My top 28 films of 2024

This year I have seen 416 films, 257 of them for the first time, and of those 257 these are my top 28, in roughly this order:

Comrades (Bill Douglas 1986)
Wanda (Barbara Loden 1970)
Yukinojô henge/An Actor’s Revenge (Kon Ichikawa 1963)
Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Jeff Barnaby 2013)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer 2023)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat 2024)
Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby 2019)
The Circus (Charles Chaplin 1928)
El Bruto/The Brute (Luis Buñuel 1953)
Joy Ride (Adele Lim 2023)
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik 2022)
Jui kuen/Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-Ping 1978)
Manbiki Kazoku/Shoplifters ((Hirokazu Kore-eda 2018)
Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (Nariman Massoumi 2023)
Shao Lin da peng da shi/Return to the 36th Chamber (Chia-Liang Liu 1980)
Street Scene (King Vidor 1931)
Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann 1992)
Sandome no satsujin/The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda 2017)
Tai gik Cheung Sam Fung/Tai Chi Master (Woo-Ping Yuen 1993)
Biruma no tategoto/The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa 1956)
Umi yori mo mada fukaku/After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda 2016)
Llévame en tus Brazo (Julio Bracho 1954)
Bastarden/The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel 2023)
Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby 1976)
Eshtebak/Clash (Mohamed Diab 2016)
The Garment Jungle (Vincent Sherman and Robert Aldrich 1957)
Unrueh/Unrest (Cyril Schäublin 2022)
Coming Home (Hal Ashby 1978)

Should anyone care, here is the full list of titles:

3-4 x jûgatsu/Boiling Point (Takeshi Kitano 1990)
5 Against the House (Phil Karlson 1955)
7 jin gong/Wonder Seven (Siu-Tung Ching 1994)
1990: I guerrieri del Bronx/1990: Bronx Warriors (Enzo G Castellari 1982)
2019: Dopo la caduta di New York/2019: After the Fall of New York (Sergio Martino 1983)

Against All Flags (George Sherman 1952)
Ak Kam/The Stunt Woman (Ann Hui 1996)
Akô-jô danzetsu/The Fall of Ako Castle (Kinji Fukasaku 1978)
Alien: Romulus (Fede Alvarez 2024)
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh 2023)
The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer 1960)
À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma/At Midnight I will Take Your Soul (José Mojica Marins 1964)
An American Werewolf in London (John Landis 1981)
Anatomie d’un chute/Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet 2023)
The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett 1999)
Another Day in Buenoseres (Cameron Medford-Hawkins and Benjamin Scrase 2023)
Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020)
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (James Wan 2023)
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig 2023)
Arson, Inc. (William Berke 1949)
The Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty 1982)
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan Juran 1958)
Aventurera/The Adventuress (Alberto Gout 1950)
The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey 1937)

Baby It’s You (John Sayles 1983)
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah 2024)
Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks 1941)
El barón del terror/The Brainiac (Chano Urueta 1962)
Bastarden/The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel 2023)
Ba wong fa/The Inspector Wears Skirts (Wellson Chin 1988)
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié 1953)
The Beekeeper (David Ayer 2024)
Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999)
The Big Country (William Wyler 1958)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang 1953)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2014)
Biruma no tategoto/The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa 1956)
Black Friday (Arthur Lubin 1940)
Black Jack (Ken Loach 1979)
Blackmail Alfred Hitchcock 1929)
Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz 2024)
Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby 2019)
Blue Beetle (Angel Manuel Soto 2023)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch 1986)
Bodigâdo Kiba/The Bodyguard (Ryûichi Takamori 1973)
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Kathryn Ferguson 2024)
Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden 1983)
Bottle Shock (Randall Miller 2008)
Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby 1976)
Boxcar Bertha (Martin Scorsese 1972)
Boyhood (Richard Linklater 2014)
Brian and Charles (Jim Archer 2022)
Broken Arrow (John Woo 1996)
The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles 1984)
El Bruto/The Brute (Luis Buñuel 1953)

Cadaveri eccelenti/Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi 1976)
Capricorn One (Peter Hyams 1977)
Carita de Cielo (José Díaz Morales 1947)
Carnosaur (Adam Simon and Darren Patrick Moloney 1993)
Casa de los Babys (John Sayles 2003)
Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock 1928)
Christmas in July (Preston Sturges 1940)
Cinerama Adventure (David Strohmaier 2002)
El cine soy yo (Luis Armando Roche 1977)
Circle of Danger (Jacques Tourneur 1951)
The Circus (Charles Chaplin 1928)
City Girl (FW Murnau 1930)
City of Hope (John Sayles 1991)
The City of the Dead (John Llewllyn Moxey 1960)
Civil War (Alex Garland 2024)
Cocoon (Ron Howard 1985)
Cocoon: The Return (Daniel Petrie 1988)
Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch 2003)
The Colony (Jeff Barnaby 2007)
Coming Home (Hal Ashby 1978)
Comrades (Bill Douglas 1986)
Cops (Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton 1922)
The Creator (Gareth Edwards 2023)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold 1954)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold 1954)
The Creature Walks Among Us (John Sherwood 1956)

