If you wanna check out my Substack, I belated put up an annotated top 20 list of my favorite movies of 2023, with links to where I wrote about them, if applicable. (It is applicable to most of the top 10, at least!)

I don't think they should let people go a second time until we all get to go

In which we are exposed as a six-advent-calendar household. (Some of them were free! We'll have fewer this year! Mine isn't even a full 24 days!)

ICYMI: Here's why I'm saying to wait on AI-enabled toys (and predictions for what happens when they get better). https://t.co/rGp7PcewXA

Watching the Rock Hall thing did give me some intense early 00s nostalgia. I saw the White Stripes play for free in Union Square two weeks after moving to NYC. Here's a picture of that I took with my film camera. https://t.co/jU7OcEYBmv somehow lists this as happening at Best Buy

The absolute cratering of my mood when Olivia Rodrigo finished "We're Going to Be Friends" and then threw the White Stripes tribute over to Twentyonepilots.

I wrote about a movie I have seen a perhaps-embarrassing number of times. (Good though!)

Cool that the PREDATOR movie I liked is making money but it's so cheesy and disingenuous when it's accompanied by "analysis" that's like "see? You just need to MAKE A GOOD MOVIE!" Oh OK sorry to DIE MY LOVE, ROOFMAN, GOOD FORTUNE, TWINLESS... try being GOOD like PREDATOR 9

Recapped & reviewed Nikki Glaser's SNL with that very tall boy

So do movies like ETERNITY exist because Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Charlie Kaufman don't make a lot of movies or did they actually all quit making movies to protest stuff like ETERNITY?

This is a knockoff @LexG_III riff but NOUVELLE VAGUE being about the titans of Cahiers making their own revolutionary movies unavoidably made me picture a misguided spoof about the Ain't It Cool luminaries changing Hollywood forever circa 1999, trying to make horrible geek movies

Paying $20 to see a Linklater movie that will be free at home like, any day now........please clap

The comments on this piece are really opening my eyes to how there's apparently a subsection of people who consider Shane Black's THE PREDATOR, a silly movie with Predators running around and Olivia Munn being cute as hell, one of the worst movies ever made.

There's a new Predator movie out. I love the Predator movies. Let's Run. The. Series.

When I had to stop with AVC for a couple of years, my last one was AFTER YANG. So I like that my last Paste review is also for something I loved. (I didn't know it was my last one when I wrote it but it kinda reads like I did??) Anyway! TRAIN DREAMS

Also incredibly grateful that Paste rescued the A.V. Club from G/O Hell! I'll continue to contribute freelance stuff there as long as I can! But I do honestly think that Paste had better and deeper film coverage than a lot of sites more closely associated with film!

Josh and Jacob hired me as a part-time associate editor for the movies section in fall '23, which continued under @JimVorel ... all great people to work with, and so grateful for the leeway I had to write about what interests me (including LOTS of regular new release reviews).

Hilariously, the Paste CMS tells me this is the 299th piece I've published with them. But I think there are probably a couple of group lists where my name isn't the official byline, so let's call it 300. Just about 200 reviews since I started freelancing for them in 2021.

I loved TRAIN DREAMS. It's not playing widely (in NYC it's at the Paris, the Manhattan Drafthouse, and the IFC) but it's very much worth a trip to the theater before it hits Netflix in a couple of weeks. It's also my last movie review at Paste.

Early word on THE IRISHMAN was that they assured Scorsese of a normal wide release and when it came down to it, they shrugged and booked their same odds-and-ends theaters. Wild to have big-name movies treated with the same minimal-contractual-obligation reluctance as 1997 MIramax

It is wild how consistently versions of this seem to play out: Netflix initially assures a filmmaker that *their* movie will get a theatrical release and then when the time comes, it's 350 pieced-together screens for a couple of weeks.