The original post: /r/movies by /u/abaganoush on 2025-01-02 23:47:43.
This is my fourth 'End of Year' recap. In January 2021, during the Covid lock-down, I began logging the many films that I watch every day, just to keep track. In the beginning I jotted a line or two about each, only to create a record. But then I started adding longer notes and more elaborate impressions, and before I knew it, I've got a 'Film Project' on my hands.
The obsessive project mushroomed. In the course of these four years, I watched and reviewed a total of 4,126 movies; 885 in 2021, 954 in 2022, 998 in 2023, and a ridiculous number of 1,289 movies this last year.
And it seems that I'm just getting started.
As I wrote before, I owe an apology to nobody for my indulgence. I derive great pleasure from discovering daily the best movies ever made, and I enjoy even more the process of thinking about them and coming up with my own specific takes, if I can. As an un-accomplished 'Creator', composing short reviews fills me with just the right amount of self-fulfillment. The fact that I am blessed with the physical and financial ability to enjoy this type of existence right now, at the end of my own life and while civilization collapses all around us, is not lost on me either.
The project, like the many others I created before it, is purely personal, and is a strict 'labor of love'. Watching a movie today is an individual experience [Except of one visit, I haven't been to a theater in many years], and maintaining a film tumblr (which hardly anybody visits), is done as a form of mental masturbation; I do it every day because I like it a lot, and because it doesn't hurt anybody. I described my background before, so there's no need to repeat it here.
So here are some generalities, with a dozen 'Best-Of' samples below.
I've made a concerted effort to watch more films helmed by women directors - 215 in all (but only 16% of the total). Next year I will increase that number.
I like good documentaries, and of the 1,289 movies, 170 were documentaries. However, most of them were not that great. Surprisingly, only 99 were repeat films that I had watched before – it felt as if the number would be higher. I also started watching many more short films (5 to 40 minutes), and I plan focusing even more on short films in the coming year.
As I'm moving away from Hollywood-type blockbuster fair, I saw 737 “Foreign” films (read: Not American) which were 57% of the total. Next year I will be sure to increase that ratio too. Here is the break-down by country:
From the UK (108)
From France (106)
From Canada (44)
From Japan (40)
From Denmark (25)
From "Czechoslovakia" (24)
From Germany (21)
From Sweden (20)
From Italy & "Russia" (18 each)
From Israel & Poland (17 each)
From Brazil (16)
From Australia, Iran & Ireland (13 each)
From Iceland, Korea & Spain (12 each)
From Hungary (11)
From Turkey (10)
The rest were films from China, Romania, The Netherlands, Argentina, India, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Finland, Latvia, Mexico, Chile, Croatia, Norway, Austria, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, Morocco, Palestine, Scotland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Nigeria, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Haiti, Lebanon, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Afghanistan, Armenia, Colombia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Jordan, Paraguay, Portugal, Senegal, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia and Wales. [But unlike 2023, no films in Babylonian this year...]
Many of these 1,293 movies were terrible. But only 23 of them I simply couldn't finish. They included: Otto Preminger's 'Exodus', Troma Studio's 'Poultrygeist', Polanski's 1970 'A day at the beach', The Japanese 'Patisserie Coin de rue', Bob Fosse 'All that Jazz', M. Night Shyamalan 'The happening', Gene Hackman's 'Heartbreakers', Elaine May 'A new leaf', Etc. Many of the others were boring, tedious, stupid. YMMV.
Next year I will also start keeping track of the genres, which I haven't done up to now. I may try new things, but there are some popular genres I generally stir away from: Superheros, horror, franchise, fantasy. There were six A.I.-generated films that I saw this year. I predict that in 2025 we'll experience the first 'good' A.I. features.
I wish I had signed up to Letterboxd at the start. It would have made sorting the list so much easier. But I've been dropping out of all social media (reddit and tumblr are the only ones still active), and I don't plan on starting on a new platform.
I only felt the urge to "rate" 40% of the movies that I saw (527), and of the ones that I did rate, there were 18 which I designated “Best”, and 78 to which I gave the 10/10 score. 'Best' for me usually meant that it offered a 'very' strong emotional reaction.
