Author: Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley

Check out previous installments here.

2023 was a long, long year, and now it’s over. Ciara started lecturing and became chief film critic of Current Affairs. Dean started writing again and became an uncle. We saw Fern Brady at Vicar Street, Fun Home at the Gate Theatre and McFly at the Point. Dean watched more films this year than ever before, but still less than half of what Ciara watched. Ciara has now done enough themed film months to do a whole month of films that didn’t make the cut (July Jumble). Ciara was finally diagnosed with epilepsy after years of struggle against a biased, failing healthcare system, and Dean was finally diagnosed with hypermobility after years of physiotherapists just not noticing somehow. Ciara now lives in a real apartment with rooms and everything, and Dean’s roof doesn’t have a hole in it for the first time in two years.

We did a really fun and very good miniseries for our podcast called Love at Worst Sight and had our first, second and third guests. We talked about Halloween III: Season of the Witch with our friends at The 250, and also recorded an episode on Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey coming out next year, which does sadly mean that, yes, we’ve both seen Winnie-the-Pooh: Bloody and Honey. Please keep us in your thoughts. Ciara also got published in a bunch more places and presented papers at several conferences, while Dean spent over thirty euro on a taxi to crash on someone’s couch just to see The People’s Joker.

As ever, we’ll be singing the praises of our favourite films released in 2023 in March, for the eighth annual Sundae Film Awards. Right now, we want to look back at the best films we watched for the first time this year, from silent dramas at the dawn of cinema to Jason Statham films released post-COVID. We’ve never had more films to choose from, and whittling them down to just eight each was painful. It was so tough we couldn’t even fit any films from the seventies, and we love films from the seventies. Until next year, here’s the movies we just had to tell you about.