In 2009 I learned about my friend's habit of logging every movie he watched into an annual list. Starting mid-year, I took up this task and recorded every feature-length film I viewed. Not long after that, I was introduced to Steven Soderbergh's "media diet," which inspired me to expand my list and include novels and TV series. In addition are the stats on most-viewed directors, as well as my lists for top releases of the year, top new discoveries, and least favorite overall.
Only full viewings are included.
KEY:
Asterisk*: Repeat viewings
Bold: TV series (season)
Underline: books
2021 Media Diet
January
1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2. Mank (Fincher, 2020)
3. Miss Oyu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1951)
4. Death and the Maiden (Polanski, 1994)
5. Gamera (Noriaki Yuasa, 1965)
6. The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973)
7. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (Herzog, 2020)
*8. Dr. No (Young, 1962)
9. Special: A Tale of Two Toads (Cockle, 1989)
10. A Few Good Men (Reiner, 1992)
11. The Set-Up (Wise, 1949)
12. UHF (Levey, 1989)
13. Promising Young Woman (Fennell, 2020)
14. Spontaneous (Duffield, 2020)
15. The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 1973)
16. Smokey and the Bandit (Needham, 1977)
17. Birds of Prey (Yan, 2020)
18. Police Academy (Wilson, 1984)
19. Ripley’s Game (Cavani, 2002)
20. First Love (Takashi Miike, 2019)
21. Toni (Renoir, 1935)
22. Soul (Doctor, 2020)
23. City of Zero (Shakhnazarov, 1988)
24. Animal Farm (Batchelor, 1954)
25. Until the End of the World (Wenders, 1991)
26. Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate (Post, 1971)
27. Some Kind of Heaven (Oppenheim, 2020)
February
28. Ganja & Hess (Gunn, 1973)
29. Women in Love (Russell, 1969)
30. Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
31. Blackboards (Makhmalbaf, 2000)
32. The Great Silence (Corbucci, 1968)
33. SST: Death Flight (Rich, 1977)
34. The Phantom of Liberty (Buñuel, 1974)
35. Nayak: The Hero (Ray, 1966)
36. The White Tiger (Bahrani, 2021)
37. Begotten (Merhige, 1989)
38. The Old Man Who Cried Wolf (Grauman, 1970)
39. Dara of Jasenovac (Antonijevic, 2020)
40. Crip Camp (Lebrecht, 2020)
41. Judas and the Black Messiah (King, 2021)
42. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2021)
43. Caught (Ophüls, 1949)
44. The Earrings of Madame De . . . (Ophüls, 1953)
45. The Screaming Woman (Smight, 1972)
46. Letter From An Unknown Woman (Ophüls, 1948)
47. Sherman’s March (1985, McElwee)
48. Lola Montès (Ophüls, 1955)
49. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Herzog, 2009)
*50. Z For Zachariah (Zobel, 2015)
51. The Kid Detective (Morgan, 2020)
52. Nomadland (Zhao, 2020)
March
53. Collective (Nanau, 2019)
54. Gamera vs Viras (Yuasa, 1968)
The Mandalorian SE1 (Favreau, 2019)
55. Black Sea (Macdonald, 2014)
56. Night of the Kings (Lacôte, 2020)
57. Return to Oz (Murch, 1985)
58. The Mole Agent (Alberdi, 2020)
59. The Point (Wolf, 1971)
60. The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)
61. Raise the Red Lantern (Yimou Zhang, 1991)
62. Lapsis (Hutton, 2020)
*63. On the Beach (Kramer, 1959)
64. Grey Gardens (Maysles, 1975)
65. The Father (Zeller, 2020)
66. The Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
67. The Wanting Mare (Bateman, 2020)
68. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wolfe, 2020)
69. Down Periscope (Ward, 1996)
70. To Live (Yimou Zhang, 1994)
71. Midnight Run (Brest, 1988)
72. Cool World (Bakshi, 1992)
73. Red Sorghum (Yimou Zhang, 1988)
74. Another Round (Vinterberg, 2020)
75. Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990)
