Where to begin with Mai Zetterling

 
I wrote about "Where to begin with Mai Zetterling" for the BFI. Read it here. 

LFF Review: The Cheaters (1930)

I reviewed the excellent Australian silent film The Cheaters for Silent London. Read it here. 

Where to Begin with Kurosawa

I wrote a piece on Where to Begin with Kurosawa for the BFI. Read it here. 

Caligari at 100

I wrote a piece for the BFI celebrating 100 years of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Read it here. 

My Top Films (and Books) of 2019 – And of the Decade

There seems to be a consensus that 2019 was a strong year for film and, while that may be the case, I feel like overall it's (once again) the films from the archive which excited me most – thanks, in no small part, to the BFI's double-whammy of a stupendous Weimar Cinema season and a complete Antonioni retrospective. Of course, now that we're heading into the 2020s, it's an appropriate time to be looking back, so I've also included a list of my top films of 2010s below, along with my list of the Best Books I Read for the First Time in 2019.

That's a lot of lists!

As always, I've limited myself to one film per director/one book per author.

My Top Films of 2019

01) The Irishman (dir. Martin Scorsese)

02) Waiting for the Barbarians (dir. Ciro Guerra)

03) Ghost Town Anthology (dir. Denis Côté)

04) Vitalina Varela (dir. Pedro Costa)

05) mid90s (dir. Jonah Hill)

06) Venezia (dir. Rodrigo Guerrero)

07) I, Apostate (dir. Jeremy Moss)

08) I Lost My Body (dir. Jérémy Clapin)

09) It Must be Heaven (dir. Elia Suleiman)

10) The Ghost of Peter Sellers (dir. Peter Medak)

The Best Films from Previous Years that I Saw for the First Time in 2019

01) La signora senza camelie (1953, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

02) Hangmen Also Die! (1943, dir. Fritz Lang)

03) Life Begins Tomorrow (1933, dir. Werner Hochbaum)

04) The Student of Prague (1926, dir. Henrik Galeen)

05) All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, dir. Lewis Milestone)

06) Madagascar Skin (1996, dir. Chris Newby)

07) Room at the Top (1959, dir. Jack Clayton)

08) You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012, dir. Alain Resnais)

09) Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (1929, dir. Phil Jutzi)

10) La otra (1946, dir. Roberto Gavaldón)

11) No Man's Land (1931, dir. Victor Trivas)

12) The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927, dir. G. W. Pabst)

13) Her Majesty, Love (1931, dir. William Dieterle)

14) Man of a Thousand Faces (1957, dir. Joseph Pevney)

15) Happy End (2017, dir. Michael Haneke)

16) A Special Day (1977, dir. Ettore Scola)
17) In Vanda's room (2000, dir. Pedro Costa)

18) Scherben (1921, dir. Lupu Pick)

19) The Song of Life (1931, dir. Alexis Granowsky)

20) The Story on Page One (1959, dir. Clifford Odets)

The Best Films of the 2010s

01) The Turin Horse (2011, dir. Béla Tarr)

02) Ida (2013, dir. Paweł Pawlikowski)

03) Silence (2016, dir. Martin Scorsese)

04) Boyhood (2014, dir. Richard Linklater)

05) Miss Julie (2014, dir. Liv Ullmann)

06) Blue Valentine (2010, dir. Derek Cianfrance)

07) Birds of Passage (2018, dirs. Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra)

08) Museum Hours (2012, dir: Jem Cohen)

09) La Sapienza (2014, dir. Eugène Green)

10) 1945 (2017, dir. Ferenc Török)

11) I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018, dir. Radu Jude)

12) The Assassin (2015, dir. Hsiao-Hsien Hou)

13) An Elephant Sitting Still (2018, dir. Bo Hu)

14) Demain? (2011, dir. Christine Laurent)

15) The Revenant (2015, dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

16) 36 (2012, dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit)

17) On Body and Soul (2017, dir. Ildikó Enyedi)

18) Horse Money (2014, dir. Pedro Costa)

19) Under the Skin (2013, dir: Jonathan Glazer)

20) Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

The Best Books I Read for the First Time in 2019

01) My Antonioni – Carlo di Carlo

02) All those Tomorrows – Mai Zetterling

03) The Late Mattia Pascal – Luigi Pirandello

04) R.U.R. – Karel Čapek

05) Mikhail Kaufman: Ukrainian Dilogy

06) The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

07) Piers of the Homeless Night – Jack Kerouac

08) Nosferatu in Love – Jim Shepard

09) United States Vs. Murder, Inc. – Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming

10) Metropolis – Thea von Harbou

Where to Begin with Costa and Resnais

For the BFI, I wrote a piece on Where to begin with Pedro Costa. 

Earlier in the year, I also wrote about Where to begin with Alain Resnais, but for some reason I never posted a link on this blog. You can read it here.