STROHLTOPIA

Our recent visit to Italy was a long time coming. Angela is a painter with a background in art history, and I am something of a food enthusiast. She had never been to Italy at all and I had only been to Venice. She hates sun and heat and I hate crowds, so we decided to go in January. Overall, I think this was the right call.

The cons: a number of restaurants and gelato places in Bologna were closed for a post-holiday break (coming in February instead would have made a difference here), and a large number of gelato places were closed in Florence. Pretty much everything in Rome and Napoli was open. Two of the hotels we stayed at were undergoing renovations, which was loud during the day but brought the price down and didn’t affect us very much. Some museums had partial closures, but generally nothing we cared about seeing. It was cold in Bologna, but mostly the weather was comfortable.

The pros: way, way, way fewer people. In Napoli and Bologna there were almost no other tourists around. Florence still managed to be annoyingly crowded in the touristy areas but I can only imagine how hellish it must be in the summer. Rome was fine aside from the Vatican Museum (which is apparently always at full capacity) and the Colosseum (which is ok as long as you prebook and go early in the day). The Trevi Fountain and the surrounding area were generally crowded and totally packed on weekends, but I didn’t enjoy that part of the city much anyways (full of instagrammers, luxury boutiques, bad food).

People will tell you that it’s hard to find a bad meal in Italy, but this was not my experience at all. Overall, I would say the food was hit or miss (and of course I did a lot of research in advance). Like most places, you can’t take recommendations from random people and expect them to reliably pan out. In Bologna, for instance, a trusted friend relayed a recommendation for Trattoria di Via Serra. I asked the hotel manager to call them and make a reservation for us and he flew into a rant:

“NO VIA SERRA. It is booked for two months. I know Via Serra. Is popular only because of TripAdvisor. On this street alone there are five restaurants that are just the same. Via Serra is far from city center. You should go to Biassanot. It’s very good. Biassanot!”

This sounded plausible to me in as far as I do believe that TripAdvisor and other online rating aggregators can tend to be reverse predictors, so I let him book us for Biassanot instead. But we also decided to walk over to Via Serra just before they opened and try to walk in for lunch. He was right about one thing (and only one thing): they were indeed booked out for weeks. But they keep four bar seats open for walk-ins and we were able to have lunch. Reader, it was tremendous. They served us some of the best food we had on the whole trip, and the rest of the menu was impressive (lots of snail symbols indicating the use of high-quality products certified by the Slow Food Alliance). Biassanot, on the other hand, was abjectly terrible (think lamb chops cut to very unevenly and served grey and well done, low quality charcuterie for premium prices, etc.). Biassanot was one of the most expensive meals we had the whole trip and easily the worst. To add insult to injury, we were seated next to a table of posh Brits who spent the meal pretending to know a lot about wine and repeatedly thanking each other for coming along on holiday.

The overall culinary winner was Napoli by a long shot (I’ll Anglicize the other cities but calling Napoli “Naples” just feels wrong). The abundance of extraordinary (and inexpensive) pizza and sfogliatelle is hard to compete with. Every city/region had notable highlights, however. I’m not going to do a complete recap, but will instead make some overall comments for each area and highlight the places that I’d recommend without qualification.

Bologna

Lots of closures in Bologna so I didn’t get to try a few promising places (like Grassilli). Contrary to what your hotelier may tell you, I would be highly suspicious of crowded places in the center of town.

Trattoria di Via Serra

Book far in advance (you have to call, but they speak English) or show up early to walk in. Totally worth it. The menu is representative regional food done extremely well with high quality ingredients. It’s a little bit of a walk from the city center but very doable.

Mò Mortadella Lab

Inexpensive lunch place with two locations. Made me moan with pleasure in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, embarrassing Angela. With mortadella this good, I think it’s more embarrassing to not moan. This is a can’t miss in my book.

Florence

I was the least impressed overall by the food in Florence. It’s very meat-heavy, and I’m sure if you shelled out big bucks for a thick dry-aged steak you could get a pretty good one, but that’s not really something I’m interested in. The problem I have is that the secondi are generally just piles of sliced meat or offal in sauce with nothing whatsoever to balance them. There are side dishes (“contorni”) on the menu but little effort is made to coordinate them with the mains and they are generally just potatoes or greens. The greens are usually watery and unsalted. It’s just not what I want with a big pile of offal. I want some damn pickles— something bright to cut through the richness. It wasn’t till Rome (see below) that I was actually offered something desirable as a side dish.

My favorite sit-down place in Tuscany was not in Florence, but rather in Siena (an excellent day trip):

Enzo e Sonia

We walked by this place and my spider sense went wild. I announced to Angela: “Good food here! I am having an intuition!”

Indeed it was so good (and the couple running it was so charming) that after having a terrific lunch I insisted at the end of the day that we hang out in the coffee shop across the street until they opened for dinner and then take the late train back. Beautiful food, warm hospitality. It’s the kind of fantasy dining experience you hope for when you plan a trip to Italy.

By far my favorite meals in Florence proper were inexpensive street food:

Panini at Semel

Can’t miss. This place is amazing. The paninis are five bucks and I ate three of them in ten minutes (venison with mushroom, cacio with truffle and pear, and anchovy with fennel). The guy slinging them is an old school icon, and when he asked me what I thought I gave him a big, enthusiastic chef’s kiss and blurted out every Italian superlative I could come up with, which pleased him greatly.

Sergio Pollini Lampredotto (aka Tripperia Pollini)

Around lunchtime in Florence you’ll see many of the tradesmen working in town head over to the lampredotto stands for a sloppy sandwich or a cardboard tray of stew with bread on the side. Lampredotto is part of the cow’s stomach, braised and served either in a tomato broth or with a salsa verde. Most stands also have stewed tripe. Pollini is the most famous stand and I liked it very much. Tender lampredotto with bright, spicy accompaniments. Angela isn’t the world’s biggest offal eater and even she was happy to wolf down a large portion. The guys who run the stand were a lot of fun as well, and very friendly. They gave me some stickers to advertise them in Montana. This was a five dollar lunch that I liked better than any of the more expensive restaurants we ate at in Florence.

Rome

Overall, we ate very well in Rome. It was still hit or miss, but there were some very solid hits.

You can throw a baseball and hit a good gelato joint, but I would recommend going out of your way to hit Gelateria Fassi, which was probably the best gelato we had the whole trip and is in a lovely building with very high ceilings (thanks to Sara Protasi for this rec). For a cheap bite, the ubiquitous pizza al taglio is generally very good (our favorites were hot slices at the crowded Roscioli bakery and the cold burrata-broccoli at the comparably crowded Il Forno Campo de’ Fiori). Suppli are consistently good, but heavily dependent on freshness. My favorite by far were at Suppli Roma, but they were much better piping hot on a busy Saturday than they were midweek, when they have a chance to sit around and cool down. Lots of places do a carbonara suppli, but here they actually put an entire yolk in the middle. And they offer a variation of cacio e pepe with candied lemon peel, which I much preferred to the unadorned version. Also would highly recommend Testaccio Market, where you’ll find clustered together a very nice cheese counter, a couple pizza al taglio places and the famous, unmissable panini place Mordi e Vai.

Another major highlight, which you absolutely should not miss, Is Love – Specialty Croissants. They are (believe it or not) very close to the Vatican Museum, and it would be sheer folly not to stop on the way there. They have exquisite Italian and French pastries—as good as I’ve had anywhere—and also world class espresso. Try the single origin espressos. They are so well-prepared that I stayed and ordered every single one of them (pleasing the barista greatly). Most of the espresso you’ll find across Italy is low quality and burnt, but along with this standout spot I also had terrific espresso at Marigold (thanks, Autumn) in Rome and a very good pourover at Ditta Artiginale in Florence (thanks again, Autumn).

We had a bunch of sit-down meals in Rome, and I would recommend two places highly:

SantoPalato

I almost skipped this because I was skeptical of the “updated classics” concept. Very glad I didn’t because this was some of the most thoughtful food I’ve had in a long time. I loved everything we were served except my rigatoni with goat ragu. The ragu was boring and the rigatoni was considerably more al dente than I prefer. Angela’s pasta e fagioli, on the other hand, was exquisite— easily the best version of this dish I’ve ever had, with a rich, complex broth and perfectly cooked pasta and beans. The pigeon dish was a masterpiece, and the only time in Italy I was served a pickle as an accompaniment to a main course. The breast was served rare with hazelnuts, jus, and pickled pumpkin, while the leg was served on a purée of sweet pumpkin and topped with a purée of the organs. There was also a strange and delicious breaded meatball of braised oxtail with a sauce of peanuts and lovage. I realized too late that they are famous for their carbonara, but it’s made with the same rigatoni that I found undercooked and the woman at the table next to us seemed disinclined to finish hers. It’s a great restaurant overall, and you should certainly make a reservation if you visit Rome.

La Tavernaccia Da Bruno

This place is a little off the beaten path and not cheap, but it’s reachable by bus and it’s great. It’s more as traditional than SantoPalato, and everything they served us was excellent. The menu was thoughtful and I overheard the servers steering other tables towards bright, acidic contorni to balance the meaty secondi. We had a beautiful orange and fennel salad alongside a juicy hunk of suckling pig. The pasta alla gricia was stunning, and probably my favorite pasta of the whole trip.

Napoli

Sweet, sweet Napoli. This is clearly one of the greatest food cities in the world. The pizza is so good and inexpensive and there are so many world-class pizzerias that we didn’t eat much else for dinner (I tried some fritto misto but wasn’t as enamored), though I would certainly recommend hitting a trattoria in the bustling Spanish quarter on a busy Friday or Saturday night for the cultural experience. We ate at Trattoria da Concetta. The scialatielli ai fruiti di mare was exceptional, but otherwise the food was just OK. The vibe, however, was magnificent. The waiters all learned my name and yelled “Matthew! Welcome! This way!” when I got up to look for the restroom. The place was packed with loud Italian families who clapped and sang along with the several street musicians who came in and performed. It was a whole scene.

