Us and Them (2018)

IMDb plot summary: Ten years ago, on a train home, fate brings Xiaoxiao and Jianqing together. Like many young couples, they meet, fall in love, and strive to make it work, but eventually, the harsh realities of life make them drift apart.

Directed by Rene Liu. Stars Boran Jing, Dongyu Zhou, and Zhuangzhuang Tian.

Us and Them is a Chinese romantic drama following a couple's tumultuous young romance, and then picking up several years later when they happened to run into each other again in much more stable personal circumstances. I kept wanting to really like this movie but it never worked for me. Every time there would be a moment that drew my attention because it seemed fresh and new -- for example, the ongoing saga of the video game he was trying to make that capture a romantic loss -- then it would be surrounded by so many moments that were long and slow and dull. It made it really hard for me to care about the outcome of these characters in the long run. I feel like if I remember anything about this movie and take anything away from it, it's going to be a series of unconnected thoughts and scenes that I'll have to work hard to remember were from this movie. A disappointing watch.

🎥 Us and Them (2018)

📊 Ranked #3259/4248 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 26

lost to Eyes Wide Shut (#2140 → #2139)

lost to The Phantom of the Opera (#3199 → #3156)

beat Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (#3742 → #3699)

beat The Card Counter (#3473 → #3577)

beat The Giver (#3331 → #3328)

beat Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (#3264 → #3265)

beat 12 Days of Terror (#3230 → #3233)

beat Darkness (#3214 → #3219)

lost to The Robe (#3206 → #3160)

beat Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (#3210 → #3211)

lost to Soylent Green (#3208 → #3163)

beat Despicable Me (#3209 → #3207)

Nouvelle Vague (2025)

IMDb plot summary: The behind the scenes of the filming of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), a landmark of the French New Wave film movement.

Directed by Richard Linklater. Stars Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, and Aubry Dullin.

Richard Linklater made two movies this year about real-life people who were masters of their craft. One was Blue Moon and one was this, about Jean-Luc Godard making his film Breathless. One thing to note as going into this is that I absolutely hate Godard as a filmmaker. I've seen maybe four of his films and find his work extremely irritating and pretentious, and this film certainly did nothing to convince me of anything otherwise. It was also extremely unhelpful to watch this back-to-back with Day or Night because I could not keep the two of them straight most of the time. The character interactions are engaging because Linklater is excellent at working with character dialogue, but I just couldn't care about the story being told. Blue Moon was incredible, this one kept left me a little cold.

🎥 Nouvelle Vague (2025)

📊 Ranked #2443/4244 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 47

beat Show Girl in Hollywood (#2170 → #2163)

lost to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (#1126 → #987)

lost to Manhunter (#1644 → #1630)

lost to 12 Angry Men (#1909 → #2428)

beat John and Mary (#2039 → #2165)

lost to VeggieTales: God Wants Me to Forgive Them!?! (#1974 → #1904)

beat Pat and Mike (#2007 → #2109)

lost to The Forest (#1990 → #1992)

lost to The Last Castle (#1998 → #1997)

beat The Light in Her Eyes (#2002 → #2000)

beat Malcolm & Marie (#2000 → #2010)

lost to Dot the I (#1999 → #1836)

Day for Night (1973)

IMDb plot summary: A committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.

Directed by François Truffaut. Stars Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and François Truffaut.

Day for Night is a Francois Truffaut film from the 1970s about a director making a film and the many dramas, small and large, that come along with it. One has to assume this is at least partly autobiographical, considering Truffaut also plays the director character in the film, and the plotlines and characters certainly have a ring of authenticity to them. I haven't seen a lot of Truffaut's work, but I have often not meshed with French new wave in general, so I was a little hesitant about this one. The individual moments in it were engaging enough, and I kind of found myself invested in whether this movie was going to come together. But ultimately it ended up being more a matter of the sum of its parts not adding up to more.

🎥 Day for Night (1973)

📊 Ranked #2953/4243 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 34

lost to Cast Away (#2176 → #2071)

beat Labor Day (#3213 → #3215)

beat Casino (#2689 → #2692)

beat Following (#2431 → #2432)

beat David Copperfield (#2305 → #2324)

lost to One 2 Ka 4 (#2243 → #2161)

beat The Dinner Guest (#2273 → #2281)

lost to To Be or Not to Be (#2258 → #2246)

lost to Miracle on 34th Street (#2265 → #2259)

beat Fly Me to the Moon (held at #2269)

lost to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (#2267 → #2176)

lost to A Time to Kill (#2268 → #2262)

The Long Walk (2025)

IMDb plot summary: A group of teenage boys compete in an annual contest known as "The Long Walk," in which they must maintain a certain walking speed or get shot.

Directed by Francis Lawrence. Stars Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Garrett Wareing.

The Long Walk is a movie based on a Stephen King story, about a post-apocalyptic world where every year a group of young people are chosen to walk until they die. The last one standing gets a wish granted. I am definitely a sucker for stories about dystopias with weirdly specific rules trying to give people a chance to escape -- think this and Hunger Games -- and this does a good job making this compelling. The variety of characters we encounter on the road is enjoyable and you can pretty quickly begin rooting for your favorites. It's also paced very well, ramping up the horror slowly enough that you get teasers of it early on, but then really feel the exhaustion as the story continues. This is definitely something that will appeal to other folks like me who enjoy the genre.

