Here it is, my annual ranking of all the films I saw from the previous year. As always this is based on UK release dates, and I gave myself until the end of January to circle back on some of the films I wasn’t able to see first time around. There’s a list at the bottom for films I’ve still not seen but would like to, and feel free to leave more suggestions in the comments.
Continue readingThey say it’s a bad idea to compare yourself to others, especially the lives others share on social media, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. For reasons I won’t go into just yet, I could describe my 2024 as having been pretty terrible, but when I put it into perspective against the year some of my friends have had, it starts to look not all that bad. What do you mean you’ve had a year filled with hospital trips and chemotherapy? You’re living in an active war zone? Too many of your weekends were spent attending family funerals? My current living situation is temporarily a little uncomfortable and now I have to take a tablet if I want to eat cheese!
So yes, my year could have been better, but it also could’ve been a whole lot worse, and I’m grateful for just how bad a year some of my friends had, so mine may appear better in comparison. So, how did my year go? If you’re new to these annual posts, I’ll be taking a look back at the plans and resolutions I made this time last year, laugh raucously at how few of them I accomplished, and then make some more wildly implausible plans for the coming twelve months. Let’s get to it!
Continue readingRemember 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!
Continue readingI’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?
Continue readingHi 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!
Continue readingHey, 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.
Continue readingBelieve 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.
Continue readingHere 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:
Continue readingAnother year is over, and for this I’m sure we’re all grateful. I’ll go into more detail with how 2020 treated me personally in a future post, but for now it’s time for the annual listing of every new release I watched this year, from worst to best. It’s a shorter list than previous years at just 39 new releases (as always, bear in mind these are UK releases, so there’s a fair few films many of you would consider 2019 films on here), so I’ve also listed some shorts/TV specials, and listed my top 10 new-to-me, non-2020 films at the bottom too.
Continue readingHappy New Year! It’s a new year (it’s not a new decade, don’t get me started), so let’s take a look at everything that happened to me in the past twelve months. Those of you who just follow my exploits on the blog will be forgiven for assuming that I’ve been in a coma. I haven’t, it’s just that, like pretty much every year, I started out on a fairly average trajectory and rapidly spiralled into doing nothing, but that’s only here, what about everywhere else? Well, I think the best way to look at this will be to run through my resolutions from 2019: Continue reading
Life Vs Film 