The Conformist (1970)

IMDb plot summary: A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, and Gastone Moschin.

The Conformist follows an Italian man in 1938 who is tasked by the fascist authorities to assasinate a former teacher of his. He reluctantly goes along with the plan, though it becomes clear he makes a poor government flunky. I really struggle to connect with the New Hollywood films of the 1970s. Even when I'm tangentially interested in the themes, such as this one, they speak a very different cinematic language than I do, and most of what they show me distances me rather than bringing me into what they're trying to say. I like the idea of this film in theory, but in practice I found it mostly tedious. I did find the ending scene by far the most interesting, and if I had been more engrossed in the rest of the movie I could see it having a very powerful effect on me, but as it is, it fell flat. I actually had to go look up the plot on Wikipedia to remind myself what happened in it aside from that ending scene because the rest of it had so little impact on me. I understand people connecting to this, but it's not for me.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Conformist < Bad Education

The Conformist > Faust: A German Folk Legend

The Conformist < Boogie Nights

The Conformist > Scrooge: A Christmas Carol

The Conformist > Touch of Evil

The Conformist > Ready Player One

The Conformist > Firecreek

The Conformist < Star Trek Into Darkness

The Conformist < Hancock

The Conformist < Matchstick Men

The Conformist > Hitchcock

The Conformist < Sideways

Final spot: #2389 out of 3779, or 37%.

Spirited (2022)

IMDb plot summary: A musical version of Charles Dickens's story of a miserly misanthrope who is taken on a magical journey.

Directed by Sean Anders. Starring Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, and Octavia Spencer.

Spirited is a holiday musical comedy inspired by A Christmas Carol, starring Will Ferrell as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ryan Reynolds as the soul the ghosts are tasked with saving this year. The music is by current musical theater darlings Pasek and Paul, who I usually dislike, but I'm going to come out there and say I think this is their best work. In fact, this movie as a whole is so much better than I would have expected. Ferrell and Reynolds aren't the best singers, but they bring the exact right musical theater *energy* to this movie, with a willingness to go all in on every single number, no matter how cheesy. And while there is a plot and a "message" to this movie, it doesn't ever get in the way of the actors just having a good time. The movie leans into its musical stylings in its visuals as well, both in its vivid cinematography and its energetic choreography. Honestly, this movie is better than it has any right to be and I can definitely see this becoming part of my regular holiday viewing.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Spirited > Bad Education

Spirited > Key Largo

Spirited > Six Degrees of Separation

Spirited < Deathtrap

Spirited > The Gods Must Be Crazy

Spirited < I'm Not Scared

Spirited < Broadway Danny Rose

Spirited < The Banshees of Inisherin

Spirited > The Producers (2005)

Spirited < Bicentennial Man

Spirited > Primal Fear

Final spot: #344 out of 3778, or 91%.

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (2022)

IMDb plot summary: A supernatural, time-travelling, musical adaptation of Charles Dickens's cult Christmas story.

Directed by Stephen Donnelly. Starring Luke Evans, Olivia Colman, and Jessie Buckley.

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol is a loose adaptation of the Leslie Bricusse musical Scrooge first released in the 1970s with Albert Finney in the title role. A few songs from the original musical appear here, with the rest being, as far as I can tell, also composed by Bricusse, though I had a surprisingly difficult time finding that out. But there's almost nothing done here that isn't done better in the 1970 version -- and I don't even like the 1970 that much. The new songs are absolutely dismal, with instrumentation that feels jarringly out-of-place. The one thing that actually works about this movie is the character design of the Ghost of Christmas Past, a wax candle-like creature who can change her appearance, which lends itself to the best visual moments of the movie -- the only good ones, really. But overall it's a deeply uninspiring version of this story that tries too hard to beat its audience over the head with the "message" of the story, through really uninteresting musical numbers.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < Neighbors

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol > Warm Bodies

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < Dr. No

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol > The Ides of March

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < The Cat in the Hat (1971)

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < The Howling

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < House of Games

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < Immortal Beloved

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < Paint Your Wagon

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol > Benedetta

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < Nine (2009)

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol < The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Final spot: #2593 out of 3777, or 31%.

Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)

IMDb plot summary: Competition between privately owned Los Angeles, California ambulance companies is played for humor.

