world-building beyond lazily reiterating the present?
What is one to do with such a fundamentally symptomatic text that braids together elements of the dystopian world in which we live, albeit without any discernible dystopian inflection, with an extinction-level event akin to the one through which we are living, but also separating them out (bourgeois aliens live on one world, extinction descends upon another) so as to deny the causal links between, and culpability of, actually-existing socioeconomic systems and global catastrophe?
Given such blankness, such mutually cancelling contradictions that somehow sidestep the commonplace that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia, how can such a text be positioned between utopia and dystopia?
To treat it as utopian is to accept some Fukuyaman vision of neoliberal hegemony as not just the end of history, but the all of history; to admit that the best we can imagine is just more of the endless same.
To treat it as dystopian is to move beyond the superficial appearances that distinguish it from the polluted trashworld of, say, Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017), and to accept the worst that we can imagine is just more of the endless same.
But 65 has no discernible interest in either of those possibilities, nor in any admixture of two.
Someone asked how many of the 403 films I watched in 2023 I saw on the big screen. Off the top of my head, I would have guessed closer to 30 than 20, but much fewer than usual since at the end of 2022 we moved from Bristol to a small Welsh village with a train station but not much else, and certainly not a cinema.
There is a multiplex a few miles away in the Newport retail park, but being dependent on public transport, the only way to get there is an hourly bus which stops there 55 minutes before the film starts and departs 5 minutes before the end credits roll. Every fucking time.
So in the face of such first world problems, we’ve stayed Bristol-oriented. Fortunately my commute is on the same line and costs the same as travelling to the city centre, with no restriction on breaking the journey partway to put in my hours inspecting the pipe at the piss factory, so I’ve made use of that a few times this year (and of my customary picket line being near the Watershed and about ten minutes from the Odeon).
And it turns out, the answer is actually 60 films on the big screen (although not always in cinemas), with 21 of them over the five days I spent at the Cinema Rediscovered and Forbidden Worlds festivals. (I’ve written about falling in love with cinema, rather than just film, here; if you scroll down you can listen to me reading about falling in love with cinema, rather than just film, aloud.)
It was a hard year for cinemas. Audiences are still nowhere near pre-Covid levels, Bristol lost two of its five multiplexes (including the only cinema in the south of the city), and the Watershed took a funding hit. But there wass still an awful lot going on: festivals (although I didn’t manage to get to anything at Afrika Eye, Encounters, Bristol Radical Film Festival or Bristol Palestine Film Festival, and only one film at Slapstick) and screenings organised by the good folks at 20th Century Flicks, Cary Grant Comes Home, Film Noir UK, Horror Without End and Southwest Silents, among others).
Cinemas, festival, screening organisations, pop-up events are precious and we should cherish them. I mean, just look at the range of stuff I did manage to get to (I promise I’ll stop just posting lists soon):
Salomé (Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova 1922) – with live accompaniment Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau 1924) – with live accompaniment Papirosnitsa of Mosselproma/The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom (Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky 1924) – with live accompaniment Beverly of Graustark (Sidney Franklin 1926) – most uncomfortable seats Asphalt (Joe May 1929) – with live accompaniment
Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakuan ryô no tsubo/The Million Ryo Pot (Sadao Yamanaka 1935)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943) Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945) Wanted for Murder (Lawrence Huntington 1946) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston 1948) – highest cost/lowest quality one-off screening, but it was in a fancy old wine cellar with a fancy glass of red included The Third Man (Carol Reed 1949) – IMAX
The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield 1950) Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner 1952) Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies 1953) – IMAX 20000 Leagues under the Sea (Richard Fleischer 1954) – in London Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson 1956)
Koroshi no rakuin/Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki 1967) – IMAX Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke 1967) Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (Abraham Polonsky 1969)