Danger: Diabolik (Mario Bava 1968)
Dark Passage (Delmer Daves 1947)
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch 1995)
Deadpool (Tim Miller 2016)
Deadpool 2 (David Leitch 2018)
Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy 2024)
Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce 2015)
Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis 1992)
Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin 1999)
Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman 1985)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer 1945)
Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry 1970)
Die Hard  (John McTiernan 1988)
Dolls (Stuart Gordon 1986)
Domino (Tony Scott 2005)
Don’t Fuck with Dolphins (Nick Hearne 2024)
Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde 2022)
Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch 1986)
Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock 1927)
Drive-Away Dolls (Ethan Coen 2024)
The Drop (Michaël R. Roskam 2014)
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve 2024)
Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam/The Man Who Saved the World (Çetin Ínanç 1982)

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper 1969)
Eight Men Out (John Sayles 1988)
The Elephant Man (David Lynch 1980)
Eraserhead (David Lynch 1977)
Eshtebak/Clash (Mohamed Diab 2016)
Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down) (Jeff Barnaby 2015)

The Fall Guy (David Leitch 2024)
The Fantastic Four (Oley Sassone 1994)
Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Vinterberg 2015)
The Farmer’s Wife (Alfred Hitchcock 1928)
Feng hou/Mad Monkey Kung Fu (Chia-Liang Liu 1979)
File Under Miscellaneous (Jeff Barnaby 2010)
Fingerprints Don’t Lie (Sam Newfield 1951)
Fisshu sutôrî/Fish Story (Yoshihiro Nakamura 2009)
The Flash (Andy Muschietti 2023)
Flash Gordon (Frederick Stephani 1936)
Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges 1980)
Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges 1980)
The Florida Project (Sean Baker 2017)
Fong Sai-Yuk/The Legend (Corey Yuen 1993)
Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock 1940)
Frankenstein: The True Story (Jack Smight 1973)
Frankenstein Unbound (Roger Corman 1990)
From Cherry English (Jeff Barnaby 2004)
Fuga dal Bronx/Escape from the Bronx (Enzo G Castellari 1983)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller 2024)

Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn 1973)
The Garment Jungle (Vincent Sherman and Robert Aldrich 1957)
Gerry (Gus Van Sant 2002)
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Gil Kenan 2024)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch 1999)
Gilda (Charles Vidor 1946)
Girl in the Headlines (Michael Truman 1963)
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Adam Wingard 2023)
Gojira – 1.0/Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023)
Gojira – 1.0/Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki 2023)
Golok Setan/The Devil’s Sword (Ratno Timoer 1984)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson 2014)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson 2022)
Guangdong shi hu xing yi wu xi/Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Cheh Chang 1980)
Gunpowder (Norman J. Warren 1986)
Gwok chaan Ling Ling Chat/From Beijing with Love (Lik-Chi Lee and Stephen Chow 1994)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh 2008)
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen 1922)
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann 1952)
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino 1953)
The Hitman and the Assassin (Will Axtel 2023)
Holiday (George Cukor 1938)
Un homme et une femme/A Man and  a Woman (Claude Lelouch 1966)
The Hounds of Annwn (Bryony Evans and Beth Hughes 2023)
How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and Richard Thorpe 1962)
How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker 2023)
Huang jia shi jie/Yes, Madam! aka Police Assassins (Corey Yuen 1985)
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik 2022)
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik 2022)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence 2013)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (Francis Lawrence 2014)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Francis Lawrence 2015)

I’ll Get You (Seymour Friedman and Peter Graham Scott 1952)
I Married a Witch (René Clair 1942)
The Incredible Petrified World (Jerry Warren 1959)
Incubo sulla città contaminato/Nightmare City (Umberto Lenzi 1980)
In the Soup (Alexandre Rockwell 1992)
L’invenzione di Morel/The Invention of Morel (Emido Greco 1974)
The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer 1935)
The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin 2023)
I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun 2024)

Jane Eyre (Cary Joji Fukunaga 2011)
Jason X (James Isaac 2001)
Jennifer’s Body (Kaaryn Kusama 2009)
Jin bi tong/Kid with the Golden Arm (Cheh Chang 1979)
Joy Ride (Adele Lim 2023)
Jui kuen/Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-Ping 1978)
Juno and the Paycock (Alfred Hitchcock 1929)
Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton 2019)

