Before Mubi was a streaming website, it was actually a message board for cinephiles that preferred arthouse, obscure, international film. Like literally any message board about any subject in the pre-social media era,1 threads would proliferate either for users to share lists they made or to ask for lists to be made: best movies of all time, best movies of the year, best movies of the year 1939, best Romanian movies of the year 1939, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 not featured on any major film publication or website list, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 not featured on any list yet on Mubi forums, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 no one has ever seen and only exists as a registrar record in an abandoned film indexing periodical published for only three months of 1944 found in a lost library in the forest under the corpse of a hermit who clearly was the world’s greatest cinephile…. you get the picture.
This behavior lead to the famous thread Stop the Lists! or StL! for short, which started out as a meta-commentary about the purpose of film discussion and then became a perpetual top-listed new post thread, until one day it just served as the Mubi forum’s general chat area where you could talk about anything, but where occasionally new users would only read the first page (which ended with the post, “Good luck with your play, Drew!”), skip to the last page (like page 1700 or 2400 or so) and start the debate about the purposes of lists in film discussion all over again.
Indeed, Stop the Lists! turned out to feature many, many lists. I even used StL! to create the ultimate Mubi list, “The Mubi Forum User’s Top 20 Films of All Time” which after a baroque multi-month process of voting and removing and debating and tracking and voting, very very very nearly ended up topped by a six-hour Filipino film with no extant print before users vote-brigaded it off because it was too ironic.2
Anyway, I don’t do best-of-the-year lists and, for well over a decade, didn’t track movies watched or books read or whatever at all. Stop the Lists! was one reason — listing and seeing a million lists can get tiresome — but also I burned out.
In college I used to rate, review, and list pretty much every media I consumed. I’d review everything I’d see on IMDb, I’d track recommendations on Amazon and Movielens, and I’d collate rankings wherever meaningful.
It took a lot of time, and I didn’t realize how wasted that time was until I hit 1000 reviews on IMDb, decided to collect them into a self-published book, and when I started looking through the reviews, realized I didn’t remember many of the movies I had seen, and in a few reviews didn’t even know what I was talking about. I had also binged a ton of books by that point with nary a takeaway to discuss them.
I had spent years greedily intaking anything I could get my hands on, and couldn’t even remember most of it. Listing and tracking media consumption had a terrible consequence of driving me to try to see more movies per year, read more books per year, find more music per year, yadda yadda yadda.
I was also at the beginning of my career and learning that it was far more interesting to make movies than to write about them, and also that it’s not really a great idea to speak ill of movies you don’t like because you never really know whether the person you’re talking to was involved in them.
Because remembering movies was an issue, I took up a laissez-faire attitude about seeing which movies I actually remembered rather than trying to remember them via documentation.
Because remembering movies is an issue, I decided in 2023 to merely track the media, no rankings or ratings or reviews. I opened up a Google Sheet and I titled it Stop the Lists!
I wanted to see if it helped me remember anything or if it showed what I forgot. I was curious to see if I’d end up with best-of lists. I figured I’d tie the lists in to my one-screening-per-week activity.
Here’s the lists:
Feature Films:3
Eo*
Upstream Color (2013) ‡
The World's End (2013) ‡
Strange Brew (1983)
M3gan*
Skinamarink*
My Name is Otto*
Black Swan (2010) ‡
Congo (1995) ‡
An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)
Sleep Has Her House (2017)*
Infinity Pool*
Twisted Pair (2018)
Titanic (1997)*
Rock-A-Doodle (1991)
La La Land (2016)
Alucarda (1977)*
The Menu
Cocaine Bear*
The Keep (1983)
Stereo (1969)
Magdalena Viraga (1986)
Wendell & Wild
Queen of Diamonds (1991)
This Transient Life (1970)
Mandara (1971)
Poem (1972)
Videophobia (2019)
Inside*
Easy Rider (1969)* ‡
The Wind (1928)* ‡
A Man Escaped (1956)* ‡
The Bloody Child (1996)
Top Gun: Maverick
Clue (1985)
The Origin of the Species (2020)*
Murder Mystery 2
Tori & Lokita*
The Love Witch (2016)
Phantom Love (2007)
The Doom Generation (1995)*
Whiplash (2014)
Dissolution (2010)
Self-Portrait
De Humani Corporis Fabrica*
Joyland*
The Mask (1994) ‡
Orlando (1992)
Golf Alpha Yankee (note: unreleased)*
