Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2024

As I write this post, I’d feel remiss not to mention the context I write it under. This past week saw the death of David Lynch, potentially one of the great American auteurs and certainly one of my favourite cinematic figures. Despite living a fruitful life artistically and personally, his loss feels grand and shocking, a hole forever left in an art form by his absence. I’m going to write a bigger and more reflective thing because he’s too big a part of my love of film not to, but for now, this is my acknowledgement of a crater that has been left in cinema.

To move to lighter territory, what treats we have had this year. As by the nature of UK release dates, the start of the year saw the overflow of 2023 films and the end saw us narrowly miss out on other future classics (we will come back for Nosferatu next year) but in between, we were hardly starved. When I examine the year, while we lack the amount of stone cold classics I felt we had last year, I see a crop of films I still love, admire and respect in equal measure. Ranking them feels tricky, because they’re such a diverse group that all succeed in different fields. How do you put Hundreds of Beavers on the same list as The Zone of Interest? Not with ease, but we strive for greatness here. As ever, a full ranked list of everything I saw from 2024 is here, argue amongst yourselves about The Beekeeper being ranked higher than The Substance or whatever it is that really riles you, but I’m here to get giddy and chat film. Let’s get into the honourable mentions!

The Delinquents

We start with what sounds like an act of self-parody, because one of my favourite films of the year is a three hour slow cinema heist movie, in which the heist happens in the first half hour. Don’t let that mislead you though, this is a warm and funny movie that absolutely basks in its luxuriously long run time.

Sleep

I am a sucker for a slick thriller with an unrelenting pace, of which Sleep is a top class one. A simple seeming story about a man with insomnia blooms into this unpredictable ride that I would recommend to everyone.

Conclave

On the one hand, Conclave can be enjoyed as a juicy drama about gossiping cardinals talking shit behind each others backs and vaping furiously. On the other hand, it’s also a very sincere drama about people grappling with their faith in a time of crisis. Whichever hand you take, it’s an old fashioned thriller that will delight everyone.

Kill

No other film on this list uses its title as a statement of intent this powerful. You go into Kill knowing that a lot of people are going to die but when the title card appears on screen halfway through the film, the action ratchets up to apocalyptic levels. It immediately joins the pantheon of cinema’s two great genres; violent action movies and train movies.

La Chimera

The world would be a richer one with more films like La Chimera. For her latest magical journey, Alice Rohrwacher takes us into the underworld through the lives of graverobbers and once again proves how much joy can be found by just digging a little deeper.

Better Man

The Robbie Williams monkey movie is phenomenal! That’s the headline! In a world plagued by boring biopics, choose something that feels alive. Hyperbole aside, I was in tears for huge portions of this film and sat with my jaw agape at the rest. Don’t be the last one to discover this slice of fried gold.

Dune: Part Two

Dune: Part Two may be one of the most important and seismic achievements in sci-fi film this century. It also doesn’t even crack my top 7 this year. Maybe this is a great year in film. The original source novel is one of the knottiest of its type and where the first part was an admirable adaptation, this second is a true treat, two and a half hours of all cake after finishing your main meal.

The Iron Claw

If you ever wanted to know what it feels like for your emotions to be hit by every car on a motorway, try The Iron Claw! This story of wrestling brothers goes from heartbreak to heartbreak in a true life story so sad that they had to remove some of the events because it would have seemed too ridiculous. My beautiful boys love each other so much and are so bad at processing any familial trauma, come suplex my heart!

And now onto the big Top 7!

7. Anora

I’ve been a fan of Sean Baker since his film The Florida Project and a full-blown fan after Red Rocket knocked my socks off a few years ago. With his newest film Anora, he has returned with a film that is at once the culmination of all he has been building to over the decades, and also his most accessible and purely enjoyable film yet. It’s the comedic tale of a sex worker who falls in love with the son of a rich Russian family and how that relationship spins in and out of control. To say this thing is charming is an understatement. Baker’s usual mastery of script and editing are on display but with Mikey Madison, he has found his most electric lead yet (which I promise is tough competition). Her performance is what holds this big film together, playing up the comedy and anchoring the pathos in what may be my favourite performance of the year. She keeps you utterly and totally engaged until the sucker punch ending, one which I was unsure of the first time I saw it but which completely stuck with me after and devastated me on a second watch. I’m still working out where Anora sits in my overall Baker rankings, but just on its own merits it is very soundly one of the best films of the year.

6. The Zone of Interest

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, there’s no easy way to talk about The Zone of Interest and compare it to other films from the year. It is singular, it is urgent and it is distressing in ways that no other film has been. It’s also an inherently cinematic way of approaching the Holocaust but without exploiting or turning the event into melodrama. For what is somehow only his fourth film, Johnathan Glazer places us inside the house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, a house he shares with his family and that shares a wall with Auschwitz itself. We follow not the atrocities being committed inside the extermination camp but the banality occurring inside the house. People are planting flowers, making dinner, having their friends over, all while ignoring an evil they are complicit in. For me, Glazer’s film works for three big reasons. First, the boredom. It forces you to be alone with your thoughts as people do chores, making you perversely wish for something to happen. That leads into the second thing, it creates complicity between the audience and the lead characters, putting us in the uncomfortable place of being on the side of fascists. But that’s wrong, isn’t it? We aren’t a world that could sit by and write blogs, eat at restaurants, watch Bargain Hunt while a genocide is being committed, are we? Are we? The third and final reason is a scene near the end of the film, in which Höss stares down a dark corridor and is greeted by a vision of modern day Auschwitz, in which staff are seen cleaning the exhibitions that house the former possessions of the victims of the Holocaust. It is a startling reminder that though these events happened many decades ago, we are not as removed from them as we may wish to believe we are. All of these things have made the reputation of The Zone of Interest a little sticky, with many not really knowing how to approach it, though they are the same things that will cement this as one of the truly important films of our time. It is a purely cinematic product and a thing to marvel at, which is good because it is not a film you should look away form.

5. Poor Things

There’s no easy segue between that and this, but now it’s time for a new adventure from Yorgos Lanthimos! Though I enjoyed his demented triptych Kinds of Kindness, I found myself more wholly transported by his earlier film last year, Poor Things. Here, he dips his toes into the fantastical more than ever before (we can argue if The Lobster is sci-fi or just odd) in creating a story unlike any other. His tale is of Bella Baxter, a perfectly ordinary young woman except for the fact that she has the brain of a baby. Literally. Poor Things follows Bella’s journey as she discovers the world and herself, embracing all with a joy that is infectious. I’ve left many Lanthimos films with a feeling of being absolutely sick to my stomach from dread, violence or some combination of the two. Poor Things is the first of his films that I’ve left feeling gleeful. It’s as if, after two decades of peering at humanity’s depravity, pain and hatred, Lanthimos found the joy of the world. Naturally, the joy he finds is in the world of his that least resembles this world of ours, but the point stands regardless. There’s a quote from It’s Such a Beautiful Day that rolls around my head a lot, where the main character Bill, facing their likely death, says to a stranger “Isn’t everything amazing?” When we’re distant from death or birth, we fail to grasp the beauty that Bill or Bella see, and it’s beauty that Lanthimos leaves his audience with. He’s still too much of a gleeful trickster to play it completely sunny (the main character exists only because of a suicide to posit just one downer note) but Poor Things feels like a special addition to his filmography because it gives the audience genuine hope for the first time. Maybe the last time.

4. The Taste of Things

There are, if we are to cast broad aspersions, two types of French film. There is the weirdo, surreal, arthouse nonsense (more on that later) and there is the slow, sensitive, rather sexy film. Your mileage with both will vary but with The Taste of Things, we find perhaps the most French take on a French film yet. It’s a slow paced romance about two people cooking for each other and without wanting to be dramatic, it is one of the most searingly romantic films I have ever seen. I would be lying if I tried to extend the summary and say that actually this film is about more than that, but the very strength of The Taste of Things is that it is about nothing more than food and love. You know, food and love, those two things that are essential to our physical and emotional wellbeing! No biggie! The cooking scenes in this are unbelievable, some of the finest cooking scenes I have ever seen. Through the eyes of a young participant in the kitchen, we are guided through every step of preparing these elaborate meals, with one prepared over the course of half an hour of in-film time. You will wish for longer before dessert is even mentioned. It’s one of those films where you need to slow down and get into the pace of the film, because when you do your stomach and heart will be filled. Sensual is the only word that comes close to explaining the alchemical power of The Taste of Things, so lean in and take a bite. You may be hungrier than you realise.

3. Hundreds of Beavers

When I have slow cinema, surrealism and big serious movies populating my best of the year list, I worry that I’m losing my touch. Where is my silliness? My joy? My ability to wind people up? Then I see a film like Hundreds of Beavers. This is a film in which a huntsman goes to war with hundreds of beavers. That’s it. That’s the plot. Man versus beast, again and again and again. While that may sound ridiculous, what may shock you is that it actually is just as, if not more, ridiculous than it sounds. This is slapstick comedy at its finest, building off simple pratfalls into unbelievably elaborate references, call-backs and set-pieces that are engineered into a perfect little structure of a film. By the time you reach the top, you look back and are in awe of how well all the little pieces from before fit in to the whole. I find myself stuck with finding more to say. The film speaks itself is evidence enough of its own brilliance. This is a funny film that is very smart in how it chooses to make you laugh, made on a budget that couldn’t even cover catering for most of the other films on this list. If you’re in the UK (as I know most of you lot are), the film is embarking on a nationwide tour with an in-person Q&A and a bunch of merch at each stop. Even though I’ve already seen the film, this is an idea so tempting that I might forsake my blu-ray copy and go in to the cinemas for another chance to hoot and howl with strangers again. I highly suggest you do too, and if you do please buy me merch, I need a poster for this, please.

2. Challengers

Like with Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino released two fantastic films this year and while his sad and mercurial Queer just missed out on the list, Challengers absolutely storms the top two. No film left me with such ecstasy pulsing through my system as Challengers did. I immediately came home, breathless, and attempted to explain to my partner how good the film was (poorly, apparently, she still hasn’t seen it.) For those who still carry the shame of not being in the know, Challengers is the story of two best friends who both fall for the same girl, all while they’re coming up in the professional tennis scene. The film zips around in their life, from when they exit the amateur scene up to a climactic match between the two friends, never once losing a single shred of momentum. No film this year has moved like Challengers, which has if not the best then certainly the most exciting cinematography, editing and structure of any film this year (not that the Oscars would agree.) During my first viewing, I kept feeling worried that there would be a mistake, a slip-up, some fault that would make the film fall on its knees. Reader, there was no such incident, this is a film that only gets stronger as we careen towards the finale. And the finale? Oh man. If you thought the film was great before this scene, you have another thing coming, as the entire creative team fire on all cylinders. It is the kind of scene that makes you sprint out the cinema, run back home and excitedly tell whoever you see that they have to watch Challengers (source: I did this.) If somehow I still haven’t convinced you, put the score on. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created a pulsating techno beat that runs under the whole film and is so good that I almost put it on my best albums of the year list. Please please please, watch Challengers. Though it isn’t my number one film of the year, it is an effortless recommendation to all and the film I am most desperate to rewatch at all times of every day.

