My Top 25 Film Discoveries of 2022! (and a goodbye, at least for now …)

Another year and MMC!’s favourite first-time watches list expands yet again, this time recounting our top 25 discoveries! Plenty of Criterion Collection titles find representation, as well as releases by Kino, Disney, Deaf Crocodile, Film Movement, Radiance Films (upcoming), and VCI. Our Noirvember screenings manage to make up a fifth of this list and streaming platforms like the Criterion Channel, Midnight Pulp, and Kanopy (plus some less legitimate options) fill in the rest.  And for anyone keeping score, Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli takes the top spot as MMC!’s favourite first-time watch of 2022, followed by Konrad Wolf’s Goya: Or the Hard Way to Enlightenment!

Un carnet de bal (Julien Duvivier, 1937)

“Dance Card plays like High Fidelity in glorious French mono as a wealthy widow revisits a list of old suitors nearly twenty years later. In a series of vignettes, Duvivier tours through French cinema, from fated nightclub noirs to bittersweet Catholic piety, from queasy, canted, quayside seediness to Raimu and Pagnol-esque banter. Love French cinema and you’ll find here a full house, ace of diamonds high, loaded with wistful romance, fated tragedy, swooning melancholy, and evocative compositions. A lovely and sad confection.”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2021!

Another year, another new crop of cinematic discoveries! Now five years into sharing MMC!’s annual list of favourite first-time watches, it’s interesting how each year manages to bring forward its own character. Our inaugural list in 2017 boasted far-flung films with audacious choices while the 2018 selection seemed to specialize in pervading fashions of low-key dread. MMC! pivoted toward dense and daring cinema in 2019 and 2020 seemed to retreat into Japanese cinema and experimentalism. This year offers something of a return to more classical narrative forms in its globe-hopping. Egyptian master Youssef Chahine joins Yasuzo Masumura, Ulrike Ottinger, and Toshio Matsumoto as an MMC! discoveries list double-entrant, and this list sees returns by Frank Perry, Frederick Wiseman, and Yuzo Kawashima. In keeping with our capricious standards, this list treats Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Dekalog as single entries, yet chooses to include only one part of The Marseilles Trilogy and Chahine’s “Alexandria Trilogy.” What can we say? It’s our list and we choose the rules.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

“Such an exceptional film. Murnau is in full command of the silent form here, pushing it in cleverly imaginative ways – novel framings, sloped sets, superimpositions, collages, miniatures, unusual title cards, and always those silent film close-ups. And the film hops tones and genres with alacrity, swaying from tragedy to comedy and back again, dabbling in dance and slapstick and adventure along the way. An improbable culmination of the silent era that arguably shouldn’t work, yet is a masterpiece.”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2020!

Reviewing my Top 50 Discoveries of 2020, it’s hard not to miss that this year has been most notably defined by a falling back into Japanese cinema. There’s no complaint in saying so as I adore Japanese cinema and as there is plenty of variety otherwise appearing on this list – experimental cinema, documentaries, dream cinema, Afrofuturism, animation, Canadiana, and plenty of general weirdness. Certainly this list owes a great debt to the bounty of streaming options out there. This list includes films screened on The Criterion Channel, MUBI, Shudder, Midnight Pulp, Kanopy, Netflix, and this year’s online version of the Fantasia International Film Festival. And if hard media is still your bag, many of these titles are available from The Criterion Collection, Arrow Films, Film Movement, Vinegar Syndrome, Synapse Films, Cult Epics, Third Window Films, and even the Winnipeg Film Group.

And so, without further ado, here are MMC!’s Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2020!

The Blue Sky Maiden (Yasuzo Masumura, 1957)

“An absolutely charming little melodrama featuring a plucky and adorable Ayako Wakao as a true-hearted young woman discovering her estranged family, whether they like it or not. Nice gals finish first!”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2019!

I’m generally pretty open-minded about cinema, but I wanted to be challenged in 2019 and so one of my resolutions for the year was to watch films that are too easy for me to avoid — films that are too long, too dense, or too specific. The results of those efforts have been astonishing as 2019 has provided new appreciations for John Waters, Terence Davies, and Tsui Hark, introductions to Toshio Matsumoto, Craig Baldwin, and the Japan Animator Expo shorts, new favourites in already beloved movie franchises like the Showa Godzilla titles and the Tora-San series, and a bevy of brilliant discoveries from Eastern Europe.

Below are my 20 favourite first-time screenings and you can see my top 50 discoveries in my “New to Me for 2019” list on Letterboxd, but the truth is these lists could have gone up to 100 or more and they would still be stacked with killer titles. This is year is almost over so let’s get to it!

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927)

“Berlin in five acts and one day. An astonishing array of footages, from sleepy, early morning hours to commerce and industry, from midday dining and rest to nighttime sport, recreation, and leisure, from children to the elderly, from affluence to poverty. Wonderfully constructed, briskly paced, and always fascinating, I could watch this time capsule again and again and never grow tired of it. Hooray for city symphonies!”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2018!

For list-nerds like me, the end of the year is a special time with everyone one and their dog posting their best and worst movie lists for debate and celebration. (For what it’s worth, you can find my still-evolving list of Top 50 favourites for 2018 on Letterboxd and our dogs’ most hated film of the year was Wim Wenders’ Pina (2011).) I particularly love those year-end discovery lists and recommend the Pure Cinema Podcast‘s “Film Discoveries for 2018,” the loads of lists at Brian Saur’s blog Rupert Pupkin Speaks, and the “Ants in the Pants of 2018” episode hopefully soon to arrive at The Magic Lantern podcast. But before I get to MMC!‘s favourite discoveries of 2018, I want to take a moment…

This has been a great year at MMC! To be honest, this blog is really meant to satisfy my curatorial, scholarly, and fan-service itches and I really don’t pay much attention to traffic and the like, but it’s hard not to notice that traffic is up a whopping 40% over last year and that’s no doubt due to a lot of good people who’ve contributed to keeping MMC! a rewarding experience. Big thanks to Aaron West for having me on his Criterion Now podcast once again, this time with the great Tim Leggoe. With two visits under my belt, I’m just going to declare myself part of the CN family. Big thanks to all the film festivals who’ve let me participate in their great events – the Chattanooga Film Festival, Ithaca Fantastik, the Buried Alive Film Festival, the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival – and to filmmakers like Ryan Prows and Bo McGuire for being genuinely awesome people to meet and spend time with. Thanks once again to podcast-men Sam and Dan of the Arrow Video Podcast for their kind words. Lastly, big thanks to those out there who regularly support this little corner of film fandom – blogs like Noirish, Sci-Fi Jubilee, Voices From The Balcony, Movie Fan Man, Screen Zealots, The Telltale Mind, Cracked Rear Viewer, dbmoviesblog, 100 Films in a Year, Silver Screenings, Windows on Worlds, and our Finnish friend jnvahtola. (Plus shout-outs to floodmouse, Erin, and Simoneteffect!) Keep up the good work all of you and see you in 2019!

And now, here are my top 20 first time screenings for 2018 along with my Letterboxd reviews: