Brendan Hodges

The remarkable year for film has already been captured in this feature of the ten best movies of the year, and this one with over 100 works cited on individual lists. It’s time to talk about performances! We asked our regular contributors to pick a performance this year they loved, and the results capture the diversity of genre, tone, and even acting styles in the art form.
There were some rules, including that each film could be represented by only one entry, which is one of several reasons ...

What do you think of when you think of James Cameron? There's his Oscar speech, the (brief) popularization of 3D, the cornball dialogue, the badass ladies, the romantic men, or the quantum leaps in visual effects with nearly every film.

There are also the dozens of iconic images that spring to mind, all seared into pop-culture consciousness: the robotic tank in “The Terminator” crushing skulls beneath its treads, the Titanic with its bow sunk into the ocean still lit like a city, and, for the “Avatar” heads, a nine-foot-tall alien pulling her bowstring to t...

In Steven Spielberg’s cyber-noir thriller Minority Report, the world’s greatest movie star is paralyzed in panic as a ghostly image of his future self commits murder. He hears the words “Goodbye Crowe” in frenzied loops, replaying the footage again and again, as if one more doomscroll will uncover a new fate. But each time, he pulls the trigger.
Trapped in one of Spielberg’s best and most unnerving close-ups, Tom Cruise is center-frame as the smeared face of the other Tom Cruise, the killer, ...

As the closing credits of 2025 roll, Letterboxd contributors round up their favorite films that they watched for the very first time this year, from underseen international gems like Forever a Woman to acclaimed mainstays like Paper Moon.
Simply put, there is no shortage of films to fall in love with. Every single year, you’re practically guaranteed to discover something new via a like-minded friend’s recommendation, by digging through your own watchlist, or maybe even by reading an article suc...

This year’s best science fiction was more earthbound than cosmic. There were coming-of-age sagas, miserable women on missions to save the Earth, Patton Oswalt playing a Vulcan, and Lee Pace looking more and more like Jesus. They also reflected many of our recent anxieties back at us: the dangers of A.I. and surveillance, the rise of authoritarianism, and the need for hope and resistance in the face of both.
By deadline, a couple of this year’s biggest sci-fi titles ...

While the holiday season can be a time for brain-off hundredth-time-rewatches (we see you and we love you!), with the end of the year can also come a time for last-minute love affairs and discoveries of the most life-changing order, if you look hard enough.
That’s where your devoted Letterboxd crew comes in: our correspondents have rifled through the pages of their memory books of holidays’ past, in order to find the most loveable hidden gems (with no more than 50,000 logs!) to add to your ro...

I can’t believe I’ve finally seen “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.” In its original two-volume form, Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill“ was already a masterpiece of pop-art exuberance, a samurai-western mixtape that danced through genres with bloody, maximalist élan. But ever since “The Whole Bloody Affair“ screened at the Cannes film festival in 2006, which restores The Bride’s revenge saga into one four-hour epic as Tarantino originally imagined it, it’s become an artifact as coveted as on...

When you’re tucked into a cozy nook and crack open a whodunit, you know what to expect. The dead body in a locked room. The shrewd detective. The suspect list. An assortment of clues that double as puzzle pieces, some true and some false, exposing town secrets whether they’re related to the murder or not. Finally, a grand act of oratory theater, the summation, where that shrewd detective links each clue in a chain of causality that brings order to chaos, and justice to an immoral world.
These...

Ten years ago, Star Wars still felt like magic. Some people remember where they were for the Moon landing; I remember where I was when the first teaser for The Force Awakens launched online (at an old girlfriend’s house after Black Friday brunch). Every frame was scrutinized: the cross-guarded saber, X-Wings roaring planetside, BB-8’s anxious roll. The plot, shrouded in another J.J. Abrams mystery, was teased in marketing and merch, wher...

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Siskel & Ebert,” we asked our writers to share their memories and appreciation for the greatest movie review show of all time. Here are their thoughts.
ROBERT DANIELS
Throughout much of my childhood, my family neither went to the movies nor owned a television. We lacked the disposable income for either. Lately, though, I’ve thought about lots of memories I’ve buried. But one that remains in front of my mind is when we did finally get a television. It was ...

As Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master“ ends, Lancaster Dodd, a charlatan of cosmic promises, sings a love song. He hopes to win back the affection of Freddie Quell, a wandering post-war brute of deadly but delicious alcoholic potions, and commands that they must either be companions or enemies for all of time. It has been said all of Anderson’s movies are dysfunctional love stories, and “One Battle After Another,“ a gauntlet of Americana psychosexual paranoia and revolutionary fervor, is anot...

50 years since A Touch of Zen’s first proper release dazzled viewers, Brendan Hodges reflects on King Hu’s revolutionary wuxia that’s both a swashbuckling adventure and a cosmic meditation on reality—and our place inside it.
Within a bamboo forest so thick it hides every horizon, a woman flies through the air; to keep the whereabouts of her betrayed clan hidden, she hunts her quarry. Soon, armed figures appear. She’s surrounded.
What follows is one of the most celebrated set pieces in all of wu...

Horror has a long history of confronting us with what we take for granted, revealing the dark truths we keep in the locked basements in the back of our minds. We may not like to think about it, but we all know if someone really wanted to break into our homes, they probably would. In a real sense, our locks are as much for our peace of mind as they are for our protection.
Comedians have long satirized those vulnerable social bonds with observational comedy, but filmmaker Zachary Cregger specia...

It wasn’t long ago that being a big anime fan was a verboten pleasure, treated as a vice that’s best enjoyed in private. Those days are past, and it’s partially thanks to ocean-hopping anime like “Attack on Titan,” “Jujutsu Kaisen,” and the wonderfully successful “Demon Slayer” that those barriers have fallen. Unlike other anime of its type, there’s a surprising flow of empathy alongside the bloody carnage, giving rare heft to a series with a hack n’ slash namesake. The latest feature film in the “Demon Slayer” saga, “Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle,” brings that characteristic quality back

Sixty-five feet beneath the streets of Paris, you’ll find their catacombs, where the bodies of six million are buried. Endless walls of skulls, femurs, radius and ulna reveal a labyrinthian network of tunnels, ornamented with charnel crosses and bone tombstones. These paths of the dead act as a kind of ghostly time travel, forcing you to imagine who they were, what choices they made, and how, soon enough, we’ll join them. Above one entombed doorway reads “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort...