Day Zero (2007)

IMDb plot summary: The military draft is back, and three best friends are drafted and given 30 days to report for duty. In that time, they're forced to confront everything they believe about courage, duty, love, friendship, and honor.

Directed by Bryan Gunnar Cole. Stars Elijah Wood, Chris Klein, and Jon Bernthal.

Day Zero is set in a mid-2000s version of America where average citizens are drafted into military service to go fight in the Middle East. We follow three men, played by Elijah Wood, Chris Klein and Jon Bernthal, who are all good friends who get drafted at the same time. We join the countdown in their lives down to that day, watching them process it and figure out all the things that they are worried about, whether they're going to try to get out of it, whether it's something they're proud of. This film got absolutely eviscerated by critics, but I didn't think it was that bad. It's a little edgelord-y at times, but the core concept of it isn't terrible, and some of the acting choices are interesting. The characters are written in good balance with each other, where each one of them is saying something unique and different about their place in the world, even as they all share the experience of being semi-privileged young white men who suddenly find themselves in a position of having to give up those privileges, and how they respond to that when their country is letting them down that way. It doesn't pull off the ending, and it doesn't manage to say as much as it thinks it's saying by the time the credits roll, but I stayed engaged on the ride. It's a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels absolutely incorrect, when this is clearly around a 50: adequate but not exciting.

🎥 Day Zero (2007)

📊 Ranked #2261/4218 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 46

lost to The Shining (held at #2156)

beat City Slickers (#3204 → #3205)

beat The Muppets Take Manhattan (#2670 → #2671)

beat 42 (#2415 → #2416)

beat Superman Returns (#2284 → #2285)

lost to It's Kind of a Funny Story (held at #2219)

lost to Kiki's Delivery Service (held at #2250)

beat The Green Goddess (#2268 → #2269)

lost to All Quiet on the Western Front (held at #2260)

beat To Kill a King (#2264 → #2265)

beat The Unsinkable Molly Brown (#2262 → #2263)

In This Corner of the World (2016)

IMDb plot summary: A spirited 18-year-old woman is married off to a man she barely knows as she combats the daily struggles of living in Hiroshima during World War II.

Directed by Sunao Katabuchi. Stars Non, Megumi Han, and Yoshimasa Hosoya.

In This Corner of the World is an animated movie about a young woman from Hiroshima in the 1940s who enters into an arranged marriage. We follow her from her childhood all the way through the aftermath of World War II, seeing the effects of the war on her and the life that she's trying to build with her new family. This one took a little while to grow on me, but ultimately it really landed. I became very connected emotionally to this character who is an average girl trying to be a good and kind person. I love the relationship that builds between her and her husband, where they really don't know each other well at first, but then then they slowly start to grow together, especially in the portion of the film where a past love comes back and tries to steal her away. The relationship that she builds with her niece who lives with them for awhile is also beautifully done. This was a very dark time in history, and while there is hope and positivity in this, it does have some heart-wrenching moments as it gets to the the end of their story. The obvious comparison here is Grave of the Fireflies, but here there's a more obvious throughline of hope and finding meaning even in dark difficult times. Beautifully put together and worth watching.

🎥 In This Corner of the World (2016)

📊 Ranked #600/4217 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 86

beat Wimbledon (#2159 → #2160)

beat Fresh (#1133 → #1134)

beat Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (#616 → #617)

lost to Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (held at #311)

lost to The Parent Trap (held at #479)

lost to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (held at #551)

lost to Portrait of a Lady on Fire (held at #582)

lost to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (held at #599)

beat Animal Crackers (#607 → #608)

beat The Courtship of Eddie's Father (#603 → #604)

beat The Reader (#601 → #602)

Train Dreams (2025)

IMDb plot summary: Based on Denis Johnson's beloved novella, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly-changing America of the early 20th Century.

Directed by Clint Bentley. Stars Joel Edgerton, Clifton Collins Jr., and Felicity Jones.