Before discussing pizza, I want to report on the other god-tier category in Napoli: sfogliatelle. You’ll find great pastry all over Italy, but Napoli is at another level. There are a large number of variations available but for my money you can’t beat the basics: sfogliatelle riccia and sfogliatelle frolla, served hot. Look for a sign that says “sfogliatelle calda” and ask if you aren’t sure. The hot ones are held in a warm oven so it’s not always clear whether they’re available. Right by the train station you can get top notch versions of both at Sfogliatelle Attanasio. Note that Google maps is very wrong about where this place is located. It’s on a narrow slant street around the corner from McDonalds with a red and white “SFOGLIATELLE CALDA” sign. You’re going to be tempted by the decorated sfogliatelle. Trust me, they are not as good. The custard topping is too sweet and the cherries aren’t sour enough to balance it out. You lose a lot by letting them cool down. Stick to the basic hot variety. Both riccia and frolla are filled with a mixture of ricotta, semolina, sugar, cinammon, and citrus peel (usually orange, sometimes lemon). Frolla has a firm shortcrust, while riccia is like a laminated triangle with brittle, crispy layers. I wouldn’t want to part with either. The cinammon can be a little aggressive but usually it’s nicely balanced. I can’t remember which was which, but Mary’s Sfogliatelle did one with orange and very agressive cinnamon and one with milder spice and lemon.

The other pastry that blew me away in Napoli is called fiocchi di neve. You’ll find it here and there, but the original and by far the best version I tried is from Pasticceria Poppella. It’s an airy, soft yeast-risen bun filled with a light whipped ricotta cream. They do get soggy if you let them sit, so I would suggest just housing them right there in the street outside the bakery. There are also delicious pistachio and chocolate varieties, but the slightly savory original ricotta version is perfection.

It’s also very worth trying baba, which is pretty similar at most places. It’s a cake that’s been soaked with a rum syrup. I was hesitant to try it, as I do not consume alcohol, but I saw little kids eating it and decided to order a mini one to sample. The rum syrup is boiled thoroughly enough that I didn’t detect any hint of ethyl alcohol. Take care if this is something you’re sensitive to, but I found them very delicious.

So… about that pizza. I kind of went nuts on pizza. You may be familiar with this ranking: https://www.50toppizza.it/

I generally don’t put much stock in this kind of thing and actively avoid Michelin recommendations unless corroborated by a more trusted source, but this ranking is extremely legit. The good news is that you don’t have to go to Europe to try some of the best pizza in the world. I can confirm first hand that Una Pizza Napoletana in NYC is right up there. It’s a slightly different style than anything I had in Italy; the dough is softer and fluffier, more of a steamed texture, and it has more of a sourdough tang. But hot damn it is excellent. The downsides are that it is extremely hard to get in and you have to share space with some of the worst people in the world. This is the pizza place repeatedly featured on Billions, and it is indeed popular with hedge fund types who have their assistants secure reservations for them or stand on line for a walk in table. I found it impossible to get a four-top reservation (believe me, I tried), and the only way to get a two-top was to spam refresh and book a table within seconds of it becoming available (7am eastern time, I think a month out but I don’t recall exactly). It is possible to walk in but you have to be early. Still, it’s worth it.

In Italy I ate at: I Masanielli di Francesco Martucci, I Masanielli di Sasà Martucci, Diego Vitagliano (Bagnoli), Diego Vitagliano (Santa Lucia), Seu Pizza Illuminati (Rome), 50 Kalò (Napoli), Pizzeria Salvo, and Starita. They were all very good or better. One thing that I found interesting is that every menu has a range of very crispy deep fried options (sometimes stuffed, sometimes sparsely topped—“montanara”-style) that seemed quite popular with locals. Setting aside the fried category, most margherita and marinara pizzas are soupy in the middle (as one expects) but at the very high end places a noticeable effort has been made to protect the light crispness of the crust all the way to the center. (Note that even at these “high end” places a margherita pizza is still around 8 bucks).

I thought about ordering margherita pizzas everywhere to enable an apples-to-apples comparison, but in the end I decided to just order what I wanted to eat, because it seemed silly to limit myself to such a narrow perspective on the category for the sake of comparison. So, I can’t exactly rank these pizzerias, but I can divide them into tiers. I mostly agree with the pizza ranking above, though I did find Seu Pizza Illuminati a bit less impressive than they did. One note, however is that all of these places serve deep fried pasta as an appetizer, and Seu Pizza Illuminati had by far my favorite fried pasta: squid ink lasagna with squid meat. There was actually a pretty clear inverse relationship between the fried pasta and the pizza. My favorite pizza places had my least favorite fried pastas, for the most part.

Top tier: I Masanielli di Francesco Martucci, Diego Vitagliano (especially the Bagnoli location).

Most of the high-end places offer a tasting menu, which is generally a bad value, but it lets you try a larger array of pizzas. The only place I went for it was I Masanielli di Francesco Martucci, where you also get a few slices that are not on the regular menu. It was truly great, and the service was handled very well. They sat the two tables having the tasting menu directly next to the kitchen, so pies could be divided and immediately served at the correct temperature.

I would also include NYC’s Una Pizza Napoletana in this tier, with the caveat that the vibe is much worse. The other Diego Vitagliano location was comparable to Bagnoli food-wise, but the vibe was not as good.

Not far behind, I’d put 50 Kalò. I have no idea about the London or Rome locations, but the one in Napoli had a really nice sourdough tang (more so than any of the other places in Italy) and was overall delightful. It’s a bit annoying to get in and the service is impersonal and rushed (as one expects from places mentioned in recent Michelin guides), but I wouldn’t miss it.

I’m the lower tier, still very good but not quite as exceptional, I would include Sasà Martucci – Pizzeria I Masanielli (which lacked the thoughtful balance and textural contrast of the pies at his brother’s nearby restaurant and had a much less appealing vibe, but did have similarly great crust), Pizzeria Salvo (with nine margherita pizzas on the menu, it’s a little precious for me… the pizza is good but extra soupy and the vibe is pretty bad—in a huge, mostly empty restaurant on a Tuesday evening they sat us two feet from two salesmen having a business dinner and we had to endure every word of their conversation), Starita (more of an old school place—go on the weekend for an incredible vibe but prepare to wait up to an hour to get in), and Seu Pizza Illuminati (crust a little boring, margherita too soupy, fancier options have too many elements not quite singing in perfect harmony).

As a final note, I would mention the local gelato chain Mennella in Napoli. It competes with Fassi in Rome for my favorite of the trip. The texture is at the ideal level of softness and the rich dark chocolate flavor was especially mind-blowing.

I’ve lapsed on updating Strohltopia this year, because I’ve had too much on my plate and I haven’t had much spare time that I felt like spending in front of a computer. A request came in for streaming recommendations, however, and of course I am at your service. As usual, I’ll try to highlight some better known options that I think are due another look alongside more obscure titles.

Amazon Prime

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Norman Mailer, 1987)

For me this is one of the greatest neo-noirs, an extravagantly lurid, riotously funny hothouse fable of fallen machismo that Mailer shot in and around his own beach house in Provincetown. It’s best known for an unfortunate meme that takes an exaggerated bit of dialogue out of context (“oh god oh man oh god oh man….), but reducing the movie to an object of mockery in this way is sheer philistinism. The meme bit doesn’t even rank as one of the top 10 most remarkable scenes. NB, this features an all-timer Wings Hauser performance (the featured image for this post). Tough Guys Don’t Dance is one of my favorite American films of the 80’s.

Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)

Underseen late Billy Wilder. Nice and long, packed with incredible location work, alternately brash and romantic, full of life but never sentimental: it’s something you should absolutely see if you have a liking for Wilder or late style in general. It has screwball energy that reminds me of Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong (high praise). Jack Lemmon is at his best as he walks the tightrope of playing a very unlikable character who one is happy to see find love.

Runaway Train ( Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)

The most undeniable Cannon group action film, featuring peak performances from John Voight and Eric Roberts and based on an unproduced Akira Kurosawa screenplay. It cooks, and I recommend it without qualification to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Even if you don’t think of yourself as someone who likes 80’s action movies, this one deserves a chance.

The Covenant (Guy Ritchie, 2023)

It’s been a minute since we’ve gotten a movie this good about courage and honor and men who live by a code. Guy Ritchie has gone drone happy, and it really makes the terrain come alive. Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim both give performances I can feel in my bones. One of my favorite movies of the current year.

Eye of the Beholder (Steven Elliot, 1999)

A maligned and neglected thriller that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished. It’s one of a kind: a nearly pure psychoanalytic abstraction, where we learn almost nothing about the main characters for the first hour. They are like embodied drives, ricocheting around every corner of the US through insane snow globe transitions. Nothing ever seems quite real, as though we are trapped in McGregor’s liminal consciousness and Eros and Thanatos have control of the wheel.

Netflix

How Do You Know (James L. Brooks, 2010)

An underappreciated masterpiece about the joy of shedding an old identity to make way for a new one. It includes Jack Nicholson’s final screen performance, which goes out on the absolutely perfect note.

Dil Se.. (Mani Ratnam, 1998)

The best thing about Netflix is that it has a large and well-curated selection of Indian films, which until the recent wave of interest provoked by RRR were among the most consistently neglected by American cinephiles. I include myself in that statement. Indian cinema is such a massive constellation that I’ve found it intimidating to approach. This last year I’ve tried to just dive in and explore a good mix of received classics and more outré selections. This is a well-regarded 90’s classic, and it’s something that people without much context in Indian cinema should have an easy time getting into. It’s a big, bold movie with delirious style, romance, mystery, and violence seeping out of every pore.

Eega (S.S. Rajamouli, 2012)

Speaking of RRR, this is one of Rajamouli’s earlier films and an easy slam dunk recommendation. Basically everyone would like this. You might think that a 2 hour 15 minute movie about a guy getting reincarnated as a fly and then seeking revenge would wear out its welcome, but you’d be wrong. Rarely has a movie been so committed to a bonkers high concept premise.

Bulbbul (Anvita Dutt, 2020)

Another title from India, but this time a smaller art horror film. West Bengal Gothic. A rape revenge movie that harkens back to Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion in that it treats the genre as an origin story for the spirit of feminine revenge. Gorgeous, haunted images throughout.

Hulu

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011)

One of the funniest movies of the last 15 years and my favorite Greta Gerwig performance by a country mile. It has been absent from streaming for a long time, so get it while the getting’s good.

Punisher: War Zone (Lexi Alexander, 2008)

My favorite 21st century superhero movie. It’s the anti-Disney Marvel movie, and it shows us what the genre can do when someone steps in and makes an action movie for adults that shirks the excruciating imperative to do preliminary marketing for 20 forthcoming franchise movies. Lexi Alexander’s direction is exuberantly brutal.

Sister of the Groom (Amy Miller Gross, 2020)

Latter day Alicia Silverstone is a new frontier for me, but so far it’s been highly rewarding to explore. This is not for everyone! It’s baggy and abrasive, and doesn’t even try to reign in its narrative chaos. But it’s also the kind of fully sincere low budget production that viewers with a taste for unconventional genre fare need to see. Someone really cared about this, you can tell, and Silverstone lays it all out there. Her performance is over the top, but also vulnerable. I’m hooked, and I’ll watch anything she does in this zone.

