2023 Movies Ranked

Posted on January 25, 2024 by jaycluitt

Remember when I’d have this list and my new year’s resolution post published on the first few days of the month? What blissful days they were, sat up typing on New Year’s Eve with my wife scrolling Instagram next to me, Interstellar playing in the background turned up loud so the dogs wouldn’t get terrified by the surrounding fireworks. Alas, things change and time marches on, but it brings with it a whole load of new films every year. Here’s my ranking of all the 2023 new releases I’ve seen so far (a significant selection have been watched in 2024). As always, as I’m in the UK I’m only counting films that were released in the UK in 2023, hence why some of these films might count for earlier years for some of you and, whilst I have seen the likes of Poor Things, American Fiction and The Holdovers, they weren’t released here until 2024, so you’ll find their placements around this time next year. Let’s go!

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2023: What Kind of Year Has It Been? Plus Plans for 2024

Posted on January 25, 2024 by jaycluitt

I’m still here! And so are you! That’s awesome, welcome back. To give you an idea of time, I’m starting writing this on Sunday 7th January, fully a week into the new year. It’s unlikely I’ll finish it today, and with the aim of posting this as soon as possible (before February would be great) I’m going to keep things comparatively brief this year. As years go, 2023 wasn’t the best. In my personal life there were some massive dips (the only grandfather I’ve ever known passed in February, the first truly significant death I’ve experienced in well over two decades) and I don’t think my year ever fully recovered, but we’ve all kept going, life goes on, and the rest of the year saw us take some wonderful trips back to Scotland, see some shows (Back to the Future and Groundhog Day are both excellent) and welcome a new nephew into the family. None of this sounds like it has anything to do with the resolutions I set this time last year, or my plans for the future, so let’s curtail this and move things along, shall we?

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The Lighthouse

Posted on March 19, 2023 by jaycluitt

Two men must spend 4 weeks together maintaining a lighthouse on an isolated island in the late 19th century. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? There’ll be some butting of heads as their personalities clash and cabin fever sets in, but eventually they’ll either become friends, lovers, or they’ll kill each other, but however it turns out, the story will be clear and everything will be resolved, yes? After all, the film is called The Lighthouse, and the primary job of a lighthouse is to reveal what would be otherwise hidden and dangerous, so calling a film The Lighthouse when it’s actually a near-impenetrable sack of confusion would be ludicrous!

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2022: What Kind of Year Has It Been? Plus Plans for 2023

Posted on January 30, 2023 by jaycluitt

Hi there, reader! Happy New Year! Or Happy one-twelfth of the way into the New Year! Wait, January can’t already be almost over, right? Bloody hell. OK, see, this is what I’m going to talk about. I’ve had the majority of this post written, images and links set up, just waiting for me to finish it for a couple of weeks now, and I just haven’t been able to kick it out of the draft airplane and let the… the… the parachute of publication open up? No? That doesn’t make sense, but so be it. I could’ve posted this and moved on to edit a podcast or write an actual damn review, but instead I’ve kept thinking about how to finish this one or, more accurately, how to start it with this ultimately inconsequential opening paragraph. So that’s what I’ve decided is going to be the theme of my 2023, getting on with it. Not sure what to do on a morning where I’ve got lots of things that need doing? Just sodding pick one and start. Even less sure what to do on a rare day where there’s nothing urgent? Go for a run. Watch a film. Read a book. Go back to sleep. Whatever, just do it. None of this undecided, introspective nonsense, that just leads to stressing out and panic attacks. As such, here’s my update on how 2022 went, and my plans for 2023, compared to last year’s post, which can be found here: 2022 goals post. Not sure what to do now? Read it, silly!

