“They’re everywhere! Everywhere you turn!”

1. One of those astonishing-that-this-even-exists films: an overtly queer noir from 1961 that’s explicitly sympathetic to gay men and their plight, but also willing to portray them in their complex, messy glory.

2. I love the depiction of queers as belonging to a shady underworld simmering beneath the surface, with their own networks and codes — everywhere and nowhere.

3. Interestingly, this is almost a proto-serial killer thriller in a way, although the killer doesn’t do any direct murdering, but pushes the titular victims to death through blackmail.

4. Although absurdly chaste by today’s standards, I found this thrilling, horrifying and full of gag-worthy shocks and melodrama.

5. The ending is a dud, with its appeal to respectability politics, police authority and doing the right thing (follow the law at all costs!) but I was so impressed with the meat of the film that I’ll let it slide.

Ravishingly beautiful, terminally Italian. 4 stars.

Bizarrely, this riff on Fritz Lang’s M, replaces a grand sweeping narrative (featuring themes of extra-judicial justice and moral panic), with a kind of paranoid domestic thriller for children. It is astonishing and strange to see a sort of gaslight women’s picture where the abused female protagonist is swapped out for a pre-teen boy — a little tyke, chafing against the disciplining rod of the school-mistress, and the punishing fist of the father.

And it’s genuinely thrilling (and stressful) in the final act to see the boy at the heart of the story desperately try to communicate danger and be repeatedly disbelieved by authority figures in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who has watched Rebecca or similar domestic noirs.

Unfortunately while the film is handsome enough (its Argentinian-by-way-of-German expressionist look is sometimes lovely, and in the last act, quite scary), the repeated attempts to recast serial child-killing as a contemporary fairytale, felt unimaginative and forced to me. And the ultra-conservative ending that sees the police detective father swoop in and save the day, and the nuclear family reforged, feels both astonishingly stupid, and thematically incoherent considering the preceding hour has spent so much time depicting both the school and the home as sites of disciplinary abuse.

Need to know what the wig budget for this film was.

“Too gay, you think?” asks Claudette Colbert about her frilly new bonnet. Thus setting off a chain of events that ends in the Salem witch trials.

Colbert is iconically and hilariously miscast here as a simple, puritan maid. Her casting is the 1930s version of the contemporary phenomenon that sees actresses with lip filler star in period films: Claudette’s lustrous fake eyelashes, arched thin eyebrows, and exaggerated Cupid’s bow, make her look more like Betty Boop than Goody Proctor.

Kind of astonishing how freely the tone here careens from light, frothy romantic comedy about the absurdity of puritan life, to disturbing, deadly-serious condemnation of hysteria and persecution, with a relatively progressive (for the time) but crashingly didactic narrative thread about how noxious repression, resentment (and even bigotry) can be when they fester.

Bonkers ending though, that ties up the witch trials with a neat little bow so that Colbert can get her romantic happy ending. And Fred MacMurray is also doing a vile approximation of an Irish (?) accent throughout, so I'm not sure I can describe the film as good. But I had fun and I laughed!

Gina Gershon is the most versatile actress alive! The fact that she is so convincing as a butch! She is my Meryl Streep!

This is so fucking good I can’t believe I waited so long to watch it. The heightened, borderline cartoonish tone that magnifies every aspect from the lesbian stereotypes (butch leather-wearing plumber with lock-picking earring attachments) to the mafia hijinks (corny, gun-toting, Italianx histrionics), collapsing cinematic signifiers into each other from classic American noir to exploitation flicks, to erotic thrillers to gangster movies, in a cascading torrent of visual pleasure, garnished with flamboyant pre-Matrix camera theatrics…

Just superb in every sense.

Love the theme of queers as slippery, untrustworthy, criminal, beholden only to each other and not to the phoney, vile world of straights.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ah yes, the four genders: lover, liar, adulterer and thief.

*

Found this a bit of a slog at first. It takes so long to get going, but once the titular cat turns up, and the chaos begins, it’s a total delight. Loved the West Side Story as directed by Jacques Demy-esque “dance” sequences. The shots of the Czech countryside in the fantasy love sequence are so breathtaking I was googling flights straight after.

Almost 2 full hours of unfiltered juiciest-grade workplace gossip, presented in a series of stunning, jewel-box tableaux. What more could you ask for?