40 years ago I studied film at Copenhagen University, but it's only during these last few years that I've become pretty knowledgeable about the overall history of the cinema. It is therefore my favorite experience today to come across a movie I never even heard of, maybe from a different time and place, which knocks me completely over.
And so, here are a few of the less obvious gems which I enjoyed the most this year. Many more on the blog. Check them all out if you want.
- The films of Icelandic Hlynur Pálmason (all but 'Winter brothers'). My favorite was White, white day, a masterful feat of slow film making, with unusual choices in its subtle direction. A policeman grieves for his wife who died in a car accident. The man renovates a house, takes care of his cute granddaughter, and then, (like ‘The Descendants’), he discovers that before she died, his beloved wife had an affair with some guy. A stunning story of heartbreak, resignation and acceptance. The Trailer.
- Nuri Bilge Ceylan 8 films (I still haven't seen his 'Casaba' and 'Clouds of May'). My favorite of his: About Dry Grasses which plays for over 3 hours in the desolate, snow-covered mountains of Eastern Anatolia. Like Mads Mikkelsen in 'The Hunt’, a teacher in a small village is being falsely accused of improper behavior toward a 14-year-old girl. But the slow and meandering story embraces other themes as well, of longing, of truth seeking, of weariness, complacency and contempt. With a delusional, self centered man and the two females he misunderstands and maligns. It includes one shocking 'break the 4th wall’ moment (at 2:05:00) which illustrates that nothing we think and believe in is true. The trailer.
- A brand new life (2009), a heart-breaking Korean story, based on the director’s personal life. A sweet 9-year-old girl is abandoned by her father, who one day and without any warning drops her off at a Catholic orphanage in the countryside and leaves. Life is suddenly too painful for her. With the cutest little girl, who has to deal with life’s harshest lessons. A relatable debut feature, it uses the simplest and purest film language. It's similar to other tragic stories about innocence lost; Carla Simón’s ‘Summer 1993’, the French film 'Ponette’, and the Irish 'The Quiet Girl’ from last year, all with the same kind spirit and sad understatements. The trailer.
- The Last Repair Shop, winner of last year's Oscar for Best Documentary Short. A quiet story about a shop that maintains and repairs the 80,000 musical instruments used by students of the Los Angeles school district. It’s about mending broken things so they can be whole again, performed by people who were also broken, but are now whole. Similar to and even better than the 2017 Oscar nominee 'Joe’s Violin'.
- Ága, my first Bulgarian film, but it plays somewhere in Yakutsk, south of the Russian arctic circle. An isolated old Inuit couple lives alone in a yurt on the tundra. Slow and spiritual, their lives unfold in the most unobtrusive way, it feels like a documentary. But the simplicity is deceiving, this is film-making of the highest grade, and once Mahler 5th is introduced on a small transistor radio, it’s transcendental. The emptiness touched me deeply. (I should watch it again!). The trailer.
- Symphony No. 42 by Hungarian animator Réka Bucsi. It consists of 47 short & whimsical vignettes, without any rhyme or rhythm; A farmer fills a cow with milk until it overflows, a zoo elephant draws a “Help me” sign on a canvas, a UFO sucks all the fish from the ocean, wolves party hard to 'La Bamba’, an angry man throws a pie at a penguin, two cowboys holding blue balloons watch a tumbleweed rolls by, a big naked woman cuddle with a seal, etc. etc. Bucsi made it before Don Hertzfeldt’s 'World of tomorrow’ and even before 'Echo', my favorite Rúnar Rúnarsson’s. 10 perfect minutes of surrealist chaos.
- Shirkers, a 2018 documentary. Sandi Tan was an avant-garde teenage punker when she set out to make Singapore’s first New Wave road movie in 1992, together with 2 female friends and a middle aged mentor. But when the shooting was over, this 'mentor’ collected the 72 canisters of completed film as well as all supportive materials, and disappeared. For 20 years, Sandi and friends could not figure out what had happened, and eventually gave up on their groundbreaking w...
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