Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2021 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2021)

Check out previous installments here, here, here and here.

2021 was, I’m sure we can all agree, the most recent year in the Gregorian calendar. Though, that being said, Ciara now exclusively understands the passage of time through self-programmed film seasons (e.g. Soviet June-ion, Silent September, Shane Black Christmas) and Dean has lost track of linear time altogether. It was a year of surprises in film: Zack Snyder finally got to finish his four-hour superhero epic and Sylvester Stallone, for better or worse, finally got to cut the robot from Rocky IV. We started a podcast, The Sundae Presents, where we take turns showing each other favourite films of ours the other hasn’t seen (catch up now!). We published lots of good pieces, including the first guest contribution to our pop punk series. Ciara finished watching all the Nightmares on Elm Street (except the remake, obviously) and Dean watched every Gus Van Sant film, then immediately got super into pirate movies for some reason. 

We’ll be looking back at our favourite films released in 2021 on Oscars weekend, which we guess is in March this year? This is a look back at some of the best films from other years that we watched for the first time, spanning eighty years of cinema from the earliest days of animation to the earliest days of Paul Verhoeven’s post-Hollywood career. At the risk of repeating ourselves, one of the few upsides to a year where staying inside was, at the very least, highly recommended was a lot of time to watch movies, and these represent less than five percent of them, so you know they come highly recommended. We’ve got Arthurian myth and silent romance and four films from the seventies, because we can’t pretend we don’t have a period bias. Check them out and stay tuned to The Sundae for more cold takes and fresh pods in 2022!

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

Dog Day Afternoon: The Sundae Presents Episode 7

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which each of us makes the other watch films they haven’t seen. This episode, Ciara makes Dean watch one of her actual favourite films, Dog Day Afternoon. They talk about sexuality and gender, optimism and the Attica prison massacre.

Dog Day Afternoon – The Sundae Presents

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Ciara Moloney External Links

God Help Bobby and Helen: Panic in Needle Park at 50 [Crooked Marquee]

“God help Bobby and Helen,” reads the original poster. “They’re in love in Needle Park.” Helen (Kitty Winn) leans on Bobby (Al Pacino, in his first starring role), arm around his shoulder and eyes downcast; Bobby kisses her cheek. It’s not clear from the still image of the poster if Helen is hanging onto him carefree and in love – a candid shot in motion as she laughs and moves – or if she’s out of it and can barely stand. The film itself answers: both. 

I wrote about The Panic in Needle Park on Crooked Marquee for its fiftieth anniversary. Read it here!

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Sundae Film Awards 2020

This was a really, really great year for film. It was full of reflective elegies by aging masters; sophomore features that delivered on their predecessors’ promise in spades; and at least one or two blockbusters with some guts. There were so many films that could have been contenders any other year – the sweetness of Paddleton, the daring weirdness of Velvet Buzzsaw, the meditative exploration of masculinity in Ad Astra – that just ended up getting squeezed out. I mean, Happy Death 2 U was a masterpiece. Some years it’s hard to scrape together enough nominations in some categories – this year it was heart-breaking to make cuts. This is one of those years that we’ll remember.

The film year, for the record, we define as “films that came out in 2019 in Ireland unless they were eligible for the Oscars last year as well as films that came out in 2020 in Ireland if they were eligible for this year’s Oscars.” Perils of being a film fan outside of North America.

We can’t really claim that these are what we think should have been nominated at the Oscars, or should win, since we can’t even be sure if any film that wasn’t nominated was eligible. But if we were the only two members of the Academy, and we only cared about the eight major awards – 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 – this is what you’d get: the Sundae Film Awards 2020.

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 picked a Special Achievement Award for something not covered in the major categories. You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of this post, which we strongly encourage you to check out if you’re looking for recommendations. There were so many brilliant films this year, and we only got to award a small fraction of them.

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