I talked about that here if you want a fuller discussion. That's a pretty long post, and only part of it is about that. The short version: I was keeping up this spreadsheet of all the movies I'd seen, to accompany the Word document I have of the same, but I fell off in early 2022. I started catching up earlier this year, periodically when I had a few free moments, and now I'm finally all caught up.
So I thought I would celebrate with a little blogging project. We have Good Friday off, so I've got the time for it.
As I was adding these movies, I had to remind myself what convention I used for alphabetizing movies with the same titles. The question is the same as in the Word document, though I handle it a bit differently there. In the Word document, if two movies have the same title, I put the year after them in parenthesis, listing the older one first. So the logic is the same in Excel, except I don't need to use the parenthesis because the year gets its own column in the spreadsheet.
This short conversation I had with myself in my head, though, prompted an idea. It was an idea I could have done from the Word document, but it works better here, because this Excel spreadsheet also reminds me whether I liked the movie or not, as exemplified in a column with either the word "Up" or the word "Down." (The thumb is implied.)
So I thought: Why not look at all the films I've seen with the same title, and decide which title, itself, provides me the best value?
It's actually an idea I had for the first time a while ago, and this was the kick in the pants I needed to finally do it.
When I went through the list, I found 47 qualifying instances. That's not too many to rank, if you have a few (or 15) minutes. I'll keep my comments on each short.
So let me explain the rules here. First, exclusions.
1) No sequels or remakes or adaptations of the same material. I'm excluding any films that have the same title because they are interpretations of the same subject matter. It might be interesting to see which movies have the best remakes, but that's a difference exercise.
2) No movies that are clearly in conversation with another movie, even if they don't have the same plot. This rules out movies like Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation, Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty and Ladj Ly's Les Miserables. Those titles would not have been chosen for those movies if they didn't intend to invoke some other source material for thematic purposes, which each of these movies does.
3) Possessives matter. Disney chose to call their movie Disney's The Kid, at least as far as I've seen it listed most commonly, so that can't be the same title as Charlie Chaplin's The Kid.
4) Subtitles matter. People may refer to Luc Besson's Joan of Arc film as The Messenger, but its full title is The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, meaning it can't team up with Oren Moverman's The Messenger. (Weirdly, I just checked on IMDB and they are currently calling Besson's movie Joan of Arc. Huh?)
5) Spelling matters. Even though Twentynine Palms and 29 Palms would clearly rank last on this list -- I discussed their awfulness in this post -- for the purposes of this exercise I am not considering these to be the same title. That's possibly arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. I gave the two movies their own separate labels when I wrote about them in that post, which tells you all you need to know. This rule also knocks out Nine and 9.
6) Punctuation matters. I would love Darren Aronofsky's mother! to help strengthen the case of the two other movies I've seen called Mother, but it's not the same title. Nor is After.Life the same title as After Life, even though the period does create a space of sorts between the two words.
7) Articles matter. The Apostle is not the same title as Apostle. Same with A Hero and Hero.
Okay, now the rules for how I will rank them:
1) Each movie will be listed with the title, the year and director of each one I've seen, and whether I gave them an Up or Down.
2) Every title that has all Up will come in before any title that has at least one Down. Even if the other movie paired with the Down is one of my favorites of all time, the Down collectively drags them, um, down.
3) Quantity matters. Any scenario where I've seen three movies with that title, and they are all Up, will have to be ranked ahead of any movie with only two Ups, even if I may like the movies in the second pair much better than any of the movies in the first trio. A bit arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. There are only a few instances of seeing three different movies with the same title and no instances of seeing four.
Okay, since I'm already on the verge of losing you, let's gets this started. Because this is not a situation involving building up the anticipation toward a big reveal, I'll rank them from best to worst.
