Watching

Films

Cinema: places to find things worth watching, writing about how films are made, and what I’ve seen.

Reference

They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (Website) — Bill Georgaris's aggregation of critical opinion into ranked lists, grown out of a Geocities hobby and updated every New Year's Day — the 2026 edition draws on 17,747 lists and ballots (the Sight & Sound polls alone supply 4,100) narrowed from a pool of 26,551 films.
  • The 1,000 Greatest Films (Reference) — the main list, in ascending order from Citizen Kane. Each film gets its year, country, runtime and cast, a critic’s quote, the names of the critics and directors who voted for it, and how many of the source lists it appears on.
  • Top 250 Directors (Reference) — the same data turned sideways: directors ranked by the standing of their films.
  • The 21st Century’s 250 Most Acclaimed Films (Reference) — the parallel project for films too recent to have settled into the main canon.
  • 1,000 Noir Films (Reference) — a genre list built the same way, for when you want the shadows specifically.
  • Sources/Critics (Reference) — every poll and ballot feeding the ranking, which is the honest way to read any aggregate list.

Reading

Nothing here yet — check back after the next Finds issue.

Shorts

  • The Alchemist’s Letter (Short film) — five minutes of 3D animation directed by Carlos Andre Stevens and made by artists out of LAIKA, with John Hurt and Eloise Webb voicing it: an estranged son inherits his late alchemist father’s very strange machine, which carries him back through the family’s times and places. Watchable in full on Short of the Week.

Completed

Films I’ve finished, with a rating.

  • The Odyssey — 8.5/10 (Film) — Christopher Nolan’s Homer, with Matt Damon as Odysseus; the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film, across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and Malta.
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day — 7.5/10 (Film) — Destin Daniel Cretton’s soft reset, four years after Doctor Strange’s spell erased Peter Parker from the world’s memory: Tom Holland’s Spider-Man works New York anonymously while his powers start changing on him. Street-level by design, with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, and the first of a planned new trilogy.
  • Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift — 6/10 (Film) — Justin Lin sends a teenage troublemaker to Tokyo, where he’s pulled into the drift-racing underground and meets Sung Kang’s Han — quietly the franchise’s best character, introduced here years before later films caught up to his timeline. The plot is thin; the drift choreography is why it’s remembered.