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With Andor having come and gone, cementing itself as perhaps the best Star Wars anything ever, it was difficult to resist the desire to revisit Rogue One to see if it has retroactively benefitted from such a powerful lead-in. The result? It’s pretty much the same.

Its problems remain. The characterization is messy. Jyn Erso’s evolution from lone wolf to Rebel rabble-ro can be described as generic at best. Andor, who we should now understand more than ever, still goes through a muddled, unconvincing arc. The script often overcomplicates itself, getting tangled up in meandering situations that don’t drive anything forward. The middle of the movie gets lost for a bit in this weird confrontation on Eadu. The third act piles MacGuffin on top of MacGuffin. And occasionally, the film feels a little too attached to the 1977 original for its own good. The two dudes that Luke and Ben run into in the cantina have no reason to be here. The resurrected Tarkin is more hideous than ever. Leia at the end is marginally better but still pretty uncanny.

But all that said, it is easy to see why many people consider this their favorite film of the Disney era. It is still quite striking from a production standpoint. The scenery is gorgeous. The costumes are incredible. The action is propulsive. The music is rousing. The cast is great across the board. K-2SO is a delight. James Earl Jones’s last major appearance as Vader carries more weight with it than ever. The Death Star, too, is given an apocalyptic stature that I don’t think it ever had before. The battle of Scarif, already one of the best in Star Wars history, now feels even more momentous as the moment that the Rebellion finally threw its full might into open conflict against the Empire.

Rogue One is ultimately a good time. Its existence was probably necessary for the creation of Andor but the show itself outgrew this movie within its first couple of episodes and by the time it reached its end, became entirely its own beast. If anything, Rogue One itself represents this dichotomy between affirming what Star Wars is and carving out the future of what it can be.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

The only project to date to grapple with the post-Endgame ennui of the MCU (and by the looks of what remains of the Multiverse Saga, it’s going to stay that way), Thunderbolts* is the best thing to come from this franchise since the cathartic finality of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which was itself a rejection of the ultimately hollow promises of possibility offered by the multiverse. In many ways, it feels like the antithesis to so many of the problems that have been plaguing the MCU in recent years.

Setting aside the inflated production pipeline, messy writing, and underbaked VFX that have plagued the majority of the output of the Multiverse era, I think the biggest issue of these last few years for the MCU has been its complete and utter lack of change on a narrative level. Consistent quality has never been a given with the MCU but you used to be able to count on there being progression in characters and in the world around them to keep things moving forward. Lately there has been none of that. Big problems in individual projects have come and gone with no follow through of any kind. Huge numbers of people displaced after the Blip in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? It’s like it never happened. Skrulls infiltrating the world’s institutions in Secret Invasion? Never mentioned again. The only thing that seems to be going anywhere is the multiverse itself. But even that feels more like a meta-tool, an in-universe excuse to bring back old actors and probably soft reboot the MCU, rather than a concept that anyone is actually curious about. It’s a sad state of affairs. This franchise, which was once actually pretty restrained about doling out fan service, has now become almost exclusively dependent on it. Whereas it once had to build itself up from scratch with no household names like the X-Men or Spider-Man to lean on, its biggest selling points have become names from two decades ago. The future is just the past.

Against this backdrop, we have Thunderbolts*, a breath of fresh air with its relatively grounded roster of characters and distinct aura of exhaustion. The heroes and villains are all gone and all that remains are people trying to get by. Its cast of misfits is comprised of far-flung characters from an assortment of other movies and shows, ranging from the delightfully over-the-top Red Guardian, troubled Walker, and Bucky and Ghost, who are really just along for the ride. They are led by the wonderful Florence Pugh’s Yelena, the only new character of this era to have any kind of arc, a quality that continues to pay dividends in this film. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Val makes for a decent adversary even if it is just her doing a sanitized impression of Selina Meyer from Veep. These characters all have various personal histories from other projects, which allows the movie to just get straight into things. As they come into with one another, we get some of solid, well shot action. The film’s gritty, well-choreographed sequences are made all the better by the fact that few of the characters here have powers of any kind, keeping the fights restrained and preventing them from descending into the contextless green-screen slop of so many of Marvel’s other recent features. The less exciting moments are equally engaging, with some good one-liners and group banter helping to paper over some of the weaker subplots (like how on earth did Bucky become a congressman?).

Along the way, they pick up “Bob,” a cipher of a man who brings with him a creeping darkness that gradually makes itself known. By the time they reach a grim, sullen New York City with its dilapidated Avengers Tower (a far cry from the bright metropolis of 2012’s Avengers, it’s become clear that he is at the heart of this whole affair. Thunderbolts* recognizes the fatigue that has crept into this sort of movie and rather than doubling down on its importance, it lets it go. It’s no longer about saving the world or stopping the bad guy. All that is an afterthought. Now the best we can do is to save ourselves and love ourselves. It’s an unexpectedly poignant place for a movie like this to arrive at, heightened by an inventive third-act setting and a deeply moving score from Son Lux. Thunderbolts* was the last Marvel project announced so far that I was genuinely looking forward to so I was quite happy that it turned out as good as it did.  

Winning performance by Keke Palmer. SZA is not too shabby. I enjoyed the "all in a single day" structure of it and there is a fun array of ing characters to keep things interesting. Fun!

One Hour Photo is very much a movie of its times. Everything from its sets to its sound design to even its premise is early 2000s. Robin Williams shines in this role. It is very much not the sort of thing you would think he'd be the right choice for but he knocks it out of the park, infusing this quiet little man with a disconcerting undercurrent of something. As he drifts through his world, you gradually learn more about him, but even by the end he remains refreshingly enigmatic. The spaces he inhabits are very striking, from the stark supermarket he works in to the liminal hallways and backrooms of a hotel room he es through. The banality of the setting makes the atmosphere even more unsettling. That all this is happening in such ordinary spaces makes the outcome feel increasingly uncertain. The extent of havoc that could be wreaked feels endless precisely because everything feels so lived in. A truly tense slow burn that keeps you guessing until the end.

Ex Machi-blah

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

I'm not sure who decided to let David Lowery make such an introspective take on a classic Disney property but I was absolutely here for it. Peter Pan & Wendy is easily one of the best Disney live action remakes. It is the only one to date that actually feels like it's in conversation with the original. It leans heavily into the implications of what "never growing up" looks like and grapples with that question in genuinely compelling ways that are reminiscent of some of Lowery's other, decidedly less family-friendly works. All this is combined with beautiful cinematography and visual effects that put some of Disney's other recent blockbusters to shame (the fact that this was sent directly to Disney+ is insane). The result is a breath of fresh air that occasionally feels constrained by its nature as a Disney fantasy but otherwise is quite impressive.

It’s a neat concept and Aisling Franciosi is a fantastic lead but most of it just exists in this strange stasis where you more or less know what will happen so you just kind of have to bear with it until it does. It feels way too long for a 90 minute movie. But I do have to give credit where it is due: some of the body horror did genuinely make me squirm, so kudos to Stopmotion for that.

Still holds up remarkably well for a movie approaching 90 years of age. The animation is beautiful. All the animals and birds cavorting around the screen at once is always impressive to see. The Queen's potion brewing is still an absolute delight, as is Snow White's nightmarish run through the woods. The music brings me back to my childhood, when this was shown not quite as often as titles from the Disney Renaissance period, but enough for certain moments to conjure a breeze of nostalgia.

I forget how little actually happens in this, which gives a lot of scenes a chance to breathe and take their sweet time. This does lead to certain sequences going on for a little too long but the movie as a whole is short enough that this isn't too big of a problem.

I had also forgotten how small of a role the prince actually plays in all this. His role here is essentially as a glorified MacGuffin who serves to both land Snow White in her predicament, at least in part, and to get her out of it. Aside from that he essentially has no characterization of any kind.

The real heart of all this is Snow White's relationship with the dwarves. There is still something quite heartwarming to see with how she is able to win them all over, Grumpy especially (Snow White adds an addendum to a prayer to this effect that got a good chuckle out of me).

Impressive, especially as a historical artifact but also as a movie by modern standards.

I ed this one pretty fondly and there are definitely still parts of it that still hold up. Aesthetically, the blockbusters today can't hold a candle against this. The creature designs are impeccable and really unlike anything out there. The tooth fairy fight at the beginning is wonderfully insane. The visual of Prince Nuada training in a subterranean lair ending with a subway flashing by is just delightful. Ron Perlman is fantastic as Hellboy himself. But where things fell apart a bit for me this time was just the writing. Things move along at a good clip for a while but then falls into a weird flow, moving both too slowly and too quickly at the same time, somehow.

At least the youth enjoyed it

There is an incredible richness to Sinners that makes it feel like a horror movie from another era with the way it spends so much time carefully building up its world before things start going down. The care with which Ryan Coogler takes to introduce the characters and their relationships to each other in the afternoon leading up to that night of blood and revelry pays enormous dividends. Sinners morphs into a few different things over the course of its runtime but the robust composition of its first act helps ensure that each of those transformations feel earned and authentic. The cast is absolutely phenomenal, especially Michael B. Jordan (in dual roles), Hailee Steinfeld, and newcomer Miles Canton. There are a couple of entrancing musical sequences that are some of the most hypnotic scenes you'll see at the movies this year. It's an enormously refreshing experience that has grown on me the more I've thought about it.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on a projector with a DVD playing on a PS2 synced with audio playing on a JBL Charge 5 connected to a phone playing a copy of the movie from a legally suspect website because the built in speakers of the projector were not loud enough. It was a feat of sheer technical madness.

This movie has, on both occasions I’ve seen it now, been the most okay Miyazaki feature of the bunch. It is essentially Indiana Jones by way of Studio Ghibli. There are some interesting undercurrents that I feel eventually get explored in more potent ways in later movies. There are charming characters, fascinating world-building, and gorgeous animation. It’s all good so I think it’s only that the rest of Miyazaki’s filmography is so exceptional that Castle in the Sky doesn’t hit harder.

afterthought: As awkward as the dubbed version of this movie is, I'm glad to have seen it. Colonel Muska is voiced by Mark Hamill, who would go on to voice Granduncle in The Boy and the Heron. It creates an interesting little meta-narrative between his two characters: one wanting to conquer a mystical land and the other lost and aimless, having achieved just that.

Shu Qi in this is easily a top five movie crush. Now that I've been reading Journey to the West, I understand a lot more of the world of this movie, so it was fun to pick up on little details that went over my head before. The balance between outlandish comedy and genuinely authentic emotion here is really something and makes every rewatch of this a great time.

There is a kind of simplicity to Flow that allows it touch on feelings and experiences rarely seen on film. The animals of this movie are just swept along with little control over their circumstances. Homes and families are lost in a matter of moments. Entire forests are swallowed up over the course of a single day. All this occurs with little fanfare. All that these creatures can do is keep going.

The world that they inhabit is gorgeously realized on screen. The water in particular is always a treat, especially in moments where you can see vegetation and fish just beneath its surface in the shallows. The environment hints at an old world that has seen many events like the flood of this movie: enormous statues rising out of the water, an ancient town with flooded streets, carved mountains jutting into the sky. All now abandoned, now just remnants of some forgotten past.

All this makes Flow sound like quite a somber and melancholy experience, but it's not. It's full of life and sunlight and wonderful little moments that brim with curiosity and wonder. The cat, dog, capybara, lemur, and bird all have well-drawn personalities that come together in charming ways. It's remarkable how much you are able to feel through these characters without a single one of them uttering a word.

Flow is a singular delight. Its title captures its essence perfectly. Through both stormy moments and serene ones, it finds a consistent medium, gently reminding its audience of what it is to persevere. It is an important thing, as inconsequential as it might seem.

