I happened to watch my first Hong Sang-soo movie right before his new one premiered, won the Golden Leopard and was featured on Cinema Scope’s front page, which gave me more emotional investment in all this. Before recently he was just a name – a repeatedly championed name, but still. So I’ve made a list of other currently-working(?) filmmakers whose names come up in magazines and festival reports but I’ve never checked out – including a few lingering overlaps with the 50 Under 50 list (Rodrigues, Alonso, Pereda) and a few overlaps with a similar list I made five years ago (Suleiman, Iosseliani, Lee). The goal: to watch at least one film by each, so next time I see their name I’ll have some context.

Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool, Jauja)
Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust & Bone, Dheepan)
Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning Night, Vincere, Blood of My Blood)
Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory, Outside the Law)
Jean-Claude Brisseau (Exterminating Angels, Girl From Nowhere, Secret Things)
Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer)
J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost, Margin Call)
Isabel Coixet (Elegy, Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me)
Anton Corbijn (Control, The American)
Lav Diaz (Norte, From What Is Before, Century of Birthing)
Mati Diop (Atlantiques, Snow Canon, A Thousand Suns)
Jacques Doillon (Just Anybody, Ponette, Le petit criminel)
Xavier Dolan (Mommy, Tom at the Farm, Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother)
Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Hors Satan, Hadewijch, L’Humanite)
Pascale Ferran (Bird People, Lady Chatterley)
Bahman Ghobadi (Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon)
Amos Gitai (Kadosh, Kippur, Free Zone)
Philippe Grandrieux (Un Lac, A New Life, Sombre)
James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Lost City of Z)
Eugene Green (Portuguese Nun, La Sapienza, Le Pont des Arts, Toutes les nuits)
Jose Luis Guerin (Memories of a Morning, Guest, In the City of Sylvia)
Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence, Evolution)
Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years)
Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love, Things To Come)
Otar Iosseliani (Adieu plancher des vaches, Jardins en automne, Chantrapas, Winter Song)
Benoit Jacquot (School of Flesh, A Single Girl, A Tout de Suite, Diary of a Chambermaid)
Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep, Let the Bullets Fly, The Sun Also Rises)
Miranda July (The Future, Me and You and Everyone We Know)
Naomi Kawase (The Mourning Forest, Shara)
Andrei Konchalovsky (The Postman’s White Nights, Inner Circle)
Nadav Lapid (Policeman, The Kindergarten Teacher)
Pablo Larrain (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No, The Club)
Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, Secret Sunshine, Oasis, Peppermint Candy)
Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, In the Fog, Austerlitz)
Jodie Mack (a bunch of shorts)
Lech Majewski (Onirica, The Mill and the Cross, Glass Lips)
Brillante Mendoza (Captive, Kinatay, Serbis)
Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball, Foxcatcher)
Lukas Moodysson (We Are The Best, Hole In My Heart, Lilya 4ever, Container)
Darezhan Omirbayev (Student, Kairat)
Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, Play, Involuntary)
Nicolas Pereda (Summer of Goliath, Greatest Hits, Minotaur)
Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have, Nenette, In the Land of the Deaf)
Joaquim Pinto (What Now? Remind Me, Fish Tail)
Rafi Pitts (The Hunter, It’s Winter)
Joao Pedro Rodrigues (Last Time I Saw Macao, To Die Like a Man)
Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, Little Men)
Ben & Joshua Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time)
So Young Kim (Treeless Mountain, In Between Days)
Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, The Great Beauty, Youth)
Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains, Divine Intervention)
Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon, Sunday in the Country, Life and Nothing But)
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (Mary is Happy, 36)
Tran Anh Hung (Norwegian Wood, Cyclo, Scent of Green Papaya)
Joachim Trier (Oslo August 31)
Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario)
Peter Von Bagh (Socialism, Helsinki Forever) edit: R.I.P.

Oh man, this list is longer than I thought it’d be.
I may have no choice but to tackle ’em film-fest style.
A festival of filmmakers who show up regularly at festivals… a FESTIFEST.

EDIT Dec. 2015: I still like the FESTIFEST idea, and am keeping the name, but when this season’s Sundance slate was announced I changed focus from the above list. Now when a new film is announced by a director I’ve heard about but never seen, I’m prioritizing watching one of his/her previous films. For example, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine was announced, and I haven’t seen anything by Greene as director, so I watched his Actress from last year. Don’t think I’ll add those to the bottom of this list as the year goes on, because I have enough trouble keeping track of things.