I’ve always avoided this because I rebuke the canon, and I’m allergic to film bro favs, and I’ve been busy building my own syllabus: cinema of the homosexual with taste.

But I can’t lie (and what’s more I won’t lie) and I think for long stretches this is sublime. It’s certainly a best case scenario for male directors who make self-mythologising, thinly-veiled autobiographical coming of age films: the director’s stand-in is mostly silent and almost entirely unseen as an adult. As he should be.

The middle section, however, that juxtaposes a military school scene with archive footage of major 20th century events, almost entirely lost me. And I think the film suffers majorly whenever Margarita Terekhova‘s two characters aren’t on-screen. Her scenes as Maria are especially brilliant and I’m genuinely surprised I’ve never seen any of my fellow actress gays talk about her as a deserving Oscar nominee.

But those first 45 minutes and last 15 minutes are insanely magical — a perfect distillation of everything that makes film distinct as an art form: lyrical visual poetry, an oneiric tone, ravishing lush visuals, followed by haunting, dread-inducing surrealism. Shadow and light, movement and stillness, memory and subjectivity, unimaginably strange beauty: a dream, captured forever.

Impressively moody, gloriously rain-speckled cinematography in service of the compelling story of a young woman’s search for justice in the face of catastrophic corruption.

Unfortunately I was regularly let down by other aspects of the film. The English subtitles on the version I watched were poorly translated, so maybe the dialogue is better than it seemed, but the plotting itself could have used a polish. I don’t normally go in for realism, and I prefer thematic resonance over logical coherence, so it takes a lot to have me noticing plot holes or clunky narrative contrivances as I did here. Also not a fan of the jarringly corny score, or the strange recuperative epilogue that deflates the thrilling scenes that precede it. The film does so much to undermine trust in institutions including the bumbling police, but it’s all undone in the epilogue.

Shame, because it really looks uniquely stunning for a large percentage of the runtime, and I was somewhat beguiled by the story of people who’ve been failed by traditional avenues of justice, pursuing a life in the margins.

An absurdist, sexually charged parody of Spanishness itself. All the icons, symbols and clichés of Spanishness that exist both in the international public imaginary, and simultaneously form the basis for national identity, are paraded in an erotic farce of heightened carnal ions, food-based sexual puns, multi-generational partner-swapping, jamón serrano-based murder and primal, bestial urges.

Opens with a shot of Javier Bardem’s enormous dick print in a pair of skimpy blue shorts, but unfortunately also features a shot of him putting a clove of garlic up a pig’s arse, so… impossible to say if it’s good or not.

Not enough gay kissing.

An-autumn-y of a Fall.

*

As an avowed Ozon-apologist I loved everything that was happening here. The gorgeous prestige-style footage of lush forest bathed in golden light, lovingly shot like a tourism advert for the French countryside, as a vehicle for the tacky, soapy, corny subject matter. I love to clap my hand to my mouth in shock and/or joy! I eat it up!

This is the front-runner for my annual award: The Madame Web Prize for Uncategorizable Camp Genius.

Every now and then I watch a classic boys’ movie, just to see what all the fuss is about. I didn’t hate this — Michael Mann sure knows how to place a camera — although it is resolutely Not For Me. Despite my sexual proclivities (I’m gay), I’m not particularly interested in repressed straight men engaging in homoerotic pissing contests, so I was never going to get on board. But this could have been a 5 star banger if Bob and Al started ionately making out in the final scene. Sadly, the woke mind virus hadn’t infected Hollyweird yet, so gay kissing was off the table.

Always fascinated by the wife and girlfriend roles in films like these. I would love a film about a police wife or mob wife who rolls her eyes whenever her man has to leave for some important homoerotic cat-and-mouse games, but secretly she’s relieved he’s gone so she can pull her own devious stunts.

I'm not hugely keen on spare, naturalistic, social realist films about disaffected young men, bumming around the city.

But this is basically a best case scenario because:

1) it's directed by genius Jia Zhangke and therefore uses the hook of alienated, directionless young men, fumbling aimlessly through an impoverished urban milieu, as an entry-point to address the ongoing political and social themes in his work, predominantly the globalisation and industrialisation of China, and the influence of pop culture and Western media on Chinese youth

2) it stars genius Zhao Tao in a femme fatale-style role, playing a local singer with a violent, shady boyfriend, who has links to small-time organised crime, and who inadvertently inducts a naive, lustful man into the world of violence and criminality. Zhao essentially gets to play the third main character, and eventually gets her own (small) character arc, so she's not just a symbol of unattainable lust and desire for the boys either.

