Office Space. We’ve added a new ‘HQ’ membership tier for film-related organizations—from festivals to arthouse theaters to podcasts, and everyone in between—to make it easier for them to participate in our community. This week, we’re launching HQ, a new membership tier that’s designed to give our friends in the film industry a place to call home on Letterboxd. Since our inception in 2011, more and more film organizations—festivals, studios, theaters, podcasts and the like—have joined Letterboxd. However, our profiles were always intended for individual use, and aren’t ideal for supporting an organization’s activity. How do we include groups in a space that’s first and foremost a platform for individual movie lovers? How can we fold them into the culture around here? And: what tools might they need? How could they drop trailers, festival line-ups or general news, and how might they gather Letterboxd followers around an event or announcement? Continue reading…

Fantasia 2020. We emerge from the depths of Fantasia Festival 2020—the largest genre fest in North America—with the ten best things we saw this year. Fantasia Festival aced this weird shitstorm of a year with one of the best online film festival experiences of 2020 so far. Sure, we miss that unique, zombie-like, end-of-fest haze brought on by midnight madness and inappropriate mealtimes, but quarantine breeds an adjacent kind of mental fog that made Fantasia’s online offering a weirdly natural place to be this year. Tuning into Montreal from London and Auckland, our Fantasia team (Kambole Campbell, Aaron Yap and Gemma Gracewood) watched as widely as possible, and we recommend most of what we saw—but these are the ten films that stuck out. Continue reading…

Drawing Closer. Animation lovers: watchlists at the ready. From action capers to Irish folk tales, in 3DCG or the humble pencil, by manga legends and raucous newcomers, Letterboxd’s animation correspondent Kambole Campbell picks ten new feature films we’re excited to see. When the gears of the live-action film industry ground to a near-halt earlier this year, animators were still at work. As a medium that, at its most fundamental level, is controlled fully by the imaginations of its creators, this might be the one element of the screen industry that has some kind of ability to operate throughout the pandemic. Based on previews from this year’s online edition of the annual Annecy International Animation Film Festival, there’s a lot to look forward to that’s still in the works, even now. With everything from blockbuster capers and fantastical alternate histories, explorations of folklore and real human stories alike, we can expect a spoil of boundless and endlessly creative films limited only by the imaginations of those drawing them. Here are ten animated features I’m specifically excited for, in no particular order (except for the first—fight me if you like, Masaaki Yuasa will always win). Continue reading…

Chadwick. Adam Davie pays tribute, as a viewer, to the “immense power” of Chadwick Boseman’s body of work, which features “portrayals of Black life that are true to our experience”. “I just want to tell stories that expand people’s minds, and about who we are in the world,” Chadwick Boseman told GQ in 2018. This is how I will remember him. This is who he really was. The 43-year-old star of films such as 42, Get on Up, Black Panther and 21 Bridges (which he also produced) was more than just an actor. He was someone who was perpetually committed to positive representation, inclusive storytelling, and portraying Black excellence on screen. He was rarely a character actor—since his mainstream breakthrough in 42 he almost always played the lead—but he was definitely someone whose character informed his choice of roles. These parts led to empathetic and intimate performances, which then informed us as viewers as we watched him battle foes both systemic and supernatural for the greater good. As Jackie Robinson in ‘42’ (2013). Continue reading…

