I was all set to do my usual year's best and worst movies of the year list, albeit with a few caveats - this was the year where my last remaining steady film reviewing gig stopped answering my emails, so I'd missed a few of the bigger big titles - when a film came along that redefined the very notion of "best". That film?
A sleazy right-wing gritty cop fantasy packed with plot points too demented to recount with a straight face - though Muzzle makes a good fist of it, being completely po-faced no matter how absurd the twist - it was in no way a "good film". But to me, and very possibly only to me, its delirious nutbaggery was consistently entertaining in a way many much better films couldn't come close to achieving.
That I often enjoy violent trash cinema is no surprise. But Muzzle was a reminder that year-end best-of lists - and critical opinion in general - are really nothing more than a way for a critic to try and explain what kind of person they are. The point is not so much "these are the films I thought were the best", as it is "I want to let you know I am the kind of person who liked these films".
Which is the whole point of the exercise, obviously: who want to take film recommendations from a critic they have nothing in common with? And thus freed from any requirement to present to you, my most likely non-existent reader, a list of films I think achieved some arbitrary benchmark of overall quality, here instead in no particular order are 25 films I saw for the first time this year (either at home or in the cinema) that I enjoyed more than usual.
Hopefully there's some titles here you might be inspired to check out for yourself, if only to discuss the completely insane and totally terrifying camel attack (seriously!) in Naga.
*Mother’s Day (the violent Polish one)
*Master Gardener
*Furies
*Aftersun
*How to Have Sex
*Tar
*Jung_E
*The Locksmith
*Skinamarink
*Dead Shot
*How to Blow Up a Pipeline
*Silent Night
*No One Will Save You
*Fair Play
*Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
*Bottoms
*Plane
*Sisu
*The Royal Hotel
*Rise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance
*Night of the Hunted
*May December
*The Yellow Sea
*Naga
*John Wick: Chapter 4
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