Some people know me for game-related stuff, but I probably watch movies more than I play games. I mostly like sci-fi, sci-fi horror, and stoner comedies. If you like any of these, here are some of my favorite movies I saw this year. Not all of these came out this year, of course. These aren't in any particular order, either. If you have similar tastes as me, then I hope some of these recommendations will give you some enjoyment.
Also, please overlook my poor writing below - I'm basically writing all of these descriptions from memory in a train-of-thought format. Weird wording and bad spelling/grammar are sure to abound.
A kid becomes famous around town for solving mysteries, just like in Encyclopedia Brown, Three Investigators, Hardy Boys, etc. books. But the movie takes place when he's a washed-up adult with a joke of a detective agency. So very better than what I expected.
A dark, slow, and very creepy foreign sci-fi, horror, social commentary film about an apartment complex that installs a new government-mandated antenna. I recall some of the visuals being impressively disturbing.
A man and a woman must navigate + survive when the pilot of their little plane suddenly dies. I seem to recall that they don't really have much flying expertise. If you like bottle + thriller movies, I guess try it.
I was never a big fan of the original, but my wife was, so I watched this with her. It turned out to be more interesting than I thought. I remember feeling like the story/movie must've been written with the final "climax" battle in mind from the start, but it was still good.
Finally watched these, were as cheesy as I expected. They were fun, with the best one IMO being when they rob that bank in South America. Newer entries do feel more like "James Bond movies but with muscles, dance music, and bald people everywhere". The title still lives on in jokes and memes, which is neat. I had a dream a sequel to Tokyo Drift was in the works.
A Korean horror film that involves Korean exorcism and Korean ghost stuff. I enjoyed the unsettling vibe that the film unleashes.
I absolutely loved this. It's a comical sci-fi horror about the ultimate evil being. Except the ultimate evil being was defeated before the movie begins, and was sealed away and sent off into space. It gets dug up by some kids, and the kids try to make the evil monster their friend. Warning ahead of time: the main girl is annoying in the movie, but if you understand that she's SUPPOSED to be annoying it's a little more tolerable. I rarely get annoyed this much by characters in movies, so I was actually impressed by the annoyance, heh.
A ghost hunting show hires a town local as a guide to a haunted spot. But then things get weird, twisty, and confusing. It feels like a budget bottle type horror film but I really enjoyed the weird surprises it had to share.
I usually hate cliche "spooky kid sees spooky things but nobody believes him" Goosebumps-esque horror movies. But this one was weird and creepy enough for me to remember it almost a year later.
A detective in New Orleans follows a mystery drug that missing people have taken. If you like time manipulation-y type of stories, you'll probably like this. Some things are easy to see coming from a mile away, but I really liked when the main character tries to study the supernatural phenomenon he encounters in a sort of scientific way.
I'm not usually into "kid and parent go to an isolated cabin and the parent meets a mysterious love interest" horror stories, but this one had some creepiness-delivering pacing and surprises.
WTF how did I never hear about this before? It's a horror comedy drama that's tough to explain without giving away details, but it has meta elements and a VHF-esque silliness to it that I just love.
Dude has an accident but doesn't die? He continues his life as if nothing happened, until he realizes no one can see or hear him. I barely remember this but the concept has always interested me.
Imagine Freaky Friday, except one of the people who gets switched is a serial killer who loves to kill students. Nothing incredibly special, but it was fun enough.
A comet is coming! Fragments start to wreck the world, and then it's a rush to the underground bunkers in an undisclosed location. I recall it felt like your usual disaster movie but more toned down than the usual "mega destruction" disaster movies.
It's World War II and weird ass stuff starts happening on a gunship flying through the air. It's mostly predictable, but I enjoyed the claustrophobic atmosphere and interesting ideas here and there.
Some weird stuff washes up on a beach, and then people start getting infected with some weird thing. I normally don't go for this kind of movie, but I liked the slightly different way the infection progresses. I recall the visuals being good too.
People will surely describe this as a toned down Mad Max or a slow, drier John Wick. Basically the wrong people steal a dude's car, and that car is super important. I haven't seen a Guy Pearce movie in a long time, but he still manages to do a great job.
The premise of this is really weird, but if you're a fan of comedy-suspense-horror that juggles silly gore with disturbing gore, you'll probably like this. I usually hate movies that rely on gore, but this one does plenty of other stuff as well.
I wouldn't say I "liked" this, but it was memorable and unsettling enough for me to remember months later. Vibe-wise, it felt creepy and confusing, and some of the sets felt very real to me, yet unnatural at the same time.
A thief tries to case a fancy house, but becomes involved with its owner. It turns out the owner is a flashy serial killer with her own goals. More than anything, I just liked this movie for its over-the-top presentation. I usually don't like "uh oh this house we're criminalizing actually belongs to a worse criminal" movies, which seem to be increasing in number lately.