1. The Beast

In a purely accidental move, here is a film whose surreal brilliance feels like a modern answer to David Lynch, a pushing at the form of the medium that I imagine he would have loved. The Beast is a sci-fi tale that leaps through time and through worlds to tell a tale of eternal love. You’re going to have to stick with me on this one. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a woman who, in the near future, decides to purge her emotions in order to make herself better at her job. To do this, she must explore her past lives and purify them from strong feelings, often connected to the same man (George MacKay) who keeps haunting her pasts. In one life, we are in a flooded Paris shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In another, we are in modern day Los Angeles, seeing actresses and incels mingle like oil and water. The two meet in all these times in different guises and also meet in their future present, sharing hushed conversations and glances across the room at a retro nightclub. During this exploration, the two find themselves drawn together romantically, yet always being tragically torn apart before they can act upon the romance that threatens to explode from their chests.

It’s at this point that I should mention that The Beast is adapted from a Henry James novella called The Beast in the Jungle, which I wasn’t familiar with before the film but that provides a crucial lens to read through. In this story, a man finds himself drawn towards a lover but cannot consummate the relationship as he has been told of a catastrophe that awaits him (the titular and metaphorical Beast) and so lives an unremarkable life, just distant enough from his love to avoid hurting her. It is only at the end of his life though that he realises the great catastrophe he was warned of was to find love and squander it, to spend your life too paralysed by fear to ever act on your own happiness. As someone who finds himself in the clutches of anxiety, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t resonate, and it’s this anxious feeling that permeates the film from start to pulse racing finale. Our two characters keep approaching, keep getting close, keep waiting for the terrible thing to happen, until they realise that this terrible thing has already happened, born out of their own fear. Lynch feels like the touchstone for me because while I wasn’t always sure of the narrative thrust of The Beast, I was always certain of its emotional intent and it was an emotion that struck me deep to my core. This is a film that pushes at its audience, plays with cinematic form, practically begs you to disengage. Yet, if you make the leap that the protagonists couldn’t and commit yourself fully before the film reaches its denouement, you will be wildly rewarded. What a remarkable film. A thing so tangibly romantic, yet pierced by horror and doomed by tragedy. Like the love at the films core, I hope it transcends time itself and becomes eternal.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite Album of 2024 – brat by Charli XCX

I do think that broadly, I have listened to more music than usual this year. I also think that for pop music, this has been an absolutely fantastic year and proof that great years of music aren’t just whatever year you were 14 in. With both of those things said, my favourite album of the year does not stray from the consensus and has not had a great deal of competition in my heart since its release in May. My urge to be a contrarian has been stifled, squashed and beaten down. By whom, you may ask? It’s Charli baby.

In every conceivable sense, brat (stylised to be lowercase in a move that frustrates my inner and outer pedant) is the album of the year. If you weren’t overly familiar with the work of Charli XCX before this year, you are now. Her landmark album, ten years after exploding onto the pop scene, has created iconography that spilled over into films, TV and even politics (much as we all try to move on from that one.) Even if you went the whole year without listening to the album, you know what brat is. For many, the album snuck up on them. If I may have permission to be smug, I knew from the second I heard lead single “Von dutch” that I was going to be locked in. In the second half of that first verse, there is a pulsating bass that gets brought in which acts as a sort of emotional Shepard tone. For those unaware, the literal Shepard tone is an audio illusion in which a piece of music appears to keep raising in pitch, despite not doing so. Metaphorically, that’s what “Von dutch” did for me, ever escalating in intensity until the song finally wraps up and leaves me a broken man. Appropriately, my closest comparison isn’t music but the film Uncut Gems, a janky rollercoaster that I love to be thrown around on. The music video featured Charli beating the shit out of the cameraman while they followed her through an airport and yeah, that’s about the effect this song has on me, a banger that leaves me bruised.

If you’re here for bangers, my oh my are you in the right place. “360” gets us off to a great start and the refrain “I’m so Julia” (in reference to the breakout star of the aforementioned Uncut Gems) has never been far from conversation since release. We then jump into the wicked and wild “Club classics”, in which beats are all slowly layered on top of each other in a way that caused me to burst into a wild grin the first time I heard it. It’s outlandish, as is all of A. G. Cook’s production on the album, and you can’t shake the feeling that there’s no way he and Charli can get away with this. Speaking of getting away with it, the sheer transparency of “Sympathy is a knife” is audacious too, a barely concealed attack on the likes of Taylor Swift that conveniently also has a beat to shake your head to. Another favourite of mine is “Mean girls”, a ripping yarn about being horrible that out of nowhere drops the best piano solo of the century. Debussy would be proud, even if he wouldn’t know what the Staples Centre is. Final amongst the bangers is the closing track “365”, which interpolates the opening track but folds it in deeper and deeper and deeper until it bursts. As someone who no longer enjoys clubbing, this nightmare banger is the most appealing adaptation of how horrible being trapped in the club can feel. It’s a phenomenal way to end the album.

Lest we think Charli is just capable of bangers and bops, there’s also songs on brat that slow it down and get in depth about her life. “I think about it all the time” comes as a strange turn when you first hear it, really slowing the tempo down as Charli reflects on the purpose of her career and whether she should scrap it all for the chance to have a child. It is raw and a little messy, but both of those elements compliment the other to make a song that just feels real. The song on the album that really moves me though is “So I”, a song that is an ode to Charli’s friend, collaborator and hyperpop icon Sophie. In 2020, Sophie died after falling off a roof, having gone up there to stargaze. I wouldn’t usually specify cause of death but in contextualising Sophie for those who haven’t heard of her, I think it is important to know that to her last breath, she was in pursuit of intangible beauty in the world. This slow ballad reimagining a possible future that never was is at once a beautiful tribute to such an artistic soul and at the same time, entirely against what Sophie was known for, Charli even musing “Would you like this one? Maybe just a little bit.” The rawness comes through in these songs like a sledgehammer, enhancing the high energy of the songs that sit alongside it in a way that only a well structured album can.

The exciting thing about brat is that this isn’t even half of the project. In October, Charli released Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, which was a remix album full of guest stars. They aren’t all home runs (regarding Matty Healy being on the song “I might say something stupid”, I’m sure he will) but they are way more hit than miss and all reshape their original songs into new and worthwhile experiences. Ariana Grande emphasises the difficulty of fame on “Sympathy is a knife”, Caroline Polachek sings about foxes having sex in the newly downbeat “Everything is romantic” and “So I” is finally turned into the kind of weird up-tempo song Sophie might have liked. An honourable mention also goes to the “Von dutch” remix, a remix I originally rejected for being too different to the original, but that not only converted me to its new take but also eventually brought me around to the musical prowess of Addison Rae. Once again, we end on “365”, but now ratcheted up to a new insane level. When I head the song for the first time as I walked into a Lidl, I felt like I had been electrocuted. It was phenomenal and a massive statement to prove that months after brat originally came out, it could still be the talk of the town.

There is a song I have conspicuously not mentioned so far, because it is not only the best song of the album but also the best song of the year. The song is “girl, so confusing”, Charli’s ode to confusing female friendships where you love the same person whose downfall you secretly root for. With the lyric “people say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair”, many immediately assumed the song was about Lorde. Instead of denying, or even just staying quiet, Charli pulled a power move; she released a remix of the song with Lorde. As someone who is a huge Lorde fan (remember, Solar Power was my album of the year for 2021), I have to say that her verse here is some of the best writing she has ever done. Much as Charli used brat to scratch the surface of her soul, Lorde turns up to “work it out on the remix” and deliver an album worth of iconic lines in one verse. I’d be remiss to not mention the “you walk like a bitch, when I was ten someone said that” line which changes the whole vibe of the verse to one of total self evisceration, but I also get goosebumps whenever I hear the line “inside that icon, there’s still a young girl from Essex.” To borrow a dumb twitter phrase, it is a song of two queens coming together to maximise their joint slay. It is the greatest song of the year in every sense, something that will forever define the album that defined the year.

We will see how time treats brat. Ultimately, we will enter an era where it is viewed as cringe. We all are stuck with the legacy of “Kamala is brat” for at least another four years and whenever something is this popular, it has to be unpopular before it can be popular again. But trust and believe, coming from the music expert that I am, brat will be beloved again in the future and endure its criticism. There is no argument that it will define 2024 but its greatness will endure too. Not bad for a young girl from Bishops Stortford.

Honourable Mentions:

Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay – Though this list is unranked, Imaginal Disk is my second place. I liked it on a first listen but I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since. It’s playful in its experimentation, welcoming in its oddness, yet always in reach of an operatic grandness. It’s an easy listen that only gets more thrilling the longer you’re there.

Found Heaven by Conan Gray – Like many on this list, Conan Gray is someone whose earlier songs I liked but whose albums have always missed the mark. Found Heaven really did do as its title promised, delivering a fun 80s spin on Gray’s sound that marks them out as someone who continues to have real promise.

Radical Optimism by Dua Lipa – The great crime of Radical Optimism is not being Future Nostalgia, which is tough as one of the great pop albums of the decade. However in the right time, with the sun shining and the world being right, it hit like an absolute freight train.

Don’t Forget Me by Maggie Rogers – As with Radical Optimism, this is an album that needs the sun shining and the open road ahead of you. Rogers really commands a laidback rock style here on what feels like an exciting new direction for her sound.

Short N Sweet by Sabrina Carpenter – Short N Sweet is the sixth album by Sabrina Carpenter but might as well have been her first. It was a big announcement to the world of who she was, what her sound has become and why she’s worth putting in your headphones. True to the name, it’s a delicious dose of sugar that doesn’t outstay its welcome.

The Great Impersonator by Halsey – Consider this my big prediction for the future, one day The Great Impersonator will be looked upon as a misunderstood masterpiece. It came out to a baffling herd of misogynistic hatred, despite being a painfully sincere examination of someone who thought they were about to die finally realising the value in their life.

Charm by Clairo – I’ve liked a few Clairo songs before but always found her albums a little incoherent. Consider me delighted then that she finally scores a true homerun here, in a wistful album that is playful enough to never teeter over into full sadness.

Eternal Sunshine by Ariana Grande – It’s nice to have an Ariana Grande thing from 2024 that I really like! Though she takes a risk by referencing my favourite film of all time, the albums narrative isn’t reliant on it and is able to blossom into its own confident project.

Songs About You Specifically by Michelle – My partner put a song from this album on one day and after it worming its way around my brain for days, I was drawn to the album. Simple pop brilliance, start to finish, I cannot wait for more.

Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé – My big critique of Cowboy Carter? It’s not Renaissance. That album undid years of preconceptions I had about Beyoncé in a big way, so I was going to be very receptive to whatever was next. Though overlong and unwieldy, it does cohere as a project and unlike other epics this year, I can see myself going back often for the whole thing in addition to those regular doses of its highlights.

Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers – I like listening to Australians swear and scream loudly. Easily the best album of the year that your mum will hate.

Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend – There was a Vampire Weekend album this year! Even more impressively, it was great! This band so defined by one era continue to impress as they blaze into the future with a constantly shifting sound.

Kissing With a Cavity EP by Sophie Truax – The puppet girl from tiktok made an EP that I think is fantastic. Opener “fifty50” sets a bleep boop tone before getting nice and silly with an ode to electronic cars in “MFPR1US”. I wish Sophie Truax luck in becoming a bigger artist and not just being “the puppet girl from tiktok.”

GNX by Kendrick Lamar – There are two reasons Kendrick Lamar is on here. First, GNX is a fantastic album that I’ve had on a real solid rotation since its release. Second though, consider this a placeholder for all his songs attacking Drake. “euphoria”, “meet the grahams” and especially “Not Like Us” came together to contribute to a historic downfall of the former biggest name in rap music, a blaze of gunfire that rocketed Lamar to the top of the charts and into legend.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite Video Game of 2024 – Balatro

My favourite game of the year is a game where you just play poker. Not in a Red Dead Redemption way, where you can play poker and then go out of the bar to do quests, kill some guys, enjoy some voice acting. No. It’s just poker. Except of course, it isn’t. Balatro is more than just poker. It is a special and singular little game that has managed to completely consume my year.