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970) Bushman (David Schikele 1971) Dolgie provody/The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova 1971) Meng long gou jiang/The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee 1972) Coffy (Jack Hill 1973) A Rainha Diaba/The Devil Queen (Antonio Carlos da Fontura 1973) Shampoo (Hal Ashby 1975) Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter 1976) – IMAX Prey (Norman J. Warren 1977) – IMAX
Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards 1982) – most uncomfortable seating but we’d learned from the earlier screening of Beverly of Graustark and managed to get in the front row so we could at least stretch our legs out WarGames (John Badham 1983) – IMAX; I introduced this one despite being ill – too ill, in fact, to stick around for the second half of the double bill, which was a shame cos there’s no way seeing Threads (Mick Jackson 1984) on an IMAX screen could have made me feel worse, surely? After Hours (Martin Scorsese 1985) – IMAX; I introduced this one, which was pretty weird since I’m no fan of Scorsese, but at least I managed to make an increasingly baffled and angry audience applaud Teri Garr Night of the Creeps (Fred Dekker 1986) – IMAX Something Wild (Jonathan Demme 1986) – IMAX; I introduced this one before introducing After Hours and it was lot smoother ride for everyone involved Wong ga jin si/Royal Warriors (David Chung 1986) – IMAX Salvation (Beth B 1987) Die Hard (John McTiernan 1988) – in Plymouth One Hand Don’t Clap (Kavery Dutta Kaul 1988) Cyborg (Albert Pyun 1989) – I introduced this one, too, suggesting that I am now Bristol’s go-to guy for reminding people how fucked up and weird (and shit) the 1980s were
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante 1990) – IMAX Szürkület/Twilight (György Fehér 1990) Ging Chaat goo si III: chiu kup gin chat/Police Story 3: Supercop (Stanley Tong 1992) – IMAX Beurokeo/Broker (Hirokazu Koreeda 2022) Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022) R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu 2022) Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin 2023) Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli 2023) Expend4bles (Scott Waugh 2023) – the last film I will ever see at one of those now-closed multiplexes (where thirteen years earlier I saw the first Expendables back-to-back with the Piranha remake) Fast X (Louis Letterier 2023) Gojiro – 1.0/Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold 2023) – in Amsterdam, in the most ornate venue of the year, and the only one to serve champagne-and-absinthe cocktails Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg 2023) John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski 2023) Kuolleet lehdet/Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki 2023) The Marvels (Nia DaCosta 2023) Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley 2023) Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan 2023) Pathaan (Siddharth Anand 2023) Polite Society (Nida Manzoor 2023) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Power and Justin K Thompson 2023)
Began the year by finally watching Comrades (Bill Douglas 1986) and finally reading Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015) – cos, as Andrea says, I know how to show a girl a good time – and there seems little room for improvement.
This year, the year in which I took advantage of Andrea being away on two weekends to watch all the Hellraiser movies and all but (for good reasons) the first and last Texas Chain Saw Massacre movies, and in which Andrea forced me to watch a dozen Miyazaki movies, I have watched 403 films, 264 of them for the first time
First, some awards: Best dog: Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki 2023) and A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin 2023) Best unexpected robot/dystopia dance routine: Evergreen (Victor Saville 1934) – from 3.09 Best soundtrack thrown together by middle-aged white men: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears 2023) Worst soundtrack thrown together by middle-aged white men: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Aaaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic and Pierre Leduc 2023)
Second, my top 3 films released in the UK in 2023, in joint first place. Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023) Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki 2023) A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin 2023)
I also enjoyed, in roughly this order: Polite Society (Nida Manzoor 2023) Sisu (Jalmari Helander 2022) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Power and Justin K Thompson 2023) Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022) Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg 2023) Pearl (Ti West 2022) Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley 2023) Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) The Marvels (Nia DaCosta 2023) John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski 2023) Pathaan (Siddharth Anand 2023) Fast X (Louis Letterier 2023) Smoking Causes Coughing (Quentin Dupieux 2022) I am still not sure if I enjoyed R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu 2022) or if ‘enjoyed’ could ever be the right word for it.