Directed by Peter Yates. Starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, and Harvey Keitel.

Mother, Jugs & Speed are the nicknames of three employees at a nearly-bankrupt for-profit ambulance company. Mother, played by Bill Cosby, is the company's mainstay, while Harvey Keitel's Speed and Raquel Welch's impolitely-named Jugs are newcomers trying to establish their credentials. This film is all over the place when it comes to tone. It zigzags back and forth between being a sort of zany workplace comedy and a dark drama. The two occasionally play well together, especially in scenes where the team is working and highlighting how they find the darkly funny or absurd moments in the tragedies they have to respond to. But a lot of the time, it feels like the movie can't decide whether it wants to make commentary or just goof around with low-budget workplace shenanigans. As a result, the comedy feels hollow and the drama feels unearned. There's an interesting movie at the heart of this film, it just doesn't quite cohere for me into something that works on the whole.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Camp Rock

Mother, Jugs & Speed > L'Age d'Or

Mother, Jugs & Speed > Liz & Dick

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Star!

Mother, Jugs & Speed > The TV Set

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Happy Gilmore

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Fish Tank

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Amazing Grace

Mother, Jugs & Speed > Do You Like Hitchcock?

Mother, Jugs & Speed > Superman

Mother, Jugs & Speed < Carol

Final spot: #2232 out of 3777, or 41%.

La Condesa (2020)

IMDb plot summary: Three generations are cursed by a secret in La Condesa.

Directed by Mario Ramos. Starring Hannia Guillen, Gonzalo Trigueros, and Soraya Padrao.

La Condesa is a Honduran film tracking a haunted house at two different points in time: once in the 1970s, and once in the 2020s, where a descendant of the original characters comes back to the house. This isn't a bad premise for a horror movie, and there are moments where I think it's going to kind of work, but none of the characters are particularly interesting, and, sadly, neither is the Evil they're fighting against. You've got to have one of those to make something interesting in a horror flick, and this one just kind of floats around without ever landing anywhere interesting. I will say the grungy 70s nostalgia aesthetic works really well in this kind of movie, and for a good chunk of the film I thought this was going really work for me. As it is, sadly, it's a pretty disappointing ride. I seriously wish there had been as much thought put into the story, because I really wanted to like it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

La Condesa < Neighbors

La Condesa > L'Age d'Or

La Condesa > Liz & Dick

La Condesa < King Kong (2005)

La Condesa < Rosemary's Baby

La Condesa < The Shop Around the Corner

La Condesa > Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl

La Condesa > Val

La Condesa < About Ray

La Condesa > Blow Out

La Condesa < The Fourth Kind

Final spot: #2311 out of 3776, or 39%.

Love Hard (2021)

IMDb plot summary: An LA girl, unlucky in love, falls for an East Coast guy on a dating app and decides to surprise him for the holidays, only to discover that she's been catfished. This lighthearted romantic comedy chronicles her attempt to reel in love.

Directed by Hernán Jiménez. Starring Nina Dobrev, Jimmy O. Yang, and Darren Barnet.'

Love Hard is a Christmas rom com about a woman who starts an online relationship with someone across the country, but when she flies to surprise him for Christmas, it turns out that man has lied to her and used someone else's photo for his profile pic. He agrees to help her win over the man whose photo she fell in love with if she promises to spend Christmas with him and his family. Jimmy O. Yang is the male lead in this story, and he is absolutely the highlight. I wouldn't have guessed it from other things I've seen him in, but he carries an earnest melancholy here that totally works to sell the character. Our female lead, on the other hand, is hammy and unbelievable and unlikable, and the only reason I want to see them get together at all is because I'm rooting for Yang's character. Like many rom coms, you can see the beats coming a mile away and really need chemistry from the leads for that to work well, and that's not fully here in this case. I would totally watch Yang in another one though.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Love Hard < Cambio de ruta

Love Hard > The Black Stallion

Love Hard < Liz & Dick

Love Hard > Milk

Love Hard < Anchors Aweigh

Love Hard < Rebecca

Love Hard > Cellular

Love Hard > Braveheart

Love Hard < The Trouble With Angels

Love Hard > Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Love Hard < A Week Away

Final spot: #2547 out of 3775, or 33%.

Women Talking (2022)

IMDb plot summary: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. In 2010, the women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling a brutal reality with their faith.

