Well, I watched more movies than I did in 2023… I crossed the 1095 films watched overall (three films on average per day, the majority on weekends), and I did excel in watching more movies than were added to my watchlist. I also am back under 100 films on my to watch list, thanks to staycation.
My top 15 movies of the year are: “Dune Part Two,” “Hundreds of Beavers,” “The Wild Robot,” “Anora,” “Print it Black,” “Flow,” “Wicked: Part 1,” “The Substance,” “Nosferatu,” “Patrice: The Movie,” “Out of My Mind,” “The Fall Guy,” “Challengers,” “Sugarcane” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”
I’m not going to speak on all 15 of my favorite movies of the year. A couple of them, like “Hundreds of Beavers” and “The Wild Robot” I’ve already talked about in previous columns.
What I am going to say is the ABC Studios documentaries “Print it Black” and “Patrice” are both exceptionally good documentaries. “Print it Black’ is hard as a journalist to watch – talking about doing the job in the face of a tragedy that hits your community and trying to be objective, which gets so much harder when you are drawn in as part of the story. It’s another angle on the Uvalde tragedy from an interesting perspective.
“Patrice” is one of those documentaries that highlights a law that is functioning in a way that impacts the quality of life for individuals pursuits of happiness. At its core is Patrice, a woman whose joy and exuberance to overcome obstacles in her path is a reminder of the human spirit. Yes, it has contrivances. But it is one of the most positive documentaries I watched this year with a point.
“Flow” as an animated movie is one of those wild cards in the animated race I would not hate to see win. It’s choppier than “The Wild Robot” on a technical side, but it’s got just as much heart and personality in many of it’s animal characters.
“Wicked” proved again Jon Chu knows what he is doing in adapting musicals, with my only quibbles being the color grading seeming off because they were shooting for IMAX/3-D cameras that always leave everything looking muddy in all aspects.
“The Substance” and “Nosferatu” are going to be interesting to watch in visual effects and cinematography races this year. “Nosferatu’s” cinematography alone was gorgeous to watch on the big screen.
Many of the other films on my list are popular fare. I have some films, like ”The Brutalist,” “September 5,” “Sing Sing,” and “Nickel Boys” that I haven’t seen that are vying for awards, as several haven’t had wide releases yet.