Jawbreaker (1999)
Hypnotic*
Bully (2001)
Eraserhead (1973) ‡
The Elephant Man (1980) ‡
Dune (1984) ‡
Blue Velvet (1986) ‡
It is Night in America (2022)
Wild at Heart (1990) ‡
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) ‡
Lost Highway (1997) ‡
The Straight Story (1999)
Mulholland Drive (2001) ‡
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) ‡
Inland Empire (2006)* ‡
Rio (2011)
Elemental*
Asteroid City*
But I'm a Cheerleader (2000) ‡
Addicted to Fresno (2015)
SLC Punk (1999)
Independence Day (1996) ‡
XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX *
Bubble Boy (2001)
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
Two Deaths (1995)
The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1969)*
Interiors (1978) ‡
Sweet Bird of Youth (1989)
Bananas (1971)
Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963)*
Mon Oncle d'Amerique (My American Uncle, 1980)
Oppenheimer*
Barbie*
La Mala Educacion (Bad Education, 2004) ‡
La Guerre est Finie (The War is Over, 1966)
Talk to Me*
El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, 1960)
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
The Unknown Country*
Society (1989)*
The Burial of Kojo (2018)
Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
They Cloned Tyrone
Landscape with Invisible Hand*
Crimes of the Future (1970)
Antiporno (2016)
Center Stage (2000)
Piaffe*
Donnie Darko (2001) ‡
Sausage Party (2016)
Incroyable mais vrai (Incredible but True, 2021)
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
See You Yesterday (2019)
Whip It (2009)
Nowhere (1997)*
Totally Killer
The Beaver Trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985, 2001)
The Beaver Trilogy Part IV (2015)
Rubin and Ed (1991)
Once Within a Time*
The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2019-2022)*
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Renfield
They Live (1988)
Bedazzled (2000) ‡
Gerald's Game (2017)
Killers of the Flower Moon*
The Killer*
I Heart Huckabees (2004) ‡
Firelight (unreleased)*
A Bronx Tale (1993)
The Big Lebowski (1998) ‡
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt*
Trainspotting (1996) ‡
Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
Fallen Leaves*
Wish*
May December*
The Conjuring (2013)
Maestro*
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) ‡
A Haunting in Venice
Poor Things*
A Castle for Christmas (2021)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) ‡
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (2000) ‡
The Boy and the Heron*
Short Films:
Valentine (2022)
2023 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Animated
An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It
The Flying Sailor
Ice Merchants
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
My Year of Dicks
Aphotic Zone
2023 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action
Ivalu
Night Ride (Nattrikken)
Le Pupille
The Red Suitcase
An Irish Goodbye
The Great Sadness of Zohara
MoMI Persistent Visions Program 1
Light Signal
Zero Woods of the Wild Place
Gospel Hill
Growing Up Absurd
I Thought the World of You
MOMI Persistent Visions Program 2
Drowned (Ertrunken)
ipsae i/ii
Earth in the Mouth
Social Skills
La source de la loire
A Family that Steals Dogs
Desert Air
The Wind
Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp)
The Mind Palace of Louis
Dwarfo-psychosis
New Plaza Cinema presents New York Filmmaker's Shorts
Under the Sun, After the Wind
For a Better Life
Yo on the Go
Letters Home
Harari Loses His Squash
Tantamount
Thomas Naegle: A Poem
A Side Hustle
Drink Lounge
2023 Coney Island Film Festival - Program 11 - Animation
Buildings
Trapped
The Grudge: Ghoul Edition
The Beatles Vs The Stones
Powers of 10
Love Letters for the Subway
ASK AGAIN LATER
Frontier
Deep Field
Loup Garou
Little Hurts
My Dear Mr. Whitman
There's a Bison on The Prairie
Chihuahua Drama
Misophonia
2023 Coney Island Film Festival - Program 14 - Shorts
Bushwick Jodi
Young Mom
Hidden
Escape From Canal Street
Sugar
2023 Coney Island Film Festival - Program 16 - Coney Island Films
Looka Looka
Parental Orbit
MORPHEUS OF CONEY ISLAND
Heptapus
Wonder Wheel
Joey & Sarah Go to Coney Island
Coney Island Baby
Artists & Beers May 2023
Relationshirt
Detour
Mommy Mafia
Mystery Man
Sleepyhead
Date Night
Wanna Have Fun
The Age of Stone (A Idade Da Petra) (2013)
11010
The Black Dog (2018)
Views from Sunk Island (2021)
QWFF — I AM and WE ARE: 6 short films that examine intersectionality
Lunchbox
Empty Room
Xmas Eve Eve
Moving
Wo
Everything Will Be Okay
Tres Haikus Modernos (2010)
KÜME PEWMA WENÜY (2020)
Pitch Black Panacea (2019
The Cowboy & the Frenchman (1988)
Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times)
The Icing on the Cake (2010)
Katra Film Series — Fall 2023 Block 1
THE UNQUIET DEAD
HANDWRITTEN
THE INTERVIEW
CLEAR DAY
A PERFECT LOVE
IZZY
Katra Film Series — Fall 2023 Block 3
Part-Time
Dicktation
A Minute to Midnight: A Musical
Midas
Falls Cry
The Final Tour
How Do You Like Your Eggs?