This review may contain spoilers.

That ending feels like a cruel joke.

I’m aware that bisexuality exists (I’m not sure that the makers of this film are aware, but I certainly am) however the sense you get by the final scene is that Jessica was just a straight woman trying something out. Which… fine. But how dare you dangle a bi4bi, femme4femme lesbian happy ending in front of me and then snatch it away so that one of them can date Max Medina from Gilmore Girls. So mean.

I understand what Lee Chang-dong is trying to do here: to drum up sympathy and comion for disabled people by depicting their plight in gruesome, brutal, and unflinching detail. But by doing so, he falls into some ableist traps and tropes, and finds himself creating - whether intentionally or not - disability misery porn.

In order to depict our society (one in which disabled people are robbed of agency, personhood, and a literal and figurative voice), Lee has contrived a situation of utmost, grimmest misery. A carnival of anguish and pain. Most disabled people can probably relate to something depicted in this film, but Lee piles on every insult imaginable, to create a film so hopeless and depressing that it produces a dreadful, disheartening effect. I understand that Lee is trying to create a confronting, bracing portrait of the "reality" of ableism in order to induce tenderness... but (and call me an incurable optimistic here), I don't think it works.

For example, in order to depict that Gong-ju, a character with cerebral palsly, is capable of consenting to sex with her "boyfriend", he chooses to contrast her enthusiastic consent with a graphic depiction of her attempted rape by that same "boyfriend", who has broken into her home, early into the film. In order to depict her fantasies of able-bodiedness, he depicts her springing up from her wheelchair as if miraculously "cured" or "normal" (which shores up ableist narratives that disabled people are not normal and can or should be cured). The CGI doves, CGI butterflies, and magical South Asian people do not improve these fantasy sequences.

Yet again, for the millionth time, I find myself returning to Mark Fisher's concept of Capitalist Realism. I'm not necessarily opposed to films that depict the cold, harsh reality of life under capitalism, and are therefore uncomfortable or difficult to watch (I'm not as enamoured with them as I was in my teens and early 20s, but I'm not morally opposed to them either), but I can't help but wonder how much more interesting a film would be that dared to show us a world that doesn't exist - not in a fantasmagorical genre sense, but something frank, yet radical, that we've never seen in media before. For example, something as simple as a disabled couple who care for each other and create an oasis (geddit) of love and mutual care in a world of violent subjugation. But even when Lee flirts with this idea, he still chooses the pain and misery of "reality" every time. Images of disabled people being abused, disabled people being exploited, disabled people hurting and hurting others, disabled people unable to speak for themselves, disabled people being raped, kidnapped, beaten, imprisoned, neglected, and disabled people as incomplete, abnormal, and in constant, wrenching physical and psychological pain. It's not very imaginative and I don't think it's successful, either as art, or as political message.

Invented gaslighting. Queen of toxic positivity. Vive la !

It’s extremely rare that I enjoy a rom-com, so I’ve given this a higher score than it probably deserves. But there’s so much that is delightful in this deeply dated Marlene Dietrich vehicle.

Laughs abound, with camp bisexuals spreading toxic gossip, goofy prop gags, and gout-based humour. It doesn’t re-invent (or even invent) the wheel but I had fun!

If I’m being really generous, I think there’s an interesting thread here about how women are forced to bisect their personalities and create a crass, money-grabbing alter-ego/doppelgänger to pour their baser desires and impulses into, in order to conform to the unwritten laws of compulsory virtue, and comport themselves in a manner befitting a marriageable woman.

But this is mostly just delicious fluff.

I had a great time with this, but it is a total mess.

This is my first Douglas Sirk (I know, leave me alone, we all have blind spots!) and what a weird one to start with. I adore the pulpy, almost tacky quality Samuel Fuller brings with his script, but the film drives off a cliff halfway through and ends with a laughably pat button. The kind of "and it was all a big misunderstanding" ending that feels like a parody of bad Hollywood storytelling (if only it was satire).

