One of my long term goals for The Goods is to make it easy for readers to navigate my archive of 500+ (and counting) reviews. Today I debut an upgraded version of the Review Index which I hope will be an important step in that goal.
The index is broken up into a handful of sections. First, two sections that already existed: a list of recent reviews and a few ways to parse the complete archive (alphabetically, chronologically, randomly).
The next section is the one I spent the most time working on. Inspired by the directors retrospectives and selected works sidebar at Kinemalogue (but expanded because there’s nothing I won’t overcomplicate), I’ve made a series of pages for directors whose works I’ve written about extensively — at least 3 films. This proved to be a lot of directors, so I’ve grouped them into three tiers, which made for an interesting thought exercise on how I feel about each director whose work I’ve dived into. Exclusion of a director from this index just means I haven’t written about them enough rather than anything qualitative. For each director, I wrote an intro/micro-bio, links to any related lists and podcast episodes, and links to all reviews of films by the director, sorted both chronologically and by rating.
Next up is the Years in Film index, where I have pages for each of the years since I’ve launched this site (I might go backwards in time on these if I ever have years I feel I’ve thoroughly covered). Then a few more review collections (series, Tom Hanks, etc.) Lastly, a link to Andrew’s Gareth Evans and Gangs of London reviews.
I plan to refine and expand these sections over time, especially as I write about more directors and series, but I’m glad to finally have something semi-complete representing what I’ve published so far.
(As a matter of housekeeping: I’ve phased out the previous usage of “Review Projects” in favor of these index pages, and I’ve leaned on the “Series” mechanism that you see linked in the bottom of associated reviews.)
As always, let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback. Feel free click around and make fun my director tiers. A couple other refinements to the site are in the pipeline as well.
Happy new year to all of you out there. Thanks for stopping by and sticking around. End of 2024/start of 2025 content is coming in the near future. In the meantime, I’m back to powering through the OFCS Awards nominees I haven’t seen!
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.