When you boot Balatro up, it does appear unassuming. You are given a hand of cards and, over the course of a few more hands and discards, you are asked to score a set amount of chips. Typical poker rules apply, where a two pair is fine but if you can get something like a full house you’re going to get a much bigger score. Once you hit the blind, you are taken to a shop. Here is where Balatro starts to evolve. In the shop, you can buy Jokers, which will radically change the course of play. Some change the rules, such as cards which allow you to build a straight with a gap of one or with four cards, or perhaps a Joker that will treat Spades and Clubs, and Hearts and Diamonds as two interchangeable suits of black and red. Some however change your score. It might be more chips for playing face cards, a bonus for how long you go without playing your most frequent hand, perhaps a x3 multiplier for when you play your last hand. These Jokers that change your score are the key to making it through the escalating gauntlet of “blinds” (rounds) that make up the game.

These blinds themselves provide challenges, as on every third blind, you will be given an additional obstacle to overcome. Some are as simple as facing a bigger blind or only being able to play one hand, but some are potentially game ruining as they debuff all cards of a set suit or disable all Jokers until one is sold. If you’ve built your entire run around playing diamonds, a blind like that can ruin everything. Speaking of though, the shop doesn’t just offer Jokers. There are vouchers which offer long-term improvements to your run, as well as booster packs that can add cards to your deck, change the cards already in your deck or make certain hands more valuable. What this leads to is insane runs where depending on the random number generation (or RNG to the real losers) you could be picking up five of a kind on the ace of spades while holding Jokers that boost your score when playing aces and only having black suits in your hand. You will eventually break the game. That is how the game is designed and quite frankly, that imperfection of structure is the perfection of the game.

Everything I’m saying will sound crazy if you’ve not played or watched footage of Balatro. I admit, when I heard about it, I was confused too. But, where there can be strategic complexity, the face of the game is refreshingly simple. All areas of the screen are neatly segmented and overlaid with a CRT filter that gives an old school vibe to the game that the gameplay is also leaning into, which allow the personality on the Joker cards to pop. They are all given unique and fun designs that weirdly create a connection between them and the player. You’ll do a run of the game and see that Joker that got you your first win. A warm nostalgia spreads across your chest and you smile, picking the Joker again. This time you fully shit the bed and are out on ante 4. But what a face that Joker had. Crucially, the musical score for Balatro is also perfectly weighted, this endlessly looping track that never once got on my nerves throughout all my playthroughs. While I would often substitute it with a podcast or an album, playthroughs with the sound on were never grating. Those little noises as cards clock up extra points are so well judged too, little addictive bursts of pleasure to stimulate the brain. I would be remiss though if I failed to mention the fire effect in the game. Early in your time with Balatro, you will notice you get a score that causes the score boxes to set alight. This is what happens when you play a single hand so good it eclipses the entire blind. That is the high you will spend the rest of that run and every run forever after chasing, a small design decision that can itself be enough to sustain a gameplay loop around.

All of that would be enough. I have roguelikes that I have returned to frequently throughout the years that offer me no new content but retain that addictive gameplay hook, and Balatro would remain a great game if the same were true for it. The same is not true though. Balatro has a level of depth to it that makes returning to it frankly a necessity. There are more Jokers to unlock by playing in unusual ways, new decks that can completely change your playstyle and even a challenge mode, full of twenty hand crafted runs that are all intended to push the rugged Balatro player into doing something new yet again. Roguelikes often become a game of bashing your head against the wall, yet Balatro doesn’t stop at making it fun to hit your head against the wall. There are new ways to hit your head against the wall, new walls to hit your head against and new treats hiding behind the wall. You’ll have so much fun that you won’t realise you’ve given yourself concussion (for the sake of the metaphor, replace concussion with losing five hours of your life to Balatro that you could have put towards writing the next great American novel). People have managed to 100% Balatro but not without sacrificing hundreds of hours to it. Even without getting close to that feat, I can’t admit my playtime isn’t staggering.

Again, this all sounds like complete nonsense, so do yourself a favour and buy a copy of Balatro. It is on all consoles, PC, even your phone and you will not regret a single one of the (many) hours you lose to it. It is proof that not only is the indie gaming scene the most exciting facet of that industry right now, but also proof that even a genre as overextended as the roguelike still has plenty of juice to be squeezed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for another round. Dealer, I’m all in. Poker reference. Yeah.

Honourable Mentions:

Buckshot Roulette – If you thought Balatro didn’t go far enough in perverting an existing game and turning it into something new, may I present to you Buckshot Roulette, a game that boldly asks “what if you played Russian Roulette with a shotgun?” The vibes are rancid but undeniably compelling.

The Casting of Frank Stone – I’m always a sucker for Supermassive Games and their now classic playable movie style of gameplay, so another serving is always welcome. While Frank Stone falters a little with an ending that hews too close to Dead by Daylight to be fully satisfying as a standalone game, the journey getting there was one of their best yet.

TCG Card Shop Simulator – I always question if I can put a game in early access on this list, but seeing as I sunk 20 hours into this over four days, it feels wrong not to acknowledge that I have had and am continuing to have a blast with this game. There’s nothing like coming home from a hard day of being a manager and decompressing by playing a managerial sim.

Peglin – “What if Peggle was Slay the Spire?” is a pretty simple premise as far as they go, but then why hasn’t it happened until now? Though lacking the purity of either game, Peglin combines the two into a game I keep dipping back into.

UFO 50 – I can’t claim to have even scratched the surface of UFO 50, a densely packed and carefully curated compilation of 50 full-length retro games from fictional developer UFO Soft (but actually developed by Spelunky team Mossmouth.) From what I have already discovered though, this is a feat as vast as it is special, that I want to keep returning to all next year.

Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 – This is undeniably little more than a big dumb shooter game that failed to get me actually invested in the Warhammer universe. However, blasting and slashing through hordes of goons with a friend was a great time and I don’t think my time with it is yet done, a thought that does still excite me.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite TV of 2024 – The Traitors

At the tail end of 2022, my partner and I were searching for something fun and easy to watch together and stumbled across a show on iPlayer called The Traitors. The show is a British adaptation of a Dutch format called De Verraders in which Claudia Winkleman guides a series of guests through missions to earn cash. Amongst them, however, are traitors, looking to murder faithful players every night and sew the seeds of chaos. Players vote to eliminate traitors and if any are left at the end of the game, they steal the whole prize pot. It’s a simple format, which has spread across the globe to broad success, but the British series is king for me, primarily because it casts normal people. The American and Canadian versions both fill their casts with celebrities, which still makes for entertaining TV, but loses the sheer purity of the game. And if we’re talking purity, the second season of The Traitors UK is the place to go for the purest joy that reality TV has to offer. It kicked off the year in TV with a bang in a way that left everything else in the dust.

As a warning, this is sort of going to devolve into a recap of The Traitors UK season 2 as that’s the easiest way to explain why it’s so excellent. I will keep spoilers on other seasons light so that there is still plenty for you to discover if this makes you realise what you’re missing out on. Our first two episodes are pretty standard fare, with the players going on missions together and our traitors being chosen. This series there are four traitors, three chosen by Claudia who are then tasked with recruiting a fourth. Our first three are Harry, Paul and Ash, who recruit Miles and start off pretty strong. Ash’s name is thrown around but the traitors all look out for each other. Things start to get special though in episode three. Everyone has been joking that Paul looks like the son of Diane, another contestant on the show. Diane jokes about it in a confessional interview and says “Paul’s not my son… But Ross is.” Usually on the show, when a pair know each other from the start the audience are told this information. Here though, we are surprised, deceived and flummoxed. It is an incredibly exciting structural move that sets up an insane episode.

One of the joys in every single season of The Traitors is that the people who breakdown, lose their mind or otherwise act a fool are almost always innocent. People with nothing to hide suddenly become the most volatile cast members and borderline force the group to banish them out of sheer confusion. Episode 3 features one such case, as a faithful named Brian gets in his head. During a mission, it is revealed that the other players all think he is a sheep, allowing himself to be led blindly by others. This disconnect between how the others see him and how he saw himself sends Brian mad and he is rabidly running around the group asking people what they think of him. It is unbelievably suspicious behaviour that itself pushes him to a rambling monologue at the round table in which he cuts off Claudia Winkleman, just to dig his own grave deeper. Early on, it felt like a special moment we would all remember forever, a chorus of “am I or amn’t I?” ringing out across the nation.

The moments kept coming though. Ash eventually found herself banished and the three male traitors carried on, planning to murder Diane, which was to be a murder in plain sight. For this to work, they had to convince Diane to drink a glass of pink fizz. Unfortunately, Diane bloody loves pink fizz and downed the whole thing. However, the juicy part of this is that the murder isn’t instant and the traitors all have to come to breakfast, expecting Diane to be dead and seeing her alive and well. That’s because today is her funeral. The mission for the players is to work out who hasn’t been killed, slowly whittling down options and leaving a handful of players walking to what might just be their grave. Once we reach the graves, the final three must climb into caskets and the players put flowers in the grave of the person they think has died. This leads to a genuinely heartbreaking moment as Ross walks up to his mother’s grave and throws a rose on her body, having to avoid tears because no one knows about their connection. This whole scene is a moment that somehow rides a delicate line between delicious camp and genuine sentimentality, in a way that I think even a scripted show might struggle to.

Shortly after Diane’s death comes a big moment. This season, Paul was a particularly smug traitor, someone who seemed very certain of his own success from the word go. Even though the show often has you rooting for the traitors, he was someone whose downfall promised to be legendary, a promise which the show wisely delivered. You see, while faithfuls usually crack over nothing, traitors are often tripped up when they buy too much into their own hype. Become popular, get traitors out, but don’t look too in control while doing it or people will be suspicious. It’s a tough balance and it’s fair to say Paul got vertigo. Earlier in the season, he attempted an elaborate double bluff that, to cut a long story short, ended with Paul losing his place as the most trusted faithful and casting a permanent shadow of doubt on himself. Harry saw this and understood that a downfall was coming. With Paul having kicked out two fellow traitors already, Harry lays his trap, allowing all the faithfuls to do the talking for him while he comes in with the killer blows. The mere reaction alone to what comes next is a highlight of the show. Paul is voted out, delivers a speech and bows as he admits to being a traitor. Cue screaming and shouting, chairs being thrown, people hugging Harry, pure cinematic chaos.

With Harry being a “traitor hunter” now though, he needed a get out scheme, which leads us to the smartest play a player has ever made for their game. In a mission, Harry picks up a shield, meaning he is safe from murder that night, though obviously as a traitor he is safe every night. His friend Molly, a faithful, sees him get the shield, but he asks her to keep it a secret. Later in the day, Harry tells two other players about this shield in order to gain their trust. That night, he recruits another traitor and at breakfast, magic happens. Due to the recruitment, there was no murder, but the three who knew about Harry’s shield immediately start blabbing that the traitors must have tried to kill Harry the night before, meaning Harry couldn’t be a traitor and that anyone gunning for him probably was. It was an absolutely stunning move which cemented a trustworthy clique around Harry and made him one of the all time great Traitors contestants.