1) The Silence
Movies: 1963, Ingemar Bergman (Up); 2010, Baran bo Odar (Up); 2019, John R. Leonetti (Up)
Comment: There were two trios of movies where all three were a thumbs up, and to help me decide which I preferred, I consulted my Letterboxd ratings for them. These three had a combined 11.5 stars whereas the next trio I'll discuss had a combined 11, so this gets the #1 slot -- even if I suspect the 2019 A Quiet Place ripoff probably did not deserve 3.5 stars. Incidentally, I will not continue to use this tiebreak method for the most part. Bergman's is one of my favorite of his films and Odar's is a moody murder mystery. Incidentally, Odar's gets the poster for this post because I have already written about each of the other two Silences and used their posters in those posts.
2) Lamb
Movies: 2015, Yared Zeleke (Up); 2016, Ross Partridge (Up); 2021, Vladimar Johannsson (Up)
Comments: The first two of these both got ranked in the same year, so that was confusing. The stories of an African boy and his lamb, an unusual relationship between a man and a girl who is not his daughter, and an Icelandic couple with a strange offspring could not be more different, but they are all good.
3) Swan Song
Movies: 2021, Benjamin Cleary (Up); 2021, Todd Stephens (Up)
Comment: Speaking of movies ranked in the same year, these movies were my #6 and #20 of 2021. It may be recency bias that places these two ahead of all the double Ups, but I was profoundly moved by both the story of a terminally ill man considering whether to give over his life to a healthy clone, without telling his family, and a gay man in a nursing home trying to have a last hurrah from his old life.
4) Birds of Passage
Movies: 2015, Olivier Ringier (Up); 2018, Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra (Up)
Comment: My intense appreciation for the five-star look at an indigenous family and its role in the South American drug trade elevates the very sweet coming of age story that I watched while selecting movies for the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival.
5) The Harder They Fall
Movies: 1956, Mark Robson (Up); 2021, Jeymes Samuel (Up)
Comment: I watched these movies in the same night, as you may remember from this post. (You don't remember it. I'm fooling myself.) I went surprisingly hard for the Humphrey Bogart boxing movie as part of a conclusion of my Knowing Noir monthly series in 2021, and then was enthralled by the style of the western that followed.
6) Mother
Movies: 1996, Albert Brooks (Up); 2009, Bong Joon-ho (Up)
Comment: This title does quite well with or without the help of mother! It'd be higher if I only liked the Brooks movie a bit more, but Bong's is probably my second favorite of his, behind only Parasite. (Actually it's higher on my Flickchart than Parasite, but I suspect if they came up in a duel I would choose Parasite.)
7) The Girl Next Door
Movies: 2004, Luke Greenfield (Up); 2007, Gregory Wilson (Up)
Comment: This might be higher just on the strength of the personal favorite, better-than-a-guilty-pleasure story of a high school kid and his relationship with his new porn star neighbor, but the 2007 Girl Next Door is a rough sit. This is the one about the kids who rape and torture their neighbor in the basement for weeks on end, with the knowledge and support of their mother, based on a true story. It's good but yikes.
8) The Interview
Movies: 1998, Craig Monahan (Up); 2014, Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen (Up)
Comment: My wife and I were some of the biggest supporters of the otherwise generally dismissed movie in which a pair of journalists try to kill the supreme leader of North Korea, but it's the Australian film with a pre-Matrix Hugo Weaving that is the key here, moody and sinister.
9) Proof
Movies: 1991, Jocelyn Moorhouse (Up); 2005, John Madden (Up)
Comment: And we have our second straight pairing involving a young, even younger this time, Hugo Weaving. He plays a blind man in Moorhouse's very good film, but I was a big sucker for the Madden version starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins -- though I have not revisited it as I suspect it might not hold up.
10) Life Itself
Movies: 2014, Steve James (Up); 2018, Dan Fogelman (Up)
Comment: James' documentary about Roger Ebert got five stars from me, so obviously I loved it. I actually quite liked Fogelman's film too, a "hyperlink" melodrama starring Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, but I was in the minority on that one. The guilt keeps me from ranking this pair higher.