Sex Appeal (Talia Osteen, 2022)

DTV romcom/sex movie about a neurotic, over-achieving STEM student who discovers sexual pleasure and falls in love, but not with the guy she expected. Lots of imagination: female pleaure is repeatedly rendered through Esther Williams homage, which is a fun surprise in a 2022 DTV romcom. This is also not for everyone, but I consider it ideal late night viewing.

MAX

Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)

Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse: you can’t go wrong. A very beautiful picture about wanting to stay and live in the world of the movies. One of my favorite Minnellis.

The Rage: Carrie 2 (Katt Shea, 1999)

I neglected this for a long time because I assumed it would be infuriating. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s about as good as a Carrie sequel could possibly be, and I regret that I haven’t been watching it every couple of years this whole time. It is very much a highschool movie of its own era, just as Carrie was, and it even makes contact with the 90’s slasher revival cycle. It’s also recognizably a Carrie movie, but the key is that it’s not simply another movie about a girl with telekinesis who gets bullied. It does have plenty of mean kid venom, and it’s wicked and lurid in a De Palma-esque way, but it’s doing its own thing. This is one of the few legacy sequels to go out of its way not to rehash the original beyond some judicious callbacks and a broader thematic relationship. It really feels more like Carrie in its formal dimension than anywhere else. Shea’s use of rack focus is particularly fitting, and very impressive.

Species 2 (Peter Medak, 1998)

Much, much sleazier than the very sleazy original. If you want kinky alien stuff, this is your movie.

We continue our family tradition of Academy Awards counter-programming. Josh and Izzy are busy this weekend celebrating my niece’s 5th birthday, but they still managed to send me lists, and I even got comments from Josh for his top ten. I went with a top 15 for myself, and Angela and Izzy both wanted to stick with ten. It wasn’t the best year in film for me, but the high points were high.

Matt Strohl

15) Benediction (Davies)

The flipside of A Quiet Passion, swapping one sort of gendered quiet desperation for another. It’s a melancholy late film that uses biographical form to reflect more generally on the way our lives only become legible to us in retrospect.

14) Pacifiction (Serra)

I find this more interesting as a Serra text than a post-colonial inquiry. Magimel was fed dialogue through an earpiece, so that he had to think on his feet within a scene, and extraneous cameras were set up so that the actors wouldn’t know which one to play to. The story is indeterminate all the way down: even Serra didn’t know who is ultimately on which side and who is or isn’t a spy. His chaotic artistic methodology is mirrored by Magimel’s character, who struts around intervening in inscrutable ways in an inscrutable situation. 

13) Il Buco (Frammartino)

Another work of lyrical minimalism from Frammartino. It’s a mostly wordless depiction of the 1961 expedition that reached the bottom of a 700-meter deep cave in Calabria. The magnificent soundscape surrounds the viewer with drips and sloshes that become hypnotic as we venture deeper and deeper into the abyss.

12) The Munsters (Zombie)

In an era when commercial films have become synonymous with soulless recycled IP, Rob Zombie took studio money and corporate IP and used it to make a vibrant, goofy love letter to his wife. You won’t find a contemporary studio release with a purer heart.

11) Down with the King (Ongaro)

A standout American indie. It may be the first hip hop pastoral, and it shows remarkable restraint in the way it allows Gibbs’ internal conflicts to structure the film and doesn’t pack in unnecessary incident.

10) Introduction (Hong)

Like The Woman Who Ran, this is a brisk triptych that might look slight at first glance, but once you start digging, you find such a dense structure that it demands a second viewing. Notice, for instance, the way each segment features a prominent embrace, but each has a notably different posture. Taken together, these three embraces summarize the film as a whole.

9) Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Graf)

The film of a free man. Comparisons to early Von Trier are inevitable, but my preferred point of reference is the first half of Vincere. Gorgeous digital textures give Fabian a pervasively modern feel, which plays well with the parallels it finds between the Weimar period and the present.

8) Thirteen Lives (Howard)

An outstanding procedural about professionals doing a difficult job. I also thought Rush was very good, so between these two movies I’m coming around to an idea of a late Ron Howard cycle about the best in the world tackling the most severe challenges. I expected this to be sappy and sensationalistic, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mortensen and Farrell are terrific as tired middle-aged guys who have been doing this too long but accept there’s no one better to take the lead. The movie takes its time and studies their patient, systematic resolve. Its moral and emotional center runs deep, but it sticks with the nuts and bolts of the job. The digital photography is beautiful and effectively claustrophobic. All the lens flares and splashes don’t disrupt the film’s immersive quality but rather enhance it, as we feel like the camera is in the fray of the action. Thanks in part to its vivid physicality, it towers above the weightless CGI spectacles clogging up theaters.

7) Both Sides of the Blade (Denis)

Characteristically, Claire Denis’s films omit most of the connective tissue of their narratives. This does the opposite: it isolates the middle third of a narrative and stuffs it to the gills with detail. It’s very thorny (how many movies that are primarily about a love triangle between three white people remind you to think about Fanon?), and doesn’t give itself over readily. I’m struck by the way Juliette Binoche portrays the kind of deception that doesn’t feel deceptive to the person perpetrating it, because the emotions behind it are honest. She conveys a divided self without the usual sort of histrionic pathology. Lindon gets to really sink his teeth into this one, and of course he delivers. It’s great to see Bulle Ogier, who holds down a delicate role.

6) The Novelist’s Film (Hong)

A wonderful Hongian ourobouros, where the subject of an artist retreating to a more personal form of expression becomes the occasion for a film that does the very same thing.

5) Dark Glasses (Argento)

If Argento’s received classics are grand operas of fear, this is a late-career piano sonata. It’s essentially a series of digital giallo abstractions in different sensory modalities, but it also reprises his career-spanning affection for outcasts and is in the running for his most warm-hearted movie.

4) Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg)

This is unmistakably part of what we might call Cronenberg’s technology cycle. Arguably, the central theme of this cycle is the blurring of the line between self and technology. Someone who uses a tool every day may start to feel as though the tool is an extension of their body. Ubiquitous smartphones and search engines are in some sense an extension of our cognitive faculties. It’s just an ordinary, entirely routine stage of thinking to do searches on one’s phone. The possibility of not being able to remember or find out some fact is largely gone from the world, because we can always just look it up.

In the case of a prosthetic limb, the integration of a technological device into the self is very intuitive. Cronenberg is interested in finding the same kind of literal and direct representations of a broader range of ways that technology and the self interrelate. So much of the imagery he developed in Videodrome, eXistenZ, and other films recurs here, but now as a kind of summative statement at the end of the world (or, the leap into the transhuman). But this is also a widower film, and as such it is nowhere near as cold as its subject matter might lead one to expect. It’s the year’s greatest love story.

3) Dead for a Dollar (Hill)

The closest thing we’ve seen to the great B westerns of the 50’s in a very long time. Hill dedicated it to Budd Boetticher, but Filipe Furtado is right to point out that it’s closer to the cycle of films that Randolph Scott made with André De Toth. Its greatness is bound up with Hill’s insight into the ways that old forms both can and cannot be resurrected. It slips between the Scylla of nostalgia and the Charybdis of topical revisionism, delivering something that is authentic to the present in a way that parallels the relationship between the films of artists like Boetticher and De Toth and their own era.

2) Limbo (Cheang)

Limbo has the most intricate mise-en-scène of any new film I saw this year, and it is built almost entirely out of garbage. A post-handover Hong Kong death rattle, the likes of which we have never seen before and may never seen again.

1) Stars at Noon (Denis)

Like Both Sides of the Blade, Stars at Noon gives us the intact core of a narrative and leaves ellipses around the edges. It’s all about following Margaret Qualley through liminal spaces (which even include the “home” space of her hotel room, always positioned as a place she’s trying to leave). It’s important that the film stays with her, just as stuck as she is. She’s the feminine noir figure made protagonist, mystique replaced with sticky, sweaty tangibility. She reminds me strongly of Juliet Berto in Out 1, prowling like a cat through alleys and hotel lobbies. Here, the malaise of the post-May ‘68 counterculture is swapped for Latin American political purgatory, which takes on a surreal character as events resembling the 20th century Nicaraguan Revolution are set in the present (covid masks and all). I like the casting of Joe Alwyn. I know Denis wanted Pattinson, but he would have been too much of a presence. Alwyn is a mannequin for Qualley to play off of, and that’s what the movie needs. He’s far more pathetic than Pattinson could have managed, and it works. It’s her movie, and she turns in the performance of the year. 

Angela Shope

10) Elvis (Luhrmann)

I don’t care for the musical biopic in general, but the combination of Luhrmann’s propulsive style and Butler’s charismatic energy is thrilling.

9) The Whale (Aronofsky)

This movie offers such a strange cocktail of cruelty and empathy. It’s not an element that many people are talking about, but I was deeply moved by the thorny father-daughter relationship, and watching this was cathartic for me.

8) Three Thousand Years of Longing (Miller)

Stories about stories. Every movie that made me cry this year made my list, and this was one of them. The chemistry between Elba and Swinton is magical and I was excited by the way Miller moves through history.

7) Thirteen Lives (Howard)

The emphasis on community organization and massive coordination of effort warms the heart without becoming overly sentimental. It’s an absolute nail-biter and I could have kept watching it for hours.

6) Aftersun (Wells)

Another vexed father-daughter movie that moved me. I watched it twice. The intimacy between the two actors is something rare and special. The first time, I naturally connected with Sophie, who reminds me very much of myself at that age, but the second time I connected more closely with her dad, which speaks to the emotional richness of the film as a whole.

5) Eo (Skolimowski)

I love Eo, because he’s just a sweet little donkey going through the world alone. He’s an uncorrupted little angel donkey and I love him.

4) Blonde (Dominik)

I avoided reading anything about this before watching it, and I was surprised when Matt told me that internet feminists hate it. I found that it very effectively crystalizes my experiences as a woman living in a world full of disgusting men. Ana de Armas is great and the way Dominik films her is often beautiful.

3) Dark Glasses (Argento)

I was so happy to see a new one from the maestro, and I’m not at all surprised that it’s fantastic. It’s a gift.

2) Deep Water (Lyne)

Sexy! I love Ana de Armas’ treacherously seductive outfits in this and would wear every single one of them.

1) The Northman (Eggers)

Matt somehow got me into viking metal, and this is the cinematic equivalent. A bloody fairy tale that creates a strange world I keep wanting to return to.

Honorable Mention: The Menu, Prey, Ambulance.

Josh Strohl

25) Kimi (Soderbergh)

24) In Front of Your Face (Hong)

23) Nope (Peele)

22) Confess, Fletch (Mottola)

21) Three Thousand Years of Longing (Miller)

20) Halloween Ends (Green)

19) Moonfall (Emmerich)

18) RRR (Rajamouli)

17) The Munsters (Zombie)

16) Elvis (Luhrmann)

15) Top Gun: Maverick (Kosinski)

14) Both Sides of the Blade (Denis)

13) Armageddon Time (Grey)

12) Benediction (Davies)

11) Apollo 10 1/2 (Linklater)

10) Ambulance (Bay)

It was hard to get my ass to the theater this year with two little kids at home, but you better believe I made it to this. It’s finally a Michael Bay movie that people feel like they’re allowed to like, but I’ve always been a true believer. It rips.

9) Decision to Leave (Park)

A truly modern noir. Intricate plot mechanics function to deconstruct familiar tropes, but in a way that adds rather than subtracts emotional weight.

8) Deep Water (Lyne)

Adrian Lyne is underappreciated as a master of the erotic thriller. This is in freaky-deaky Ben Affleck cuck territory, with Ana de Armas absolutely tearing up the screen. This story has been told before, but this version is wildly unpredictably in its details.

7) Dark Glasses (Argento)

The maestro revisits familiar ideas from across his career, but flips them on their head by taking the perspective of the victim more fully than he ever has before.

6) Limbo (Cheang)

There’s nothing else like it. People use the word “visionary” too lightly, but this movie demands it. Nightmarish images in stark black and white that feel completely alien, like they’re from another universe.

5) Stars at Noon (Denis)

Almost impossible to blurb, because the emotions it evoked in me are difficult to articulate. I felt lost in it, like I was drifting along in a sad romantic song.

4) Thirteen Lives (Howard)

I didn’t know Ron Howard had this in him, but he reveals himself here as a true picture maker. Immediate, immersive, and intense.

3) Dead for a Dollar (Hill)

Like The Outlaw Josey Wales, it unites a band of outsiders who are deprived of agency by the dominant power structures of the time and connects their story with contemporary political concerns. Stripped down, unpretentious, and made on the cheap, but with the chops of an all-time master.

2) The Fabelmans (Spielberg)

Our greatest pop filmmaker rips open a psychic gash and spills out his mommy issues for all to see.

1) Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg)

Not just my favorite of the year, but the best new release I’ve seen in a decade. After waiting so long for a new Cronenberg film, it arrived as a glorious summation of the career of a great master. It’s a surprisingly tender movie that scrambles the audience’s responses to body horror by rendering it as an act of connection and creation.

Isabel Strohl

10) The Whale (Aronofsky)

9) RRR (Rajamouli)

8) Thirteen Lives (Howard)

7) Ambulance (Bay)

6) Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg)

5) Kimi (Soderbergh)

4) Elvis (Luhrmann)

3) Dark Glasses (Argento)

2) Top Gun: Maverick (Kosinksi)

1) The Fabelmans (Spielberg)

Featured image from City of the Dead.

It is upon us. I’ve tried to include something for everyone: deep cuts for horror fans and entry-level selections for people who aren’t as keen on the genre. The gruel is getting thinner every year on the generalist services, so I highly recommend getting Shudder at least for the month. Their selection far outpaces all of the other pay services combined. The other option is Tubi, which is free and stacked with options, but plays movies with commercial breaks. I love Tubi but do not normally include it for this reason, and because half the fun of Tubi is browsing through their vast library and trying out stuff you’ve never heard of. This time I did pick out a couple Tubi selections. Criterion Channel also has a terrific horror feature, but there’s no reason to make recommendations, since it’s all worth watching and the curators have already supplied context to help you decide what you’re interested in.

Shudder

The Whip and the Body

There’s a trove of Mario Bava on Shudder and all of it is eminently worthwhile, but if I had to pick one title, it would be this. Gothic kink, with Christopher Lee, trap doors, secret passages, perverse secrets.

Eyes of Fire

A singular film that belongs in the highest pantheon of American horror. It was finally restored and released on blu-ray last year, which was its first home video release since a 1987 VHS. It’s set in 1750 and tells the story of an adulterous preacher and a small group of followers who are banished from their settlement and try to found a new one in Shawnee territory, where they encounter ancient magic. Strange and oneiric, it’s stylistically unique and full of images that have haunted that back of my mind since I first saw it last year.

City of the Dead

Also known as Hotel Horror, starring Christopher Lee, this is one of the finest horror films of the 60’s and absolutely essential viewing. A college student visits a New England town to research its history of witchcraft. It does not go well.

Alison’s Birthday

Another excellent example of folk horror, this has a fairly typical narrative about an unsuspecting young girl and a secret occult group who have devious plans for her birthday, but it is elevated above the pack by its briskly inexorable pacing, unnerving imagination, and unusual Australian setting.

Blood Beat

One of a kind bonkers Wisconsin regional horror from French director Fabrice A. Zaphiratos, centered around a family gathering and a set of haunted samurai armor. When you put this on you may feel like, “what the hell am I watching right now? why the hell would he recommend this?” but stick with it and you’ll see.

What Have You Done to Solange?

Not for everyone! This is an exceptionally sleazy giallo! All content warnings apply! Fabio Testi plays a teacher who is sleeping with one of his students and becomes a suspect in a series of campus murders. If you have an appetite for ’70s Italian sleaze, this is a delicacy.

Kriya

Unique and mesmerizing art horror from New Dehli, directed by Sidharth Srinivasan. It’s dense and disorienting, borrowing tropes from the possession horror subgenre to examine a collision between modernity and tradition.

Intruder

Supermarket slasher, it just plain rules.

Dark August

Exceptional Vermont regional horror, a prime example of slow burn autumnal dread.

Hack-O-Lantern

Often taken under the “so bad it’s good” heading, do with it what you will. It’s a wild ride, full of satanic panic .

Fangs

This is a hoot and I highly recommend it to anyone with a taste for regional horror. Set in Texas, it’s about an old snake-loving coot named Snakey Bender who likes to come into town on Wednesdays and carry out his routine… until a group of uptight conservatives conspire against him.

Evilspeak

Arguably the peak of the “evil computer” cycle, it’s basically a male Carrie with an evil computer.

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood

Another great example of regional horror (Pennsylvania), it’s about a family searching for a son who’s gone missing at an amusement park and uncovering more than they bargained for. It’s only 75 minutes long but dense with memorable images. There’s really nothing else like this, and genre fans shouldn’t miss it.

The Corruption of Chris Miller

Sleazy Spanish giallo with Jean Seberg, it’s a great place to take your genre exploration once you’ve made your way through its more famous Italian counterparts.

Pledge Night

I am genuinely amazed by how many divergent 80’s tropes come together in this movie. The practical effects are great.

Tubi

Beyond the Darkness

One of the wildest and most enjoyable films from world-historic sicko Joe D’Amato. It is one crazy psychosexual stew, and I’m only recommending it to people who set no limit on depravity. (Edit: I think this is also on shudder)

Hellhole

I’ve explored the women in prison exploitation subgenre pretty thoroughly, and at a certain point they all start blending together. This one, however, stands out. It’s really one of the only under the radar examples of the category that I’d go out of my way to recommend, and probably the one that does the best job integrating horror elements. It’s certainly not for everyone, though. It is, after all, a women in prison movie called “Hellhole.”

Amazon Prime

Grave of the Vampire

John Hayes is the king of the “bad dad” low budget horror movie. It’s an atmospheric slow burn, nasty and depressing, and a far, far bleaker and more affecting take on family than any of the trendy recent examples with a more discursive approach.

Deranged

This preceded Texas Chainsaw as an Ed Gein movie. I’m not a fan of the true crime framing, but this is a must-see for Roberts Blossom’s extraordinary performance.

Evil Dead Trap

Kitchen sink 80’s Japanese slasher mayhem from Ikeda.

The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism

A 1967 German Christopher Lee vehicle, the sets alone make it worth seeing for anyone with a taste for this sort of Hammer-esque production.

Netflix

Hubie Halloween-The Munsters

Netflix may not have much in the way of horror, but they DO have the best feel-good Halloween double feature in the business. I love both of these movies with my whole heart. Hubie is one of Sandler’s very best, full of the warmth and sense of fun that make his movies such enduring comfort classics. The Munsters is the rarest of all contemporary movie sightings: a studio IP picture with personality and a unique stylistic sensibility. It’s Rob Zombie’s own love story with Sheri Moon, very thinly veiled, and it’s silly and hilarious and overflowing with affection. It’s only for people who like fun, though!

Piranha

Aja’s remake of Joe Dante’s classic is a trashy good time.

Vampires

By far John Carpenter’s meanest, nastiest movie, it’s not for everyone, but amidst the marshmallow Netflix slate it certainly stands out.

Hulu

Urban Legend trilogy

Jamie Blanks’ original is great, and I enjoy the whole trilogy (although many people view the third one a lot less favorably than I do). Outside of Scream, Urban Legend is arguably the highlight of the slasher revival. I watched these last year and I’m already feeling like I might dive back in.

HBO Max

Empty Man

Unusual amidst the contemporary horror landscape, this 2020 film is 138 minutes long and uses its duration to develop an overwhelming sense of dread. It’s a deliberately paced procedural that effectively coaxes us to imagine what’s out of sight.

The Fly II

This is a lot of fun and has surprising pathos given how much slime is involved.

Amityville 2: The Possession

The first one is not my favorite, so I never actually watched this until recently, but it’s far, far better (it’s directed by an Italian, which of course helps). The first hour is fun and depraved family horror. It then loses steam and becomes an Exorcist knock off, but it’s still worth seeing overall.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

Speaking of The Exorcist, Boorman’s sequel has a terrible reputation and frequently makes “worst of all time” lists, but that’s to be expected for something this defiant of the banalities of convention. It’s actually closer to Friedkin’s Sorcerer than The Exorcist in many ways, and doesn’t do anything like what fans of the original wanted it to do, much to its credit. If you’ve avoided it on account of its reputation but can manage an open mind, I’d suggest giving it a try.

Featured image from Shadow in the Cloud

Netflix

This is the best Netflix crop in a while.

Bahubali: The Beginning and Bahubali: The Conclusion (Tamil language versions)

I’m no expert here, but this was filmed in both Telegu and Tamil and my understanding is that while the Telegu version may be preferable (but not currently on Netflix), there’s nothing wrong with the Tamil version. I looked at a lower quality stream of the Telegu version online and it seemed to me that some actors are dubbed worse in that version, while other actors are dubbed worse in this version, and so there are trade-offs either way. In any case: these movies SLAP. You might describe them as Cecil B. DeMille meets Zack Snyder by way of Rajamouli’s very distinct imagination (with the outstanding music of M. M. Keeravani). The two films follow one continuous story, 5.5 hours long in total (and there’s apparently still a third one coming), and when we had to break it up over a couple days because of Angela’s work schedule, every minute we weren’t watching it I was dying to get back to it. It’s hard to think of a more entertaining movie. If you aren’t convinced by the first hour or so, stick with it (I can imagine the waterfall climbing musical number maybe losing some people– not me– but after that it’s hard to imagine anyone not getting into this). Peak action, and a clinic on how to use CGI to expand cinematic possibilities rather than to substitute for doing things the hard way .

The Professionals

Terrific 1966 Richard Brooks men-on-a-mission western. The cast is hard to beat. Four mercenaries (Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, and Burt Lancaster!!!!) are sent to Mexico to retrieve Claudia Cardinale, the wife of oil tycoon Ralph Bellamy, who he claims has been taken against her will by Mexican revolutionary Jack Palance.

Cliffhanger

One of the last great action blockbusters shot without extensive use of green screens and CGI: this is Stallone and company up in the Dolomites for real, doing wild stunts in a hybrid Die Hard-scenario/sports movie. I went on Cinematic Underdogs podcast to talk about it not so long ago.

Beast Stalker

It’s very cool that this showed up on Netflix. It’s a Dante Lam crime movie from 2008 and I think this is the first time it’s been available to stream in North America. If you are averse to children-in-peril movies, be warned: rarely have children been in more peril. It’s about a cop (Nicholas Tse) racked with guilt about a tragic accident who puts everything on the line to save a young girl who’s been kidnapped. His double/nemesis is Nick Cheung, also bearing scars and carrying a heavy burden. This is a great example of full tilt Hong Kong male melodrama: the emotions in this movie are enormous.

Double Team

Absolutely wild Tsui Hark/Van Damme/Dennis Rodman collaboration. Not for everyone, but certainly one of the most distinctive things you’re likely to find on Netflix.

The One

Before the current multiverse craze (which I am not at all a part of), there was The One. Jet Li plays a double role, first as a rogue agent who travels between dimensions to kill his counterparts to gain their power, and then also as LAPD cop who teams up with two Multiverse special agents (Delroy Lindo and Jason Statham) to stop him from becoming the One. It’s like a martial arts Highlander.

The Guns of Navarone

One of the great afternoon movies (and also one of the great dad movies): feast upon 158 minutes of men on a mission. Directed by J. Lee Thompson.

Hulu

Ghosts of Mars

I won’t even say this is unfairly maligned, because that’s too generous: it’s inexplicably maligned. A John Carpenter Hawksian sci-fi horror western should not have been a tough sell, and yet… Anyways, it’s a great film, and one you should definitely see if you let its poor reception scare you off, or see again if you missed the boat the first time around. It’s dense with cinematic ideas and multiple viewings help.

Hunter Hunter

I recommend going into this knowing as little as possible, but you should know that it is a very intense slow burn horror movie that many would find upsetting. The setup is that a family living off the grid starts to suspect that there’s a predator preying on human beings in the region.

We Own the Night

I haven’t seen this in a long time myself and I plan to revisit it. James Gray is one of our greatest contemporary filmmakers and someone we should be doing everything we can to support in a time when movies for adults are in shorter and shorter supply. I recall this having a strong sense of setting (something Gray always excels at) and a successful balance between affecting drama and rich political context.

One Shot

I’m not really a fan of the single-take gimmick genre, but this is a good version. It’s a straightforward Call of Duty run-and-shoot siege movie, but effectively immersive and with a typically exciting Scott Adkins performance at the center. Not to be missed for action fans.

Sense and Sensibility

You know, as literary adaptation period pieces go, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility is really good, thanks in no small part to Alan Rickman.

That’s My Boy

Not for everyone. One of the more extreme Sandler films and it’s probably over the limit for a lot of people, but I fully agree with B.A. Radetski’s contentious letterboxd review: a better film about class than Parasite.

Shadow in the Cloud

Paul from Cinematic Underdogs podcast was reading my book in a hotel lobby and ended up explaining the main ideas to the receptionist, who recommended this movie in response. He passed the recommendation on to me, and that’s of course a recommendation I’m going to take! Glad I did. This thing is bonkers! There’s no irony here and no winking self-awareness. It’s like five movies at once, and it’s fully committed to being all of them. The mystery luggage bit is amazing.

The Requin

This is probably a bridge too far for most people, but for the boldest bad movie adventurers, this is some avant-garde shit. I mean, the premise is that Alicia Silverstone and her husband end up on a floating hotel room lost at sea. The CGI is extremely cheap, and the combination of ambitious high concept premise and painfully limited means is thrilling for me. You can absolutely tell at all times that she is standing on a soundstage, not a floating hotel room, and this just adds to the complete madness of her performance. If you have an upper-limit on Alicia Silverstone, this movie will exceed that limit. Despite the shark on the poster, there is not much shark. This is not a movie for shark horror fans so much as it is for the small niche of people who share the thought, “I want to see Alicia Silverstone go absolutely berserk for the full duration of a feature film.”

Amazon Prime

The Train

This is not the first time I’ve recommended John Frankenheimer’s The Train, and it won’t be the last. A great action movie about French resistance fighters (including Burt Lancaster and Michel Simon) trying to stop a Nazi train carrying off the great masterpieces of French art at the end of the war. It powerfully engages the question of whether the preservation of culture can justify a loss of life.

A Quiet Passion

Terence Davies’ exquisite Emily Dickinson film is not a biopic of the usual (terrible) sort. It takes a creative approach and it’s funny and beautiful and thoroughly devastating.

Bliss

I’ve recommended this before, but it was only on Shudder at the time. Not for everyone, but I love this. Don’t even think about watching it while the sun is out. You want to watch this late at night and as loud as possible. This is a drug-addled LA vampire fever dream in grimy 16mm. The sound design is out of control. The music is great across the board but the use of sludgy doom metal during the most intense scenes is especially inspired.  People who didn’t watch the later seasons of Friday Night Lights are missing out, as one of the many joys this has to offer is that the edgy protagonist is played by the actress who played Becky Sproles. She just rules in this. And the practical effects! 

Turbulence

In honor of the late, great Ray Liotta, this is one of his many wonderful villain performances. It came out during the glut of 90’s airplane hijack movies, and the plot is pretty stripped down, but the Liotta performance is plenty to carry this. I thought while rewatching it recently that he understood as well as any actor how charisma and vileness can be two sides of the same coin. His performance is disturbing precisely because he’s so charismatic that you want to like him.

The Siege of Firebase Gloria

Premium ‘Namsploitation from cult hero Brian Trenchard-Smith. I had this on my list as one of the most significant Wings Hauser movies I hadn’t seen, but thanks to Daniel Gorman for spreading the word that it showed up on streaming. It’s terrific for what it is. Wings and R. Lee Ermy are a supreme war movie duo, with Ermy playing it about like you’d expect (that is, a lot like Full Metal Jacket— though I like this movie better) and Wings at an intense dramatic pitch.

Evil Dead Trap

Happy to see this movie readily availabile in good quality in North America. Jam-packed 1988 Japanese industrial-complex-of-horrors slasher mayhem from Ikeda.

HBO Max

Revolver

My favorite Guy Ritchie movie (alongside Wrath of Man) and a truly gonzo genre experiment. I’m bringing it up because it contains one of my favorite Ray Liotta performances.

Pygmalion

At a trim 96 minutes, with Leslie Howard as Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle, this is an incisive adaptation of Shaw’s play. It’s better than My Fair Lady, in my opinion.

Sweet Bird of Youth

Richard Brooks does Tennessee Williams. A neglected movie that I’m very fond of. The hysterical desperation is overwhelming. The character of Heavenly gets almost no dialogue, but her series of self-contradictions and reversals is the emotional core that plays out quietly while Page and Newman burn up the screen with their tragic fallen egos.

Featured image from France.

Matt Strohl

We are changing the format a little this year. My first year on Twitter has cured me of any urge to be negative, so instead of summing up everything I watched from 2021, I’m just going to focus on what I liked. I did pretty well seeing everything that I really wanted to see, although I didn’t get a chance to see either of the Hong movies (the rips circulating online are beneath my standards!), so those will be pushed to next year. The Woman Who Ran and Tsai’s Days I included last year. Anything that was released internationally during the last few years that I had no reasonable way to watch until this year was eligible.

25) The Voyeurs (Michael Mohan)

A glorious return to both the spirit and substance of the 90’s direct-to-video erotic thriller. The plotting is delectably ridiculous, and (unlike Netflix’s attempts at the genre) it doesn’t pull its punches.

24) The Last Duel (Ridley Scott)

Confidently paced and very engaging. The cast is great and everyone is at their best. Damon playing against type is potent, but the tastiest bit is Ben Affleck doing Guy Pearce (circa The Count of Monte Cristo). In an era when most studio pictures are shot in front of green screens and weighed down with dramatic bloat and marketing for future franchise entries, it’s a pleasure to see a big budget movie with actual production design and brisk dramatic efficiency. This goes hard.

23) All Eyes Off Me (Hadas Ben Aroya)

An elusive tryptic, structured almost like a ronde, but instead of the pairings of lovers coming full circle, we return to the existential restlessness we began with. As Mike Thorn put it, this is “cinema of questioning rather than declaration.” It doesn’t leave us with a pat commentary on millennial relationships, but rather an unsettling collection of moments that are likely to resonate differently for each of us.

22) Kriya (Sidharth Srinivasan)

Dense and disorienting. Ancient magic, mysterious rituals, innovative sequencing of light and dark. It’s very refreshing to see a horror movie that both engages with the genre and does something challenging that I haven’t seen before. It’s the real deal.

21) New York Ninja (John Liu)

As a connoisseur of the ninja subgenre, I have to say bravo to Vinegar Syndrome for rescuing this. John Liu filmed it in 1984, but the production was abandoned and the film was not edited or released. Vinegar Syndrome saw the value of the materials and assembled it into a pretty darn coherent movie (the lingering incoherencies work just fine with the B movie trappings). All original audio was lost, so they had to record an entirely new audio track. This could have been a disaster, as it’s so easy for dubbing to come across as self-parody, but they did an *incredible* job casting beloved B movie actors. Don “The Dragon” Wilson is delightful in the lead, but it’s the great Michael Berryman who steals the show.

20) The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)

The further Wes Anderson pushes his idiosyncrasies, the more I like him. I don’t even really care about the subject matter here; this appeals to me plenty just taken as a gloriously uncompromised display of a singular point of view. My least favorite take is that only the first segment is good. It’s certainly the easiest to like, but it’s just an appetizer. The unapologetic density of the rest of the film is even more exciting.

19) The Swordsman (Jae-Hoon Choi)

One of two movies I loved this year that combine aspects of Zatoichi and Taken. This is an eminently satisfying Korean swordplay movie with superb action.

18) Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues)

The other Zatoichi-Taken movie on my list. This lacks the graceful martial arts of The Swordsman, but it delivers buckets of unflinching nastiness. I am very excited by (producer and writer) Fede Álvarez’s work in recent years. The way you can tell that he makes real exploitation movies is that they genuinely piss people off. I would especially highlight Fiona O’Shaughnessy’s character acting. She turns in one of my favorite performances of the year (it’s certainly my favorite that I have not seen a single other person mention).

17) Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

A riff on Rohmer’s Rendez-vous in Paris, this tryptic from Hamaguchi has an appealing balance between pointed oddness and searing poignancy. The three entries don’t neatly come together, and the tension between their affinity and incongruity makes the film more interesting than the sum of its parts.

16) Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

I have only seen it once, but I expect that future viewings (in tandem with a rereading of Uncle Vanya) will reveal further riches. I greatly admire the unflinching sincerity of this film, and also the way it lets so much depend on connections with Chekhov that require a patient literary sensibility to unravel. This is arguably the least hip movie to achieve widespread critical success in recent memory, and I’ll count that as a win for film culture.

15) French Exit (Azazel Jacobs)

What can I say, I love French Exit. It’s bone dry and morbid. It appeals *immensely* to my own sense of humor, but I can imagine that it’s not for everyone. Michelle Pfieffer is god-tier. No one else could come close to doing this as well as she can. She’s approaching late Joan Crawford status here.

14) Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)

Finished this with tears on my face. Almodóvar riles up our emotions with highly engaging melodrama and then seamlessly escalates to national identity and historical memory. The melodrama prompts us to ask questions about why lineage matters, and lets us dwell with a deception for a long time before revealing the broader implications of what the film is doing. Almodóvar’s courage in letting the tremendous images at the end stand on their own is incredibly refreshing in 2022. Great acting, smart writing, terrific score.

13) Wife of a Spy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I don’t know if anyone else is capable of making something this elegant that slaps this hard. The way Kurosawa deploys horror tropes in far flung genres is fascinating as ever.

12) All Hands on Deck! (Guillaume Brac)

I saved this for the dead of Montana winter, and it was a delicious treat to be transported to summertime in France. This is such a readily lovable movie, with an endearing sense of romance and spontaneity. Truly a joy.

11) Annette (Leos Carax)

Leos Carax making an English-language movie for Amazon was a little concerning, but wow, what a result. It is certainly not artistically compromised. Indeed, what I most admire about this its sense of artistic liberty. The drama doesn’t quite grip me the way it grips many others, but I don’t even care about that, as I am just utterly exhilarated by its formal boldness and unfettered creativity.

10) Malignant (James Wan)

If you’ve heard grumpy horror fans like me complaining about the direction the genre has gone in the last 5-10 years and you’re wondering what we would prefer instead, this is the answer. I will probably watch this movie once a year for the next 20 years. Bravo!

9) France (Bruno Dumont)

This movie is widely referred to as a media satire, but I think that sells it far short. It’s doing something much more interesting than satirizing the media; it’s exploring the question of what “authenticity” even means at this stage of history, and examining the way that “real life” already involves elements of performance and performance is in turn a part of “real life.” Dumont’s absurdist humor is still here, albeit in a subtler form.

8) Hold Me Back (Akiko Ohku) 

I had not seen any of Ohku’s films before this one, so credit to Filipe Furtado for pointing me to it by putting it high on his 2021 list (which I recommend taking a look at if you enjoy year end lists). I realized as I watched this that there are very, very few films that address (let alone take as their primary subject matter) the anxiety that can be present at the beginning of a relationship even when things are going as well as could be hoped for. The core conflict here emerges from the Proustian idea that transformational life changes constitute a sort of death, and that often we head into them with profound dread even when they are changes that we do in fact want for ourselves. Superb acting.

7) Wrath of Man (Guy Ritchie)

First let me say that I fully understand disliking Guy Ritchie. I have mildly disliked Guy Ritchie for most of my life. But I have to say, this one turned it around for me, and a second viewing confirmed my impression: I really love this. Since I first saw it, I went back and rewatched his entire filmography, and liked most of it a lot better. This is one of my favorite moments in cinephilia: changing my mind!

What I realized about Ritchie is that his primary genre is not crime, it’s screwball comedy of masculine embarrassment. Wrath of Man comes full circle and stretches what could have been such a comedy out into a pitch black slow burn revenge movie. Some complain that the plotting is strained, but that doesn’t bother me a bit: the lineage here is not Heat so much as Den of Thieves, Armored, and Julien Leclercq, and I appreciate the way this wears its B movie heart on its sleeve. The real interest of the script is the way it captures the absolute garbage that men (and women) say to each other in unrestrained macho contexts. Tough guy posturing and inevitable humiliation, this time played as tragedy.

Two other highlights I would emphasize are Christopher Benstead’s score, which is easily my favorite of the year, and Scott Eastwood, who is remarkably well-deployed. Scott just looks so much like his dad in this, and his repeated stare-downs with Statham are extremely effective at evoking the Eastwood iconography.

6) Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)

I highly doubt there will be a better movie about the pandemic (which is not to say that that’s all this is about). Let me be clear that this is a challenging film and I don’t think it’s something that most people would like (so proceed at your own risk and don’t blame me if you hate it!), but its dark, underexposed visual style and elliptical narrative are (for me at least) perfectly suited to the subject matter.

5) Old (M. Night Shyamalan)

So many things are happening at once in this movie. First, there is the sci-fi horror story that primarily functions as a critique of the-ends-justify-the-means ruthless utilitarianism. But, as is typical for Shyamalan, this blunt thematic framework is the beginning rather than the end of his ambitions. For most of the movie, we have no idea what’s really going on and the wild events of the narrative play as surrealism. Once all hell starts to break loose, he doesn’t narrowly orient the movie towards its thematic goalpost, but rather dives headfirst into the prismatic range of possibilities that the situation opens up. Shyamalan never wastes anything. He puts the full weight of life into every subplot and blasts every emotion at once at full volume. I watched this twice, and it excited me even more the second time.

I am trying to be careful about spoilers but see my letterboxd review for more thoughts on this fantastic movie.

4) Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

An extraordinary example of experiential cinema, inviting us to share not just in the sensory experiences of Swinton’s character, but also the liminal state of consciousness that she sinks into over the course of the film.

3) Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood)

More similar to Memoria than anything else from 2021, this is another starkly unconventional study of a gringo in Latin America. It’s certainly not for everyone, but for lovers of late style in general and Clint Eastwood in particular, it’s hard to beat. It’s not so much a swan song as the epilogue to a series of swan songs. The narrative is largely tossed aside in favor of languid scenes of Clint caressing horses and slow dancing with a widow he meets along the way. The way this movie is so happy to be imperfect only adds to its shaggy beauty.

2) Siberia (Abel Ferrara)

I suspect that my own life history as a recovering alcoholic with more than 14 years of sobriety gives me a different vantage point on this one. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I find it helpful to think of Siberia as the psychic substrate of the more literal Tommaso. Both films are best understood as not merely being about recovery, but rather as part of Ferrara’s own recovery project. When one is sober for years on end, the threat of relapse slips into the background and the more immediate struggle becomes coping with the crushing weight of all the fears, desires, and urges that one used to suppress by drinking. What Ferrara is doing in these films is not merely portraying this subject matter, but actively working through his own struggles. I can say from experience that it is very common for people to get into stuff like Jung at this stage and try to use it to make sense of their own psychic landscape, and that’s exactly what we find Ferrara doing here. I could understand the complaint that the Jung material is too on the nose, but again from my particular vantage point it’s perfect. Making a movie about his own most fucked up dreams using an explicitly Jungian framework is EXACTLY what I would expect from Abel Ferrara as he eases into long-term sobriety. The images he finds along the way are simply spectacular. Thrilling, vital cinema.

1) Titane (Julia Ducournau)

Julia Ducournau said in an interview that she put everything into Raw, and that after finishing her festival tour with that film she had the very common experience of creative block in approaching her second major work. Eventually, she explained, she stopped struggling and wrote freely from a place of unfettered rage, and Titane is the result. Many have complained about a perceived lack of thematic coherence and legibility. I have seen countless people ask: what the hell is it about? Reductive answers to this question do the film a disservice. If there’s anything that’s true of Titane, it’s that it is pitched at a level of abstraction that cannot be readily translated into some kind of message or commentary. It’s understandable that this makes us uncomfortable, especially given the thorny terrain of violence, gender, and sexuality, but the more time I spend thinking about this film the more confident I am that the best way to approach it is not to try to reconstruct it as a totalizing allegory, but rather to think about the complex, evolving ways it reacts to its own vicissitudes, and to the conventions of the serial killer and melodrama genres. It asks us to imagine Alexia’s surreal way of being, where traditional objects of affection (first parents, then lovers) are replaced by metal, engines, and automobiles. It then asks us to inhabit her sense of overwhelming rage at a world that holds open some possibilities but closes off others. The status of Alexia’s sexuality as absurd is itself a fountain of rage in the movie. She isn’t interested in people, she’s into metal and this just isn’t a path the world allows. As she navigates the consequences of her revolt, she stumbles into a loving relationship that is so utterly unconditional as to be surreal, but even this turns out to be limiting in a way that enrages her: she has to be son or lover, male or female. Even if she gets to choose her role, it’s still a role, and every possibility that it opens closes off many others. And it’s this–the qualified nature of human freedom, built into the very structure of human agency–that is the primary target of the movie’s rage. I’m still planning to write a longer piece arguing that it has at least as much in common with All that Heaven Allows as the range of movies it is more often compared to.

