Cine Outsider, the site that you're reading this on right now, is 20 years old. Without getting too specific about my age, that's been a sizeable chunk of my life. I can probably guarantee that both it and I are unlikely to still be around in another 20 years, and whether the site survives for even half of that time is something I'll be touching on later in this piece.

I know that I usually end the year with an article in which I pick some favourite films and discs from the past 12 months, headed up by a rant about this bloody awful government. But this year, that government has plumbed such wretched depths of wanton immorality, heartless cruelty and greedy corruption that if I really got going on that, I'd never stop. In addition, as I was focussed almost exclusively on disc releases in 2023, I've not yet seen many of the films that would likely make the shortlist for my pick of the year, so feel completely unqualified to makes such a list at this time. That said, a list of favourite disc releases is still a possibility. Watch this space.

Instead, I thought it might be appropriate to mark this anniversary by looking back at how the site came to be, how it developed, and how changing times are impacting its relevance and may yet help to one day bring it to a close. As the only other contributor to the site who was there at the beginning and who has continued to review films and discs through sometimes difficult times, my good and long-standing friend Camus has written his own reflection on this anniversary, which you can read here.

So, where did it all start? Well, if you want to be precise, it would be back in the 1930s, decades before the World Wide Web was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. That's when my grandmother, a wonderful woman who just happened to share my political convictions, first fell in love with the experience of watching films on the big screen. As a London Eastender, she was a regular at the capital's cinemas in her youth, and when discussing older films with me one time, she revealed that she saw Fritz Lang's 1931 M at one of the grander screens in Leicester Square, cinemas at which I later attended the third night of Star Wars, and the first weekend screenings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Platoon. She also was also someone who moved with the times and embraced the changes that cinema underwent over the course of her lifetime of film watching. When she was in her late 70s, I asked her to name some of favourite movies, fully expecting a selection dominated by movies that had had an impact on her in her youth. The list instead consisted primarily of films released in the previous 25 years, and included the likes of Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, The Exorcist and The Right Stuff.

My father inherited his mother's passion for cinema, and I absorbed it from him through a process of gradual osmosis. I gained an appreciation for older films through the ones we watched together on TV in the evenings and at weekends, was treated to the opening weekends of new James Bond movies, and poured over his small collection of books about movies and their enticing pictures of films I could only imagine ever seeing. Perhaps most significant was when he took me to see the much talked-about 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was still a child, and while am not going to claim that I understood what I saw, I still remember that it blew my mind. I wish I could recall where I read this, but a few years later I came across a reappraisal of the film that posited the theory that while adults struggled with 2001, kids cottoned on immediately. We didn't understand it, but in a strange sort of way, we got it. It was also around this age that I fell in love with horror and 50s science fiction, this time not through my father but thanks to a friendly babysitter who would allow me to stay up and watch these movies when I should really have been in bed. Secretly, I think she wanted to see watch them herself but was nervous about doing so alone.

Things really changed in my early teens when I was let off the leash and able to go to the cinema without parental accompaniment. A turning point came with the arrival on UK shores of the first martial arts films from Hong Kong, a wave that began with King Boxer (Tian xia di yi quan, aka Five Fingers of Death, 1972), the first X film that I lied about my age to get in to see (you can read the full story of this little adventure in my review of Ong Bak). It wouldn't be the last. By the time I reached my 18th birthday, I must have seen at least 50 films at the cinema that I was not legally of age to see.

I detested my schooldays and was always either getting in trouble or getting the shit kicked out of me, so left as soon as I was free to do so, albeit with no real sense of direction. I could draw a little, so spent a couple of years immaturely faffing around at art school, blowing endless opportunities but still coming away with significantly improved artistic skills. More importantly, it was here that I was first introduced to avant-garde cinema, which I eagerly embraced. It was on a college visit to the Tate Gallery in London that I was first exposed to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's 1928 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, and I can't even begin to describe the impact that had on me. When a friend and I got our hands on an 8mm film camera and splicer and decided to make out own short film, this was our primary inspiration. The resulting work was bonkers, a disconnected collection of surrealistic sequences and imagery that went down a storm at the end of year show. Hey, I thought, maybe I could get into moviemaking after all. The problem was that the only sort of films I was interested in making were not ones that most sane people would pay money to see.

