Here we are in the middle of 2026, which is as good a marker as any to see where my movie watching is at. Thanks, Letterboxd, for enabling my OCD! All stats are as of June 30th.
I watched 197 movies in the first half of the year. I have a not totally serious goal of 500 this year, which is a number I hit in 2023 after which I decided to stop being quite so obsessive. You don’t need to make the number go up every year, so I pulled back for the sake of my sanity. Now, however, I have more free time. The math says… maybe, particularly since I’m gonna see like 75 movies at Fantasia. (I do count shorts in this.)
As is now my tradition, I began the year with a long movie. This year it was Norte, the End of History, by the great Filipino slow cinema director Lav Diaz. I liked it.
My top ten 2026 releases list currently looks like this:
Very SIFF flavored, with six out of the ten being festival views. And fifteen of the top twenty. That’s pretty typical. I expect some of my Fantasia viewing will make the top ten, and of course awards season is typically later in the year.
Much to my surprise, as much as I have a theme this year, it’s Westerns. I’m most of the way through the watchlist I built to familiarize myself with the genre and I’ve enjoyed it a ton. S. and I bought the Criterion Ranown Western set, which is awesome, and I just got the Arrow Sergio Leone Dollars Trilogy set. I guess I like Westerns.
Speaking of which, probably the biggest movie event of the year for us was the trip we made down to see the Criterion Mobile Closet. S. loved Rififi and we have much more French crime cinema in our future. No, I lie, it was the VIFF Mexico Noir series, because that opened a whole new world to us. I won’t spend another couple hundred words talking about how cool Mexican Golden Age cinema was; you can read the linked post if you missed it the first time. SO cool, though.
Which brings me to my most watched data. Actors first.
I was gonna cut that off at the top four but I couldn’t resist getting Randolph Scott in there and at that point I might as well fill it out with every actor who I’ve seen in three or more movies. Scott, of course, is because of those Ranown Westerns. Klaus Kinski makes it because I finally got around to watching a couple of krimi flicks from Germany. There’s a big chunk of actors from Mexico, for obvious reasons. The Northwest Film Forum has been doing a cool Ozu series. Robert Hossein is courtesy of the Radiance Hossein set, which I recommend. Finally, I have SIFF to thank for putting the luminous Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung at the top of this list; they showed most of Wong’s movies on the big SIFF Downtown screen. Such a joy.
Let’s look at directors.
Oh hey, Wong Kai Wai and Roberto Gavalón! You know why that happened. I’ve already talked about the reasons most of these directors are listed, in fact. I also watched Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile series, which is fantastic, and S. and I have been getting into Frederick Wiseman recently who was a massive gap in my knowledge. He lives up to the hype.
And there down in the lower right corner is Teuvo Tulio, courtesy of Deaf Crocodile. His movies are not great, but they’re really compelling. You can absolutely see why Aki Kaurismäki is a fan of his fellow Finnish filmmaker.
That’s my 2026 so far. I love looking back on this, thinking about where my passions have led me, and thinking about the half year ahead.