Summer Loving. Summerland writer-director Jessica Swale shares 50 of her favorite heart-filled films for troubled times. Since its release in July, Jessica Swale’s WWII cottagecore drama Summerland has quietly captured hearts—and a very respectable four out of five stars—on Letterboxd. In the time of Covid, Summerland is the “warm, breezy ride” we’ve needed, writes Tuhin. Written and directed by Swale, an Olivier Award-winning playwright who also made the brilliant and blistering short, Leading Lady Parts (watch it here), Summerland centers on Gemma Arterton’s character Alice—also played by Penelope Wilton later in life. Alice is reclusive, prickly, focused on her writing; it’s a great inconvenience when she’s put in charge of one of the children sent to her small seaside town from London to escape the bombings. But his arrival sets off memories of a lost love, Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and Alice begins to thaw. “It’s perhaps the feel-good film of the year, as it explores many things: imagination, motherhood, the heartbreak of war and lost love, and the touching story of how this young boy changes Alice’s life,” writes Sara. “You mean it’s this easy to make a lesbian period drama with a non-white love interest and a happy ending!” Sonny agrees. As the northern hemisphere summer cools into fall, the blockbuster-season-that-wasn’t fades in the rear-view mirror, and a vaccine remains yet a dream, we invited Swale to select 50 uplifting films to help us through, and to pen some thoughts on the importance of movies that make your heart sing. In the following essay, Swale shares how, through a deeply personal loss, she made a commitment “to always tell stories with hope at their heart”.

Jessica Swale and cinematographer Laurie Rose on the set of ‘Summerland’. Continue reading…

Common Language. With her third feature, Lingua Franca, now on Netflix, Filipina filmmaker Isabel Sandoval talks to Valerie Complex about undocumented immigrant workers, sensual cinematography, taking narrative risks and Steven Soderbergh’s sexiest film. “I’m not the type of filmmaker that is into crowd-pleasing and I think that resonates with audiences.” —Isabel Sandoval Isabel Sandoval’s films have an auteur, European appeal; they take their time. Inspired by cinematic film legends including Chantal Akerman, Wong Kar-wai and James Gray, Sandoval is pushing forward in an industry reluctant to change, creating narratives that speak to her existence, and her experience. After making two feature films set in her native Philippines (Apparition, Señorita), Sandoval relocates to her adopted hometown, New York City—or at least a small seaside corner of it—for her third film. Lingua Franca follows Olivia (played by Sandoval), an undocumented Filipina trans woman who is looking to secure a green card so she can continue to stay and work in the US. Olivia knows the only way to legal status in present-day America is through marriage, but struggles to find the right person to accept her offer. Continue reading…

Highland Trip. Get Duked! writer-director Ninian Doff shares his ten favorite tripped-out sequences in films. When Scottish filmmaker Ninian Doff showed his debut feature film Get Duked! at SXSW 2019 (under its original title Boyz in the Wood), it picked up the Midnighters Audience Award, and jumped straight into our top ten premieres from that fest, alongside films like Booksmart, The Art of Self-Defense, Us and Karen Maine’s recent Yes, God, Yes. Get Duked! sees four high school lads hike into the Scottish Highlands on a mission to win a Duke of Edinburgh Award (a real award, launched decades ago to encourage youth to learn new skills). Three of the boys are there because they’ve gone off the rails, the fourth is a friendless dork who enjoys navigating the outdoors. Things take a weird turn when they come up against a gun-happy aristocrat. And, warns Doff, things get “very bizarre” when the cast take “hallucinogenic rabbit droppings (standard plot I know)”. With Get Duked! at last coming to screens thanks to Amazon Prime Video, we asked Doff for the ten trippiest, weirdest, drug-fuelled film sequences that have inspired—or warped—him over the years. “I’m sure there’s a million others I’ll be remembering for weeks but these are the ones that really stuck in my head.” Continue reading…

How I Letterboxd #6: Sean Boelman Talking 2020 movie trends, the year’s best documentaries, and Elijah Wood’s death-stare with peach emoji lobbyist Sean Boelman. “Honestly, there’s not much I like to do other than watch movies or go to theme parks, and one of those things wasn’t an option for months.”

In a year like no other for the movie business, it’s still possible to see hundreds of new films if you have the right connections. For professional critics, the downside of missing the in-person festival buzz and tent-pole previews is somewhat offset by the upside of being able to pace out your screenings in the comfort of your own home. Wondering who might possibly hold the title of “the Letterboxd member who has watched the most new releases so far this year”, we poked around in the server room and found Sean Boelman, who has logged well over 400 films from 2020 in his diary. So far this year, Sean (20) has covered the Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Florida and Fantasia Film Festivals; he also reviews films via screeners sent through from PR firms. Sean hails from Orlando, Florida, and is the founder of movie review platform disappointment media, which he created to promote a wider range of voices in film criticism. Park So-dam and peach in ‘Parasite’ (2019), directed by Bong Joon-ho. Continue reading…

