Three Years and a Thousand Movies

After three years of sharing with you our movie reviews, we would like to make a balance with some statistics. In our last two yearly articles, we reported about the history of the blog and the trade-off between blog providers, in addition to statistics about the number of movies seen, their country of production, their genre and rating, the list of visited film festivals, and finally a short list of recommended movies of the year.

This year we will try to give an overview on the work we have done from July 20th 2012 to July 20th 2015.

 
Statistics on Publications and Pageviews
Having now three years to compare it is even possible to speculate about trends.

Let's have a look at our behaviour over the three last years. In the plot of the number of movies posted per month, we can see the trend that some months are quieter with a stable fewer than 25 posts in December and July. The peaks are located in May mostly caused by the Far East Film Festival in Udine. Also in September and October we have a relatively high number of posts, mostly caused by the several small festivals in Munich and Bremen and maybe by the Autumn coming back. 

Movies posted by JoRafCinema per month in the first (dark blue), second (medium blue) and third (light blue) year

On the plot of the number of pageviews per month, we can obviously see the step reached by the opening of JoRafCinema to search engines after one year and the publication of the Newsletter at about the same time. On top of that we see also that the number of pageviews is increasing steadily every year, in particular during the months when we have our peaks of posts (FEFF in April/May, various festivals in September). This means a lot for us because besides the friends following JoRafCinema in the first year before the publication, many others joined.

Posts viewed on JoRafCinema per month in the first (dark blue), second (medium blue) and third (light blue) year

The list of countries where the viewers are coming from is interesting. The list below presents the percentage of the main (top ten) country of origin and therefore does not show the Asian and Latin American countries from where we have less pageviews.
As the JoRafCinema team is living in Germany, it is normal that Germany is on the top. The United States of America are in second position because our blog is written in English, and the Internet companies send a lot of robots on the blogs. Depending on the sense we give to Europe, we find only European countries in the remaining top ten. It is good that Russian and Ukrainian viewers like our posts, possibly because we watched some movies from these countries, from the Soviet Union and from the Baltic states.

The most viewed movie's posts are also quite surprising. Some well-rated movies are in, like the Russian movie in Russian and Ukrainian Kak menya zovut and the wonderful Filipino romance Shift. A few good horror movies are in (Tulpa, It follows and Housebound) while other very bad-rated movies are also present. This means that the viewers on JoRafCinema have really all kind of taste, going from the Horror and Danish Polar via Japanese Pinku and French Drama to fine Romance.
Even if one review and the rating are very bad, we are happy that any review motivates people to watch movies.

Statistics on the movies viewed and comparison with worldwide production and distribution 
The plot below of Number of movies seen by country is the update of the one shown in last year's article. First of all we are proud to count that within three years we have seen more than 1000 movies produced in 67 countries all over the world, a majority of those still coming from the USA followed by France and England (~ 100 movies each), Germany (60) and Japan, Canada, Spain and Italy (30-40).
We are still watching many movies from Europe and Asia (mainly at the Far East Film Festival in Udine), but this year we made a special effort in increasing our coverage of the South American continent (24 co-productions compared to 6 last year) and of Eastern Europe. Africa is still blank on the map except for a very few South African releases.

Number of movies we have seen (co-)produced per country, with close-up view on Europe and East Asia. Note that out of the 10 Russian movies, 4 were actually produced at the time of the Soviet Union.

For external statistics, we checked data from UNESCO available here. There are more stats on the movie theatre market than on the movies themselves. One interesting stats is the comparison of the country of production. Where are produced the movies worldwide and where are produced the movies reviewed in JoRafCinema? 
In the table below as expected, there is a bias with India, the major producing country but almost not exported. A similar phenomenon occurs with Nigeria for which unfortunately no movie has been reviewed on JoRafCinema. 
As expected also, the USA are more seen than they produce. And JoRafCinema follows this trend as well. The same phenomenon occurs for the UK, Germany and France. As with this stats it is not easy to understand whether JoRafCinema really like movies from the USA, the UK, France and Germany, we need to have a better view on what kind of movies are available in Europe.

Worldwide production per country compared with Movies in JoRafCinema

By searching in statistics institutes all over Europe, the material found was very poor, apart from Austria (thanks to Statistik Austria, Bundesanstalt Statistik) and France (thanks to the CNC). This allows making slightly biased comparison between what we could watch if we were living in Austria or France and what we actually watch. As the list from the CNC is more detailed (and we are incidentally French), we focused our analysis on that table. On the histogram below we can notice some disparities:
1. China, Japan, South Korea: JoRafCinema watches much more than distributed in France, 
2. India, Russian Federation, Brazil and Mexico: JoRafCinema watches more or less as it is distributed in France, 
3. Nigeria and Argentina are not visible in these stats, apart inside other countries of Africa (watched much less by us than distributed in France) and other Latin American countries (watched much more by us than distributed in France). The number of distributed African movies distributed in Germany (where we live) might be much lower than in France and therefore we lack African movies. 
There is a clear tendency of JoRafCinema to look for Latin American (apart from Brazil and Mexico) and Asian (apart from India) movies.