11) Monster
Movies: 2003, Patty Jenkins (Up); 2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda (Up)
Comment: Kore-eda is one of my favorite directors and this coming-of-age story is a top three of his films. Despite the Oscar-winning performance from Charlize Theron, though, I would say I respect Jenkins' film more than I love it.
12) Look Both Ways
Movies: 2005, Sarah Watt (Up); 2022, Wanuri Kahiu (Up)
Comment: This pairing might be lower except I was sucked in deep by Kahiu's Netflix movie that was surely designed to hook in women and not give us much else, but it did give us a lot else, including wonderful work from Lili Reinhart. Watt's film is really strong, too, and my wife knows the sister of the director, who sadly passed. (The director, not the sister.)
13) Thelma
Movies: 2017, Joachim Trier (Up); 2024, Josh Margolin (Up)
Comment: Trier's artistically accomplished look at a girl with telekinesis is more a curiosity I respect than a film I love, but I was quite charmed by last year's film about the vengeful senior citizen going after the man who scammed her.
14) Last Night
Movies: 1998, Don McKellar (Up); 2011, Massy Tadjedin (Up)
Comment: Both of these movies are mid-strong. The first is a quiet -- well, quiet by the standards of this sort of genre -- Canadian movie about how people are spending what they know is the last night on earth before some unseen apocalypse that is otherwise not visible to anyone. Sandra Oh is in it. The second is a mature movie about potential adultery with really good performances by Keira Knightly and Sam Worthington.
15) Joy Ride
Movies: 2001, John Dahl (Up); 2023, Adele Lim (Up)
Comment: Lim's buddy comedy among Asian women was just pretty good, not great, but I was a big fan back in the day of Dahl's movie about three young people being stalked by a malicious trucker, though I didn't like it quite as much on a recent revisit.
16) Frozen
Movies: 2010, Adam Green (Up); 2013, Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee (Up)
Comment: Perhaps because of the very short window between the release of these two movies, I remember the release of the Disney movie really making me think about the phenomenon of reusing a title that was already out there rather than going with something distinctive. Of course, the movie about skiers trapped on a lift above hungry wolves would not stake very much of a claim to the title in light of the through-the-roof Disney phenomenon, which I don't like as much as most people do. (See other discussions on this blog about its rivalry with my beloved Tangled.)
17) Passengers
Movies: 2008, Rodrigo Garcia (Up); 2016, Morten Tyldum (Up)
Comment: Now we're getting into the zone where one of the Up movies has something fairly problematic about it. I really vibed with Garcia's film about survivors of a plane crash in grief counseling, but the troublesome aspects of the Chris Pratt-Jennifer Lawrence vehicle about awakened passengers on a hundred-year space journey have been well documented. (I still liked it overall though.)
18) The Square
Movies: 2008, Nash Edgerton (Up); 2017, Ruben Ostlund (Up)
Comment: There are people who like Ostlund's film a lot more than I do. I was expecting a bit more given my affection for Force Majeure, though the uncomfortable seats in the theater where I watched it probably made it more of a tough sit (literally) than it would have otherwise been. Edgerton's Australian crime drama is fine but a bit forgettable.
19) Awake
Movies: 2007, Joby Herald (Up); 2021, Mark Raso (Up)
Comment: Here are two genre films that are just three-star efforts for me, just on the right side of a recommendation; one a story of a woman who awakens during surgery where she's supposed to be asleep, and one of a world where human beings have lost the ability to sleep and trying to find a cure before they all die.
20) The Killer
Movies: 1989, John Woo (Up); 2023, David Fincher (Up)
Comment: The Woo movie I remember more by reputation of the people who love it, and on that basis, it should drag The Killer ahead of Awake. However, I am fairly down on Fincher's movie the further I get from it, which drags the pair down. If I were giving out an assessment anew, I might go thumbs down on Fincher's movie.
