Logically, the purpose of having a movie collection ought to be to actually watch the movies you own. Unfortunately, like many collecting hobbies, the compulsion to simply have stuff – and ideally, more and better stuff than others that share your interests – too often overrides the original point of doing the thing in the first place. Over the years, I’ve found myself collecting literally thousands of movies on home video formats from Laserdisc to DVD, Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD, and more, a significant portion of which have sat unwatched in their cases on my increasingly cluttered shelving system.

To be fair, a good number of those unwatched discs represent movies that I have actually seen before, either in the theater or on a prior home video format, or perhaps even on television. I bought them because I wanted to own them permanently, and/or own them in a better quality presentation than the last time I watched.

Nevertheless, those discs haven’t ever gotten watched, and I own countless more movies that I’ve still never seen at all. Often, I’ll buy a movie with a legitimate intention to watch it in the near future, only for it to get backlogged behind a steady stream of more incoming titles. Sometimes I’ll buy a movie just because it’s famous enough or well-regarded enough that I’d feel guilty if I didn’t have it. (I’m a little ashamed to acknowledge some of the all-time great cinema classics currently sitting on my Criterion Collection shelf that I’ve never bothered to watch.) Regrettably, I’ve also bought a fair number of discs simply because they came in a nice SteelBook or a fancy box set that I wanted for collectibility purposes.

When forced to face the reality of this ridiculous hobby, I’ve rationalized my ever-growing collection of unwatched video discs as building a movie library. I like to have all these titles around me so that I can watch them whenever the mood or interest strikes. At this point, I don’t realistically expect to watch all of them in my lifetime, but it’s comforting to know they’re readily available on my shelf whenever I want them.

In my defense, I have watched a huge volume of the discs I own, I think it might be safe to say greater than 50% of them. Also, I haven’t have to pay for all the movies in my collection. For over two decades, I worked as a professional home video reviewer for several publications, from which I would regularly receive packages of screener discs I was assigned to review. Screeners are typically provided to reviewers from the home video studios for free. Although a small handful of them might have come without full packaging, or as burned check discs, nearly every screener I ever received was identical to a standard retail copy.

However, the consequence of receiving screener discs is that they must be reviewed, and thus prioritized for watching before anything else I might have bought with my own money.

After getting unceremoniously laid off from the longest of my professional writing gigs (that’s a long story I don’t need to rehash here), I decided to branch out on my own and founded The Video File Blog as a continuation of my prior work, but on my own terms and without all the obligations that used to burden me. Rather than focus solely on new releases, one major intent of this blog was to be an exploration of my home video collection, both new titles and old, whatever I felt like watching whenever I felt like watching it.

On a personal level, I still find this work satisfying. On a professional level, it sucks not getting paid or receiving free screeners anymore. Worse, it’s been terribly disheartening to witness the blog format, and long-form writing in general, fall out of favor with the audience I used to write for, and to watch my readership numbers dwindle down to near nothing.

Still, I’m determined to persevere, because I enjoy writing about film almost as much as I enjoy watching it. Writing about movies is my method of working through my feelings about them, and preserving those thoughts for future reference.

Where Am I Going With This?

I’ve rambled a bit here. I tend to do that sometimes, sorry.

As my resolution for 2026, I’ve decided that my movie reviews will have an ongoing theme this year, and will no longer be quite so random. The theme I’ve chosen is: Film from Z to A.

Over time, I’ve amassed a movie collection that encompasses titles from every letter of the alphabet. This year, I’m going to work through them systematically, starting in reverse alphabetical order. I’ll begin with a Z title and each week move down one letter, all the way to an A title. Because there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 52 weeks in a calendar year, I should have time for two runs. I’ll hit A at the end of June, at which point I’ll reverse direction and work back up from A to Z, finishing neatly at the end of December.

This is a fun challenge I’ve set for myself, for no other purpose than to satiate some latent OCD issues in my movie collecting mania.

Some Rules

• The Film from Z to A theme applies only to my weekly written movie reviews published on Mondays, not to the Film at 11 video podcast, which I consider a separate project.
• To the best of my ability, I will try to select titles that I own on physical media. If I think of something I really want to watch that fits the theme but I don’t already own, I may purchase a new disc specifically for the occasion.
• I’ll try to limit doing so, but I also must reserve the right to stream a movie if necessary.
• Any article (A, An, The) at the start of a movie title will be ignored in the alphabetization. The Godfather is a G title, not a T title. (No, I don’t necessarily plan to do The Godfather for this; that’s just an example.)
• Movie titles that start with numbers will be alphabetized by the phonetic pronunciation of that number. For example, 2001: A Space Odyssey would fall under T for Two Thousand One.
• If I’m feeling productive and get the urge to review something outside this project (perhaps a new TV show?), that will be published on a different day of the week, not in the regular Monday slot.
• I’ll also share some older reviews I’ve written in the past on The Video File Blog’s Facebook page each week.