Tag: best of
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Favorite Films of 2024
Though I usually do a Top 10 with some honorable mentions, once this year’s list of honorable mentions creeped past 10 movies I figured why not just do a full top 20? The more movies the merrier. Here are the 2024 dramas, documentaries, dystopias, debuts, and other delights I dug. (Check JustWatch to see if…
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Favorite Books of 2024
It would be more accurate to title this post merely “Books I Read in 2024” because man oh man did I slack on reading this year. Long gone is my 80+ per year pace (pre-kids, crucially), replaced by not even hitting double digits. There are various reasons for this, but suffice it to say I…
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Favorite Films of 1998
I’m creating my movie best-of lists retroactively. See all of them. Hard to believe my last retrospective list in this series was almost two years ago. But I recently rewatched what ended up as my top two movies on this list and realized I hadn’t done this movie year yet, so here we are. I…
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Favorite Films of 2023
As with last year’s list, I decided to skip the usual pressure to make a top 10 by the end of the year without having seen a bunch of the eligible movies. Instead I took my time, waiting to watch titles as they hit streaming or Blu-ray so I’d have a better shot at a…
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Favorite Books of 2023
I read 15 books in 2023, which is the lowest number since I started keeping track in 2010. A few factors contributed to this, including having a second baby in May and opting more often to watch movies in my free time. So it goes. I’ll get back on the reading train in 2024. Until…
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Favorite Films of 2022
Pretty much every year I’ve done this list (since 2007), I’ve published it soon after the beginning of the year to coincide with the bevy of other year-end lists. But every year I’d end up watching more movies after publishing that would have been eligible and affected my list. So I realized: what’s the rush?…
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Favorite TV Shows of 2022
I realized this year that I’ve pretty much stopped watching traditional TV, i.e. shows with 22-ish episodes per season and an undetermined end date. I’m much more interested in limited series and shows with short seasons—the key being intentional and self-contained ideas from the show and a predictable time commitment from me. Luckily that’s becoming…
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Favorite Books of 2022
Gotta be honest: 2022 wasn’t a great reading year for me. I read 22 books, which was much worse than 31 in 2021 and just barely better than the 18 in 2020. A lot of my potential reading opportunities were either taken up by movie watching, Cinema Sugar, or other leisure activities. Not a bad…
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Top 5 Christmas Movies
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. 1. It’s A Wonderful Life The once and future king of Christmas movies. I could praise a lot of things: the cinematography, the supporting cast, the dramatic depth of Jimmy Stewart’s first postwar performance. But its magic ultimately comes down to Harry’s closing line—“A toast to my big brother, George,…
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7 Hard-Boiled Lessons from Noir Films Old and New
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. These are dark times. It’s tempting to feel that it’s never been darker, that the weight of our modern struggles is unprecedented. But I take comfort in knowing that film noir—a genre that has existed for almost 100 years—has been there before. It’s seen some shit. To show this, I’ve…
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Top 5 Noir Movies
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. 1. Double Indemnity This isn’t the first major noir (fedora-tip to The Maltese Falcon) but damned if it isn’t the genre’s absolute peak: femme fatale, no-nonsense narration, crime gone wrong, investigator on the case. It’s hard to pick Billy Wilder’s best movie but this has to be near the top.…
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Top 5 Horror Movies
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. 1. The Ring Seeing this Gore Verbinski joint in early high school did three important things: it initiated my undying love of Naomi Watts, it showed me how artful scary movies can be, and it scarred me so deeply that I subsequently swore off horror for a long time. So…
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Top 5 High School Movies
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. 1. Brick If you found high school to be a dark, inscrutable enigma with a rigidly enforced social-class structure and impenetrable lingo, you’ll deeply appreciate Rian Johnson’s lean and masterful debut feature that renders adolescence as gritty film noir. A young, sphinx-like Joseph Gordon-Levitt investigates his ex-girlfriend’s mysterious disappearance like…
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Favorite Films of 2000
I’m creating my movie best-of lists retroactively. See all of them. As usual with this silly but enjoyable series, I started by consulting my logbook for all the movies from 2000 I’ve seen. That initial list of 36 films had some pretty easy cuts (Men of Honor, My Dog Skip) and plenty of titles I…
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The Greatest Films of All Time
Recently I thought I should make a list of my top 10 films of all time. Making best-of lists is a hallowed tradition on this blog after all, so why not go for the big kahuna? Because it’s insane, that’s why. As Roger Ebert wrote: “Let us agree that all lists of movies are nonsense.”…
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Favorite Films of 2001
I’m creating my movie best-of lists retroactively. See all of them. We’re now over 20 years away from the films in question. This means my impressions of the ones I haven’t rewatched somewhat recently are encased in metaphorical amber, for better or worse. It also means I wouldn’t have seen a good number of them…
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Favorite Books of 2021
In 2021 I read 31 books. That’s 13 more than my record-low in 2020, so that’s nice. Regardless, my prime directive as a librarian and reader remains to follow my own reading values. Don’t worry about the quantity. Read serendipitously and at whim. Don’t forget fiction. And heed the Pollanian reading maxim. With that in…
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Favorite Films of 2021
In 2021 I only saw three movies in theaters, which is two more than I saw in 2020. A personal historic low, it probably goes without saying. But ultimately I’m just grateful to be able to watch great movies, whether at the theater, on a streaming service, or with a library Blu-ray. To that end,…