Third, my top 32 films I saw for the first time in 2023, in order of release: Poil de carotte/Carrot Top (Julien Duvivier 1932) The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield 1950) The Tall T (Budd Boetticher 1957) The Human Condition trilogy (Masaki Kobayashi 1959–61) Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (Kenji Misumi 1964) Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa 1965) Bushman (David Schikele 1971) Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1974) The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi 1978) Dirty Ho (Chia-Liang Liu 1979) The Magnificent Butcher (Yuen Woo-Ping 1979) Norma Rae (Martin Ritt 1979) Vagabond (Agnès Varda 1985) Royal Warriors (David Chung 1986) One Hand Don’t Clap (Kavery Dutta Kaul 1988) Twilight (György Fehér 1990) Drylongso (Cauleen Smith 1998) Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda 2000) I Wish (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2011) Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2015) Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2015) Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2017) Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook 2022) Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023) Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki 2023) A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin 2023) Sisu (Jalmari Helander 2022) Polite Society (Nida Manzoor 2023) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Power and Justin K Thompson 2023) Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022) Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg 2023) Pearl (Ti West 2022)
Fourth, for anyone not yet bored out their mind by my lists, the complete list of 403 titles: 21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller 2012) 22 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller 2014) 65 (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods 2023) 65 (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods 2023) 20000 Leagues under the Sea (Richard Fleischer 1954)
After Hours (Martin Scorsese 1985) After Hours (Martin Scorsese 1985) Aftersun (Charlotte Wells 2022) After the Fox (Vittorio De Sica 1966) Akahige/Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa 1965) L’albero degle zoccoli/The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi 1978)* Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) Amazing Grace (Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack 2018) Ambulance (Michael Bay 2022) Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1974) Anna (Luc Besson 2019) Antlers (Scott Cooper 2021) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Peyton Reed 2023) Asphalt (Joe May 1929) Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter 1976) Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron 2022)
Babylon 5: The Road Home (Matt Peters 2023) Bad Boys (Michael Bay 1995) Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019) Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019) The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson 2008) Barbara (Christian Petzold 2012) Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) Beast (Baltasar Kormákur 2022) Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999) Belle (Amma Asante 2013) Beurokeo/Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2022) Beverly of Graustark (Sidney Franklin 1926) Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner 1952) The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (John Badham 1976) Black Adam (Jaime Collet-Serra 2022) Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks 1955) Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler 2022) The Black Phone (Scott Derickson 2021) Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017) Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance 2010) Bodies Bodies Bodies (Halina Reijn 2022) Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson 1997) Born in Flames (Lizzie Borde 1983) Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1961) Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch 2005) Buchanan Rides Alone (Budd Boetticher 1958) Bullet Train (David Leitch 2022) Bushman (David Schikele 1971)
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton 1928) Can que/Crippled Avengers (Cheh Chang 1978) Chiu kup gai wak/Project S/Supercop 2 (Stanley Tong 1993) Ciao maschio/Bye Bye Monkey (Marco Ferreri 1978) Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis 1981) La classes operaia va in paridiso/The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri 1971) Climbing High (Carol Reed 1938) Cocaine Bear (Elizabeth Banks 2023) Coffy (Jack Hill 1973) Comanche Station (Budd Boetticher 1960) Commando (Mark L. Lester 1985) Creed III (Michael B. Jordan 2023) Cyborg (Albert Pyun 1989) Cyborg (Albert Pyun 1989) Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (Michael Schroeder 1993)