After that play, there was almost no way Harry wouldn’t have made the final, which is fortunate as he leads us somewhere very emotional. Over the episode, the numbers are slowly whittled down and the only thing standing in Harry’s way is a man named Jaz, also known as Jazatha Christie. Jaz has been picking up clues very slowly but has been the only one with solid suspicions of Harry. It became a race against time for Jaz to gather enough evidence and create enough alliances to take Harry down before it was too late. Alas, Harry’s trump card was Molly, an ally who he knew would take him straight to the end. Indeed she does, eliminating Jaz and triggering the end of the game. The two stand there, excited. Both are asked to reveal their allegiance. Molly smiles, saying faithful. Harry pauses. Molly’s smile fades. She has been absolutely played like a game of Kerplunk and now the balls have finally dropped. She runs off crying and Harry wins every single penny of the prize fund. What a brutal game, ending on a note that only isn’t dour because the strategy was just that impressive.

Those paragraphs leave out so much, so genuinely, don’t consider this season a loss if you still fancy watching it. It really is one of the most gripping seasons of television I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. This year I also got properly into the franchise as a whole, watching all the US, New Zealand and Canadian seasons, as well as the final Australian season. The only one of those I wouldn’t recommend is Australia S2, in which the faithful are complete fools the entire season, reject all potential evidence and are blindsided at all times. Its sole redemption is the final three minutes in which the traitors face off and get what was coming to them. As I say though, all the others are well worth your time. Aus 1 is a special blend of a season with some phenomenal moments, the New Zealand seasons have some of the best connections between contestants and both UK seasons do remain a golden standard. With UK and US seasons 3 starting this week (and in fact, UK starting tonight), now is the perfect time to get into The Traitors. Enjoy what these new seasons have to offer, before enjoying the extensive and highly rewarding back catalogue of the greatest reality competition show with men in capes that isn’t Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Honourable Mentions:

Ru Paul’s Drag Race US16, All Stars 9, UK vs the World 2, Canada vs the World 2, France 3, Global All Stars, UK 6, Down Under 4 and Canada 4 and 5 – Welcome to Drag Race corner! Lots of confusing seasons this year with wrong winners (according to what the show was telling us, all love to the queens), with the highlight being, for the first time ever, the UK season. All the queens were instantly iconic, wore terrible wigs and made us fall in love with them in every fantastic lip sync. Something to be patriotic about finally!

Hunted – This year I finally got into Hunted, a show in which contestants must go on the run from fake police officers. The hook is simple and the show always seems to deliver the goods, it’s that good kind of reality TV done well.

Baby Reindeer – Look, I did watch things that weren’t reality TV! Baby Reindeer burst onto the scene with an unbelievable mix of gripping shocks, dark humour and complex exploration of how we allow ourselves to be manipulated. If you didn’t see it, it really is the show this year you have to see to believe.

Doctor Who – I like Doctor Who and I think it’s nice to have a good series of it again. Nothing mindblowing, just fun Saturday night viewing with big ideas and a heart, even (and often especially) when it’s being stupid.

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee (Aus and NZ) – One of my favourite discoveries from Taskmaster New Zealand was Guy Montgomery, whose dry absurdism I find hysterical. Here, he transplants that to his own show in which spelling is mixed with torturing comedians for our enjoyment. Until you watch it, you won’t realise what you’re missing.

Taskmaster (UK and NZ) – As I was saying above, nothing warms my heart like dry absurdism, stupid challenges and melting comedians brains. Of the year, my highlights were cricket nut Andy Zaltzman, as well as frenemies Rosie Jones and Jack Dee. Long may the mighty Davies and the pathetic Horne reign!

Boybands Forever – I have an issue with where this documentary ends, especially given recent incidents in pop culture, but it’s a really interesting documentary that allows its villains to dig their own graves and allows the exploited boyband members plenty of time to air their grievances.

End of Year Favourites, top 7

Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2023

You may have noticed, we’ve skipped over best album and best TV show this year. That’s my bad, I’ve been in a writing slump and for those interested, I’ll have my rundown of some of my favourite of both at the end of the list. I know it’s mainly me who beats myself up over that but considering I don’t often share my opinions on those things, I wanted to just throw them out somewhere. ANYWAY! Movies! Aren’t they rad? It has genuinely been an excellent year for films, especially if we go by the UK release calendar. Like sure, films like Poor Things and Evil Does Not Exist are worthy of the list but when you see what made the cut, you won’t be so mournful. As I said, we’re doing UK release dates, feature films only and for obvious reasons, only films I’ve seen. I saw over 100 so we have a good pack (and the full list is here for anyone who wants to get angry over nothing) and I’m even allowing myself some extra honourable mentions because of how many films I loved this year. That is it for introductions, let’s rock and roll!

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

The thing about Guardians is that it is so much bigger than a swansong for a trilogy of lovable rogues, because it manages to also be an accidental swansong for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was the only success for the company this year and also the only one that deserved to succeed.

Eileen

Big controversial choice for me, because no one else seemed to fall under Eileen‘s spell. However, this thriller on a road to nowhere had me totally under its seductive spell for the whole breezy runtime.

All The Beauty and The Bloodshed

There are very few documentaries as profoundly moving as this one, a dual tale of Nan Goldin’s life and her battle against the Sackler family, in which the personal and political are inextricably connected. The telling of the tale doesn’t slack though, demanding the audience watch at every moment.

The Killer

David Fincher proves again that he has a wickedly dry sense of humour, in this hitman tale that doesn’t sacrifice thrills for a chance to wryly play The Smiths. Again, not a popular choice, but I’m very happy to see Fincher having fun again.

May December

Kudos to Todd Haynes for a balancing act that few others could complete, in which comedy and media satire are balanced with a heart-breaking tale of abuse. Charles Melton should be winning awards for this role every year for as long as we do awards.

Talk to Me

For a horror film, this is basically everything I could ever ask for. Thrills are paired with proper scares, complimented by some deliciously and realistically unlikable characters, all of which absolutely barrel towards an ending as bone crunching as it is inevitable.

Blackberry

Matt Johnson has made his most mainstream film yet, without losing any of his personality. Blackberry could so easily just be a Canadian riff on The Social Network but it has much more fun and is clearly a film that is so excited to simply exist.

Asteroid City

Justice for Asteroid City! Both this and The French Dispatch have been criticised for being “just Wes Anderson doing his thing again,” which is brutally unfair. No Anderson film before has made me cry which Asteroid manages while creating some of the most beautiful artifice we’ve ever had on screen. He is an artist at the height of his powers and Asteroid City is yet more proof of that.

Beau is Afraid

Love it or hate it, good luck forgetting Beau is Afraid. From the opening scenes in which we meet “Birthday Boy Stab Man,” through to the… I suppose testicular is the best way to describe the ending. Either way, Aster got a blank cheque and God bless him for running with it into hell.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I feel hesitant to give a film which is so blatantly half of a story a higher placement, but Across the Spider-Verse was one of those truly exciting cinema experiences that worked on every technical level (once it was sound mixed properly.) Fingers crossed part two comes out, doesn’t disappoint and is made with minimal employee exploitation.

John Wick: Chapter Four

This is one of the best action films I’ve ever seen and still just barely misses out on the top seven of the year, that’s how good a year this is! Where I usually love a film with a bit of restraint, John Wick: Chapter Four is a three hour buffet of action that never stops and never once becomes less than captivating.

Anyway, huge selection of honourable mentions done, it’s time to get to the actual Top 7! If you thought those films were good, wait until you see these.

7. Rye Lane

Romcoms are, broadly speaking, one of my least favourite genres of film. Favourites stand out but generally, if Richard Curtis has been near it, I’m unlikely to warm even slightly to it. Rye Lane though is special. It exists within that mould that Curtis laid, but makes it feel modern, fresh, like an actual film about actual people! Obviously, there’s the part of that which relocates the action from the rich realm into the slowly gentrifying area surrounding Brixton, yet relocates in a way which still maintains the feeling of love for location. That’s not the only updating though because, at risk of sounded both pretentious and vague, Rye Lane just feels so well built. Scenes are presented in abstract form to create the most exciting presentation, music gently tinkles behind conversations that are about everything and nothing and the setups are paid off in ways to make you hoot and holler. Oh, it’s also 82 minutes long. There are six films I ended up loving more than Rye Lane but there were none that made me love love as much. Everything in my life felt better each time I saw it and it is the very easiest recommendation on this list. If you only come away from here with one new film on your watchlist, make it Rye Lane.

6. Oppenheimer

Judging by the box office, you almost definitely saw Oppenheimer. To be very honest with you, I do regret my time with Oppenheimer, because I only saw it once. It feels like such a rewardingly dense film that one viewing seems like a bit of an insult. Even in that fleeting three hour encounter though, what is on display is stunning. Nolan has made many absolutely brilliant films before and while Oppenheimer is a continuation of that craft, it feels distinct. What seems on the surface to be a telling of one man’s life story blossoms out into a grander tale of politics, science and ethics, in which there is no black and white. Again, you probably saw it! And that’s amazing, that an obtuse but well crafted and serious drama managed to draw in almost a billion dollars at the box office (and may yet make it there.) It is a rare instance of one of the greatest films of the year also being the most successful.

5. Barbie

Speaking of! You definitely saw Barbie, which made eight Barbillion dollars. Even more of an achievement than that though, Barbie was actually a really great film! I’ve loved all three of Gerwig’s solo directorial films and what is so great about them is that all three feel like films made by the same person. Admittedly, I think Barbie is the weakest of the three but considering that Lady Bird and Little Women are not just films I love but are also cornerstones of who I am as a person, third place can still be great. And it is! Barbie is so so much fun and one of the films on this list that I rewatched very soon after first watching, because it filled me with this absolute lightness. We can talk around it or try and be snobbish about it, but that gleeful lightness isn’t an easy thing to create and kudos to Gerwig for doing it in a way that seems effortless (if you ask the Academy Awards, it maybe seemed too effortless.) It’s hard to know what else to say. It’s Barbie! It was everything, or it was just Ken, but it has rightfully defined cinemagoing for many people this year.

4. The Royal Hotel

When I first saw The Royal Hotel, I didn’t realise that it wasn’t really going to have much of a ripple out in the world. I saw it at Cambridge Film Festival and was so electrified that I assumed on release, it would just be an absolute hit. It then… just kind of wasn’t, I can only assume because no one saw it. Because if you did see The Royal Hotel, I can’t imagine feeling anything other than exhiliration. It’s the story of two young American women who, while on holiday in Australia, find themselves working in an outback pub to make up a bit of extra cash. Stuck in the middle of nowhere though, they’re at the mercy of a murder of men, all of whom have an element of sketchiness to them. The rest of the film plays out as a queasy thriller with this pulpy edge, in which very little happens all while a sick feeling builds. The women may not be actively threatened but there is a lingering air of bad. Something bad could happen. Something bad might happen. Surely, something bad is about to happen. That feeling never really disappears, despite moments of respite, and the film delivers on that by having an incredibly satisfying finale that left me breathless as the credits rolled. If The Royal Hotel somehow escaped you, I really recommend a trip. It’s thrilling and a little bit pulpy, but always the right side of good taste and with this lingering dread that I absolutely loved.