Thematically, it seems like this may be hitting a rich vein, with overt allusions to the social construction of the criminal popping up early in the runtime, anchored by Patricia Knight's icy unrepentant murderess, caught between the sleazy man she loves, and the controlling, jealous parole officer determined to redeem her. But as soon as it becomes clear that she's not secretly pulling the strings and isn't a covert manipulatrix, but has actually been redeemed and become a blank, simpering saint, it's all over. The lovers-on-the-run material is moderately thrilling, and it is fun to see former goody-two-shoes Cornel Wilde fully inducted into the shady world of crime, but no one is taking the material seriously, and the ending makes it clear that this was a moral message movie all along -- any complexity was coincidental.

This is my Twin Peaks.

*

I’m being facetious. This only bears a superficial resemblance to Twin Peaks, in that it takes the form and tone of a highly stylised tragicomic pastiche of soap operas, which slowly becomes more surreal, disturbing and uncanny as the runtime unfolds.

In actuality, this reminded me more of Elia Suleiman‘s Divine Intervention, in that it comprises a series of interconnected, satirical, absurdist sketches with specific sociopolitical references. Unfortunately, although I know more about the recent history and politics of Chile than the average person living in the UK, and I have a rudimentary grasp of the Spanish language, a lot of this flew whizzing over my head.

Fortunately it didn’t matter because I was so bewitched by the gorgeous, funny and clever metatextual interplay of images.

Lee Chang-dong has never disappointed me, and although he does come perilously close once or twice in Green Fish, his debut film, I’m still blown away by his ceaseless ingenuity, his sensitivity to beauty, and his understanding of how to express social and political themes in creative and non-didactic ways.

So although I really didn’t respond to the (large) parts of this film that resemble a stereotypical gangster film, thrilling as they sometimes are (naive young man climbs through the ranks of organised crime, but at what cost to his humanity and morals?), I went crazy for the narrative thread about a disillusioned, but still idealistic young man, chewed up and spat out by the military apparatus, who is enticed into the dark and corrupting underworld of the city by a mysterious, abused woman he fantasises about rescuing.

Insane epilogue (complimentary and derogatory).

Akerman has an astonishing sense of the power of an image, and utilises shot composition to devastating effect here.

There is a long, unbroken, “oner” that bisects this film: a tracking shot that charts a section of border fence for what feels like eternity. The effect is obvious, but gutting. A border is like a prison perimeter. Industrial, policed, guarded against those that would transgress it.

Maddening, then, that Akerman, who shows remarkable sensitivity and empathy in this film to the plight of Mexican migrants seeking a better life in America, was reportedly a Zionist. Maddening that she was able to see the national border as a site of violence, that she was able, even as she professed a non-judgemental approach, to point to the absurd hypocrisy that forms the backbone of American policy and policing, a machine of death that disappears Mexican migrants as it exploits them for their labour, but that she was incapable of this analysis with regards to Israel’s subjugation and displacement of Palestinians.

I found this riveting in its understated power, especially the earlier, Mexican-set sequences, unvarnished and raw as they are. The charming moments when a child accidentally intrudes on an interview, or when another rounds the corner and, seeing the camera crew, reverses away, disarm you, purposefully wrongfooting you with their human warmth, before the cold horror of the aforementioned border footage. The haunting ghost story that functions as an epilogue (the only section narrated by Akerman), also packs a heavy punch, but the film does lose some of its weight in the sections set in America (one gut-punching interview aside). Although it allows Americans to humiliate themselves with their bigotry and ignorance, it also sets up a literal both-sides approach that betrays the project of the film as stated in its title.

Immaculate vibes, as Akerman charts the setting of the sun, riverside in Shanghai. But — and feel free to accuse me of being a wokescold if it makes you feel better — I always find this kind of ethnographic travelogue film to be shot through a queasily colonial lens, no matter how “neutral” the tone or the resultant footage. Even in this film, which consists of a series of long, unbroken shots of the skyline in the middle distance, Akerman is relying on Westerner’s deriving a frisson at the ensuing culture shock from witnessing the “foreign landscape”, with its digital screens displaying unfamiliar images and the soundtrack of both unfamiliar and familiar sounds in unexpected contexts.