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (Bernard Girard 1966) Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher 1957) The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies 2011) Depraved (Larry Fessenden 2019) Detour (Edgar G Ulmer 1945) Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2002) The Devil-Doll (Tod Browning 1936) Diabolik – Ginko all’attacco!/Diabolik: Ginko Attacks (Antonio and Marco Manetti 2022) Die Hard (John McTiernan 1988) Distant Voice, Still Lives (Terence Davies 1988) Doctor X (Michael Curtiz 1932) A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin 2023) Dolgie provody/The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova 1971) Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly 2001) Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde 2022) Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli 2023) Drylongso (Cauleen Smith 1998) Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein 2023) Dung fong tuk ying/Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung 1987) Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam aka The Man Who Saved the World aka Turkish Star Wars (Çetin Inanç 1982)
Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel 1982) Eden Lake (James Watkins 2008) Ek Tha Tiger (Mathur Goswami and Kabir Khan 2012) Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022) Eraserhead (David Lynch 1977) El Espejo de la bruja/The Witch’s Mirror (Chano Ureata 1962) Evergreen (Victor Saville 1934) Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert 2022) Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons 1997) Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin 2023) Expend4bles (Scott Waught 2023)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson 2009) Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (David Leitch 2019) Fast X (Louis Letterier 2023) Fast X (Louis Letterier 2023) Fei Ying/Silver Hawk (Jingle Ma 2004) La femme bourreau/A Woman Kills (Jean-Denis Bonan 1968) The First Great Train Robbery (Michael Crichton 1978) Flesh+Blood (Paul Verhoeven 1985) The Forgiven (John Michael McDonagh 2022) Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach 2012) Free Guy (Shawn Levy 2021) Free State of Jones (Gary Ross 2016) Fumer fait tousser/Smoking Causes Coughing (Quentin Dupieux 2022) Funny Face (Stanley Donen 1957)
Gake no ue no Ponyo/Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki 2008) Gangway (Sonnie Hale 1937) Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn 1973) Gap tun kei hap/The Iceman Cometh (Clarence Fok 1989) Gekititsu! Satsujin ken/The Streetfighter (Shigehiro Ozawa 1974) The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton 1926) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks 1953) Gespenster (Christian Petzold 2005) Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) Ging Chaat goo si III: chiu kup gin chat/Police Story 3: Supercop (Stanley Tong 1992) Gisaengchung/Parasite (Bong Joon Ho 2019) The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler 1942) Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda 2000) Gojiro – 1.0/Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023) The Good Companions (Victor Saville 1933) Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant 1997) Grease (Randal Kleiser 1978) The Great Escape (John Sturges 1963) Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante 1990) The Grifters (Stephen Frears 1990) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (James Gunn 2023) Gummo (Harmony Korine 1997) Guzaarish (Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2010) Gyakushû! Satsujin ken/The Streetfighters’ Last Revenge (Shigehiro Ozawa 1974)
Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green 2022) Happy Ever After (Mario Zampi 1954) Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (Danny Leiner 2004) Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg 2008) Hauru no ugoku shiri/Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki 2004) Head Over Heels (Sonnie Hale 1937) Hellraiser (Clive Barker 1987) Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel 1988) Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Anthony Hickox 1992) Hellraiser: Bloodline (Alan Smithee (Kevin Yagher) 1996) Hellraiser: Inferno (Scott Derickson 2000) Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Rick Bota 2002) Hellraiser: Deader (Rick Bota 2005) Hellraiser: Hellworld (Rick Bota 2005) Hellraiser: Revelations (Victor Garcia 2011) Hellraiser: Judgment (Gary J. Tunicliffe 2018) Hellraiser (David Bruckner 2022) Heojil kyolshim/Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook 2022) The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino 1953) The Holiday (Nancy Meyers 2006) Hong Xi Guan/Executioners from Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu 1977) The Hot Rock (Peter Yates 1972) How Green Was My Valley (John Ford 1941) How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber 2022) The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012) The Hunt (Craig Zobel 2020)
Ich möchte kein Mann sein/I Don’t Want To Be A Man (Ernst Lubitsch 1918) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold 2023) Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg 2023) Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies 1953)
Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer (Andrew Donohoe, Lacey Duke, Alan Ferguson 2018) John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski 2023)