3. Tár

The best film about a composer from the last year and it’s not even close! Tár is an absolutely swaggering work that is immediately imposing. It’s a long film about classical music that starts by making you sit through the entire credits and then listen to the lead character literally lecture you on music. This is all some wicked foreplay though, as Todd Field slowly ratchets his film up to pace. What you’re actually watching is the study of a woman who is falling apart because of things she may or may not have done, but is definitely capable of. Calling it a dissection of cancel culture way undersells the final product, which while included is just a fraction of what we’re going to explore. Lydia Tár is such an intricately drawn character, both from Field’s screenplay and an all timer performance by Cate Blanchett. Together, these two create someone who is repellent yet enticing, despicable yet admirable, awesome yet very much not awesome. The momentum of Tár comes from our fascination with Lydia Tár and watching her spiral into… Something, even after all this time it’s not worth spoiling the ending. Needless to say, it is an ending that is already pretty legendary and reveals a wicked glimmer of comedy that was hiding throughout the film. For such a dense work, that tease of humour at the end sent me back to the film very quickly and I absolutely adored my second viewing, even more than the first one. Maybe on the surface, Tár seems like this big serious film about classical music and cancel culture, but once you step inside you will be rewarded for your patience by a ghostly atmosphere that crumbles into mania. It it a riot. The best film about a composer from the last year and it’s not even close, it bears repeating!

2. Babylon

Hehe. Damien Chazelle does it again, at least for me. Since his second film Whiplash, I’ve been an adorer of Chazelle’s films. La La Land made me realise I can love a musical, First Man was the kind of unconventional biopic that I’m perpetually thirsty for and the aforementioned Whiplash remains one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Fair to say then, my anticipation is always high for a new Chazelle film and when that film is a three hour ejaculation that celebrates some of the best (and worst) years of Hollywood, anticipation grows yet higher. Unlike most of the viewing public though, Babylon easily met those expectations. Sure, its flagship party scenes really are special, these festivals of debauchery that (while not especially shocking) are a hell of a lot of fun, but there’s something greater going on. There are these warring emotions happening, in which we are both eulogising what the film industry was and also not shying away from how horrible a time it was for pretty much everyone. Scenes become a dialogue between grief and celebration and the audience is pulled in uncomfortable ways that have stayed with me for the year since I saw Babylon. Crucially, the film does all this while also being incredibly funny. One scene in which a battle is filmed is an absolute riot and features the best Spike Jonze cameo outside of Jackass. I know that the three hour runtime and the 18 BBFC rating both seem daunting, but they’re only in play because we have so much to do here. We have to laugh, we have to cry, we have to write a powerful eulogy to cinema as we know it. All of this is to be done before we get to the most divisive ending on this list where brilliant endings are something of a speciality. For me? It’s a home run, an ending so brazenly sincere as to fly past cringe and into genuinely amazing. Put it on tonight, gather round the family and make up your own mind (please don’t get the family together for this, lol, I cannot be responsible for that again.) I hope you love it as much as I do but I can’t expect everyone to be capable of this much love for something this wonderfully stupid.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon

We find ourselves now at a number one entry that surprises even myself. Don’t get me wrong, I was very excited for a big new Scorsese film, but how can someone who made classics like Goodfellas and modern bangers like The Wolf of Wall Street be expected to top himself? Like this! Again, Killers of the Flower Moon hasn’t made itself an easy pitch by being three and a half hours long and about (depressingly real) atrocities committed upon the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, but fortunately what they did to balance that out is make the best film of the year. It is this absolutely incredible sweep of a story, which begins as a man falling in love with an Osage woman and descends into this wretched court case about whether an act of genocide has been committed or not. It is basically the ultimate in feel bad film, tempered only by the joy you feel in getting to watch some of the best filmmaking you’ve ever seen. Scorsese is working on levels that are both immediately impressive and also basically subliminal, making me start to physically shake in my seat as the evil on screen starts to course through my veins.

All of this manages not to overshadow all the stuff on the surface that is immediately and undeniably excellent. The performances range from merely great to absolutely iconic, where actors with great faces get to play on the greatest canvas there is. Robert De Niro gets to capitalise on the last decade of friendly granddad roles by twisting benevolence into evil, Leonardo DiCaprio gets to play a level of dumb where you’re constantly guessing if he doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s happening, and then there’s Lily Gladstone. Her eyes contain a beauty and a pain that should never have to coexist, but which speak to a darker truth about the intertwined nature of both. She shouldn’t have to but her face speaks to an entire fading culture of people in ways that have haunted me mercilessly. Even a cameo at the end of the film is a performance that brought me to tears, bringing together the narrative of the film while also dissecting true crime as a genre and our complicity in it. Again, in a year of amazing endings, this was one that appeared out of nowhere and somehow summarised with grace the three and a half hour movie I’d just seen, as well as the great American project. People who are much smarter than me have struggled to appropriately appraise Killers of the Flower Moon, so I won’t keep you here any longer, other than to say that this is an absolutely major work from an artist who has made a habit of creating an absolutely major work at least once a decade since the 1970s. Do not miss it.

Favourite TV Shows

Physical 100 – A great format for a reality TV show, made all the better by competitors who were committed to the love of the game and of each other. The greatest sportsmanship you could ask for.

Drag Race (US15, All Stars 8, Sweden, France 2, Down Under 3, UK 5, Canada 4) – I think I might do a longer post on all things Drag Race soon but as the franchise gets bigger, it has often gotten better too. Of all the seasons, I’ve been so happy with the fourth season from Canada, it’s a version of the show that deserves so much more love.

Taskmaster – Sam Campbell from series 16 won my heart, but series 15 of the perennially perfect Taskmaster has been one of the best yet, with a cast that would fight for every single pointless point.

Beef – I love a good limited series, and so while I’m obviously annoyed at the possibility of a second series, what we got of Beef was ace. Complicated character dynamics built to an unexpected place, where I only hope we remain.

Black Mirror – I think I’m the one person left who will still defend Black Mirror, but I must do it, like clockwork! This season, the big standout was “Loch Henry,” a profoundly upsetting episode that feels like Brooker pointing the biggest middle finger possible at Netflix.

Succession – For many, the obvious choice of best of the year, a consensus which I’m hard pressed to disagree with. “Connor’s Wedding” hits hard for all the obvious reasons but “America Decides” was the episode I kept coming back to, a nauseating crash to Earth as the Roy siblings meet the consequence of their actions.

Favourite Albums

10,000 gecs by 100 gecs – For a while, this was the album I would play when I started work at 9am. If you know the album, you know why that is insane, but I am very comfortable in that insanity.

the record by boygenius – Three artists in their prime, coming together to make an album where the best of every artist is fused into something beautiful. Whether you’re screaming in pain or ecstasy, this was the album for you.

Fantasy by M83 – I am always so glad to be in a world where M83 are making more music. Their soundscapes make me so happy and their testament is always in their endurance.

The Last Rotation of Earth by BC Camplight – BC Camplight is basically the only cool taste in music I have, so I like to shout his name nice and loud when I can. He’s awesome! Listen to him, this is the best one yet!

The Age of Pleasure by Janelle Monae – Going back and listening to this album in December was bleak, but The Age of Pleasure makes complete sense when the sun shines and a drink is in your hand. I can’t wait to go back.

The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski – I cannot believe that in a world where I have a girlfriend (humble brag), Mitski is still capable of making an album that caters to my emotional needs, gentle and sublime it is.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan – If we’re talking just sheer weight of bangers, no album has been as great a heavyweight champion as this, god bless girly pop music.

Something to Give Each Other by Troye Sivan – The biggest shock this year for me was Troye Sivan not only making an album this good, but also filling it with samples this outrageous that all (without exception) work completely.

Guts by Olivia Rodrigo – After an album as good as Sour, Olivia Rodrigo had plenty to live up to. In many ways, Guts is superior and even in the ways it isn’t, it’s so impressive that complaints are totally pointless.

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek – I discovered this album just as the year ended and it consumed me for a week. These are songs that are laced with something beautiful and have the addictive qualities of something evil. Going back in almost feels dangerous.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite Video Game of 2023 – Cocoon

I’m playing Skyrim right now. I know what you’re thinking, “oh, I love replaying Skyrim, I can always go back to it” and you are wrong. I am playing Skyrim for the first time ever. Hopefully that gives you an idea of the scope of my backlog and why I’ve played very little this year, not even a single one of the Game of the Year nominees at the “prestigious” and “real” The Game Awards. There’s a lot to play! I don’t have the time or money to keep up with all these new releases and so I quite simply don’t try. But! I always have room in my heart for sweet little indie games (as evidenced by my game of the year every year for the past few years) and 2023 has been no exception, in that our winner has proved to be exceptional. This year, that game is Cocoon.

Cocoon doesn’t begin by offering you much of a story. It doesn’t end by offering you much of a story either unless you’re willing to think in abstract terms, WHICH I AM. You are an insect-like creature who crash lands on this beautiful desert planet. You’re not given a goal but naturally, you’re going to explore and learn what everything does. This switch moves that platform, this button reveals a new path, classic puzzle game stuff. Eventually though, you’ll approach a platform which, when activated, kicks you out of this world and into a grey reality. In this world, your previous world is now a ball which you can carry around and use for new puzzles. At this point, I’m going to recommend that if you don’t know what this game looks like you check out a quick trailer, because I’m good with my words but we’re dealing with concepts that words can barely explain. It’s worlds within worlds in which the worlds you no longer inhabit are puzzle solving tools in the worlds you do inhabit.

This all sounds quite mind bending and that’s for a very simple reason; it is. But, the genius of the game is that it takes you towards these difficult and confusing concepts very gently. There are no tutorials in the game, only exploration and experimentation. There’s an obstacle in your path that stops you from progressing, so try a new way to go around it. Exit your current world, head into a different world, pull a new item from there and use it to progress in the old world. It’s a method of puzzle presentation that never holds your hand but guides you ever so gently towards solutions in ways that made me literally gasp and shout at the screen. I felt consistently rewarded for my understanding of the game and for picking up new mechanics, remembering old and fusing them in new settings. All of this is to say that I have no idea how to write about the actual gameplay of a puzzle game! Puzzles! Pick up orbs, enter orbs, game!

The look and sound of the game is also absolutely perfect. The actual scale of these worlds is impossible to ascertain (as the ambiguous little ending seems to tease), which the visuals lean into. You seem to be a little bug creature traversing through little worlds, but even as you leap out into bigger worlds, the scale still prevails. Your worlds are all a little bit bigger than you, looming just a bit above you on top of oceans that are just too deep to swim in. Between all the chaos, it creates some coherence. I say chaos, the worlds all have designs that are distinct enough to make sure you’re never confused as to which thing was where. Just by colour, the distinction is simple. Red world, green world, purple world. You know what they do in other worlds, you know where you left it and you know what you’ll need to return to do. When the puzzles themselves are this brain bending, simplicity in design is a gift.

Finally, as is often crucial for indie games, Cocoon can fairly easily be finished in one sitting. If you need to take a step away and clear your brain between tricky puzzles, by all means go for it, but it rewards memory of things that have come before. It doesn’t hang around so long that you’re forgetting the earliest lessons it taught you, instead leaving on a high which, again, gestures towards a narrative for those who are interested. As a lover of puzzle games for most of my life, Cocoon hit all the spots I needed and wanted it to. It was a treat that I want to distribute to everyone and if puzzle games are even slightly your jam, it is a game that you owe it to yourself to play.

Honourable Mentions:

Sea of Stars: I’m someone who never gravitates to RPGs but Sea of Stars grabbed me regardless. Its throwback presentation appeals to someone unfamiliar with where we’re throwing back to and I can’t wait to keep discovering more.

Solar Ash: Though I had some issues with moments of traversal, Solar Ash excels because it just feels great. It’s a sci-fi skating game by way of Shadow of the Colossus, which works so much better than it should with that premise.

YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!: The worst named game I played this year is also super fun, which makes recommending it annoying. It’s a series of games based on those fake mobile game ads you see, but where the games are real and actually fun! Drop in drop out fun, I can’t stop returning to it.

End of Year Favourites

Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2022

At long last, we are here. My favourite films of 2022. There were a lot of films I watched last year (at time of writing, 110 films) and a lot of them were really great! I feel like there was maybe a slightly higher level of excellence last year, but that doesn’t stop there being a lot of brilliance to see at the cinema or at home this year. Notably, I think there’s also a lot of films that are at the top of other peoples lists that I only thought were great and not masterpieces. We’ll see some of them soon. In the meantime, here is the rest of the stuff I have to say before we see a poster. My full list of films I saw from 2022 is here, feel free to browse my best and worst at your leisure. These are all 2022 releases as by UK dates. That means they have to have come out proper in the UK in 2022, previews or film festivals don’t count. Finally, there are also still lots of films I missed, even at 110. Forgive me, I am only mortal. All these lil things out the way, let’s move into honourable mentions!

Nope

All the problems I have with Nope and all the things that stop it from being a masterpiece are exactly the things that I think could make it seen as a masterpiece someday. It was exhilarating big screen entertainment that still makes me think, all these months later.

Aftersun

Aside from having the most gorgeous poster of the year, Aftersun also has a very gentle power that has kept working. It’s a film about time and its effects, so I think it’s only fitting that time is the very thing that is so kind to the strength of this film. A killer ending scene doesn’t hurt though.

Nightmare Alley

I love film noir. Can’t help it, won’t help it. So, when a film is as deliberately and deliciously indebted to that genre as Nightmare Alley is, I can only lay back and submit. I also think it’s one of those perfect examples of a film where seeing the ending coming is an example of great construction, making the story reach its perfect, dark and natural end.

Resurrection

I really liked a lot of Resurrection while I was watching it. Then we hit this long monologue suddenly. Rebecca Hall lays out one of the most bonkers confessions you’ve ever heard in a film. Yet you believe it. Or at least, you believe her. Those aren’t the same thing, and balancing between the two of those is what keeps the fire in the twisted belly of Resurrection.

The Souvenir Part 2

Life rolls into fiction rolls back into life again. Watching The Souvenir Part 2 feels like the sensation of remembering The Souvenir. I know that’s a confusing way to explain it, but there’s a lot going on in this brave sequel. It pushes everything that was subtext in the first film into the full realm of text. And yet again, one of the great endings of the year.

Red Rocket

Red Rocket is about a terrible human being who does terrible things that ultimately hurt decent people. It’s also hysterical. That’s not easy, but Sean Baker makes it look like it is. His dirtbag world is charming and sticky, but you cannot look away, no matter how bad things get.

Glass Onion

I’ve become a little bit hooked on murder mysteries since the first Knives Out and Glass Onion continues that brilliance. If it didn’t have the humour or the social critique or the sheer momentum, it would still be a knotty little thriller. Except it does have all those things, and more. I only mourn that more people didn’t get to see this in a cinema.

We’re done with the honourable mentions, into the big hitters now!

7. Compartment No. 6

I know what you’re thinking. Such a waste to have a film with 6 in the title place at number 7. What can you do though? The list is the list, we carry on regardless. We also need to stop though and really talk about and appreciate the wonder that is Compartment No. 6. Since I saw it at London Film Festival back in 2021, I’ve been a little obsessed. It’s the story of two travellers on a very long train journey across the east of Europe, where their journey is from one frozen town to another frozen town. Stuck with nothing to do and nothing to see, the two get to know each other. Think that first meet cute from Before Sunrise but at feature length and with a true ambiguity as to whether the two leads are actually going to have a romantic connection. Even while that is ambiguous though, the film absolutely sparks off the screen. The dialogue is a treat for the ears, brought into fruition by two stellar leads. The journey may feel ambiguous, but you trust the crew enough to stay to the final station.

6. Hatching

Eraserhead. Annette. Titane. What do all these films have in common? They’re all excellent films about weird little babies. Finally, getting to join those ranks, is Hatching. It’s a Finnish horror movie about a young girl who finds an egg in the woods, looks after it, and then it hatches. Hatches into what, you may ask? So few people have seen Hatching that I’m still really hesitant to actually talk much about what happens after the egg hatches. What I’m not hesitant to talk about is how much I love this weird freak of a movie. From the pitch I’m giving you, you’re probably expecting a very creepy movie that’s very serious. In parts, sure. But there’s also this wicked strain of comedy in the film that injects levity into the creepiness. The mother of the family runs a vlogging channel about her perfect family and their perfect life, while her daughter is still struggling with whether she actually wants to be the gymnast her mother insists on her being. The dad in the family is also brilliant, playing the father of all cucks, an absolutely pathetic loser who would have no idea what to do if his daughter was only going through puberty and not dealing with whatever is in that egg. Quite simply, I had a gleeful ride with Hatching. It was proper fun, playing in horror and comedy with the ease that would suggest a seasoned director, not a first time director. Watch it, because it’s the one on the list you probably didn’t!

5. The Worst Person in the World

Describing a film by saying “it’s everything” is a phrase that is completely useless at describing the film and also makes you think that the critic in question has absolutely no useful phrases in their dictionary to break down cinematic power. The problem is, sometimes films don’t give you many other options. The Worst Person in the World has been described as many things, but is, for me, mainly a romance movie. It’s about Julie, a Norwegian woman in her twenties, trying to fall in love with herself and the people around her. It also uses those stories to explore a sort of existential crisis that Julie is having. As the narrator says in the prologue, “this used to be easy”. It no longer is. It’s complicated and it’s messy and it’s falling in love with the wrong people at the right time. It’s also pretty heart-breaking at the right moments. Director Joachim Trier manages to wrong foot the audience by playing the first half of the film with such a light comedic touch that when more serious moments appear, they devastate. I saw the film with three people from work and we were all absolute wrecks afterwards, but all watched the film again after that screening. If a film can tear you apart that much and still pull you back in, something incredible has happened. To describe the film in two words; it’s everything.

4. Decision to Leave

Park Chan-Wook has made a career out of violent movies about dark people doing horrible things. Even films like The Handmaiden, notably lighter than films like Oldboy by the sole virtue of their lack of [REDACTED], are still full of very graphic sex and violence. Immediately, that makes Decision to Leave stand out. Though there is death and there is romance, it lacks the full on frenzy of director Park’s most notorious films. I mention all of this only because it seems to be the sticking point for so many people in not falling in love with this film. It was very much not my sticking point. For two and a half hours, we watch a master craftsman get to riff on Vertigo, make two people fall in love and tell every single shot in the most exciting way possible. It’s hard to explain it fully, but every single shot has been done in the most breathtaking way possible. A scene where a character is spying on another character? Time to abandon the literal and place the snooper in the room. Time for a chase? Make the shot extremely wide and launch our characters across it. Oh, there’s a mirror in this shot? Time to surprise the audience with which silhouettes are in focus. Nothing is taken for granted and everything is pushed to the limit, while carrying an air of classiness that evokes classic thrillers. It was a cinematic experience whose sheer cinematic qualities made me want to stand up and holler at the screen. That, is what the magic of the movies are for me.

3. Bones and All

I love Luca Guadagnino’s recent films. Call Me By Your Name is a sensuous love story about young people finding their hearts and Suspiria (2018) is a horror film that takes its time approaching its destination and treats you to all the pleasures of the new flesh. So, consider me delighted when I feasted upon Bones and All and discovered it existed as the middle of this Venn diagram of films I already treasure. We follow Maren, a wanderer who discovers a dark side to her at a sleepover (a scene which is such a dark treat) and goes on the run after her father abandons her. While running, she discovers others like her. One is Sully, a brilliant Mark Rylance, who slithers on and off screen with ease. He teaches Maren about herself, but also while demanding she learn about him. Another wanderer she meets is Lee, played by the already legendary Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet is an actor who changes on film. He’s compelling in photos or on the red carpet, but in films I cannot look away from him. There’s an attraction he carries that feeds into his dangerousness here, such a brilliant utilisation of star persona. We know his need for Maren is physical, but in what way? Throw in a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, properly sensuous cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan and an absolute knock-out, one scene performance from Michael Stuhlbarg, you have a film that leaves a mark. It has not been for everyone (and for God’s sake, please make sure people you recommend this film to know what it is), but it is so far up my street that I should be concerned about my confidential information being linked. I was, in short, very well-fed.

2. Everything Everywhere All At Once

Well, here we are . It’s the one everyone has on their 2022 list. In my defence… No, actually I have no defence. I think Everything Everywhere All At Once is just as good as all its fans say. It is everything. Everywhere. Quite a lot of the time. It is also, in weirdly reductive terms, a success story. I’ve been a fan of Daniels since their bonkers debut Swiss Army Man. A story of a suicidal man and a farting corpse (played by Daniel Radcliffe) going on adventures together was not for everyone but it worked wonders for me. That made me both very excited and very nervous about their follow up film. The logline didn’t make me excited. A woman, doing her taxes? Yeah, no thanks. Except, obviously, it’s more than that. It’s an examination of the multiverse, but crucially through the lens of a single verse. We see universes of martial arts, pixar charm, sausage madness, in a matter of seconds, extended over hours that stay with you for years. That multiversal attitude to genre extends to tone. The film begins very funny, becomes very strange and eventually becomes very emotional. I’ve seen the film twice and I’ve also failed to see the ending twice, because of something in my eye, could be anything, dunno what. No film this year (or in years) has pushed and pulled me in the way that EEAAO has, over and over again.

1. The Northman

When I left The Northman, I felt ready to flip a table. It turns out, I mean this as a compliment. With just three feature films, Robert Eggers has marked himself out as a creative force unlike any other. And though you can trace similarities through his films in their exquisitely detailed period settings, the feeling you get from them is completely different. The Witch was a creepy horror film, The Lighthouse was a full tilt breakdown, so the fact that The Northman is an action epic fits in with that pattern of these films not fitting in with each other at all. It’s the story of Amleth, a prince who loses his future kingdom after watching his uncle murder his father and kidnap his mother. This sends the boy (soon a man) onto a relentless quest for vengeance, first as a mercenary and later as a slave. You’re probably already doing the math and going “hmm, Amleth, that feels like an anagram of a famous play about a Danish prince” and I will stop you right there to say that this is based on the legend that Hamlet was based on. No ripping off and pretending it didn’t happen, the influences are worn on the sleeves here. Not that there’s a lot of sleeves to go around, but the point stands.

