Introduction

Prologue

This project came to me from a conversation I had with my girlfriend. I expressed feeling a bit inadequate because I didn’t quite understand the references a film (All About My Mother) was making to another film/play (A Streetcar Named Desire). She jokingly asked if I paused my movie to go watched the one it was referencing… And this spawned me to think about the birth of this project: Wouldn’t it be fun to watch a movie from every year that there has been one?

Within minutes there I was, plotting this little project. I opened up a document and started plotting my mov[i]es.

Selection Process

The selection process was in 3 main sections: Movies I had and have been meaning to watch, movies I put on a list to seek out, and lastly: “I have no movie for this year, let me check Wikipedia for movies in this year”. From the birth of cinema in 1874 to around 1907, Wikipedia was my go-to. Starting in 1907 and scattered from until 1970 was a mix of IMDB lists and Wikipedia. For the titles I got from Wikipedia, it was more or less random selection with titles that could be interesting, singling out especially non-English titles when I saw them (I wanted this list to not only be English-speaking films!). In the 70s and on, I had a film for every year on my IMDB lists... Sans 2024 and 2025.

For those who know me, I don’t keep up with recent films. I’m pretentious through and through and tend to prefer older movies anyway. So, I turned to my friend, Luka, who is very well-rounded with films and asked their opinions on what movies to watch. They gracefully provided me with Problemista and Sinners (which I’ve heard good things about from other friends as well.)

For this project I specifically picked movies I haven’t seen before from different genres. In addition, I tried to pick movies that weren’t in a series or in some sort of multi-film saga. Like every other time I’ve done movie reviews, I’m going in knowing nothing. To make this easier to read, I’ll be dividing this project into parts.