Katra Film Series — Fall 2023 Block 4
The Interrogation
Two Wrongs
Trusted Hands
271 Raeburn Avenue
Death Differently
A Roadside Banquet
A Tennis Friend
Artists & Beers October 2023
I'm Not Lost
Gone Glamp
Solidarity
The Black Disquisition
Oscar Zulu
FilmShop Presents: Guilty Pleasures
Competition
Moon
Do Sheep Dream of Electric Androids?
DECAF
Nightblooming
Good Meat
HYPEBOYS
LOWBROW UTENSILS
SALT OF MAN
OBJECTOPHILIA
Holdmese (1975)
░▓░▓ 𝑷𝑹𝑶𝑴𝑬𝑵𝑨𝑫𝑬 𝑴𝒀𝑻𝑯𝑨𝑵𝑨𝑳𝒀𝑻𝑰𝑸𝑼𝑬 🆁🅴🅰🅵🅻🅸🅲🆃🅸🅾🅽 : 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘘𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 ²⁰¹⁶⁻²⁰¹⁸ ░▓░▓
Yuki's Sun (1972)
Un Por Esprit (2004)
Seven Fishes
Lost Highways: Embodied Travels
Ghost Trip (2000)
Desert Abstractions (1997)
Rain Painting (2014)
Frame (1977)
XCTRY (2018)
Stark Film (1999)
Vision Point (1999)
On the Line (2002)
Carte Noire (2014)
Goodbye Thelma (2019)
Jáaji Approx. (2015)
Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) ‡
I also tracked books, but this post is focusing on movies. I tracked periodicals I read and television seasons I watched, but those were difficult for me to follow up with and even more useless than the lists above. From a television series perspective I finished Mad Men, Better Call Saul, Twin Peaks: The Return, and The Fall of the House of Usher. I watched seasons of Futurama, Key & Peele, and Malcolm in the Middle.
One medium I did not track but should have because I watch a ton, are hour-long stand-up comedy specials. I burn through tons of standup on 800 Pound Gorilla and Netflix.
I’ve just started reading professional scripts to learn some more about how they are written. There are three types of scripts I want to read: movies I’m interested in but haven’t seen yet, so I can imagine the movie while I’m reading it and then see how it ends up on screen; my favorite movies, especially the ones that are really non-linear and anti-narrative, to see how they were described on paper; and classic, well-respected scripts regardless of whether I’ve seen them or not. Right now I’ve only read two: The Conjuring and Saltburn.
Were those lists useful or interesting for you? If so, tell me why in the comments, I’d really like to know.
For me, if I keep doing this, it will largely be out of habit. The incentive here was to see if it could help me remember certain movies or highlights from over the year. Turns out I was at a Christmas party and someone asked about my one-screening-per-week activity, “So did you see any standout independent films this year?”, I whipped open my phone and opened up Stop the Lists!, and immediately got lost. Too many titles, I couldn’t parse what’s significant or not.
So the problem with the lists above is that they may be data, but they’re raw, unorganized data. They lack context and metadata. These are movies I watched in 2023 — did I like them? Which were the best? Who made them? Did I learn anything from them?
Here’s the thing. I don’t like rating or reviewing anymore. I never opened up a Letterboxd account4.
I was telling my wife about these lists and whether I should keep doing them, and she said I should at least rank them and give my favorite discoveries of the year and so forth.
But consider this:
Top Gun: Maverick is a Tom Cruise vehicle about Maverick finding renewed purpose in training the next generation of Top Gun talent. De Humani Corporis Fabrica is a fly-on-the-wall documentary about invasive surgeries in low-income French communities. XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX is an hour-long remix of a found-footage 1920s French pornography that Ken Jacobs made by flashing back and forth between the photo positive and photo negatives, every four frames, to create a stereoscopic effect over various audio and music samples.