As you’d hope from a film about vengeance, the action absolutely rips. An early scene where a village is stormed by warriors perfectly sets the tone when it begins with a spear being thrown at Amleth, him catching it and then throwing it straight back at the attacker. There is a confidence to the presentation of this film, a swinging bravado that Eggers has earned. From this early scene and right up until the climactic battle (which, friends and lovers, is a hot treat), you feel safe in the hands of a man who knows how to ruin his characters days. If that were all that The Northman offered, it could probably still be my favourite of the year, but it’s the layers beneath this seemingly simple vengeance quest that keep the tale under my skin. All is not quite what it seems, and while some of that delves into spoilers (and oh, the scene where the true nature of the quest snaps open is delicious), some of it I can still talk about. Like with his previous films, Eggers engages with myths in ways that remain enigmatic, even as you watch your hero wrestle a dead warrior. You can take it as literal or as a refraction of Amleth’s brain, weighed down by the curse of prophecy. Either way fits satisfyingly into the narrative, a flexible little number that appears deceptively simple. Eggers has come out and said that he wasn’t happy with the final product of The Northman. That baffles me. I adore The Northman and think it is yet another singular work from a genius filmmaker who seems set to reshape cinema for decades to come.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite TV of 2022 – The Rehearsal

Once again, I haven’t really watched a lot of TV this year. In fact, once you see the honourable mentions list down at the bottom, feel free to have a good chuckle that basically the only stuff I watched this year was reality TV. Sue me, I like the way TV moulds reality into compelling little nuggets of drama. Weirdly, that’s also exactly how we find our way to my favourite TV show of the year, which is not reality TV… Probably. Maybe. It’s hard to tell and I’m honestly not sure if I do want to make the distinction. If you haven’t heard of The Rehearsal, none of this makes any sense to you, so let me explain a little bit what the show is.

Nathan Fielder, former host/main character of the legendary Nathan for You, comes up with the idea of creating a space where you can rehearse for important life events. Maybe it’s a pivotal confession, perhaps it’s a family confrontation, or it could even be the raising of a child. That last one is what most of the show orbits around, as Nathan helps a woman practice the experience of raising a child. With this example, you can start to see where the strange, uncanny and often hilarious side of the show emerges. The fake children are played by child actors, but due to child labour laws the actors have to be regularly swapped out and for the evening the child must be played by a robot. The child is slowly aged up over the course of weeks as they are replaced by child actors of slightly older ages, all with the aim of “rehearsing” the process of raising a child. But who is the rehearsal for? Is it Angela, the woman playing the role of the mother? Or is this rehearsal all for Nathan’s sake, as he masterminds the plan from a room full of security monitors? Even though the answer feels obvious, it is never as clear as you’re expecting in the execution.

If you know Nathan Fielder from Nathan For You, he’ll feel familiar here. It’s a similar character to that show, in that he plays a fictionalised version of himself who is incredibly awkward and deadpan to all the real people he meets. Fielder also operates on largely the same principle, of just letting people talk at him. I genuinely think it’s a unique skill he has as a comedic personality, in that he never pulls out the truly ridiculous things his guests say. By Fielder remaining quiet, the others on screen fill the silence with some of the strangest confessions or statements you’ve ever heard. On Nathan for You, that included things like a shop owner talking about drinking his grandson’s pee when he gets scared. Here, it starts at a guy who sees conspiracies in all numbers, which help explain why he crashed his car while drunk driving, but slowly and suddenly escalates into quietly troubling places. As you might have worked out from that, it means that the comedy is often a little dryer and a little more underplayed, but it means the shocks are even greater.

In The Rehearsal, the character of Nathan becomes more part of the picture than ever. That’s not his intention from the start, but it’s a spiral, as things go absolutely bonkers. The only place you can really compare it to is suddenly not other sitcoms or comedy shows, but the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York. In that film, a man creates a play that is a reflection of his own life, inside of a large warehouse, where actors play him and the people in his life. The barriers slowly start to dissolve between the play and the outside life and things go real crazy real fast. If you’ve been paying attention to the images here, you might have worked out that this is exactly what Fielder is doing. He builds these real locations and populates them with actors to get the most accurate recreation of an event. The spiral comes when he panics about not being accurate enough and starts to integrate himself into the rehearsal, while also keeping old sets and actors around for his own personal gratification. It is weird from the word go and it doesn’t get any less weird.

As a show, I find The Rehearsal less consistently hilarious than Nathan For You. Admittedly, it’s not an easy bar to clear, comparing a show to one of the funniest shows ever made. What The Rehearsal does have though is its consistent WTF factor. The barriers of reality and fiction have always been blurry in Fielder’s work, but he takes it to whole new levels now, as well as actually addressing some of the ethical complications that his experiments can create. The actual answer to “where is reality and where is fiction?” is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ambiguity of the line and the fact that you’re always thinking about it. Where Fielder plans to take a commissioned second season I have no clue. This first season feels like a complete thesis statement on artifice and reality, ending with an absolute bombshell moment. But, I will also be there the second it drops. For people like me, who don’t watch much TV anymore, The Rehearsal is powerfully compelling enough to lure me back to that world, for a taste of pure imagination.

Honourable Mentions

The Traitors – Though it was a reality TV show, The Traitors was the kind of reality TV show so special that it rivalled anything scripted. As a huge fan of social deduction games, this was the concept taken to the top, in all its scheming brilliance. No show had my mouth on the floor as much as this one did this year and if you still haven’t got around to it, I genuinely think you’ll still be rewarded.

Ru Paul’s Drag Race – So, I got really into Drag Race this year. I’ve watched huge amounts of the show (and it’s probably a large reason why I’ve seen so few other shows this year), but the 2022 entries I’ve seen are US14, UK4, Canada vs The World and the legendary All Stars 7, the all winners season. If I’m forced to pick one season, it would be All Stars, a victory lap for the franchise if ever there was one.

Taskmaster (UK and NZ) – Taskmaster remains one of the single funniest shows on TV and the reason I’ve included the New Zealand version on this too is that the format is so rock solid that even when you don’t know any of the comedians, you can still laugh so hard that it hurts. Greg and Alex are probably TV’s strongest double act right now and we should treasure them.

The Boys S3 – The Boys has never been the best show on TV and it probably never will be. However, it is the most fun, the purest example of what I think TV could be and once was. Week after week, it was the show I wanted to talk to people about, the show that I got excited watching and the show that I am still excited to watch whenever its next season arrives.

The Suspect – I’m still not entirely sure if The Suspect is any good or not, but it was compelling! It was one of those ITV dramas where it’s moody and has twists and is a little trashy, but totally watchable from the first scene to the last. Like The Boys, it reminded me why I love TV as a medium.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite Album of 2022 – The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen

Well what do you know? A pop princess once again steals my heart. Honestly, I don’t know why any of you are surprised by me at this point. The only real question is whether the pop princess I love is going to have fun enough vibes to overpower the album I listened to by a female indie artist that absolutely ripped my heart in two. This year, love wins!

Every single time Carly Rae Jepsen comes up, I feel like I have to do a little defence of her as an artist. She is forever the artist who brought us “Call Me Maybe” and yes, she certainly is. Even her fans will not dispute that legacy. That was a song that was much maligned in its time and I think actually, the past decade has been very kind to it. The past decade however has been even kinder to Jepsen’s career. After her albums Emotion and Dedicated, she set herself out as the most reliable pop princess in town. I love Dua Lipa, I love Taylor Swift, but Carly is the one who I know can always knock it out of the park. So with another album on the way, my hopes were, naturally, high. I had some doubts, but those were of course completely foolish doubts.

Once again, this is another change in vibe for Carly. She’s still in pop, naturally, but this is now a dreamy 70s, Fleetwood Mac-ish vibe. “Western Wind”, the lead single, exemplifies that best. Many of my favourite songs from CRJ are ones that pack a huge punch with big sound, but “Western Wind” is immediately quieter. Even the chorus, Carly plays it low key on. It’s an almost casual introduction to the record, one that speaks to an immense confidence on the part of the artist. And of course, once you get into the album itself, the big sound pops out for you.

That first track “Surrender My Heart”, is such a sucker punch. It first highlights the top tier vocals that we’ve always known Carly can do, but also highlights that we’re still going on emotional journeys on this album. She starts by singing “I’ve been trying hard to open up” and that offers a chance for the audience to take these songs as a sort of confessional for Jepsen. She’s been trying hard, she wants to be open, this is her trying. Even with old school instruments backing her though, she keeps a modern beat and bass, which I love her sound for. It is this pure energy that flows through the music and from this first song into the last, it carries you.

I’ll be honest, I think the next handful of songs aren’t amazing. They’re by no mean bad, because even the worst Carly Rae Jepsen song is a breezy and delightful pop song, but I think they’re below her usual bar. We return to that bar pretty quickly though with “Beach House”, the funniest song on the album. It’s about all the terrible men that Carly has dated across the years, but done with the kind of wry smile that this genre needs now. Think of it as her take on “Blank Space”, a smart takedown of the criticisms female pop stars are labelled with. The ways these men are pathetic is hilarious too, whether it’s that they cry during sex, have their mother cook the food for their date or say “I love you” on the first date. On top of that, it’s an absolute bop.

The next song is “Bends.” I’m going to really struggle to talk about this song because it is one I associate very deeply with Annie, my girlfriend. It’s a slower song but still fully in the genre of pop, about having a bad day and it all being healed by the embrace of the one that you love. There’s this refrain of “I can feel the darkness sometimes too” that I think is gently sensational. I hear it and I take it as being about being someone who is incredibly emotional and finding solace in someone of the same ilk. You both have your moments of vulnerability but in each other you find peace. For me, “Bends” is about the healing power of someone who loves you and how that can heal you with the strength to be there for them when they need you. For me, this song is forever Annie, so it owns my heart for that reason.

That’s what I love about this album, it covers such a brilliant emotional spectrum, just as Jepsen’s previous two albums did. You might be jumping off the walls with glee or holding your head in your hands as you cry in the shower at any given point, but the transition between the two is never abrupt. Let’s take two songs on the album as examples. “Shooting Star” is an absolute, blast off to the moon banger. The tempo is immediately quicker than most and that gets the fun across, before we even get to the cheeky opener “I might sleep with you tonight, if you wanna know why, just because.” This isn’t a song about relationships with other people or even with yourself, it’s about a fun and quick hook-up that you have just because the moon is right and the feeling is nice. Of all the songs on the album, it’s the one I dance to the most. The flipside of it and the song that immediately follows it is “Go Find Yourself or Whatever”, a song that immediately slows things down. Just from the title, you know this is a song about the end of a relationship, maybe a relationship that spun off from that one night the last song depicted. I love that it depicts the attempt at indifference Jepsen feels at the breakup, using “or whatever” to mask the fact that “I wake up hollow”. By most metrics it’s not a stripped back song, but compared to this album it is and that makes the lyrics pack a punch, as Jepsen attempts (and fails) not to care about her ex. It feels almost casual, but is totally devastating.

That takes us to the final track, the titular one. We’ve made it through the good and the bad, so now it’s time to say goodbye. That’s exactly the vibe we get from the start. It’s a goodbye tinged with sorrow, but a farewell that we’ll still try and celebrate regardless. I don’t know enough about music history to say where or what it pulls from, but this sudden strain of disco emerges onto the album for the first time, signalling a definitive moving on. Maybe the most shocking facet of this song though is that it’s a duet with Rufus Wainwright, perhaps most famed for his cover of “Hallelujah”. Here, he fits in with ease. I have no idea how that works, but he and Jepsen perfectly compliment each other and I commend them trying something that could have so easily backfired. Plus, that middle eight! So much fun! It is a perfectly judged conclusion to an album that, while not itself perfect, is another sterling example of the perfect pop that Jepsen is beloved for.

In fact, in Carly Rae Jepsen tradition, even the bonus tracks are amazing! “Anxious” is one that’s been on repeat for me recently, for reasons that are obvious for anyone who has spoken to me in the past few weeks. If you haven’t properly dived into Jepsen’s wider work yet, this album is a great start, because it introduces you to the talent and variety she offers, while still saving her very finest work for exploration later. It is the burst of energy at the end of the year that got me back into music and it gives me energy every time I even see the cover. I adore it, because I am obvious like that.

