Saw the remaster of Yi Yi in the theater for the 25th anniversary and that movie has everything. It's graceful and expansive, uninterested in anything tidy, instead giving us the chaos of life with everything entangled in and rhyming with everything else.

I saw All That Jazz for the first time this year and I've thought about it every day since.

Network. I was familiar with the film's famous speech before, but seeing it in the context of the film, and how relevant it is in today's times, hit like a truck.

I legit think it’s CLASS OF 1999. Dystopian schools filled with student gangs that end up having to fight automoton teachers whose military-grade programming turns them into killing machines? One of whom is played by Pam Grier? Art. Goddamn art. What a midnighter blast.

THEY ALL LAUGHED, Bogdanovich’s most rigorous *and* his loosest and loopiest. A film that pushes screwball plotting into a nearly avant garde tangle, leaving you to just soak in the vibes. John Ritter’s performance is a miracle. And by the end you find yourself unaccountably moved.

Inside Llewyn Davis. Perfectly conveys what it looks and feels like to be deep in pursuit of something —a warm winter coat, a few bucks, a place to sleep, artistic fulfillment and connection, love, contentment, a lost cat, etc.

This is the secret point of all of this! And if anybody wants to make a letterboxd list out of it, that’d be swell 🖤

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES. An absolute masterpiece: focused, gentle, elegiac. Such love amid such loss.

Hopscotch (1980) Walter Matthau on the run from various security services because he's releasing all their big secrets. He's smart in a Doctorish way and has Glenda Jackson as his confident and foil. Only found out about it because of the Criterion edition and wish I'd grown up with it.

Hoop Dreams!! Good and evil, love and hate, success and failure, vice and virtue - all in two Chicago households, all on the basketball court

PARIS, TEXAS. You watch a movie like that and you thank whoever or whatever you usually thank for things for the existence of movies.

Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. Emotional longing manifests itself in surreal and musical movie magic. It's incredibly sad that such an amazing filmmaker had to die so young. One of my favorites.

The Straight Story, which I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades and still brought me close to tears. There’s just this overwhelming sense of kindness in the film that makes the viewer want to be a better human.

Separate Tables (1959), for moral maturity.

YI YI DEEP COVER THE DEVIL'S BATH NOTORIOUS PEKING OPERA BLUES WALKER EVE'S BAYOU CITY ON FIRE JOHNNY GUITAR THE APPOINTMENT ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST MY DINNER WITH ANDRE HANGOVER SQUARE MCCABE & MRS.MILLER THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER

THE BLOOD SHIP (1927), which I have been wanting to see for more than a decade and it lived up to the hype! The hype, of course, being a bloody and decadent seafaring revenge tale.

Crossing Delancey, a movie that made me romantic for New York

Night Moves Don't Bother to Knock Mona Lisa The Company What Lies Beneath Light from Light Kindred Dead Mail All the President's Men McCabe and Mrs. Miller The Serpent and the Rainbow Dead and Buried Good Time What Lies Beneath

Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, which I’ve meant to see for years & finally did. It’s not influenced by Terence Davies & Ken Loach, it uses their tools to make something new, personal, & specific - maybe the most assured & mature debut I’ve ever seen, one of the best British movies of all time

It might be CODE UNKNOWN. boxd.it/alPfqJ

If I can only pick one that's not a Kubrick film I'm always going on about: W.C. Fields' 1933 short film A FATAL GLASS OF BEER is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and maybe it's the world's first postmodern film, the way it continually draws attention to its own lack of realism.

I finally watched Sorcerer this year, and it absolutely delivers. Unique storytelling, incredibly tense moments, absolutely nails the ending.

The Taking of Pelham 123, original 1974 version. perfectly paced movie, absolutely no fat on the narrative

Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station. Criterion release. Just a stunner.