I ended up applying for and unexpectedly landing a place at one of the few film schools in the country, where over the course of three years I learned a great deal about the technical and artistic process of filmmaking. Yet by the time I left, my principal takeaway was that a career in the then very closed British film industry was probably not for me. I'd discovered that I didn't really want to direct, and my partial colour-blindness proved a barrier I hadn't even considered to working as a professional cinematographer or editor. Yet it was here that the seeds for what would later become Cine Outsider were first sewn. There was a slew of cinema screens within walking or cycling distance from the school, and an arts centre with its own small cinema just a short train ride away. My cinemagoing thus accelerated to several visits a week, with the then often vibrant mainstream fare (this was the late 70s, after all) spiced up by world cinema and retrospective double-bills at the arts centre screen. With student rail travel then as cheap as chips, I joined the BFI and regularly travelled up to London at weekends to the National Film Theatre (now known as BFI Southbank) to watch a wide range of films in carefully curated seasons and attend onstage interviews with notable filmmakers. It was also around this time that I first discovered London's independent cinemas, my favourite being The Scala, the only cinema in London playing Eraserhead, which I was completely blown away by and was back up to London a week later to see a second time. I was later to become a regular visitor to the Scala, both at its original Charlotte Street location and when it later relocated to King's Cross. I'll have more to say on this when Jane Giles and Ali Catterall's documentary on the cinema is released on BFI Blu-ray later this month.

Having been impressed with the programme notes handed out at screenings at the NFT, I began collecting review quotes and credits for films that I'd seen, and for the first time began writing my own short reviews, at this stage purely for my own amusement. When my classmates took control of the student union magazine, however, I began for the first time reviewing films for a wider audience and responding to feedback. In my final year, I also met a first-year student with whom I quickly became and stayed close friends, one who writes for this site under the pseudonym of Camus. In some ways, he and I were polar opposites. I was brash but emotionally insular with no real ambition, while he was outgoing, positive, and knew from an early age that he wanted to work in film. While I continued to drift from one project to another on the course, he stuck the course out for less than a year, then hopped off to America, which a couple of years later led to a job as an assistant on Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983). Where I later found work on small independent productions before finding a degree of unexpected contentment working in a media support role in further education, he went on to become an award-winning editor, an assistant to directors Richard Franklin  on Link (1986) and Gavin Millar  on Dreamchild (1985), as a well as directing several prestigious projects himself. What continued to unite us over the years as our lives followed very different paths was and remains our shared passion for cinema, something that was to prove crucial for the birth of this site. And in case you're wondering, we did eventually end up working together on a project, a too-little seen independent feature titled Kelling Brae, which Camus wrote, directed, and edited, and on which I, for perhaps the only time in my life, worked as a feature cinematographer. While the film never landed a distribution deal, it did go on to win Best No-Budget Feature at the 2012 London Independent Film Awards. One day, maybe.

It was aso around this time, thanks to student union funding, that a friend and I started a college film society, hiring films on 16mm for screening in the lecture theatre one evening per week. Initially, this meant running a single projector at the back of the theatre, a machine whose constant clatter attendees would have to tolerate, and pausing at the end of every 30 minutes or so to change the reel. Later, we added a second projector, which we would cue up and start when we saw the cogarette burn marker appear on the end of the reel that was already running, resulting in no more than a second of black screen or overlap. Later still, we got really carried away and built a box from perspex and insulation board to muffle the sound of the projectors, opening the top only when the time came to switch reels. These screenings were often well attended, no more so than our presentation of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a hugely popular film with students of the day which had just become the victim of a censorial cut. After announcing proudly to a packed auditorium that we would be showing the uncut version, which prompted appreciative cheers, we then added a couple of edits of our own when the projector reel got jammed on my leg (oh, don't ask) and the film jimped out of the gate. As we were almost at the end of the reel, we hastily switched to the second projector, effectively excising more shots from the film than had been cut by the censor.

Having moved to an area far away enough from London to make my once regular trips to the NFT no longer financially viable, my cinemagoing was restricted to a cosily small local cinema and a handful of larger screens in neighbouring towns. Good though they were, they tended to show almost exclusively mainstream fare, and I was thus reading about titles in film monthlies that I was frustratingly unable to see. One thing that had significantly changed for the film enthusiast by this point was the arrival of domestic home video formats like VHS and Betamax. The first recorders were unaffordable for someone on my meagre wage, so I hired one and bought cheap multipacks of VHS tapes on which to record favourite films when they were shown on TV, sitting anxiously by the pause button to edit out the ad breaks if the film was screening on one of the two commercial channels. It was on TV and hired video tapes that I was still able to see some of the films that really interested me, the ones that did not dance to the mainstream tune and were willing to experiment with narrative and form. But this was long before the large flatscreen TVs and specialist streaming services of today, and watching any film on a comparatively small screen CRT TV – with the image only as sharp as the VT transfer and 625 scanlines would allow, often in an incorrect aspect ratio – was a piss-poor substitute for seeing them on a cinema screen. I really missed my trips to the NFT and those London independent cinemas in which I spent some of my happiest hours. It turns out that I wasn't alone.

