The challenge for 2018 was to watch 365 films in 365 days. Not necessarily every day but just the total. And not necessarily 365 new films, just 365.

I made the total on the 18th November, with Primer. At that point I had seen 290 new films, so with 75 left I knew it would be difficult but possibly achievable.

In the end I watched 457 films, 378 of which I had never seen before. You can see the major statistics for the year on this infographic, and deeper stats analysis on this post.

I’m pleased to have done this, and it’s definitely broadened my knowledge of films over the least 90 years. I want to mention Letterboxd.com as being such a great service for tracking films watched – the stats pages were superbly useful, and the ability to create multiple lists for different needs makes it so much easier to manage what you want to watch compared to every actual movie service that has a single listing function.

This summary would be a bit short if I just said that I achieved my goal and was pleased to do so. Here are the things I learned, and some bests/worsts from the year…

Things I learned:

1. Back catalogues are a great way to see a range of film types, getting out of my personal bias for genre or style. This was particularly true for directors
2. Amazon Prime Video is the best place to go to find a range of quality films. The inclusion of Channels means you have a lot of services in one place, and they are regularly (more than once a month) introducing new films to watch, as well as giving dates when films will leave the service
3. If a film leaves one service it usually means it’s appearing on another one – generally between Netflix and Amazon but sometimes Sky Cinema or one of the other services (BFI, MUBI, MGM)
4. Netflix is great for TV, but not great for films
5. Tilda Swinton is phenomenal, as is Cate Blanchett
6. Female directors are better than male directors (Average rating 7.52 vs 6.98 respectively)
7. Films from female directors are much less likely to be advertised or easily available on the major services

Bests & Worsts:

• Best film from 2018 – Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was easily the best thing I watched that came out this year. Visuals, narrative, performance, soundtrack… all of it was top notch and better than pretty much any other superhero film

• Best new film – Amélie probably takes it on what is an exceptional list of films. I’ve ended up seeing Amélie three times this year and I’ve enjoyed it every time, so that’s probably the biggest support I can give it

• Best film – The Prestige is one of my very favourite films for a reason, watching it again this year I pick up on things I missed on previous watches

• Worst film – The Con is On (also called the Brits are Coming) was one of three films that got just 1/10 this year, and as offensive as Deck The Halls was, this was even more so and I would like this time back in my life

I’ve done some other posts about this challenge – you can find the stats analysis here, you can find deeper thoughts on each streaming service here, and you can read about the 2019 challenge here.