Video Essays, 2024

Here is a round-up of all of my video essay work available for public consumption made in the last calendar year. The big project was An Aim Not Devoid of Merit, a look at the complete works of Steven Spielberg, created with Tucker Johnson. I added several titles to my ongoing series Other West, about offbeat westerns: John Frankenheimer's Andersonville, Jordan Peele's Nope, and Bruce Beresford's Black Robe. I released my look at the late Michael Apted's Always Outnumbered, one of his finest works and probably the best TV movie of the 1990s. I introduced a new series, I Wanna Talk About One Thing, and have publicly released two inaugural essays, one on the epochal use of swearing in Blazing Saddles, the other on the layers and layers beneath the surface of Ocean's 12. For Ignite films I created a video essay for their new blu-ray release of William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe, but in order to see it you have to buy the disc, so, just to be fair to everyone, I created a separate Joe for Beginners style intro to the film and its director.

And of course it wouldn't be a year of my videos without the new editions of The Unloved, starting with a big milestone: ten years of The Unloved, using Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (for which I've just done a commentary for Kino Lorber's upcoming blu-ray release) as my text. Since then I've done essays on Tom Tykwer's The International, André de Toth's Play Dirty, John Woo's Silent Night, Jonathan Glazer's Birth, Keith Gordon's Mother Night, John Boorman's Zardoz, Russell Mulcahy's Highlander 2, Kim Jee-woon's Cobweb, Byron Haskin's The Power, Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man, and Alex Proyas' Dark City. It's been, as ever, quite a busy year, and there are still more essays on my patreon to be discovered.