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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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2022 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2022)

Check out previous installments here.

2022 was a long, dreary year that overstayed its welcome many times over and we’re glad to see the back of it. But it had its highlights. Dean fell in love with James Whale and Claude Rains, fell back in love with superheroes and finally got 2001: A Space Odyssey after seeing it on the big screen. Ciara got Cruisepilled by Top Gun: Maverick, Bazpilled by Elvis and Brian Trenchard-Smithpilled by the films of Brian Trenchard-Smith. We saw My Chemical Romance live (!!!) and Dean accidentally bought two tickets to Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, which isn’t good, but is funny. Ciara watched all the Fast and Furious movies in February and Dean watched a bunch of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff films in October.

We released a load of really good episodes of our podcast, The Sundae Presents, and published excellent essays on Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road and Anglophilia, the death of the Queen and Herman’s Hermits by guest contributors Jennifer O’Callaghan and Will Shaw. We appeared individually on The 250 podcast to talk about It Happened One Night and Modern Times, and together to talk about The Conversation. Ciara got published a bunch of different places and Dean genuinely came up with around 200 original superhero and supervillains just for fun.

We’ll have our piece to say about the films released this year when we do the Sundae Film Awards in March, but suffice it to say, despite the bright spots, now more than ever, we’ve found our greatest joy in cinema past. Eras when the medium seemed full of potential instead of peril. This year, we’ve watched films famous and infamous, forgotten and forsaken, celebrated and slandered, from around the world and across time. Over a hundred for Dean, and over four hundred for Ciara. These are just some of our very favourites, and we highly recommend all of them.

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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 Film

2020 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2020)

Check out previous installments here, here and here.

It goes without saying that 2020 was a bizarre year for films, because it was a bizarre year for everything. But all the same, a lot of insane things happened in the movies this year. Cinemas all over the world closed down and it’s not clear they’ll survive long-term. Several blockbusters that were supposed to draw a billion-dollar box office ended up with a streaming debut, to unclear results. The industry got thrown into such disarray that the Oscar eligibility window was extended and the ceremony rescheduled for April.

By some twist of fate, that’s also when we’ll be looking at the best films of 2020 in the fifth annual Sundae Film Awards. For now, we’d like to look back at some of the gems from throughout film history that caught our attention this year. One of the few upsides to a year in lockdown was a lot of time to watch movies: in our case, literally hundreds. We’ve whittled them down to eight each, from the early thirties through to 2016, covering films as diverse as a war drama about the French resistance, a psychedelic Japanese anime about witchcraft and a documentary about race and class in America through the lens of high school basketball. Check them out and stay tuned for more cold takes from the Sundae in 2021!

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2019 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2019)

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.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2018 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out This Year)

Check out The Sundae’s 2017 in films that didn’t come out in 2017 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, whether in the form of a self-imposed anxiety or others dismissing your opinions because you haven’t seen X or Y. This is silly, obviously, because no-one has seen every great film ever made: the last time anyone could conceivably watch every film ever was in the early 1930s, and here in the present, it would take someone years to work through the established canon of great American cinema – let alone the cinema of every other country, experimental and avant-garde filmmaking, and all the great films (and okay films) that have gone unnoticed or unrecognised.

But that’s no reason not to try. Sometimes when people reject the pressure to pretend to have already seen every great film, they throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject a desire to try to catch up all the great films they haven’t seen, as if boldly declaring that you will never watch Casablanca is anything but a tragedy. It’s looking at the whole thing backwards.

The joy of accepting that you’ll never see every great film ever made is realising that 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 third annual Sundae Film Awards. But looking back on the year in film shouldn’t just mean looking back at what came out this year. 2018 is the year Ciara got into westerns and Michael Moore documentaries, the year Dean watched A New Leaf again and was like, oh no, wait, this is great. So here are some of the best films we saw in 2018 that didn’t come out in 2018.

It’s no big deal if you haven’t seen them, but we definitely recommend checking them out.
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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Year in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out This Year)

One of the most annoying things about being a young critic – or just any young person who likes to talk about movies – is the pressure to pretend like you’ve already seen every great film ever made. Some of that is a purely self-imposed anxiety about sounding knowledgeable enough to justify your opinions, but mostly it’s the fairly explicit comments like “What!? How have you not seen X!?” or “Come back to me when you’ve watched Y, then maybe you’ll know what you’re talking about”.

But no one, not even Edgar Wright or Quentin Tarantino, has seen every great film ever made, even when you leave aside that anywhere between 70% and 90% of films made before 1929 are lost. The last time anyone could conceivably watch ever film every made was the early 1930s, and more great films have probably gone unnoticed or forgotten than will ever be recognised. People have families and friends and interests and jobs and also just can’t physically stare at screens for a long time with no breaks. Even if you could somehow make time to watch a film every day, not including new ones, it would take you years to make a dent in the canon of great American cinema, let alone every other country, let alone alternative, experimental and avant-garde film, let alone all the great movies that were dismissed on release and have yet to be rehabilitated by dorks like us.

You don’t have to pretend to have seen all the “great” or “important” films to think, speak or write about movies. We sure haven’t. You can find out our favourite new releases of the year when we post the Sundae Film Awards 2018 in March, but we’re ending 2017 with a look back on the best films we saw this year that didn’t come out this year.

These films are great, and you should watch them. But it’s not a big deal if you don’t.

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