2023 felt like the year that movies were finally BACK. After several years of COVID delays, moviegoers finally got a full year of uninterrupted cinematic releases. And genuinely most of these releases were incredible feats of cinema and storytelling. Emphasis on most, as there definitely were some stinkers.
It’s 2023, and movies are finally back. Hollywood has at last reached the point where the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are barely felt, and the ensuing bounty of film has resulted in one of the best years for the movies in recent memory. This was the year of the Barbenheimer craze that occupied our collective consciousness over the summer months, the year of features ranging from the nostalgic and personal to the unsettling, the harrowing, and the deeply, fantastically odd.
We are again sitting down to talk about our favorite films of 2022. This episode is part 2 of our 2-part series in which we focus on our top 10 films. In this episode, we focus on the top 4 films on our lists. If you’d like to listen to the first episode, I highly recommend it before listening to this one. Lastly, I hope you enjoy our 94th episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!
On this episode: Drew Favors, PJ Knapke, Luke Wilhelm, Harrison Hall
You can find us on Facebook at /UWFilmClub, and on Twitter and Instagram @FilmClubUW. Make sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play, and tune in every week for a new episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!
2022 is now long behind us. With that in mind, it was one of the greater years of cinema we have experienced in quite some time. For this podcast, we are sitting down and breaking down our top 10 films of last year, some of our honorable mentions, and our general opinion of recent films with some of our more disliked films entering into the mix. This episode is part 1 of a 2-part series in which we will focus on our top 10 films. In this episode, we are focusing on our honorable mentions and the films that made our 10-5 spots on our lists. I hope you enjoy our 93rd episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!
On this episode: Drew Favors, PJ Knapke, Luke Wilhelm, Harrison Hall
You can find us on Facebook at /UWFilmClub, and on Twitter and Instagram @FilmClubUW. Make sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play, and tune in every week for a new episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!
I’m not sure I’m qualified to declare whether or not it’s been a “good year” for film. Like everyone else, I spent the first two years of the pandemic watching movies in my bedroom, so to have an entire year that felt almost normal– the theaters opening again, delayed projects finally getting released— is enough for me to count 2022 as a massive win. The fact that some of the new releases from this year have made their way onto my list of all-time favorites certainly doesn’t hurt either.
Another year has passed us all by, far too quickly for my tastes. In my preamble to my list chronicling the top films of last year, I noted how the year marked a “new reality of everything being bad all the time in every way.” Unfortunately for all of us, not only does this remain true, but everything around us continues to get worse. A shame.
Thankfully, however, we have the power of cinema to hold us over until it all comes crashing down. And, on the bright side, this past year has actually been an exceptional year in the medium, and a marked improvement on the dip in overall quality we saw in 2020 (for obvious reasons). The 110 new releases from 2021 that I had the pleasure of watching this past year were full of highs and lows like any other year, yet the cream of the crop has undoubtedly risen above and beyond, providing me with some truly profound and deeply impactful experiences that I won’t soon forget. My full list of rankings can be found here.
2021 was a year that began in strict lockdown and ended in cautious reopening. Films that were meant to be released in 2020 and subsequently delayed reluctantly opened this year to much less pomp and circumstance once it became clear that we were in the pandemic for the long haul. For me, this year saw my return to school, and also my return to theaters. I was delighted to be able to see films with my friends on the big screen again, many of which I had been looking forward to for over a year. After the disappointment that was 2020, it’s undeniable that 2021 was an improvement both in film and overall.
2021 was honestly not my favorite year for movies, and we are going into a highly disappointing Oscar season by the unredeemable amount of nominations for Don’t Look Up. I did like a lot of movies this year though; I also watched way more movies from 2021 then any year I have before. At the time of writing this I have marked down 82 movies from 2021 on my Letterboxd, which is a crazy amount of times I sat in a theater. There wasn’t a lot of box office success, and definitely an even higher impact on Oscar pick season in the late fall and winter movie runs, but it was fun to watch a lot of very different stories and look at the different techniques in which filmmakers go about their movies.
This week on the podcast, we’re concluding our conversation about our favorite films of 2019, this time recounting each of our top 5s! If you haven’t already listened to part 1, please do so prior, and then come back to listen to the second and final chapter in our year-end review saga!
On this week’s episode: Jim Saunders, Cynthia Li, Stephanie Chuang, Joel Garcia, Maddie McDougall, and Ryan Circelli
You can find us on Facebook at /UWFilmClub, and on Twitter and Instagram @FilmClubUW. Make sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play, and tune in every Monday for a new episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!
For the next two weeks, we’re changing it up a bit and giving you guys a rundown of our favorite films of the last year! This week we’ll be covering our honorable mentions, as well as the bottom 5 from each of our top 10 lists. Are you ready to reminisce about your favorite cinema of the last year, while listening to us reminisce about our favorite cinema of the year? Then check out our 65th episode of the UW Film Club podcast now, and come back next week for even more! You won’t want to miss it.
On this week’s episode: Jim Saunders, Cynthia Li, Stephanie Chuang, Joel Garcia, Maddie McDougall, and Ryan Circelli
You can find us on Facebook at /UWFilmClub, and on Twitter and Instagram @FilmClubUW. Make sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play, and tune in every Monday for a new episode of the UW Film Club Podcast!