Everything Everywhere All At Once

#142 at the time of writing.

More than a third of my top 30 films of all time are from the years 1999-2001 - check out my list in the sidebar - and I think that's testament to the age I was when I first watched them (19-21). I was young and impressionable, and the mark those films left on me will stay with me for life.

But that means new-to-me films start at a monumental disadvantage; how can anything new possibly hope to change my life now that I've seen it all before? After thousands of films and increasingly entrenched tastes, how can anything blow my mind anymore?

This is how.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is the most bonkers and ambitious film I have ever seen - and it's about laundry and taxes. That mismatch is part of its genius; it tells an impossibly grand story while remaining grounded throughout. The Daniels went for a maximalist style that conveys how overwhelming our modern world is - but ultimately this is the story of a struggling Chinese immigrant family just trying to get along.

This cerebral sci-fi kung fu thriller does so much exactly right, and manages to be like nothing else I've ever seen. I love that the characters switch between Chinese and English throughout. I love the bagel and the googly eye symbolising nihilism and existentialism. I love the myriad of references to some of my favourite films, especially The Matrix, Ratatouille, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I love that this was Ke Huy Quan's first major on-screen role since Indiana Jones and The Goonies. I love that Michelle Yeoh cried when she talked about how validated she felt by being asked to play such a versatile character (and, wow, she knocked it out of the park). I loved it so much, that I went back to watch it a second time at the cinema... and then a third time... and then once more at home with my daughter, all within the space of a couple of weeks.

It was released at the same time as another multiverse movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which had eight times the budget and wasn't even half as good.

Everything Everywhere All At Once rockets into my favourite films of all time - not just into the top 30, not even the top 10, but the top 3. I'm thrilled that my mind can still be blown.

Interstellar

#15 at the time of writing.

Wow. I continue to be in awe of the grandeur and ambition of Christopher Nolan's (and his brother's) vision and their ability to bring it to the screen in epic style. For me, Inception was impressive but ultimately unsatisfying. Interstellar is just as impressive if not more so, but with a stronger emotional core than catapults it into the highest echelons of cinema.

The film starts slowly, on a farm struggling to survive in a world suffering from lethal dust storms and chronic food shortages, and then shifts gear (almost too quickly) into SPACE! But out of the nearly three-hour running time of this film, I reckon I spent a good hour on the edge of my seat with tension and emotional tumult, to the point where I found myself trembling and exhausted - but desperately wishing for another hour to allow the story to play out. When we finally left the cinema it took me a good ten minutes to decompress before I could string a sentence together.

So, yes, I think it's brilliant. Clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also a better adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War than any adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War would have been. The representation of space as stark, brutal and indifferent to human emotion; the rigorous hard science fiction; and the unexpected, uplifting twists of hope that burned the story into my heart.

Moon

Unranked at time of writing.

It's a conspiracy! This film has been voted for by enough people, who have rated it high enough, yet it's not on IMDb's Top 250!

It easily deserves to be. It's a quiet, creepy and wonderful character-based science fiction yarn. No alien invasions nor CGI explosions, just a lonely man working out his time on a lunar mining base.

Directed by Duncan Jones, aka Zowie Bowie, and featuring a tour-de-force performance by Sam Rockwell, this wonderful story manages to pay homage to a golden age of celluloid sci-fi (think 2001, Silent Running, Alien, Outland...), and yet still be totally original. It brings the old tropes right up to date.

Moon was screened at NASA's Space Center Houston at the request of a professor there, as part of a lecture series. Softcore punk porn site SuicideGirls interviewed Duncan Jones about it:

"He'd been reading online that we'd done this film about Helium-3 mining and that's something that people at NASA are working on," said Jones. "We did a Q&A afterward. They asked me why the base looked so sturdy, like a bunker, and not like the kind of stuff they are designing that they are going to transport with them. I said 'Well, in the future I assume you won't want to continue carrying everything with you, you'll want to use the resources on the moon to build things' and a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, 'I'm actually working on something called Mooncrete, which is concrete that mixes lunar regolith and ice water from the moon's polar caps.'"