Doug Orleans's Journal

When 2025 started, I decided to be a little pickier about movies, and not bother going to see the ones with a low Rotten Tomatoes rating unless I had some reason to suspect I would enjoy it more than the professional reviewers they survey. I'm not sure it made a difference in my movie-watching habits, because I ended up seeing even more new movies than I had around this time last year, and the ratings distribution looks pretty similar—maybe weighted a bit more towards 8s and 7s, which is good. It also didn't help that AMC Theaters expanded their A-List subscription to let you go to four free movies a week instead of "only" three, and I took advantage of this most weeks!

My number one favorite movie of the year is a sports movie, which is pretty unusual for me, although the original Bad News Bears is one of my top five favorites of all time. Eephus does have some of that feel, except instead of Gen X pre-teen losers, the teams are made up of Gen X middle-aged losers. And instead of charting their unlikely ride to the championship game, it's just one game, from the opening pitch to the final out. But it's a great demonstration of how a baseball game can have all the dramatic beats of a complete story, in fact many stories on different levels. I found it absorbing and affecting, and maybe you would too?

My number two movie, the only other one I rated a 9/10, is Fackham Hall, which is an incredibly silly satire of Downton Abbey. It's filled with gags, from puerile to intellectual, and made me laugh way more than anything else this year. It evokes the classic ZAZ comedies much better than this year's Naked Gun sequel did.

The list below is separated into groups by rating out of 10, and in descending order within each group. (I haven't rated anything a 10/10 in years, because in my mind that means "an old favorite that stands the test of time", and nothing recent has aged into that yet. Also, fortunately, I didn't hate anything enough to warrant a 2/10 or 1/10 rating this year.) I saw nearly all of these in movie theaters; the exceptions are marked with an asterisk (except I did see Thunderbolts* in a theater, it just has an asterisk in the title!). As usual, for me the 2025 movie year doesn't end until the Oscars award ceremony, so I'll post a final updated list after that happens—hopefully sooner than my 2024 list I finally just posted yesterday!

9/10 (great):

1. Eephus
2. Fackham Hall

   8/10 (really good):

3. Tornado
4. Predator: Badlands
5. Freakier Friday
6. Honey Don't!
7. Black Bag
8. Train Dreams
9. Trifole
10. The Ballad of Wallis Island
11. Good Fortune
12. Weapons
13. A House of Dynamite
14. Left-Handed Girl*
15. It Was Just an Accident
16. Pavements
17. Relay
18. She Rides Shotgun
19. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
20. The Phoenician Scheme
    ( 21-148 )

Here's my current list of 2025 releases I plan to see in theaters soon:

Wicked: For Good
Zootopia 2
Is This Thing On?
The Housemaid
Avatar: Fire & Ash
Marty Supreme
Anaconda
The Plague
No Other Choice
Father Mother Sister Brother
The Choral
The Testament of Ann Lee
Sirat
Dracula: A Love Tale

And a selection of other 2025 releases I would like to catch up with:
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Let me know what else I missed!

Just like last year, I've managed to watch at least one episode of every show nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award, including the specific episodes nominated in the writing and directing categories (but not counting the reality/variety categories). Once again I don't have enough time left before the ceremony tonight to write up my opinions of each show, but here are my rankings in each category from most to least favorite. (These are not predictions, just how I would fill out my ballot if I were in the Television Academy.) I've indicated how many episodes I've watched of each show; for the ones with no indication, I watched the full season. (For multiple-season shows that were new to me, I watched the pilot episode first. In the case of Somebody Somewhere, I watched the first and last episodes of the series, since the finale was nominated for Outstanding Writing, so it felt like I was on Alan Sepinwall's Too Long; Didn't Watch podcast!)

Outstanding Comedy Series

1. The Bear (FX)
2. The Studio (Apple TV+) - 5 episodes
3. Hacks (HBO Max) - 4 episodes
4. Abbott Elementary (ABC) - 8 episodes
5. Nobody Wants This (Netflix)
6. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
7. Shrinking (Apple TV+)
8. What We Do in the Shadows (FX) - 2 episodes

While none of these shows were home runs (and not the best season for any of the returning shows), they were all worth watching, and it's honestly hard to rank them.