Kaze no tani no Naushika/Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki 1984) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1933) King of New York (Abel Ferrara 1990) Kiseki/I Wish (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2011) Kishibe no tabi/Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2015) Koroshi no rakuin/Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki 1967) Koroshi no rakuin/Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki 1967) Kosure Ôkami: Ko wo kashi ude kashi tsukamatsuru/Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi 1972) Kûki mingyô/Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2009) Kuolleet lehdet/Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki 2023) Kurenai no buta/Porco Rosso Hayao Miyazaki 1992)
Lan tou He/Dirty Ho (Chia-Liang Liu 1979) The Last of Sheila (Herbert Ross 1973) Last Seen Alive (Brian Goodman 2022) Leatherface (Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury 2017) Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Jeff Burr 1990) Leave No Trace (Debra Granik 2018) Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau 1924) Life (Daniel Espinosa 2017) Life of Pi (Ang Lee 2012) Lin Shi Rong/The Magnificent Butcher (Yuen Woo-Ping 1979) Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris 2006) Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong/Challenge of the Masters (Chia-Liang Liu 1976) La llorona (Ramón Peón 1933) La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante 2019) Lola (Jacques Demy 1961) The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies 1992) Luk ding gei/Royal Tramp (Jing Wong 1992) Luk ding kei II: San lung gau/Royal Tramp II (Jing Wong 1992)
Mad Love (Karl Freund 1935) Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Steven Soderbergh 2023) The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges 1960) Majo no takkyûbin/Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki 1989) Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan 2016) Mandy (Panos Cosmatos 2018) The Man from Toronto (Sinclair Hill 1933) Martyrs (Pascal Laugier 2008) Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda 2017) Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning 1935) The Marvels (Nia DaCosta 2023) M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970) Matewan (John Sayles 1987) Mayhem (Joe Lynch 2017) Ma Yon Zhen/The Boxer from Shantung (Cheh Chang and Hsueh-Li Pao 1972) Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010) Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010) Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley 2023) Meng long gou jiang/The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee 1972) Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943) Al midan/The Square (Jehane Noujaim 2013) Mission Impossible II (John Woo 2000) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie 2023) Misterios de ultraumba/Black Pit of Dr M (Fernando Méndez 1959) Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry 1981) Un monde/Playground (Laura Wandel 2021) Un monde/Playground (Laura Wandel 2021) Mononoke-Hime/Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki 1997) Multiple Maniacs (John Waters 1970) My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946)
Night After Night (Archie Mayo 1932) Night of the Creeps (Fred Dekker 1986) Ningen no jôken 1/The Human Condition 1: No Greater Love (Masaki Kobayashi 1959) Ningen no jôken 2/The Human Condition 2: Fury (Masaki Kobayashi 1959) Ningen no jôken 3/The Human Condition 3: Nostalgia (Masaki Kobayashi 1959) Ningen no jôken 4/The Human Condition 4: The Fog of War (Masaki Kobayashi 1959) Ningen no jôken 5/The Human Condition 5: Escaping Death (Masaki Kobayashi 1961) Ningen no jôken 6/The Human Condition 6: Wandering in the Wilderness (Masaki Kobayashi 1961) Nope (Jordan Peele 2022) Norma Rae (Martin Ritt 1979) Nuoc 2030 (Nguyen-Vo Nghiem-Mihn 2014)
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies 2008) One Hand Don’t Clap (Kavery Dutta Kaul 1988) Onna hissatsu ken/Sister Streetfighter (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi 1974) Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan 2023)
Paperhouse (Bernard Rose 1988) Papirosnitsa of Mosselproma/The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom (Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky 1924) Paris When It Sizzles (Richard Quine 1964) Pathaan (Siddharth Anand 2023) Pearl (Ti West 2022) Perfect Friday (Peter Hall 1970) Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi 2007) La petite marchande d’allumettes/The Little Match Girl (Jean Renoir and Jean Tédesco 1928) Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson 2017) Phoenix (Christian Petzold 2014) Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon 1959) Poil de carotte/Carrot Top(Julien Duvivier 1932) Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991) Polite Society (Nida Manzoor 2023) Polite Society (Nida Manzoor 2023) The Pope of Greenwich Village (Stuart Rosenberg 1984) Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke 1967) Possession (Andrzej Zulawski 1981) Il posto/The Job (Ermanno Olmi 1961) Prey (Norman J. Warren 1977) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcok 1960) Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino 1994) Pusher (Nicolas Winding Refn 1996) Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (Nicolas Winding Refn 2004) Pusher III: I’m The Angel of Death (Nicolas Winding Refn 2006)
Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam 1979)
Radio On (Chris Petit 1979) A Rainha Diaba/The Devil Queen (Antonio Carlos da Fontura 1973) Rawhead Rex (George Pavlou 1986) Ready Or Not (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2019) Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940) Le Redoubtable (Michel Hazanavicius 2017) Relic (Natalie Erika James 2020) Renfield (Chris McKay 2023) Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher 1959) Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah 1962) R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu 2022) Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller 2010) The Rocking Horse Winner (Anthony Pelissier 1949) The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman 1975) Ron’s Gone Wrong (Sarah Smith, Jean-Philippe Vine and Octavio E Rodriguez 2021) The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson 2001) Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro/Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Hayao Miyazaki 1979)
Sailing Along (Sonnie Hale 1938) Saint Maud (Rose Glass 2019) Salomé (Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova 1922) Salvation (Beth B 1987) San De huo shang yu Chong Mi Liu/The Iron-Fisted Monk (Sammo Hung 1977) The Sand Pebbles (Robert Wise 1966) Sanpo suru shinryakusha/Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2017) Sans toit nil oi/Vagabond (Agnès Varda 1985) Santo contra ‘Hombres infernales’/Santo vs. Infernal Men (Joselito Rodriguez and Enrique Zambrano 1961) Satsujin ken 2/Return of the Street Fighter (Sigehiro Ozawa 1974) Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945) Sen to Chihiro no kamikushi/Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki 2001) Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher 1956) Shadows (John Cassavetes 1959) Shampoo (Hal Ashby 1975) Shao Lin si/Shaolin Temple (Cheh Chang and Wu Ma 1976) Shao Lin wu zu/Five Shaolin Masters (Cheh Chang 1974) Sharpe’s Battle (Tom Clegg 1995) Shazam! Fury of the Gods (David F. Sandberg 2023) Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Guy Ritchie 2011) Shin Gojira/Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi 2016) Shin Zatôichi monogatari/New Tale of Zatoichi (Tokuzô Tanaka 1963) Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman 2020) The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski 1978) Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995) Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952) Sisu (Jalmari Helander 2022) Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972) Soldaat van Oranje/Soldier of Orange (Paul Verhoeven 1977) Something Wild (Jonathan Demme 1986) Something Wild (Jonathan Demme 1986) Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley 2018) Soshite chichi ni naru/Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2013) The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield 1950) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman 2018) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Power and Justin K Thompson 2023) Spite Marriage (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton 1929) Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky 1979) Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris 2008) Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven 1997) A Study in Terror (James Hill 1965) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Aaaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic and Pierre Leduc 2023) Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman 2008) The Sword and the Sorcerer (Albert Pyun 1982) Szürkület/Twilight (György Fehér 1990)
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (John Harrison 1990) Tales of An Ancient Empire (Albert Pyun 2010) The Tall T (Budd Boetticher 1957) Ta’m e guilass/ Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami 1997) Tampopo (Jûzô Itami 1985) Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakuan ryô no tsubo/The Million Ryo Pot (Sadao Yamanaka 1935) Tang ren jie xiao zi/Chinatown Kid (Cheh Chang 1977) Tár (Todd Field 2022) Tarzan’s New York Adventure (Richard Thrope 1942) Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (Richard Thorpe 1941) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears 2023) Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (Abraham Polonsky 1969) Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta/Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki 1986) Texas Chainsaw 3D (John Luessenhop 2013)) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel 2003) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part Two (Tobe Hooper 1986) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Jonathan Liebesman 2006) Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel 1995) The Theory