I had missed this one because I chose to watch the other magician/illusionist movie that came out at about the same time. This one went in a different direction and was very enjoyable. It's an artsy fartsy olde-timey story that takes place in Vienna I believe, but even if that sort of movie sounds like a turn off to you (it usually is for me), I think the rest of the film is incredibly strong and entertaining.
A wife accidentally kills her husband, but she becomes a town celebrity when everybody thinks the husband has gone missing. Things unravel in a fun way.
I actually saw this right when it came out. On second watch, it doesn't hold up as well. The thing I remembered most about the movie only happens at the very end too. But if you like space exploration movies and/or "why does our little group keep losing people" mystery movies, you might like this.
I finally watched this after all this time. It really does feel like it's going to be a classic movie that people remember for decades to come. It was pretty good IMO, but if the ending disappoints you, it's possible you might not have put all the pieces together yet.
I really don't like zombie stuff at all, but the cinematography of this blew me away. At first I was like "WTF why is it filmed on such a crappy camcorder?" but upon realizing that it was a stylstic choice to make the events feel more "real", I really enjoyed it.
A girl joins a university sleep study to figure out how to fix her constant nightmares. It's a predictable enough movie, but some of the visuals in this movie are AMAZING and absolutely deserve some sort of award. I want more of these creepy visuals!
I have a hard time with Tom Cruise movies, as I can only ever see him as "Tom Cruise". But I really enjoyed the look and feel of this sci-fi movie, as well as the growing realizations that the main character makes alongside the viewer.
A gritty suspense horror at a cabin. Some wolf or something has been killing stuff, so a dad tries to kill it, but then... Again, I rarely like these types of movies, but this did some unexpected things that made it really memorable for me.
A sci-fi horror anthology. I love these when they work right. And this works amazingly well. One day, a bunch of doors just start appearing throughout the world. We get to see how various people react to this bizarre and sometimes horrifying situation. Definitely one of my favorites of the year.
When things have extra sub-titles like this, it usually makes it sound really bad. This is a suspense comedy about computer-y stuff, but I mostly just remember the suspense aspect. From the preview alone I would've definitely ignored this movie, but I gave it a shot and was very pleasantly surprised.
Another sci-fi horror bottle movie, but mostly just horror. A lady gets stranded on a lone highway, but no matter how far she walks, she keeps ending up back where she started.
A sci-fi horror drama comedy with social commentary. From that description alone this sounds kind of bland, but basically ordinary people can sign up to lay special cables to hook things up to a new quantum Internet. At first it seems like a basic premise and it sounds like an easy enough job, but the main character ends up with a fake ID that leads to problems. I forget the details, but I'd watch this again for sure someday.
A suspense horror about a husband and wife. They suddenly get locked inside their own house by a mysterious entity that makes them follow its instructions. A lot of cliche relationship stuff happens too, but I still recall liking the movie as a whole by the end.
A "suspense, action" foreign film with a story based on a massive, real-life tunnel accident that happened in the Norwegian mountain area. I actually hated this film and gave up partway through. But I'm listing this because my god it feels like a scientist or a programmer or something must've directed it. We follow like 80 different groups/main characters and view the incident from their eyes. It feels like programming code in the sense of "first we gotta define ALLLLLLLL the variables", then we gotta add comments about them alllllllll, then we prepare for the next step by doing 50 other setup things. It felt like whoever was involved REALLY wanted to document everything, leading to overwhelming overdocumentation. I understand the importance to stay true to the events of the story, but from a storytelling sense it falls so hilariously flat.
The name and the trailer turned me off from this at first - it all feels so generic. But I gave it a shot and it was much better than I expected. Some super creepy visuals and a constant feeling of existential dread. It falls apart at the end, but that was probably to be expected.
I've always loved stupid stoner comdies, but somehow missed this one from quite a while back. It's about the work staff at a fancy restaurant, except they all mess with each other and have to deal with silly situations + customers.
Again, I'm super late to the party but this was really good. It feels like an artsy fartsy movie, and it is, but it involves time traveling back and forth between the past and present, meeting famous artists and celebrities from the past, who offer advice about the main character's predicament in the present.
I love movies like Tremors that have a mysterious new creature eating/chasing people in unusual ways. This movie is kind of like that, but is about a big mine where weird stuff happens and miners get dead.
A foreign sci-fi comedy/drama anthology. It revolves around societies that are falling apart, and the ordinary people in them who have to somehow still survive. That description sounds boring, but if you're in the mood for a different kind of sci-fi/horror anthology, check this out. I liked it enough that I'll probably watch it again eventually.
