The Sundae Film Awards 2024

The best and worst thing about 2023 was how it gave us genuine hope that maybe… the movies are back? The seemingly unbreakable stranglehold that effects-driven action blockbusters have had on popular cinema for our entire adult lives was shattered by, of all things, an existentialist Barbie movie and a J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic. (The latter also dethroned the repugnant Bohemian Rhapsody as highest-grossing biopic of all time, a victory for good taste we never thought would happen in our lifetime.) Disney lost the global box office for the first time since we started this blog, and the Oscar nominations were so good people had to make up reasons to be mad at them. There were so many great films that picking winners for these awards wasn’t just difficult, it felt faintly insane. Films that might have swept other years barely got a look in. Even our full slates of nominees, linked at the bottom of the post, represent just a fraction of the greatness on offer.

Nevertheless, we did, eventually, painfully, manage to pick our winners. As with every year, we gave one award for each of the eight major Oscars: we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too. We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something that doesn’t fit our other categories.

Continue reading “The Sundae Film Awards 2024”

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: The Sundae Presents Episode 34

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. For the first episode of the year, Ciara chose John Ford’s late career masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as Dean’s third encounter with both Ford and John Wayne. They talk about its unusually unscenic take on the frontier, the role of violence in politics, and how it reflects on the western’s place in American culture.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance The Sundae Presents

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts

The Sundae Presents trailer

2024 is gonna be jerkin’. Keep your eyes peeled. Or your ears, I guess.

The Sundae Presents trailer The Sundae Presents

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts

2023 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2023)

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.

Continue reading “2023 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2023)”

The Servant: The Sundae Presents Episode 32

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Dean fulfils a long-held ambition to introduce Ciara to his boys, director Joseph Losey and actor Dirk Bogarde, with their 1963 film The Servant. They talk about its homoeroticism, the class anxieties of 60s London and whether Dean hates James Fox.

The Servant The Sundae Presents

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts

Midnight Cowboy: The Sundae Presents Episode 31

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Ciara gets to show Dean a film for the first time in months, and it’s a big one: John Schlesinger’s multi-Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy. They talk about disability, poverty and sexuality, its satire of Andy Warhol’s Factory and how dumb Joe Buck is.

Midnight Cowboy The Sundae Presents

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts

Saw: The Sundae Presents Episode 30

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. For our third Halloween Spooktacular, Dean shows Ciara one of the most iconic horror films of their adolescene: Saw. They talk about how it riffs on and/or rips off Se7en, the strange politics of John Kramer, and the shadow of the real torture of the Bush administration.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny: The Sundae Presents Episode 29

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. After months of broken promises and outright lies, it’s here: Ciara and Dean finally dig into Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. They talk about the origin of the titular band, its religious epic structure, and why Jack Black swore to never write another film.

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny The Sundae Presents

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Amazon Music

Listen on Audible

Listen on RadioPublic

Listen on Pocket Casts