Movie Journal: December

Hidden Figures

Unsurprisingly, since December coincides with the end of year list-making and awards-voting seasons, I spent most of the month frantically trying to catch up on films that I had missed, or which I finally had a chance to see thanks to expanded theatrical releases or screeners. I watched 28 films in December, the overwhelming majority of which were 2016 releases, with very few older films getting a look in. As a result, there's a lot of overlap between thes list and my Top 25 Films of the Year, which was radically reshaped throughout the month as I tried to see as much as possible.

The worst film I watched in December was Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals. I was a big fan of Ford's A Single Man, which I found to be an aesthetically gorgeous and emotionally rich study of grief and loneliness, and while Nocturnal Animals was, if anything, an improvement in terms of achieving a better balance between story and style, the story it's telling is utter horseshit. A multi-stranded, multi-fictional narrative about an art dealer (Amy Adams) who receives a book written by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), the violent plot of which she suspects is a form of revenge for past wrongdoings, it's a film whose overwrought cynicism winds up being completely laughable thanks to Ford's unceasing ponderousness. There are some good performances - Michael Shannon, unsurprisingly, is fantastic as a character in Gyllenhaal's book - but it's all in aid of a pointlessly mean movie which doesn't even find fun in its meanness.

Among the crush of new releases, work and Christmas, I found time to rewatch two Coen Brothers movies which I had underestimated on first viewing. First, Burn After Reading, which I didn't like when I saw it in the theatre back in 2008 because it felt aimless and incomplete, two of the main reasons why I liked it this time. It's not their funniest movie or their best comedy in terms of structure and intent, but it's a charming bit of nonsense filled with great actors having a lot of fun. Taken out of the original context - i.e. coming mere months after they won Best Picture, Director and Screenplay for No Country For Old Men - it's much easier to enjoy as a lark, a way for the Coens to unwind after making such a heavy drama. It also felt weirdly appropriate to watch a movie in which two of the most repeated refrains were "The Russians?" and "What the fuck?!"

I also watched Hail, Caesar! which I started an hour or so before midnight on New Year's Eve, so it was the last film I watched in 2016 and the first I watched in 2017. Unlike Burn After Reading, I enjoyed Hail, Caesar! on first viewing, but came away from my second with an even greater appreciation for it. Like the earlier film, its story is pretty superfluous to the jokes, but what becomes more apparent with each viewing is how lovingly the film views its motley crew of film industry types, and the appreciation it has for their skill and craft. From Eddie Mannix's (Josh Brolin) ability to somehow keep a studio running (even if it requires threats and manipulation) to Hobie Doyle's (Alden Ehrenreich) knack for lasso tricks, it's an oddly touching tribute to people who find comfort and fulfillment in their work, even if the work itself doesn't amount to much more than gossamer.

Let's dig in to the good stuff. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in December of 2016.

Movie Journal: November

November was another month focused primarily on catching up with 2016 releases, with all but three of the twenty-four I watched coming out in the last twelve months. As is so often the case, a year that looked like it might be barren in August looks positively flush in November, as a consensus about the best films begins to form, and seemingly every week a film comes out which seems determined to shake up any established sense of order. It's chaotic and beautiful and it's my favourite period of the film calendar.

The worst film I saw this month was Mick Jackson's Denial, a moribund courtroom drama recounting the real case of a historian (Rachel Weisz) who was sued by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) - not to be confused with the defensive end for the Cowboys - for libel after she accurately described his beliefs and methods. It's a compelling story, but one which is retold with little drive or power, wasting a great cast on material that couldn't be more important, but which winds up feeling trivial. Not merely bad, but wholly inadequate.

Now, lets talk about that good good stuff. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in November of 2016.

Movie Journal: October

Queen of Katwe

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

No, not because Christmas is just around the corner (though that is a plus) but because it's awards season! Good films are finally coming out again! After what has been one of the more dispiriting summers in recent memory, the next couple of months look phenomenal and the slow drip of interesting, challenging movies started in October, as reflected by this month's list, which is less reliant on non-2016 films than usual.

