Funny year this, one more survived than lived, with swathes of the country shut down and closed up for months at a time including most of the cinemas. This meant that the films mostly came from the small screen this year, there's no '10 favourite new films I saw in a cinema' because I only saw 10 films in a cinema, one of them was Akira and at least two of the other nine were utter shit. However on the screen that never shut in my living room there was plenty of good watching to be had, whether it be through watching various film festivals that went online or by dipping into the continuous flow of content from the streaming giants. So I thought I'd just go with a general 10 favourite new films of the year, regardless of the size of screen I watched them on.
10 Favourite New Films
10: Lucky
Finds an unexpected sweet spot in its blend of bland home invasion horror tropes and abstract expressionism. I do like a film that makes sense by not making sense.
9: St. Maud
The slowest burn of the year, so slow at times it would almost go out, but when it finally explodes there's magnificence to be had.
8: Death Ranch
Does not waste a minute in getting to its point, that point being here's the KKK doing bad shit and the main characters are going to fuck them up for it, something that starts happening roughly ten minutes in and does not let up till the end.
7: The Swerve
Frightfest's best online offering this year wasn't really a horror film at all. Though it was a deeply unsettling gut punch of a movie, and they don't come along all too often, so I'm happy they showed it.
6: The Color Out Of Space
Picturing Lovecraft's shrieking insanities on screen has always been a challenge, to get around this the production got a real life shrieking insanity in the form of Nicholas Cage and then ensured all the CGI madness eclipsed him in levels of pure shrieking insanity. And Alpackas.
5: Another Round
I was worried that without a strong knowledge of Danish drinking culture I maybe wouldn't get any deeper subtext on offer, but with film-making this good there's still plenty to enjoy and by the end I found I had also acquired a strong knowledge of Danish drinking culture.
4: Tenet
This fi[LOUDMUSICMOUDMUSICLOUDMUSIC]uite remarkab[HELICOPTORNOISETHUDTHUDTHUD] time [GUNSHOTSBANGBANGLOUDMUSICLOUDMUSIC] loved it.
3: I'm Thinking Of Ending Things
Kaufman at his very best enriching a story that was already unconventional and spinning it off further into the depths of the bizarre, uncanny and weird.
2: Parasite
A story where every development is a revelation, where every action is viscerally felt and which all culminates in sudden controlled intense madness. Remarkable.
1: Possessor
The one film this year that made me gasp at the goopy violence on display, thrill at the head melting technologies envisaged and made my jaw physically drop as it romped into its unflinching home stretch. An incredible movie.
10 Shittest Films I Sat Through
10. 6 Underground
The Netflix approach of non interference with film makers is a clear litmus test of true film making talent yielding a huge range in quality of finished product, so for example somebody like Scorcese will make an opus and then somebody like Michael Bay will shit out this screaming turd instead.
9: The New Mutants
I understand that this had a troubled production history which made it difficult to get a quality movie up on the screen. I understand this mainly because I made the mistake of watching it.
8: Ballad In Blood
Somebody clearly wanted to see Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato make a movie again after all these years though on the evidence of this it wasn't Ruggero Deodato because he clearly has no intention of making a movie, he just wants to film a lot of tits.
7: Ava
Cannot remember the last time I laughed this hard at a gritty spy thriller. I was crying with laughter. I had to stop it at one point because I was whooping with hilarity, which would be great if that was the intention of this gritty spy thriller, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
6: Secret Santa
Hinges on a scene where everybody is meant to quite suddenly turn in to hideous unlikeable wankers making their actions surprising by contrast with their earlier selves. Spoilt by everybody acting like hideous unlikeable wankers from the start.
5: Tarzoon: Shame Of The Jungle
Offensive, badly animated but worst of all unfunny. How on earth is it possible to make anthropomorphic cocks unfunny? Here's the answer.
4: Bad Boys For Life
A sequel that absolutely nobody asked for and which Michael Bay couldn't even be bothered to make, though he does turn up in a cameo to ensure it maintains his usual standards. Of bollocks.
3: Blind/Hall
It was difficult to seperate this pair of nadirs from this year's online Frightfest, both were excruciating in how bad they were, both became closer to being an endurance test the closer they got to ending and both made me swear at the telly copiously because both of them were eye-rolling shite.
2: Cats
It's not easy to explain how something so bland can become such an unpleasant experience but I imagine it’s somewhat similar to the sensation you'd get if you were chewing on cardboard and suddenly hit a hard bit of nasty meaty gristle. Ick.
1: Verotika
Only down lower than Cats because somewhere round the halfway mark it gave up any pretence on telling a story, being a film or for that matter being remotely watchable in any way. Utter, utter piss.
