The end of the year brings some structural changes and new content to the site. These are accessible directly from the main navigation menu above, or from the sidebar of the relevant sections. For several years the Critic section has been lacking in updates and largely overlooked, as I have little time to write longform film reviews. Last year the Reeltime Harry Potter series gave it a shot in the arm but, whilst we intend to do more Reeltime projects, they too require a considerable time investment.

QuickViews

To allow for more regular updates, we are formalising the QuickView single-paragraph reviews that grew out of last year’s film resolution. Rather than collecting them into posts of a dozen or more films (which became somewhat overwhelming for readers) they will now appear as individual posts in the Critic section. Hopefully this will also encourage more engagement on individual reviews. The final set of 2018 QuickViews will be collated at the end of the year, but after that they will no longer appear in the Fragments section, where they already felt slightly out of place.

Fives

Another new feature is Fives, a response to the routine question about my favourite films. I do not have a favourite film and a static top ten list has struck me as absurd whenever I have tried to construct one. The films that speak to me the most will change considerably depending on my mood, my current focus, and a host of factors. To reflect this, Fives presents selections of five movies within varied categories loosely inspired the weird genre classifications Netflix uses for its recommendations. The Fives page will be updated only intermittently, but feel free to suggest new categories and I will try to populate them.

Virtual Photography

Meanwhile, the Artist section now features a new gallery of Virtual Photography, featuring “photographs” shot in the virtual worlds of various videogames. Over the past year I have started applying the techniques I have learned from real-world photography to experiment with virtual images. Starting with Red Dead Redemption 2, this will gradually expand as increasing numbers of games provide tools to reduce the HUD or fully-fledged photo modes. In fact, for the first time this virtual photography provided the image for this year’s Christmas card.