The Long Good Friday (1980): the film that gave us Bob Hoskins, who anchors a plot with an enthralling, historically informed spin on the "gangster trying to go straight" trope. featuring a rapturous, heart-pounding score as well as an all-time twist ending

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, which took me by surprise because I tend to bounce pretty hard off Carpenter. Loved the dream sequences and the precise mix of setting and surreality

Blow Out because it's a movie about making movies and an exploration of political corruption. Also because it takes place in Philadelphia and showcases John Travolta at his finest.

Zerograd (1988) is my movie to beat for ‘discovery of the year.’ A nightmarish comedy about the fall of the Soviet Union. Surreal, funny, sad, at times beautiful. I’m sure a lot of the cultural references went over my head but what an experience!

BAD AXE from 2022. A documentary that follows an immigrant family trying to keep their restaurant afloat in rural Michigan during COVID and Trump’s first term. Sadly, it still feels very relevant. You desperately wish we would have learned some lessons and come out the other side better, but alas…

Sunday in the Country by Bertrand Tavernier You read that title, and you instantly imagine a mood-and you’re right but you’re so wrong too! Yes, It’s full of tenderness, beauty but also so much ENERGY, dancing through times invention, regret, bitterness. It’s a peaceful and angry film,

Was genuinely awestruck by THE SWIMMER this year as a wild, surreal, riveting, film with probably Burt Lancaster's best performance

Sticking to first time watches, likely a tie between Wanda (such great performances and tone) and The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (completely gobsmacked by something I’d never heard of). Second time watches: The Long Day Closes, which is simply a masterpiece.

The "Why" of #1 should speak for itself — it's Ozu. It's just about perfect. But all of these have been memorable. I suspect I'll go back to HEDWIG and THE NOVELIST'S FILM repeatedly — can't stop thinking about them.

MIKE'S MURDER. Didn't expect something so deeply compromised by the studio to still be a devastatingly bleak neo-noir about men vanishing in the early AIDS era.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) followed closely by The Seventh Seal (1957). Both of them affected me deeply in different ways. I love a film that leaves me wanting to read 400 pages of scholarship about them once they're over.

finally saw BELFAST, MAINE this year which just instantly feels like one of the most consequential American films ever made. i could’ve stayed in that world for another 4 hours.

Barry Lyndon, because of the candlelight, the tunes, and making an entire-ass three-hour movie about a guy who just kinda sucks* is 🤌 *-thereby qualifying as an everyman

I was saving All That Jazz for a special occasion. Turned out that special occasion was finally getting COVID for the first time. Watched it half-delirious with a fever, not sure if my head was spinning from sickness or awe (it was the latter). The chutzpah it takes to make that film!

Sunset Boulevard. Basically a horror film about getting old, which is something I can relate to more and more in the 30-odd years since I first saw it

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Think of a proto-John Wilson documentary about how people use plazas. It's a short film based on a scientific survey about what makes a used, and therefor GOOD public space and how to make them better. All of the glory of urban living in 50 minutes or so

first time: NASHVILLE (‘75) One of the five best movies I’ve ever seen toggling over two dozen characters, and the only ones that are better are also directed by Altman. It’s a poetic epic about America; a poignant, often very funny hangout movie; and the music’s great.

Our Little Sister Feels like Kore-eda’s take on Little Women. Forever having the wind gently knocked out of me by his capacity for building empathy out of human complications.

I made it a point this year to watch a lot of older movies I’ve never seen before so this is really hard 😅 But I loved Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope enough to add it to my Letterboxd top four so I guess I’ll go with that. The suspense I felt watching it was unmatched.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. I work in harm reduction, and art vs. activism are often regarded as though they’re at odds. This is a beautiful story about what’s possible when the two intersect.

Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR Kazuo Hara’s 1987 documentary THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON Both fall under the heading: How the fuck did these get made? And to see them for the first time during the first year of Trump’s second term, I found them particularly vital.

Frank & Eleanor Perry's Last Summer (1969). Every performance is great but Catherine Burns manages something beyond description as Rhoda.

35mm print of Out of the Past at the Brattle

I finally got round to watching Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) back in January, which I loved: great performances and the filmmaking is infused with such love for the medium. There’s a transition from top hat to train funnel which made me beam.