Outstanding Drama Series

1. Andor (Disney+)
2. Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
3. Severance (Apple TV+)
4. The Pitt (HBO Max) - 4 episodes
5. The White Lotus (HBO)
6. The Diplomat (Netflix) - 1 episode
7. Paradise (Hulu) - 2 episodes
8. The Last of Us (HBO) - 1 episode

While I ranked Severance over Andor in my best TV of 2022 list, it was a very close call. After their second seasons, though, I'm ready to call Andor the clear winner, and the clear leader for best show of the decade. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's going to win, but you should all watch it! Even if you hate Star Wars!

Everyone says episode 7 of Paradise is the one to watch, but I haven't gotten there yet. Looking forward to it, but from what I hear, the rest of the season is unlikely to change my rating. And I think the same goes for episode 2 of The Last of Us, but I already was lukewarm on season 1 (ranking 49th in my best TV of 2023 list), so you shouldn't be too surprised to see it ranked last here.

Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series

1. The Penguin (HBO)
2. Adolescence (Netflix)
3. Black Mirror (Netflix) - 2 episodes
4. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (Netflix)
5. Dying for Sex (FX) - 6 episodes

All worthy shows, and while Dying for Sex didn't totally land for me, I can see its appeal for many others. I was skeptical about Monsters but after episode 5 I understood why it was nominated, and it's worth watching the show just to see how it gets to that. I regret not getting around to the other Black Mirror episodes, but the first two felt a little lower than average compared to past seasons.

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Last year, I had seen 9 of the 10 nominees for Best Picture when the Oscar nominations were announced. The year before, I had seen 8 of 10. This year, I had only seen 7 of 10, a disappointing trend! But, I actually saw one more that same day, and had plans to see another one the next week, so I don't feel so bad. It took me another couple weeks to get around to seeing the last one, and then another couple weeks to get around to writing up my thoughts on them all, but here we are now!

According to the tradition I started in 2016(!), these are in the order that I saw them:

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I've been procrastinating posting my end-of-year movies list, but the Oscar nominations drop tomorrow morning so now's a good time! Like last year, I plan to post an updated list after the Oscars, because I still have a bunch of 2024 releases on my to-watch list.

I saw almost all of these in the theater; the ones I saw streaming online are marked with an asterisk below. (Technically I saw Majority Rules on a DVD player in the Somerville Public Library but it was a pretty crowded room so I'm calling that a "theater"!) I've separated them into buckets based on what rating I gave them on a 1-10 scale, and they're sorted from best to worst inside those buckets. I'm wondering if I need to start recording fractional ratings, because it was hard to remember enough details to fully rank the 48 movies that I rated a 7! So, take the precise relative rankings in this list with a grain of salt.

My number one favorite movie is a documentary, which I'm fairly sure has never happened before. Flipside is an unassuming doc about an unassuming run-down indie record store in New Jersey, but, much like Chris Wilcha's previous documentary The Target Shoots First (from 1999), it's also part autobiography, part sociological critique, and part psychoanalysis, with many fun tangents and surprising cameos. To quote DOC NYC, it's "the existential Gen-X movie we didn’t know we wanted."

I'm too tired to write up my other faves right now, but feel free to ask in a comment if you want me to expound on anything. Or just go stream it! I try to watch most movies without knowing anything about them (other than whatever it was that made me curious to see it: a director or actor I like, say, or its appearance on someone else's favorites list); it can lead to some fun surprises, and I recommend trying it out.

9:

1. Flipside
2. Sometimes I Think About Dying
3. Challengers

   8:

4. Hundreds of Beavers
5. Flow
6. Riddle of Fire
7. Good One
8. How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
9. Dune: Part Two
10. Conclave
11. The Dead Don't Hurt
12. Knox Goes Away
13. Hard Truths
14. Nickel Boys
15. Heretic
16. The Fall Guy
17. Hit Man
18. Touch
19. Nosferatu
20. Thelma
    ( 21-142 )

Here's my current list of 2024 releases I plan to see in theaters soon:

The Brutalist
All We Imagine As Light
A Complete Unknown
September 5
I'm Still Here
Better Man

And a selection of other 2024 releases I hope to catch up with:
( Read more... )

Let me know what else I missed!

