Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Sundae Film Awards 2026

We watched a lot fewer new films than usual this year. Amid the wider atmosphere of horror and sorrow and grim foreboding in the world, it felt like a dispiriting year for popular cinema, the first big stumble since Tom Cruise resuscitated its prospects in 2022. Still, don’t let that take away from the films we loved enough to celebrate, because they’d all be great films in any year. A frenetic sports epic about table tennis? Pynchon as Terminator 2 in the key of stoner comedy? Rapid-cut montages of Irish news footage? These are the things that movie dreams are made of!

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.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2025 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2025)

Check out previous instalments here.

2025 was a year that happened and now it’s over. Ciara completed her PhD and finally watched Tiger King. Dean presented at his first conference and finally finished the second season of China Beach. Along the way, we saw Richard Herring live, and The Pillowman at The Gate Theatre, and did a long-overdue guest episode of our podcast with our friend Conor.

We also watched a lot of films, some of which stuck with us so much we just had to tell you about them. You’ll have to wait until the tenth (TENTH!?) annual Sundae Awards in March for our thoughts on new releases. In the meantime, as ever, please enjoy a selection of our favourite films from this year that didn’t come out this year.

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Ciara Moloney Film

The Art of Singing Badly

Armageddon is the kind of movie that people say “not that it’s a great movie or anything but…” before they say anything nice about it. It’s a Michael Bay movie about guys who work on an oil rig going to space to save the Earth from an asteroid, and therefore dumb, and therefore sucks. One day I’ll write about how it is a great movie, actually, because Michael Bay is a genius and he deserves his flowers after being treated as a critical punching bag for most of his career. But right now, I want to tell you about my favourite scene.

The oil workers, having been given a crash course in being astronauts, are about to board the rocket. They’re in their space suits. Harry (Bruce Willis) hugs his daughter Gracie (Liv Tyler) goodbye, promising to see her in a couple of days. Then Ben Affleck, who plays her boyfriend AJ, holds her close, swaying her in his arms as he sings: “All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go…” It’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, which manages to be fun and silly at a potentially tense moment, but also resonate as terribly romantic and bittersweet, heart utterly on sleeve. Affleck first sings in a quiet intimacy, forehead pressed to Tyler’s, and then belts with buoyant exuberance, sweeping her up off her feet.

He can’t sing worth a damn. It’s beautiful.

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Ciara Moloney Film

Double Features #9: Back At It Again

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here.

Hey there. It’s been a while.

I write about film and TV all the time. In Current Affairs or Crooked Marquee or Cineaste, for lectures and conference papers and podcast recordings. Sometimes I get paid, sometimes I don’t, but it is (at time of writing) the closest thing I have to a job. When Dean and I started The Sundae eight years ago, I would have said that was an impossible dream: ungraspable, barely glimpsable. Distant to the point of unreality.

I’m glad that it’s come true, of course. But there can be something alienating about it: I only write what I want to, but even to get paid the small-to-medium bucks, I have to shape my ideas around news pegs and audience expectations. When we started The Sundae, the only thing between me and the page was me (and Dean, thank God). And I didn’t have the time or space to decide what I wanted to say was neither clickable nor important – I had to write something new every fortnight, and, for reasons still unknown, everything we wrote was many thousands of words. Being a (semi-)professional is a dream come true, but there is a value in amateurism. Amateur, from the French: “one who loves, lover.” I don’t want to be such a professional that I cease to be an amateur.

When you move away, you still visit home. And as the internet transforms into a graveyard of bots and private equity, The Sundae only feels more and more like my online home. So let me say what every wayward child says and almost always means, even if they don’t follow through: I promise to visit more.

Let’s recommend some double features.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Sundae Film Awards 2025

You don’t need us to tell you that 2024 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, but did you know that films came out during it also? We won’t hold it against if you forgot now that we’re two months that felt like years into a year that’s going to feel like decades. In fact, it’s the perfect reason to join us as we heap praise on the films that shone brightest through the dark. It was a great year for primates, body horror and homoeroticism, not to mention staring into the yawning abyss at the heart of American celebrity culture.

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.

