Half a decade later...

Half a decade has passed and JoRafCinema is still not only present but very active in producing reviews of Movies and TV-series seen at the Cinema, in Festivals, at home or on the go. We also write some articles - mostly Festival reports - and once a year analyze some statistics and summarize some thoughts in the anniversary Article that you are now reading. The one of this year is a little late, but let's see in more detail what happened in the first five years (with emphasis on the last one) until July 20th 2017.

Number of posts

The plot above is an update to the one shown last year, and on which we see that we have reversed the decreasing trend: this year we have both posted more reviews, watched more movies and written more articles. This is a good sign that after a busy year we managed to regain some more time for our passion. The level of the three first years is not reached yet but this could be a goal for next year.
The number of TV-series reviews has almost doubled every year for the past two years, which is explained to the same analysis we gave a year ago: more TV-series of better quality are produced nowadays, and we have a tendency of watching more of them, which also partially explains the lower number of movies reviewed this year: watching TV-series takes a lot of time! On the plot above we have introduced the concept of Movie-equivalent reviews, which considers a TV-series season equivalent to about 8 movies in terms of watching time, as a season often contains 10 to 20 episodes of 40 to 60 minutes. We see that this year the time spent watching reviewable material is larger than it has ever been (440 movie-equivalents).
The number of posted Articles has been steady over the past three years at five to nine per year. For the coming year we plan to continue on the idea to write articles on our top directors, and this could become the top actresses or actors, the top music, etc. It is interesting to notice than in five years there are 50 double reviews out of 1494, i.e. only 3.3% of the movies that we have both rated. But note that we usually don't cross-review the movies seen together at a Festival and thus give only one rating. 
Note that many of our movie reviews are based on specific Film Festival all over Europe and Latin America:

• Nordic Film Days in Lübeck, Germany (NFDL2016), with Scandinavian and Baltic movies 
• Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre in Buenos Aires, Argentina (BARS2016), with Fantastic and Horror movies from all over the world with an accent on Latin America
• Berlinale in Berlin, Germany (B2017), with an accent on indigeneous movies
• Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy (FEFF2017), with popular movies from East Asia
• Fantaspoa in Porto Alegre, Brazil (FANTASPOA2017), with fantastic movies

Production year

The now-traditional plot above shows the production year of the movies and series we have reviewed since the birth of JoRafCinema. For our fifth year they seem to be spread like in the past four, but the other plot below reveals a trend: it shows the age of the movies reviewed with respect to the release of the anniversary article. The trend hinted last year is much more pronounced in 2017: 60% of the reviews concern movies or series from the past year (i.e. 2016 for the reviews posted from July 2016 to 2017), and more than 80% of the past 2.5 years (2015-2017). In comparison, we have watched very few movies from the past 10 years, but still a reasonable amount of older ones.

Movies per Country

We have updated the plot above showing the number of movies we have reviewed per production country. Not much has changed compared to the previous years, American productions are still largely dominating, but this year we have seen movies from two new countries: Laos (with Dearest Sister) and Bosnia Herzegovina (with Dobra Zena).
With now five years of statistics we can try to see if the geographical repartition of the movies we review has evolved. The plot below shows the evolution over the five years of JoRafCinema of the ratio of reviews for the most popular countries. Note that because of the large domination of the American cinema, its plotted ratio is to the total number of reviews while for all other countries it is the ratio to the total non-USA.
We see that the ratio of reviews of American movies has dropped from the first year to the second but has been rising since then. The ratio of French movies has been rising and is now steady at about one third of the non-USA movies. Other noticeable countries are Germany which number of reviews is much higher than it used to be, and Denmark and Japan which both showed a spike in our fourth year, especially Japan being represented in 30% of the non-USA reviews! 
From Denmark, we watch Drama/Melodrama and Polar/Thrillers. Note that this includes also co-productions with other Scandinavian countries. From Japan, we watch rather Drama, Comedies, SF and these are mostly no co-production. Our preference for Denmark is supported by our yearly visit to the Nordic Film Days in Lübeck (2014, 2015, 2016) and the one for Japan by our visit to the Far East Film Festival in Udine (2014, 2015, 2017) and the irregular visit of the Nippon Connection (2016). 

Movies per Genre

Average rating and quantity per genre over all times (left) and in 2017 (right)

JoRafCinema updated the plot above on which 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. 
As I was under the impression that some trends were changing, I compared the trend of the past five years (left plot) with the year 2017 (plot on the right). And it is obvious that the Romance and Anime genres are getting much better in 2017 while Drama, Black Comedy and War genres are getting worse. Even if the year 2017 does not provide many movies for some genres, a tendency is visible. The proportion of Drama and Thriller increased in 2017 while the proportion of Fantasy, Horror and Comedy decreased in 2017.

Which movies are high (>7) and low (<4) rated?  

After five years there are also enough movies in both extremes to understand whether there is a genre that is often top of the class or in the back row. Few combinations in the above plot can be interpreted. For instance if high rated is above average and low rated too (i.e. Drama, War), this means we have mostly a categorical opinion on the genre either "great" or "awful". If high rated is above average and low rated below (i.e. Epic, Thriller, Western) this means we mostly like this genre and are seldom disappointed. If high rated is below average and low rated is above (i.e. Comedy, Horror, Melodrama) this means we like less this genre but still watch it! The other cases are more difficult to read into. If high and low rated are below average or if the difference in percentage are not large, this means the distribution is quite normal. Actually any reading about Epic, Melodrama, Music and Western movies are not really statistical, as there are less than 40 movies in each of these Genres.