Directed by Sarah Polley. Starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley.

Women Talking is a fictionalized account of a true story in which a group of Mennonite women are given the chance to respond to a culture of widespread sexual assault that has been covered up by the community. The entire film is a group of women discussing whether they are going to transport all the women out of the commmunity or stay and fight to change the system. There's just so much about this story that I love so much. Even when it's 95% just what the title states, a very long conversation, it's so compelling, and by the time it gets to the end I'm all emotionally wrapped up in it. This is a tremendous cast of actors, many of whom were new to me, and they do such a great job of showing how varied the response can be to mass trauma on this scale, with some furious and some defeatist and some doing seemingly just fine until they abruptly have a panic attack. I'm delighted it got the Best Adapted Screenplay win, because the screenplay truly is a triumph of examining these characters compassionately and honestly, and it's a great watch.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Women Talking > My Week With Marilyn

Women Talking > Anna Karenina

Women Talking < Secretary

Women Talking > The Farewell

Women Talking > The Jungle Book (1967)

Women Talking > Black Panther

Women Talking > 56 Up

Women Talking < Jean de Florette

Women Talking > Philadelphia

Women Talking < Detroit

Women Talking > Glengarry Glen Ross

Final spot: #488 out of 3775, or 87%.

F for Fake (1973)

IMDb plot summary: A documentary about fraud and fakery.

Directed by Orson Welles.

F for Fake is an unusual sort of documentary, made by Orson Welles and focusing primarily on a famous art forger and his biographer. On the whole, though, the film is more of an essay than a representation of the facts, and features Welles as himself commenting on the nature of art and deception and authenticity. This is certainly a unique film, and one that greatly benefits from being interested in the kinds of ideas Welles is exploring. It's creatively put together and I definitely haven't seen anything quite like it. It is, however, hard to escape how pretentious the whole thing feels, Welles stepping in and using other people's lives to pontificate at the audience, and at times that rubs me the wrong way, so my interest kept fading in and out throughout the story. The ending is strong and pulls me back into it, and I admire what it's trying to do, even when it doesn't entirely work for me.

How it entered my Flickchart:

F for Fake > My Week With Marilyn

F for Fake < Anna Karenina

F for Fake < Die Hard

F for Fake > Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told

F for Fake > Albert Nobbs

F for Fake < The Hidden Fortress

F for Fake < Suddenly, Last Summer

F for Fake > Mosaic

F for Fake < How to Marry a Millionaire

F for Fake < The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

F for Fake > Mother Night

F for Fake > Mr. Holmes

Final spot: #1515 out of 3774, or 60%.

Disney's Newsies: The Broadway Musical! (2017)

IMDb plot summary: Filmed live on stage at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, CA, this is a not-to-be-missed high energy show starring Original Broadway cast members.

Directed by Jeff Calhoun and Brett Sullivan. Starring Jeremy Jordan, Kara Lindsay, and Ben Fankhauser.

Disney's Newsies: The Broadway Musical! is a pro-shot of the 2012 Broadway adaptation of the 1992 musical. This version was filmed in 2016 but featured many of the original cast members reprising their roles. The story follows a group of newsboys at the turn of the 19th century who go on strike after prices are raised, making it harder for them to earn a living. While the real-life strike this story is based on was unsuccessful, Disney's turned it into a more heartwarming underdog story, and it's got some of Alan Menken's best tunes. I'm a huge fan of the original movie despite its many flaws, and this version of the show attempts to address some of those flaws while falling short in other ways. The musical numbers are again the strongest here, with some incredibly moving songs juxtaposed against some pretty sloppy scriptwriting. There are certainly enough musical numbers here to pull the whole thing in a positive direction, but I don't think the lyric changes from the film are particularly strong, and honestly you might as well just fast forward through everything but the songs and have a great time.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Kinky Boots the Musical

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical < Anna Karenina

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical < Die Hard

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Serenity

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Y Tu Mamá También

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > The Hunt (2020)

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Hereditary

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Hero

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Creation

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical > Incendies

Disney's Newsies the Broadway Musical < The Night Before

Final spot: #1419 out of 3773, or 62%.

Aftersun (2022)

IMDb plot summary: Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't...

Directed by Charlotte Wells. Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, and Celia Rowlson-Hall.