A local artist I had met and become friends with was similarly disappointed at the lack of diversity in the films shown in our area, and together we approached the manager of our small local cinema with the idea of starting a film society there. He politely declined. His setup meant hiring 35mm prints of any films we wanted to show for just a single day and disrupting his regular programme, something that potentially could upset the distributors of the films that kept the cinema in business. We thus shelved the idea, but a couple of years later the cinema was taken over by a man who was rather keen on the idea of basing a film society there. As he was now busy managing three separate entertainment venues, he approached one of the most gregarious regulars at the cinema with the idea. She knew of our earlier ambitions on this front and brought the offer to us, and a new cinema-based film society was born.

On reflection, the deal that the cinema manager offered us was pretty darned sweet. It included a knock-down price for the rental of the cinema for one evening every two weeks, which included a member of his staff to man the box-office and project the film. The cost of the film rental would have to be covered by our ticket sales, and if we somehow made a profit, the money would be evenly split between the film society and the cinema. Indeed, so keen was the manager on the idea that he offered to fund our first season in order to get us up and running. Single day hire of films was expensive, and as there tended to be only a few prints of the sort of films we wanted to show – non-mainstream, world cinema, and independent works that did not otherwise play in local cinemas – we were denied access to most of them until after they had completed their week-long runs elsewhere.

The film society's eclectic first season

What was now a five-person group (soon to be reduced to four) sat down with a list of films that we wanted to show and whittled it down to the six slots we had for our first season. If few people showed, we'd can the whole thing, but if it was somehow a success, we had the green light to keep going. While the others took care of booking of the films and manging the cashflow, my job was to design the season poster and programme, as well as posters for individual screenings and programme notes to be handed out to patrons. Our first season ran from October to December 1994, and included such titles as Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (Xi yan, 1993), Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique (La Double vie de Véronique, 1991], and Ken Loach's Raining Stones (1993). To our surprise and delight, almost all of the films were very well attended, and a couple of seasons later we made the move from fortnightly to weekly screenings. At our most successful, we were making enough money to cover us for the less well-attended shows, and we even had a few complete sell-outs, which raised enough cash to enable us to stage special screenings and events.

I can't recall when I first became aware of the internet but know for a fact it was Camus that introduced me to it, and that back then it was all text messages and bulletin boards. This later sparked my interest in the World Wide Web, which was in its early days when the film society launched. Eventually, I got my hands on some software through my workplace that enabled me to create a basic website, and it seemed logical to make the promotion of the film society my first project. And basic it was, but this was back when even corporate websites were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today, and once when we were visited by BFI representatives they remarked on how unusual it was for a British film society to have a website of its own.

The arrival of DVD was a genuinely game-changing deal for me. The format represented a massive jump in quality over VHS tapes, and while discs were prone to scratching if mishandled, the optically read media could not be damaged by dirty or worn playback heads. And films were being released in the correct aspect ratio, sometimes with stereo or even surround soundtracks and a range of special features. This was old news to laserdisc afficionados, of course, but while DVD players were still initially expensive, the discs themselves were far more affordable than their laserdisc equivalent. If you saved up, you could also buy modified players that enabled you to play back discs from anywhere in the world, considerably widening the range of titles available. As I started collecting DVD releases of some of the films that the film society was screening, I began adding short reviews of them to the website. After a few months of doing this, it occurred to me that creating a site dedicated specifically to such reviews might be an interesting project. Back then, there weren't that many disc and film review websites, and fewer still dedicated to the sort of films that interested me and that we screened each week at the film society. Had I acted on it then, we would now be one of the oldest UK-based film and disc review sites on the net. But I stalled, repeatedly. For a variety of primarily personal reasons, I just couldn't pull it together. Over five years passed before I felt I was ready to give it a go, by when we would be just another kid on the now rapidly expanding block. Would it be worth it?