21) It
Movies: 1925, Clarence Badger (Up); 1990, Tommy Lee Wallace (Down); 2017, Andy Muschietti (Up)
Comment: Here we get our first asterisk of this exercise; a couple asterisks, actually. The two more recent versions of It are both adaptations of Stephen King's novel, and the one from 1990 is actually a TV miniseries, though it has gotten grandfathered in to my list for reasons I won't bother to explain right now. However, obviously the 1925 It, starring Clara Bow, is not the same subject matter, so it should be included in this exercise. Because I believe I liked the Bow movie (it's a little hazy in my memory) and I know I liked Muschietti's It adaptation, I've included it at this pivot point where we're starting to include films I didn't care for -- especially since if I excluded the 1990 miniseries entirely, this would just be two films called It about different things.
22) Hero
Movies: 1992, Stephen Frears (Down); 2004, Zhang Yimou (Up)
Comment: In trying to figure out how to choose which title to rank first out of the pairs where I liked one and didn't like the other, I looked to which of the films that I liked, I liked best. Assuming, that is, the other was not completely terrible. That describes Zhang's beautiful, painterly wuxia film and Frears' curious misfire about journalism and stolen valor.
23) The Hunt
Movies: 2012, Thomas Vinterberg (Up); 2020, Craig Zobel (Down)
Comment: I believe I like Vinterberg's The Hunt more than I like Zhang's Hero, just barely, but I have a more negative appraisal of Zobel's The Hunt than Frears' Hero. The heartbreaking look at a teacher falsely accused of molestation by one of his students, which has a great Mads Mikkelsen performance at its center, is a minor masterpiece. The Most Dangerous Game-inspired movie about hunting humans is not.
24) Greed
Movies: 1925, Erich von Stroheim (Up); 2020, Michael Winterbottom (Down)
Comment: The gulf in quality between the two movies continues to widen with the two Greeds. Von Stroheim's is one of the great silent films of all time, in my top 100 on Flickchart, while I was really put off by Winterbottom's acidic look at a bastard played by Steve Coogan.
25) Kicking and/& Screaming
Movies: 1995, Noah Baumbach (Up); 2005, Jesse Dylan (Down)
Comment: About at this same level of difference in quality are my favorite Noah Baumbach film -- yes, I know that's a bold statement -- and just about my least favorite Will Ferrell film (although this year's You're Cordially Invited gives this one a run for its money). I suppose this requires another asterisk of sorts. I say punctuation matters in whether a title is the same or not, but I don't think that extends to the fairly arbitrary difference between an "and" and an ampersand.
26) The Illusionist
Movies: 2006, Neil Burger (Down); 2010, Sylvain Chomet (Up)
Comment: Back closer in quality, inspiring less of an extreme feeling from me, is this pair. Each can be compared to another film like it to color my impression. Although Burger's film was not a major misfire, it suffered majorly in comparison to the other contemporaneous magic movie, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. And although Chomet's is undoubtedly a delight in his unique style, I don't remember nearly as much about it as I remember about his The Triplets of Belleville.
27) Possession
Movies: 1981, Andrzej Zulawski (Up); 2002, Neil Labute (Down)
Comment: As awesome as Zulawskis' film is in its batshit craziness, Labute's film is that indistinct. I remember that Gwyneth Paltrow is in it and that I did not care for it, but little else.
28) White Noise
Movies: 2005, Geoffrey Sax (Down); 2022, Noah Baumbach (Up)
Comment: It took my a little while to get on the wavelength of Baumbach's apocalyptic adaptation of a Don DeLillo period piece novel, but once I did, I was really on it. The thing I remember most about the 2005 Michael Keaton thriller is that it was a contender for my first date with my wife. Thankfully, we saw The Aviator instead.
29) The Nest
Movies: 1987, Terence H. Winkless (Down); 2020, Sean Durkin (Up)
Comment: Durkin's movie about Jude Law and Carrie Coon trying to make a new life for themselves in a British castle in the late 1980s is a very good examination of domestic discord in an era of wealth acquisition. Winkless' movie is about killer insects.
