I saw 118 feature films in the theater this year, and yet I had a pretty hard time compiling this list. I saw a lot of good movies, but I feel like I saw very few GREAT ones. Very little truly blew me away, including a lot of the films everyone else is putting on their end-of-year lists. It’s not that those movies–or many of the others I saw and liked–weren’t good. It’s just that few of them particularly touched me, for some reason. I can count on one hand the number of times I cried in a theater this year, which is very unusual (I’m a big movie crier; I admit it). And nothing I saw left me as slack-jawed as The Witch or Goodnight Mommy from last year, or pushed artistic boundaries as interestingly as Birdman the year before. I can’t tell if I’m just getting old, or if being a filmmaker and seeing how the sausage is made has made movies more difficult to appreciate. But for whatever reason, it felt like a very ‘meh’ year for me.

That said, I did see some great stuff, mostly at festivals (of which I attended 10 this year, thanks to Found Footage 3D). I like to include festival movies on my list because I think it’s good to make people aware so that you can catch them in their general release. Here’s the best of what I saw in 2016:

Continue reading “Director’s Blog: Steve’s 2016 Favorites”

Before too much time went by, I wanted to share my top ten movies of 2015 with you. I saw 174 feature films this year. Of those, 128 were movies I had never seen before. I saw 79 movies in a theater (80 if I count Star Wars twice).  This is down slightly from 2014, when I saw just shy of 100 movies in a theater, but that’s to be expected, what with an infant to take care of and a movie of my own to finish. (Note: this tally does *not* include the roughly 800 billion times I watched Found Footage 3D.)

For the second year running, I saw my favorite film of the year at Fantastic Fest. Last year I opted to not include festival movies that had not been released to the general public by the end of the year. This year, I’m taking a cue from Simon Barrett and including any movie I saw in calendar 2015. This not only saves me having to compare movies I saw nearly two full years ago with stuff I just saw last week, but it also gives me an opportunity to put some great movies on your radars so that when they do finally come out, you can make sure to see them.

Here are my top ten movies for the year:

Continue reading “Director’s Blog: Steven’s Top Ten for 2015”

Three years ago this very day, I had a sudden inspiration for a story that no one had ever done before… a feature film that I could write and direct myself, and possibly even raise the money to shoot. Given that I’d never done any of those things on that scale before (especially the money raising part), it was pretty crazy to think I would be able.  It required a pretty big leap of faith, especially on the part of my very supportive wife, who thought I was nuts but went along with it anyway.

Continue reading “Director’s Blog: Anniversary”