It's Our 10th Anniversary!


It has been exactly ten years since we (Walter and Vic) started this blog. During those years, the blog has evolved. At first, it was envisioned as a way for the two of us to dialogue about the films we were watching, with the hope that others would be interested in reading, and contributing to, this dialogue. However, it soon became clear that the dialogue element of the blog would be somewhat limited, due to varying opportunities to access and watch films. As a result, the blog became more focused on providing film reviews from our personal perspectives, which, whether or not it was overt, always included a theological component. Due to Vic’s writing of film reviews for other publications (e.g. Canadian Mennonite and Third Way CafĂ©), and his ability to watch far more films, he became the primary contributor, with Walter contributing as he was able.

In total, we have written 675 posts during the ten years, reviewing more than 750 films and cable TV shows. With less than 30 posts a year during the first four years, we have averaged 94 posts a year since 2010. Our readership has increased steadily over the past decade, with more than 132,000 pageviews to date. A big thank you to all our followers and readers, and a special thanks to those who posted comments. Please don’t be shy about joining the conversation.

To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we decided to share with you a list of our jointly-favourite films of the past decade, listed in order of how highly we agreed on our appreciation of the films. To clarify, this list does not contain all of Walter’s favourite films or Vic’s favourite films (annual lists of this kind can be found on the blog, generally in January), but a list of films that we are equally excited about (two mugs held high, as it were). So the first film on the list, Of Gods and Men, was, for both os us, our favourite film of 2011, the only time this happened. 


This does not mean that we think this list represents the best thirty films of the past decade. Rather, these are films that, for whatever reasons, we particularly enjoyed. While most of the individual years are equally-represented below, there are six films on the list from 2014 (the best year for film during past decade). Another stat of interest is that ten of these thirty films are foreign-language films and only a couple would qualify as Hollywood films.

Some readers may be wondering why we use mugs to describe our appreciation of films, something we haven’t addressed since our very earliest blog posts. Well, we happen to both be coffee lovers, so, ‘thumbs up’ being taken, we decided to lift up our mugs to the good films we were watching. The films below all got a ‘mug up’ from both of us, and the mugs were full of Colombia’s finest (fair trade, of course).
  1. Of Gods and Men (2011)
  2. The Lives of Others (2007)
  3. The Visitor (2008) 
  4. Les Miserables (2012)
  5. Calvary (2014)
  6. Short Term 12 (2013)
  7. Winter’s Bone (2010)
  8. Once (2007)
  9. Tangerines (2015) (made in 2013 but released in 2015)
  10. Monsieur Lazhar (2012)
  11. Captain Fantastic (2016)
  12. The King’s Speech (2010)
  13. Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2009)
  14. Ex Machina (2015)
  15. The Salt of the Earth (2015)
  16. A Man Called Ove (2016)
  17. Locke (2014)
  18. Ida (2014)
  19. Incendies (2011)
  20. Cloud Atlas (2012)
  21. Take Shelter (2011)
  22. The Ghost Writer (2010)
  23. Selma (2014)
  24. Pride (2014)
  25. Hellbound? (2012)
  26. The Way (2011)
  27. Her (2013)
  28. Doubt (2008)
  29. Leviathan (2014) 
  30. I, Daniel Blake (2016)


Comments

  1. I noticed that you ranked Tangerines (2015), and I can't find any film by that name that came out in that year. There is a movie called Tangerines from 2013, and a movie called Tangerine from 2015. Am I correct in assuming it is Tangerine?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry - should be 2013 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2991224

      Delete
  2. I am putting the date back to 2015. While the film might have been made in 2013, it was not released anywhere in North America prior to 2015, and it is one our lists for 2015, so that's what it needs to be.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looking forward to the next 10 years!

    ReplyDelete

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