Kaette kita onna hissatsu ken/Return of the Sister Street Fighter (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi 1975)
Kaibutsu/Monster (Hirokazu Koreeda 2023)
Kanashimi no Beradonna/Belladonn of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto 1973)
Key Largo (John Huston 1948)
Killer Klowns from Outer Space (Stephen Chiodo 1988)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese 2023)
Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka/The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki 2023)
Kin-dza-dza! (Georgiy Daneliya 1986)
Kin-dza-dza! (Georgiy Daneliya 1986)
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933)
King of Thieves (James Marsh 2018)
Kozure Ôkami: Ko wo kashi ude kashi tsukamatsuru/Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi 1972)

Lady Godiva of Coventry (Arthur Lubin 1955)
The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock 1938)
The Last Detail (Hal Ashby 1973)
Late Night with the Devil (Cameron and Colin Cairnes 2023)
Lat sau san taam/Hard Boiled (John Woo 1992)
Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (Shane Meadows 2009)
LEGO Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite (Jon Burton 2013)
Lianna (John Sayles 1983)
Limbo (John Sayles 1999)
Llévame en tus Brazo (Julio Bracho 1954)
Loan Shark (Seymour Friedman 1952)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock 1927)
Lone Star (John Sayles 1996)
Lone Star (John Sayles 1996)
Lost in the Sky (Simon Öster 2023)
The Lost World (Irwin Allen 1960)
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass 2024)
Luca (Enrico Casarosa 2021)

Machibuse/Ambush at Blood Pass (Hiroshi Inagaki 1970)
Madame Web (SJ Clarkson 2024)
Mai ming xiao zi/The Magnificent Ruffians (Cheh Chang 1979)
La maldición de la Llorona/The Curse of the Crying Woman (Rafael Baledón 1963)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941)
Manbiki Kazoku/Shoplifters ((Hirokazu Kore-eda 2018)
Mandy (Panos Cosmatos 2018)
The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard-Smith 1975)
Mannequins für Rio/They Were So Young (Kurt Neumann 1954)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock 1934)
The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock 1929)
Marie Antionette (Sofia Coppola 2006)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh 1994)
Matewan (John Sayles 1987)
MaXXXine (Ti West 2024)
Meek’s Cut-Off (Kelly Reichardt 2010)
Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer 1930)
Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer 1930)
Men with Guns (John Sayles 1997)
Midnight Run (Martin Brest 1988)
Mo him wong/Dr Wai in the Scripture with No Words (Siu-Tung Ching 1996)
Mondocane/Dogworld (Allesandro Celli 2021)
Monkey Man (Dev Patel 2024)
Monstrosity (Joseph V. Mascelli and Jack Pollexfen 1963)
Moon of the Wolf (Daniel Petrie 1972)
Las mujeras panteras/The Panther Women (René Cardona 1967)
Multiple Maniacs (John Waters 1970)
Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock 1930)
My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin 1940)

Nan Shao Lin yu bei Shao Lin/Invincible Shaolin (Cheh Chang 1978)
Nekojiru-sô/Cat Soup (Tatsuo Satô and Masaaki Yuasa 2001)
Neptune Frost (Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman 2021)
Night and the City (Jules Dassin 1950)
The Nightcomers (Michael Winner 1971)
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (Ralph Thomas 1979)
Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch 1991)
No Trees in the Street (J. Lee Thompson 1959)
Nou fo/Raging Fire (Benny Chan 2021)
Nowhere to Go (Seth Holt and Basil Dearden 1958)
Number Seventeen (Alfred Hitchcock 1932)
I nuovi barbari/The New Barbarians aka Warriors of the Wasteland Enzo G Castellari 1983)
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore 1988)

The Old Oak (Ken Loach 2023)
Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (Shane Meadows 2002)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman 1975)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt 1969)
Onna hissatsu ken: Kiki ippatsu/Sister Street Fighter: Hanging by a Thread (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi 1974)
Onna hissatsu godan ken/Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist (Shigehira Ozawa 1976)
Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed 1959)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)
Outland (Peter Hyams 1981)

Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood 1985)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula 1974)
Passion Fish (John Sayles 1992)
Past Lives (Celine Song 2023)
The Phantom (Simon Wincer 1996)
The Phantom of the Opera (Dwight H. Little 1989)
Pi li shi jie/Disciples of the 36th Chamber (Chia-Liang Liu 1985)
Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon 1959)
The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli 1948)
Plane (Jean-François Richet 2023)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (Edward D. Wood Jr 1957)
Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg 2021)
The Pleasure Garden (Alfred Hitchcock 1925)
Point Blank (John Boorman 1968)
Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991)
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos 2023)
Il Postino (Michael Radford and Massimo Troisi 1994)
Pote tin Kyriaki/Never on Sunday (Jules Dassin 1960)
Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (Nariman Massoumi 2023)
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion 2021)
Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright 2005)
Primal (Nick Powell 2019)
The Punisher (Jonathan Hensleigh 2004)
Punisher: War Zone (Lexi Alexander 2008)
Puromea/Promare (Hiroyuki Imaishi 2019)