30) Under the Shadow
Movies: 2013, Fiona Lloyd-Davies (Down); 2016, Babak Anvari (Up)
Comment: I remember very little about Lloyd-Davies' movie, which, like with Birds of Passage, I was tasked with watching for HRAFF. Only enough to say that I didn't care for it. Anvari's Iran-set horror movie that turns elements of Islam into horror iconography, though, was quite memorable.
31) Talk to Me
Movies: 2007, Kasi Lemmons (Up); 2023, Danny & Michael Philippou (Down)
Comment: I found Lemmons' look at DJ Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) compelling and engrossing, and the pair would have been higher had I not been completely out of sync with popular opinion on the recent horror film from a pair of Australian directing brothers, which I basically hated.
32) Joy
Movies: 2015, David O. Russell (Down); 2024, Ben Taylor (Up)
Comment: I wasn't expecting to be quite as taken as I was with the story about the scientists and doctors who developed in vitro fertilization, but Russell's movie about Jennifer Lawrence is confused. When Russell misses, he misses big.
33) Robots
Movies: 2005, Chris Wedge & Carlos Saldanha (Down); 2023, Casper Christensen & Anthony Hines (Up)
Comment: Here is a very mild thumbs down and a very mild thumbs up. In fact, I was surprised to see that I had given a thumbs down to the animated movie starring the voice of Robin Williams, though I knew any affection I had for it was marginal. It might be a better movie than the recent story of Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall playing both people and their robot doppelgangers, but I enjoyed watching the latter better.
34) The Freshman
Movies: 1925, Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor (Up); 1990, Andrew Bergman (Down)
Comment: All I really remember about the vehicle for Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick is that I saw it and that my spreadsheet says I liked it little enough to not give it a recommendation. I saw the Harold Lloyd movie during my silent movie series No Audio Audient about six years ago and thought it was pretty good.
35) The Stranger
Movies: 1946, Orson Welles (Down); 2022, Thomas M. Wright (Up)
Comment: You'd be forgiven for thinking I mixed up which one of these was up and which one was down, but I was surprised at how disappointed I was by the Welles film. The Wright film about Australian drifters, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, works better.
36) Smile
Movies: 2005, Jeffrey Kramer (Down); 2022, Parker Finn (Up)
Comment: I appreciated, but did not love, the horror movie with the people and their maniac smiles from a couple years ago, which got a sequel last year that I still haven't seen. The one from 2005, though, is a really unfortunate movie about a person with a cleft palette, which has such a better message than its ability to present it.
37) Damsel
Movies: 2018, Nathan & David Zellner (Down); 2024, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Up)
Comment: My affection for Millie Bobby Brown is undoubtedly driving my positive feelings toward Fresnadillo's film, which most people dismissed and which I likely would have also dismissed if not for Brown. Most would prefer the Zellner western, but it left me unsatisfied and scratching my head.
38) Hush
Movies: 1998, Jonathan Darby (Up); 2016, Mike Flanagan (Down)
Comment: I'm similarly in the minority in having any positive feelings about Darby's film, another one that stars Gwyneth Paltrow, but it was one of the first movies I reviewed when I was doing my first reviewing gig at the weekly newspaper in Rhode Island, and I kind of got into its groove (even though it famously had to come back for reshoots, which I apparently did not notice at the time). However, it's really dragged down by Flanagan's film about the home invasion of the deaf woman's home, a big miss for me even though I like most of Flanagan's other horrors.
39) Christine
Movies: 1983, John Carpenter (Down); 2016, Antonio Campos (Up)
Comment: I barely remember Carpenter's King adaptation, though the fact that it was Carpenter makes me wonder if I'd appreciate it more if I saw it today. I vastly prefer Kate Plays Christine as a movie about Christine Chubbuck, but liked this one just enough to give it a recommendation. However, it's telling that I couldn't remember, until I checked just now, which one was thumbs up and which one was thumbs down.