One of the reasons I had delayed launching the site for so long is that I was working 80+ hours a week in two jobs, and thus knew that I couldn't do it on my own. It took some time to convince several others to also come on board, all of whom promised to contribute reviews and articles once the site went live. At this point, I was still working with the most basic of web creation and publishing software, so creating a site that looked even half decent and that had potential for later expansion was a serious consumer of my time. A close friend gifted me with a front page banner graphic that shape-shifted a couple of times over the course of next year or so, and I wrestled with a couple of names for the site – as Camus rightly recalls, DVD Bastard was even on the shortlist for a while – before settling on DVD Outsider. I chose this partly as a reflection of my own inability to fit in just about anywhere, and partly as a reference to my own fondness for films that rarely reached the sort of audience that mainstream studio movies regularly did. The decision to include DVD in the name was an indication that the site's prime focus would be DVD releases, despite also featuring the odd film review and article. It was also, in retrospect, a little short-sighted in its failure to envisage a time when the format might be superseded. That said, it's worth noting that some of the more prominent review sites of the day – DVD Beaver, DVD Times, DVD Talk (a site on which Glenn Erickson wrote as The DVD Savant) – also had that three-letter acronym in their names, and were thus presumably also as optimistic about the future of the new format. I did later wonder if this also reflected a subconscious conviction on my part that the project wasn't destined to last.

The changing face of DVD Ousider

When the site finally went live, I discovered to my disappointment and mild alarm that most of the people who had pledged contributions were now making themselves conspicuously scarce. I can only speculate on why, but one of them did later admit to me that while he liked the idea of reviewing films and discs, he was ultimately dissuaded by the hard work of actually doing so. Writing reviews, decently written and persuasively argued ones at least, requires time and effort, and not every film devotee is cut out to do this. It probably didn't help that I had no interest in seeking advertising for the site – I detest commercial advertising in all its forms – and was essentially running the whole project as a hobby on a wage that left me with little cash to spare, which meant I could offer no payment for submitted reviews. If you wrote for DVD Outsider, you did it for the review disc and the enjoyment of writing about film alone, which essentially whittled the Outsider staff down to just Camus and myself. Fortunately for me, Camus was as committed to the project as I was, and the site was thus launched.

Unsure who to contact at the time for information on upcoming releases or to request possible review discs (as you can see, I really did my homework), and with no track record or readership numbers to convince distributors or PR companies that I was genuine, I started by scouring the 'coming soon' sections of reputable online disc retail sites for interesting titles, and used their published information as the basis for news stories, just to give the site a little content. Just occasionally, these details proved to be less than accurate, and a couple of times I found myself having to make corrections and issue apologies. Camus kicked off the reviews with a critical look at Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol 1, and I began by rewriting and expanding my review from the film society site of the DVD release of Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, which the film society had only recently screened. Early disc reviews were always of ones that I had bought, often of titles in recent film society seasons, and that's primarily what kept the site ticking over during its first year.

Having passed my teaching qualification a year or so before launching the site, I had taken a second part-time job teaching Genre classes to A-level Media students, and the course leader had selected the subtext-rich vampire genre as our principle focus. I thus used the site to post reviews of the five films in Universal's Dracula: The Legacy Collection box set, primarily as reference material for students looking for examples of the sort of essays they were required to write. When we moved onto the documentary module of the course, I also posted reviews of a few key early genre works such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) and the fruitful collaboration between Charlotte Zwerin and Albert and David Maysles that gave us Salesman (1969), both of which were released on region free Criterion discs. It was also through my work in further education that I learned the basics of how to use what was back then Macromedia (and later Adobe) Dreamweaver, a more complex but also more flexible website authoring software that I migrated the site to and am, a little unfortunately, still running the site from today. More on that a little later.

The first time I was contacted directly by a distributor to review a disc was most unexpected and was for a film that a good many reading this have probably never seen. The film in question was Adam Elliot's 2003 animated short, Harvie Krumpet, and the distributor was the now sadly defunct Metrodome. Despite the film being only 22 minutes long, making it a tough sell for a standalone disc, compensation aplenty was provided in the special features, and the film itself was a low-key delight. Over time we began to be noticed by other distributors, but help on this score came from an unexpected source. I was alerted by a friend that the BFI was releasing a comprehensive collection of short films by the Quay brothers, two gloriously gifted animators whose work I had been a huge fan of for some time. I thus posted a news story based on what information I was supplied, and in doing so noted that one of the Quay's short films – one that was included on a far less comprehensive earlier American DVD – appeared to be missing from this collection. Shortly after I had posted this, I was contacted by the producer of the disc, Michael Brooke, wondering how I could have made such a howling error. I apologised profusely and corrected the story, and in the email conversation that followed, Michael was instrumental in hooking me up with the likes of Eureka and Second Run, two labels whose work we continue to champion to this day. Michael himself has also been a key supporter of the site, correcting me on technical, historical, and even on one occasion geographical details, and offering words of encouragement when my enthusiasm was lagging.