A bottle-esque suspense thriller about an ordinary lady who works at a high-tech storage facility. Stuff happens and she gets taken hostage and has to survive + thwart her captors + escape + save others all at the same time. This wound up better than I expected!
A comedy "mockumentary" about a guy who's intent on exposing false prophets because he fell victim to one and lost everything as a result. It gets really weird, cool, and even scary in places. The cover and the trailer make it look kinda bland and generic, but I'm glad I ignored those outer appearances.
A kidnapped girl escapes from her kidnapper and tries to get a truck driver to help her hide. But of course it's not going to be that easy. The tension in this movie was off the charts in some scenes. I remember thinking I'd give this movie some awards if I could.
This sounds like (and to some extent, IS) a generic "spooky kid sees spooky things" movies. But the spookiness in this movie was really good, and the fact that the monster can grant wishes adds more to the tension.
A competently good, solid sci-fi story in movie form. In some ways it's pretty ordinary, but I enjoyed learning about the current situation piece by piece, and learning bits of speculative sci-fi history that all hook together.
A comedy drama... thing? I'll just post Amazon's description here: "A directionless college grad working as a campus bus driver forms an unlikely friendship with the bus’s night shift security guard — a heavily tattooed, 300-lb man named Pineapple." I had reservations about this movie going into it, but it turned into a memorable story and it sometimes felt so real that I almost felt I was there with the characters.
A very stylistic and creative movie about the "video nasties" that plagued the UK decades back. In particular, this story is about a person on the censor board, and how watching so many horrific videos affects her. There's also a larger story above it all that connects the censor lady with certain mysterious events.
An action comedy drama starring Bob Odenkirk doing badass stuff. This was a lot of fun - it felt like a really and satisfying amusement park ride from start to finish.
A sci-fi horror film similar in feel to Cube. I vaguely recall that this might have been a European film that takes place in (or at least partly takes place in) America. Basically, a woman wakes up and finds herself trapped in a series of tubes filled with deadly traps. She has to figure her way out by using her smarts, environmental clues, and other bits of information gleaned from unexpected sources. It almost feels like a video game now that I describe it. In any case, this had been on my radar for a year or more until it just randomly dropped in 2021.
A mixture of comedy and relatable frustration. A guy orders an engagement ring, but the shipping company screws up. The rest of the movie is the guy getting more and more frustrated trying to get the customer service person to fix the problem. From the description and the title, you can expect there to be some violence.
A weird comedy movie that will probably become a cult classic. Two guys discover a gigantic fly in the trunk of a car they stole. After some mishaps, they decide to train the fly so they can be rich. The silliness reminded me in general of movies like Rubber, Blood Car, etc.
I was sad to see how this movie immediately just rips up everything the previous movies had accomplished. But it was also a lot of fun once it got going. The time travel shenanigans in this one were really fun and better than I had expected.
A comedy horror. A small town is besieged by a mysterious serial killer, and the town has to survive and figure out what's going on. Some fun casting and surprises.
I don't really like gory movies, so I was never big on Saw, but this turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. The casting was a surprise too, but I felt it worked well. Basically, this is a gritty detective movie where the killer seems to be following a familiar pattern of brutality. I think I just liked seeing how Saw movies might look from an outside perspective, rather than of someone stuck in some torture device. Although that does happen too of course.
This felt like a combination of a goofy stoner-ish comedy, a horror movie, and a coming of age story. The movie turned out to be nothing like what I had expected, but I'd warn against seeing the trailer as it gives a lot away.
Two young adults (I think?) in Wisconsin discover that a group of thieves is targeting their neighbors' houses. It's hard to remember how to explain this. Maybe think of it as an alternate universe's version of Home Alone, except it's darker and more of a suspense, thriller, horror than a kid's movie.
A comedy-drama. The apocalypse is coming and everyone knows it. We follow a bunch of weird characters dealing with the situation in their own ways. It was also neat to see a movie clearly made during the COVID pandemic.
A family living on a small plot of land on Mars is suddenly attacked by other settlers. The story is sharp and hope-crushing at times. I really liked the quiet desert-ness of it all, and how ordinary all the future tech seemed.
A suspense thriller about a family on a road trip that gets targeted by a mysterious van. If you liked Duel, you'll probably like this, although it veers off in a different direction entirely.
A sci-fi comedy drama about an Uber driver who picks up a really weird passenger. I really loved how this movie didn't follow the usual, expected plot threads in some parts.
I dunno how to classify this properly. It's a bunch of genres at once. It's about a public defense attorney who keeps messing up while weird cosmic-y things happen around him. It got so weird that I can't recall the details about it, but it's a fun movie if you're in the right mood.
A comedy action movie. I was looking forward to this for years, but it kept getting pushed back and pushed to different companies. It's a fun story about an NPC in an online game who discovers he's in a game.