40) Scoop
Movies: 2006, Woody Allen (Down); 2024, Philip Martin (Up)
Comment: Last year's Prince Andrew movie essentially went in one ear and out the other for me, and not just because I saw it on a plane. I did give it a thumbs up though. I remember Allen's movie better, but found it terminally frivolous and not worth the time, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson.
41) Fly Me to the Moon
Movies: 2008, Ben Stassen (Up); 2024, Greg Berlanti (Down)
Comment: The movie from the third-rate animation studio about flies who hitch a ride on an Apollo mission to the moon was mildly diverting, but it's not something that would make the cut for me to watch today. Last year's similarly themed movie, only with humans, just didn't really work for me -- again, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson.
42) Rage
Movies: 2014, Paco Cabezas (Down); 2021, John Balazs (Up)
Comment: And here we get to what I believe is our final asterisk. Cabezas' disposable Nicolas Cage vehicle was actually called Tokarev in some markets, and Rage in others. I recorded it as Rage for reasons discussed in this post (it's the American title, and I follow all things American when it comes to movies). Anyway, it's not good. Balazs is a filmmaker who contacted me directly to review his film for ReelGood. I did end up liking it, though I thought it had the not-quite-ready-for-primetime quality of a film made by a person who directly contacts critics to review his films.
43) Crash
Movies: 1996, David Cronenberg (Down); 2005, Paul Haggis (Down)
Comment: It's hard to believe there are only five titles where I didn't like either of the movies I saw. This one ranks at the top because I think there are arguments to be made that I did like both of these movies, or would if I saw them today. With the Cronenberg, I think I was too new of a cinephile to appreciate what was going on there, though I have to say, his movies are hit and miss with me to this day. With the Haggis (remember when he was a thing?), I famously remember telling my then girlfriend/now wife, at the time we saw it, that it was probably the best movie I'd seen that year. How quickly that curdled into the total backlash state that has been its enduring legacy.
44) The Gift
Movies: 2000, Sam Raimi (Down); 2015, Joel Edgerton (Down)
Comment: These are both genre movies that are mild failures; both thrillers, if memory serves. Memory does not serve very well on the Raimi film, though. I just remember it not clicking for me. Edgerton's film is fresher in my memory and probably misses by about the same margin. Both Edgerton brothers have a film on this list (The Square for Nash).
45) Brothers
Movies: 2009, Jim Sheridan (Down); 2024, Max Barbakow (Down)
Comment: Speaking of brothers. Now we are getting into the quite bad. I can't remember why Sheridan's remake of a Danish film I haven't seen, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman, was such a whiff, but I do remember my strongly negative feelings toward it. The strongly negative feelings are a lot more recent for last year's movie that many people thought was supposed to be a remake of Twins, with Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage.
46) Employee of the Month
Movies: 2004, Mitch Rouse (Down); 2006, Gregory Coolidge (Down)
Comment: For movies whose titles celebrate superlative performances -- even though I believe it's supposed to be ironic in both cases -- these movies are entirely lacking in superlatives. One stars Matt Dillon. One stars Dane Cook. Both are awful.
47) Serenity
Movies: 2005, Joss Whedon (Down); 2019, Steven Knight (Down)
Comment: And lucky last goes to perhaps Lloyd Braun's favorite pair of movies, or would they cause him to scream out "Serenity now!"? I famously can't stand the Firefly movie, which we thought was so horrid that my wife and I used to quote from it for its terrible dialogue. Our favorite one was: "Everyone on this planet is dead for no reason." Maybe we just didn't get it. Then you have Knight's truly bizarre Matthew McCaughney starrer, whose absurdity I can't even get into without going into spoilers, though I've also blocked most of it out.
If you are still here, congratulations. That was a long and tedious exercise.
But at least it's done now.