In total, I watched 22 films this month, 21 of which were first time viewings. The lone rewatch was of James Whale's Frankenstein, which I hadn't seen in about a decade, and was even more haunting and gorgeous than I remembered. Karloff's performance as The Monster is one for the ages, not merely because he's convincing as a hulking mass of murderous potential, but because he also makes The Monster's fear as he's trapped in a burning building feel palpably real.

The worst film I watched was Finian's Rainbow, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the 1947 musical about an Irish couple (Fred Astaire and Petula Clark) coming to America, pursued by a Leprechaun (Tommy Steele, in what may be the most grating performance ever committed to celluloid) and interrupting the lives of a small town while singing terrible, forgettable songs. Also, there's blackface for some reason. A thoroughly dispiriting watch, though it's weirdly inspirational; Coppola was only four years away from making The Godfather, after all, so anything is possible.

Without any further ado, let's talk about the best films I watched in October, 2016.

Movie Journal: September

Hell or High Water

Oh shit, a movie journal that's more or less on time! That's what happens when you go on holiday for a few weeks and have a little bit of time to actually put one of these things together!

Said holiday did eat into my film viewing for the month, however, since I watched a relatively paltry 27 films in September, four of which were rewatches. For the record, those rewatches were of Pan's Labyrinth, which I watched for Shot/Reverse Shot purposes; The General, because I've been on a Keaton kick lately and wanted to revisit it for the first time in a decade; Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, just because; and The War Room, which for some reason I find myself revisiting every four years. (I also wanted to refresh my memory in advance of watching the Documentary Now! pastiche of it, "The Bunker", which was unsurprisingly perfect.) All four were great, for very different reasons.

Of the new to me films I watched this month, the worst was Cimarron, the 1931 Western which is only really notable for winning Best Picture that year. As a film, it's a drab epic of American expansionism which covers 40 years but feels like it takes 50 to watch. There's a few fun, eccentric performances in the mix, but Richard Dix and Irene Dunne make for pretty boring leads, and their strained marriage isn't a strong enough backbone to sustain a movie that's light on substance or fun.

(X-Men: Apocalypse ran a close second for worst film of the month, but I'm going to write a review of that later because I feel like its shittiness can't be easily summarised in a single paragraph. Make no mistake, though: it's pretty bad, and would be the worst X-Men-associated movie if the first Wolverine film wasn't there giving it a low bar to clear.)

Enough of the bad stuff, here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in September, 2016.

Movie Journal: August

Wendy and Lucy

I'm somewhat late on this month's movie journal on account of work, and since I'm going to be spending much of the next week traveling and going to comedy shows, I thought I'd better write this now otherwise I'll be writing about films I saw in August in October, and that isn't a good look.

August was easily my weakest month for movies this year. Due to a hectic few weeks, I only managed to squeeze in 20 films throughout the month, one of which was Suicide Squad, far and away the worst film I've seen so far this year, and one of the most miserable cinematic experiences I can remember. I already spent two whole episodes of Shot/Reverse Shot talking about why it's terrible in and of itself and representative of everything wrong with blockbuster filmmaking, so let's leave it at that.

I also re-watched Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time in about a decade and it was roughly ten times better than I remembered. Admittedly, I remembered it being really good, but I didn't remember it being brilliant (until the tacked on happy ending, which is hilariously obvious and ill-fitting). It's easy to obsess over the fact that it's an incomplete work because swathes of it were cut and destroyed over seventy years ago, but focusing on the lost masterpiece that no one living has seen can only distract from the masterpiece that we actually have. It also reminded me of how much I enjoy the scene in The Squid in the Whale in which Jesse Eisenberg tries to impress a girl by bragging about having only seen stills of the film, a scene I think of very often because it's not a million miles away from what I was like as a teenager.

Right, let's get down to business. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in August.

