Counting down movies, counting up for a cause

Collage by Easton Clark, Photo Editor

“It's the one thing that I do that people generally like and makes people happy, which is not something that film critics often do.”

David Ehrlich, the head film critic for Indiewire, began making video countdowns of his favorite films of the year in the middle of film school in 2011 to get hands-on experience with editing software. Now, it’s become an annual phenomenon that has raised over $180 thousand for various causes and organizations over the last five years. The latest 2025 video was no exception, raising over $60 thousand for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

The videos existed purely as an extension of Ehrlich’s critical work and a pairing to his published year-end lists until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit shortly after the birth of his first child. Ehrlich had finished the videos every year without fail, “through thick and thin,” but both of these events forced him to reexamine the hours and hours it took to put the videos together.

For 2020’s video, Ehrlich asked Garrett Bradley, the director of his top film that year, “Time,” to pick a charity and make the video a fundraiser for that organization. Bradley selected Rich Family Ministries, which was started by the couple at the center of the documentary.

With each passing year and the accompanying countdown, more and more money has been raised, and the partnership with filmmakers has grown with it, from “Aftersun” director Charlotte Wells to Oscar winner Jane Campion. In 2023, Ehrlich decided to make aiding children and families in Gaza the focus of the donations.

“It makes me…certainly prouder than (of) the videos and prouder than any of the other work that I've ever done in writing, to have raised that kind of money for those charities. Eventually, whenever I stop making these videos, that will be the part of it that I miss the most,” Ehrlich said.

His process starts with a running list of songs from the year’s movies, a rule that Ehrlich has set and maintained for each countdown. The real work begins around August, fiddling with trailer footage. Then, in September and October, he starts trying to choose songs to complement the images and have the different tracks flow together seamlessly. 

The marriage of music and images can range from contrasts as delightful as setting the spirited anthems of “KPop Demon Hunters” to the Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value,” or setting the gothic dread of “Nosferatu” to “My Heart Will Go On.” It’s not until December that Ehrlich really gets into figuring out the images, once the spine of the video is assembled.

“I have lots of spreadsheets about what movies could work with what song and where they would go and how, because that is far and away the hardest part … that is the part where I pull my hair out every year. It's the part where you reach that point (where) you're like, why am I doing this?’” Ehrlich said.

To Ehrlich, a casualty of this rhythm-based enterprise is the infrequent appearance of documentaries, a result of a format that leans towards visual dynamism. He mentioned the 5 ½-hour documentary “My Undesirable Friends” about Russian journalists as a tough omission from this year’s list, in part because the available footage is entirely subtitled and largely limited to people talking in rooms.

These videos have become annual mini-events on a certain movie-obsessed corner of the internet. Months before the release, Ehrlich will sometimes drop images of a bustling editing timeline with no further explanation. This is met with a deluge of celebratory GIFs and a level of anticipation typically reserved for a famous musician bringing out their next album.

As the countdowns have built their relatively small but mighty following, they’ve taken certain pivots in form in addition to getting longer in length. Beyond just songs, certain sequences have become the spine of the videos, serving as an interlude between the individual slots, like a set piece from “Furiosa” or the climactic skirmish thousands of feet in the air in the most recent “Mission: Impossible” film. 

Ehrlich will sometimes mess with the order of the list to make a better video, as he’s come to terms with the distinction between, say, the 21st and 22nd best movie of the year as not being all that meaningful.

This year, Ehrlich may be going on a hiatus from the tradition, given the sheer amount of time required— especially as he’s in the early stages of writing a book about the film studio A24 that he’s currently on a seven-week leave to go “wrap his head around.” He did mention that he’s been noting songs from 2026 movies “just in case,” but for now, the enduring nature of this ritual is in doubt. 

“I appreciate anyone's interest in these … It's always been really gratifying that people out there seem to like them and think about them and revisit them,” Ehrlich said. “It does feel like sort of… sending things into the void, so to make anything that any amount of people find meaningful and that stays with them is amazing.”

You can find Ehrlich’s countdowns present and past here, and here’s a link to this year’s fundraiser.