Extended Edition

As better as this longer version is at actually concluding this story (primarily due to a couple of pretty crucial scenes that are just entirely absent from the theatrical cut), it is still a deeply exhausting experience. Ostensibly about the journey of a company of dwarves and a hobbit across Middle-Earth, The Hobbit trilogy instead ends up becoming more of a table setting session for Lord of the Rings. More time is spent with franchise stalwarts like Gandalf, Legolas, and Sauron than the characters of this series. There certainly isn't any shortage of runtime to dedicate towards these things given that the source material really just doesn't have enough going on to fill the nearly nine hours that this saga spans but it is just done so sloppily and ends up overshadowing the actual story at hand. It's quite a pity that these movies turned out like this. Lord of the Rings had enough goodwill and popularity for The Hobbit to have just been a smaller, standalone adventure rather than this bloated, meandering epic. Can't capture lightning in a bottle twice, I guess.

This review may contain spoilers.

Of all the movies that have made my best-of-the-year lists over the last decade, there is not a single one that comes close to matching the staying power of La La Land. It is not my favorite movie of the bunch, not even my favorite of that year, yet it’s remained a constant in my life since I first watched it back in the final days of 2016. Its music has become permanently lodged in my life. Its songs have been the soundtrack to many a workday, commute, or even workout, becoming deeply familiar to me in the process. And so, it was a joy to get to experience this movie with a live orchestra conducted by Justin Hurwitz himself.

When I watched La La Land for the first time, I wasn’t immediately blown away by it but I had the feeling that it would be a movie that I liked much more on another watch. This proved to be corrected when I revisited it a couple of years later after having gone through a breakup and a lot more life. Its bittersweet ending felt closer to home than ever and I felt like I finally got it. Over the many subsequent rewatches, the movie, like its soundtrack, has become a source of balmy comfort for me. The music is catchy. The cinematography is vibrant and confident. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling both shine, bringing an old-school Hollywood sort of charm to their star-crossed characters. Their chemistry is infectious, making the highs and lows of the narrative hit that much harder. It’s a delight every time I see it.

The thing I appreciated the most this viewing is the movie’s belief in the lasting impact of fleeting moments. The whirlwind romance of the first act culminates with a dance through the stars and an iris shot paired with swelling orchestral music; as rousing of a Hollywood ending as you’ll ever get. But the movie keeps going. Happily ever after might exist for a moment but life carries on. Mia and Sebastian’s romance may not last but they are both nonetheless better off having had it. It’s still as real five years later as it was in the moment.

Their eyes lock

A hint of a tear in both…

And, ever so subtly, for just a fleeting second, Mia smiles.

It’s the kind of smile you could miss if you blinked -- but it’s enough to signal to Sebastian that she recognized the melody he played, and that she still re it, and still thinks of it to this day…

THE END

Watched on Friday April 4, 2025.

Really gets under your skin in a very novel way. There are some incredibly eerie moments that just make your skin crawl. The whole schleppy rich genius thing that Oscar Isaac is doing here feels a lot more at home in our current moment than when I first watched this a decade ago. Gorgeous cinematography. Alicia Vikander knocks it out of the park.

Killers of the Flower Moon operates with a kind of rhythmic evenness that belies the brutality of the crimes being perpetrated against the Osage people. As with The Irishman, Scorsese seems to have become less concerned with showcasing the excesses of greed, preferring to just cut straight to the moral decay that accompanies it. The violence feels almost secondary, like it's just something that is naturally occurring on your way to making a living. The hostility is so commonplace that it's become banal.

Killers is bolstered by three terrific performances: Leonard DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, Lily Gladstone as his wife Mollie, and Robert De Niro as his uncle Hale. DiCaprio here in particular seems to be playing against type to some degree. Ernest is as tortured as many of his other characters, expressing genuine love for his wife while also committing great violence against her family and people, but is also uniquely idiotic, just bumbling along with little thought or agency for a large portion of the runtime. Gladstone's Mollie is the opposite, forced to navigate and be conscious about every facet of her life as she and her loved ones see their lives gradually chipped away by their own neighbors. De Niro's King Hale at first seems like the face of the sort of villainy that this film is about: one that smiles at you while stabbing you in the back, but as the movie goes on, that seems to be less of the case. In truth, it takes a village.

This is a quintessential tale of America: manifest destiny, not as a righteous inevitability, but as a covetous conspiracy. It's a reminder that many of the issues that are being grappled with in this moment have been around for far longer than we may imagine. What we are living through is just an echo in a different octave.

Features some of the best sequences of the Hobbits, like the fall of Erebor, the time at the Shire before the adventure, riddles in the dark, and my favorite this time: Gandalf explaining to Galadriel why he chose to bring Bilbo on this journey.

But the rest of it demonstrates the worst elements of this adaptation: grueling pacing, gratuitous padding, and action scenes that seem to have been pulled straight out of Looney Tunes.

It's a good encapsulation of this series as a whole, little gold nuggets scattered throughout a rough, unrefined whole.

An oddity for sure but I'm happy that Bong Joon-Ho gets the budget and ability to make such a strange film. As for the movie itself, it was not entirely what I was expecting, though what those expectations actually were I can't really describe either. The scope of the whole thing was a little more restrained than I was anticipating and I'm still trying to decide if that actually made me enjoy the movie more. The movie keeps things largely limited to the perspective of its titular character. Robert Pattinson is fantastic here, playing a weird little dude (or more accurately, several weird little dudes) with complete commitment. He's the heart and soul of the whole movie while also getting to be charmingly hilarious all the while (a gag involving two Mickeys coming down a stairway was my favorite moment of the whole thing). The rest of the cast is great, especially Naomi Ackie as the other artery of the whole thing and Mark Ruffalo, who hams it up to high heaven. The creepers were also quite wonderful, like some giant tardigrade/roly-poly hybrids. Overall very fun and definitely original. I'll probably like it even more on a rewatch.

Incredibly and sadly necessary in this moment. There is nothing new about Israeli treatment of Palestinian people, property, and land that anyone even vaguely informed about the subject hasn't heard about but seeing it happen in front of your eyes makes you see what all actually looks like. It is then that the true barbarity of all those things feel much more real and pressing. The things that you see filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra have to go through are inhumane. There is a surrealness to it all; a reality where people who can just appear one day and knock down your house and declare that you are not allowed to rebuild or do anything about it. I cannot imagine how confused and infuriated I would be if that was my lived daily reality.

The biggest source of sadness for me coming out of this was how unnecessary all of it feels. The people of Masafer Yatta are simply trying to lead their lives, make a living, go to school. What is the point of inflicting so much carnage and upheaval upon them? What have they done to warrant such overwhelming and uncompromising force against them? What nation is so feeble that it feels as though it must do this in order to feel complete? What good comes of all this?

I am thrilled that this won Best Documentary at the Oscars as it will surely lead more audiences to see what No Other Land has to say. By far the most important movie of 2024.

I don't usually go for these sort of illness romance movies but Viva La Vida won me over completely. It is a movie that takes immense care of its characters and their lives. No detail is spare in making their world feel organic and inhabited, which is very important when telling this story about people that are carrying so much weight with them. Li Gengxi and Peng Yuchang are perfect as the two leads. The relationship between them is given some unexpected dimensions like some light stalking, alien communications, and other more serious things that helps make it feel fresh yet incredibly authentic. Your heart just goes to them completely as they gradually learn to love one another and life itself. Every moment of this felt achingly real and in its toughest moments it just keeps you on the edge of tears for minutes at a time. The spirit of Viva La Vida is one that I will forever think warmly of, even if I might forget some of its finer details. AOLIGEI!

This was one of the movies I ed off of Taiwanese Netflix during my layover in their airport and it turned out to be an absolute delight. Ostensibly it is a sort of heist movie but Tresers cares very little about the process of the whole thing; you ultimately don't even see the characters making their way up to their target and they succeed with little fanfare. But from there, it goes in some charmingly bizarre and unexpected directions. It's got some truly kooky characters and it takes full advantage of this to hilarious effect, even if it strains credibility on more than a few occasions. The whole cast is wonderful but my favorites were Rinko Kikuchi, who shines in this comedic role, and Mai Shiraishi as the increasingly bewildered target of this whole affair. All in all, a quick and twisty little farce that's also a great time.

Justice, My Foot! is a rowdy Stephen Chow comedy that hits some pretty terrific comedic beats but lacks the focused narrative that his later works would feature. The plot ends up becoming a little too complicated and unwieldy for its own good but the funny moments are funny in a way unlike anything else out there.

Seeing this pop up on the Netflix Top 10 finally prompted me to watch it after hovering on my radar for a couple of years and it turned out to be even better than expected. Watcher is absolutely gorgeous, offering up a Bucharest draped in sumptuous colors and captured with beautiful, frigid shots. Director Chloe Okuno suffuses this setting with a dreadfully effective sense of tension that makes mundane environments like grocery stores, apartment hallways, and metro stations feel eerily sinister. Maika Monroe is great as Julia, who has to deal with all this while navigating a country that she does not know the language of and in which she often has no one to rely on except herself. Monroe treads the line between conviction and paranoia perfectly. Between this and her role in Longlegs last year, she is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actresses to see in horror. The movie itself blurs the roles of its players; the question of who is watching who is frequently inverted and inverted back, making for a twisty, unnerving thrill ride. The only downside of all this delightful setup is that inevitably has to conclude somehow and this is where I thought things just panned out a little abruptly. That being said, I don't even know what I would have preferred, which is why this isn't as much of a gripe as it is a musing. All in all, Watcher lived up to and occasionally sured my expectations. The perfect bite-sized thriller.

Watched on Sunday February 23, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 14, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 14, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 10, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

Watched on Sunday February 2, 2025.

Glad I finally got around to seeing this! It's a fairly straightforward premise but executed with such visceral deliciousness. You feel every bone crunch, skin stretch, and needle injection so fully, it's just delightful. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both knock it out of the park. The way Elizabeth's psyche gets gradually separated between these two versions of herself is not something I was expecting to see but these two actresses sell it so incredibly well that you just get swept along for the ride. The last 15 minutes or so felt a little divorced from the relative tightness of the rest of the movie but I had a very good time with this nonetheless.

The animation itself is outstanding and there is a wonderful tale of found family in there but the second half just gets bogged down with all sorts of randomness that stopped this movie from hitting the highs that I was hoping from it.

Watched on Saturday January 25, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 24, 2025.

Offers little but a thinly sketched parable dressed in occasionally beautiful multi-medium animation. The biggest problem is that the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in its own ideas. When the characters leave their painting for the first time, it is treated like a non-event even though it seems like no one else ever does this and no one even knew it was possible. The castes based on completedness ultimately gets resolved because the lower classes manage to meet the beauty standards of the elites, not because it was wrong for them to discriminate in the first place. There’s just a whole lot of laziness like that here.

I really need to look more into this “mumblecore” genre. I had a lot of fun with Sword of Trust. It mines humor from the smallest of situations, never really feeling like it is grasping for laughs. The cast is perfect. A delightful little treat of a movie.

What a great time. Late Night with the Devil is an absolute blast. I loved the talk show setting. Having such a commercial, kitschy backdrop for everything that happens gives this movie a very unique flavor that I don’t think I’ve ever really seen before. It also adds a tightness to things that makes it the perfect 90 minute ride. Great performances all around. Awesome to see David Dastmalchian finally in a leading role. The retro visual effects are quite charming. Not too much to interrogate here, just an impressive and delicious snack of a movie.