Movie Journal: July

The Witch

Another late entry into this series, though one which is at least slightly less late than the June journal was. It's a shame, really, because July was easily the best month of the year for me in terms of the quality of movies I watched, so much so that I struggled to narrow this list down to just ten. For the record, films which just missed the cut include: Ghostbusters (2016), No Home Movie (2015), L'inhumaine (1924), Call Me Kuchu (2012) and Real Life (1979).

The worst film I watched in July was The Trip, Roger Corman's 1967 dalliance with psychedelia and LSD that is most notable for featuring such soon-to-be luminaries as Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, and for being written by another future legend, Jack Nicholson. Any film with that pool of talent at its disposal is going to have some worthwhile stuff in it, and the last twenty minutes or so, when Fonda's character descends into a prolonged and disjointed acid trip that possibly destroys his mind, is visceral and brilliant in its use of abstract, associative editing. But it's a long and dull road to get to the one good part of the film.

I also watched Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I didn't think was as bad as most of the Internet did. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot more fun than Man of Steel (it would almost have to be, admittedly) and it has the courtesy to be bad in interesting ways. Taken as a whole, it's an awful mess, but there are some individual scenes and sequences - most of them featuring Ben Affleck's Batman - that work really well, and I could see myself rewatching it dozens of times before I sat through even one minute of Zack Snyder's first Superman story again.

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in July.

Movie Journal: June

The Lovers on the Bridge

I think it's fair to say that I've fallen off a little bit when it comes to these monthly journals, and this blog in general. In my defense, the last month or so has been pretty hectic with work (not to mention that I've spent way too much time delving into the ins and outs of the Presidential election, an occupation which is much too stressful to do without being paid), but that's not really much of an excuse considering I still managed to find time to watch a lot of films during that same time period, and these posts generally don't take that long to knock together. Here's hoping that I can finish the year off strong after this summer stumble.

I watched 33 films in June, and the worst of them was Stanley Kramer's On The Beach. Aside from the fact that the title caused me to constantly think of this sick guitar lick, which was a distraction even if it wasn't the film's fault, it was such a drab, dreary experience. Even for a film about people waiting to die from radiation poisoning, which has never been the perkiest of sub-genres, it proceeds at such a ponderous pace that it bores long before it has a chance to lecture on the absurdity of nuclear war. Kramer more ably balanced social commentary and genre filmmaking with The Defiant Ones and Judgement At Nuremberg. Here, the results are too turgid to contemplate.

Right, on to the good films I watched in June.

Movie Journal: May

Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981)

I watched 38 films in May, which breaks down into 31 features and 7 shorts. One of those viewings was a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, a film that I love more and more with each viewing, and which I find myself revisiting every few years. In addition to being an emotionally draining experience and a virtuoso display of editing and pacing (it's three hours long and it feels like maybe half that), I always forget at least five or six of the famous actors who are in it, so even though I know the layout of the film pretty well at this point, it's still able to surprise. It also gets funnier and funnier with each viewing, possibly because the story gets a little less overwhelming each time, so the genuinely funny moments don't get lost as easily as they did on my first viewing.

The worst film I watched all month was David A. Stewart's Honest, which I watched purely to discuss it on this episode of Shot/Reverse Shot. As bad as a Swinging London-set film, shot by The Other One from Eurythmics, starring three-quarters of All Saints and drenched in all the worst excesses of post-Guy Ritchie British gangster films may sound, I was still surprised by how dreary the whole thing was. I was hoping for camp value - and it does deliver that during a climactic scene involving the Irish neighbour from Shameless, a machete and a fortuitous watermelon - but for the most part it's just incompetent enough to be bad, but not incompetent enough to be compelling.

Fair play to the supporting actors, though, many of whom have gone on to find work in things like the Twilight series, Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, instead of having their careers fatally derailed by association.

Now, to the good stuff. Here are the ten best films that I watched for the very first time in May of 2016.

Movie Journal: April

Owing to a combination of work and family, this was a comparatively light month for me when it came to movie watching. I only watched 20 films that were new to me, though they all were of a pretty high quality so it balances out. Even the worst film I watched this month - Dheeraj Akolkar's Liv & Ingmar - wasn't bad per se, it was just a fairly middling documentary about two great artists that I hoped would be better. It did make me want to watch (or rewatch) a bunch of Ingmar Bergman films in the near future, so that's one positive to come out of an otherwise not especially enlightening experience.