Movie distribution in France per country of production, Worldwide production per country compared with Movies in JoRafCinema as histogram (click to enlarge)

Statistics on movie genre and production year
The following diagram presents all the genres defined in JoRafCinema. The bubble size is driven by the number of movies. The larger the size, the more movies JoRafCinema has been watching. The bubble colour is driven by the average rating as shown in the scale: the darker blue the lower average rating, the darker red the higher average rating. The label displays not only the Genre but also the Number of movies and the Average rating.
Visually we can draw some conclusions. The small dark blue bubbles (here Melodrama) depict Genres completely underrepresented. We cannot say really that we do not like them, we just do not watch much Melodrama (7 only). The large dark red bubbles (here Thriller and Drama) depict Genres correctly largely represented according to JoRafCinema's taste. Inversely, small dark red bubbles (here Epic, Western, War and Black comedy) depict Genres that JoRafCinema should watch more as these are genres we like but do not watch much. Large light blue bubbles (here Action, Comedy and Horror) depict Genres that JoRafCinema might watch too much with regard to our taste. Actually it is not right to conclude on Genres with very small number of movies, as the statistics are strongly biased.
Compared to last year, we watched more Documentaries and Polar and noticed that we like Polar more than before. We watched relatively few Horror movies. We doubled the number of Western and Epic movies. As for Black comedies, it seems that we cannot watch much more although we like
them. A more detailed analysis of the movie market and which Genres are distributed would be interesting to locate JoRafCinema with regard to the global market.

On the histogram below one can track the production year of the movies we have reviewed in the past three years. The trend in the third year is very similar to the one observed during the first two but the larger amount of samples allow us to further notice that from 1990 on, the number of movies we review is roughly proportional to the inverse of their age, with a maximum for the movie of the current year and the immediately preceding one. To the exception that during the third year of JoRafCinema we apparently watched few movies from the 2010's but more from the 2000's.
For movies released before 1990, the trend doesn't go anymore with age but with our actual preferences, i.e. we like the Thrillers from the 60's, Polars from the 70's and Action movies from the 80's. Older movies are still seldom reviewed.

Number of movies per production year watched in the first three years of JoRafCinema. Mind the change of vertical scale for the year after 2009.

In addition of the trends on the production year of the movies we watch, the pie charts below show the evolution of the Genres we have watched from the first to third year of JoRafCinema. Some trends are visible: we have been watching more Adventure, Drama, Documentary and Romance, but less Action, Comedy, Horror and Thriller.

Ratio of movies per Genre reviewed per year of JoRafCinema.

Movie genres can also be sorted by reviewer, as shown on the pie charts below. For those who know us it will be no surprise to see that one watched more Action, Fantasy and SF while the other prefers Drama, Polar, Romance and Documentary. This split of preferences actually makes for a nicer overview on JoRafCinema as if we both had the same tastes.

Ratio of movies per genre seen by both co-bloggers of JoRafCinema.

Festivals  
We have participated to quite a few Festivals this past year: Munich Fantasy Film Fest 2014, Donostia Zinemaldia 2014 in San Sebastian (Spain), Nordic Film Days 2014 in Lübeck (Germany),  Fantasy Film Nights 2015 in Munich (Germany), and the classic one for JoRafCinema: the Far East FilmFestival 2015 in Udine (Italy).
In the coming year we intend to further participate to film festivals:

• 04-11.11.2015: Nordic Film Days in Lübeck
• 27-31.01.2016: Gerardmer Fantastic Film Festival
• June 2016: Nippon Connection, the Japanese Film Festival in Frankfurt am Main

Movies recommended by JoRafCinema from the last year
Among the 343 movies watched by JoRafCinema from July 20th 2014 to July 20th 2015, we have selected the ones that we wish to recommend, particularly ones that were less heard of.
[Jo]:

• Birdman, a humane reflexion on the super-hero movie trend by Alejandro González Iñárritu
• Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller couldn't have done any better for this post-apocalyptic instant classic.
• The Ninth Gate, the nice mystery by Roman Polanski with Johnny Depp
• The Fall of the House of Usher, a 1928 classic, now re-released with an Electro soundtrack. Very interesting
• Tusk, the latest Kevin Smith that brought him back to movie-making because only him could have produced that weird Horror flick
• The Blob, a classic of the 80's horror that still stands especially compared to other movies of the same period
• The Wicker Man, now cult pagan 'apology' by Robin Hardy co-starring the regretted Christopher Lee.
• The Last Reel from Cambodia, big success of the Far East Film Festival 2015
• Heavy Metal, the psychedelic animated UFO from 1981. The Blu-ray bonus documentaries are also very interesting to learn about the atypical making of the movie.
• Cold in July, discrete and modest Texan thriller that goes back to the roots of the genre.
• Marshland, a Spanish Polar worth watching
• Elite Squad, the shock Brazilian police Action movie by José Padilha
• And I will not elaborate on some old and recent movies that I loved but that are easy to find: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, Jurassic Park, Gone Girl, Kingsman the Secret Service, 2001 A Space Odyssey and Interstellar, Brokeback Mountain, It Follows, and the TV-series Sons of Anarchy and Sherlock.

[Raf]:

• Lost Highway, the Masterpiece from David Lynch
• What we do in the shadows, the best comedy of the year, very black humour by the Kiwis Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement
• Amer, for opening the door to the beautiful Giallo cinematographic language by Cattet and Forzani
• Kak menya zovut, for the emotional tensions and a promising director Nigina Sayfullaeva and actress
• Ekskursante, for a striking post-war story and story-telling by Audrius Juzenas
• The Forbidden room, for the special and unique Guy Maddin style
• Zona Sur, for the realistic picture of change of the Bolivian society by Juan Carlos Valdivia
• The railway man, for demonstration of the striking force of redemption by Jonathan Teplitzky
• Et maintenant on va ou?, for the message of hope delivered by Nadine Labaki
• Moon, for the amazing story by Duncan Jones and acting of Sam Rockwell

If you miss any infographic seen in the First anniversary article or in the Two-years article, feel free to ask us. It will be a pleasure to complete our article.

We wish to thank all our friends who regularly visit our blog, even if just to check the titles and rating of the recent movies we watched. We noticed you are a bit shy in leaving comments to our articles while you shouldn't, we also built this blog to interact and share opinions with you. Every time you do it or send a comment by email, it warms our hearts.

We wish you all a happy cinematographic year 2015-2016.

Jo&Raf