Days of Future Past has held up quite well in the decade or so since it came out. In a time when comic book fare has gotten increasingly sloppy and desperate when it comes to legacy characters, the most ambitious X-Men movie to date is a reminder of a time when this kind of nostalgia actually felt novel. Days of Future Past bridges the old and the new without feeling self-congratulatory about it. The original and reboot casts are brought together seamlessly. Standouts include Hugh Jackman's Wolverine (as gruff as always, made even more so by the responsibilities foisted on him this time around), Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique (who is wisely made to be the heart of this whole affair), and both Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender as Magneto (operating with weary coolness and simmering resolve, respectively).

Where this movie succeeds where others like it fail is that it never feels hampered by the fact that it's got all this legacy riding on it. The characters never feel bound to a certain canon, in fact the film itself frequently leans into the messiness of its characters and offers them their own agency. The result is a gripping, no-holds-barred blockbuster featuring some of the best action setpieces of the series. Easily the best mainline X-Men movie.

Cool places, formats, or events. Music Box screenings have their own list.

• Crimson Peak

  April 13, 2016 @ the Virginia Theatre in Champaign

  With Naomi

  EbertFest

  Guillermo del Toro in attendance

• Waves

  October 20, 2019 @ AMC River East 21

  Chicago International Film Festival

  Trey Edward Shults, Kelvin Harrison Jr, and Taylor Russell in attendance

• Balloon

  October 21, 2019 @ AMC River East 21

  Chicago International Film Festival, North American premiere

  ​Pema Tseden in attendance

• Nobody Knows

  October 18, 2024 @ the Gene Siskel Film Center

  With Lillian

  Chicago International Film Festival, Kore-eda Retrospective

  Presented in 35 mm with Hirokazu Kore-eda in attendance

• La Cocina

  October 20, 2024 @ AMC NEWCITY 14

  With Lillian

  Chicago International Film Festival

  Raul Briones in attendance.

• Nosferatu

  November 11, 2024 @ the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove

  With Lillian

  After Hours Film Society

  Live organ accompaniment on the Mighty Wurlitzer by David Rhoades

  One day before the organ (Muriel) turned 100 years old!

• The Fall

  December 29, 2024 @ The Beverly Theater in Las Vegas

  4K Restoration

• Ne Zha 2

  February 14, 2025 @ the iAPM Palace Cinema in Shanghai

  With Dad, Lillian, 国平, 婶婶, 大姑姑, and "BaBa" (her boyfriend).

• La La Land

  April 5, 2025 @ The Auditorium Theatre in Chicago

  With Lillian

  Live in concert with the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Justin Hurwitz

Movies I've had the pleasure of seeing at 3733 N Southport Avenue

• Shoplifters

  Dec 20, 2018 - first movie here, watched in theatre 2

• Capernaum

  Jan 08, 2019 - first movie in the main auditorium

• Funny Face

  May 02, 2019 - with Elle and Johnny

• The Florida Project

  July 22, 2019 - presented in 35mm with Sean Baker in attendance

  Preceded by a presentation of the 1934 short Our Gang in The First Round Up in 16mm. There is an homage to this short in the jam scene of the film.

• Aquarela

  Sept 04, 2019 - watched in theatre 2

• Give Me Liberty

  Sept 13, 2019 - with director Kirill Mikhanovsky in attendance

• Tigers Are Not Afraid

  Sept 13, 2019 - watched in theatre 2 immediately after Give Me Liberty

• Monos

  Oct 01, 2019 - watched in theatre 2

• Joker

  Oct 04, 2019 - with Elle, Matt Dawood, and Jordan, as well as Katherine Kelly and Grant, who we ran into before the showing, and presented in 70mm

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire

  Feb 12, 2020 - with Céline Sciamma in attendance

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

🦖🔥🏙️

• Godzilla
• Godzilla Minus One
• Shin Godzilla
• Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster
• Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
• Godzilla
• Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla
• Invasion of Astro-Monster
• All Monsters Attack
• King Kong vs. Godzilla

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Abigail
• Pearl
• Evil Dead Rise
• Devil
• The Shining
• The Rule of Jenny Pen
• American Psycho
• It
• The Thing
• Possession

Hey little train, wait for me. I once was blind but now I see. Have you a seat left for me? Is that such a stretch of the imagination?

I began writing this from a hospital bed in which I would end up staying for five days. By the fourth day, a deep sense of stagnation had set in. Nothing I tried to watch moved or excited me or distracted me from the feeling that I could be doing so much more with myself. I could not wait to get out of there. It was a fitting coda to a year that I’ve been ready to be done with for a good while now.

As with any year, the movies I watched were a big part of it. Coming into 2023, there were a lot of movies I was excited about; most notably the tsunami of sequels in franchises I’d grown up with, such as John Wick, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy. What a lineup. I ended up having a good time with most of them as the majority turned out to be good and even amazing on occasion, which did not come as much of a surprise to me. What did surprise me was the other feeling I got watching a few of these movies: a sense of finality. Several of these sequels also turned out to also be conclusions of one sort or another. As more and more of my favorite series and characters ride off into the sunset, I started wondering whether there would even be anything left for me in the blockbuster landscape in years to come.

The biggest catalyst of all this was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which in May gave a rousing and heartfelt send-off to what has become my favorite series within the MCU. For a while, I thought of it as the perfect ending to the Guardians trilogy but as it stayed with me longer, I gradually began to see it as a conclusion to the current chapter of my relationship with the MCU as a whole. For the last few years, I still largely enjoyed Marvel’s latest films even when the general reception towards them had become decidedly more mixed. Having grown up with the universe (my first MCU movie at a theater was Iron Man 2 just a few weeks before I finished middle school), I had a soft spot for it and was willing to overlook its faults more generously than others. I thought more about the genuinely brilliant moments Marvel could occasionally whip up rather than the increasingly shaky wholes in which they came. After Vol. 3, I came to the realization that I had already gotten what I needed from this franchise and that it was okay to move on and find new things to love. With that mindset, I headed into one final rewatch of all the movies of the MCU up to that point, concluding with one final definitive ranking.

Even before that last Marvel-thon, I found myself revisiting the blockbusters that I grew up with this year. Maybe I just knew it was time. After the MCU had been put to rest, the trend only accelerated. This resulted in a safe, nostalgic year full of movies that I was already deeply familiar with. It was a mixed bag in of how well they held up. Some were old favorites that were even better than I ed. Others were films that I had never really liked all that much before but enjoyed for the first time ever this year. A few turned out to be much worse than memory served. But most of them were just fine. I saw their flaws and issues but found that none of it stood in the way of my enjoyment nonetheless. I guess that’s just what happens when something is irrevocably locked behind rose-tinted glasses.

In the end, 2023 has turned out to be a final stroll down memory lane. It’s an appreciation of all that’s brought me here and all the movies that I’ve laughed with, cried at, and been enthralled by over the formative years of my life. Now we are here at the end and I find myself ready, even anxious to move on. I’ve spent enough time in this unmoving time capsule of my own making, watching the same movies I’ve always watched the same way I’ve always watched them. I've known for a while, but I will never be able to get anywhere new without letting some things go. I already have everything I could possibly want from my childhood.

I want to watch fewer movies but go deeper with them. To learn more about how they were made, the contexts from which they came, and the people behind them. I have a whole stack of screenplay and concept art books in my room that I’ve barely even flipped through. That’s where I hope to take my journey with film. I also have many new dreams beyond this medium but that will have to wait for some future write-up, one that hopefully will have a very different author writing it. So here's to 2023, to the future, and for one last time: my ten favorite movies of the year.

The End.

• Monster
• Return to Seoul
• Godzilla Minus One
• All That Breathes
• TÁR
• Wolfwalkers
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• The Menu
• Porco Rosso
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Perhaps there's something there that wasn't there before...

• The Shining
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Spider-Man 2
• Beauty and the Beast
• Alien: Covenant
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon
• Blade Runner
• Transformers: The Last Knight
• Man of Steel
• The Wolverine

Leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you want to survive

• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
• Avengers: Endgame
• Spider-Man: Homecoming
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Captain America: The First Avenger
• Iron Man
• Avengers: Infinity War
• The Avengers

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

It's such a fine and natural sight, everybody's dancing in the moonlight...

• Jennifer's Body
• The Nun
• The Medium
• The House
• Army of Darkness
• Annabelle: Creation
• Annabelle
• The Blackening
• The Conjuring
• Annabelle Comes Home

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

• WandaVision

  One of the best things (if not THE best) that has come from the MCU

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• Hawkeye

  Fun and breezy. Knows what it's about and fully revels in it.

  Kate + Yelena = comedy gold

• Ms. Marvel

  Iman Vellani is an absolute gem

• Werewolf by Night
• The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
• Spider-Man: No Way Home

  Fun when it doesn't get lost in the nostalgia.

  Also working against it is the fact that this is just a worse version of Into the Spider-Verse

• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

  Brutal and aesthetically distinct. A solid WandaVision follow up. Gets a bit bogged down for its third act but otherwise pushes the package in exciting ways.

• Thor: Love and Thunder

  Fun and vibrant until it actually has to be about something.

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A month ago today, my beloved dog of eleven years ed away. His name was Meelo. His loss was not an unexpected one. He was a big dog, and this was about the age they told us he’d get to. For the last few months of his life, he also had a bone tumor on his right leg. Its impact on his wellbeing grew more and more noticeable towards the end. It was more or less time for him to move on. Despite it all, his ing was still deeply devastating. It is the biggest loss I have experienced so far in life.

I spent most of that final Friday with him and felt a well of emotion growing over the course of the day. He spent the entire day outside, but we were able to get him to come in shortly after dinner. Wanting to spend time with him in the living room, I put on Inside Out. Part of it was to have an outlet for the storm of feelings that had built up over the course of the day. There is no better feelings movie than Inside Out, which addresses the necessity of sadness so poignantly. It felt like a good choice for that night. I sat on the floor with him, unknowingly giving him the last belly scratches that I ever would.

Another part of it was because I wanted to have the right last film on should the worst come to . I thinking that I simply could not have The Super Mario Bros. Movie be the last movie I ever watched before my dog left us. It’s a stupid thought, I know. There is absolutely no connection. After all, Meelo was a dog who never watched TV. I him looking around behind the screen for the dogs he heard barking while we watched Argo, but that was just about the only reaction he’d ever offered in response to anything we watched. But still, I felt this impulse to find the proper movie to mark the occasion.

When did I get here, trying to frame moments of my life through recycled frames of film? I’m wasting time desperately hoping that I can squeeze just a bit more meaning out of my life instead of just being present to experience it for myself in all its beauty, joy, and sorrow. I’ve been grappling with that desire ever since, trying to figure out why and when I began looking at my entire life through the prism of film and how this one ion has come to color everything else to this degree.

Maybe it was an attempt to imbue events in my own life with the significance that I’ve found in movies. Maybe it was just an easy way to help me process new experiences through familiar ones. So many possible maybes. In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter how it started, only that it ends.

Meelo was a dog, but he still taught me so much about my own life. To be present. To be alive. To be curious. Movies will not save me. As powerful as they are and as much as they move me, they will never compare to my own lived experiences. I’ve spent too long lost in these painted worlds, hiding from the beautiful reality that awaits me outside. It is time to hurry home.

After Inside Out, I went to take a quick shower and came back and put on Coco. Halfway through, Meelo got up to go back outside. I had to essentially carry him out. He wasn’t even able to stand on his bad leg at this point. I helped him walk out into the yard and underneath the maple tree, where he laid down in what would be his resting place. My mom and I left him with a few final touches and words of affection before going back inside. I saw his tail move around a little as we were watching the rest of the movie, but by the end I had a feeling that he had gone. After my mom went upstairs to prepare for bed, I opened the porch door and stepped out into that cold, dark, and very gentle night. Rain had started falling.