Maybe my most significant viewing this month (aside from the ten listed below) was my rewatch (well, rewatches, since I watched it twice in one day) of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Everything I loved the first time - its energy, the new characters, the fact that everyone involved seems so excited to be making a Star Wars movie - was still present and correct, while the stuff that bothered me - the way the film stops dead every time an old character appears, the entire third act - didn't bother me as much. Its place as my third favourite Star Wars film is increasingly secure.

Right, to the business at hand. Here are the ten best films that I watched for the first time in April, 2016.

Movie Journal: March

Much of my viewing this month was driven by an overwhelming desire to fill in some gaps in my knowledge of the French New Wave. I'd watched most of Godard's major work from the '60s and basically everything that Truffaut made, but the death of Jacques Rivette in January made me realise that there were some big names from the movement whose work I had never seen. Starting with Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us (which didn't make the top ten for the month but is still great), I started rinsing Hulu's selection of Criterion titles in order to see as many of the unseen films from the period as possible. So far, it's a decision I've been very happy with, and I would not be surprised if future journal entries end up being very French indeed.

After a subdued February I tried to make up for it with a hectic March. As such, I watched 31 new films this month, along with a long overdue rewatch of North by Northwest, which remains sublime even though I'm not sure if I'd include it in my top 10 Hitchcock films. Definitely would make the top 20, though. I mean, probably.

The worst film I saw in March was the Thai horror film Shutter, which I decided to watch purely because it was expiring from my Hulu queue. This is more of a relativistic assessment than the result of the film being egregiously bad. It's an effectively creepy ghost story with plenty of jump scares that genuinely freaked me out. The problem is that it has only one trick (a moment of silence is followed immediately by the sudden appearance of a horrible looking ghost, accompanied by loud music) and when every scare in a film is essentially the same, it gets a little tiresome by the end. In the case of Shutter, it goes beyond tiresome and ends up being kind of funny, particularly during the last half hour, when each of the ghost's appearances feel more and more like the Scary Movie parodies that would have been made if Shutter had been a big enough phenomenon to warrant the lazy mockery.

And now, here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in March of 2016.

Movie Journal: February

Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist

After a January in which I took advantage of the holidays to watch as many films as I could, February proved to be a pretty sharp retraction as I only managed to watch 17 films which were new to me. Unlike the last few months, there was a bit more variety as I got out of 2015 catchup mode and felt like I could watch films that weren't being considered for awards or end of year lists. I'm very much looking forward to doing more of that now that Awards Season is in the rear-view mirror.

The worst film I watched last month was Marion Jones: Press Pause. I've been watching a lot of installments of ESPN's 30 for 30 series recently, and this John Singleton-directed entry is easily the weakest I've seen. It's a scattershot retelling of the story of Marion Jones, the track and field athlete who won Gold at the Sydney Olympics, then had them stripped from her after it was revealed that she had used performance enhancing steroids, and ultimately spent time in jail for perjuring herself during the investigation. It's a great story, particularly when it touches on the racial aspects of how Jones was treated by the sporting establishment and the media, but the uneven mix of archive footage, post-prison interviews, and fly-on-the-wall segments about Jones' family life suggests that Singleton hadn't figured out how to tell it. He tries everything and none of it works.

Now that's over and done with, let's look at the best films I watched for the first time in February, 2016.

Movie Journal: January

Much like Black Box, I am ride[sic] on time this month with my first monthly movie journal of 2016, and what a month it was. I watched a grand total of 44 films in January, with 37 of them being first time viewings. Those viewings can be broken up into a handful of strands: 2015 catch up, filling in blind spots, and getting heavily into true crime documentaries on the back of Making a Murderer. All three are pretty well represented in the top ten.