Other stuff I liked:

Licorice Pizza, Red Rocket, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story, No Sudden Move, Godzilla vs. Kong, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, The Many Saints of Newark, Shiva Baby, Benedetta, Wrong Turn, The Forever Purge, One Shot, Halloween Kills, In the Earth, Shock Wave 2, Me You Madness, Raging Fire, Hell Hath No Fury, Spencer, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, Venom: Let there be Carnage, Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City, Copshop, Rifkin’s Festival.

Special bargain bin awards:

Above Suspicion, Jolt, Voyagers, Chaos Walking, Ice Road, Karen, The Woman in the Window, Zone 414.

Angela Shope

10) Dune

I appreciate the way this version’s dramatic focus is the relationship between Jessica and Paul. That’s a riskier direction to take the movie than it gets credit for, and I like it. I also found it visually striking. Not many big blockbusters of recent years have captivated me like this.

9) The Green Knight

I love Arthurian lore and this scratched that itch for me. There’s a seriousness and a darkness to this movie that Matt totally rejected when we watched it together, but it really works for me.

8) House of Gucci

Loud, colorful, and super fun. No apologies, I love it.

7) Memoria

Mesmerizing and dreamlike. By the end I felt like I was sharing the state of mind of Swinton’s character.

6) Old

This has a fantastical quality to it, like a dark fairy tale, and I am drawn to that. It’s very moving, but it also has its wicked pleasures. The horror elements are exactly in the zone that I like: terrifying, but not disgusting.

5) Parallel Mothers

Extremely affecting. The way this movie combines melodrama and politics is something I’ve never seen done quite this way before. As usual for Almodóvar, the use of color is fantastic and wonderfully evocative of Spain.

4) Spencer

I found the depiction of anxiety and an eating disorder in the style of a horror movie to be haunting. Kristen Stewart is excellent.

3) Wrath of Man

I was gripped for every second of this. The way the plot and the musical score both build to a violent eruption is extremely satisfying. Great cast.

2) France

Léa Seydoux is one of my favorite actresses, and this is her best role. Her makeup and costuming is *so amazing*, but it’s not just for show, it’s closely connected with the themes of the movie. I’m thrilled to see such a complex and ambivalent female character take center stage. The score is incredible.

1) The Last Duel

There have been a lot of explicitly feminist movies in recent years that reinforce the rallying cry of #metoo. The Last Duel is the one that most fully captures my own sense of rage as a woman. I love period pieces, and I am extremely impressed that this movie manages to simultaneously satisfy my historical craving while also so perfectly capturing the present.

Honorable mention: The Power of the Dog, Lamb, The Tragedy of Macbeth

Josh Strohl

This year Josh and Isabel have been very busy moving to Rochester and starting new jobs, but they still managed to put lists together. They didn’t have time to write commentary, but will be happy to discuss their picks on Facebook.

1. The Last Duel (Ridley Scott)
2. France (Bruno Dumont)
3. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)
4. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)
5. Siberia/Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)
6. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)
7. House of Gucci (Ridley Scott)
8. Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood)
9. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
10. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
11. Old (M. Night Shyamalan)
12. Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodovar)
13. Zola (Janicza Bravo)
14. The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson)
15. Wrath of Man (Guy Ritchie)
16. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)
17. Titane (Julia Ducournau)
18. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
19. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Zack Snyder)
20. Swan Song (Todd Stephens)
21. In the Earth (Ben Wheatley)
22. Red Rocket (Sean Baker)
23. Malignant (James Wan)
24. Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues)
25. The Forever Purge (Eduardo Gout)

Acting performances

1. Lea Seydoux – France
2. Udo Kier- Swan Song
3. Ben Affleck/Jodie Comer/Matt Damon/Adam Driver -The Last Duel
4. Lady Gaga/Jared Leto/Al Pacino/Jeremy Irons- House of Gucci
5. Simon Rex – Red Rocket
6. Alana Haim/Cooper Hoffman- Licorice Pizza
7. Vincent Lindon – Titane
8. Clint Eastwood – Cry Macho
9. Charlotte Rampling – Benedetta
10. Matt Damon – Stillwater

4K UHD Blu-ray releases

I continue to be an avid physical media collector, and these were my favorite UHD releases.

1. The Ten Commandments
2. The Red Shoes/Criterion 4K
3. Argento on 4K
4. Maniac Cop 2/Blue Underground 4K
5. In the Line of Fire/Last Action Hero
6. My Fair Lady
7. Awaken
8. Django
9. Tremors
10. Speed

Isabel Strohl

1. The Last Duel
2. France
3. Titane
4. Parallel Mothers
5. West Side Story
6. Malignant
7. Old
8. The Night House
9. Zack Snyder’s Justice League
10. Zola

Amazon Prime

Day of the Outlaw (André De Toth, 1959)

An exceptional western, stark and relentless, with an unforgettable Burl Ives performance. You’ll recognize it as the primary blueprint for The Hateful Eight.

Posse (Mario Van Peebles, 1993)

It’s annoying that the Netflix western The Harder They Fall prompted so many articles about how finally a movie is straightening out the truth about the west and showing us that there were black cowboys. There are so many black westerns! This is not a new thing! Posse is a terrific example, and I greatly enjoyed revisiting it recently. Psychedelic style, Big Daddy Kane, and let’s not overlook the single best Stephen Baldwin performance.

Phantasm: Remastered (Don Coscarelli, 1979)

An all-time banger, restored for your viewing pleasure in all its oddball glory.

Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin, 1949)

What might have been a minor noir is juiced up by Lizabeth Scott’s incredible femme fatale performance opposite Dan Duryea. I really love this one.

The Brain (Ed Hunt, 1988)

Avoid the RiffTrax version like the plague (and let me take another opportunity to say: fuck RiffTrax). This is sort of a Videodrome/They Live/Bodysnatchers mashup with effects out of Invaders From Mars. So, it’s highly derivative, but of some terrific stuff.

The Butcher (Jesse V. Johnson, 2009)

Low budget crime movie, not for everyone. The question you’ve gotta ask yourself is, “how interested am I in watching Eric Roberts drive around LA doing errands?” Because that’s what most of this movie is. I’m a fan.

Alien Intruder (Ricardo Jacques Gale, 1993)

Also not for everyone. I’ve been very pleased to see on Twitter that the younger generation of cinephiles have found their way to PM Entertainment– some of the finest trash this country has ever produced. Don’t be deterred by the advertised PG-13 rating. Amazon has it wrong: this is definitely a hard R. Bargain basement Lifeforce meets Nightmare on Elm Street, starring Billy Dee Williams.

London (Hunter Richards, 2005)

Also not for everyone. This features one of the most outside-the-box Jason Statham performances. It’s in the highly unfashionable zone of probing the most pathetic depths of the injured male psyche, but it’s a very good version of this (the 14% tomato score shows you that it’s doing something right). Most of the movie is Statham and Chris Evans doing cocaine and talking about an involuntary breakup and other pathetic bro shit. Works for me.

Hulu

Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

Just letting you know that Titane is on Hulu! It’s a highly divisive movie which you may very well hate, but I vote that you watch it. I am writing an essay on it still, I swear, though it’s slow going and I’ve had a lot of distractions. I absolutely vehemently reject the main criticisms that have been circulated and it’s one of my favorite movies in recent memory.

Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)

Superior neo noir with an outstanding cast. This is something everyone should see.

The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997)

I’ve seen this movie so many times. I like Lee Tamahori in general, and this was written by Mamet. It’s a terrifically fun and engaging “lost in the wilderness” story, with a killer bear, Anthony Hopkins as a survival manual expert with no practical experience, and Alec Baldwin as his sleazeball frenemy.

Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020)

Not exactly a masterpiece, but I recommend it because it stands out amidst contemporary mainstream cinema. It succeeds because it fully commits to being what it is and because the monsters are really cool and someone put loving attention into designing them. Infinitely better than something like A Quiet Place. 

HBO Max

My Brother’s Wedding (Charles Burnett, 1983)

Underseen Charles Burnett family drama, rough in certain ways (arguably more of a feature than a bug) but full of rich detail and withering observation of class dynamics.

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976)

Chantal Akerman reads her mother’s letters over long takes of mundane city scenes. One of the greatest NYC movies in the way it conveys so much about the immigrant’s experience without ever breaking away from its rigorous concept.

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)

One of the more underseen titles among Cassavetes’ essential masterpieces. Absolutely see it if you haven’t.

Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990)

One of the key movies for my generation. I saw it so many times in the 90’s, and it absolutely holds up. Christian Slater gloriously conveys the ecstasy of transgressive performance.

Netflix

Netfix is still mostly bad (I’ve already recommended most of the good stuff several times over), so I’m lining up some safe favorites for anyone who may not have noticed them.

Michael Mann trifecta: Ali (2001), Public Enemies (2009), Blackhat (2015)

I rewatch most of Michael Mann’s movies regularly, and these are all just getting better and better with age. Ali is a rare attempt to do something creative and bold with a terrible genre (the biopic). The digital textures of Public Enemy are more bracing now than ever. Miami Vice gets more attention at this point, but while Public Enemies might not have quite the same level of shaggy evanescence, it is fascinating in its integration of aspects of classic Hollywood style. And, of course, you know how I feel about Blackhat.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 2001)

I’m blow away every time I watch it (and it’s my wife’s favorite movie, so I watch it a lot). One of the greatest modern examples of the Méliès/Cocteau lineage of cinema. Would take this opportunity to note that “Keanu Reeves is a detriment here” is one of my least favorite opinions.

Anaconda (Luis Llosa, 1997)

I’m well known for my enduring love of Anaconda. My siblings still tell the story about the time when they had a party in my parents’ cellar and I got stoned and passed out watching Anaconda in the other room. When the revelers emerged and woke me up, I saw the credits rolling on the TV and lamented, “Aw, man, Anaconda’s over?!!!” Seriously though, what a cast: Jon Voight (the MVP), J-Lo, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Danny Trejo.

Wild Things (John McNaughton, 1998)

I remember finding this unremarkable when it was released, but that was a different time. We were absolutely glutted with erotic thrillers and it was easy to take them for granted. Now, in the new era of cultural puritanism, this looks a lot better. Fun and trashy, with a great Matt Dillon performance. It looks like there are some even trashier sequels (three of them!), which I intend to check out.