• Coco

  May 12, 2023

  Goodbye, Meelo. We love you so much.

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

  May 5, 2023

  I was supposed to see this with Knox, but a sudden emergency came up right before we had planned to meet. I reached out to Jeong and Austin to see if either of them was interested but nothing ended up panning out so I just went to see it alone. I managed to snag a ticket for an IMAX screening at Streets of Woodfield, the exact same place I saw the first one almost nine years ago. It was a grand, emotional sendoff that ended with a truly moving finale set to Dog Days are Over. I came out of the theater feeling that I could bid farewell to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That I no longer needed it to mean as much to me as it once did. And that that is perfectly fine. Finding this capacity to be done with something on your own felt incredibly powerful to me. It does again now, as I stand on this new precipice. Take the plunge. You won’t die.

• Belle

  November 14, 2021

  Belle represented a lot of things. It represented the culmination of my journey through the works of Mamoru Hosoda which began with the life-changing recommendation by Kyrah to watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It represented the end of my self-imposed embargo on movie theaters, which ultimately lasted 615 days. And it represented the end of my annual top 10 lists. From 2015 to 2021, I made lists of my favorite films of released each year, which by this point had become annual diary entries for my life in general. As much as enjoyed compiling them, these lists also took up an inordinate amount of my time, driving me to watch things that I didn’t really want to just so they could be considered for inclusion. The futility in trying to capture an entire year of life through the lens of ten films increasingly dawned upon me as well. In the end, I knew I just had to put all of it behind. This screening of Belle at the beautiful Music Box Theatre was the perfect coda to that time. It was both an ending and a beginning.

• Onward

  March 8, 2020

  This was the last time I was in a movie theater before the pandemic shut everything down and completely changed society. Obviously, I did not go into it knowing that this would be the case, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. Looking back on it now brings forth an air of nostalgic simplicity, a sunny gust of wind from a time that feels so far away now. The movie itself was fine but I clung onto its name as a sort of reminder of where I ought to be going. In the months that followed, I found myself almost happy that the theaters had all been closed. It was the push that I needed but wasn’t strong enough to give myself. Onward indeed.

• Christopher Robin

  August 4, 2018

  I don’t know what it was about this movie. I never had a particularly notable connection to Winnie the Pooh but even just seeing the trailer for this made me tear up. When I did go to see the actual thing, I ended up crying through the entire runtime. Literally just wet eyes from start to end. Winny was there with me and held my hand during all of this. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was a release of the bottled-up feelings from the breakup with Demi or maybe it was something else, but I’ve never had this visceral of a reaction to a movie before and I would be surprised if I ever did again.

• Sorry to Bother You

  July 28, 2018

  Sorry to Bother You was an odd dramedy that I would probably appreciate more now as a working lad myself but this particular viewing of it was unremarkable except for the fact that it was the first movie I watched after getting AMC A-List. I made liberal use of the three movies I could watch every week, spending far too much time going to movies just because I could. By the end, it ended up becoming a rather unhealthy investment, netting me comfort at the cost of growth. Like some other unhealthy aspects of my life at the time, I think it was just something I had to live through in order to move past, but I often find myself wishing that I could have figured it out all sooner.

• Star Wars: The Last Jedi

  December 16, 2017

  I went to the Savoy 16 (my home theater at school) with Tad and Miranda. We were only able to get seats in the back row of the front section as it was opening weekend. Mike was running late. I wasn’t even sure if Mo was coming. In the end, everyone made it. It was the last thing we all did together before we went our separate ways. It was nice final moment to have with these friends who were there from beginning of this time of life. The movie itself befuddled me at the time but on the ride home, Miranda waxed on about how subversive it was for Star Wars, planting a seed in my head that with time and Twitter threads would blossom into an unabashed love for this entry.

• Poltergeist

  October 31, 2015

  Prior to Poltergeist, I would only ever occasionally dabble in horror, checking out things like Alien and Silence of the Lambs due to the cultural cachet they held. An unexpected viewing of Poltergeist at a Halloween party in 2015 would change all that. I found myself suddenly open to this last unexplored genre and dove headfirst into it after this catalyst of an experience. If watching Poltergeist opened the floodgates, seeing The Witch and The Conjuring 2 in theaters the following year blew them to cinders.

• The Fall

  January 1, 2014

  I think I learned about Letterboxd through some reviewer on Collider or something like that. Before this, I used to movies on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, two websites that I now disdain. Letterboxd turned out to be just the thing I was looking for. I logged The Fall on New Year’s Day 2014 and the rest is history. The abundance of features on there have had a huge hand in shaping how I think about and engage with movies. I’ve watched movies solely to ensure that certain actors in my most watched for that year. I’ve agonized over whether a movie deserves that extra half-star or not. I even stopped rating movies altogether for a few years at one point. Letterboxd has definitely made me more conscious of what I watch in ways that have helped me grow but also in ways that made me place unwarranted importance on ultimately trivial things. It’s been a ride.

• Inception

  July 17, 2010 (probably)

  Prior to Inception, I really ever only went to theaters for blockbusters and franchises, so this marked a new chapter for me as the first “deep” movie I being excited about seeing. During the movie, I kept whispering to my dad to explain things before he whispered back that he was following just fine on his own. Afterwards, I being captivated by the imagery of the little paper pinwheel in the safe, the nature of dreams, and the entire experience as a whole for a long time. It was everything I’d hoped for, and I am still immensely fond of Inception to this day. This movie was a gateway to the possibilities of film as a medium and is probably what inspired me to engage more deeply with movies at all. Maybe it’s the high I’ve been chasing ever since.

• Christopher Robin
• Inside Out
• Toy Story 2
• Toy Story 3
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• Moana
• Big Hero 6
• Coco
• Paddington 2
• Bumblebee

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For this year, I decided to approach this list a bit differently. Instead of comprising only of new releases from this year, this list includes my favorite movie experiences of the year, whether I watched them in a theater or at home, new or old. The idea this year was to the experiences of actually sitting down and watching these films, to those singular impressions that I was left with. There were quite a few of those moments in 2022. Thanks for reading.

Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) | watched November 30 at AMC Naperville 16 in IMAX: Getting to see Evangelion in IMAX was inevitably going to be one of my favorite experiences in any given year. I felt a very curious feeling experiencing this series in a communal setting for the first time. There was a sense of something like collective catharsis in that theater that night. Certainly one of the most notable moviegoing experiences I was fortunate enough to make it to this year (after being quite sick earlier that day) but since this movie just topped my list last year, I thought I'd keep it off the official top 10 to give myself a chance to talk about other great movies.

RRR (2022) | watched November 12 at the Music Box Theatre: Undoubtedly one of, if not THE best theatrical experiences of my life. The packed house at The Music Box Theatre was fully onboard for this maximalist epic. People clapped along to the songs. They booed when the villains appeared onscreen. And they cheered, laughed, and roared through the rest of the three hour runtime. Cinema at its most magnificent.

In the Mood for Love (2000) | watched October 01 at the Music Box Theatre in 35mm: This is a rewatch, but I felt like I truly saw it for the first time this year. All the longing and nostalgia of Wong Kar Wai's masterpiece drifted off that giant screen at the Music Box and hung in the air as we breathed in every beautiful moment of this love long lost.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022) | watched May 14 at the Music Box Theatre: Charming and funny but also unexpectedly moving. A lovely time that tugs at your heartstrings as much as it makes you laugh. My favorite 2023 release.

The Wind Rises (2013) | watched October 16 on HBO Max: The undercurrent of melancholy in this film sets it apart from the rest of Hayao Miyazaki's works even as it retains the bright and imaginative aesthetic that they all share. It's a quiet examination of the junction between dreams and life, between aspirations and realities. Learning that Hideaki Anno voices Jiro added a whole new layer to this. And the music is just so, so good.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | watched April 12 at AMC Loews Streets of Woodfield: The supreme multiversal adventure of our time that is simultaneously more intimate and ambitious than other explorations of this concept that we have been seeing of late. Especially cathartic for me.

Nope (2022) | watched July 23 & 31 at AMC Loews Streets of Woodfield in IMAX: It's not quite as immediately digestible as his last two movies, but this film reveals itself to be immensely thoughtful once you look long enough at it. Jordan Peele's most nebulous work thus far is also his grandest technical achievement to date. The sounds of this film linger in your head for days after and some of the shots you see here are truly magnificent, beautiful beyond a doubt.

High and Low (1963) | watched August 12 with a Criterion DVD: This movie is so many things at once: a morally challenging thriller, an incredibly detailed detective procedural, and a hard examination of economic stagnation. Simply terrific.

Enemy (2013) | watched October 11 on HBO Max: Creepy and unsettling. Enemy crawls under your skin and stays there, leaving you with a relentless feeling that something is off right up until its last hair-raising shot. Remarkable how color-grading and music can turn Toronto into such a Kafkaesque hellscape.

La Llorona (2019) | watched August 05 on Shudder: An excellently constructed horror film that brings together a centuries-old tradition with more recent atrocities to incredible effect. Powerful and unnerving and relevant.

Wildlife (2018) | watched September 18 with a Criterion DVD: The gorgeous color grading and stark American landscapes make this movie often feel like a painting come to life. There's a banality to the gradual disintegration of the family at its center that makes it feel all the more tragic, as if these bonds were never going to last.

Honorable Mentions
Titane (2021)
Prey (2022)
Barbarian (2022)
Decision to Leave (2022)

And a few more...
Turning Red (2022)
The Empty Man (2020)
Fresh (2022)
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Le Samouraï (1967)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)
Kimi (2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

• RRR
• In the Mood for Love
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• The Wind Rises
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Nope
• High and Low
• Enemy
• La Llorona
• Wildlife

Honorable Mentions: Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, In the Mood for Love, Bones and All, Belle

• Drive My Car
• Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
• Nope
• RRR
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• White Noise
• Little Women
• Bodies Bodies Bodies
• Lamb
• Shiva Baby

My favorite 10 narrative shorts that I watched in 2022. I need to explore this medium more in the future.

Best (and only) documentary short: A Night at the Garden (2017)

• Love, Death & Robots: Jibaro
• Love, Death & Robots: Night of the Mini Dead
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• Portrait of God
• The Windshield Wiper
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Two
• Let's Eat
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Three
• Zen - Grogu and Dust Bunnies
• Kids

2022 marked an interesting turning point in my relationship with the MCU. I think I've become less precious about it and am willing to look at it from a more holistic perspective.

The franchise as a whole seems to have settled into a comfortable stasis while it sets the board for the culmination of its Multiverse Saga. On the one hand, there were more new projects than ever, enough for me to make this list of MCU entries that I watched for the first time this year. On the other hand, a lot of it has felt rather inconsequential, existing as another cog in this ever expanding machine. Lately, the main issue plaguing the franchise is weak, CGI heavy third acts that undercut the often solid character work and better, earlier set pieces of these movies.

I still enjoyed myself with all these projects to various degrees but I've found that I've also started tempering my expectations going in. It'll be interesting to see if all this ends up coming together in the coming years. The output this year has been one terrific miniseries, a pair of good specials, a handful of movies ranging from pretty gold to mostly decent, and two very uneven shows.

• Ms. Marvel
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Werewolf by Night
• The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• Spider-Man: No Way Home
• Thor: Love and Thunder
• Eternals
• She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
• Moon Knight

• Spider-Man: No Way Home

  at AMC Classic Dubuque 14

  with Jamie, Landon, Austin, Michael, Kevin, Caitlin, and Chris

• Licorice Pizza

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Lillian

• Drive My Car

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Lillian

• The Batman

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Lillian

• Princess Mononoke

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Lillian

• Everything Everywhere All at Once

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Jeong

• Memoria

  at Gene Siskel Film Center

  with Lillian

• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

  at AMC Randhurst 12

  with Kevin, Austin, and Caitlin

• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

  at Music Box Theatre

  with Lillian

• Men

  at AMC Streets of Woodfield 20

  with Lillian

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A rather abridged spooky season this year. Movies are ranked based on how much I enjoyed them this time around. Some rewatches really smacked (Annabelle, Coraline) while others weren’t quite as good as I ed them being (Doctor Strange, Zombieland). Also found a few new solid pics.