It’s end-of-year list-making time!

The Lists

Favorite New Movies on Video, 2014
Favorite New Movies in Theaters, 2014
Favorite Older Movies on Video, 2014
Favorite Retrospective Screenings, 2014
Favorite Shorts of 2014
Some 2014 Movies I Missed
Previous year lists

Letting the new/video list sit on top this year. The new/theater list is what people think of as the “movies of the year,” and those top three picks were important to me, but since the blog was moving to Nebraska I didn’t make it out to the theaters too often, and on video I had a wider variety of movies available, so I feel the video list is more representative of my taste.

—
Movie Memories

Other viewing experiences that stand out:

Watching 99 minutes of The Clock from comfy couches at the Walker with Katy and Aaron.

Babette’s Feast long-distance with Katy (texting) on Valentine’s Day during an earthquake.

Getting into the stories from Breadcrumb Trail, spending the next month listening to Slint-related albums.

—
Television

Most enjoyable shows:

Dollhouse s2 and The Prisoner in the wacked dystopian drama department

Comedies Veep s2, Girls s1, Futurama s6, Important Things s2 and The Day Today.

—
The Year In Bad Movies

I try not to make “worst movies” lists, since I try not to watch bad movies (or to pick on Katy’s occasional bum pick), but I saw a few that deserve special mention – Bastards, The Maze, Poto and Cabengo, Witch Hunt and The Handmaid’s Tale were all foul in their own way. And usually I leave shorts alone, since they don’t waste much of my time, but The Legend of Hallowdega and Festi were pretty terrible.

—
SHOCKtober

Horrors watched in October rarely make the end-of-year lists, so sometimes I give ’em their own lists just so they can feel special. This year brought the Polanski movies and Possession, so horrors don’t need an entire consolation page, but these were very good:

The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Antiviral
Metamorphosis
Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell
Kiss of the Damned

—
Rewatches

Watched/enjoyed for the first time in years (in no order):

A Man Escaped
Scanners
Brazil
Hellraiser
Dead Man
The Thin Red Line
Eyes Wide Shut
Minority Report
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Batman Returns
Princess Mononoke

—
Viewing Projects, Lists, Etc.

Added some directors to the sidebar: Bong Joon-ho, Jean Cocteau, David Fincher, Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Satyajit Ray, Tsai Ming-Liang.

I made a to-watch list for 2014 (which I didn’t share online because it overlaps most of my already-online lists) and only ended up watched 15% of those. No big deal… not getting hung up on any one list or project as long as I’m watching good stuff, just going with whatever catches fancy at the time. That said, I could stand to have a Criterion Blu-ray month… or year, since they keep putting out gorgeous editions of new movies that I act excited about then never watch. And I’ve created a way of keeping track of about a hundred movie lists, so when I complete any of those, whether by concerted effort or by accident, I plan to do an Inventory write-up like this one.

—
Happy New Movie Year 2015

1. The Dance of Reality (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
2. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
3. Room 237 (Rodney Ascher)
4. Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney)
5. The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet & Forzani)
6. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
7. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zurcher)
8. Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang)
9. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)
10. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

—
Eight more, to match the theater list:

11. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)
12. Viola (Matias Piñeiro)
13. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
14. Watermark (Jennifer Baichwal)
15. John Dies at the End (Don Coscarelli)
16. Passion (Brian De Palma)
17. Breadcrumb Trail (Lance Bangs)
18. Coherence (James Ward Byrkit)

1. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
2. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
3. Citizenfour (Laura Poitras)

Keith Uhlich’s short review of The Duke of Burgundy reads “This ended before I was ready. And grew in my mind as a result.” I would say the same about these three.

4. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
5. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
6. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Bros.)

Three great works by longtime favorite filmmakers.

7. Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
8. Gone Girl (David Fincher)
9. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Three big multiplex movies by major directors.

10. The Boxtrolls (Laika)

And one bit of fun.

—
Ten’s not enough – here are the other great movies I watched:

11. Dear White People (Justin Simien)
12. Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier)
13. Natan (David Cairns & Paul Duane)
14. Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn)
15. The Past (Asghar Farhadi)
16. Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
17. The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)
18. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)

1. Four by Ingmar Bergman
I watched Winter Light and The Silence, then moved forward to Autumn Sonata and back to The Seventh Seal, also checking out a documentary about Bergman. Spacing these out every few months ensured that his cinema was always on my mind this year.

2. Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant
Took the opposite approach of the Bergmans, watching all these in one month. Whether this was intended as a trilogy or not, they’re all really interesting together, and each is terrific on its own.

3. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires)

4. Yoyo (Pierre Etaix)

5. Possession (Andrzej Zulawski)
This had similarities to The Tenant, and both Zulawski and Polanski worked with Wajda. It was a good year for movies by Polish directors with hidden connections.

6. House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)

7. Kanal (Andrzej Wajda)

8. Deseret (James Benning)

9. Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)

10. A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder)

11. D’est (Chantal Akerman)
It is a weird thing to watch this on a laptop in 2014.

12. Spectre (Jacques Rivette)
I think watching this at home with interruptions, versus seeing Out 1 in theaters, was detrimental to the experience. Watching it felt more like an academic exercise than an immersive feature film. That might be the reason why I didn’t know what to do with L’Amour Fou a few years ago.

1. Bad Blood (Leos Carax)
Electrifying movie, seen in all its 35mm glory at Emory

2. A Summer’s Tale (Eric Rohmer)
Perfect digital projection at The Ross

3. Son of the Sheik and Man With the Movie Camera
Live music by Alloy Orchestra, seen at The Ross and Film Streams

4. John Hubley Anniversary Shorts
Terrific-looking restorations at Film Streams

5. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau)
An old favorite at the Landmark

Some of these flew by – I’d want to see them all again before ranking, but here are some favorites:

from the Oscar shorts program: The Missing Scarf, Get a Horse, A la francaise

from Atlanta Film Festival: Rabbit and Deer, Monkey Rag

Jan Svankmajer’s Jabberwocky

Venice 70: Future Reloaded (some of it, anyway)

The Tender Game from the Hubleys

At least some of the Cattet & Forzani shorts

Guy Maddin’s Bing & Bela and Sighs & Bosoms

I’ve already identified 100+ must-see 2014 movies and am adding ’em to my master movie list, so not gonna repeat all those here. But here are a few I’ve been reading about on other lists (some people publish year-end lists before the year’s even over, would you believe it?) that I am especially anxious to watch.

Obvious Must-Sees:

Life of Riley
Winter Sleep
Maps to the Stars
Edge of Tomorrow
Timbuktu
Mr. Turner
Inherent Vice

Critically-Acclaimed Films that I suppose I oughtta see although they don’t look that interesting:

Listen Up Philip
Nightcrawler
Whiplash
Calvary
Selma
Two Days, One Night

Festival and Limited Release Films I haven’t had a chance to see yet:

Adieu to Language 3D
Duke of Burgundy
Jauja
The Trip to Italy
20,000 Days on Earth
Leviathan
Lil Quinquin
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
White God
Horse Money
The Look of Silence
Clouds of Sils Maria

Movies Nobody Loved but I am determined that I will love them:

Burying the Ex
Willow Creek
They Came Together
The Congress
Sin City 2
The Zero Theorem

Additions from The Dissolve:

John Wick
Last Days in Vietnam
Wild
Lucy
The Overnighters
Song of the Sea
The Guest
The Rover

Additions from individual critics lists in Sight & Sound:

Taprobana – Jason Anderson
Heli – Michael Atkinson
Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy – Anton Bitel
LFO The Movie – Anton Bitel
Obvious Child – Catherine Bray
The Kindergarten Teacher – Michel Ciment
Frank – Mark Cousins
Dos Disparos / Two Shots Fired – Maria Delgado
La Sapienza – Suzy Gillett
Love Is All – Sophie Mayer
Ow / Maru – Tony Rayns
Nuoc / 2030 – Tony Rayns
Hwayi, A Monster Boy – Tony Rayns
Hipopotamy – Chris Robinson
Wonder – Chris Robinson
We Can’t Live Without Cosmos – Chris Robinson
Unity – Chris Robinson
The Pride of Strathmoor – Chris Robinson
The Tribe – Jonathan Romney
Locke – Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Owners – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Lettres du Voyant – Sukhdev Sandhu
Closer to God – Jasper Sharp
Tu dors Nicole – Thirza Wakefield
Psychic Driving – Neil Young
Sun Stop / Sonne Halt – Neil Young