In the late 2000s, my decision to include 'DVD' in the site name showed its first signs of biting me squarely in the arse. High definition was showing strong signs of becoming the future new standard, and had given birth to rival disc formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD and a new generation of larger flatscreen TVs. While home cinema enthusiasts – especially in America, it seemed at the time – were embracing HD, I was considerably slower off the mark. The TVs cost a lot and the format war meant that buying an expensive Blu-ray or HD-DVD player had its risks, unless you were wealthy enough to purchase both. At that time I could afford neither, yet I knew sooner or later I'd have to make the move and so started saving, and even before Blu-ray emerged victorious I had made it my pick. My reasoning had logic. While Microsoft had decided to build its latest console around HD-DVD, Sony had opted for Blu-ray for the PlayStation 3, and in doing so made the console the cheapest Blu-ray player on the UK market. As well as watching movies, I also enjoy playing video games, and I'd been a PlayStation user since the launch of the original model, so the PS3 was firmly in my sights anyway. What sealed the deal was the news that Blu-ray had been selected as the format of choice by labels such as Anchor Bay, Blue Underground and Tartan, while by the end of 2007, Warner had announced that it was dropping HD-DVD as a format and releasing titles on Blu-ray only from that point on. When the first Masters of Cinema title arrived on Blu-ray from Eureka (Mad Detective, 2007), as far as I was concerned the deal was sealed. By September 2008, I had switched my 32" CRT TV for a 42" Plasma that would later give me a hernia trying to lift without assistance, as for a while was using a PlayStation 3 as my primary Blu-ray player. I wrote an article for the site about making the move and my initial reluctance to do so, which included this wonderfully fateful line: "So does this mean we'll eventually be changing our name to Blu-ray Outsider? Hardly." Yeah, about that…

In January 2012, I made the decision to change the name of DVD Outsider to Cine Outsider. It had become clear that Blu-ray was now the home entertainment format of the future, and long before I made the decision to change the site name, I was getting offhand comments from label representatives about if and when I was likely to do so. It was Camus who suggested Cine Outsider, and not wanting to be caught out again by the arrival of another new format (well, what do you know?), it seemed the logical choice. Transferring everything to the new site required a huge amount of work, as I took the opportunity to clean up the structure and, with considerable help from the close friend who created our first logo, redesign its look. Every article, review and news story had to be copied over manually, and every review link on IMDb had to be individually updated, all of which this took me every spare second of a good part of the second half of 2011. When the new site went live, we kept DVD Outsider online for several months with a message and a link to steer visitors to the new location. But we're now Cine Outsider, and that's who we're going to stay until… well, I'll get to that little question later.

By the late 2000s, the review DVDs were starting to pour in, and we were getting far more each week we had the time or personnel to cover. Already our reviews were growing in length and depth, and the time it takes to write them was increasing proportionally, which was complicated further by the special features being added to discs being released by our favourite labels. Long before the name change, the site had built enough of a readership to attract the attention of a small number of highly talented individuals who came on board as reviewers. One of the first was a former student of mine with whom I became friends and who writes under the pseudonym of Lord Summerisle, and whose first post was a belter, being an adaptation of his degree essay on William Burroughs in Film. Joseph Ewens, Adam Wilson, Michael Ewins and Catherine Stebbins all wrote some excellent reviews in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and I effectively roped CNash into coming on board as an anime specialist to help cover the discs that we were being sent by MVM and Manga after he wrote to me with a suggestion for a series of articles we were running. A far more recent addition to the team was the US-based clydefro, whose reviews were once again of impeccable quality and who arrived with a substantial record of review writing already under his belt, and whose detailed analyses I always keenly looked forward to reading.

