Another year, another batch of Letterboxd stats. I’m pretty happy with it once again. Let’s see what they remind me of…
365 movies total. I wasn’t working towards that total but when it became clear I could hit it, I couldn’t resist. More than I saw in 2024, when we did not go to Fantasia; well under the ridiculous 507 I hit in 2023. As noted, 507 wasn’t totally healthy.
I am not going to finalize my top ten list until I see No Other Choice, The Testament of Ann Lee, and maybe Father Mother Sister Brother. There are for sure other 2025 movies I won’t get to by the end of January. Regardless, Reflection in a Dead Diamond was the best thing I saw all year. S. and I wound up watching the other four features by the directors, Cattet and Forzani. My top five rounds out with It Was Only An Accident, Sinners, One Battle After Another, and The Phoenician Scheme in that order. I saw a lot of good new movies this year.
We went to Fantasia. We’re gonna try and go every year for a while. It’s such a great festival. I went to SIFF but didn’t blog much about it; these are the movies I saw. Really good variety. I am gonna have to miss SIFF this year for the most part, which is sad.
My most watched directors were John Ford and Akira Kurosawa, at six movies each. There was a Kurosawa program at SIFF Downtown and how could I miss the chance to see all those classics (most of which I hadn’t seen) on the really big screen? As far as Ford goes, I decided this was the year to figure out what’s going on with Westerns. I made myself a watchlist and unsurprisingly there were a lot of Fords on there. You know, I liked them. He had blind spots and I think the Western myth is damaging to the American psyche, but Ford was a hell of a director with more complexity than I gave him credit for.
Couple of other directors I visited over and over again: Carpenter by virtue of his Criterion Channel collection. The only major Carpenter I haven’t seen is Halloween. S. and I intend to binge most of the Halloween movies for October next year. I mentioned Cattet and Forzani already; what incredible eyes they have. Johnnie To got four viewings from me, also because of the Channel, and the Radiance release of an Alain Corneau box set meant I watched three of his.
That dovetails nicely with the fact that I spent a lot of time on Eurocrime. This was a natural extension of my curiosity about poliziotteschi a couple of years back; that made me prioritize Radiance’s Damiano Damiani releases which reminded me of a bunch of French crime I saw at Noir City a few years back and yeah. I don’t have much cogent to say there, except that I’m enjoying the way concerns with social unrest are getting filtered through a variety of political viewpoints and cultural norms. The Beacon – currently my favorite Seattle movie theater – is doing a general crime movie program this month including a krimi movie so I’m gonna get to see my first from that subgenre. Coincidence can be lovely.
That dovetails nicely with the fact that I spent a lot of time on Eurocrime. This was a natural extension of my curiosity about poliziotteschi a couple of years back; that made me prioritize Radiance’s Damiano Damiani releases which reminded me of a bunch of French crime I saw at Noir City a few years back and yeah. I don’t have much cogent to say there, except that I’m enjoying the way concerns with social unrest are getting filtered through a variety of political viewpoints and cultural norms. The Beacon – currently my favorite Seattle movie theater – is doing a general crime movie program this month including a krimi movie so I’m gonna get to see my first from that subgenre. Coincidence can be lovely.
Which actors did I see a lot of? Well, Toshirō Mifune and John Wayne, also tied with six movies each. Most with Kurosawa and Ford, of course, although in each case one was with another director. (Don’t go out of your way to see Red Sun.) Others: five with Takashi Shimura, also a Kurosawa regular. Four with James Stewart, mostly Westerns. Four with Eddie Cheung, thanks to Johnnie To. Four with Roy Scheider, cause he was great. Four with Tilda Swinton, ditto. And Isabelle Huppert got four watches from me without me even noticing it.
Shout Factory getting the rights to the Golden Princess film library is literally the best development in cinema in quite some time. I saw a ton of those movies down at the Towne Theater in San Jose in the late 1990s, double features every Thursday night; that’s where I discovered Hong Kong cinema. I love them so much I rented a theater and showed Hard-Boiled for all my friends on my 50th birthday. I had given up hope of seeing them re-released in any format. And now they’re back.