Train Dreams is a slow western drama starring Joel Edgerton as a lumberjack working on the railroad at the turn of the century, as industrial revolution is starting to kick in and things are starting to become mechanized. We follow him over the course of his life and how his world changes and how he copes with life and loss. It's a very slow meditative film. I understand why got nominated for the awards it did and why so many people loved it, although it is not my typical style of film. I'm such a city girl that I really struggle to connect with films about loners off living in the woods by themselves, but Edgerton does a lot to bring some depth to this character beyond just making him vaguely unreadable and stoic. He brings humor and kindness and care, especially in the way that he talks to the William H. Macy's character. It's a very thoughtful movie, one that definitely you're just supposed to sit in and live in that world for a while. I don't think that it's one that I am connecting to in such a way that I want to go back and re-watch it anytime soon but I appreciate it for what it is and for what it is about.

🎥 Train Dreams (2025)

📊 Ranked #809/4216 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 81

beat The Benson Murder Case (#2159 → #2160)

beat Baby Driver (#1133 → #1134)

lost to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (held at #616)

beat Monsieur Lazhar (#873 → #874)

lost to Le Trou (held at #745)

beat Brooklyn (#809 → #810)

lost to Damn Yankees (held at #777)

lost to Jeopardy (held at #793)

lost to A Different Man (held at #801)

lost to Bride of Frankenstein (held at #805)

lost to The Mask of Zorro (held at #807)

Hot Rod (2007)

IMDb plot summary: Self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble is preparing for the jump of his life - to clear fifteen buses to raise money for his abusive stepfather Frank's life-saving heart operation.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer. Stars Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, and Ian McShane.

Hot Rod stars Andy Samberg as a man-child wannabe stunt man who decides he's going to do a massive stunt, one-upping Evil Knievel's bus jumping record, so that he can raise money to provide his stepfather with an organ transplant ... specifically so that his stepfather can recover and Andy Samberg can beat him up to earn his respect. I really enjoy the ludicrousness of the stakes at play here. It's a good window into what the rest of the film is like. I love Lonely Island and other things they've done, such as Popstar. This one has fewer moments that are perfect, but it has all these little tiny throwaway lines that may be improvised, may just have pitch-perfect delivery. They hit me the same way that Napoleon Dynamite did -- where lines are not necessarily comedic but are said so dryly that they become funny. For example, in one scene, they're filling up a little kiddie pool in the backyard, and Bill Hader casually says, "Man, you know what? Pools are really perfect for holding water." It's such a dumb sentence, and it made me laugh super hard because it's delivered so sincerely. So it's full of little things like that and little moments that really work. Overall a really fun movie. A lot of people I knew really got into this in college, and I can see why. It's made of the same stuff as a Napoleon Dynamite or an Anchorman that so easily become a beloved film with no end to quotable moments.

🎥 Hot Rod (2007)

📊 Ranked #1005/4215 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 76

beat An Innocent Man (#2159 → #2160)

beat Match Point (#1133 → #1134)

lost to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (held at #616)

lost to Monsieur Lazhar (held at #873)

lost to The African Queen (held at #1002)

beat The Voices (#1067 → #1068)

beat Man on the Moon (#1034 → #1035)

beat Fargo (#1018 → #1019)

beat Apollo 13 (#1010 → #1011)

beat The Paper (#1006 → #1007)

lost to Wicked: For Good (held at #1004)

The Descent (2005)

IMDb plot summary: A caving expedition goes horribly wrong when six explorers become trapped and ultimately pursued by a strange breed of predators.

Directed by Neil Marshall. Stars Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, and Alex Reid.

The Descent is a horror film about a group of women friends meeting for the first time in a while to go spelunking in an Appalachian cave. When they get there, they become trapped. There's nobody coming to rescue them, and there are also creatures down there in the dark with them. I watched this one on Amazon Prime, and it was extremely helpful to have the Amazon X-ray the Prime X-ray function available so that when I couldn't figure out which of the seven identical women was on screen, it told me who it was. Otherwise I would never have kept any of these women straight. This movie is claustrophobic and brings that vibe out strongly throughout. The characters are a little bit slower than I'd like in gathering or inferring information about the creatures... although of course, they're panicking, so they're not going to be as focused on discovery as I wanted them to be. I didn't like the ending at all. I found to be a needlessly stupid jump scare style ending that wasn't helpful at all in terms of the story or the scares. I liked the film up until that moment, and that brought it way down in my estimation. That aside, though, if you want a creepy claustrophobic people-in-the-dark movie, this is a pretty good one.