🎥 The Long Walk (2025)

📊 Ranked #1003/4242 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 77

beat Cast Away (held at #2176)

lost to The Favourite (#1123 → #1122)

beat The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (#1642 → #1662)

beat Orgazmo (#1392 → #1433)

beat High Strung (#1262 → #1270)

lost to Song of the Sea (#1195 → #1181)

beat Gone Baby Gone (#1225 → #1231)

lost to Airheads (#1210 → #1207)

lost to Frankenweenie (#1217 → #1208)

beat The Magnificent Seven (#1221 → #1256)

beat OBEX (#1219 → #1222)

beat The Secret of Roan Inish (#1218 → #1239)

I'm No Longer Here (2019)

IMDb plot summary: In Monterrey, Mexico, a young street gang spends their days dancing to slowed-down cumbia and attending parties. After a mix-up with a local cartel, their leader is forced to migrate to the U.S. but quickly longs to return home.

Directed by Fernando Frias. Stars Kevin Ryan, Juan Daniel García Treviño, and Xueming Angelina Chen.

I'm No Longer Here tells the nonlinear story of a young man who was involved with a dance crew in Colombia and then has to leave town and emigrate to America after his crew becomes entangled in gang violence. I actually found the nonlinear aspect surprisingly difficult to follow. It took me 2/3 of the way through the movie to realize that it was out of order. While usually I'd blame that on myself, I do feel like I was paying pretty close attention, so something got lost there. It hits a lot of familiar beats here, both in stories about gang violence and stories about refugees, but it does bring an interesting new angle with the aspect of dance being the grounding point for this character. That doesn't get explored very often in film. That being said, though, overall it was not a film that really stood out to me, and I'm pretty sure the only thing I'm going to remember about it a month out is the dancing.

🎥 I'm No Longer Here (2019)

📊 Ranked #2632/4241 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 42

lost to Dunkirk (#2171 → #2169)

beat Captain January (#3213 → #3295)

lost to The 39 Steps (held at #2685)

beat The Ice Storm (#2949 → #2943)

lost to Flypaper (#2820 → #2907)

lost to An Ideal Husband (held at #2883)

beat Choke (#2916 → #2913)

beat The Rocky Horror Picture Show (#2899 → #2896)

beat No Country for Old Men (#2891 → #2889)

beat Streets of Fire (#2886 → #2884)

lost to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (#2884 → #2780)

beat Little Big League (#2885 → #2968)

Bugonia (2025)

IMDb plot summary: Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Aidan Delbis.

Begonia is a Yorgos Lanthimos film starring Jesse Plemons as a doomsday prepper type character who kidnaps successful businesswoman Emma Stone because he is convinced that she is an alien come to invade his planet, and he has to get her to agree to take him to her ship and bargain to get them to leave Earth alone. Lanthimos is becoming one of my favorite modern directors. He always gets phenomenal performances out of his actors, but it doesn't hurt that he's choosing actors like Stone and Plemons who are gems in anything they do. I did have portions of this story spoiled for me before watching it, and I was curious if that was going to make me less interested, but the way it played out was compelling enough to watch in the moment that I didn't mind. The back and forth between Stone's and Plemons' characters is electric. And while I won't be the one to spoil the story for everybody else the way it was for me, I found the final few minutes absolutely astonishing. I'm going to be thinking about that ending for ages. I loved it, totally get why other people wouldn't... as is the case with most Lanthimos films.

🎥 Bugonia (2025)

📊 Ranked #572/4240 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 86

beat Revolutionary Road (#2177 → #2236)

beat Pretty Woman (#1123 → #1141)

lost to Dogville (#601 → #598)

lost to Companion (#865 → #863)

beat Contact (#992 → #993)

beat Madam Satan (#929 → #953)

beat Southside with You (#896 → #891)

beat The Hunger Games (#881 → #886)

beat The Graduate (#872 → #899)

beat Last Night in Soho (#868 → #869)

beat The Grand Budapest Hotel (#866 → #897)

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)

IMDb plot summary: A man, driven by his desire for a multi-million dollar inheritance, begins to care for his terminally ill grandmother. However, winning her favor will not be an easy task and he is not the only one with an eye on the money.

Directed by Pat Boonnitipat. Stars Putthipong Assaratanakul, Usha Seamkhum, and Sanya Kunakorn.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is a Thai film about a young unemployed man who decides to befriend his grandmother in the hopes that she'll leave everything to him when she dies. This one took a little bit of time but in the end it really won me over. Our main character starts off being a pretty terrible person, and while the film does hint that he's going to go through a character growth journey, watching it play out is very satisfying. The movie manages to avoid ever being too sappy or sentimental about the topic at hand, but I had to trust it to get there, because the beginning makes it feel like it WILL go that route. But the film makes it work, and tells the story in a way that really brings the audience along for the ride. A good one to check out.

How it entered my Flickchart:

🎥 How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)

📊 Ranked #1120/4239 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 74

beat Mr. Nice Guy (#2195 → #2194)

lost to Kneecap (#1125 → #1130)

beat Sweet Smell of Success (held at #1605)

beat Hocus Pocus (#1394 → #1441)

beat Scrooge (#1260 → #1286)

lost to Top Secret! (#1197 → #1225)

beat Kursk (#1361 → #1371)

lost to Safe (#1211 → #1075)

lost to Chronicle (#1220 → #1085)

lost to What the Deaf Man Heard (#1223 → #1217)

beat The Dark Knight (#1124 → #1186)

beat Studio 666 (#1221 → #1271)