By Ezra Stead

By Ezra Stead
By Ezra Stead
As always, it is important to stress that this list is a compilation of my ten personal favorite movies of the year, and not necessarily the “best,” though I do consider the top three to be timeless, unassailable classics. The bottom three are, on the other hand, a few that I feel have not gotten the love they deserve on lists like this one. 2019 saw feature film conclusions to two of my all-time favorite television series in Deadwood and El Camino, both of which I considered for this list before ultimately deciding to count them as TV in order to make room for other, equally worthy movies. It is a bit of a cheat, necessary because of the difficulty of ranking my ten favorites out of the 113 movies I managed to see in 2019, so allow me to indulge in a bit more cheating….
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By Ezra Stead
Vore King, USA, 2016
Directed by Daniel Schneidkraut
Let’s get your first question out of the way now: “vore” is short for “vorarephilia,” a fetish involving a desire to be consumed by—or to be the one consuming—another person or creature. Yes, it is a sex thing, and yes, as per Rule 34, there is pornography for this fetish. Daniel Schneidkraut’s latest feature is a documentary about Raymond P. Whalen, sometimes known as Rock & Roll Ray (full disclosure: both the director and his subject are friends of this reviewer), who holds claim to the title of the most successful purveyor of vore porn.
Still with us? Good.
Of course, no one is actually eaten or otherwise harmed in Whalen’s vore videos. Instead, they are bizarre playacting sessions in which Whalen, dressed as one of various foam rubber monsters he designs and creates (with affectionate nicknames like Bumper Humper and Kitty Gulp), admires and then engages in simulated intercourse with a nude model, before ultimately “devouring” her. The sex is no more real than the cannibalism, and this is part of what makes a documentary that is (at least sort of) about pornography so unexpectedly charming. Read More
By Ezra Stead
Well, here we are again, folks! Every year since 2001, I’ve made it my self-imposed obligation to see at least 100 new movies (104 in 2016) and then attempt to rank my ten (or more) favorite ones against one another. Notice I didn’t say these were the “best” movies of the year, but my favorite ones; the distinction is important, lest anyone mistakenly expect a shred of objectivity herein.
Anyway, this year, in the interest of championing underdogs and holding a light to some movies you might not have been constantly hearing about since November or so, I have decided to exclude any of the Academy’s Best Picture nominees from my top ten. If you want to know how I felt about those films, you can find my favorites, unranked, in the Honorable Mentions just below the main list, and if you want to know more than that, there’s always the annual MoviesIDidntGet.com Oscars Podcast, which you can listen to on this very site, very soon. Read More