Lockdown Lens. The filmmakers behind found-footage hits Searching and Host share their best tips for making movies in quarantine. Hint: you’ll need to tape your camera to your laptop, move away from the wall, and plump up the post-production budget. “There is a really opportunistic moment here that you can take advantage of, if you come up with the right thing.”—Aneesh Chaganty, director of Searching “You should never wait for the ideal circumstance because it doesn’t exist. Look at what you’ve got right now and use that.”—Rob Savage, director of Host A low-budget thriller starring John Cho as a desperate dad, Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 debut feature Searching, co-written with Sev Ohanian, shook up the found-footage genre with its seamless blend of content from chat rooms, social platforms, security-camera footage and news coverage. Chaganty and Ohanian’s next film, Run, which also takes place mostly inside one house, will debut on Hulu later this year after its theatrical release was quashed by Covid-19. Meanwhile, a 56-minute séance horror that appears to take place entirely on a Zoom call became the most popular film on Letterboxd within a week of landing on Shudder in July (our popularity score is based on the amount of activity across our platform for each film, regardless of rating). Host—conceived and completed within just twelve weeks—was written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd, and directed by Savage. Our editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood asked Chaganty, Hurley, Savage and Shepherd to draw on their expertise in making browser horrors and other limited-setting stories, to inspire other aspiring filmmakers sheltering in place. Listen to the full interviews on the Lockdown Filmmaking episode of The Letterboxd Show. Joseph Lee and John Cho in TV news footage from ‘Searching’. Continue reading…

Life in Film: Kris Rey. As her new comedy I Used to Go Here opens, Chicago-based writer and director Kris Rey talks to Letterboxd editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood about turning 40, divorce, female friendships, why nobody but Jemaine Clement could pull off a scene making tea, and what we can all learn from Generation Z. If Kris Rey’s new comedy I Used to Go Here were a typical Hollywood rom-com, it would finish just before Rey’s film starts: with Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs) as a newly published author, engaged to be married to a handsome guy. Instead, we meet Kate in a Bushwick apartment she can no longer afford, as her publishing company breaks the news that her debut novel (Seasons Passed; terrible cover art, purple prose) is a failure and the publicity tour is off. That’s on top of the insult that her fiancé has recently ended their engagement. Kate is given a faint ray of optimism when her creative writing professor (Jemaine Clement) invites her back to the liberal arts college she graduated from a decade earlier, to give a talk to his Gen Z students. Leaving Brooklyn and her pregnant bestie behind, Kate dives into the nostalgia of her old Illinois stomping ground, and I Used to Go Here turns into a low-key, pot-fuelled, intergenerational romp through ideas of success, friendship, creativity, authenticity and idolization. The film’s fans on Letterboxd include Matt Neglia, who writes: “Gillian Jacobs brings charismatic charm and restraint to her role as a writer longing for a time when we were filled with endless potential without the fear of failure.” Matt DeTurck identifies with this theme: “Relatable for anyone wrestling with fitting the pieces of their life together in ways that feel truthful.” On the contemporary representation of university life, Alex Billington remarks that “it’s got all the college movie tropes… but it repackages all of these in a smart adult-looking-back indie film package”. Max notes that “the college kids are an invaluable addition and feel like people rather than college or Gen Z stereotypes”.

Kate (Gillian Jacobs) and David (Jemaine Clement) in a scene from ‘I Used to Go Here’. Continue reading…

Seeing is Believing. The relentlessly hellish 1985 war film Come and See has marched to the number two spot on Letterboxd thanks to a stunning restoration, digital availability and pandemic-panic. Aaron Yap surveys the community’s reviews of Elem Klimov’s “mortar-blast of a masterpiece” for insights into its importance—and our psychic states. War is hell—fundamentally the principle behind every anti-war movie, but there’s arguably never been one that conjures this state of being as convincingly as Elem Klimov’s 1985 Come and See (‘Idi i Smotri’) does. And it’s a hellscape that appears to be wildly resonating with the Letterboxd community—the film has now unseated The Godfather to take second place in our Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films list, just behind Parasite. For those yet to surrender to this mortar-blast of a masterpiece, Come and See plunges the viewer into the chaos and devastation of the 1943 Nazi invasion of Soviet Belorussia. Based on Klimov and writer Ales Adamovich’s own experiences during World War II, and the accounts of genocide survivors, it’s almost an anti-anti-war film. There are no professional actors. No battle scenes. No digestible history-pedia plot beats. No heroic feats of courage. Our guide into the harrowing void is a fourteen-year-old partisan adolescent named Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko). Joining a troop of resistance fighters against his mother’s wishes, he embarks on an unnervingly subjective odyssey that leaves him a shrivelled, visibly aged husk by the end. It’s without question one of cinema’s most heart-breaking, unforgettable transformations. Continue reading…

Survival Mode. In ten recent coming-of-age films, Ella Kemp finds the genre thriving—and looking very different than the 1980s might have predicted. Film directors and Letterboxd members weigh in on the specific satisfactions of the genre, especially in a pandemic. There have been jokes, some more serious than others, about the art that will come out of this time. How many novels about a fast-spreading disease are you betting on? Will Covid-19 be better suited to documentary or fiction? But the art I’m most looking forward to, and revisiting now, is the art made about teenagers going through it. Physical school attendance, so central to the John Hughes movies of the 1980s, is up in the air for so many. Sports practice, theater clubs, mall hang-outs; the familiar neighborhood beats of a teenager’s life are more confined than ever. All of us have had to tweak our reality to make the best of invasive changes forced upon us during the pandemic. In a sense, it feels like we are all coming of age. Teenagehood, though, is a particularly tricky time of transition, and we don’t yet know the half of how the pandemic is going to impact today’s young adults—and, by association, tomorrow’s coming-of-age films. But in the last two years alone there have been enough brave new entries in the genre, about young people so enlivening, that there’s both plenty for young film lovers to lose themselves in, and plenty for us slightly older folks to watch and learn from. Continue reading…

How I Letterboxd #5: Will Slater Talking mullets and other manes with the man behind the internet’s definitive ‘exploding helicopters in movies’ catalog. “Man cannot live on helicopter explosions alone. Even I need some occasional intellectual nourishment.” A London-based PR man by day, by night Will Slater has a thing (and a podcast, blog and Twitter account) for movies that feature exploding helicopters. According to his Letterboxd bio, it’s “the world’s only podcast and blog dedicated to celebrating the art of exploding helicopters in films… as well as shaming those directors who dishonor the helicopter explosion genre”. As Will tells Jack Moulton, he also loves film noir, Wakaliwood, masala movies and much more. Just don’t get him started on the one action movie cliché that never fails to disappoint. Sylvester Stallone takes aim in ‘Rambo III’ (1988). Continue reading…

Pure Verhoeven. Writer and director Jeffrey McHale talks to Dominic Corry about his new documentary You Don’t Nomi—an examination of the cult surrounding Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 “masterpiece of shit”, Showgirls—and recommends a few campy sequels to watch afterwards. Few films have enjoyed as interesting a post-release existence as Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 film Showgirls. A classic “blank check” movie—that is, a film made with unnatural freedom thanks to a director’s prior success—Verhoeven and controversial screenwriter Joe Eszterhas attempted to build on the success of their 1992 smash Basic Instinct by upping the on-screen sauce in a riff on All About Eve, set in the “high-stakes” world of Las Vegas striptease. Elizabeth Berkley, at the time still defined by her performance as the (mostly) virtuous Jessie in the Saturday-morning teen sitcom Saved By The Bell, led the film as Nomi Malone, a young woman who arrives in Vegas, gets work stripping in a low-rent club, then ascends to the sought-after position of lead showgirl in a big casino’s “classy” choreographed striptease show, replacing the previous star Cristal Conners (Gina Gershon). Continue reading…