This was a lot better than I had expected. As a movie, it was fun, but I especially enjoyed it as a linguist. Basically, this movie seems to use a newer type of writing style that cuts through social red tape and "reading between the lines" so it makes sense to people who best grasp concepts when presented in a "And then that marine punched Einstein and everyone clapped" sort of Facebook-esque format. I've noticed more and more movies using this writing style lately, in fact. So if you do watch this, view the dialogue in that light, otherwise you'll get frustrated by how the dialogue spells everything out and hits you over the head with its bluntness.
A thriller, suspense movie. A guy gets obsessed with bizarre video broadcasts similar to the Max Headroom incident in the 1980s. As he digs deeper, things get more suspenseful.
An underwater haunted house movie. Nothing incredible or inventive happens, but this was a fun combination.
I like stoner comedy movies, but I hate comedy that's just "isn't this weird!?" or "boy this is really awkard!!". A lot of Seth Rogan's movies have been like that lately, so I skipped this movie until now. It was quite good, and felt in places like a distant cousin to the Harold and Kumar Christmas movie.
So many workplace horror stuff these days - it's definitely a sign of the times. In this movie, a toy store gets struck by a meteorite just before Black Friday... and people get infected. This was a really fun movie, and features Bruce Campbell, in case you're into his stuff.
An absolute gem of a silly comedy movie. Don't watch any trailers or look at any info about this - just go into it blind. A sequel is mentioned in the final credits, but the movie did so poorly that there's probably zero hope for a sequel. This is probably the best comedy I've seen this year, and maybe in several years. I can't believe I never heard of it until now - I want more of this in my veins!
I actually saw this horror anthology when it came out a while back, but I watched it again this year and wow it's still really good, even when I know what's coming. Seriously, this is probably one of the most fun Christmas horror movies I've ever seen.
You know how comet and asteroid movies usually have us kicking butt as soon as we discover a deadly comet? This movie is a more realistic take on how things would go. Similar to The Forever Purge, this script uses a newer writing style that cuts the crap, gets to the point, and tries to speak in clear language to viewers who usually digest information in "overexaggerated Facebook story/chain e-mails from Grandma" format rather than the more traditional writing style. If you watch with this in mind, the script is more tolerable. If you watch it at face value, it'll feel like the writers are hitting you in the head with the incredibly simplistic writing. It's clear this was intentional, as the movie is 100% social commentary on life and politics today, especially during COVID. In that sense, I liked this movie as a piece of history. I probably wouldn't watch it again though.
Technically this isn't a movie but it was a really interesting series on Netflix. Similar to The Forever Purge and Don't Look Up, the writing in this is very carefully written in language that the average random person can understand and relate to. I was really impressed with the wording choices during some of the many monologues, as it was intended to get straight to the point in a way that can pierce multiple politics/ideologies. I'm not fond of this style of writing, but it sure has been picking up steam these past few years.
A suspense horror film. Terrorists take over a plane, but a woman with a strange illness decides to take things into her own hands to protect her son. I was worried this would be a standard cliche horror film and/or a standard "uh oh bad guys on a plane again" movie, but I quite enjoyed it in the end.
A Korean sci-fi horror movie about two doctors who discover that ghosts are real. They use science to study it, but of course things get corpsey. Some really interesting, rarely explored ideas come up during the story too. It got kind of cheesy near the end, but I liked it well enough.
A suspense thriller that really messes with your mind. I almost forgot this movie entirely, until I saw the preview again and was like "oh yeah!!".
A sci-fi thriller movie. A newlywed woman is told that a certain room is off-limits in her husband's house. When she checks it out, it gets weird. I wish I had a good name for this type of movie, there's gotta be a good word for it.
A horror thriller drama? I can't remember if this is the movie I'm thinking of, but if it is, it's got some fun sci-fi elements too. I remember thinking "oh, it was based on a book, no wonder it was that cool".
Someone stows away on a spacecraft being sent to Mars. But the extra weight messes things up right off the bat, and the insufficient supplies causes tensions to rise. A pretty decent space movie if you're into those things.
A sci-fi horror thriller. I confuse this with other movies that have a similar vibe, but I recall that this one felt satisfying. I don't remember much but I guess I'll list it here anyway.
A sci-fi thriller action movie. I don't recall this being super great or anything, just fun and cool. It's full of military stuff and android stuff. I usually don't like when these are paired, but this time I think it worked okay.
A foreign thriller suspense story. In some small way it feels like Duel too, but it gets angry and deadly quick. Some surprises here and there kept me in suspense.
Wow, this was really good!
PS: I wanted to check my Hulu viewing history to add more movies to this recommendation list. But Hulu doesn't have a simple way of checking your viewing history (WTF) so I guess I can't recommend any Hulu stuff to anyone. Oh well, it's their loss.