1950 Ten Best Movies

1950 offers a number of film classics in its ranks, so my #1 movie is not the Greatest film of the year, merely the best. What does that mean? Well, my #1 does not boast the long profile of, say, Sunset Boulevard or All About Eve, a couple of indisputable Hall-of-Famers. It’s more modest than that; Wagon [...]

2007 Ten Best Movies

It seems like only a couple of years ago we were arguing the relative merits of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood and the other films of 2007, a strong year in the movie datebook. No Country is the Coen brothers’ razor-sharp realization of Cormac McCarthy terrain, and the kickoff of a [...]

1962 Ten Best Movies

As I write this the Brooklyn Academy of Music is just wrapping up a film series devoted to 1962, a tribute to the New York Film Critics Circle (‘62 being the only year the group did not give out awards in its 75-year history, due to a newspaper strike). The thrust of the series is [...]

1922 Ten Best Movies

F.W. Murnau scores three films in this year’s list, which says something about A) how many 1922 movies are available to be seen, and B) how deep this filmmaker’s talent was. The Number One is Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Most silent films have vanished because of indifference and [...]

1983 Ten Best Movies

Recently I was on KUOW radio for one of my (once weekly, now intermittent) appearances, and I talked at some length about Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s enchanted Scottish fable. (That show is archived here.) About the very earned magic of that film, and how it once led me on a detour in Scotland to find [...]

1949 Ten Best Movies

Noir is everywhere in 1949’s movies: from the expected sources, such as the American crime picture, but also defining style in unlikely matches such as French Revolution films, Ayn Rand adaptations, and British comedies. A nervous year, evidently, as the #1 movie proves.
At times The Third Man can look put-on, just a tad too baroque. And yet even [...]

1934 Ten Best Movies

Josef von Sternberg went apotheosis on his torrid collaboration with Marlene Dietrich in 1934, resulting in movie-unlike-any-other-except-ones-you’ve-dreamed masterpiece The Scarlet Empress. Mad history mixed up with emotional autobiography, the movie goes a long way toward suggesting that whatever Svengali power the director might have held over his pupil was now something of a turned table. Their [...]

1971 Ten Best Movies

Without the warmth or buoyancy of Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut’s second adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche is nowhere near as famous or beloved as that earlier classic. But Two English Girls is a great, beautiful film, another triangle with certain eternal truths at play (and three cherishable actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Kika Markham, [...]

1990 Ten Best Movies

If you look at the top-grossing movies of 1990, it appears the 1980s have not yet ended; there’s plenty of that kind of title here (Home Alone, Pretty Woman, Ghost, Die Hard 2, Kindergarten Cop). But something was changing for the better, and the two muscular films at the top of the list are signposts. [...]

1952 Ten Best Movies

Thought for a few seconds about a tie for #1 this time, with two big “O” movies almost in a dead heat. But no, I’m going with Orson Welles’ Othello, a remarkably inventive and alive Shakespeare adaptation produced in patchwork fashion. Would the film be what it is without its low-budget, stop-and-start production history? Probably not; [...]