About

 

I fell for movies in high school video class the moment I saw Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho. By the time I saw the famous double dolly shot in Do the Right Thing in college, I was in deep. I remember wondering how something so simple could feel so electric.

These days watching movies in theaters are just the thing that reliably pull me away from my phone and back to myself. I miss the theaters I grew up with in Northern California and Los Angeles, the ones that made room for oddities and originals before streaming turned everything into content and independent houses started slipping away. 

Somewhere along the way, I decided to watch every film on the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list in an actual theater. Once a decade The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine editors conduct the world's biggest poll of critics and film makers to produce the list of the Greatest Films of All Time. First published in 1952, the decennial list has become a bellwether for cinephiles and international film culture. In 2022, more than 1,600 critics, curators, and archivists voted for 3,800 films in the critics' poll. (And almost 600 filmmakers voted for 1,700 films in the directors' poll.) This is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive and expertly curated list of great films ever compiled. These films, more than any, are a celebration of the big screen.

Seeing each film in a theater is an absurdly slow project, full of inconvenient showtimes and long drives. But it's the kind of slow, stubborn commitment that keeps me connected to why I fell in love with movies in the first place.

This blog is just a way to keep the spark alive—notes on the films that stay with me, the little theaters still holding on, and the joy of chasing that feeling I first found in a Spike Lee Joint.



Many thanks to Tima Miroshnichekno for the images.