But of all the new reviewers, there were a handful of big hitters who really impacted the site and, I believe, helped elevate it to another level. The first was Leanne Weston, whose reviews of Czech cinema DVD releases by Second Run were so admired that more than once she and I received emails of thanks from the label's passionate founder, Mehelli Modi, along with requests that she be the one to review their future titles. Leanne's coverage extended far wider than this, and included titles as diverse as Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009), Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988), Pedro Almodovar's High Heels (Tacones Lejanos, 1991), Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák, 2000), and Peter Mullan's Neds (2010), as well as contributing three consecutive reviews of the year. When Leanne had to bow out for personal reasons, it left hole in the site that was not easy to fill, but fortunately we by then had two other key contributors on the Outsider team.

I seem to remember that it was through Leanne that Jerry Whyte came on board, a phenomenally talented writer who may take his time on some of his submissions and have missed almost as many release dates as me, but he's delivered some of the most detailed and insanely well researched and referenced reviews we've ever published. Oddly, perhaps, he's also one of the only site contributors I've actually met and spent time with, having hugely enjoyed our conversations over a few jars at his most amenable local boozer. Jerry regularly visits the London Film Festival on our behalf and reviews the films that made the biggest impression on him. I remember that we both picked Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round (Druk, 2020) as our favourite of film of the 2020 festival and then had a very English argument over who should review it ("You do it," "No, you do it"). In the end, it fell to Jerry and I'm so glad it did, as I could never have written anything half as impressive as what he turned in.

Michael Shannon interviewed by Tim Evans about his lead role in Take Shelter

The reviewer who had the greatest impact on the development of the site was definitely Tim Evans, who wrote under the pseudonym Timothy E. RAW. Not only did he deliver many impeccable quality disc and film reviews, it was he who nagged me into listing the reviews and articles by their author (not as straightforward as it sounds on a non-database system), and adding a search function on the front page, something only made possible by features offered for websites by the omnipresent Google. In 2010, he also conducted the site's first video interviews at the Ischia Global Film & Music Festival in Italy, and continued to interview actors and filmmakers for the site for several years. In the process, he has spoken to a range of film luminaries and then luminaries-to-be, including Marion Cotillard, Brandon Cronenberg, Heather Graham, Jeremy Renner, Michael Shannon and Thomas Vinterberg to name but a few. And he asked good questions. At the 2011 Raindance Film Festival, his interview with The Black Belle director Brian McGuire and lead actor Joey Capone overran because McGuire was so enjoying the conversation he was having with us. It's also thanks to Tim's encouragement that I picked up a camera again and started shooting some of these sessions. In those days, this meant hauling a hugely heavy HD camcorder and equally weighty tripod up to and around London, only to then be offered completely unsuitable locations to shoot in, or for the camera to mysteriously malfunction when the clock was ticking on available interview time. I even got to shoot some Red Carpet interviews at the 55th London Film Festival, and later hauled all of this gear up to the NFT to shoot an interview with Daniel Bird on my lonesome, asking questions whilst keeping one eye on the nearby camera's LCD panel to check the framing, which Daniel was professional enough to tactfully ignore. Technology had thankfully advanced by the time I shot Jerry's interview with Chilean director Patricio Guzmán at the 2015 London Film Festival, where the weighty and bulky HD camcorders of earlier shoots that I'd borrowed from work had been superseded by a lightweight Panasonic DSLR and a small Zoom audio recorder.

But times and lives change. Writing reviews of the length and detail that have become a site standard eats into your free time, and most of our previous reviewers have since moved on. The only constants throughout have been myself and Camus, who as a freelance film professional has to take work whenever it comes, and reviews sometimes have to take a logical back seat. And Camus is a hell of a writer that I'm so lucky to have on board. What impresses me the most about his reviews is their consistency of quality. I maintain that I can see a real progression in my writing over twenty years for which this site has been in existence, but for me, his early reviews are every bit as sharply written as anything he has delivered in the past couple of years. Like me, he injects much of himself into his writing, and being of a similar age, we share many of the same reference points and were shaped early on by many of the same films. His extensive experience on the film business and working with some of those whose films we write about gives his reviews an edge that mine can never have, and is part of what makes them so distinctive. He can also still turn around a detailed, witty and analytically on-point review in a fraction of the time it takes me to do so, and he gives his time freely, no matter how busy his life may be at the time, to proof read my own reviews. And I welcome this, as they are always littered with typos and grammatical ticks, often the result of me repeatedly rewriting passages and two-fingered typing that seems to have become a lot less accurate with age.