This is a surreal Amnesty International awareness-raising infomercial/testimonial in which an ever-glamorous Catherine Deneuve emerges from the Parisian night reciting a letter to/poem about Febe Elisabeth Velasquez, an El Salvadorian trade unionist who was kidnapped, tortured, released and then murdered in a bomb attack on the trade union headquarters by a US-backed junta.

I didn’t recognise Deneuve’s voice at first so it was quite a shock to see her materialise out of the shadows and stare down the camera. I know Akerman was Belgian, but it does feel terminally French to use the erotic, tantalising glamour of a film star — dressed for a perfume advert, shot in one long, unbroken, slow cinema-style take, accompanied by mournful cello — to draw attention to the plight of a murdered political activist! I’m not necessarily complaining!

“Death: it's the new pornography."

Of all the things I expected to be able to say about this largely forgotten, eerily prescient dystopian science fiction film about a woman with a terminal illness whose final dying days are filmed as a reality tv show, “ravishingly lush photography” was not top of the list.

But it’s true. From the early scenes of warm rain lashing the leafy streets of Glasgow, to the later sequences set at the end of the world, amongst mist-wreathed grassy hills, and richly green lake-side foliage, captured in the purple-blue light of the gloaming hour, this looks like no other science fiction film I’ve seen.

But despite its surprising good looks, I was still trepidatious at first. This film may have spookily predicted, or anticipated, various technological advances (the scene of Romy Schneider’s Katharine using simple prompts to automatically write books on a chatGPT-style computer programme, is shockingly prophetic), but it also contains wildly heavy-handed metaphors for surveillance culture. Harvey Keitel, for example, plays a shady camera-man working for a money-hungry TV network who has lenses implanted into his eyeballs, in order to become a literal camera. Not especially sophisticated. Plus the overly long runtime contains ample gratuitous scenes and subplots (most probably carried over from the book), and a totally extraneous voiceover narration, improbably provided by Julie Christie (not actually in the film herself, but here on dubbing duties), that bloat the runtime.

But by the time we reached the third act with its inevitable, but still gutting reveal, and final, desperately tragic denouement, I was hooked. This was Romy Schneider’s last film role before she died at the relatively young age of 43. And she pours everything into it. A miraculous performance of a woman trapped, manipulated, gaslit and exploited, who chooses agency and personhood again, and again, and again, at all costs.

They don’t make them like they used to!*

*featuring
- Ava Gardner in the role of a lifetime as a woman so immortally snatched that men are willing to commit murder, suicide and destruction of personal property in order to win her hand in marriage 
- sumptuous Technicolor photography shot on location on the Catalonian coast
- a bevy of those ravishing soft-focus close-ups of Ava Gardner — each one elicited a little gay gasp from me
- scenes of flamenco
- a tarot reading scene that ends in an argument and a melodramatic pull-in on the Death card
- a yearning, brooding, melodramatic, across-the-generations love story that is so nonsensically histrionic in its intensity that it becomes gay (my husband pointed out the similarities with the Mina/Dracula love story in Coppola’s adaptation so if you like that…)

Every film covered in a main episode of hit podcast Every Film Is Gay.

1. Titanic
2. The Matrix Resurrections
3. Nightmare Alley
4. Interview with the Vampire
5. Point Break
6. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
7. Crash
8. Strictly Ballroom
9. Audition
10. Ghost in the Shell

...plus 71 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Way of the Wind
• Resurrection
• Young Sinner
• Abiding Nowhere
• Caught by the Tides
• Queens of Drama
• Serpent's Path
• Alpha
• Hope
• Chocobar

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Using the broadest, most inclusive definition of 'giallo'. Yes, I do believe that Suspiria counts as a giallo film, and no I can't be bothered to argue about it.

1. Opera
2. Suspiria
3. Phenomena
4. The Girl Who Knew Too Much
5. Don't Torture a Duckling
6. Dark Glasses
7. The Black Cat
8. All the Colors of the Dark
9. Shock
10. Inferno

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Self Divination
2. Lacuna
3. Scent Line on a Moving Mountain
4. Unstable Rocks
5. Instruments of a Beating Heart
6. For Febe Elisabeth Velasquez, El Salvador
7. Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths
8. Postpartum Film
9. The Only Girl in the Orchestra
10. Nightfall in Shanghai

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Adding to this as I watch/rewatch.