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Ciara Moloney Film, Podcast

Friday Film Showcased, Episode 5: Giallo – Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

For many years, with regard to their film-watching, Ciara and Conor have been theming their months. On Friday Film Showcased (FFS to friends, and sometimes enemies), they look back on themes gone by.

In the quintus episode of FFS, Ciara and Conor continue their discussion of the giallo genre with a deep dive on Lucio Fulci’s 1972 masterpiece, Don’t Torture a Duckling. Spoilers abound! You can find our previous instalment, where we discussed giallo more broadly, here. (Including an edition in which all screams have been replaced by bunny noises. How relaxing!)

And make sure to tune in to the end of the episode for Conor’s original song inspired by the film!

Episode 5: Giallo – Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) – Friday Film Showcased

Listen and subscribe on: Spotify || Apple Podcasts || Amazon Music || Castbox || Overcast || Pocketcasts || Goodpods

Giallo list on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/hoganassasin/list/giallo-season/

Mentioned in the podcast

Ciara’s Fangoria article about Don’t Torture a Duckling: ⁠https://www.fangoria.com/lucio-fulci-so-much-more-than-the-godfather-of-gore-dont-torture-a-duckling-at-50/

The Giallo Files: https://giallofiles.blogspot.com/

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2024 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2024)

Check out previous instalments here.

Thus spoke the prophet: “Well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’.” There were elections and wars, genocides that proceed unabated and natural disasters that we can hardly call natural when we’ve created conditions that make them inevitable. So many celebrities died that there would have been a whole “fuck you, 2016!”-style outcry if we didn’t have other things to worry about: those who lived long lives, like Maggie Smith, James Earl Jones or Donald Sutherland, and those whose lives were cut tragically short, from Shannen Doherty to Liam Payne. (Reports of Noam Chomsky’s death were greatly exaggerated.) But there were bright spots, too – Mickey Mouse finally entered the public domain, all that Mikey Madison stock we bought early is paying dividends, and Terrifier 3 made people throw up. (If that one doesn’t sound like good news, please factor in some 2000s kid nostalgia.)

It was a year of endings and beginnings, as are, admittedly, all years. Ciara finished her thesis after years of toiling in the PhD mines. Dean suddenly became an investigative journalist, and he rocks at it. Ciara’s extended family found out that she’s a writer or something when she wrote about her epilepsy journey for the Irish Independent, and Dean helped found a network of community groups to promote integration in Tipperary. Ciara watched all of Seinfeld for the first time, and Dean finally finished Fez, a video game he first purchased in 2012. We both launched new podcasts: Ciara’s is about films, as is her wont, and Dean’s is about Tipperary, as is his wont, these days. Both of them are excellent, if we do say so ourselves. 

As ever, we’ll be singing the praises of our favourite films released in 2024 in March, for the ninth (ninth!) annual Sundae Film Awards. Right now, we’re going to look back at the best films from the rest of the medium’s history that we watched for the first time this year, from North Korean kaiju adventures to camp classics about child abuse.

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Ciara Moloney Film

You Should (Not) Watch Julien Donkey-Boy

“I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me, I’m always interested in movies that scar.”

David Fincher, interviewed by Mark Salisbury in Empire, February 1996

The first Harmony Korine film I saw was Spring Breakers, because Dean made me watch it for our podcast, The Sundae Presents. I did not like Spring Breakers, but in a way where saying whether I liked it or not seems like such a gross simplification that it becomes a lie. While watching it, I found what was great and awful about it impossible to parse, and from a distance, I mostly think of it as an epic troll – a movie whose existence is a joke despite it containing zero jokes. I remember the boring parts more than the unpleasantness that felt so visceral at the time.

Julien Donkey-Boy has not come out in the wash that way. I can feel its viscerality still wriggling in my blood. Korine’s sophomore directional outing, Julien Donkey-Boy is the sixth Dogme 95 film – it’s got the certificate and everything – though less because it strictly follows the Dogme 95 rules (no “superficial action,” no non-diegetic sound, only natural lighting, only handheld cameras) and more because what the hell else could it be? It is, at once, a family drama and totally outside the bounds of mainstream filmmaking. And since there are Dogme 95 movies that are both these things, fuck it, this one is too.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

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” →
Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

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.

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