Q – The Winged Serpent (Larry Cohen 1982)
Queen of the Amazons (Edward Finney 1946)
A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski 2024)

Radio On (Chris Petit 1979)
Ralph Breaks the Internet (Phil Johnston and Rich Moore 2018)
The Rare Breed (Andrew V. McLaglen 1966)
Rats – Notte di terrore/Rats: Night of Terror (Bruno Mattei and Claudiio Fragasso 1984)
Raumpatrouille Orion – Rücksturz ins Kino (Theo Metzger and Micahel Braun 1968/2003)
Red One (Jake Kasdan 2024)
Regan (Tom Clegg 1974)
Relatos salvajes/Wild Tales (Damián Szifron 2014)
Retfærdighedens ryttere/Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen 2020)
Return of the Secaucus Seven (John Sayles 1980)
Revenge of the Creature (Jack Arnold 1955)
Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Jeff Barnaby 2013)
Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock 1931)
The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman 1983)
The Ring (Alfred Hitchcock 1927)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks 1959)
Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger 2023)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman 1975)

Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow 2012)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville 1967)
Sandome no satsujin/The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda 2017)
Santo contre los jinetes del terror/Santo vs. The Riders of Terror (René Cardona 1970)
Sasquatch Sunset (David and Nathan Zellner 2024)
Saw X (Kevin Greutert 2023)
Scrapper (Charlotte Regan 2023)
The Searchers (John Ford 1956)
The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles 1994)
The Set-Up (Robert Wise 1949)
Shadow Man (Richard Vernon 1953)
Shao Lin da peng da shi/Return to the 36th Chamber (Chia-Liang Liu 1980)
Shao Lin san shi liu fang/The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu 1978)
Sharpe’s Sword (Tom Clegg 1995)
Sharpe’s Regiment (Tom Clegg 1996)
Sharpe’s Siege (Tom Clegg 1996)
Sharpe’s Mission (Tom Clegg 1996)
Sharpe’s Revenge (Tom Clegg 1997)
Sharpe’s Justice (Tom Clegg 1997)
Sharpe’s Waterloo (Tom Clegg 1997)
She (Avi Nesher 1984)
She Gods of Shark Reef (Roger Corman 1958)
Shin Zatôichi: Yabure! Tôjin-ken/Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1971)
Shin Zatôichi monogatari: Oreta tsue/Zatoichi in Desperation (Shintarô Katsu 1972)
Shin Zatôichi monogatari: Kasama no chimatsuri/Zatoichi’s Conspiracy (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1973)
Shoot to Kill (William Berke 1947)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940)
Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995)
Shuang ma lian huan/The Mystery of Chess Boxing (Joseph Kuo 1979)
Silver City (John Sayles 2004)
Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen 1952)
The Skeleton Twins (Craig Johnson 2014)
The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcok 1931)
Sleepaway Camp (Robert Holtzik 1983)
Somers Town (Shane Meadows 2008)
Sono otoko, kyôbô nit suki/Violent Cop (Takeshi Kitano 1989)
The Sound of Music (Robert Wise 1965)
Source Code (Duncan Jones 2011)
Spark of Being (Bill Morrison 2010)
Speed (Jan de Bont 1994)
Stargate (Roland Emmerich 1994)
Star Wars (George Lucas 1977)
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner 1980)
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand 1983)
Step Up (Anne Fletcher 2006)
Street Scene (King Vidor 1931)
Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann 1992)
Strike: An Uncivil War (Daniel Gordon 2024)
The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman 1970)
Studio 666 (BJ McDonnell 2022)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat 2024)
Suffragette (Sarah Gavron 2015)
Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder 1950)
Sunshine State (John Sayles 2002)

Tai gik Cheung Sam Fung/Tai Chi Master (Woo-Ping Yuen 1993)
Talk to Me (Danny and Michael Philippou 2022)
También la Lluvia/Even the Rain (Icíar Bollaín 2010)
Tang shan wu hu/Five Superfigthers (Mar Lo 1975)
Tenet (Christopher Nolan 2020)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974)
Thank You For Smoking (Jason Reitman 2005)
Three Baths (Rafael De Leon Jr 2023)
Timecop (Peter Hyams 1994)
Timestalker (Alice Lowe 2024)
Tin lung baat bou/Sakra (Donnie Yen and Ka-Wai Kam 2023)
To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch 1942)
To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks 1944)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan 1962)
To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin 1985)
Ein Toter hing in Netz/Horrors of Spider Island (Fritz Böttger 1960)
The Toxic Avenger (Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman 1984)
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (Steven Caple Jr 2023)
Les trois mousquetaires: Milady/The Three Musketeers: Milady (Martin Bourboulon 2023)
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Eli Craig 2010)
Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung 2024)

