After a tough 2020, 2021 was an improvement. Mostly because vaccination against COVID-19 gave a way out of the pandemic, and life started to come back to normalcy. One ancillary effect, the one that is relevant to this space, is that movie theaters reopened and distributors restarted to schedule a more constant and diverse flow of films. It was also a reminder of how much the theatrical experience matters; this goes beyond the quality of image and sound, which generally […]

Categories: Lists

Needless to say, unless this is being read centuries in the future by someone with diminished historical sense, that 2020 was an unusual year, to say the least. Considering all that has happened, in so many dimensions, all over the globe, film-watching habits are among the lesser impacts of the pandemic, but films are what this space is about, mostly. My local lockdown hit early in March, when “Filmgoing 2020” was about to start; as a result, a tiny minority […]

Categories: Lists

It is a good thing the idea that this list should be limited to only ten titles was abandoned long ago, as 2019 was yet another year filled with great films that came from a great variety of origins, which is always a plus. This plurality of voices matter. That’s not to say there was not one major source of anxiety as the year went by, however. As the streaming services are producing more and more top-shelf films, odds grow […]

Categories: Lists

The year of 2018 (and its ancillary weeks in 2019 as far as this list-building exercise is concerned) was intense, in a film-watching sense. Both by force of circumstances and a specific drive, I never watched as many films as in this particular window. One effect of this is neither unexpected nor unwelcome in the slightest: my horizons were broadened further, as I watched a more varied slate of films. It has been a step in the right direction; the […]

Categories: Lists

Some of the commonly accepted definitions of Year are “a period of time equal to one year of the Gregorian calendar but beginning at a different time” and “the period of about 365 1/4 solar days required for one revolution of the Earth around the sun”.

Categories: Lists

I think it’s time to embrace the fact that I’m utterly unable to come up with just 10 films. It’s an arbitrary number, one that is neither too large nor too small, that is traditionally used just because most people have that number of fingers in their hands. Well, more often than not I have more than 10 films in my head that I feel should be a part of a list such as this one. 2016, thankfully, was one year […]

Categories: Lists

2015 was a peculiar film-watching year. Up to June, if a list such as this one had to be written, I would have to leave it blank. Of course there was a “best film”, out of everything I had watched, but not one of those earned, for me, a spot in a list that was supposed to celebrate the quality of the films of the year.

Categories: Lists

This one must be the last of such lists to hit, since 2014, after all, is long gone. A quick word explaining why may be in order, so bear with me.

Categories: Lists

The task of making a list of favorite movies is always a thankless one; it is a common enough question and fixture, but such list is generally dynamic as one re-watches and re-evaluates films. Some years in particular, it becomes very hard as there are just too many films that must be mentioned. 2013 is one of those years. Thankfully, no matter how traditional it is, the number 10 is just an arbitrary, round quantity, so I feel perfectly comfortable picking […]

Categories: Lists