The ever-busy Jerry still intermittently pops up to deliver the occasional review, and can always be relied on to cover a few of the films at each year's London Film Festival, and I should also give a mention to SilverBlueSnow, whose occassional reviews always target the very sort of films I set this site up primarily to highlight in the first place. What really gave the site a boost in recent years was the arrival of Gary Couzens, who already had over a one-and-a-half thousand disc reviews under his belt by the time he joined the Outsider team and who seems to have himself the task of covering everything that the BFI releases on disc. His ability to tackle content-heavy box sets was established in his first review for the site, the six-film Blu-ray collection, Play for Today: Volume 2, and I'm frankly in awe of his willingness to take on box sets of key films by acknowledged masters like Ingmar Bergman and Ozu Yasujirō, about whose work so much has already been written that it's difficult (and more than a little intimidating) to know where to start anew.

To all of those good people mentioned above who have contributed to the site in the past, and especially those who continue to do so, I salute you. Writing reviews of the length and detail that have become the Cine Outsider standard for no financial gain is a bloody big ask, and I appreciate every review that lands in my inbox. All any of us here can hope for by way of payment is the odd bit of positive feedback, which always warms our collective heart, particularly on those rare but precious occasions when it comes from the filmmaker whose work we are discussing. In the end, we write about film because we enjoy doing so, and it's thus no surprise that the vast majority of our reviews are positive ones. Who wants to spent days working on a long review explaining why they didn't like a film that they know full well that others will enjoy? Not me, matey. This site grew out of a film society that was set up in to show films that its organisers admired or wanted to see and share them with other like-minded souls, and that positivity remains core to the Cine Outsider mission. Back when we were getting 20+ review discs a weeks from a slew of distributors, it was a harder to sing the praises of every title that we covered, but even then, given the choice between a film that excited me and one that irritated, I'd always opt to review the former if I could. And, if pressured to cover a title I didn't enjoy, I'd still never claim that the film itself was bad, but instead emphasise why it didn't work for me. And long may that philosophy continue.

The three-stage quote that made my day in Third Window's trailer for Tōkyō Fist

Picking high points for the site is surprisingly easy, as they all involve us being recognised for our work in some way or other. I particularly remember the firsts, such as Tim's review being quoted on the DVD cover of the brilliantly titled Bumblefuck USA, whose lead actors Cat Smits and Heidi M. Sallows we were given the chance to interview. As far as I'm aware, Tim is also the only one of the Outsider team who has moderated an on-stage interview with a film's cast and crew, which took place on the 2 October 2012 at the Raindance Film Festival. The film in question was Strings, the microbudget debut feature from director Rob Savage, who has since tapped in to a far wider audience with ace social media Host (2020) and the recent The Boogeyman (2023).

My first big thrill came when an email from Third Window Films alerted me to the fact that a quote from my DVD review of Tsukamoto Shinya's Tōkyō Fist (1995) – a work I adore – was featured prominently in the trailer for label's upcoming Blu-ray release of the film. I've since been asked for permission to use quotes from my reviews in the promotion of Arrow's Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest UHD box set and the label's upcoming 4K release of Nakata Hideo's Dark Water. I agreed both times, but can't say I ever saw the quotes used. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places. I did get a serious charge seeing my memories of my first encounter with Eraserhead at the Scala quoted in Jane Giles's magnificent crowdfunded book, Scala Cinema 1978-1993.

One of the most satisfying moments for us all came when Indicator invited Leanne to write the lead essay in the booklet accompanying their Blu-ray release of Georgy Girl (1966), but this was topped for me personally when I was asked by the label to do likewise for its Blu-ray of Murphy's War (1971). To complete the set, so to speak, Camus has written a belter for the booklet that will accompany the Indicator release of Richard Franklin's Patrick (1978) when it hits the stores in February.

And so, 20 years on, what is the future for Cine Outsider? Does it even have one? I'll be honest and admit that I just don't know. We were always a niche site, but in the past few years we've become a niche site in the realms of niche sites. The way the majority of people consume information has changed considerably over the last decade. Written film reviews now sit deep in the shadows of podcasts and verbally delivered ones on YouTube, and long form essays like the ones we write are increasingly side-lined in favour of bitesize criticisms, which can now be created in a few seconds using one of the many free-to-use ai article generators now available. Seriously, type "AI article generator" into your search engine of choice and see how many hits you get. Web and even print publications worldwide are already using them, with The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express (don't read that shit, please) publishing their first AI generated articles in the first quarter of 2023, by when The Associated Press and Thomson Reuters were already doing likewise. And why read a long review when you can ask ChatGPT to summarise it for you? The fact that our site is still maintained on Dreamweaver and is not mobile compliant doesn't exactly help in a world where the majority of web material is apparently now viewed on smartphone screens. The preference for video reviews that you can watch or listen to on your phone, meanwhile, means that if I posted a video on YouTube of me unboxing an Arrow special edition Blu-ray, I can almost guarantee that it would receive far more views than a detailed written review of the same.