Uchu kara no messeji/Message from Space (Kinji Fukasaku 1978)
Umi yori mo mada fukaku/After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda 2016)
Unrueh/Unrest (Cyril Schäublin 2022)

Victimas del Pecado/Victims of Sin (Emilio Fernández 1951)
Video Days (Spike Jonze 1991)
Virus: L’inferno dei morti viventi/Zombie Creeping Flesh (Bruno Mattei 1980)
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (Pavel Klushantsev and Curtis Harrington 1965)

Wanda (Barbara Loden 1970)
The Wasp Woman (Roger Corman 1959)
The Weak and the Wicked (J. Lee Thompson 1954)
Werckmeister harmóniák/Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr 2000)
The Westerner (William Wyler 1940)
Wicked Little Letters (Thea Sharrock 2023)
The Wild Party (Dorothy Arzner 1929)
The Woman in Question (Anthony Asquith 1950)
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Kier-La Janisse 2021)
Working Girls (Lizzie Borden 1986)

Yod ai jian wang/The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (Joseph Kuo 1968)
You and Me (Fritz Lang 1938)
Yukinojô henge/An Actor’s Revenge (Kon Ichikawa 1963)

Zatôichi tekka-tabi/Zatoichi’s Cane Sword (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1966)
Zatôichi umi o wataru/Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage (Kazuo Ikehiro 1966)
Zatôichi rôyaburi/Zatoichi the Outlaw (Satsuo Yamamoto 1967)
Zatôichi chikemuri kaidô/Zatoichi Challenged (Kenji Misumi 1967)
Zatôichi hatashi-jô/Zatoichi and the Fugitives (Kimiyoshi Yasuda 1968)
Zatôichi kenka-daiko/Samaritan Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi 1968)
Zatôichi to yôjinbô/Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (Kihachi Okamoto 1970)
Zatôichi abare-himatsuri/Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival (Kenji Misumi 1970)
Zatôichi goyô-tabi/Zatoichi at Large (Kazuo Mori 1972)
Zhang bei/My Young Auntie (Chia-liang Liu 1981)
Zimna wojna/Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski 2018)
Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters (Lucio Fulci 1979)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer 2023)

David Gaffney, Out of the Dark (2022)

Thanks to a mutual friend (also called David), David Gaffney sent me a copy of his new novel about a traumatised man obsessed with an obscure British film noir.

Set primarily in the Midlands of the 1980s, Out of the Dark falls somewhere in the terrain triangulated by Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971), Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006).

It is also under the influence of JG Ballard. But its motorways are not London’s near-future-but-never-happened orbitals, nor are its high-rises desublimating enclaves of bourgeois acquisitiveness and hierarchical obsession. Rather, it all takes place in actually-existing concrete landscapes of marginalisation, disconnection and dereliction –  ‘neither in Walsall nor West Bromwich’ and thus ‘equally inconvenient’ in all directions. And it is rather more grungily quotidian and irreal-adjacent than anything in Ballard – closer, perhaps, to M. John Harrison or Ramsey Campbell.

And while the story it tells is full of twists and turns, genre-playfulness and sharp observations – as is the story within the story – what I loved most about Out of the Dark is something much more personal. I was born in Staffordshire, in a small-now-swallowed-in-the-conurbation Staffordshire village, but all my family were from Birmingham, from the Perry Barr/Perry Beeches parts of Great Barr, with outliers in Handsworth and West Bromwich; and behind my paternal grandparents mid-terrace two-up/two-down (with an outside loo), on the far side of the allotments onto which the garden backed, was an aerial stretch of the M6. And although we moved down to Devon when I was four years old, there is something ineffable about the litany of place names threaded through the novel: in chapter five alone, Perry Barr, Great Barr, Sarehole Mill, Kings Heath, Cotteridge, the impossibly distant Worcester, Bourneville, Harborne, Dudley Road, Perry Barr Island, Aston Lane, Swan Island, Billesley, Walsall…

And if this is nostalgia, it is not inappropriate for a novel enamoured of noir – especially when, for me, it is so oneiric and bittersweet.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer 1982)

…and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer 1982) is the way in which Kirk passes the real Kobayashi Maru test when he is backed into a no-win situation by his two best (i.e., only) friends, barely able to suppress their rivalry for his affection, competing with each other to present him with the bestest of best birthday gifts, with Bones giving him reading glasses and Spock giving him the most monumental edition of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities ever printed (more disproportionate even than the Neo’s humungous copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation), so massive in fact that it must be the largest of large-print editions ever printed, and he serenely navigates these tides of desire by changing the conditions of the test and reading it with his reading glasses on…

The typical Polish home

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One of the legacies of the Communist era is that every Polish home is guarded by a robot –  with lethal capabilities and firefighting equipment. Although many Poles feared they were installed as surveillance devices, this was pretty much beyond the technical capacities of the time.

