Tara Brown

Comments

Moonlight

I was there at LFF where it was screened and there was a ten minute ovation. We felt it from the first bars of the opening song. Tender, vulnerable. To see Black bodies given the right lighting, the right music. And to see Moonlight win best movie was a touchstone moment for me, a moment I really did feel seen and loved and Black.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

It's a bold move to put such a new film on the list, but in the end it felt right because this film was pure magic. The ambition was almost terrifying - bringing multiverse energy into a story about a mother daughter relationship, action films, mental health, a life crisis, hot dog hands and chekov's buttplug!? I have been living in this film since I was plunged into its world. How often I have used the phrase I will always want to be there with you to save a relationship, save a friend?

It is on this list because so many films have tried and failed to bring together a scale of ambition, play and entrenched family conflict and fall into sillyness, dropped threads and dead exposition. Everything Everywhere All At Once took it all on and created the best representation of love and positivity saving the day.

Paddington 2

A film of delight that unites diaspora. Everywhere I go where I meet a film nerd, we need to take 20 mins at least to marvel over Paddington 2. From full bodied laughter to blurred with tears at the end. It's a symposium on kindness. Paddington 2 is the perfect anti Brexit film and is completely perfect end to end. If this isn't in the top 100 I will protest. Loudly!

Spider-Man  Into the Spider-Verse

The best 21st century superhero film. I sat in Peckhamplex, jaw down, face hurting with my smile for two hours. Vibrant, animation of the highest order, and a message about being a hero and that anyone can wear the mask.

Shoplifters

Kore-Eda does the best films about found family and creating families in unorthodox ways. Shoplifters provides the biggest emotional arc of his films. He crushed my heart. I am forever trying to peer over the balcony, wishing to reclaim what was lost.

Inside Out

If you ask most mental health therapists they will praise Inside Out. This film came to me during a breakdown where I had lost so much sense of self. Seeing this film with loving friends helped me begin to turn around, understand my emotions, understand the reason and liberation and help that sadness brings. Things like this people don't learn in a lifetime.

The Watermelon Woman

A seminal work, a film that deserves better distribution! It's radical. It is a work of history activism as BIPOC queers are so erased out of history and sometimes we have to create what is already there.

Toy Story

I kept the cinema ticket with me for over 20 years. Because the film is that precious to me. It has sunk into the canon. When a good person's status is threatened, how do you react, can you hang on to your goodness or do you get twisted into something else? One of my favourite films about jealousy, whilst being a thoroughly brilliant, funny kids film

Further remarks

Special mentions to: Small Axe, Still Walking, Back to the Future, Contact, Superman, Pariah, The Social Network, The Raid 2.

Very much up for giving further comments to my top ten. It's a bit sparse because I am having a fibro flare.