76. Bananas (Allen, 1971)
April
77. Metropolis (Rintaro, 2001)
78. Honey Boy (Har’el, 2019)
*79. Wizards (Bakshi, 1977)
80. The Gleaners & I (Varda, 2000)
81. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (Masaaki Tezuka, 2003)
82. Layer Cake (Vaugh, 2004)
83. Godzilla: Final Wars (Ryûhei Kitamura, 2004)
84. Godzilla vs. Kong (Wingard, 2021)
Dune (Herbert, 1965)
*85. Popeye (Altman, 1980)
86. Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955)
87. Time (Bradley, 2020)
88. Aparajito (Ray, 1956)
89. The World of Apu (Ray, 1959)
90. Li’l Abner (Frank, 1959)
91. The Last Unicorn (Bass, 1982)
92. The Color of Paradise (Majidi, 1999)
*93. Dune (Lynch, 1984)
94. Concrete Cowboy (Staub, 2020)
95. Children of Heaven (Majidi, 1997)
*96. Seconds (Frankenheimer, 1966)
97. Top Secret! (Abrahams, 1984)
98. Cop Car (Watts, 2015)
99. Simon of the Desert (Buñuel, 1965)
100. Once Upon A Time in Norway (Aasdal, 2007)
Fleabag SE1 (Waller-Bridge, 2016)
101. The Weather Man (Verbinski, 2005)
May
102. Beyond the Clouds (Majidi, 2017)
103. Synchronic (Benson, 2019)
*104. They Live (Carpenter, 1988)
105. Tombstone (Cosmatos, 1993)
Fleabag SE2 (Waller-Bridge, 2019)
*106. Cameraperson (Johnson, 2016)
107. Kaschei the Immortal (Rou, 1945)
108. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Horvát, 2020)
109. Ride Lonesome (Boetticher, 1959)
110. Overnight (Montana, 2003)
111. The Lair of the White Worm (Russell, 1988)
112. Mainstream (Coppola, 2020)
113. 306 Hollywood (Bogarin, 2018)
114. Hamilton (Kail, 2020)
115. The Man Who Sold His Skin (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2020)
116. Jasper Mall (Thomason, 2020)
117. Europa (von Trier, 1991)
118. Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994)
119. My Blue Heaven (Ross, 1990)
120. Voyagers (Burger, 2021)
*121. 5 Centimeters Per Second (Makoto Shinkai, 2007)
122. Army of the Dead (Snyder, 2021)
123. Whispering Pages (Sukurov, 1994)
124. On the Silver Globe (Zulawski, 1988)
June
125. Bo Burnham: Inside (Burnham, 2021)
126. Dead Man’s Letters (Lopushanskiy, 1986)
*127. Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
128. Things To Come (Menzies, 1936)
129. The Big Blue (Besson, 1988)
130. O-Bi, O-Ba - The End of Civilization (Szulkin, 1985)
131. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964)
132. Streets of Fire (Hill, 1984)
133. The Man with the Golden Arm (Preminger, 1955)
134. I Was Born, But . . . (Ozu, 1932)
The Man Who Fell To Earth (Tevis, 1963)
*135. The Man Who Fell To Earth (Roeg, 1976)
136. Swamp Thing (Craven, 1982)
137. A Quiet Place Part II (Krasinski, 2020)
138. Return of Swamp Thing (Wynorski, 1989)
139. Three Women (Altman, 1977)
140. The Killing Fields (Joffé, 1984)
141. In The Heights (Chu, 2021)
142. Crisis (Bergman, 1946)
*143. The Devil, Probably (Bresson, 1977)
144. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (Signorelli, 1988)
145. Taps (Becker, 1981)
146. Pariah (Rees, 2011)
July
147. A Visitor of a Museum (Lopushansky, 1989)
148. Earth (Dovzhenko, 1930)
*149. The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
150. The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)
151. March Comes in Like a Lion (Hitoshi Yazaki, 1991)
152. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (Daisuke Nishio, 2003)
*153. Sahara (Korda, 1943)
154. Daughter of the Nile (Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 1987)
155. Distance (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2001)
156. Peppermint Candy (Chang-dong Lee, 1999)
157. No Sudden Moves (Soderbergh, 2021)
*158. Never Cry Wolf (Ballard, 1983)
159. Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963)
160. The Killing of Two Lovers (Machoian, 2020)
*161. Romancing the Stone (Zemeckis, 1980)
162. Red River (Hawks, 1948)
August
163. The Green Knight (Lowery, 2021)
164. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Richardson, 1962)
165. El Sur (Erice, 1983)
166. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Báky, 1943)
The Mandalorian SE2 (Favreau, 2020)
167. The Institute (McCall, 2012)
168. Ride the Pink Horse (Montgomery, 1947)
169. Chimes at Midnight (Welles, 1965)
170. Entre Nous (Kurys, 1983)
171. Undergods (Moya, 2020)
172. Annette (Carax, 2021)
173. Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut, 1960)
174. Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962)
175. A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961)
176. One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang, 2019)
*177. Confessions (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2010)
178. Halley (Hofmann, 2012)
One Second After (Forstchen, 2009)
179. Warlock (Miner, 1989)
180. Hearts and Minds (Davis, 1974)
September
181. Born to Kill (Wise, 1947)
*182. The Karate Kid (Avildsen, 1984)
*183. The Karate Kid Part II (Avildsen, 1986)
184. The Karate Kid Part III (Avildsen, 1989)
185. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)
186. Meet the Hollowheads (Burman, 1989)
187. The Sweatbox (Styler, 2002)
188. The Shooting (Hellman, 1966)
*189. Dead Alive (Jackson, 1992)
190. Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2006)
191. The Card Counter (Schrader, 2021)
October
192. She Dies Tomorrow (Seimetz, 2020)
193. Next of Kin (Williams, 1982)
194. Evil Dead Trap (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)
195. Hiss (Lynch, 2010)
196. Dark Intruder (Hart, 1965)
197. Titane (Ducournau, 2021)
198. Killer’s Moon (Birkinshaw, 1978)
*199. Wishmaster (Kurtzman, 1997)
200. Revenge of the Dead (Avati, 1983)
201. Grave Robbers (Galindo Jr., 1989)
202. No Time To Die (Fukanaga, 2021)
*203. Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009)
204. Jennifer’s Body (Kusama, 2009)
Squid Game SE1 (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021)
205. Viy (Ershov, 1967)
206. Them (Moreau, 2006)
207. Tourist Trap (Schmoeller, 1979)
208. Lamb (Jóhannsson, 2021)
209. Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)
210. Dune (Villenueve, 2021)
211. Playroom (Coto, 1990)
212. Eerie Tales (Oswald, 1919)
213. The House With Laughing Windows (Avati, 1976)
214. Footprints on the Moon (Bazzoni, 1975)
*215. American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
November
*216. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
217. Last Night in Soho (Wright, 2021)
218. Unusual Tales (Faurez, 1949)
*219. Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
*220. Wise Blood (Huston, 1979)
221. Insect (Svankmajer, 2018)
222. Pulse (Sonzero, 2006)
223. The Beta Test (Cummings, 2021)
224. Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
225. Pulse 2: Afterlife (Soisson, 2018)
226. Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes (Fulci, 1977)
227. L’Age d’Or (Buñuel, 1930)
228. On Broadway (Jacoby, 2019)
229. Passing (Hall, 2021)
*230. The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999)
231. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof, 2020)
232. Test Pattern (Ford, 2019)
233. I, Desire (Moxey, 1982)
234. Spencer (Larraín, 2021)
235. Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2021)
236. The Disciple (Tamhane, 2020)
237. Prayer for the Stolen (Huezo, 2021)
238. The Truffle Hunters (Dweck, 2020)
239. Chaw (Jeong-won Shin, 2009)