of Everything (James Marsh 2014) There Goes the Bride (Albert de Courville 1932) They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor 2023) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris 1988) The Third Man (Carol Reed 1949) The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison 1968) Tian xia di yi quan/Five Fingers of Death/King Boxer (Chan-hwa Jeong 1972) Tiger Zinda Hai (Ali Abbas Zafar and Musa Muhammed Olayinka 2017) Tomboy (Céline Sciamma 2011) Tômei ningen arawaru/The Invisible Man Appears (Shinsei Adachi and Shigehiro Fukushima 1949) Tommy (Ken Russell 1975) Tonari no Totoro/My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki 1988) Toni (Jean Renoir 1935) Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven 1990) Transit (Christian Petzold 2018) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston 1948) Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan/The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Marting Bourboulon 2023) Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke 2008) Two-Way Stretch (Robert Day 1960)
Umimachi Diary/Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda 2015) The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley 1989) Us (Jordan Peele 2019)
El Vampiro Negro/The Black Vampire (Román Viñoly Barreto 1953) A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (Todd Strauss-Schulson 2011) Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards 1982) Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer 1955)
Wanted for Murder (Lawrence Huntington 1946) War (Siddarth Anand 2019) Warlock (Steve Miner 1989) The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1996) The Way Way Back (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash 2013) Westbound (Budd Boetticher 1958) West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins 1961) White Sands (Roger Donaldson 1992) Who Killed Captain Alex (Nabwana I.G.G. 2015) Wing Chun (Yuen Woo-Ping 1994) The Woman King (Gina Prince-Bythewood 2022) Wong ga jin si/Royal Warriors (David Chung 1986) Working Girls (Lizzie Borden 1986) The Wrong Arm of the Law (Cliff Owen 1963) Wu du/The Five Venoms (Cheh Chang 1978)
X (Ti West 2022)
Yella (Christian Petzold 2007) Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson 1956) Yong zheng da po shi ba tong ren/Return of the 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo 1976) Yoru no kawa/Undercurrent (Kôzaburô Yashimura 1956) You gui zi/The Oily Maniac (Meng Hua Ho 1976)
Zatôichi abare tako/Zatoichi’s Flashing Sword (Kazuo Ikehiro 1964) Zatôichi jigoku-tabi/Zatoichi and the Chess Expert (Kenji Misumi 1965) Zatôichi kenka-tabi (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1963) Zatôichi kesshô-tabi/Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (Kenji Misumi 1964) Zatôichi sakate-giri/Zatoichi and the Doomed Man (KazuoMoria 1965) Zatôichi xekisho-yaburi/Adventures of Zatoichi (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1964) Zhing hua zhang fu/Heroes of the East (Chia- Liang Liu 1978) Zhong hua zhan shi/Magnificent Warriors (David Chung 1987)
Earlier this year, I was one of many people approached by the Beyond the Canon project to put together a list of 100 ‘great’ films not included among the 4400 titles found in the top ten lists of the 2100 people who contributed to the BFI/Sight & Sound decadal poll of the greatest films of all times. Although that poll does not define ‘great’ when inviting responses, the meaning of ‘great’ must inevitably shift a little when over four thousand variously/relatively canonical films are excluded from consideration (while also opening opportunities to list a lot more recent films that have not yet become, or failed to become, canonical). Anyway, here in chronological order are my hundred ‘great’ films (some of which would have been serious contenders if I’d been asked to put together a top ten by the BFI/Sight & Sound):
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh 1924) The Black Pirate (Albert Parker 1926) The Italian Straw Hat (René Clair 1928) Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin 1928)
Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair 1930) Emil and the Detectives (Gerhard Lamprecht 1931) Le Million (René Clair 1931) Movie Crazy (Clyde Bruckman 1932) The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy 1933) Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz 1935) First A Girl (Victor Saville 1935) The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer 1935) La kermesse héroïque (Jacques Feyder 1935) The Million Ryo Pot (Sadao Yamanaka 1935) The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason 1938)
The Talk of the Town (George Stevens 1942) Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944) Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk 1947)
The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich 1955) Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (Tomu Uchida 1955) Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem 1955) Rififi (Jules Dassin 1955) Ilya Muromets (Aleksandr Ptushko 1956) The Deadly Invention (Karel Zeman 1958)