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2022 Movies Ranked

Posted on January 14, 2023 by jaycluitt

Hey, remember me? I used to write here from time to time, but haven’t been very active (on here at least) since I transcribed the lyrics to the end-credits song of a bad shark movie you’ve probably never seen. Well I’m back for my annual new year posts, starting off with ranking all the new releases I saw in 2022, and I’m keeping up the tradition of being a little late, and seeing a few more 2022 releases since I started this post, and the longer I leave finishing this post the more films I’ll need to add to it, and so on. Anyway, also as always there’s a bunch of new films I didn’t get to for various reasons that I’ll hopefully get to in my 2022 wrap-up post, but currently I’ve seen 70 new releases from last year (up from 57 in 2021). Here’s a list of some of the films I haven’t seen yet, but hope to soon, although many of them are available streaming to me right now, and have been for a while, so the fact that I still haven’t seen them yet doesn’t bode well: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Troll, The House, The Northman, Studio 666, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Bones and All, Elvis, The Woman King, Decision to Leave, Brian and Charles, Triangle of Sadness, Aftersun, Living, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, The Worst Person in the World, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Emily the Criminal, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Violent Night, Vengeance, Bros, Avatar: The Way of Water. That’s enough of the films I haven’t seen, here’s the ranking of the 70 I did, starting out with a couple that I actually haven’t. You’ll see what I mean. Oh, and as always this ranking is true as of today, and will almost certainly be different tomorrow. That’s the case more so this year than ever before as 2022 had a lot of films I really liked, but no particular one that was immediately deemed better than all the rest.

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Shark Bite lyrics and music video

Posted on June 1, 2022 by jaycluitt

First off, a little back story. As you may know, I’m one of the hosts of Deep Blue Sea: The Podcast, where we’ve covered the entire Deep Blue Sea trilogy one DVD chapter at a time, and are now watching Deep Blue Sea-adjacent films, one a week, with the vain hope that eventually Deep Blue Sea 4 will be released and deemed good enough to spark a box office shattering franchise. Essentially we’re hoping it pulls a Fast & Furious, but with significantly more sharks and an at least equal amount of Kurt Russell. Recently we covered the 2011 movie Shark Night, directed by David R. Ellis and starring Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan and Donal Logue. That film features a music video at the end of the credits (on the US release, it appears to have been removed in other countries) featuring the majority of the cast rapping a song inspired by the events of the film. It is exactly as glorious as that sounds, and you should absolutely go watch it here. For our 100th episode of Deep Blue Sea: The Podcast we recorded a special episode digging deep into the song and music video but, in my research, I found that the song’s lyrics were not transcribed anywhere online so, being the hero that I am, I now present to you the lyrics for Shark Night‘s Shark Bite:

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2021: What Kind of Year Has It Been? Plus Plans for 2022

Posted on February 8, 2022 by jaycluitt

Believe it or not, but this is actually my new year post, regardless of the fact that it’s being posted partway into the second month of the year. Wait, the second month of the year? As in, this new year began OVER A MONTH AGO?!? Whilst my mind continues to recover from reeling over the ongoing and what should be by now highly anticipatory passing of time, let’s get into how last year, 2021, panned out for me. As usual, we’ll be doing this in terms of the aims I set out at the start of last year.

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2021 Movies Ranked

Posted on January 6, 2022 by jaycluitt

Here it is! My annual ranking of all the new releases from the previous year! As usual this list is comprised of films that were released in the UK in 2021, so there are some films that were released in other countries in early years. Also, as usual, I didn’t see every film I would have liked to, so here’s a list of films that would have been eligible but that I haven’t seen yet, and that I’m going to try and watch as soon as possible: Nobody, Coda, The Matrix Resurrections, House of Gucci, Minari, The French Dispatch, Pig, No Sudden Move, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Shiva Baby, West Side Story, The Green Knight, Petite Maman, Another Round, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Eternals. Of these, I’m most annoyed I didn’t see Ghostbusters: Afterlife and The French Dispatch in the cinema, they just came out during a particularly busy period for me and I had to choose between them, Last Night in Soho and Dune. I have no excuse for why I haven’t seen Coda, Minari, No Sudden Move, Another Round or The Green Knight, as they are all available for me to stream right goddamn now in my own goddamn home, but I still haven’t done so yet. Anyway, enough of the films I didn’t see, here’s my list of the films that I did: