Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas! I’m looking back over my year in film - helped by my Letterboxd diary. I’ve watched 160 films this year. Today I’m bringing you my top ten of the year. There are surprisingly few horror films on the list, but I think it’s because I’ve mostly seen the best of the best now and also I’ve made my way through a number of classics and loved them.

10: Melancholia (2011)

Lars von Trier is a very mixed director for me, not that I’ve seen all his films. Sometimes he’s great (Dogville) and sometimes he’s just trying to get a rise out of you and you start rolling your eyes instead of engaging with him (House that Jack Built). Melancholia is my favourite so far. I thought Kirsten Dunst was incredible as the lead and I think she does an excellent job of portraying depression. It is a haunting film about two (very rich) sisters as a new planet is set to hit earth. The shot of the Breugel painting Hunters in the Snow puts this film firmly as a homage to Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which I still think about regularly. Both films are about the end of the world, both beautifully shot and both full of, as you would imagine, existential dread.

9: Speak No Evil (2022)

This is one of the most stressful and intense experiences I’ve ever had watching a film. It’s 70 minutes or so, but I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. A Danish couple meets a Dutch couple on holiday and invites them to stay over with disastrous consequences. I was so uncomfortable throughout and by the end I think I was shaking. The way the director, Christian Tafdrup, ratchets up and keeps the tension high is masterful. One of, if not, the last lines in the film is one of the most chilling things I’ve heard. It’s about being too polite in a social situation to say no thanks - people pleasing doesn’t get you anywhere.

8: Before Sunset (2004)

I’ve chosen the second in the Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. All three films are worth the watch. The story across the trilogy tracks the relationship between Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who in the first film (Before Sunrise) meet on a train and in the spur of a moment decide to spend a night together in Vienna. Before Sunset has them reconnect in Paris 9 years after the first film. What is amazing about it is how naturalistic and realistic the film is. You do feel as though you’re wondering the streets of Paris with the characters listening in on their conversation. It doesn’t hurt that Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are incredibly charismatic and likeable.

7: Sunset Boulevard (1950)

This includes one of the most famous closing lines in cinema:

All right Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close up

Billy Wilder is such a great director and the dialogue is so sharp. Gloria Swanson as fading film star Norma Desmond is so over the top iconic that the character has been parodied, copied and beloved by drag queens ever since. It is a commentary on Hollywood itself with a bit of a film noir vibe and it is no wonder that this film is often in best films of all time lists. If you haven’t seen it yet, it really does live up to the hype. The insane early scene with the full on funeral for Norma’s monkey sets the tone for the film - it only gets more melodramatic and lonely from there.

6: Godzilla (1954)

Japan’s reckoning with itself and the events following the Second World War are famously made manifest in Godzilla. The fear that something on the scale of the nuclear bombs, together with questions around what scientific advancement is really for and feelings about American interference is really palpable in this film. It is based on the real events of a Japanese fishing boat being showered with radioactive fallout from US military hydrogen bomb testing. Of course Godzilla the monster is dated, but if you let go of any modern expectations, he can be really quite ominous - it’s a startling achievement. I found the scenes of the general population cowering in fright as Godzilla descends on the streets of Tokyo particularly powerful.

5: 12 Angry Men (1957)

Another film that features on several best ever film lists. For a film almost solely set in one room where 12 men are just arguing, it’s impressively cinematic. The way the men move around the room and keep changing up where the eye is drawn is very clever. As the men discuss, switch allegiance (often where they are in the room signifies how they are feeling) and try to recreate the crime they are jury for, you are drawn in by the central question of how much reasonable doubt one needs to sentence a young boy to death.

4: The Apartment (1960)

Another Billy Wilder film on the list, but he really was a great director and writer. Like Sunset Boulevard, the dialogue is super sharp and the comedy really works. Jack Lemmon and Shirley McClaine are both excellent in it and their chemistry is palpable. This is a really good Christmas film that could also feasibly stretch you into the New Year. I could see myself rewatching it as there’s so much to like. It’s not a heavy hitter with lots of themes like others on the list, but sometimes you just want a good hearted, well observed, whip smart romance story set in New York in the 50s/60s. It’s a good one, film-wise.

3: Rebecca (1940)

I absolutely loved Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I hadn’t even read the book but I got it shortly after just because I fell in love with it. The nature of the story lends itself so well to Hitchcock’s direction and interests. I also love the gothic sensibility and the film luxuriates in it. Hitchcock had to work around the Hays code, so he used a lot of suggestion to signal to the audience some of his intentions, which are used to great effect here (Mrs Denvers is so obviously in love with the title character, it is hard to see how the censors of the time ever let it through). It is a film about a haunting, but without ghosts, as our unnamed protagonist tries to live up to the legacy of her new husband’s first wife Rebecca, who tragically died in a boating accident.

2: Rear Window (1954)

Hitchcock is obviously a master of film and many people smarter than me have written books on his interest in voyeurism and titillation, among other things. What I love about Rear Window is that Jefferies (James Stewart)is so relatable in his increasing obsession with the murder he has or hasn’t witnessed, as he takes up spying on his neighbours from his flat. It reminds me of the time I watched from my own flat balcony, with a glee that could mirror Stewart’s, the start, middle and end of a fight in the pub across the road which ended with someone being taken out in a stretcher by an ambulance. We all love gossip and speculation, even if we don’t want to admit it and this is what makes Hitchcock so good here. The only thing wrong with this film is that Jefferies is not sure if he wants to marry Grace Kelly. I just don’t buy it at all, especially when she comes in and out of his flat like some kind of ethereal goddess.

1: Tokyo Story (1953)

I watched the whole Noriko trilogy directed by Ozu this year, on the basis of the recommendation in Mark Cousins’ History of Film. All three films, Early Summer, Late Spring and Tokyo Story, are really very good but this was my favourite. They are all slow films, and the camera is often static and set low down (very different to film making now), but they are so absorbing. Tokyo Story is about elderly parents who visit their adult children in Tokyo. The children are too busy with their own lives, so the parents are left in the care of their daughter-in-law Noriko and then shipped off to a spa. It is a very moving film about generational differences in a time when Japan was going through huge change, funnily enough as discussed above in Godzilla!

That’s it for now, but I’ll be back soon with my least favourite watches of the year! What were your favourite films this year?