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1 out of 40 is interesting.

Ah, a connoisseur, perhaps a true cinephile. Let me guess: on this particular list, the one that caught your eye was Top Gun: Maverick? If true, that's fine. Tom Cruise bats for average. He's pretty careful about staying mainstream. On a bad day, his films are solid, and he makes an excellent one from time to time. He's one of the most bankable names in Hollywood today for a reason.

In putting this together, I linked three different lists: different sources, different crosscuts, relatively little overlap. I thought these three provided an interesting blend. There are many more such lists. A couple that I skipped leaned much more heavily into the tentpole world of superheroes, big, splashy, CGI heavy action films, and endless franchise sequels and spinoffs. These are the big studio films that get most of the hype. I figure most of us will hear about them somehow. I thought about adding the Cannes selection list, which was recently released, but Cannes tries too hard to be global, avant garde, and woke. It still doesn't hurt to glance at the list and pick out the scattering of good ones, but for this thread, three lists was enough.

There are a lot of movie threads on FR. On many of them, we sound like a Greek chorus wailing that the film industry is a lost cause as we rain anathemas on woke movies that offend us in myriad ways. Fine. There are a lot of those. But there are still good films being made. The problem is that we often don't hear about them. They usually don't get the hype and, as streaming takes over, fewer and fewer films get even a short theatrical release. They are picked up by the streamers, linger for a couple of days on the "just added" list, and disappear into the catalogue where they will never be found except by people who already know what they are looking for. Especially from a conservative standpoint, our screening and target acquisition systems are broken.

I won't rehash the whole story here, but not long ago I was a "nuke Hollywood from orbit" guy. Then I tripped over Columbus (2017, Kogonada), not through any movie source but by reading something online that casually mentioned the use of Columbus' modernist architecture in a well-regarded film. I grew up about 45 miles from Columbus. I had taken the Columbus architecture tour many years ago. I knew the J. Irwin Miller/Cummins backstory. I wondered how anyone could possibly get a movie out of that, so I watched it out of curiosity. I have never been so surprised by a movie in my life, and I wondered how a film this good could be made about a subject of interest to me and I never even heard about it. That's when I realized that I had developed a huge blind spot. The good stuff is out there. We just don't usually hear about it.

Versions of this come up frequently in the film threads here. People discover a movie that is five, ten, or fifteen years old and are amazed to discover that it's really good. How do we miss these the first time around? More movies are being made today than ever before, but the dominant marketing systems are steadily narrowing our field of vision. The streamers' algorithms will keep feeding you more of what you watched last time. It's no wonder that the stuff that's served up to us online seems increasingly stale.

As far as I can see, the only way to break out of this box is to become active consumers and make an effort to search out good films. It only takes a few minutes to scan a list. If I see a list of 40 or 80 or 150 and find six films that look interesting enough to at least read a couple of reviews and watch a trailer, I think that's a decent hit rate. Yes, most of the films on such lists will not be of interest. But that's ok. As a matter of situational awareness, it doesn't hurt to know that they're out there too, but the point is to find the hidden gems. They will usually stay hidden unless we dig a bit.

Since none of us are professional critics and few of us will invest much effort in this, we need to develop clearinghouses to exchange recommendations. Most of us do stumble across interesting films or shows from time to time. So my point is pretty simple. Instead of just kvetching about the bad stuff, which is shooting fish in a barrel, help your fellow freepers out by making some recommendations on films and shows that you think have merit. Especially the new stuff; most of us have probably discovered the golden oldies. I like the classics too, but that doesn't mean I want to rewatch Patton or The Godfather again.

None of the six movies I recommended in this thread are woke. After Yang has my vote for best movie of the year. YMMV. This year's Oscar winner for Best Picture, Coda, is not woke. (I think that's part of the reason it won; I have the sense that a lot of people simply got fed up with the gay pride parade that had been prancing all year around The Hair of the Dog, long considered the frontrunner. Drive My Car was this year's winner for Best International Feature Film. It's not woke. A surprising number of freepers have seen it and all seem to like it; there's a noticeable and seemingly knowledgeable group here who have become serious fans of foreign films, perhaps especially Korean films. There are some terrific recent films, mostly from Europe, that are powerfully anti-communist; they put Hollywood to shame. But the thing is, we won't find these films unless we look for them. And that starts by at least scanning the lists and passing along recommendations.