When the Emmy Award nominations were announced a few months ago, I was disappointed as usual that I'd seen only about half (at most) of the nominated shows, despite how much TV I watch. But, a couple weeks ago I decided to see if I could watch at least one episode of every show nominated (including the specific episodes nominated for writing and directing awards), and today I managed to complete that goal! (I'm ignoring the reality/variety categories.) Here are my rankings within each category, in descending order of which I liked the most (i.e. these are not predictions, just how I would have filled out my ballot if I were in the Television Academy). I've indicated how many episodes I've watched of each show; for the ones with no indication, I watched the full season. (For multiple-season shows that I hadn't seen any of before this exercise, I watched the pilot episode first before skipping ahead. This was quite a whiplash in some cases!) I don't have the energy to write up my opinions for each show, but if you're curious about my thoughts on anything in particular feel free to ask. Enjoy the ceremony tonight!

Outstanding Comedy Series

1. Reservation Dogs (FX)
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
3. Hacks (Max)
4. The Bear (FX)
5. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
6. Abbott Elementary (ABC)
7. What We Do in the Shadows (FX) – 3 episodes
8. Palm Royale (Apple TV+) – 1 episode

Outstanding Drama Series

1. Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
2. Shōgun (FX)
3. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Prime Video) – 2 episodes
4. The Crown (Netflix) – 3 episodes
5. Fallout (Prime Video) – 1 episode
6. The Gilded Age (HBO) – 1 episode
7. 3 Body Problem (Netflix) – 1 episode
8. The Morning Show (Apple TV+) – 2 episodes

Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series

1. Ripley (Netflix) – 2 episodes
2. Fargo (FX) – 2 episodes
3. True Detective: Night Country (HBO)
4. Baby Reindeer (Netflix) – 4 episodes
5. Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV+)

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As I mentioned in my best-of-year movies post, I consider the Oscars ceremony to be the unofficial end of the season for watching 2023 movies. So here's my "final" ranked list. This time I'm including ratings (out of 10) so you can see how I measure things on an absolute scale too. As usual, an asterisk means I watched it streaming online instead of in the theater; bolded movies are the ones I saw after my previous list.

9:

1. Inside
   
2. Robot Dreams
   
3. The Teachers' Lounge
   
   8:
   
4. Dream Scenario
   
5. Asteroid City
   
6. The Venture Brothers: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart*
   
7. Leave the World Behind
   
8. Anatomy of a Fall
   
9. Return to Seoul
   
10. Blue Beetle
    
11. Monster
    
12. The Killer
    
13. The Iron Claw
    
14. Past Lives
    
15. Knock at the Cabin
    
16. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    
17. Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
    
18. Aporia*
    
19. Johnny Keep Walking!
    
20. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    ( Read more... )
    
    For the record, here's my full list of 2023 releases that I didn't get around to watching. It's almost as long as the list of movies I did watch! There just aren't enough hours in the day...
    
    ( Read more... )

Like last year, I kept track of all the movies I watched, and this year I rated them as I went, so I could get a better sense of how to rank them all from top to bottom. I only rated them on an integer 1-to-10 scale, though, and I ended up with 29 movies rated a 7, so I still had to make a lot of relative ranking decisions well after the fact. But it's probably a reasonably accurate representation of what I thought at the time I saw them.

Unlike last year, this actually feels like a worse-than-average year for movies, at least according to my own tastes. Asteroid City was #3 on my list, but I think I liked The French Dispatch better, and maybe even The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (one of the four short films by Wes Anderson based on Roald Dahl stories that came out on Netflix this year). The Killer is a totally fine David Fincher movie but I don't think I'll have strong feelings about it in later years compared to others in his ouvre. And I was really disappointed by The Boy and the Heron, but it isn't further down my list because it still has enough of the essence of a Miyazaki film and I'm still a fan.

My #1 movie, though, Inside, will likely stick with me for a long time. Willem Dafoe plays an art thief who gets trapped inside a luxury penthouse, and that's basically all it is. It's mechanically very fun and compelling, but it's also metaphorically, emotionally, and existentially powerful. It's grueling and sometimes repugnant, which I often don't have any patience for (like last year's Triangle of Sadness, which made me put my hands in front of my eyes for long stretches), and the critics' reviews were mixed at best, but something about this film really connected with me. I should probably watch it again soon.

