BEST MOVIES OF 2018

Blah, blah, blah – movies take ages to get here – blah, blah, blah – do the top 10 a year later. Got it? Good. 2018 was not a vintage year according to some critics but what’s new? Come the end of the year, though, I was kind of in agreement. I hadn’t seen an awful lot that had really blown my socks off. There did seem to be a lot of pretentious, middlebrow stuff getting praised to the hilt for not doing very much. It’s really only this year as the smaller independent and foreign films have trickled through that my impression of 2018 has gone up and I’ve seen new perspectives or really well-crafted films that didn’t force an agenda down my throat but allowed me to find the agenda and treated me like a grown-up.

NEARLY THE GREATEST FILMS OF THE DECADE

I am currently trying to find the time to catch up with a ton of movies from 2010 onwards with a mind to actually doing a ‘Top 100’ list. Inevitably, that won’t happen for a while, what with this year’s films being drip-fed through 2020. Even now, though, it’s bloody hard to concertina it down to a mere hundred. As it stands, Letterboxd tells me I’ve seen 561 movies from this decade. Obviously, there are vast swathes that can get cast aside but even down in the three-and-a-half star category, there are one or two for which I have a huge affection and want to flag up. The coming decade-spanning list can only reflect my favourites as opposed to any team effort but inevitably, a lot will get squeezed out because there are so many which I think are perfect or as near as dammit. There will still the always the ones that I want to mention favourably but in my heart of hearts, I know won’t make it.

BEST OF 2017

As per usual, this is a best of from the previous year because, here in NZ, we are the last to get most stuff. We are down there with Estonia as far as drip-fed movie releases go. I’ve decided to do something slightly different this time because I was getting fed up with writing a Top 10, so this time I’ve decided to do the less specific “best of”. These aren’t necessarily my absolute top 10 but they are the movies that have stayed with me the most over the course of the last couple of years. Oh and no – I still haven’t seen The Last Jedi.

BEST OLD BASTARD MOVIES, 2018

Christmas is fucking busy for me this year so I will do a best of 2017 list, as per my usual thing of reviewing the previous year’s movies in full but for now, here’s my list of old movies (for “old”, read 10 years or more) which I have seen for the first time this year.

TOP TEN: 2016

So, 2016 was a bit different as I started my new weekly job as film critic for Radio One in Dunedin but still, even having seen a vast amount more movies that year, there were many that were drip fed through to us, here in New Zealand, throughout 2017. So, for a more fully rounded annual best of, I’ve once again waited til now to give you my absolute favourites that really stuck out from the pack! Plus, there are a bunch of honourable mentions afterwards that I wanted to flag up:

TOP TEN: 2015

As per usual, I’ve ended up catching up with a lot of last year’s films this year. With that in mind, I’ve collated a top ten of 2015, 12 months after the fact. Also, my top 10 on Radio One was films I have seen this year, regardless of their original release date whereas this is a separate thing, catching up with the films of 2015 as they’ve dribbled through to NZ. Here we go:

TOP TEN of 2014

Last year, I wrote an early blog detailing my 10 favourite films of 2014 but only then realising that there was only 9 films I’d seen. Being in New Zealand (even in the UK), the bulk of cinema releases get to the rest of the world in the following year, so in a break from tradition and with plenty of distance between here and the interminable same things being said in end of year lists, here I dust off that same old shit for a go-round a year later when you’ve forgotten!