The only genuine dud was the disaster that is Halloween Ends

• Annabelle: Creation
• Zombieland: Double Tap
• Midsommar
• Werewolf by Night
• Coraline
• Lamb
• 1922
• Zombieland
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• Halloween Ends

• Star Wars: Visions – The Village Bride
• Star Wars: Visions – The Ninth Jedi
• Star Wars: Visions – Lop & Ochō
• Star Wars: Visions – The Duel
• Star Wars: Visions – The Twins
• Star Wars: Visions – Akakiri
• Star Wars: Visions – The Elder
• Star Wars: Visions – T0-B1
• Star Wars: Visions – Tatooine Rhapsody

Good night.

Good morning.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

• Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
• Belle
• The Father
• Flee
• No Time to Die
• Pig
• Red Post on Escher Street
• Shiva Baby
• The Suicide Squad
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Older films, rewatches, shows, etc.

Also really good: Star Wars: Visions

• Horimiya
• PlayTime
• One Cut of the Dead
• The Lighthouse
• Incendies
• WandaVision
• Violet Evergarden
• Hawkeye
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

• Flee

  Chicago - Virtual

• Ascension

  Tribeca - Virtual

• Searchers

  Sundance - Virtual

• In the Same Breath

  Sundance - Virtual

• A Glitch in the Matrix

  Sundance - Virtual

• The Worst Person in the World

  Chicago - Virtual

• Petite Maman

  Chicago - Virtual

• Broadcast Signal Intrusion

  Chicago - Virtual
  
  

• Misha and the Wolves

  Sundance - Virtual

• Cryptozoo

  Sundance - Virtual

Other programming:
- Kingdom: Ashin of the North
- Resident Evil 2 (2019)
- What We Do in the Shadows
- Squid Game
- Back 4 Blood

• Poltergeist
• Saint Maud
• The Amusement Park
• Werewolves Within
• Freaky
• House
• The Blob
• Malignant
• Broadcast Signal Intrusion
• Halloween Kills

• Death And The Lady
• Soft Animals
• 3 geNarrations
• Affairs of the Art
• I am a Pebble
• KKUM
• Are You Still Watching?
• Blush
• Mum Is Pouring Rain
• Little Forest

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The pandemic has definitely been an interesting time for movies. I think I've gotten more particular about what I watch, especially as I've picked up other interests. This list of movies is all the films I've seen between my last time in a movie theater (to see Onward) and getting my COVID vaccine. Looking forward to getting back to the theater this summer!

• The Master
• Candyman
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
• The Platform
• Bacurau
• Knives Out
• Shirkers
• The Wicker Man
• 3 Idiots
• 1917

...plus 164 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Bacurau

  Kino Now

• Sorry We Missed You

  Kino Now

• Lucky Grandma

  Kino Now - Music Box

• The Wolf House

  KimStim

• Yes, God, Yes

  Vimeo

• Collective

  Music Box

• Another Round

  Music Box

• Minari

  Film at Lincoln Center

• Red Post on Escher Street

  21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020 by Japan Society Film

• Shiva Baby

  Music Box

Favorite listed first, then ranked alphabetically
Best Shorts: 24 Frames per Century, Cerulia, Marooned, No Crying at the Dinner Table, O Black Hole!, Sad Day

Moviegoing in 2020 has been… different, to say the least. Never would I ever have imagined that a year would where I only saw twelve films in a theater, but here we are. So many movies have been delayed to next year, a sad but sensible move. That communal experience of watching the latest blockbuster or festival offering with a packed auditorium is dearly missed. At the same time, this pandemic has ushered in many positive changes as well, acting as a catalyst for many shifts that I’m sure would have eventually happened anyway. The availability of smaller (often international) indie films for virtual screenings has allowed me to have much easier access to them than I would have in more traditional times while also still allowing me to my favorite local theaters (shoutout to the Music Box Theater in Chicago!). Online film festivals have allowed me to see an array of short films that I probably would otherwise not have paid any attention to.

These shifts in how movies are available have also led to some changes in what I want from them and how I think about them. A personal push to watch more documentaries this year has been immensely successful, helping me gain a much stronger sense of appreciation for this class of film that I had only dabbled in on rare occasions before. Much like the evolution that came with fully getting into the horror genre a few years ago, I feel like this dive into docs has both opened up a whole new world of films for me to explore while also changing what I look for from “conventional” features. It has also been quite interesting to see how the lines between TV and cinema have been blurring at an even more pronounced pace this year. Traditional ways of defining and separating these two things don’t seem to hold up much in this increasingly digital world. Who knows what this annual top ten list will look like in a decade. I will be incredibly curious to see where this all goes.

But all that lies in the future and this list is a celebration of the past. It’s been a year full of great movies. Whittling down my favorites to just ten was (as usual), a challenge. The vacuum left by the exodus of nearly all of the big releases planned for the year has allowed many smaller films an opportunity to shine, which I am thrilled about. This diffused environment has allowed me to create an even more eclectic list for 2020 than in years past. It’s a list I’m quite proud of, one that I would not have seen myself making as recently as three years ago. Maybe it’s due to the kinds of films that I naturally gravitated towards these past few months, but it felt like a particularly gentle year at the movies, full of warmth and appreciation for the little things. These ten films below are the movies that provided some respite from this cold, weary year. They capture my year in film perfectly; a snapshot of where I am and where I hope to be going.

The Assistant | An truly discomforting horror movie where the evil lurks not in the unusual or fantastical but instead in the ordinary. This film’s ability to channel the ambience of a familiar office atmosphere into a psychological drama that slowly unwraps itself as Jane goes about her day is infuriatingly disturbing.

Gunda | A simple and pure documentary. Gunda is a reminder that the human experience represents a very limited fraction of the many different consciousnesses that inhabit and engage with our world. The lives that pigs, cows, and chickens see themselves living have never been as simple as what we would like to think they are. This film never attempts to explain the lives of its subjects, but instead leaves you to wonder.

Little Girl | My favorite film of the year. This brief window into the life of seven-year-old Sasha is deeply moving. Her joys and sorrows are intimately captured, carrying you along as she works her way through a world that isn’t ready for her. I cannot put into words how much I loved this. One of the most human films I have ever had the pleasure of watching.

The Mole Agent | As unassuming and charming as its subject, The Mole Agent is the cinematic equivalent of a warm bowl of soup. It is as humorous as it is heartwarming. Starting out as a ridiculous undercover espionage complete with handrail assisted chase scenes, it gradually turns into a smile-inducing reminder of the importance of human connection.

Nomadland | A quiet portrait of America through the eyes of s McDormand’s wonderfully acted Fern. It’s both a comionate character study of a woman who can’t and won’t set down roots anywhere and a moving odyssey across the stark landscapes of this country that finds beauty in the ordinary.

Notturno | There is a surreal quality to many of the striking images from across the Middle East that you see throughout Notturno, but this collection of interwoven vignettes is assuredly grounded. It is a haunting and urgent documentary that paints a painful picture of the lives being torn apart by endless conflict.

Soul | If there was ever a year that we needed Pixar, it was this one. Soul tells a wonderfully affirming tale, one that gently reminds us of the breadth of life, of the value and novelty that can be found in each moment every day. Visually, it is beyond breathtaking, easily the most detailed and realized world that this studio has created up till now. A funny, moving film that softens and nourishes your heart.

Tigertail | This film struck a deeply personal chord with me. It felt validating to see experiences so similar to my own reflected onscreen. It’s a very simple film, but one that also does a remarkable job at capturing the weariness that time and toil takes, not just on your body, but on your soul.

The Vast of Night | A pure thrill ride. It is a simple, recognizable tale, but one brought to life with such crackling energy. Sizzling dialogue, genuinely eerie vibes, and a wonderfully realized analog world full of switchboards, radios and recording tapes made for an unexpectedly terrific time.

The Wolf House | There are so many layers to this beautifully grotesque stop-motion masterpiece. It is an experience unlike any other. The way each scene grows from the previous, often transforming from one art style to another in the process, is simply astonishing to behold. Dark, eerie, and unforgettable.

Honorable Mentions: Another Round, Beautiful Things, Black is King, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Da 5 Bloods, The Dissident, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Minari, MLK/FBI, Palm Springs, The Personal History of David Copperfield, ‘Til Kingdom Come

• Little Girl
• The Assistant
• Gunda
• The Mole Agent
• Nomadland
• Notturno
• Soul
• Tigertail
• The Vast of Night
• The Wolf House

"That's how we're gonna win, not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love." - Rose Tico, Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Another gr8 year of movies! The consistency of quality only seems to have risen across the board, which was terrifically satisfying but a problem for my wallet. Here's my favorite ten movies of the last year, listed alphabetically. Enjoy!

Blade Runner 2049: A sensual feast that utilizes sight and sound as effectively as I've ever felt in a movie theater. Thankfully though, director Denis Villeneuve isn't content with delivering a technical marvel and so Blade Runner comes laced with thoughtful exploration of what it means to live, to love, and most importantly, to be.

Coco: Lord Almighty. Pixar's been on something of a rollercoaster since they started revisiting movies that didn't even remotely need revisiting but honestly if that was a necessary step to us getting this masterpiece, I'd be more than content to sit through as many Cars sequels as is necessary to get more movies as vibrant, joyous, and moving as this. (Also I can't the last time a movie made me cry like this so that in and of itself is a remarkable feat.)

Dunkirk: Deep colors, unexpectedly innovative editing, and Hans Zimmer's unrelenting score propel this film to what may be one of the best endings of all time. A fine return to unequivocal excellency for Christopher Nolan after the beautiful, sprawling mess that was Interstellar.

The Florida Project: There's some movies that exist to transport you away from the headaches of an ordinary life, but The Florida Project instead asks you to dive in and find beauty in the ordinary. Easily the most human film (though it often feels more like a documentary) of the year.

Get Out: Timely, thoughtful, and entertaining. It was honestly wonderful to see this movie get as much attention as it did. Certainly represents a promising new direction for horror movies that hinge more on narrative than technical nightmares.

John Wick: Chapter 2: Though the action is undeniably slick, the real meat of this franchise comes from the strange yet incredibly fascinating subtext of a modern criminal underworld inhabited with ancient "gods" bound by equally ancient rules (LOOK AT ALL THE GRECO-ROMAN STATUES SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THIS MOVIE)(ALSO THAT SCENE WITH JOHN WICK AND COMMON SHOOTING AT EACH OTHER FROM DIFFERENT FLOORS AND NO ONE ELSE NOTICING).

mother!: Never before have I seen a movie commit to itself to the degree that this one did. I came into this movie without having seen a second of footage from it, spent the first half trying to understand what was going on, and the second reveling in the audacity of Darren Aronofsky to tell this story the way he did. Even looking past its brilliant central conceit, mother! is brimming with enough details and interpretations to leave you thinking for days. Probably my favorite of this list if I was forced to pick one.

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer: I was somewhat hesitant to include this one on this list because of its ludicrously long name (that I actually love, but still). Setting that aside, Richard Gere does incredible job bringing Norman Oppenheimer to life, creating a sad and pitiable figure who is simultaneously representative of what people detest about society and reflective of what everyone wishes they can get from it.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Under all of the drama, dark comedy, perfect performances, and molotov-throwing nonsense is a plea for thought amidst a cycle of impulse, anger, and instinct. The fact that that message is relevant says a lot about our world.

