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My 100 Favourite Films (2023 edition)
Continuing an annual tradition, looking at the best that cinema has to offer
Towards the end of 2022, I told myself that I was tired of trying to update a favourite film list. I must have spent literal days messing around trying to make something that felt like it reflected my taste at all times. That is, obviously, impossible — taste is often dependent on mood, time and place. I can’t say how I’ll feel about most movies tomorrow, it doesn’t work like that. So, I came to a conclusion. I would stop myself from all this list editing by only allowing myself to make one list per year, near the end of that year.
I spent a day shortly after the start of 2023 making a top 100. You can find that version of my favourite films here.
The idea is, ultimately, to save myself time editing, but also to eventually have cultivated a series of lists which will (hopefully) reflect the shifts in taste, celebrate the new films that I discover over time (Aftersun, Take Out and Fail Safe are all new discoveries for this year, for example) and capture a wider sense of my interests within cinema. There were some agonies this year — cutting out the work of Stan Brakhage and Douglas Sirk hurt, as did losing the Before trilogy and Lilo and Stitch.
