2011 Ten Best Movies

And we wrap up 2011 with another list, this one for the Herald. Read the story here. The actual lists of best (and worst!) are arranged as a slideshow, so you have to do a lot of clicking. I know – ugh. Sorry! I will shortly post the list here in simple-to-read order. In the interests [...]

Best of 2010 (Weekly Links)

As always, a slow week for new openings; but I wrote these for the Herald: Best movies of 2010. Which also includes the worst. Made in Dagenham. “Artificially inflated by pop songs and cutesy mannerisms.” And more best of 2010: On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Steve Scher about the list. Listen to the archived [...]

1946 Ten Best Movies

I began giving over my Sunday mornings to this project in the first week of 2009, and now we’ve run out the string: ten-best lists for every year going back to 1919, beyond which I will need to do much more movie-watching to assemble something remotely respectable. After taking next Sunday off (the Port Townsend [...]

1920 Ten Best Movies

The #1 this year was not difficult for me; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is not a musty old film classic but a truly unnerving and gripping experience (especially when seen in a restored print, as has been possible in recent years). A great flowering of German Expressionism, but a very exotic, death-scented blossom, Caligari [...]

2001 Ten Best Movies

2001 was the only year I ever went to the Cannes Film Festival, and looking over the year’s most significant movies I can see what an influence the experience had on my list-making – including the top slot. Almost a decade later, Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir does not seem to have established itself as a [...]

1931 Ten Best Movies

Movie restorations are good and admirable and the people who do them are to be commended. On the other hand, setting things right with a movie can mess with your relationship with that film. Which is my way of saying that in restored versions of Fritz Lang’s M, I greatly miss the little swatch of [...]

1979 Ten Best Movies

Much of 1979 is clearer to me than stuff that happened last week, so sorting through the movies of the year is easier than usual. Maybe it’s the influence of having just read David Thomson’s piece on movies that time forgot (a critic I first read in 1979, for a film class), but there’s a [...]

1999 Ten Best Movies

Looking at the movies of 1999 and searching for some kind of end-of-the-millenium sort of theme, a summing-up that would round off the fabulous century…I got no such thing. However. You could do worse than to finish off a millenium with Stanley Kubrick’s final film, which has many and various dreamy observations on the subject of looking, [...]

1921 Ten Best Movies

The Kid is Chaplin’s first feature, and a devastating example of a simple idea (just an hour long) made rich in the doing. According to its description it ought to be horribly sentimental, and Chaplin’s is supposedly a Victorian sensibility, inclined toward ancient conventions that manipulate our nerve endings with unfair doggedness. Those conventions are ancient (and [...]

1959 Ten Best Movies

Ranking movies within years is compulsive behavior; ranking the years themselves is quite another level of crazy. However, if one were to do such a thing, and I’m not saying I would, 1959 would be at the top or very near the top of such a list. It has three films, any one of which [...]