The worst film I watched in January of 2016 was Denis Villeneuve's Sicario. It's tempting to say that it was the worst because I watched a lot of good films last month,which is true, but make no mistake: Sicario is a pretty terrible movie. Admittedly, it's flawlessly made; it looks great, has a fantastic soundtrack, and is anchored by a couple of great performances by Emily Blunt and Benicio del Toro. However, what sunk it for me - as was the case with The Revenant, to a lesser extent - was its undeserved air of self-importance. Like Villeneuve's previous tarted-up genre exercise, Prisoners, Sicario is essentially a B-movie with a great setting which purports to have something of value to say about a broader issue. Prisoners was posited as a rumination on America's quest for vengeance and its use of torture in the War on Terror, while Sicario offers a look at the horrors of the War on Drugs. But its treatment of the subject matter is hollow at best, and it's hard to enjoy the often well-staged and exhilarating action scenes when they are being suffocated by a sense that it is An Important Film About Important Things. Instead of offering any comment or insight, it shrugs and offers up easy nihilism, which is so often the refuge of filmmakers who lack the fortitude (or the intellect) to actually say something.

On the bright side, it's not quite as unremittingly awful as Prisoners, so credit where credit is due.

The film I had the most mixed feelings about, to the extent that I felt like I just had to write about it even though that has never been a category, was Asif Kapadia's Amy. I loved Kapadia's previous film Senna, which used archive footage and audio of interviews to create a thrilling hybrid of dramatic and documentary filmmaking in detailing the life and career of Ayrton Senna. Amy uses the same technique, but because so much of the footage is taken from news coverage of Amy Winehouse's life, B-roll from paparazzi, and personal video from friends and family, it felt much more invasive than the footage used in Senna. Considering that the thesis statement of the film circles the ways in which the media fed off of, and almost certainly worsened, Winehouse's addiction and mental health issues, Kapadia's film sometimes felt as exploitative of her as the photographers who goaded her, or the people who made jokes about her on television. At the same time, for all my misgivings, it was incredibly effective, and left me emotionally devastated for days afterwards. Yet I still don't know if that was a triumph of technique, or because it was somehow complicit in a tragedy that could have been avoided if people had put down their fucking cameras.

Now that we've got that moment of catharsis out of the way, here's the top ten new to me films for January.

Movie Journal: December

Since I spent the first week of 2016 visiting friends in England, this post has been delayed along with my Top 20 of the year. I've decided to push the latter one back until after the Oscars because a) the Academy Awards mark the end of the movie calendar and b) a lot of films from last year that I've been meaning to catch up on have started to hit streaming services and home media, so it feels like waiting a few more weeks would give me a chance to come up with a fuller sense of film in 2015.

In the meantime, here's my final movie journal for 2015 and, as with October and November, it was a month heavily focused on recent releases as I tried to catch up for awards consideration. Far and away the worst film I watched in December was David Koepp's Mortdecai, a laughless comedy that wastes the tremendous talents of all involved to no particular end. Possibly the worst thing about it was the fact that it features a single solitary moment - when Johnny Depp, as the eponymous Charlie Mortdecai, casually throws his drink away so that he can fondle Olivia Munn's breasts - that was genuinely funny, and reminded me of what a natural physical actor Depp can be. The inclusion of one decent bit of business just served to underline how little anyone seemed to be trying, and how there was a good film in there somewhere if anyone had bothered to work for it.

And here's the countdown of the ten best films I watched in the waning days of 2015.

Movie Journal: November

A tad late with this one because I am bad at managing my time when it comes to work, the holidays, and trying to catch up on the year in movies for awards voting/list-making purposes. As such, I only saw 18 films in November, the overwhelming majority of which were released this year and were largely mediocre. I also saw some really great films, though, so it all balances out.

The worst film I watched this month (and the current front-runner for worst film of 2015) was Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl, a completely lifeless and vapid retelling of an interesting story which made me ashamed to have ever liked any of Hooper's previous films. Most cinephiles probably think I should have been ashamed much earlier than that, but at least I'm all caught up now.