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The most such experimental models could do was phone the Esbecja on themselves, and not very surreptitiously at that.

While the guardian robots are now often regarded with nostalgia, there are other holdovers from the Communist era which are not cherished, such as the still rigorously enforced ban on ice cream

and, if your home is considered too large for the number of residents, the ban on using the upper floors.

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Another feature of homes build under Communism is the circular inner chamber in which to isolate punk rockers and other troublemakers.

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Culturally, the Polish people are divided pretty evenly between fans of L. Frank Baum and fans of CS Lewis, and they often decorate their entranceways so as to affirm their allegiance to one or the other.

The Polish are a relaxed people and their homes are always full of flowers.

The Polish people honour the memory of the ancient hero, Jan Skrzetuski, famous for leading an army of elephants across the Carpathians to defend his homeland. There is a  shrine to him in every home. Typically, this takes the form of his three favourite pachyderms, reproduced in varieties of modernist glassware.

The current right-wing Polish government has adopted a number of controversial measures to maintain its support in working class communities. These include encouraging a population increase and pushing women back into more traditional roles by paying parents a substantial sum for every child that is born. Thus it is not uncommon nowadays to find in bathroom cabinets supplies of powdered semen.

Especially valued – and commanding huge prices on the black market – is the desiccated spermatazoa of renowned philanderers.

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There is a far more sinister side to this recent upheaval in Polish life, though.

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The trade in pulverised infants. Just add water.

 

Brick Mansions (Camille Delamarre 2014)

MV5BOTI0ODQ2MzY5NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTcxNzQxMTE@._V1_SX640_SY720_and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Brick Mansions (2014) is not that it has a piece of good old-fashioned Jean-Claude Van Damme-style hasty exposition about the origins of Lino to explain why someone with a French accent lives in a Detroit ghetto (and then dubs David Belle badly anyway), nor that a film so vastly inferior to its source, Banlieue 13 (2004), has the audacity to insist that ‘different methods can produce the same result’, but that it helped answer a question posed by the old episode of Orange is the New Black I saw just before it – yes, it is actually possible for something to be more depressing than a Tori Amos tribute band…

RoboCop (José Padilha 2014)

robocop_ver3and so anyway it turns out the best thing about RoboCop (2014) is not its astonishing commitment to the lipogrammatic principles of the Oulipo group, going far beyond Georges Perec, for example, who wrote the 300-page novel La Disparition (1969) without using the letter ‘e’, in order to gather together the few surviving remains of a franchise blown apart by lame film sequels, not to mention insipid live-action and animated television incarnations, and from them to build a whole new 117-minute film without using the letters ‘wit’, ‘intelligence’ or ‘decent action choreography’; no, the very best thing is that in the tagline at the top of the poster, very first word, they spelt ‘cinema’ wrong…

Bait (Kimble Rendall 2012)

bait-3d_heroand so anyway it turns out the best thing about Bait (2012) –  the film in which a bunch of young Aussies, most of whom, according to a half-assed imdb search, seem to be stuntmen from Neighbours (!), and that bloke who used to be in Charmed (not the pudding-faced one, the other one) get stranded in a flooded post-tsunami supermarket along with a couple of great white sharks – is the sequence in which one of the kids constructs a shark cage cum body armour out of shopping trolleys and baskets so he can make his way underwater to do something or other (to be honest, I’d stopped paying attention and couldn’t be bothered to rewind it) only to find that his makeshift airtube is too short and he must spit it out in order to reach that little bit further and do that thing, whatever it was, only to then find, when he swims to the surface to breathe in the gap between the water and the ceiling, that the shopping basket over his head is too big and so he drowns, which the film tries to make noble and tragic, and to be honest you would need a heart of stone not to wet yourself laughing….

The Mad Maxathon, part three: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

MV5BMTk0MDQ5NTYxNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTA0ODYyMQ@@._V1_SX640_SY720_Part one, part two, part four

This is the one that broke the franchise.

It is the one with the audacity to have a character claim, early on, that ‘We’re dealing with subtlety here’. And the bravery, moments later, to let Aunty (Tina Turner) ask, ‘You can shovel shit, can’t you?’

It is the one featuring the Goonies outback adventure. It is Max Rockatansky’s Kindergarten Cop. His Mr Nanny, his Pacifier, his Game Plan. It is Dad Max.

It is the one that makes Waterworld look not so very terrible after all.

It is a poxalypse, full of pain.

It begins with a drum-machine, for chrissakes.

It is full of other terrible 80s things, such as a shockingly ill-judged Maurice Jarre soundtrack and a dreadful saxophone that, for a moment, fills you with dread MPW-65247that Aunty will be played not by Tina Turner – whose chainmail shoulderpads are even more awesome now than they were thirty years ago – but by Al Jarreau.