Your Name.: Plowing forth with the same kind of boldness that carries a lot of Japanese films to narrative landscapes that an American equivalent wouldn't reach until two sequels in, Your Name hits you with a kind of soft and gentle impact that nonetheless leaves a lasting impression. Great music too! (I watched this immediately before Coco. This probably had something to do with why I was such a wreck afterwards)

AND SOME OTHER STUFF

• Honorable Mention - Star Wars: The Last Jedi: I very nearly included this in my list out of sheer iration for how massive of a game changer Rian Johnson was allowed to deliver within the confines of such an established franchise. Though undeniably a jarring initial experience, The Last Jedi drives the Star Wars franchise to new heights with its incredible exploration of legacy, heroism, and failure, as well as its willingness to discard some of the opportunities for easy fan service that The Force Awakens had teed up. Simply spectacular.

• Other Honorable Mentions: The Big Sick, Call Me By Your Name, The Distinguished Citizen, Free Fire, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, The LEGO Batman Movie, Logan, Nocturama, Spiderman: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok

• Movies that I may grow fonder of over time: The Square, A Ghost Story, The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected, Loving Vincent

• Movies that I haven't watched yet that may have made this list: The Breadwinner, Faces Places

• Can't wait for INFINITY WAR tho

• mother!
• Blade Runner 2049
• Coco
• Dunkirk
• The Florida Project
• Get Out
• John Wick: Chapter 2
• Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Your Name.

The best films released in previous years that I discovered for the first time in 2020.

• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
• Summer Wars
• 3 Idiots
• Madeline's Madeline
• Perfect Blue
• Kiki's Delivery Service
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Shirkers
• Howl's Moving Castle
• Wolf Children

"So when troubles are incessant, simply be more incandescent..."

2018 began as very low time for me. I began the year in a toxic mental trench. I hated my life and myself. The easiest thing to do at that point was to dive into the lives of others and forget about my own. And so I did. Kicking things off with the lovely The Shape of Water, the year began with a pair of wonderfully subversive, mentally-engrossing films in the form of last year's Star Wars: The Last Jedi and February's Annihilation.

3.19 began my first job out of college

Bolstered with boundary-shoving hits such as Black Panther and A Quiet Place (and the decidedly safe yet oddly fascinating Ready Player One), the first third of 2018 was off to a great start.

5.13 attended my graduation ceremony

Then summer churned out spectacles such Avengers: Infinity War, Mission Impossible: Fallout, and Sorry to Bother You. But the movie that left the biggest impression and puddle of tears for me was the quiet, contemplative Christopher Robin (more on that later).

7.14 visited the Indiana Dunes

The typical slump between popcorn season and awards season didn't even bother showing up, with that corridor lined with wildly entertaining experiences like Crazy Rich Asians, A Simple Favor, and Searching flowing directly into a wealth of rich and thoughtful features. The Hate U Give, Can You Ever Forgive Me, Halloween (which was a terrific time at the theater), and mid90s all shook me in their own ways. I also got to catch up on some quality content like Hereditary, Won't You Be My Neighbor, and The Night Comes for Us at home.

10.16 met a best friend

By then, winter was rolling in and things were becoming mellow and I found myself enamored by pleasant, uplifting things. I cried my way through old favorites that I hadn't revisited in years like Inside Out, Kung Fu Panda 2, Up, and the Toy Story trilogy. New movies like Ralph Breaks the Internet and Instant Family left a much deeper impression on me than I think they would have at another time of my life. The end of the year culminated with what may be the best trifecta of comfort films ever began to grace the cinema together: Bumblebee, Mary Poppins Returns, and Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. Brimming with heart, love, and a gentle push to be better, I soaked each of their worlds up and felt that I was in a better place, even if it was just for those moments.

12.26 saw Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse, my final movie in the theater in 2018

63. This was the number of visits I made to the cinema this year and will probably be the most I ever do. The time that I spent at the movies this year, both with the people on the screen and the ones sitting next to me, helped me get through a gray, enveloping mellowness of being lonely and reminded me of the importance of being and of being good. And with that in mind, on I go.

"For your light comes with a lifetime guarantee!" - Jack, Mary Poppins Returns

TOP 10 OF 2018 (listed alphabetically)

Annihilation - A surreal tale of self destructive people journeying into a world of beautiful, unyielding, apathetic change. From the eerie serenity of humanoid flower structures to the chilling scream of a mutated bear, Annihilation stays with you long after its last shimmering light fades to black.

Capernaum - I had the pleasure of seeing this in the main auditorium of the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. Such was the only setting fit for this film that follows a fiery young child as he navigates a broken world left to him by those who should have given him a home and a playground. Heartbreaking, important, and a reminder of the power of movies as a microphone.

Christopher Robin - Never before has a movie wrecked me like this one. I made it about three minutes in before the waterworks began and never stopped. A perfect mix of nostalgia, charm, and heart rescues both its lost protagonist and its audience from the Heffalumps of the modern world. And God knows I needed saving this year.

The Death of Stalin - At once absurd and unnerving, it is remarkable that this movie manages to be so damn funny given the current state of the world today. Gave me some of the best laughs I've had in years.

Eighth Grade - I walked into this movie thinking it was a documentary for some reason and it kind of turned out to be one: not of a person, but an era. It will probably (rightfully) go down as one of the most refreshingly awkward movies ever to be made, but it would remiss to not to address the pure, genuine braveness that is the true driving force of this lovely, lovely film.

The Favourite - There are so many rabbits in this movie. Seventeen of them, in fact. And they will all scamper around your mind as you try and digest everything this film about love, power, and racing ducks has to say after it begins with that first, illuminating exchange. "Love has limits." "It should not."

Ralph Breaks the Internet - The Internet shenanigans here are all good and fun but what makes this sequel shine is its willingness to show all the love and pain that comes from the single best thing in the world: friendship. An unexpected musical number from Alan Menken is just the cherry on top.

Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse - This is peak animation, peak superhero movie, peak storytelling, peak cinema. The technical prowess and thematic richness on display here are unlike any other film in existence. Miles Morales is the hero we need. Go and see it again and again and again.

Three Identical Strangers - There are some moments where you could be forgiven for forgetting that you were watching a documentary. This twisty, jaw-dropping tale on the wonders of the mind and the importance of the heart is like no other.

Widows - As a resident of Chicago (okay, the suburbs), it is often exasperating to see this city reduced a skyline, a bundle of statistics, or a shiny bean-like monument. This beautiful drama digs deeper than that with a rich, sleek dive into the demons and angels of this complicated place.

Honorable Mentions: Avengers: Infinity War, Blindspotting, Blockers, Crazy Rich Asians, Halloween, The Hate U Give, Hereditary, Isle of Dogs, Paddington 2, Roma, Shoplifters, You Were Never Really Here

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Annihilation
• Capernaum
• Christopher Robin
• The Death of Stalin
• Eighth Grade
• The Favourite
• Ralph Breaks the Internet
• Three Identical Strangers
• Widows

2019 was actually really good for me. I think I’ve started to open up and discover myself in new and exciting ways that are helping me reach a point closer to where I’d like to be as a person. At the same time, I also messed up massively with a very dear friend of mine and my qualities that led to this happening are definitely still things that I really need to work on. I’m hoping that by the time I’m making this list for 2020, things with her will be in a better place than they are today. But on to the movies.

This was a stupendous year for movies. Quality all around, both in some of the big releases I’d been looking forward to and the smaller ones where I can never how I found out about them. Moving out to Chicago definitely has had a hand in this. I’ve gotten to visit the lovely Music Box Theatre a few more times now. I was also fortunate enough to attend the Chicago International Film Festival, where I found a lot of awesome films (and people) that have definitely broadened my tastes even more. I think this year, there were two big overall themes for me (movie-wise).

The first is that movies are a language. This realization came from something one of my lovely coworkers said. This idea has really taken hold and has helped me see past some of the stuff I typically find myself looking for in a film and be able to appreciate it more as a kind of message in a bottle about someone’s experiences in life. A lot of times, I think I get caught up in trying to “discover” the singular message of a movie and how all its working parts are put together to drive that message home. In doing so, I think I overlook the fact that movies are ultimately about people and that there doesn’t always need to be a big, grand message.

The second is that movies are here to share the stories that we have, not just the ones we want to tell. Two films, Honey Boy and The Souvenir, helped show me this. Both are wonderful, yet deeply personal movies about some incredibly dark experiences that their makers have gone through. Seeing their bravery in putting such intimate and vulnerable stories of their actual lives up on the screen for all to see really made me think about the therapeutic power of film. Even just seeing these movies left me with a strange, peaceful feeling. I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like for Shia and Joanna. Simply wow.

At the end of this year, the lesson for me both in life and film is the importance of growth. There’s plenty of great examples of where I’ve seen this in films this year (almost all of them, to be honest), but the one giant one is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve been gifted with having grown up with these films and in doing so, grown up with the characters. As I’ll talk more about later, it has really been wonderful to see that these heroes actually change. The narrative richness of their stories shows the value of such things. Actual change is hard and it takes time and is work but it is most definitely worth it. But with change comes loss. Loss has always been difficult for me but as I grow up, I’ve realized that I need to become more comfortable with it if I am to get where I’d like to go. It’s gonna be hard, but I think I’ve got this.

My Ten Favorite Films from 2019 (listed alphabetically)

AVENGERS: ENDGAME | It’s really been rather bizarre that in the five years I’ve been making these lists, not a single entry from the MCU has made it on. I’ve loved what Marvel has done with Phase 3 of their series with some bold narrative decisions, terrific character arcs, and razor-sharp humor. It all leads to this, the grandest, most spectacular “ending” that I could ever had hoped for. At times, this didn’t even feel like a movie so much as some unclassifiable cultural experience. It has been a real treat to see the thought and care that has been put into these characters and seeing where they are now versus where they began earlier in the decade. That kind of patience is I think what has driven this series to such a successful place. Endgame is filled to the brim with satisfying and rewarding scenes, much like the movies before it, but it was all especially heightened given that nothing had been revealed going in, making every twist and turn and even the basic plot a surprise. It’s an incredibly crafted adventure, juggling so many different characters and stories with such confidence and finesse that even if you’re somehow able to take a step back from the spectacle for a moment, you are still left impressed. No other minute I spent in the theater this year would come anywhere close to matching the sheer exhilaration of that final battle charge. What a fucking moment. "Avengers… assemble."

BOOKSMART | A wild odyssey on the last night of high school that makes a stop at every possible imaginable faction of the student body that is funny as it is heartfelt. An electric cast brings life to this manic, energetic jaunt. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever anchor the whole thing with a terrific portrayal of friendship, a bond that remains the beating heart of this movie as it leapfrogs from one wild locale to another. Each and every one of the ing characters, even the ones that appear for no more than a single scene, leave an impression, usually one that has you doubled over with laughter. It’s a trip well worth taking.

THE FAREWELL | As the son of first-generation Asian immigrants, it was really awesome to see a story that can only happen when your extended family lives across the world in their own culture. Having grown up watching American movies that preach Western values and then grown up some more and started exploring Chinese movies that share Eastern ones, it was unexpectedly refreshing to see something in the middle that genuinely probes what happens when those two ideologies come into with each other. The result is a kind and caring film that (like many of the other entries on my list this year) induces both laughs and sighs. It’s also a fascinating look at how director Lulu Wang uses her own life experience to spin a tale that feels incredibly accessible and sincere.