I’m writing out of a lingering sense of dismay over a recent cyberbullying episode on Film Twitter. I am relatively new to Twitter (I joined last April), but I’ve already seen a lot of highs and lows. It is a great way to connect with people and get the word out about one’s own writings, but it’s also a cesspool of fragile egos emboldened by their relative anonymity. My favorite type of Film Twitter user is the person with unconventional taste who just wants to interact with other people who like weird stuff. In my day-to-day life, my film taste stands out as eccentric. A lot of the people I interact with STILL consider it controversial to love Tony Scott. I have been defending Tony Scott against unfair comments from skeptical acquaintances for more than 20 years! But within the first year of joining Twitter I have already constructed a fairly expansive bubble where it’s just taken for granted that Tony Scott is one of the great auteurs. This makes me feel so much less alienated in my aesthetic life!

My least favorite type of Film Twitter user is the person who likes to constantly reinforce their sense of superiority with a running stream of snide comments and lazy takedowns. This person feels an unjustified sense of pride because they dislike lots of things that their perceived inferiors are fond of. The thing is, it’s extremely easy to tear down literally any movie. Just give me a movie and I will compose a condescending tweet about it in less than a minute. Often, this category of Twitter user is just talking complete bullshit and at the same time feeling embarrassingly smug about it, but they have also likely surrounded themselves with lots of people who will shower them with enough back-pats and gold stars to give them the validation they crave.

This is all pretty sad, but mostly innocuous– except when it isn’t. This sort of circle jerk really crosses the line when it starts singling out particular people for ridicule on the basis of their taste. Recently, this happened to one of the most prominent users of the Letterboxd app: Allison M., of vegan alerts fame. Allison was one of the first people to follow me when I joined Letterboxd, and her enormous log (more than 21,000 movies) is one of the most expansive on the site.

Letterboxd is a terrific app. As someone who watches a lot of movies and then writes about them, it would be hard to overstate how convenient is to have an easy way to keep searchable, sortable, exportable records of my viewing activities. But even more importantly, it gives me access to the writings of a huge number of non-professional and semi-professional critics, who (surprise, surprise) are often far more interesting to read than the people trying to make a living off the enterprise. The majority of professional criticism (of new releases) is written in a rush after only seeing a movie once. Letterboxd removes the market demand for timeliness and gives people a venue to share more considered perspectives at their own pace. When people ask me who my favorite critics are on a given movie, the answer is almost certainly not the people who work at the New York Times or Indiewire. It’s more like “well, there’s this guy in Brazil who’s really interesting, and this college student from Vermont, oh, and that one Swedish woman who works at a guitar store– her take is really good.”

A well-curated Letterboxd feed is, in my experience, far more useful than something like Rotten Tomatoes, which I really only pay attention to in order to make sure I see anything that scores below 10%. It’s easy to introduce a division of labor: there are people I follow for their eccentric horror views, people I follow for their expertise in Hong Kong cinema, people I follow because they have seen more precode films than I have, and so on. Some people I follow not because I share their views, but rather because I consistently disagree with them and find their perspective engaging and challenging. Others I follow because their sensibility is so radically different from my own that I find it aesthetically interesting, and Allison is in this category.

She is best known for the “vegan alerts” and (sometimes) “vegan points” that she adds to the end of her reviews. Vegan alerts might include “cheese is shown,” or “Isabelle Huppert wears a leather jacket,” while vegan points might include “Julia Roberts eats a salad” or “Tim Roth pets a goat.” She is also known for her outlying opinions. She has assigned conspicuously low ratings to a large number of well-reviewed films, including a great many titles beloved by film bros. The combination of her unusual approach, outlying views, and abiding sincerity has made her a consistent target for dipshit responses. I always hate to see people leaving mean comments on her reviews, not just because I hate mean people, but also because she is one of the shining lights of the website, and the people attacking her are doing everything they can to pollute the well.

Recently, this was taken to a really unfortunate extreme when some asshole screenshotted her account (in particular highlighting a number of popular movies that she gave low ratings to), and turned it into a mean tweet, which then went viral. I am sorry to say that hundreds of people jumped on this pile, saying stupid, mean, ignorant things about this woman who didn’t do anything but log her honest views about Apocalypse Now and My Neighbor Totoro. Some people who I otherwise respect joined the fray. I hope they manage to summon some remorse about this.

Step back and think for a minute about why someone would respond with this level of contempt and cruelty to someone else’s taste. I wrote a two-part blog post about this sort of phenomenon with Brandon Polite, available here, but I have some more specific thoughts about this incident. Let’s start by thinking about how weird it is to be mean to someone because of which movies they do or don’t like. Do we do this with food? Are people out there posting “this bozo doesn’t even like nacho fries”?

No, because our liking for nacho fries doesn’t characteristically involve the same level of personal investment and identification as the film tastes of people who are interested enough in the medium to participate in Film Twitter. When someone else dislikes nacho fries and we like them, we don’t make that about us. We don’t feel insulted. But when your identity is heavily wrapped up in cinephilia, it’s easy to take others’ judgments of the films you love as judgments of you. But this is projection! Allison isn’t stewing over the fact that you like Blade Runner 2049 better than Last Night in Soho, she’s just out there attending film festivals and writing dope vegan alerts and totally ignoring you. You are easy to ignore, because there are a lot of you and it’s hard to tell you apart. But there’s only one Allison M., and there’s no mistaking her.

I’m an omnivore. I was a vegetarian at one point in the distant past, but I would never even consider going back. I don’t want to argue about it, especially not with ardent vegans! But, the thing is, I still LOVE Allison’s vegan alerts, and not in a mocking way. They are great, and I always look forward to reading them. Sometimes I finish a movie and the first thing I think is “ooooh cannot wait to check out the vegan alerts on that one.”

First of all, her vegan alerts are outstandingly witty. Some of the stuff she notices is hilarious in a really satisfying way– satisfying because it gives us a glimpse into a way of seeing the world that is both idiosyncratic and internally coherent. One of my favorite recent vegan alerts, for instance, is that Sandie plays a milkmaid Last Night in Soho. There’s no milk, there’s no milking, there’s not even an actual milkmaid in the film’s diegetic universe! It’s just that the character as a sexy performance persona dresses up as a milkmaid. This is not the observation of someone who is playing around. This is something you could only possibly think of if you are watching the movie through an extremely refined lens. It’s an achievement to develop this level of vegan goggles, and I admire it as such.

Secondly, Allison’s body of work is particularly thought-provoking with respect to the interaction between moral and aesthetic value. This is a complex topic that philosophers have written a great deal about. I regularly teach it in my upper division aesthetics courses. There are a range of views out there, but most of us agree that artworks with moral faults *can* be aesthetically flawed on this account. For instance, if the suspense of a film depends on us seeing nonwhite people as inherently threatening, that can certainly ruin the film, because it should be very hard for morally well-developed people to even entertain this point of view. But few of us think that *all* moral faults are aesthetic flaws. There’s probably something morally faulty about the way Sniper gets us to sympathize with characters carrying out paramilitary operations in Latin America, but who seriously cares? I know full well that the American government’s interventions in Latin America have been moral atrocities, and I can easily bracket this background stance when I watch Sniper.

It appears that we all have different thresholds that reflect our divergent moral and aesthetic sensibilities and distinctive ways of engaging with art. I am really bothered by the way that Gone, Baby, Gone presents a dichotomy between middle class/attractive/clean/morally restorative and poor/ugly/dirty/morally degenerate. On the other hand, I highly value Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. Many commentators who are just fine with Gone, Baby, Gone have found Craven’s films repugnant. Often, we think the worst of people when we find out they like something that we abhor for moral reasons. But here’s the thing: the people who abhor Craven and love Gone, Baby, Gone should not assume that I am experiencing the movies the same way they are and I should not assume they are experiencing them the same way I am. I am sure that for these people, watching Last House on the Left is a real bummer. I get it; it’s not for everyone. But it’s not like I had the same miserable experience they did and then pronounced, “that was great!” As a Craven fan and exploitation connoisseur, I approach the movie with a very different context. I think about what’s onscreen in different ways than they do, and I find it valuable in ways that they don’t.

And that’s okay! Aesthetic diversity is a good thing. I sure as hell would not want to live in a world where every single person likes Last House on the Left. Who would there be left to shock? And it would be just unbearably smug of me to assume that every person who likes Gone, Baby, Gone is in the grips of unreflective class ideology. Surely some people are, but I have no doubt that there are many others who approached the movie differently than I did–attending to different elements, asking different questions, and arriving at different answers–and that these peoples’ takes are in many cases compelling on their own terms.

Allison’s body of criticism is so fascinating in part because it is such a vast exploration of the interplay between her moral convictions and her taste in film. The two are certainly interrelated (as they should be!) but it’s not at all straightforward how. Clearly, she does not evaluate movies primarily based on their vegan bona fides. Most of the time, the vegan alerts and the review function separately. She likes plenty of movies with bad vegan score cards and dislikes plenty that are more vegan friendly. Sometimes, however, vegan considerations DO enter into her evaluation, and she is often explicit about this. And so it is extremely interesting from the reader’s point of view to think about what the difference-makers are. What sort of vegan merits actually make the movie better according to her? What sort of vegan demerits make it worse? Why this movie and not that one? No one on the internet who I know of has published a comparable volume of criticism hovering around a particular moral concern, and virtually no one on Letterboxd has seen as many movies as Allison has. Her account is a gift to us all.

What’s the point of reading film criticism in the first place? To help us budget our time? Maybe for some of us, but not for me. I will never skip a movie I want to see because someone else didn’t like it. I read criticism primarily because it gives me a chance to try on someone else’s goggles. Trying to understand someone else’s point of view helps me expand my own. It shows me what I might be missing, and even when I’m not convinced by it, it helps me empathize with people who see things differently than I do. Sometimes it informs my own engagement directly; other times it does so indirectly, by prompting me to articulate my reasons for disagreeing. Some people I like to read because I relate to them so strongly that I feel a sense of kinship and camaraderie. Others I like to read because it is comforting to know there are people out there who are utterly different from me and that the world still has plenty of surprises in store for me.

The worst way to abuse criticism is to treat it as a zero sum game where one side has to win and the other side has to lose. Film Twitter is overrun with this form of abuse. This is no surprise, because of course the platform is prone to attract people whose egos are heavily invested in their film taste. Compare the sort of pathetic bullying that happens when a few critics dissent from the tomato consensus on some fan favorite with a 99% score. It’s so weird to me that people get angry about this. 99% of tomato shills like your dorky movie, and yet you feel the need to harass and abuse the three people who had a different take? What would it add to your life if 100% of tomato critics assented to your view? Would you finally be sure that you are worthy of love? The people who bullied Allison on Twitter are no better. Grow up. Everyone who joined that pile-on needs to do some serious soul-searching. In the meantime, I’ll be reading reading vegan alerts and having a great time doing it.