Happy Birthday to Me - 34 More Underrated Films from my Lifetime

Well, I enjoyed doing it last year, I thought I'd try it again this one too.  As a little birthday treat for myself, here are 34 films that deserve a bit of a better reputation than they currently do.  They're not necessarily the best of that year, or true classics, and some do have a better reputation than others, they just all deserve to be a bit better known.  Some are well known to film geeks, but they really should be household names.  Others are a lot more obscure, and just an audience to find them.  How many of these have you seen?

Canary Duty - Inside No. 9 Series Five

Another TV preview, however a pretty tricky one to review.  Inside No. 9, the wonderfully dark anthology show from half of the League of Gentlemen, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, has developed a reputation for its twists in the story, though as I can say from the Q&A somewhat to at least one of the creators' annoyance.  So if I say anything about whether or not there are twists or big surprises in either of the episodes, it will colour your initial watching of them, you'll spend all the time trying to "guess the twist", when it's best just to follow along with the story and performances.  Thus rest assured, I will not be giving any spoilers, nothing that you couldn't gather from a Radio Times listing; this show has had plenty of surprises that you couldn't have paid me to give away.

The Oscars - My Countering

I was going to do a blog about the Oscars in a more calm manner, one where I have a proper look at the nominations and get into what they did right, what they didn't.  Well the thing is, some of the omissions were ones so massive, and some of the decisions were so wrong-headed (11 nominations for Joker?  Really?  11?  It's the frontrunner.  Are you kidding?), that I decided I had to do a proper retort to this.  Now there were some fine decisions made, most of the Best Picture nominations are very strong (and then there's Joker squatting in amongst them, like it slipped past the bouncer saying "I'm with them"), glad that Taika Waititi, Greta Gerwig, and Rian Johnson got some noms (although none for Best Director, when the guy behind The Hangover did), and that an international feature like Parasite (which you bet I'll be seeing as soon as it gets a proper release over here) has gotten a lot of love.  But still, there are some notable absences and bad calls, like an all male Best Director line up again, in a year when there were a load of female lead features to pick from.  So what I'm going to do is take a note from The Kermode Awards, and give my thoughts on what I think should have gotten in there.  Now these aren't necessarily my favourites of last year, they are ones though where I genuinely do think that they are of the calibre to deserve the nod.  Before I start, I can't comment on ones I haven't seen yet, so I can't say much about Rocketman, Little Women, The Farewell, or Dolemite is my Name, even though I plan to catch up with all of them this month.  Let's get started though with...