How could you rank these experiences against each other? They don’t relate to each other at all; arguably, they could be defined as different types of media altogether. On the one hand they’re all movies, in the sense that they’re moving images presented on a screen from the direction of a filmmaker. On the other hand they ignore or reject each other’s modes of filmmaking. Which is a good thing, and why I enjoy experimental, underground, independent, and alternative filmmaking so much along with the commercial narrative works. But ranking them against each other can’t really be meaningful: what does it mean to rank XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX higher or lower than Maverick? Based on what metrics?
When I was looking over the lists for this post, what I did realize is that there were a lot of movies I almost wrote Movie Recommendations for, but then didn’t come around to for various reasons. Sometimes I didn’t really have much to say beyond “That’s good”; other times I was unclear whether the movie was available. Sometimes I don’t write Movie Recommendations because I don’t think the movie needs any additional marketing.
My Movie Recommendations, to be clear, are also recommendations to myself, for the future: movies I want to buy a physical copy of, movies I want to revisit and watch again.
So let’s strip the features list down to the movies I don’t want to forget, but I never got around to recommending. These will only be newly seen movies, not rewatches.
Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) - these early David Cronenberg features are actually “ambient narratives” like I make! I was totally blown away that one of my all-time favorite directors started out using many of the techniques I use in my own work.
Wendell & Wild - I can’t not like Henry Selick animation. It’s not his best story but it’s still gorgeous to look at.
Queen of Diamonds (1991) - I got the opportunity to watch many of Nina Menkes’ movies off of Mubi and loved them. Apparently this one has been selected in 2023 to be included in the Library of Congress
This Transient Life (1970), Mandara (1971), and Poem (1972) - I tried writing a Movie Recommendation for Akio Jissoji’s “Buddhist Trilogy” and it became something bigger than I could handle at the time. This stuff is unbridled, intense, thought-provoking, discomfiting fucking art. Amazing work, highly inspiring, pure cinema. Nearly every single shot stands alone and is a completely unique angle, the editing is amazing, the drama is outstanding, and all three features are stuffed with philosophical and poetic nuance.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica - the best surgery footage film since To See with One’s Own Eyes. I was mesmerized.
Joyland - solid endearing drama from a strikingly young Pakistani director about a poor man who struggles to find work until he starts working at a club as a backup dancer for a trans woman. They fall in love, risking the man’s marriage and his family’s standing in his conservative Pakistani community. The director, Saim Sadiq, is going places. Let’s hope it’s not to jail.
Orlando (1992) - Sally Potter’s debut is adapted from one of the couple of Virginia Woolf novels I actually like, and this movie is delightful and dreamy.
Mon Oncle d'Amerique (My American Uncle, 1980) - the hype is real. This movie is regularly cited as one of Resnais’ best, and it is. Resnais is one of my flat-out favorite directors and this movie is his Sans Soleil, an exhausted and cynical noir about the end of leftist idealism.
Oppenheimer - the first half of this movie made me think Nolan was finally reaching the heights of his masterpiece The Prestige, the second half didn’t keep up that excitement. But I will put my neck on the line as a professional editor to state that this is one of the best edited movies I’ve ever seen, and I hope it wins the Academy Award for editing.
El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, 1960) - this Mexican cult classic is delightful and lovingly dark, but it also gave me a bit of catharsis regarding an abusive relationship I was once in.
Society (1989) - a famously disgusting body horror with weirdo incest overtones that probably created a SFX materials shortage in California when they were working on it. I’m talking they layered on metric tons of rubber, silicone, fake blood and other gooey substances.
The Burial of Kojo (2018) - A poetic Ghanian fable about a family fleeing an omen that interestingly ended up on Sight & Sounds 101 Hidden Gems list.
Landscape with Invisible Hand - A solid YA sci fi about humans living under extraterrestrial colonialism. I feel like people on the left would see the aliens as white colonizers, while people on the right would see the aliens as liberal coastal elitists, and the movie would be as funny either way.
Piaffe - a woman takes over running folly on a commercial after her sibling gets institutionalized, and then grows a horse tail. She then starts a sub/dom affair with a professor and engages in “horseplay.” This movie was wild and one of the few I felt uncomfortable to watch in the theatre, largely because I was in an audience of what appeared to be a bunch of New School students and I felt it would have been better if I wasn’t some random lone man sitting by himself in the corner.