The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden 1960) Plein Soleil (René Clément 1960) The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass (Seijun Suzuki 1961) The Damned (Joseph Losey 1962) Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara 1962) It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo 1964) The Face of Another (Hirosho Teshigahara 1966) How to Steal a Million (William Wyler 1966) The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich 1967) Support Your Local Sheriff (Burt Kennedy 1969)
Bushman (David Schickele 1971) Hapkido (Feng Huang 1972) Bone (Larry Cohen 1972) Death Line aka Raw Meat (Gary Sherman 1972) Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee 1972) The Soul of N***** Charley (Larry G Spangler 1973) The Longest Yard aka The Mean Machine (Robert Aldrich 1974) The Terminal Man (Mike Hodges 1974) The Trial of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin 1974) God Told Me To (Larry Cohen 1976) Queen Kong (Frank Agrama 1976) Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston 1978) Bush Mama (Haile Gerima 1979)
King of New York (Abel Ferrara 1990) Highway 61 (Bruce McDonald 1991) Diggstown aka Midnight Sting (Michael Ritchie 1992) Matinee (Joe Dante 1993) Suture (Scott McGehee and David Siegel 1993) True Romance (Tony Scott 1993) Three Kings (David O. Russell 1999)
Animal Factory (Steve Buscemi 2000) Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer 2000) Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng 2000) Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker 2001) The Grudge aka Ju-on 3 (Takashi Shimizu 2002) A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto 2002) Blind Shaft (Yang Li 2003) Primer (Shane Carruth 2004) The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden 2006) Big Man Japan (Hitoshi Matsumoto 2007) My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin 2007) The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson 2008) Frozen River (Courtney Hunt 2008) JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri 2008) Fish Story (Yoshihiro Nakamura 2009) The House of the Devil (Ti West 2009) Stingray Sam (Cory McAbee 2009) Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn 2009)
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli 2011) The Raid (Gareth Evans 2011) Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers 2011) The Angel’s Share (Ken Loach 2012) Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin 2012) Crumbs (Miguel Llansó 2015) Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce 2015) Men & Chicken (Anders Thomas Jensen 2015) Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven 2015) Rams (Grímur Hákonarson 2015) Creepy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2016) Keanu (Peter Atencio 2016) The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn 2016) Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi 2016) The Nothing Factory (Pedro Pinho 2017) Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada 2018) Mandy (Panos Cosmatos 2018) Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019)
Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg 2020) Earwig (Lucille Hadzihalilovic 2021) Summer of Soul (Questlove 2021) Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King 2021) Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022)
I’m sure you’ll disagree.
Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992) was originally on my list but deemed ineligible as being less than feature length.
A 105 minute run-time, which makes it the shortest MCU, I think. Ignore the credits and it’s down to 95-100 minutes so there’s relatively little bloat (the accompanying DCEU Aquaman trailer was subjectively longer) and no room for absurd portentousness around inevitable magical objects. (I assume this is partly Disney-panic about female-led cast-of colour movie’s opening weekend – a shorter run-time means cramming in more screenings.)
It treats the typical MCU diagrammatic plotting with the contempt it deserves (that too might be a consequence of shortening the runtime for above reasons but its nonetheless nice to see the perfunctory treated so perfunctorily).
It decentres the ultra-white saviour protagonist it’s stuck with (not dissing Brie Larson) as much as possible with two other Marvels of colour (Kamala Khan and family way more important this month than Nia DaCosta et al could have imagined).
Quietly and unspectacularly, it has a cast of colour with I think just two even remotely significant speaking roles for white actors (one buried under alien makeup).
It almost makes up for having to lose Cap’s dyke haircut by giving her a moment with Valkyrie (but for god’s sake, Feige, just let them come out).
Admits ‘humanitarian intervention’ was colonial crime.
Replaces Hawkeye.
Double Dutch skipping as utopian joy.
A surfeit of kittens my partner knew nothing about in advance (and which she claims was also a sequence of utopian joy).
On the downside:
It resolves the colonial crime through a further ‘humanitarian intervention’ cos whitey knows best.
Ongoing deterioration of effects work.
Inevitable opening of a multiverse breach to let yet more IP in (really wish they’d recast the voice actor).
Mark Bould 