And then there's our collective age. None of those writing for the site are youngsters by any stretch of the imagination, and while I strongly believe that half a century of watching movies does gift us with a perspective that we just wouldn't have if we were in our 20s, it can also impact on the free time needed to write for the site and keep it running. It's unfortunately a natural process for the human body to start malfunctioning as it ages, and while I've been way luckier than some, I've still been juggling with a colourful collection of bodily dysfunctions for some time, including deafening tinnitus and increasing loss of hearing in one ear and malfiunctioning nerves in my foot that prent me from walking any distance without a stick or crutches. As you get older, there also comes a point where you have to take care of elderly relatives, devote time to your family, or deal with the sometimes unexpected illness or loss of people close to you. Perhaps the most frustrating thing of all is that these days I feel like I'm working on a reduced power setting, with the result that it can sometimes take me a week to write a review that would have taken just a couple of days 10 or 15 years ago. Being the site's lead reviewer and the one who has to format and post the reviews and news stories, I'm left with very little free time, a situation that for some while has given me serious pause for thought, and were it not for the work being done by the other fine contributors to this site, I have a feeling I would have used this anniversary to finally call it quits. The prospect of having all the time I invest into the site to do whatever I please is an enticing one. It's just…

If you're a regular visitor to Cine Outsider, particularly if you've been so for some time, I sincerely thank you for that. Our following is small, but generally appreciative of what we do, and that means a lot. And here's the thing. For all my complaints about the time the site demands of me, I really like writing about the films I enjoy, and I know for a fact that were it not for all of the review discs that I have been sent over the years, I wouldn't have seen anything like the range of films that I have. Just as my visits to the NFT and the Scala in my late teens and my 20s expanded my appreciation of world cinema, watching and writing about the films released by the likes of Indicator, Eureka, Second Run, BFI, Arrow, Second Sight, Artificial Eye, Criterion, StudioCanal, Tartan, Metrodome, et al has taken that to a whole new level.

If the site is to continue, however, something has to change. It has to change, at least on a technical level. As I said, I'm not going to get specific about my age, but it's enough to know that I'm not a huge distance from being able to retire from my day job, and while this would indeed give me the free time I so crave – a fair chunk of which I would end up devoting to the site – there are a couple of significant catches. The first revolves around whether I can actually afford to do so, and the offer to continue working past my retirement age has already been mooted by my employer. The second is that I only have access to the software on which the site is maintained because of my workplace Adobe subscription, something I cannot afford for myself should I leave my job. I've pondered before about rebuilding the site on WordPress, and have been deliberating on the prospect for far too long, intimidated by learning a whole new way of making and maintaining a website and the sheer work required to transfer the whole of Cine Outsider over to an unfamiliar system. But It would make the site mobile phone compliant and enable other writers to update their own reviews instead of sending small corrections to me via email. I really need a swift kick up the arse to get this moving, even if just to find out if it's a viable prospect.

So yes, after 20 years we're still ticking over and will continue to do so for the immediate future. Those personal issues I only hinted at above, coupled with my high daytime workload, my productivity slowdown, and my determination to counter my walking limitations by swimming most evenings, has seen me fall into a cycle of delivering reviews later than scheduled. This peaked over Christmas when I really needed a break from it all, and the planned 2024 review kickstart has been delayed by, well, me spending the past week working on this. I'll conclude by expressing our collective and heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported us over the years just by reading and sometimes feeding back positively on our reviews. You're the best, all of you.

Right, time now to address the current backlog and make a start on this month's titles, and maybe also talk to my hosting service about this whole WordPress thing. See you all on the next review, the first of 2024. What will it be? Well, let's see now…

P.S. In case you were wondering, the often early release of titles on DVD and Blu-ray did eventually impact attendance at the film society, but we did keep going even when the cinema was sold and the new owners decided it was financially unviable to cut us the sort of deal that had enabled us to start up in the first place. Indeed, we continued to tick along when they also sold up and two new, more adventurous film programmers took over. In the end we ran for 26 years straight, eventually shut down by a certain pandemic, never to return. It might be nice if Cine Outsider could at the very least equal that run.