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.”