240. Legend of the Mountain (King Hu, 1979)
241. Istanbul (Didden, 1985)
242. Death by Hanging (Nagisa Ôshima, 1968)
December
243. Power of the Dog (Campion, 2021)
244. The French Dispatch (Anderson, 2021)
245. Benedetta (Verhoeven, 2021)
246. Riders of Justice (Jensen, 2020)
247. Trading Places (Landis, 1983)
248. A Cop Movie (Ruizpalacios, 2021)
249. House of Gucci (Scott, 2021)
250. Don’t Open Till Christmas (Purdom, 1984)
251. Mogul Mowgli (Tariq, 2020)
252. The Hand of God (Sorrentino, 2021)
253. The Harder They Fall (Samuel, 2021)
254. Pig (Sarnoski, 2021)
255. Rare Exports (Helander, 2010)
256. Belfast (Branagh, 2021)
257. The Lost Daughter (Gyllenhaal, 2021)
*258. Jingle All The Way (Levant, 1996)
259. Bergman Island (Hansen-Løve, 2021)
260. The Matrix Resurrections (Wachowski, 2021)
261. Ernest Goes to Jail (Cherry III, 1990)
NEW RELEASES
Annette - With musical showstoppers that dance across magical realism, this Shakespearean tragedy comes complete with ghosts and singing puppets.
Bo Burnham: Inside - Pseudo-documentary commemorating a generation’s colorful culture and crippling economics with gobsmacking musical sketches.
Days - Poetic ode to solitude and those speechless interactions between vastly different worlds.
Pig - Thematically rich subversion of vengeance, patiently exploring grief and culinary arts.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Father
The Green Knight
The Hand of God
Jasper Mall
The Mole Agent
Passing
Power of the Dog
Undergods
The White Tiger
NEW DISCOVERIES
The Color of Paradise - Stylized environments and family dynamics highlight this quiet masterwork of editing where time and sequences will slow or erupt with emotional energy.
The Earrings of Madame De . . . - The use of exquisite camera motion and playful editing gives depth to setting and scenery as much as opulent characters with critical insights.
On the Silver Globe - Ambitiously experimental storytelling, the grandeur of its science fiction and civilizations is only usurped by those horrific implications and philosophies hidden off-screen.
Sherman’s March - A deeply thoughtful journey of personal experiences and wisdom wherein the filmmaker’s dreams intertwine with the rich history throughout the scenic Southern United States.
A Visitor of a Museum - With colors foreboding enough to construct a hellish reflection of Earth, characters exclaim their heartbreak and press across the vast landscapes of religious delusions.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
City of Zero
Dead Man’s Letters
Halley
L’Age D’Or
Legend of the Mountain
Lil’ Abner
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
The Man with the Golden Arm
March Comes in Like a Lion
The Noah
Raise the Red Lantern
Simon of the Desert
The Spirit of the Beehive
Don’t Open Till Christmas - Jarringly fragmented editing around uninspired environments that are so generic it all seems to be the same location.
Hissssss - A misfired experiment in pacing, effects, and scrambled exposition.
Pulse 2 - Back-alley locations and DIY green screen settings can’t compensate for the lack of acting or logic.
She Dies Tomorrow - Mumblecore pandering with uncoordinated narrative and wasted science fiction tone.
The Wanting Mare - Sloppy ambition incapable of disguising stale dialogue or its pretentiously disjointed story.
DISHONORABLE MENTIONS
Killer’s Moon
The Return of Swamp Thing
STATS:
Movies: 261
Books: 3
TV shows/seasons: 5
Most viewed directors:
Max Ophüls: 4
Satyajit Ray: 4
Luis Buñuel: 3
Yimous Zhang: 3
Majid Majidi: 3
Josh Avildsen: 3
If anyone can find a typo/misspelling, please report for credit.