🎥 The Descent (2005)

📊 Ranked #1382/4214 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 67

beat An Innocent Man (#2158 → #2159)

lost to Baby Driver (held at #1132)

beat The Tragedy of Macbeth (#1642 → #1643)

beat DragonHeart (#1388 → #1389)

lost to Airheads (held at #1260)

lost to A League of Their Own (held at #1324)

lost to She's Gotta Have It (held at #1355)

lost to L'Atalante (held at #1371)

lost to Watchmen (held at #1379)

beat Overboard (#1384 → #1385)

lost to Just Imagine (held at #1381)

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

IMDb plot summary: When Raj meets Simran in Europe, it isn't love at first sight but when Simran moves to India for an arranged marriage, love makes its presence felt.

Directed by Aditya Chopra. Stars Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, and Amrish Puri.

Dilwale Dulaniya Le Jayenge, or DDLJ as it is known, is a 1995 Bollywood film that stars Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan as a young couple that meet and fall in love. She, however, is engaged to a rich man back in her hometown, so he vows that he's going to come and win over her family so they will agree to their marriage instead. I was first introduced to this movie in the film A Nice Indian Boy, where it's held up as the pinnacle of idealized romance for our main character, and I totally get it. It is beautifully put together. The characters are so delightful, the dance and musical numbers are some of the best that I've seen... it is impeccably created. I love these characters and how sweet they are together and how kind they are to the people around them while they're trying to make this work.  If you like either rom coms or musicals, it's a really great one if you haven't seen it. It's one that I think I'm going to come back to again and again.

🎥 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

📊 Ranked #552/4213 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 87

beat The Butter Battle Book (#2158 → #2159)

beat Match Point (#1132 → #1133)

beat Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (#616 → #617)

lost to Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (held at #311)

lost to The Parent Trap (held at #479)

lost to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (held at #551)

beat Ex Machina (#582 → #583)

beat Bend It Like Beckham (#566 → #567)

beat The Basketball Diaries (#558 → #559)

beat Grease (#554 → #555)

beat A Man for All Seasons (#552 → #553)

Local Hero (1983)

IMDb plot summary: An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don't go as expected.

Directed by Bill Forsyth. Stars Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, and Fulton Mackay.

Local Hero stars Peter Riegert as a man who is sent by his oil company employer to a small town in Scotland, where he is offering to purchase all the land from them and is sent there to negotiate a price. The people are excited and ready to sell, but they want to negotiate a higher price, and so they keep him around for a while. While he's there, he ends up falling in love with the village and the people there and questioning whether he wants to facilitate this sale after all. This is a very quiet, slow film. Because of that, it took me a while to register the kind of story that I was seeing. It didn't hit the traditional hallmarks or beats I expected, which is a good thing on one hand because it was outside of the box, but on the other hand it meant that it took me a long time to get settled into the story and to figure out whether I was meant to look at our protagonist as a hero or a villain. It took me a long time to get emotionally invested in the story. If I went back and re-watched it, knowing what kind of vibe it was going for, it might be a much easier sell and a much quicker investment in the characters. There are so many different characters being shown to us that I can't process all of their plot lines on a first watch, so I do feel like one viewing doesn't give me the full picture of it. But after one viewing I wasn't sold on it the way I hoped I would be.

🎥 Local Hero (1983)

📊 Ranked #2307/4212 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 45

lost to Phantom of the Opera (held at #2140)

beat The Forger (#3184 → #3185)

beat Easy Virtue (#2661 → #2662)

beat Neighbors (#2401 → #2402)

lost to Waves (held at #2268)

beat The Last Temptation of Christ (#2335 → #2336)

lost to Holiday Affair (held at #2302)

beat The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (#2318 → #2319)

beat A Complete Unknown (#2310 → #2311)

lost to Malignant (held at #2306)

beat Just Like Heaven (#2308 → #2309)