Aftersun follows a vacation a young girl takes with her father, frequently told through her videotaped footage of their time together. I don't want to give away too many more details of their story, though most of the film's plotlines are hinted at long before they're ever confirmed. This movie was a slow burn for me, so slow that I genuinely didn't realize until the end how much I had been pulled into it. And then suddenly the credits rolled and I found I wanted to cry, and it took me a full day or so to unpack how much it had affected me emotionally. There's such combined love and sadness in this movie, and the two are all wrapped up in each other in a way that makes the final scenes just heartbreaking. I'm glad to see Paul Mescal getting the award attention he deserves for this role, because he really brings it all home. I don't know that this is one I can imagine watching again, given how hard it hit me emotionally the first time around, but it's really a masterful piece of work.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Aftersun > Dazed and Confused

Aftersun > Safe

Aftersun > The White Tiger

Aftersun < Deathtrap

Aftersun > Shaolin Soccer

Aftersun < I'm Not Scared

Aftersun < The City of Lost Children

Aftersun > Nosferatu

Aftersun < Shattered Glass

Aftersun > Searching for Bobby Fischer

Aftersun < Bells Are Ringing

Aftersun > Fail-Safe (1964)

Final spot: #332 out of 3764, or 91%.

A Delicate Balance (1973)

IMDb plot summary: A well-to-do Connecticut family is upended when the grown daughter's godparents, seized by a nameless terror, decide to come live with them.

Directed by Tony Richardson. Starring Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, and Lee Remick.

A Delicate Balance is a filmed version of an Edward Albee play centering on a wealthy couple who find themselves housing an alcoholic sister, a four-times-divorced daughter, and two old friends who suddenly find themselves scared of their own homes. The six characters mull around waxing philosophical about society and relationships and so on and it's very Albee and very stagey. For a lot of people that would automatically equal "bad," but I do find the cast compelling enough and the dialogue beautifully lyrical enough that I really enjoyed the moment-by-moment scenes, even if it mostly passes me by on the big picture. Katharine Hepburn in particular is really striking here. She just has such a captivating way of delivering her lines that makes the pretentiousness of them part of the appeal as a whole. Albee's dialogue is a bit like hearing a sequence of prettily-crafted mini poems that connect to each other if you try real hard, but the poems themselves are interesting enough in isolation. Not one I'm going to hold onto for very long, but I'm glad I saw it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

A Delicate Balance < Kinky Boots the Musical

A Delicate Balance > Days of Heaven

A Delicate Balance > The Apostle

A Delicate Balance > Belfast

A Delicate Balance > Internal Affairs

A Delicate Balance < Escape from New York

A Delicate Balance > The Wailing

A Delicate Balance > The Adventures of Huck Finn

A Delicate Balance < The Beach

A Delicate Balance > High School Musical 3: Senior Year

A Delicate Balance < Fatherhood

A Delicate Balance < My Girl

Final spot: #1960 out of 3773, or 48%.

The Big Pond (1930)

IMDb plot summary: A tour guide in Venice romances a visiting American tourist whose father owns a chewing-gum factory back in the U.S. She sets out to convince her skeptical father to bring the tour guide to America and give him a job in the plant.

Directed by Hobart Henley. Starring Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Frank Lyon.

The Big Pond stars Maurice Chevalier as a poor man who falls in love with a wealthy man's daughter and sets out to become a successful businessman in the hopes of proving to her father that he can support her, but along the way he may lose all the things that made her love in to begin with. This is a pretty middle-of-the-road film I watched as part of my 1930 project. It's always fun to see Chevalier in his heyday, and there are some fun song-and-dance numbers in this film, but a lot of it meanders, and the romance gets lost to us just as much as it does to the female lead. And frankly it's hard to come up with much more to say about it -- it's okay, but there's not much to recommend it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Big Pond < Dazed and Confused

The Big Pond > Kicking & Screaming (2005)

The Big Pond < John Dies at the End

The Big Pond < Milk

The Big Pond > The Amazing Spider-Man

The Big Pond < Earth

The Big Pond < The Accidental Tourist

The Big Pond > Destry Rides Again

The Big Pond > The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

The Big Pond < Lovelace

The Big Pond > Without a Clue

Final spot: #2685 out of 3770, or 29%.