New on JoRafCinema

Last year already we introduced the new tag TV-series to cope wit the increasing number of such reviews, now more than 60 in total. The changes to JoRafCinema this year were more on a cosmetic side:

• We have increased the width of the web-page, providing a more comfortable reading on the more resolved modern screens
• This left enough room to introduce a third column on the left, where we moved the Facebook link and the Curriculum of the authors
• That new column now also contains useful links to Featured Articles on the blog, and will be updated as new Articles are released
• The blog monthly newsletter sent by email is now also stored on a dedicated Archive. Watch for the clickable logo in the left column as well:

We have plans to change the text formatting of the whole blog and the format of the Newsletter, that will be for the coming year.
New Festivals visited this year: the ArteKinoFestival, the Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre and the Brazilian FANTASPOA in Porto Alegre.

Recommended movies

Here is the selection of our Top Ten (more or less) recommenced movies or the year.
[Jo]:

• The nervous, violent and to me visually revolutionary Hardcore Henry produced by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov.
• The spin-off Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that finally makes me love again the Star Wars Universe, much more than last year's Episode VII.
• The French futuristic but modest Ares. For more ass-kicking also watch for free Kung Fury on YouTube.
• Arrival, a Science-Fiction movie for adults.
• The latest extravaganza from genius cartoonist Bill Plympton Revengeance. Also watch again his incredible 1997 I married a Strange person!
• Best movie from the FANTASPOA festival, the original Dave made a Maze.
• Two classics from the end of the 90's: the defining The Game with Michael Douglas and the visionary The Truman Show with Jim Carrey.
• Kevin Smith's first movie now geek classic: the 1994 Clerks.
• The best TV-series of the year: House of Cards of which I reviewed the five seasons. A special mention goes to the 80's revival Stranger Things.
• Also made for TV, I found the Documentary Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey an excellent introduction (and a bit more) to Astronomy. The first episode recommended to anybody. The following ones to people with more interest.

[Raf]:

• Maggie's plan for the amazing acting of Greta Gerwig as archetype of the modern woman
• The satyrical Italian comedy Quo vado?
• The historical movie Black book, setting a woman in a key role during WWII
  
• The visually and emotionally amazing drama Frantz by François Ozon
• A fistfull of dollars as a cinematographically revolutionary Western by Sergio Leone
• Manchester by the sea for the emotional story and the acting by Casey Affleck
• The moving drama Sameblod
• Tiere, the great surprise of the Berlinale, from Switzerland, a psychological thriller with very excellent ideas of directing and cut
• Gender equality and racism movie in the space industry with Hidden figures 
• 1 homme de trop for its disturbing suspense and the topic of popular resistance and collaboration during WWII
• Veloce come il vento for a very touching family drama excellently directed 
• My Uncle for its amazing humour between sarcasm, irony and the acting of Ryuhei Matsuda
• Over the fence for its beautiful story with poetic moments and excellent acting
• Close-knit for the subtle treatment of the LGBT issue in the apparently conservative Japan

A word on TV-series

As already mentioned, TV-series take a increasing place on JoRaf Cinema. The reasons are multiple:

• More quality series are produced nowadays, partially since Lost in 2004 and then came Rome in 2005, Breaking Bad in 2008, Game of Thrones in 2011...
• New production networks have contributed to this trend, starting with HBO that invested more money to be able to produce better-looking series, and then Netflix that started to help by spreading the series at a very decent cost, and that now uses its benefits to flood its catalog with self-produced series (and movies) that the Network can afford to target to a very specific audience instead of producing more tepid series that will please most.
• But most importantly we review more series because ... we just watch more! And that is because the 40-60 minutes format matches better my [Jo] new lifestyle of watching them on a tablet on the go, or in a limited time and with limited energy before going to bed, instead of having the time and comfort of watching selected movies in Blu-ray on a Home Cinema.

Thus at the beginning the series I watched were limited to the ones that came highly recommended by multiple friends, and for a long time those were only Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones (I still have to start Breaking Bad!) in addition to exotic outliers like Uchū no Senshi: Starship Troopers, the Sherlock Holmes animated series by Hayao Miyazaki or the must-see Firefly. I had watched the excellent Battlestar Galactica just before creating JoRafCinema so only the prequel webisodes Blood & Chrome are reviewed on it. The same goes for the A-team, The Dukes of Hazzard or another Starship Troopers series Roughnecks (mentioned here).
Then I also started the excellent British Sherlock with Benedict Crumberbatch and Martin Freeman, Fargo following in the footsteps of the Coen brothers' classic and more oddities like the two seasons of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, the French short comedy strips of Kaamelot, the limited mini-series Ascension or the bloody Ash vs. Evil Dead. Meanwhile I was motivated to watch the six seasons of the Star Wars animated The Clones Wars and went on with two of the best series I have ever seen: Narcos and House of Cards.
Soon after started the wave of Super-hero TV-shows in which I am still currently drowning: Gotham, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Supergirl, Agent Carter, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, The Defenders and my favorite Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but I am trying to avoid The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow etc... Besides those, in the past year you can find some outliers (Africa, Ex-onnelliset, Designated Survivor with Kiefer Sutherland, 11.22.63 with James Franco, The Following with Kevin Bacon, The Shannarah Chronicles) among which the best surprisingly all have to do with Space and/or Science-Fiction: The Expanse, the docu-fiction MARS, the well-done Documentary Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and the 80's nostalgic Stranger Things.
My plans for the next year? Keep on following my favorite series: The Expanse, House of Cards, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Narcos, maybe Gotham, check which other series are granted more seasons, and maybe finally start some that I have put aside for too long like Breaking Bad or Sense 8 by the Wachowskis.

We wish you all a happy cinematographic year 2017-2018.

Jo&Raf