The list taunts me. I started it for honourable reasons and now it sits there, on my computer, mocking me, and I just can’t bring myself to delete it. I look at it sometimes, and all I get from it is guilt; sometimes despair.
I started it back in 2022, as the world reopened after Covid. I’d always been an enthusiastic but occasional cinema-goer, and had decided to up my game. Most of the movies I went to watch in my first decade of adulthood were daft – superhero stuff, action flicks with big explosions, cheap sci-fi and fantasy, the lot – but stepping out of the lockdowns as a newly minted thirtysomething made me want to change.
With a bit of effort, I thought I could easily become a real film buff. I could watch indie movies and foreign features and be able to leave a cinema after spending three hours watching nothing meaningful unfold and still feel fulfilled by it all. Maybe I could even care about things like the lighting, the way the cameras moved and lingered on details, the finesse of the scores, the subtle but powerful acting of secondary characters.
Because I love turning everything into a bit of a game, I created a Google Doc at the start of that year and decided to log every cinema outing, then end the year by picking my favourites.
It was straightforward enough in 2022, especially as I thought I should ease myself in. I went to the cinema nine times, mostly to watch Hollywood blockbusters, but mostly ended up loving Everything Everywhere All At Once. It half-felt like I’d cheated, as it was an independent movie and a big award winner, but its demented pace still fed my dopamine-starved brain with the eagerness of a kids’ cartoon.
The year 2023 was a mixed bag. I went to watch 17 films and did count Tár among my favourites, but I also had to add Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem to my top three. It was gloriously silly, and, to my shame, I did just find it more entertaining than Cate Blanchett’s turn as a megalomaniacal orchestra conductor. In my world, gooey sewer pizzas beat Mahler’s Fifth every time.
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Perhaps worst of all were the movies that languished outside my list of favourites. Return to Seoul and Scrapper were widely lauded as indie jewels but, to tell you the truth, they just made me want to climb out of my own skin. I found them so long and so boring and so slow and, God, just thinking about them now makes me feel uncomfortable.
It was a similar story in 2024; though I did my bit and went to see The Holdovers, La Chimera and Between the Temples, but none of them stayed with me in any way. Instead, I had a terrific time watching Challengers (the sexy tennis movie), Dune: Part Two (the sci-fi epic), Poor Things (the weird sex and clothes flick), and Conclave (needs no introduction).
This is the point at which I would love – love! – to say that I managed to turn things around this year, but unfortunately that would be a lie. In 2025, I watched The Mastermind and I hated it, but I had a ton of fun watching Babygirl. I checked out the 50th anniversary screening of Barry Lyndon and it felt like a living nightmare, and I thought Marvel’s Thunderbolts* was a riot.
Somehow I keep trying and trying and trying and I’m getting nowhere. In some ways it’s infuriating, because cinema feels like an exception. At the twilight of my 20s, I decided I had to get reading properly again, and I made myself a little list to update whenever I finished a novel, and it worked wonders.
I still read crap on holiday, of course, but my life has been changed for the better by the many, many wonderful and tough and sometimes opaque tomes I’ve picked up since then. Similarly, I used to be one of those people who proudly showed their disdain for any art that was vaguely contemporary, until I decided to start really trying to engage with it. I have, since then, been brought to the verge of tears by abstract pieces multiple times.
I’ve no idea why film is the one medium I just can’t seem to crack. Maybe it’s my attention span; the one thing books and exhibitions have in common is that you can go through them at your own pace. Maybe it’s just not for me, and I’ll only ever enjoy stupid and middlebrow little flicks made for people who just want to have a good, uncomplicated time.
What I do know is that, for the time being at least, I’ll keep giving it a go. Laziness is fast becoming the defining feature of our era, with AI promising to do everything for us and endless slop telling us we can scroll without having to think or focus, and I want to fight against that. Increasingly, I’ve come to see effort as quite a revolutionary act. Maybe “yawning repeatedly at the back of a big dark room” can be one as well.