Honourable Mentions:

Laurel Hell by Mitski – Had I not had such a happy end to 2022, maybe Mitski would have had my favourite album of the year. As it was, she was my most played artist of 2022 and the performer at one of my favourite concerts of the year and Laurel Hell is a worthy addition to her stellar discography

Dawn FM by The Weeknd – After Hours came out just as the pandemic took us all into lockdown and therefore feels like this last signifier of a time gone by. And suddenly, after what feels like both two decades and five minutes, The Weeknd has released a follow up. It’s weirdly conceptual, it has bops, what more can a boy ask for?

CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs – I spent much of the various lockdowns listening to FKA twigs and so news of a new album from her delighted me. The album blew past my expectations though and is one that has failed to fade in my memory or in my heart since the start of 2022.

Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road – It’s worth saying that I went to sixth form with some of the band members of BCNR and many of those band members are friends of close friends of mine. That shouldn’t be taken as a sign that this album is here because it’s from people I know, rather that I am in awe that people whose lives are so close to mine can create something as swaggeringly confident as this while I sit behind a keyboard and write four line reviews of albums.

Crash by Charli XCX – Charli is the pop princess for the alternative crowd, but she still knows how to craft an absolute banger. She has some of the cheekiest samples of the year on her album, but they’re all delivered with a knowing wink that sells them 100%.

WE by Arcade Fire – My relationship with Arcade Fire has soured recently for obvious reasons, but I can’t deny how much I loved WE on release. It is bold and ambitious and a little bit cringe worthy. It is Arcade Fire to a tee and I wish it was the impression of them that I ended the year with.

Big Time by Angel Olsen – There is still so much about Angel Olsen’s discography that I’m unfamiliar with, but even with the little I know, Big Time feels like a very refreshing change in tone for her. It wasn’t a necessary change of pace, but it’s a welcome one regardless.

Rising by mxmtoon – Singers who start because of online followings can go one of two ways for me, as I can often find them slightly grating, However, mxmtoon charms me. She has genuine talent as a singer and a songwriter and I’m excited for her future.

Everything Was Forever by Sea Power – After they provided the music for Disco Elysium, I fell in love with Sea Power and their soundscapes. Though it sounds like faint praise, they make music I can put on in the background and fade away into, and that’s one of the things I treasure most about music as a medium.

Muna by Muna – I have been rooting for Muna since “Number One Fan” in 2019 and now they’ve finally broken through into the mainstream, without losing a shred of their personality. I feel very proud of this band that I have very little to do with.

Wet Leg by Wet Leg – Rumblings were coming out of festivals in 2021 about this strange band from the Isle of Man, making pop music that was brazenly full of innuendos and strange turns of phrase. When that band, Wet Leg, finally released their debut album, I understood all the fuss and became part of the fuss myself.

Midnights by Taylor Swift – Released the same day as The Loneliest Time, I know that for many Midnights is the superior album. I however, found it as full of lows as I did highs. Those highs, however, were quite special indeed, and as a Swiftie I am dutybound to defend the stuff I don’t like with the vigour I praise the stuff I do love.

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow by Weyes Blood – Weyes Blood is one of those recent discoveries for me, where people cooler than I told me who she was. Now that I’ve discovered her though, I love the way her operatic vocals play into and against her music, to create complex soundscapes I keep returning to.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You by Big Thief – If you were to define the sound of indie music with an album, it could well be this one. Its length is sometimes a weakness, but I adored the spikes of brilliance. “No Reason”, in particular, is one of my favourite songs of the whole year.

NO THANK YOU by Little Simz – Once again, I am won over by Little Simz. I don’t listen to a lot of rap music but when I do, it’s usally Little Simz and I always enjoy her flow and lyricism working in perfect harmony.

RENAISSANCE by Beyoncé – For years, I have resisted the pull of Beyonce. I thought I was better than everyone else for that. I was wrong, of course, which I can say now that I’ve succumbed. If I need an hour of solid vibes, I put on RENAISSANCE and jam hard to it. In particular, “Virgo’s Groove” is irresistible.

End of Year Favourites

My Favourite Video Game of 2022 – Immortality

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. As soon as I played it, I was desperate to talk to everyone about Immortality. The issue was, I didn’t want to be the person to spoil Immortality for people who haven’t played it. I did what anyone rational would do and made my girlfriend play it, who in turn made her friend play it and then we had a little video game reading club. Anyway, the point being, I was considering writing a post about the game around the time it first came out, but felt it needed time. Time we have given it and time it has endured. I’ll talk about the game in non-spoiler terms first and then do a bit of spoiling later. If you want to, feel free to skip it and go down to the honourable mentions. With all that said, let us finally discover Immortality.

The first main question; what is Immortality? Let me answer that question with another question; who is Marissa Marcel? That’s the question that opens Immortality and it’s what powers the first part of your investigation. We do have some knowledge to get us started. She was an actress who starred in three films, all of which were never released. We have clips (presented as full motion video, meaning these feel like true film clips) from these films, including behind the scenes clips such as rehearsal or audition clips, and we have to click through them for clues. Again though, not as simple as it seems. You will click on objects or faces in the clip and the in-game system will take you to another clip with that same object or face, usually a new clip. Viewing all of these clips will hopefully give you answers into who Marissa Marcel is (or was) and what happened (or didn’t happen) to her. It’s a delicious setup and one that never failed to compel me.

What also compelled me was the unconventional gameplay loop. If you played Her Story, a previous knockout from creator Sam Barlow, you’ll know the kind of thing to expect. You are hunting for and then sorting through clips, trying to piece together a story out of what you have already seen and attempting to work out what is still hiding. You don’t really know how many clips there are left, or what you’re looking for. You just know you’ll know when you see it. Adding to this loop is the ability to rewind and fast forward through footage. At first it feels a little pointless, but rewinding can help bring more out of the clips and allow you to pull deeper meaning than what initially appears on the surface. These things combined allow for truly original storytelling. You discover the path through the narrative and the order you discover things may change the final conclusions you come to. That is so thrilling and nothing apart from Her Story has ever done that for me (once I play it, I’m sure I’ll say the same about Telling Lies.) Playing a game and filling two sides of A4 while making notes is the kind of nerdy delight that not enough games offer me.

You only buy into the narrative through because absolutely everything stands up to inspection. The film clips we’re seeing are from three very different genres, three quite different periods and encompass plenty of forms, and not once do you question their validity. The team at Half Mermaid worked their asses off to create hours of footage that you are able to fast forward through or completely disregard. It’s also important to note that because of the object-matching mechanic that is inherent to the gameplay, the smallest thing in frame has to matter. Writing objects and themes across a novel or a screenplay is one thing, but having these exist across scenes that you could click through at random and still work takes talent. What I’m trying to get at is that it’s difficult to praise a game like Immortality for its graphics in the same way you would God of War, but the game is nonetheless designed perfectly. The score is amazing too, adding an air of mystery to the simple act of clicking through scenes. Somehow, tension appears! And then there’s the decision to make the controller rumble and add an ominous sound effect when rewinding certain scenes, which… Well, it’s time to get into spoilers, isn’t it?

Please, if you haven’t played Immortality, skip ahead now. What I’m about to reveal is one of the greatest discoveries I’ve ever had in a video game. While I was rewinding through a scene, a second scene started to appear through the first. This was not a scene I had seen before, and it didn’t seem to have any of the actors I’d seen before. There was also the matter of the dialogue being strangely cryptic, about becoming another or about survival through generations. I was hooked. What other clips had this sort of thing hiding in them? The moment where I found a clip that, upon rewinding, snapped into the scene with what I referred to as “the shadow people”, my jaw hit the floor and my heart started racing. There was a whole other story happening under my nose in Immortality, featuring characters called The One and The Other. I didn’t yet know who they were but discovering their story felt like the key to uncovering Marissa’s fate. Discovering each of these clips filled me with dread, as they stared through the screen into my eyes, but I was always hungry for even more.

Once you discover The One, the thematic breadth of the game becomes startling. When you begin Immortality, you take the title to be some kind of gesture towards the nature of film as immortalising and capturing the images of people to be preserved forever. To say the game isn’t about that would be wrong, but it soon reveals itself to be this in tandem with the stories of immortal beings. “Becoming another” no longer refers to just acting, but to the act of literally possessing a humans body. Thinking about the levels that the themes exist and thrive on it impressive, but you become even more impressed when you remember that these scenes have appeared to you in a different order than to other players. Certain scenes have to be watched before other scenes can be triggered in the timeline, but you’re largely left in the wild. All of these things lead to an outstandingly chilling ending. It becomes established that if an immortal immolates themselves, anyone who watches this act will become their next host. This knowledge however, occurs after you have witnessed exactly this act. Without realising it, you moved from the role of observer into the role of participant and now you are trapped. As the final film cells melt away, the face of The One fills the screen and chills ran up my spine. It is a superb way of using the form of the game itself to enhance the final sting in the narratives tail.

If I am to recommend anything about Immortality to you, I recommend that you play it at the same time as a friend. You can exchange notes, work out where the story is heading and cryptically dance around revealing a scene that the other has not yet discovered. It was what I did with my girlfriend and we had a giddy nerdy time with it. In a time where video games trend towards homogeny, Immortality is a gift. It feels special and unique. Please, play it and spend money on it if you can. Otherwise, it is (at time of writing) on Xbox Game Pass and, unbelievably, on Netflix. If its existence on that platform doesn’t convince you of the strange hybridity and unique categorisation at play, nothing will.

Honourable Mentions

Vampire Survivors – I adore a little game I can pick up and play, which is exactly what Vampire Survivors offers. No game lasts more than half an hour and it has a deceptively deep well of content. I only regret playing it when I look up and realise that two hours have passed in my “one quick run” session.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – I was sceptical of a new Lego Star Wars, especially after the fatigue that I’ve felt for the film franchise these past few years. But, here is Lego Star Wars updated for the modern age, meaning it has all the filler you dread but also crave. One day I will try and 100% this game and it will kill me.

Pentiment – Despite consisting of almost entirely text and being about 16th century politics and religion (or perhaps exactly because of those things), Pentiment stole my heart. It’s the rare RPG where I felt like my decisions really mattered, especially the ones I didn’t want to make.

Escape Academy – Do you like escape rooms? Yes? Then Escape Academy is for you. The overarching story is nice but not needed, because I could have just played hour after hour of wacky and wild virtual escape rooms.

Lapin – We’ve had super hard platformers about blocks of meat, we’ve had super hard platformers about transgender women with depression, we now finally have Lapin, the super hard platformer about rabbits. The bits I played charmed and my girlfriend was absolutely head over heels for it.

Disc Room – I still feel nostalgic for the simplicity of games like Super Hexagon and Disc Room feels like a return to those kind of games. All you have to do is dodge spinning blades, but it’s the way the enemies develop and the game rewards your effort that makes Disc Room so much fun.

Trombone Champ – Toot toot! I love a rhythm game and it turns out that ones I’m terrible at are really really funny to play. Proper giggle inducing stuff, toot!

The Quite Nerdy Blog

Far Too Many Thoughts on Films, TV, Video Games and Music

Category Archives: End of Year Favourites

Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2024

My Favourite Album of 2024 – brat by Charli XCX

My Favourite Video Game of 2024 – Balatro

My Favourite TV of 2024 – The Traitors

Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2023

My Favourite Video Game of 2023 – Cocoon

Top 7 – My Favourite Films of 2022

My Favourite TV of 2022 – The Rehearsal

My Favourite Album of 2022 – The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen

My Favourite Video Game of 2022 – Immortality