Movie Journal: October 2015

Red Rock West

This was a pretty full month for me, as I watched 31 films in total, all of which were new to me. I had hoped to watch more horror films since it's the season for it, but considering what a horrifying place the world is on a daily basis, I think it's fine for me to let that ambition spread out into months other than Shocktober, even if November doesn't lend itself to any particularly fun puns.

The worst film I watched for the first time this month was Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, which did a thorough job of making me sick of the Rolling Stones song of the same name. While the footage of the Stones at work on the song is interesting, showing a band at the height of its powers stumbling towards greatness as they record different parts, try things out, and gradually hammer it into the rock classic that we all know, the other half of the film, which consists of interminable vignettes focused on Godard's interest in Marxism, revolution, and radicalism, is the worst kind of masturbatory self-indulgence from a director who isn't exactly a stranger to masturbatory self-indulgence. There's some lovely tracking shots in there, though, if you're into that sort of thing.

Right, let's get to the top ten for October.

Movie Journal: September

This was a month of illustrious firsts for me, as I dipped my toe into the filmographies of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Abbott & Costello for the very first time. In both cases, I have been aware of their work for a long time, but never made it a priority to check them out, though for very different reasons. In the case of Pasolini, when I first got into film I only knew him as the director of Salo, a film with such a daunting and unpleasant reputation that I kind of assumed he was just a director of self-consciously extreme cinema. Rewatching (and then reading) Mark Cousins' The Story of Film convinced me that I was deeply mistaken, and I look forward to working through the rest of his work in the future.

As for Abbott & Costello, I knew them for "Who's on First?" but little else, and assumed they were minor league compared to The Marx Brothers. Listening to Glen Weldon talk about them on a recent episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour made me doubt that assumption, and with good cause, because their films are both funnier and more visually sophisticated than I had anticipated. They are also, pound for pound, a lot more entertaining than your average Marx Brothers vehicle, because they don't have to grind to a halt to let one character play a harp. I ordered a collection of their Universal films - all 28 of them - on a whim and I'm hoping for a lot more laughter in the near future.

In total, I watched 24 films this month, all of which were new to me. There were two films which I would consider the worst that I saw, and I have divided them into the categories of Bad, But Entertaining and Bad And Boring. The title of BBE goes to Fateful Findings, which I've already written about at (arguably too much) length, so I will just reiterate that it is a hugely enjoyable film with pretty much no redeeming qualities.

BAB goes to John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is a film that should be, at the very least, watchable. Huston was a great director, working from great source material (Carson McCullers' novel of the same name), and with a cast of ringers like Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and a "young" Robert Forster. (I use quotation marks because Forster has the sort of craggy features which mean that he has looked more or less the same age for fifty years.) Yet the thing is completely inert, and fatally undermined by Brando's attempt at a Southern accent, which has the effect of making him even mumblier than usual, and borderline incomprehensible for most of the running time. The cinematography is interesting, and the decision to shoot everything so that it looks golden makes it a striking watch. However, that means that you can get pretty much everything you need from the film by looking at stills, Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale-style.

Anyway, here are the ten best films I watched in September, 2015.

Movie Journal: August

Mostly due to work commitments, this was a fairly quiet month for me in which I watched a mere 20 films, though at least they were all first time viewings. The only real thread in my viewing came towards the end of the month when, after recording a load of their films from TCM, I watched a string of Marx Brothers movies in a row. Through that, I have come up with a grand unifying theory regarding how to judge the quality of a Marx Brothers movie:

• If it has Zeppo (very much the Xander Harris of the group) in it, it's probably going to be a good one.
• The quality of a Marx Brothers film correlates precisely to how quickly Groucho shows up. If he isn't introduced in the first couple of scenes, then you're off to a bad start.

I didn't watch any legitimately bad films, but the least interesting was The Past is a Grotesque Animal, a documentary about Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal. It's a perfectly fine documentary and a good primer for the band, but it's a great example of a documentary which does little more than tell the story of an artist without offering any insight into why they are all that special. There's no sense that the film is offering more information than Kevin Barnes' Wikipedia page would.

