My Blog

There’s always more in cinemas than the marketing budget of any one film would suggest. Alongside the blockbuster everyone’s already talking about, there are usually two or three smaller releases quietly doing better, more interesting work. Here’s the ranked list for right now — what’s actually worth the ticket price this week.

Ask most people what a director does, and you’ll get some version of “they say action and cut.” It’s not wrong, exactly — but it’s a bit like saying a pilot’s job is to sit in the front seat. The two words you actually hear are the smallest part of the job. Everything that makes those two words mean anything happens in the hours around them.

Fifty years after its release, Jaws is still the film most people point to when they want to explain what real suspense looks like. Not jump scares, not gore — dread, built slowly, out of a director who was forced by circumstance to do the harder thing and ended up making a better film because of it.

Wes Anderson is probably the most parodied director working today — you can spot a “Wes Anderson style” TikTok trend a mile off, all symmetry and pastels. But that parody sells him a bit short. Watch his films closely as a director rather than as a meme, and the colour isn’t decoration. It’s doing narrative work. It tells you where you are in time, who a character is before they’ve said a word, and when the emotional register of a scene is about to shift.

Every critic ranks films on the same handful of things: story, performance, does it move you. Fair enough. But when I watch a film, I can’t help watching it as a director first — where the camera is, what got cut, what a scene is doing with silence, why a shot holds a beat longer than it needs to. That’s the lens for this list.

I’m Scott Townsley, a working film director who still gets excited every time a story clicks into place.