Beyond Thunderdome lays bare the insidious effects of LucasSpielbergianism.

Costing five times as much as the first two films added together, it made rather less than them added together. But a bigger budget meant a drop in the certificate. Which meant replacing innovation with competence. Which meant abandoning crude, robust, imaginative and often very skilful filmmaking in order to imitate the less-than-stellar Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Badly.

It nicks sequences and gags and ideas from HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Island of Lost Souls (1932), from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) but sadly not from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), from episodes six and seven of Flash Gordon (1936) and episode one of Bret Maverick (1981), from Star Wars (1977) and Apocalypse Now (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Mad Max and a whole bunch of westerns. Badly.

mad-max-beyond-thunderdome-train-chaseIt reworks the climactic chase from Road Warrior.

Badly.

As if Health and Safety finally caught onto some of the crazy shit George Miller was doing.

It is like some Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) knock off.

While Tina Turner is fabulous as the same-sex-yet-somehow-cross-dressing Aunty, it is disappointing to see the queerness of this future has been muted in the fifteen years since the events of Road Warrior. (I have no idea how the scantily-clad musclemen cranking Bartertown’s elevator managed to sneak unnoticed through the straightening of the post-apocalypse, but I’m glad they made it and are thriving.)

Although there are plenty of stereotypical signifiers of non-white ethnicities – Max’s burnoose and camels, the didgeridoos on the soundtrack early on, Maurice Jarre’s delusion that he is scoring Taras Bulba (1962), the plane-crash-surviving kids’ version of Aboriginal art and make-up – it remains a fairly pallid future in which whitey has learned almost nothing from these cultures about practical fashions for desert environments. One can only assume that Bartertown is built in a quarry (some of the time) because they are mining for sunblock. And talc. And, of course, vaseline.

MCDMAMA EC038When the movie came out, Roger Ebert, who loved it, raved about the Thunderdome fight sequence, calling it ‘the first really original movie idea about how to stage a fight since we got the first karate movies’ and ‘one of the great creative action scenes in the movies’. It was never that good and doesn’t really hold up that well. But it can be made fabulous by taking the time to set up a second screen so you can synch it to the Peter Pan scene from 21 Jump Street (2012).

Much was also made of the alternative Riddley Walker-lite English spoken by the kids who grew up in isolation without any adults around. This linguistic drift, which has none of the post-apocalyptic horror of the final minutes of Threads (1984) either, would have perhaps seem more innovative if a few minutes earlier it hadn’t been revealed that in Bartertown the meaning of the word ‘gulag’ had shifted to mean ‘to be driven into the desert to die while sitting backwards on a horse with a giant papier-mache head on your head’.

So, besides Tina Turner, is there anything good about Beyond Thunderdome?

Well, it provides an opportunity to admire some of the early work by Terese Willis from Neighbours, formerly Sophie Simpson from Home and Away.

It was nice to see Bruce Payne return, playing a character indistinguishable from the one he played in Road Warrior but definitely intended by Miller to be a different character, which doesn’t quite explain how Max recognises him, unless it is a version of that joke in the A-Team title sequence when Face recognises a Cylon.

And it was nice to see the sarlacc pit get work again, even if it never did manage to break free of the way it was typecast by Return of the Jedi

Oh, and the first thing the kids do after rescuing Max is cut off his mullet. Which at least puts it ahead of Steel Dawn (1987), at the conclusion of which Patrick Swayze is permitted to stride off into the sunset, mane uncropped.

Part four

Big Ass Spider! (Mike Mendez 2013)

MV5BMTk4OTU3NzY0MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDU5MTgwOQ@@._V1_SX640_SY720_and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Big Ass Spider! is not, as you might assume, its title, which, like Eight Legged Freaks (2002), no film could possibly live up to, nor is it the pleasure of seeing Lombardo Boyar, playing the offensively-written comedy ethnic sidekick, steal every scene he is in, because sadly that is not really much of an accomplishment, nor is it the unexpected Lloyd Kaufman cameo, no, the very best thing about Big Ass Spider! is that they seem to have brought it in on time and budget, more or less, I guess…

The Mad Maxathon, part two: The Road Warrior (1981) mostly

M-0005_Mad_Max_2_The_Road_Warrior_one_sheet_movie_poster_lPart one, part three, part four

Road Warrior might be punk’s Sistine chapel, but it is not without problems.

To be punk at all it has to have problems.

Many of them come from its dependence on colonial adventure narratives, particularly Westerns. There is an enclave of ‘white’ civilisation in the wilderness – a fortress, circled wagons – surrounded by aggressive and highly mobile ‘savages’, who are darker and more ‘tribal’ (some even sport Mohicans), and who rape and murder one of the ‘white’ women.