It actually makes for a good contrast to the best film I watched this month...

Movie Journal: July

This was another busy month for me as I watched a grand total of 43 films in July. Of those, 40 were features and 3 were shorts, and all but 3 were first-time viewings. There was no overarching theme to those viewings, though the publication of Little White Lies' list of 100 Great Movies by Female Directors (which can be seen in full on Letterboxd here, though you really should read the individual entries on the LWL site) did drive me to seek out more films directed by women than I might otherwise have done, including incredible shorts like Lois Weber's Suspense and Alice Guy's Falling Leaves. I've only seen 22 of the films on that list, so one of my aims over the next few months is to get that total up to a less mortifying number.

The best film I rewatched this month was Michael Mann's Thief, which I watched for a forthcoming episode of Shot/Reverse Shot on the work of Jerry Bruckheimer. Although I think Mann has made more enjoyable films (both Heat and Manhunter leap to mind) and more aesthetically bold ones (Collateral and Public Enemies), Thief strikes me as the sweet spot between the two. It's a pleasingly hard-nosed character study which looks beautiful, and is about as sparse an iteration of Mann's style and themes as you are likely to find. I also realised that I forget about the adoption storyline every time that I watch it, and that Jim Belushi is a pretty good actor when he needs to be (see also: his performance on HBO's great miniseries Show Me A Hero).

The worst film I watched for the first time was The Wizard of Oz. Not the classic 1939 musical version, which has been one of my favourite films since childhood, but the 1925 silent version directed by and starring Larry Semon. Despite some pretty good slapstick, some of which verges on Looney Toons levels of sheer visual lunacy, the pacing is really slow, the romance is dull and, oh yeah, it is horrendously racist. Like, "introduce the only black character by having them sit on the floor eating watermelon" racist. Obviously you have to grade older films on a curve when it comes to their social views, but no film is that good.

Anyway, we'll leave that unpleasantness behind and get to the top ten.

Movie Journal: June

It was a real "best of times/worst of times" situation for me this month, as not only did I see my new favourite film of the year, I also saw my new least favourite film of the year, all within the same 24 hours. It was a bit of a roller coaster. Fortunately I saw the awful one first, so the waves of Joy from the good one really helped cleanse the palate.

In total, I watched 29 films this month, only one of which was a rewatch. Fortunately, that film was Jaws, which I watched in preparation for this episode of Shot/Reverse Shot commemorating the film's fortieth anniversary. There's not much new that anyone can say about Jaws at this point, but my main takeaway from this viewing was how much it feels like a film from the New Hollywood, even as it pointed the way to a model of filmmaking which would supplant that movement. It's often written about as the film, along with Star Wars, which helped kill off that era of filmmaking, but the loose, improvisational feel to the dialogue and the subtle ways in which it reflects what was going on in the culture - the Mayor's willingness to risk lives to bring money into the town is a very post-Watergate depiction of authority, while it's significant that Brody left New York to escape the violence and crime for the supposed safety of Amity - place it as a film that emerged from the counterculture, even if its descendants would eventually consume it.

The worst film I watched for the first time this month, and the worst film of 2015 so far, was Kingsman: The Secret Service. I don't particularly care for Matthew Vaughn's work in general, though I do like Stardust for the most part and think that Layer Cake is one of the better post-Guy Ritchie gangster films, but usually his stuff just washes over me. Kingsman, however, actively angered me. The action is pretty well-staged and there are some funny moments, but the film's attitude, which could best be summed up as someone (i.e. Vaughn) smugly saying "ooh, aren't I transgressive!" while going after incredibly easy targets, was really repellant to me. It's the sort of film which thinks that repeatedly playing "Bonkers" by Dizzee Rascal is a substitute for character development, and uses its sleek professionalism to hide the fact it is almost completely without value.

