Movies I Forgot I Reviewed: "Innocence" (2004)

As many movie critics are, I'm often asked how many films I've watched over the course of a working life, and my fairly dodgy answer is that I average about one a day when you even things out. (There are movieless days, obviously, but there are also the six-a-day festival binge weeks.) Since I've been watching movies professionally and semi-professionally since high school and I'm now a ripe old 68, let's say that number tops out at 52 (years) x 365 (days in one year) = 18,980 movies.

Is that possible? Do that many movies exist? Well, yes and yes, and even if you give me weekends off, the number still comes to 13,572, high enough to bring on nosebleeds. Whatever; the more important number is how many movies I remember, which is ... less than I would like. Five thousand? Two thousand? 754? The human brain houses rooms for only so much information, and anyone who's had children knows that their arrival empties out one of those rooms – usually the one with all the jokes and movie trivia – and replaces it with a nursery.

The upshot is that there are a mortifying number of films I've reviewed over five decades that I have no memory of reviewing, many of which I recollect are pretty good once I bother to pull the sense memories out of storage. So to cap off a busy week of real-world reentry (tax prep, e-mail, sleep) after a spate of long-delayed vacation time (I won't bother to tell you where I went, but it involved a Blue Whale sighting*, which is a memory I'll retain forever), and also because I'm only one hour into Julia Loktev's phenomenal (so far) documentary epic "My Undesirable Friends, Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow," about the destruction of independent journalism in Putin's Russia (a proper review will come next week, but it's debuting today on the subscription service MUBI) – because of all that, I introduce a new stalling maneuver regular feature that I call Movies I Forgot I Reviewed.