And as if this racial othering is not enough, many of them also dress as sexual dissidents.

To be honest, I am not sure whether it is because I have cherished this movie since adolescence that I tend to overlook these problems, or whether it is genuinely more complex than this reductive account suggests. Certainly such colonial imagery can be used in different ways. For example, when Starship Troopers (1997) uses the fort under siege scenario, it does so to parody imperialist military aggression. Unlike, say, Zulu (1964), in which post-imperial melancholy works hard to mythologise yet another shabby episode in the history of British imperialism. And unlike the final section of X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), in which Brett Ratner, once more putting the idiot into idiot savant, slanders San Francisco’s queer counterculture.

And Road Warrior does do some interesting things with its colonial set-up.

RoadWarrior_066PyxurzThree of the key ‘white’ people are so white as to become parodic, including their bleached blond leader Pappagallo (Mike Preston, who back in the late 50s recorded ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘Whispering Grass’, long before The Pogues and Windsor Davis/Don Estelle). This excess at least suggests a self-consciousness at work, and although it might not be very articulate, it is far more convincing than the post-hoc claims that the Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty (in that film from the following year about the police flying around over Los Angeles deciding who counts as human) is some kind of ‘ironic Aryan’. (The absence of any actual Aboriginal people helps deracinate the situation, I guess.)

MadMax_VernonWellsRelated to this is the transition from Mad Max’s Tom of Finland coppers to the accoutrements of sexual dissidence worn by the ‘natives’: the studded leather pants, wristbands and harness of The Humugus (Kjell Nilsson), and his Jason Voorhees take on an enclosure mask; the buttocks-flashing chaps of Wez (Vernon Wells) and the cutaway bondage gear of his bleached boytoy, etc, etc. However, I think this works a little differently to Toecutter’s stereotypically jealous (but, come to think of it, not really demonised) blond second-in-command in Mad Max.

it does not mean they are really fond of camping
it does not mean they are really fond of camping

Yes, the ‘natives’ are queer (except perhaps for the misleadingly credited ‘Tent Lovers’), but they are also charismatic and alive in a way the ‘white’ folks are not.

In Doomsday, the natives’ Glaswegian equivalents – and who would have thought that thirty years after the zombie apocalypse there would be quite so much pristine bondage gear stockpiled in Glasgow? – bear a very specific resonance, as evidenced by the music Sol (Craig Conway) plays to the crowd before they cook and eat Sean Pertwee. Adam and the Ants’ ‘Dog Eat Dog’, the Fine Young Cannibals ‘Good Thing’, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Spellbound’ and Areil Rechtshaid’s knock-off of Bad Manners’ ‘The Can-Can’ are all part of the anti-Thatcher eighties, and so it comes as no surprise that during the Road Warrior-like climactic chase, we get Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’. Displaced into the future, this is a culture of political and sexual dissidence being celebrated.

In Road Warrior, the celebration is perhaps less clear, but the film does not despise its ‘natives’. Miller, like Milton, is secretly of Satan’s camp.

And the opposition between the ‘civilisation’ and ‘natives’ is not as secure as one might think. Max lives in the wilderness and only crosses into ‘civilisation’ so he can leave again. The same is true of the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence). He eventually chooses to stay, but only as ‘civilisation’ begins its long trek through the wilderness. The Feral Kid (Emil Minty) is raised in ‘civilisation’ but looks like one of the ‘natives’, grunts and growls a lot and behaves like some kind of monkey-dog; his finger-slicing boomerang is as close as we get to Aboriginal culture. And of course the opening narration turns out to have been spoken by him in his old age, long after the events of the movie, when he has become the chief of the Great Northern Tribe – a rank and social structure that suggests some retreat from ‘civilisation’.

MCDROWA EC002The bondage gear also provides Humungus’s motivation for besieging the fortified refinery. Clearly, from the way his crew race around everywhere, they are not short of fuel. But in that dry hot sandy environment, leather and rubber are gonna get uncomfortable. They’re gonna chafe. So it is not gasoline Humungus is after. It is some other petroleum-based product. Like, I dunno, vaseline.

Mad Max’s key cinematic innovation was setting the racing cameras so close to the ground. Road Warrior added a couple more things to the language of contemporary cinema.

First, is the long final action sequence. Films did not used to do that, and now they do. Without Road Warrior, the runway during the climax of Fast and Furious 6­ (2013) – a runway so long you begin to suspect they are just gonna drive all the way to the destination airport – would have been a whole lot shorter and much less would have happened on it.

Second, is the radical electro-surgery George Miller performed on the muscles under Mel Gibson’s face, so that in this film it actually moves. Sadly, this experimental procedure was not entirely successful, dooming Gibson to decades of shit-eating glibness and peculiar gurning.

One time it even turned his face blue.