When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1963, it gave its Best Picture award to Tom Jones—the movie, not the singer. It isn't very memorable, and it isn't on my list.
1. The Birds
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Evan Hunter, from a novel by Daphne du Maurier
If it isn't Hitch's best movie, it's certainly his scariest.
2. Ikarie XB-1
Directed by Jindřich Polák
Written by Polák and Pavel Juráček, from a novel by Stanislaw Lem
My pick for the most stylish space-fiction film of the '60s—and yes, I've seen 2001.
3. The Silence
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
The final and finest segment of the Silence of God trilogy.
4. The Haunting
Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Nelson Gidding, from a novel by Shirley Jackson
How I resented this picture the first time I saw it! The campy beginning relaxed my defenses and let me feel superior to the material; by the time its superbly crafted chills were jolting me in my seat, I was too proud to admit I'd been taken in. Forgive me, Haunting: You're a great horror movie, and I regret ever claiming to dislike you.
5. This Sporting Life
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Written by David Storey, from his novel
The other notable William Hartnell role of 1963. And with its flashback structure, it features several jumps through time. Hmm.
6. The Leopard
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Visconti, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, and Suso Cecchi d'Amico, from a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I'm not sure what it says that Burt Lancaster's best performance features someone else's voice.
7. The Great Escape
Directed by John Sturges
Written by James Clavell and W.R. Burnett, from a book by Paul Brickhill
"Perhaps we're being too clever. If we stop all the breakouts, it will only convince the goons we must be tunneling."
8. Scorpio Rising
Directed by Kenneth Anger
Written by Anger and Ernest D. Glucksman
The funniest fetish film ever made.
9. Judex
Directed by Georges Franju
Written by Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin, from a story by Louis Feuillade and Arthur Bernède
A semi-surrealist semi-superhero story.
10. Muriel, or The Time of Return
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Jean Cayrol
The art of the abrupt edit.
Honorable mentions:
11. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)
12. The Servant (Joseph Losey)
13. Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, Volker Schlöndorff)
14. Hud (Martin Ritt)
15. Renaissance (Walerian Borowczyk)
16. An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa)
17. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa)
18. Moth Light (Stan Brakhage)
19. To Parsifal (Bruce Baillie)
20. Charade (Stanley Donen)
Of the films of 1963 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Cool World.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1973, it gave its Best Picture award to a comedy called The Sting. That one made it into my list of honorable mentions, but it didn't crack the top 10:
1. F for Fake
Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Welles and Oja Kodar
A deliberately deceitful documentary, bordering on a mockumentary, about storytelling, filmmaking, forgery, and other forms of fakery.
2. The Long Goodbye
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Leigh Brackett, from a novel by Raymond Chandler
I have heard this anti-noir condemned on the grounds that no one is less suited to play Philip Marlowe than Elliott Gould. I say that's part of the point.
3. Badlands
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
"Loooooove...love is strange."
4. The Last Detail
Directed by Hal Ashby
Written by Robert Towne, from a novel by Darryl Ponicsan
Part of that amazing streak Jack Nicholson had in the early to mid 1970s, when it must have seemed like he was incapable of starring in a bad movie.
5. Charley Varrick
Directed by Don Siegel
Written by Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman, from a novel by John Reese
An elegy for individualism, delivered by one of Hollywood's most individualistic directors.
6. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Directed by Peter Yates
Written by Paul Monash, from a novel by George V. Higgins
The book is great too, but it doesn't have Robert Mitchum.
7. Mean Streets
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin
An ur-movie whose influence echoes from The Bad Lieutenant to The Wire.
8. Paper Moon
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Written by Alvin Sargent, from a novel by Joe David Brown
"We just have to keep on veering, that's all."
9. Day for Night
Directed by François Truffaut
Written by Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman
There's this whole genre of movies about making movies, from The Cameraman to 8 1/2 to Ed Wood to, um, Hardbodies 2, which isn't any good but it's the first specimen of the genre I ever saw, watching cable one night in my teens, so I'll mention it too. Anyway, this is one of the better ones.
