Check out previous installments here and here.
There’s a huge pressure on anyone who wants to talk or write seriously about film to pretend as if they’ve already seen every great film ever made, even as dozens more great, must-see films appear every year. It’s always been there, obviously, but it’s been magnified – like so many futile anxieties – in the age of social media, where showing off your esoteric knowledge of the medium can sometimes seem more like the film nerd version of an Instagram flex than a sincere celebration of film and its history. It creates a paralysing urgency around over a hundred years of art and it’s tempting to throw up your arms and give up. Where do you even start? Just let Disney make the choice for you and shovel whatever focus-tested crap they’re releasing next into your waiting mouth.
That pressure can be exhausting at times, but it’s an argument for logging off, not giving up. We already loved film when we started this blog and we’ve only fallen deeper and deeper in love over the past few years. It’s hard to overstate how much it has meant to us, how much it has enriched our lives to explore this beautiful art form, as practiced across the world over a century of human endeavour.
Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth living and, despite all indications to the contrary, there is an abundance of it. That’s the joy of accepting you’ll never see every great film ever made: there will always be more great films that you’ll get to see for the first time.
In February, we’ll go through our favourite new releases of the year when we post the fourth annual Sundae Film Awards. But looking back on the year in film shouldn’t just mean looking back at what came out this year. 2019 is the year Ciara finally saw Alien, gasped and giggled through her first Jackie Chan movie and got into borrowing DVDs from the library, the year Dean found Tarkovsky on All4, had his heart exploded by Point Break and watched Lillian Gish basically invent screen acting in Way Down East. So here are some of the best films we saw in 2019 that didn’t come out in 2019.
It’s no big deal if you haven’t seen them, but we definitely recommend checking them out.
Continue reading “2019 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2019)” →
The Sundae 