So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?
I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world.
If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.
But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:
"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"
And then on the very next line:
"United States - August 21, 2026"
Huh?
A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.
But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.
What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year.
In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.
But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not.
It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously.
I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.
No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.
I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival.
If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.
But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.
And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival.
Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them.
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