10. Sleeper
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Allen and Marshall Brickman
They saved Hitler's nose.
Honorable mentions:
11. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman)
12. Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg)
13. Wattstax (Mel Stuart)
14. Serpico (Sidney Lumet)
15. Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman)
16. Frank Film (Frank Mouris)
17. High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood)
18. The Sting (George Roy Hill)
19. My Name is Nobody (Tonino Valerii, Sergio Leone)
20. Hell Up in Harlem (Larry Cohen)
Best montage: It's about an hour into John Milius' Dillinger. You'll know it when you see it.
Of the films of 1973 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Mother and the Whore.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1983, it gave its Best Picture award to an all-star weepie called Terms of Endearment. I think that one's fine, but I like these better:
1. Sans Soleil
Written and directed by Chris Marker
A strange and lovely essay-film about Africa, Japan, festivals, robots, Hitchcock, and much more. No other movie in the world is like this one.
2. Videodrome
Written and directed by David Cronenberg
"It's just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. Very, very realistic. I think it's what's next."
3. The King of Comedy
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Paul Zimmerman
This and Videodrome would make an interesting double bill, especially if you're feeling a little paranoid about your TV set.
4. Tender Mercies
Directed by Bruce Beresford
Written by Horton Foote
Robert Duvall plays a country singer who's down on his luck. If you don't think that sounds great, you might be reading the wrong blog.
5. Zelig
Written and directed by Woody Allen
"It shows exactly what you can do, if you're a total psychotic."
6. Pauline at the Beach
Written and directed by Eric Rohmer
I don't know if honest self-deception is logically possible, but that's what the final scene seems to show.
7. The Meaning of Life
Directed by Terry Jones with Terry Gilliam
Written by Jones, Gilliam, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin
Palin: What we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia. Jones: What was that about hats again?
8. El Sur
Directed by Victor Erice
Written by Erice, from a novel by Adelaida García Morales
"That was the first time Dad left home in the middle of the night without a word to anyone."
9. El Norte
Directed by Gregory Nava
Written by Anna Thomas
I swear I didn't deliberately tweak this so El Norte would be immediately adjacent to El Sur.
10. A Christmas Story
Directed by Bob Clark
Written by Clark, Leigh Brown, and Jean Shepherd, from a novel by Shepherd
Available both as a conventional 90-minute movie and, come Christmas, as an ambient 24-hour experience shared by participating households across the TBS and TNT districts of the global village.
Honorable mentions:
11. À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat)
12. John Cage (Peter Greenaway)
13. Carmen (Carlos Saura)
14. Trading Places (John Landis)
15. Possibly in Michigan (Cecelia Condit)
16. The Store (Frederick Wiseman)
17. Risky Business (Paul Brickman)
18. Local Hero (Bill Forsyth)
19. Rockit (Kevin Godley, Lol Creme)
20. Smorgasbord (Jerry Lewis)
Of the films of 1983 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in L'Argent.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1993, it gave its Best Picture award to Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's attempt to find an uplifting story in a genocide. If you want a great film about life and death under Nazi rule, there are many excellent options, from The Sorrow and the Pity to Europa Europa; I don't think this one makes the cut. And if you want a great film from 1993, well...
1. Short Cuts
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Altman and Frank Barhydt, from stories by Raymond Carver
Someday I should write a long essay on the links between highbrow hyperlink cinema and lowbrow disaster flicks. For now I'll just call this the best disaster movie ever made.
2. Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
Written by Ramis and Danny Rubin
Buddha's favorite romantic comedy.
3. A Perfect World
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by John Lee Hancock
The joke goes that this is the picture that proved Eastwood's standing as a great director, because he managed to elicit a good performance from Kevin Costner.
4. The Nightmare Before Christmas
Directed by Henry Selick
Written by Caroline Thompson and Michael McDowell, from a story by Tim Burton
"Haven't you heard of peace on Earth and goodwill toward men?" "NO!"
5. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
Directed by François Girard
Written by Girard, Don McKellar, and Nick McKinney
So much better than a conventional biopic.
