A Genteel Black Hole

I’ve been tracking my film viewing since 2012. That year, at the height of my obsession, I watched 161 films! By the end of the decade, things had settled down to a more reasonable level, about 50 or 60 per year. But in 2022, due to a mixture of creative projects and health disasters, I watched just 11 films—and for the next couple of years that number didn’t go above 17. With less time spent on films, my doomscrolling ballooned.

Enter Project Glowing Rectangle, my personal effort to simultaneously get my phone habit under control and reclaim my love of cinema: Two birds, one Sharon Stone! I started the project in late August 2025. By the end of the year I had watched 38 films, of which only 9 were pre-Rectangle.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. What actually happened is that I fell back in love with cinema. I had several transcendent movie experiences during the year. While my 2010s film binge was kickstarted by the Golden Age of Hollywood, my recent cinematic renaissance had a more Japanese flavour. I started the project with a rewatch of Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds and ended the year with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. And that’s just two of the 14 Japanese films I watched—nearly all of them great! Ugetsu and Seven Samurai were two standouts, both seen for the first time in November. And Yasujiro Ozu has become a real favourite filmmaker for me: I watched the entire Noriko Trilogy and several more besides, and loved them all. I’m excited to explore more of his work in the coming year, as well as more Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and other Japanese classics on my radar.

Most of my biggest disappointments came pre-Rectangle. Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron was underwhelming, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza was a real slog. Then there’s Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight, a screwball comedy co-written by the great Billy Wilder. I was excited to watch it, only to find it utterly forgettable. So forgettable, in fact, I had already forgotten it! When I went to log it on Letterboxd, I was baffled to discover I had already watched it a decade ago; the rewatch hadn’t jogged my memory at all. Even if I couldn’t necessarily tell you what a film was about, I can usually at least remember that I’ve seen it! Maybe I’m getting old…

Anyway, Project Glowing Rectangle has been a rousing success. Getting back into cinema feels like reclaiming a lost part of myself. It’s good to start feeling more like Me. I’m excited to see what cinematic discoveries await me in 2026.

And now it’s time for the charts and lists!