JOJO RABBIT | A movie following a young boy in Nazi and his imaginary friend named Adolf Hitler could have easily gone wrong, but in the hands of Taika Waititi, it turned out to be one of the year’s best. It is outrageously funny when it wants to be (which is frequently), yet never fails to hammer home its strong yet simple message that war and discrimination and Nazis are wrong. There’s no better moment that captures this than the scene where Jojo and fake Hitler, who up till this point was delivering laugh upon laugh, are sitting in the kitchen discussing Elsa, the Jewish girl who Jojo has discovered living in his crawlspace. Hitler suddenly spits out a rant warning that a German soul must never be corrupted by the likes of her. The theater went dead silent. To me, that moment alone captures the spirit of this movie and gives me some hope for our society in this angry, angry time.

JOKER | Everything about this movie that can be said probably has been at this point. Joker is far from a perfect film but for me that does nothing to detract from the feelings it left me with. Sitting in the Music Box Theater and hearing every gasp and laugh from a full house audience was a phenomenal experience. The nervousness and tension that I felt myself watching it was also something I hadn’t felt in a long time. As a whole, things were left just ambiguous enough for Joker to become the kind of mental candy that I was able to chew on for a few weeks. At the end of the day though, it wasn’t the theorizing or analysis or attempts at social commentary that left a true impression on me. It was Joaquin Phoenix’s singular performance as a mistreated, murderous clown dancing in bathrooms, down stairways, and in asylums. This dramatic embodiment of a cesspool of rage, delusion, musicality, and an inability to emote in healthy, productive ways shouldn’t be seen as a character to be inspired by, but rather one to learn from.

MONOS | Monos starts off a top of cloudy, alien mountain, leaving you, like the titular band of guerilla fighters, suspended in an uneasy state of calm. From there, machinations and circumstance draw the story down the mountain and into madness, following an inevitable natural path much like the water cycle that leaves you back where you started but with a very different feeling. It’s a lush and rich experience, with sights and sounds unlike anything I’d ever felt before. Words alone can’t capture the rush and sensations that this magnificent film left me with.

PARASITE | Bong Joon-Ho’s latest deserves every bit of the acclaim it’s been getting. Focused, relevant, genre-bending, funny, shocking, incisive, but above all, entertaining. Much like the beautiful house that it largely takes place in, Parasite is a perfectly constructed narrative populated with a fascinating bunch of characters that move and slide along and against each other, connected yet separated, coexisting yet mutually destructive. It’s a movie about class but it’s also a movie about people and how we sometimes can become what we pretend to be. But also sometimes not.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE | Each year as I make these lists, there usually ends up being one or two spots towards the end that I struggle a lot with filling. This year, I bounced between the epic, surreal journey of 1917, the dry wit of The Art of Self-Defense, the timeliness of Les Misérables, and the bittersweet heart of Toy Story 4. In the end, I reread the review for Portrait of a Lady on Fire that I wrote after I saw it and I knew that this was the one. It's a beautifully realized love story. Noémie Merlant and Adèle Hanael give a pair of beautiful performances, showing how powerful a brief glance or a twitch of a hand can be. It's a story that knows that while moments of love will inevitably end, the feeling of love is something that lasts forever.

THE SOUVENIR | The Souvenir is fascinating both in its conception and its construction. Films based off of real-life events are rarely of much interest to me because they generally seem to be more occupied with telling what they think is an exciting story rather than an actual one. But The Souvenir, based off of director Joanna Hogg’s own experiences, comes across much differently from all that. It feels authentic and unglamorized, offering up a slice of actual human experience, no matter how messy or painful it is. The way the movie is structured also enhances this experience. There is never a strong narrative thread tying the entire thing together. Instead, it is a series of vignettes and moments, trusting its audience to fill in some of the events between them themselves. The result is a quiet, meditative reflection on an experience that I can only imagine caused immense and lasting heartache when it happened. Now it’s a heartache for us to share.

US | A little girl enters a beachside mirror maze and stumbles across some unseen horror with an expression of sheer, unbridled terror. In that moment, I knew I would love Jordan Peele’s latest masterpiece. Us manages to entertain and unnerve with incredible effectiveness. The imagery here, from a fireside reunion to eerie corridors teeming with rabbits, is simply breathtaking. There are so many small details that take on new significance once the deep social horrors brewing beneath the world of this film rise to its surface. But Us doesn’t just paint an exquisite picture; it animates it with a questioning of the notion that ordinary society and its citizens are innocent of the injustices they are blind to. Many scenes leave a genuine chill in your heart, sometimes because of what they show on screen, but more often because of what they say about the titular characters. The year’s best.

Honorable Mentions: 1917, The Art of Self-Defense, Honey Boy, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Show, The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, Les Misérables, Little Women, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Svaha: The Sixth Finger, Toy Story 4

• Us
• Avengers: Endgame
• Booksmart
• The Farewell
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Monos
• Parasite
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• The Souvenir

I'm putting a more concerted effort into watching Black stories and listening to Black voices, as I have a lot to be educated on in that regard. I also realize that this will be more of a marathon than a sprint, so this will be a growing list of both fresh finds and old favorites.

• Black Panther
• Just Mercy
• Da 5 Bloods
• Les Misérables
• 4 Little Girls
• Do the Right Thing
• Black Is King
• I Am Not Your Negro
• MLK/FBI
• Bad Hair

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Gunda

  New York Film Festival

• Nomadland

  Hamptons International Film Festival

• Little Girl

  Chicago International Film Festival

• Finding Yingying

  Chicago International Film Festival

• Pilar

  Chicago International Film Festival

• The Chimney Swift

  Chicago International Film Festival

• Homeless Home

  Chicago International Film Festival

• The Fabric of You

  Chicago International Film Festival

• Step Into the River

  Chicago International Film Festival

• Tie

  Chicago International Film Festival

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

• The Lion King
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Blockers
• Captain Fantastic
• Honey Boy
• Leave No Trace
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
• A Quiet Place
• Searching
• Finding Nemo

• Citizen Kane
• Logan
• Nebraska
• RED
• The Great Beauty
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Up
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• Coco
• Sunset Boulevard

Ranked.

This was a solid bunch of shorts. Definitely helped me gain a lot more insight into the flexibility of film when removed from the traditional feature length format. Even the ones I didn't like so much have helped inform my taste in what I look for and expect from a short. Definitely a great experience.

• 24 Frames per Century
• Marooned
• And Then the Bear
• Cerulia
• Happy Machine
• Circus Person
• Bird Karma
• The Procession
• Monster God
• Bilby

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Runner Ups
Loving Vincent
Amadeus
Le Choc du Futur

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• The Distinguished Citizen
• The Square
• Shirkers
• Adaptation.
• The King of Comedy
• Black Swan
• Faces Places
• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show

• No Crying at the Dinner Table
• Mizuko
• Modern Whore
• Daddio
• Broken Orchestra
• Blocks
• A Period Piece
• Hiplet: Because We Can
• Dirty
• Soft

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Some houses. Many spooky.

Runner Ups: Home Alone, The Little Stranger, Jumanji, Knives Out

• Poltergeist
• The Cabin in the Woods
• Crimson Peak
• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• A Ghost Story
• Beauty and the Beast
• Annabelle: Creation
• Parasite
• Up
• mother!

• Moana
• Ponyo
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• The Intouchables
• My Neighbor Totoro
• Paddington 2
• Up
• 3 Idiots
• Won't You Be My Neighbor?
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

on what to do next

• The Souvenir
• (500) Days of Summer
• Marriage Story
• Toy Story 4
• I Lost My Body
• A Ghost Story
• A Monster Calls
• Big Hero 6
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Honey Boy

• Nocturama
• In Fabric

"Luke, we are what they grow beyond."

The 2010s have been an enormously consequential few years for me. I have literally grown up in this decade. A big part of that growth has come from the movies I watch. Movies have been a lifelong ion that hit a turning point right around the beginning of this decade. I really began exploring film on a deeper basis and figuring out my own tastes. Since then, I have grown to really love movies as little capsules of human experiences and human feelings. The stories they tell, marvels they show, and values they embody never fail to brighten my day and transport me to some wonderful world outside of my own. But beyond that, the thing I’ve grown to love most about them is that they can change. I had a very different idea of this ten years ago. Back then, I thought of a film as a singular experience, one that you could revisit over and over again for the same familiar feelings. And therein lay their value. Unlike people or life, you could always count on a movie to be itself no matter if you were happy or sad or anywhere in between. As such, I was always looking for new ones, hungry to find something new to be ionate about. Since then, I have (thankfully) managed to slow down and in doing so, revisit some old favorites. Oftentimes they’ve felt like a nice cup of hot chocolate on a cold day, something that warms your heart and soul. Beyond that though, they’ve demonstrated that movies are alive. Movies don’t just exist on their own in a vacuum. They live and breathe context: the context that they were made in, that they’re shown in, and that they’re felt in. And that is beautiful.

Here are a few of the many wonderful films of the last decade that have gotten me this far.

Inception: This is probably how a lot of this got started. Inception was very likely the first movie where I came away thinking more about the themes and ideas behind it rather than the actual images and events that we see. I being so incredibly intrigued that I felt the need to try and explain the film to my dad who was in the theater with me while the film was still rolling (thankfully he told me rather early on that this was unnecessary). I chose to watch this again at the end of the decade and it is incredible how well it has held up. Even now, there's no single image in a movie that I think will have a place in my heart the way a paper fan in a dream-world safe has had for the last ten years.

Kung Fu Panda 2: This was a movie that I saw once in theaters and then didn’t see again until fairly recently. One big thing that I was excited to see was the villain: Lord Shen, a beautifully animated peacock that brought an exciting level of darkness to the bubbliness of this franchise. After I finally got around to seeing it, the thing that struck me the most about this particular character was how miserable he was. Bound by old demons and stuck on a self-destructive path of hate. This film really drove home the importance of being good.

Avengers: As terrific and groundbreaking of a film this was, the biggest takeaway for me from this was the awesome theater experience I had with it. My dad and sister came with me and we ended up with seats at the very top of the theater. Near the climax, when Hulk gives Loki the beatdown of a lifetime, the entire audience erupted in cheers and applause. Hearing all this joy fill up a room full of strangers is still something that sticks with me today as a reminder of the unifying power of movies.

The Babadook: Horror is definitely a new face that popped up this decade. I’ll get into that in a bit three entries down, but it has been an immensely rewarding genre for me to finally have come up with the courage to explore.
The Babadook is a perfect demonstration of why these sorts of movies are so good at scaring us. Tapping into the suffocating terror of depression (something that thankfully we’re seeing a lot more on screens big and small), this quiet little film isn’t the scariest movie but it certainly helped me see some of the issues I face in a new, top-hat-wearing light.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Another theater experience of a lifetime. I went to see this in IMAX in the Streets of Woodfield with my good friend Austin on a sunny Saturday morning the weekend this came out. The theater was lightly populated but what a time it was. Even before the movie itself had started, a preview for the then Zootopia featuring a particular sloth had the whole room crying with laughter. This continued on for the next two glorious hours. A truly fantastic time.

Big Hero 6: The first time I saw this, the most memorable thing was Baymax’s ridiculous fistbump. This had me guffawing in the theater for a solid minute. Seeing it again, I was almost shocked at how well of a movie about grief Disney had crafted. Overflowing with heart and comion, this has become one of my go-tos in a sad spot.

The Conjuring 2: Credit where credit is due; the movie that I think truly began my full immersion into the world of horror flicks was the magnificent Poltergeist, which I saw at a Halloween Party back in 2015. Going from there, the next big milestone came when I saw The Witch in theaters. That movie, while also excellent, turned out to be a little too sophisticated (or maybe it was mercy) to give me the baptism by jump scares that I was expecting. It was only later that year that my dad and I, largely due to a dearth of other good movie options, went to go see this. My wishes were fulfilled, I had my fingers plugged in my ears for a quarter of it, and it was a great time.

Inside Out: Yet another emotionally mature pic from Disney. Much like Inception five years earlier, this helped bolster my fascination of the mind (a fascination that ultimately resulted in one of my two majors: psychology). But beyond, that, Inside Out is just such a damn good movie. Pixar at its finest.

Crimson Peak: I had the fortune of seeing this at Eberfest in Champaign with Guillermo del Toro attending in person. It was the first time I’d been to a screening with a filmmaker whose work on hand to discuss it afterwards. The audience was engaged and entertaining, reacting in ways that I would never have imagined people would to such a morbid tale. The director provided some awesome insights and unpackaged a lot of the thought and care that went into it. Very eye opening and a great experience, one of my favorites from college.

The Wailing: I think I stumbled upon this one by accident, which just goes to show how many amazing movies are out there waiting to be discovered. Exquisitely crafted, with moments of genuinely funny humor peppered throughout a dark yet lively yarn. There are so many fascinating threads and details that every rewatch brings up something new. Seen three times at this time.

La La Land: La La Land was a movie that I had heard a great deal of hype about but had not seen a second of footage from before seeing it at the theater. The first few songs drew me in real quick but the next hour or so kind of lost me. Then the epilogue hit and I walked out of the theater with a curious feeling. I absolutely loved the soundtrack (still listen to it on occasion) but the movie itself I felt a lot more mixed about. It still ended up on my Top 10 list that year, mainly out of a feeling that it would be something that I liked more upon a rewatch. Still, I wasn’t entirely confident in my choice and briefly removed it from the list for Silence, another excellent film from that year. I ultimately reversed that decision and at the end of the day, I think my intuition was correct. It wasn’t until years later that I got around to watching La La Land again, but once I did, having gone through what I had with Demi, it just broke and warmed my heart a thousand times over.

Arrival: As a communications major and a big fan of sci-fi, this was a great time. A thoughtful, relevant film about the importance of talking and of learning from each other. It really drove home the importance of this simple social function that I’ve always struggled with. Hearing Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight for the first time (especially given the way it was used here) was also quite a moving moment.

Norman: Here is another curious film that snuck its way on to a Top 10 of the year list whose significance didn’t fully dawn on me until later. I’m usually not one for films centered entirely around a single person, but Richard Gere does such an incredible job bringing Norman Oppenheimer to life. He is at once annoying, clingy, endearing, and sympathetic. He taps into a very specific strain of loneliness, one where he is kept surrounded with people who he has more of a desired connection with than a genuine one. In doing so, it says a lot about loneliness as a whole. As someone who’s frequently felt this, Norman hit close to home.

Moana: The water in this movie nearly made me cry, a fact which I have expressed loudly to some friends over a bottle of wine. Moana is probably my favorite Disney princess and the movie that she delivers is one that is beautifully crafted. Rich storytelling, magnificent music, and a cast of endearing characters makes this an experience I’ve revisited many, many times. Even if that Tamatoa is such a strange aesthetical departure from everything else.

Silence: As I mentioned above, this one briefly held a spot in my Top 10 list for 2016. I watching it for the second time with my family at home and being so moved that I went ahead and made that revision on the spot. I’ve since decided to use the Top 10 lists as a time capsule for my thoughts and feelings at the beginning of each year rather than a definitive list of my favorite films for any given year and so changed this back. All that drama aside, Silence is probably my favorite film from Martin Scorcese, just based on its scale, readiness to tackle the complexities of Christian colonialism, and ability to actual provide some thought-provoking notions on the idea of faith itself. Growing up, I went to church and the media presented there largely sidestepped anything ever remotely resembling uncertainty, so this film was a definite gust of fresh air, even if my own faith has fallen on the wayside in recent years.

The Florida Project: A movie of moments. Every single scene is rich and entertaining and so full of life. This genuinely feels like a documentary at times. The level of craft and care put into this is simply mind blowing. The first time I rented it, I ended up watching it twice before the rental period was up. A few months ago, I was lucky enough to catch a screening of this presented on 35 mm film with Sean Baker in person at the Music Box Theater. Watching it on the giant screen with a roomful of people (literally the entire auditorium was filled) was incredible.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi: The Last Jedi has come to mean a great deal to me. I got into the Star Wars franchise through LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game. As such, the first six movies were never really movies to me. They were just culturally embedded experiences that came as a given. The aesthetics were always the main draw for me, as I considered the overall themes somewhat basic, for better or for worse. It really just always boiled down to the good guys, who were good, fighting the bad guys, who were bad unless they became a good guy, in which case they simply jumped to the other side. This movie changed all that. By deconstructing many of the tropes and themes of Star Wars, Rian Johnson managed to create a masterpiece that both affirms some of the long-held messages of this saga and infuses it with new, powerful ideas. The idea of what it means to be a Rebel or a Jedi or a hero is all enrichened and with it, the franchise as a whole. I will never get tired of heaping praise on this wonder of a movie.

Christopher Robin: The movie began and about five minutes in, I started crying and didn’t stop until the credits were rolling. I don’t even really know why. I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like that again. But somehow it happened.

Annihilation: This one I was really not expecting to be great but it turns out I was completely wrong. A deep and insightful exploration into the destructive relationship between a system of change and broken people who refuse to accept it. This provided me with mind candy to chew on for weeks if not months.

Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse: Vibrant, rich, and wholly unique. This is really such an awesome movie and a very promising precursor for all the things that remain to be explored with the medium of animation. I ended up seeing this FIVE TIMES in movie theaters, a record that I doubt will be broken soon (if ever).

• Inception
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• The Avengers
• The Babadook
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Big Hero 6
• The Conjuring 2
• Inside Out
• Crimson Peak
• The Wailing

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First time participating in one of these showdowns! It was a fun time digging through all the films I've seen in the last decade and picking out this batch. It's surprising to find memories attached to some of the entries on this list that have ittedly faded even from my own memory. So many of these films fall in the category of "good but I probably need to see it again to understand it's full meaning." Maybe it's time to see some of these again. It's always good to and to revisit. Here's my list!

• The Painting

  A simple but beautiful tale. The animation is phenomenal and unique. I this being one of the first movies I watched after getting Netflix

• Tangerine

  A wild tale of a night. The Florida Project got a lot more attention (thankfully) but Sean Baker's earlier film should not be forgotten in the slightest. It is just as good of a time.

• King Jack

  A sweet movie. Low key yet memorable

• Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

  A truly unique entry in the world of animation. It's rare to see stuff quite as dark presented in this particular medium, but that's also what makes this stand out.

• Look Who's Back

  A frighteningly relevant experiment that foreshadowed social movements now at the forefront of our minds.

• Captain Fantastic

  Very high highs and equally low lows. Viggo Mortensen has never been better. A joyful, human ride.

• mother!

  I had no idea what this was about going in and it turned out to be all I could have hoped for and more. Blending environmental themes within a historical religious context within a household setting leads to one of the most wholly original movies I've ever seen.

• Nocturama

  Consumerism + terrorism. A dark and memorable movie set entirely in a department store at night.

• The Distinguished Citizen

  A very interesting look at the nature of artistry and its relation to the context from which it came.

• Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons

  My other favorite Stephen Chow movie, Kung Fu Hustle seems to found new life as a Chinese classic/meme machine. Journey to the West restrained itself a tiny bit when it came to the sheer ridiculousness and instead focused on finding a heart, mainly through the phenomenal Shu Qi, that made it an instant classic for me.

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Unranked, Ordered alphabetically
Honorable Mentions: The Big Short, Spotlight, Dope, World of Tomorrow
It's already almost April but I've only just finally gotten around to seeing everything that I thought would have a chance of making this list. This year I've decided to eschew rankings, to make this list of movies a collection rather than a competition. It was a good year for film, though a little bottom heavy, with a vast majority of the good stuff coming in a big glut towards the end of the year. Ultimately, there was a mix of good movies from indies to blockbusters to Oscar bait. Anyways, here are my picks. Anomalisa took the cake (though it's position at the front of this list is a result of its name rather than its quality). It was unlike anything I'd seen before and I sincerely doubt I will see anything like it in the future. Inside Out, The Martian, Room, and Me & Earl & The Dying Girl were some other especially strong standouts for me. The second half was largely a tossup between the ones that made the cut, the honorable mentions, and a few that didn't make either. All were great and it essentially came down to how I was feeling at the time of this writing. Anyways, enjoy and here's to another great year!

• Anomalisa
• Inside Out
• Kingsman: The Secret Service
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Martian
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
• Room
• Sicario
• Tangerine
• Taxi

Ranked alphabetically

2016 was actually a pretty stupendous year (for movies, everything else was garbage). Despite a summer that churned out an alarmingly consistent stream of mediocrity, we were treated to a year smattered with great films. The initial draft of this list featured 25 movies, all of which I would have been more than pleased to include on here (last year I was struggling to find enough to meet 10). This is a good kind of problem. The ones that made the final cut are among the boldest, most singular films that I’ve had the privilege of seeing in the time I’ve lived on our little blue dot. If you have yet to check out any of these 10 experiences, I implore you to do so. One can only hope for a continuation of such tremendous entertainment in the years.
More notes and thoughts on the year interspersed throughout the honorable mentions below.
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HONORABLE MENTIONS

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR: a prime demonstration of just how well-oiled of a machine the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become, Civil War aka Avengers 3 juggled the single biggest roster of superheroes that has ever graced our movie theaters to spectacular effect. It was a welcome departure from the most of the year’s other (many) comic book offerings. DC in particular seemed to be doing their best to scrape the bottom of the barrel. A generally bland, uninspired, and overly twisty Batman v Superman was somehow superseded in terribleness by their attempted answer to Guardians of the Galaxy: Suicide Squad. The garbage heap of a movie may well have taken the title of worst movie of the had it not been for Warner Bros. Animation’s adaptation of The Killing Joke. On its journey from page to screen, one of the best graphic novels ever managed to accumulate a prologue featuring a thug named Paris Franz?!?!!??!?!?! that takes up nearly half of the running time, pitiful attempts to justify its R rating, a gay librarian from the ‘70s, and that one scene that looks like it was ripped from the same volume of fanfiction that spawned Fifty Shades of Grey. C’mon DC, get your shit together.

On the other hand, Disney was at the top of it's game this year. Zootopia (THAT DMV SCENE), Moana (THAT FIRST WATER SCENE), and Rogue One (THAT VADER SCENE) were all exemplary in their own way. Keep it coming, Disney.

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE & CAPTAIN FANTASTIC: a bunch of the good movies this year seemed to involve extended sequences where characters romped around in the woods and these two were some of the best examples of that. It’s rare to find films that such hide immense quantities of heart under their lovably ludicrous and cheerfully anarchic exteriors and it can’t be understated just how many more of these we need nowadays.

13TH: there’s really no greater need for truth than now and no movie did that than Netflix’s 13th, a painful, anger-inducing journey down the annals of history, cementing itself as the most necessary film of the year.

LOOK WHO’S BACK: a premise that could have gone terribly wrong instead gave us a timely satire of the nationalist movements raging wildfire all over the globe. I can’t think of the last movie I saw that juggled comedy with commentary this well. It’ll be interesting to see if we get more things along this line now that we have a Cheeto as the president of the United States.

SILENCE: a profound, difficult journey through the intertwined threads of faith, culture, and history. Grand, yet intimate. Unflinching, yet hopeful.

• Arrival
• A Monster Calls
• The Handmaiden
• The Jungle Book
• Kubo and the Two Strings
• La La Land
• The Lobster
• Swiss Army Man
• The Wailing
• The Witch