Towards the end of the month, I ended up going down a rabbit hole of watching a bunch of Charlie Chaplin shorts. Initially this was because MUBI had a handful of them streaming, which then prompted me to track down other shorts on Hulu, YouTube etc. Despite liking most of Chaplin's feature films (particularly Limelight, which I think is his most moving), I'd only watched one Chaplin short previously, and even that was only to find some silent film-style music to rip for a scene in a ramshackle short film I made at uni. After watching several in a short space of time - with the highlight being Easy Street, which ends with Chaplin beating up a bunch of hoodlums after being pricked with a syringe full of liquid cocaine, like Popeye if he had been created by Hunter S. Thompson - I've come to the realisation that I generally prefer his short films to his features.

The features are a greater achievement, both artistically and historically, but there's something about the shorter running time which really focuses Chaplin. You're only ever seconds away from another inspired bit of slapstick, and the romantic subplots, which can drag down his feature films, are kept to a minimum. They have the balance between the chaotic and romantic sides of The Tramp just right, at least for my tastes as someone who grew up mainlining Looney Toons shorts, which clearly owe something to Chaplin's work.

Anyway, without any further ado: here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in June.

Movie Journal: May

World of Tomorrow

May was a somewhat quiet month; I saw 22 films in total, of which 19 were new to me. However, of the ones I saw, two of them currently occupy the number 1 and 2 slots in my best of 2015 list, which is not too shabby. Plus, since we're well into 2015 now, most of the films from 2014 that I missed but really wanted to see are now cropping up on home media and streaming services, so there's no shortage of great stuff out there, assuming that I have the time to check them out. (Spoiler alert: I probably will not have time, as evidenced by the fact that this post is going up five days late.)

The best film I rewatched this month was Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, which I watched for an artist profile episode of Shot/Reverse Shot on the director's work. I remembered really liking the film the first time I saw it, which would have been about ten years ago, but this time around I better appreciated its sense of humour, which is incredibly dark but also genuinely funny, and Joan Allen's performance as the matriarch of the family at the centre of the story. I feel like I undervalued her contribution before purely because I was so bowled over by Sigourney Weaver, whose role is showier and more caustic than Allen's more brittle work.

The worst film I watched for the first time is a dead heat between David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars and Howard Morris' Don't Drink The Water. While the latter film is clearly the worst from a technical standpoint - it's shot in a flat, ugly way which suggests that they just filmed the rehearsals and bundled them together, and Morris replaces most of the dialogue from Woody Allen's original play with frantic montages of characters running around, making it one of the most painfully '60s films I've seen in a while - the former is the more disappointing.

I more than welcome Cronenberg's move away from more "respectable" filmmaking after the tedious A Dangerous Method, but Maps to the Stars continues his movement into blunt, toothless satire begun with Cosmopolis. Maps is much, much worse than Cosmopolis, though, since its attempts at Hollywood satire are too broad to be interesting and too focused on empty shocks to be all that funny. The only remotely entertaining moment was when some incredibly cheap-looking fire effects allowed me to laugh at the film, which had stubbornly refused to give me any reason to laugh with it prior to that. Still, Mia Wasikowska is unsurprisingly great in it, and John Cusack is believably monstrous as a truly reprehensible father.

The worst film I rewatched - to make this intro even more fucking granular than it already is - was Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's long been my least favourite Francis Ford Coppola film, though it has shared that honour in recent years with the baffling Twixt. Much like that more recent boondoggle (and unlike Maps to the Stars) Dracula has the saving grace of being a terrible film made up almost entirely on interesting choices, so at least it's fun to dissect even when it's torture to watch. Had it maintained the level of deranged intensity that it displays in its prologue - in which Gary Oldman becomes undead by denouncing God in a Church, then stabbing a cross which then proceeds to bleed profusely - I probably would have liked it more.

I also watched Clark Johnson's S.W.A.T. - which I'm only mentioning here because my friend Kei has been trying to get me to watch it for quite literally years - and I really enjoyed it. It's a really dumb movie, but the high concentration of once and future action superstars (Samuel L. Jackson! Michelle Rodriguez! Jeremy Renner! Josh Charles?), all of whom bring the right level of pulpiness to proceedings, makes for a pretty easy and undemanding watch.