Absolutely, 1999 was a significant year in Hollywood film history (so often interchangeable with ‘film history’ more generally), but let’s get a grip before we start hurling around the term ‘the greatest’. In the light of the carnival of rose-tinted glasses that covers much of positive discourse supporting this claim, it’s perhaps no small coincidence that The Blair Witch Project (one of my personal all-time favourite horror films, as an aside) is effectively the story of a woman filmmaker being punished by supernatural forces for daring to make a movie.

This film is more than an irreverent satire of Nazism. Forget the imaginary Hitler for a second. Waititi’s film is a song to critical thinking. Not quite an ode – too pompous. Not quite a hymn – way too serious. Something unassuming but with a heartbeat, that sways us to dance to our freedom amid the melancholia for the things we’ve lost and the things we’ll never know.

In the beginning, Godzilla was about us. The monster was made to show the ways in which we fail ourselves and harm each other. 1954’s Gojira, directed by Ishirō Honda for Toho studio, was the first in a franchise spanning more than 30 films. Gojira famously drew on Japan's recent experiences of nuclear horror: the city-destroying, unfathomable monstrosity of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

I’m devastated about Agnès Varda’s death, not only because the world has lost a great light but because she was still making art, and we’ve lost what she still had left to give us.

Whether it be in terms of creators or fans, horror is not – nor has it ever been – the ‘boys club’ it is so commonly assumed to be. In Haifaa al-Mansour’s recently released biopic Mary Shelley, the author is told by her stepsister Claire Clairmont upon first reading her famous novel Frankenstein: ‘I’ve never read such a perfect encapsulation of what it feels to be abandoned.’ At its best, horror is all about outsiders, its focus emphatically upon the experience of otherness.

In 1974, when Lanzmann had started filming his 350 hours of interviews, Holocaust cinema was the domain of European filmmakers such as Liliana Cavani, Louis Malle, Lina Wetmuller and Joseph Losey, pondering amnesia, conformism, class, and deep Freudian studies of the effects of totalitarianism on the psyche.

They could have shown something safer, more palatable. Or they could have run the risk but hedged against catastrophe – they could have braced themselves for a modest turnout and polite, uninspired applause. At the very least, they could have chosen a humble venue to hide the empty space.

That Biff Tannen is now in charge of the US is proof positive of a kink in the fabric of our space-time continuum. Like a VHS tape that’s been played, replayed, and copied over, the ghosts of movies past linger in the background of the world Americans now inhabit.

But there is no Stella Count for film criticism; instead, the women film critics I know employ a less formal and statistically rigorous response involving pinot noir, vented spleens and a high volume of f-words.

None of the women have much to say, but they sure look great striding around in their helmets and breastplates, muscles gleaming in the shimmery light of the Aegean sea.

Women in cinema have had their moments, but it’s mostly white men who are always pushed to the fore. In recent years, though, there has been something of a return to women – a gesture towards a different, perhaps kinder, cinema, and a gesture towards women as a whole (as subjects and audiences).

Get Out is above all else a horror film about representation itself. A photographer by trade, Chris’s character is intimately connected to a field of representation and it’s through his work that Peele introduces him to the audience. Opening on a black and white photograph of a pregnant African American belly, Peele cuts to an image of a white dog, straining on a leash to attack an unseen party.

No Home Movie is, at first ironically perhaps, precisely that: a home movie consisting primarily of conversations between Akerman and her mother Natalia (Nelly), recorded in the months before Nelly’s death. Yet this title also contains an important negation of the ‘domesticated’ history of amateur filmmaking traditions when brought into the family home.

Two dramas recently showing in Australian cinemas, 99 Homes and Time Out of Mind, vividly chronicle life in post-GFC America. Each, in its own way, is an essay on the decline of the American dream as it pertains to one of its core tenets: home ownership. But where, I found myself wondering after the credits had rolled, was Black America in all this?

This is how the future looks through Hollywood’s eyes: Asian trappings, but minimal Asian people. Our real future will probably not look like that: with the likelihood of China continuing to dominate economically and scientifically, the points of difference between Earth now and our space-faring future aren’t going to be white people in Chinoiserie; it’s going to be brown people in modern Chinoiserie. And it’s going to be people speaking Japanese and getting to space on Japanese tech and actually being Japanese.

When witches become palatable, they became controllable: I’d rather be a mad, dangerous, powerful crone than teen-screen friendly commercialised wank fodder, be it literally or – for the many feminist academics who went gaga for this mode of supposedly ‘progressive’ representation – something more symbolic.