2024 has been a great year for me, film-wise. Thanks to my near-obsession with tracking metrics about my life, I know that, as of December 26th, I’ve watched exactly 125 films this year. It’s not extraordinary, but given my target of 100 films per year, I’d say I’m doing pretty well. Among these 125 films are Emilia Perez and Queer. While they have little in common in terms of subject matter, themes, or style, they share a strikingly similar viewing experience for me. Both of these films start very strong, but their endings leave the viewer confused as to how the narrative ended up where it did.

The first film in my schedule for TIFF 2024 was The Cut. During the festival, I usually like to go in mostly blind without doing a lot of research on a film unless there’s unavoidable buzz around it, which was not the case for this film. This blog post describes my experience watching this film, and the fatal flaw in the story that in my opinion significantly hurts what would otherwise have been a gripping tragedy. This blog post will obviously reveal the plot, so if you’re planning on watching it, stop here.

CircleCi 2.0 has introduced workflows. A workflow is a set of declarations that define a number of jobs, their run order and helps you orchestrate and troubleshoot those jobs. It has a lot of benefits compared to CircleCi 1.0 that doesn’t support workflows. However, our team switched to CircleCi 2.0, getting notifications on our continuous integration process became a problem. Our team usuallys gets their notifications through Slack. We have a channel and all our CI/CD processes/pipelines report to that slack channel.