I'm posting this on the eve of the Oscar nominations being announced, and I think I've seen all but one or two of the likely Best Picture nominees. As you'll see, there are a few that I ranked quite low, so there's your teaser for the upcoming addition to my series of Best Picture posts. Also like last year, I plan to post an addendum with all the other 2023 releases I see before the unofficial end of the season when the Oscars ceremony airs in March. Last year's total was 102 movies seen; seems likely that I'll beat that number this year!

(Movies marked with * were ones I didn't see in a theater.)

1. Inside
   
2. Dream Scenario
   
3. Asteroid City
   
4. Leave the World Behind
   
5. Anatomy of a Fall
   
6. Return to Seoul
   
7. Blue Beetle
   
8. Monster
   
9. The Killer
   
10. Past Lives
    
11. Knock at the Cabin
    
12. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    
13. Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
    
14. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    
15. Emily
    
16. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    
17. M3GAN
    
18. A Haunting in Venice
    
19. The Marvels
    
20. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    ( 21-90 )

I've been taking advantage of the AMC Stubs A-List deal: $25/month for free movies at AMC theaters (up to 3 a week). My current streak is 40 straight weeks of seeing at least one movie, and 30 straight weeks at the AMC Boston Common, which has plenty of screening rooms with plenty of empty seats for me to see weekday matinees nearly alone, like I prefer. Retirement has its perks!

Here's my current list of movies I'll try to see in theaters in the next couple months:
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And here's a short excerpt of the long list of movies I missed that I'm hoping to track down at some point:
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What else did I miss? Let me know!

A year ago today, yomikoma held a puzzle potluck birthday party. I wrote a puzzle called Constellation Celebration, and in honor of his 51st birthday today, I finally finished writing up my solution for it. But you should totally try to solve it yourself first! And feel free to ping me for hints before giving up and looking at the solution.

This is the first "real", full-length MIT Mystery Hunt-style puzzle I've written, and I'm moderately proud of how it turned out. If I had had more time (i.e. if I hadn't procrastinated until so close to the deadline), I might have tried harder to make the constellation names be a bit less contrived. It was only after I'd finished the whole thing that I realized that this could have worked as a metapuzzle, with 13 feeder puzzles that could have justified the contrivedness of their answers. Maybe next time...

Anyway, happy birthday yomikoma and cnoocy!

At the end of my year-end movie ranking post, I said "there's still a bunch of movies on my to-watch list; we'll see how many I can get to before the Oscars". Of that list of 19 movies, I managed to see 14 of them, plus a bunch of others. But I also added a bunch more movies to the list, e.g. from other people's best-of-year lists. I'll keep whittling down this queue, but the Oscars still seems like a good time to symbolically close the books on 2022.

So here's a "final" list of additions to my ranking of 2022 movies (including ones that were Oscar-nominated even though they weren't released widely in the US until 2023): (Movies marked with * were ones I didn't see in a theater.)

2.5. Something in the Dirt
18.5. Broker
20.5. Three Minutes: A Lengthening*
29.5. Living
32.5. The Quiet Girl
33.5. Eo
34.5. Women Talking
35.5. To Leslie*
40.5. Is That Black Enough For You?!?*
42.5. Causeway*
49.5. Avatar: The Way of Water
50.5. A Man Called Otto
51.5. Close
52.5. The Wonder*
56.5. Happening*
57.5. All That Breathes*
61.2. The Sea Beast*
61.4. Corsage
61.6. Tell It Like A Woman*
61.8. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
62.1. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
62.2. Emancipation*
62.3. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
62.4. Turning Red*
62.5. A House Made of Splinters*
62.6. Argentina, 1985*
62.7. Navalny*

Here's that queue of 2022 movies I'd still like to see:

The Eternal Daughter
Hit the Road
The Son
Good Night Oppy
Turn Every Page
Saint Omer
The Good Boss
Hold Me Tight
Stars at Noon
Benediction
A Hero
No Bears
Nitram
Compartment No. 6
Athena
Il Buco

Once again, it's time for my annual rundown of my thoughts about the Best Picture nominees. I saw a record high number of movies last year, and I managed to see 8 of the 10 nominees before the nominations were announced. Fortunately the other two were still in theaters, so I ended up seeing all 10 on a big screen (but only one in 3D...). In fact, as of this past Monday afternoon, I've now seen every film nominated in all categories (for the second year in a row), but I'll save my picks for another post.

So without further ado, here are the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture of 2022, in the order I saw them:

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