The Beaver Trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985, 2001) and The Beaver Trilogy Part IV (2015) - a series of movies about a man who wants to be a television star, who stumbles across filmmaker Trent Harris in Utah. Part 1 is a documentary, Parts 2 and 3 are Harris’ attempts at recreating it with Sean Penn and Crispin Glover respectively. Part IV is directed by a student of Harris’ and gives context and closure to the bizarre twist.
Once Within a Time - Godfrey Reggio is known for the Qatsi trilogy and returns with this extremely stylized environmentalist fable that plays like a 65 minute long music video. This movie was pure vibes.
The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2019-2022) - These are a series, or ‘cycle’, of animations by master experimentalist Lewis Klahr. The topics and effects of his work are indescribable, you have to see them to feel them. But he makes animations by using cut-outs of vintage ads, comics, and nostalgia artifacts. They’re usually extremely sexually charged and disturbing. This cycle was named after a line in The Thief of Bagdad.
Fallen Leaves - if you know, you know. Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki is a little like Wes Anderson in the sense that he focuses on making the same sort of stories with the same sort of characters in the same style over and over again, but he does it very well and if you enjoy the vibe of one you are guaranteed a good time on the rest.
Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse - I have a rule that I only see one franchise film per year in theatres (home viewing is fine) and the only time I’ve ever felt like I missed something are the Spiderverse movies. It’s like they’ve taken everything I love about glitch, animation, design, surrealness, and maximalist spectacle and crushed it all into nearly-bursting box. What’s crazy is that they have great stories too. Spiderman: Beyond the Spiderverse is gonna be my franchise film for 2024, I’m not missing the opportunity to see at least one of these on the big screen.
Poor Things - I saw a headline that said, “Is this the best we can do in showcasing women’s sexual pleasure?” I didn’t find this movie to be about women’s pleasure, but rather’s men’s attempt to forge and control it. Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest and greatest is a steampunk reworking of Frankenstein where the men try to create the perfect sexual service golem, only for her to break free and undermine the entire social structure of their sexual control. It’s very funny and the visuals are spectacular.
The Boy and the Heron - It doesn’t have the “wrapping up and putting down the pen” feel of The Wind Rises, but this is absolutely in Miyazaki’s top three, next to Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. In fact I feel like the three make a trilogy that you should watch when you’re 12 (Spirited), 14 (Princess), and 16 (Heron).
Please be mindful that these movies are listed chronologically in order of when I viewed them and do not constitute a best-of or other ranking system. I’m just saying they’re remarkable movies I want to remember and you may enjoy too.
Considering the deluge of titles in retrospect, I feel like an ideal number of movies for me to see per year is actually more like 100 - one new one, one revisit per week. I’m not going to aim for that in 2024, it just seems like the appropriate cadence. Combined with the one-screening-per-week thing it would mean one movie viewed at home per week as well. Obviously my wife and I watch more than that.
The biggest danger of list-making is that it drives you into a consumerist treadmill. You want to see more movies, wider ranged, deeper obscured… the more movies you have seen, the more people are surprised by the ones you haven’t, so lists beget lists as you hunt down the canonical classics, the off-canon classics, the underground classics, the cult classics.
I’m going to keep noting down what I watch as long as I maintain interest. So I might be able to do a post like this again next year. However if this ends up the only post with end-of-year lists, I’m pretty satisfied: it was a great year at the movies.
The better time when you found communities based on interests and hobbies rather than mere “connections” which are largely just a form of metadata rather than real relationships.
Apologies and respect to Noel Vera, film critic and sponsor of the now forgotten movie, whose activism is an attempt to save much of the Philippines’ cinematic history from rotting to vinegar.
Films lacking years in parenthesis are 2023 films or 2022 films that were released in NYC in 2023. Asterix denotes attended a public screening. ‡ denotes re-watch
The one time I considered opening a Letterboxd account, I was overwhelmed with sample reviews of users trying to out-clever and out-viral each other. This is another area where ‘sharability’ is not discussion or community. I miss message boards!
Piaffe sounds amazing! I'm going to keep this for future references for movies to view. What I appreciated about the list was the variety of films you see. And what I appreciated most about the annotated 20 was the bit about you having a realization about a past relationship because sometimes movies are vehicles for entertainment, sometimes they're vehicles for information, and sometimes they're vehicles for our own insightful epiphanies. Appreciate you and this list. Also, since you watched Donnie Darko, do you like Southland Tales?