1. Leave Her to Heaven
2. In a Lonely Place
3. Vertigo
4. Nightmare Alley
5. Desert Fury
6. The Big Heat
7. Out of the Past
8. Diabolique
9. Rope
10. Kiss Me Deadly

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Impossible to truly define “erotic thriller” as there’s so much crossover with neo-noir, exploitation flicks, slashers and both police and court procedurals. So I’m using the Wikipedia list as reference. I will add to this as I watch things.

1. Showgirls
2. Crash
3. Eyes Wide Shut
4. Black Widow
5. Bound
6. Basic Instinct
7. Body Double
8. Dead Ringers
9. The Hunger
10. Dressed to Kill

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Alphabetical order.

• All About My Mother
• Anora
• Belle de Jour
• Blank Narcissus (ion of the Swamp)
• Body Double
• Boogie Nights
• Call Me Chihiro
• Cam
• The Chambermaid Lynn
• Chloe

...plus 52 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Trying to expand my cinematic vampire knowledge as it’s sorely lacking. Adding things as I watch them. Films in alphabetical order.

• Blade
• Blade II
• Blade: Trinity
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Byzantium
• Daughters of Darkness
• Dracula
• Dracula
• Dracula
• El Conde

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Crash
2. Videodrome
3. Dead Ringers
4. eXistenZ
5. The Brood
6. Crimes of the Future
7. Scanners
8. The Fly
9. Rabid
10. A Dangerous Method

My favourite and best films of 2024*

*(release year determined according to when they premiered at a UK festival, or, when they had a cinema or streaming release in the UK, however I saw them first)

1. No Other Land
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
3. Close Your Eyes
4. Dahomey
5. I Saw the TV Glow
6. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
7. A Traveler's Needs
8. Our Body
9. All We Imagine as Light
10. Here

I'm doing Dracula December and watching all the major Dracula adaptations (and maybe some less “major” adaptations if I get round to it).

1. Bram Stoker's Dracula
2. Nosferatu the Vampyre
3. Dracula
4. Dracula
5. Nosferatu
6. Dracula
7. Nosferatu

1. Cyber Palestine
2. Uncle Yanco
3. Seeing Red
4. Spirit Emulsion
5. Pigeons in the Square
6. The Night
7. Small Deaths
8. Artistes en zones troublés
9. Public Surfaces
10. Dead Cat

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Educating myself. I’ve barely seen any screwball so I’m going to do some learning!

1. Bringing Up Baby
2. His Girl Friday
3. The Awful Truth

• Benedetta
• Beyond the Hills
• Black Narcissus
• Dark Habits
• The Devils
• The First Omen
• Hadewijch
• Immaculate
• The Magdalene Sisters
• Mother Vera

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Volver
2. All About My Mother
3. Bad Education
4. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
5. Talk to Her
6. The Skin I Live In
7. The Flower of My Secret
8. Dark Habits
9. Law of Desire
10. Parallel Mothers

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Certified Copy
2. Ash Is Purest White
3. Beginning
4. Poetry
5. The Assassin
6. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
7. Titane
8. Trenque Lauquen
9. The Woman Who Ran
10. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

My favourite and best films of 2023*

*(release year determined according to when they premiered at a UK festival, or, when they had a cinema or streaming release in the UK, however I saw them first)

1. Trenque Lauquen
2. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
3. Chile '76
4. Monisme
5. Monster
6. Anhell69
7. A Common Sequence
8. May December
9. Call Me Chihiro
10. Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation

My favourite and best films of 2022 (according to when I saw them in the cinema and/or when they had a wide cinema release in the UK, whichever happened first)

1. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
2. Decision to Leave
3. The Metamorphosis of Birds
4. You Won't Be Alone
5. Benedetta
6. Parallel Mothers
7. We're All Going to the World's Fair
8. Great Freedom
9. Il Buco
10. Crimes of the Future

Wot I saw at Cinecity 2023

1. Trenque Lauquen
2. Monster
3. The Taste of Things
4. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry
5. Fallen Leaves
6. The Last Queen
7. Evil Does Not Exist
8. Anselm

Chronicling the short films and video art I watch this year as I do a much-needed catch-up on an art form I’ve neglected for too long.

• Casual Shopper
• Taking a Part
• Song of Love
• Ashes
• Aribada
• Louise
• Blank Narcissus (ion of the Swamp)
• Playback
• Choose Your Own Father
• The Love Machine

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.