6. Latcho Drom
Written and directed by Tony Gatlif
This celebration of Gypsy music is often described as a documentary. But the whole thing was scripted and staged, so it might make more sense to call it a hundred-minute music video.
7. Fearless
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Rafael Yglesias, from his novel
Someone once told me he saw this on an airplane. Seems unlikely, but I was once on a plane where they showed us Apollo 13—this was back when the whole flight saw the same movie—and they somehow even timed it so that we were making our descent while we watched the spacecraft plunge to Earth, so who knows? Maybe it really happened.
8. Manhattan Murder Mystery
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Allen and Marshall Brickman
Proof that Allen could be laugh-out-loud funny as late as the 1990s.
9. Dottie Gets Spanked
Written and directed by Todd Haynes
The queer fantasies of the American family sitcom.
10. True Romance
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Tony Scott does Tarantino. And a year later Tarantino got to give us his version of Top Gun, so it all evens out.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Bed You Sleep In (Jon Jost)
12. Red Rock West (John Dahl)
13. Mad Dog and Glory (John McNaughton)
14. The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung)
15. The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park)
16. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller)
17. Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara)
18. The Junky's Christmas (Nick Donkin, Melodie McDaniel)
19. The Hour of the Pig (Leslie Megahey)
20. Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Of the films of 1993 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Exterior Night.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 2003, it gave its Best Picture award to The Return of the King, a steadily-more-tedious bore of an epic that excises the best part of Tolkien's trilogy to make room for a four-hour sequence of hobbits jumping on a bed. (That's four hours in subjective time, of course. It is possible that I fell asleep during this scene and that the time that actually elapsed was longer.) These are all better:
1. The Wire 2
Written by David Simon, Ed Burns, Joy Lusco, Rafael Alvarez, and George Pelecanos
Directed by Ed Bianchi, Elodie Keene, Steve Shill, Thomas J. Wright, Dan Attias, Tim Van Patten, Rob Bailey, and Ernest Dickerson
Not only do I love the oft-maligned second season of The Wire; I think the union leader at the heart of the story, Frank Sobotka—a tragic hero who thinks he can do good by doing evil, and is brought down by it—is the show's best character this side of Omar.
2. Tarnation
Directed by Jonathan Caouette
By 2003 video cameras were standard equipment for a middle-class American household, and they had been for long enough that a documentary like this was possible. Tarnation takes the video diaries that Caouette started shooting at age 11 and assembles them into something absorbing, unsettling, and visually stunning.
3. The Saddest Music in the World
Directed by Guy Maddin
Written by Maddin and George Toles, from a story by Kazuo Ishiguro
You probably haven't heard of this one, but I swear it's one of the funniest comedies of the 21st century.
4. Osama
Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak
No, it isn't about bin Laden. But it is, in a way, about his mindset.
5. Lost in Translation
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola
If you want to appreciate how good Bill Murray is, watch the scene where his character makes a whiskey commercial. Everyone on the set but him speaks Japanese, and he has no idea what's going on. He tells us this with small movements of his jaw and eyes, and as I watched in the theater every one of those little facial ticks sparked spasms of audience laughter. I'm not an actor, but I'm pretty sure of this: It can't be easy to make people laugh just by moving your pupils slightly to the left or right.
6. Saraband
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
The sequel to Scenes From a Marriage is moving, disturbing, bleak; even better, I think, than the original.
7. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
A trash symphony.
8. Good Bye Lenin!
Directed by Wolfgang Becker
Written by Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg
There's a whiff of Ostalgie here, but I can overlook that—the concept is just so deliriously funny, and the protagonists' motive so sweet.
9. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
Directed by Joe Dante
Written by Larry Doyle
Dante dubbed this the anti–Space Jam, and that is exactly what he made.
10. The Same River Twice
Directed by Robb Moss
What The Big Chill was trying to be.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet)
12. Swimming Pool (François Ozon)
13. The Agronomist (Jonathan Demme)
14. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (Kim Ki-duk)
15. A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest)
16. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki)
17. All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green)
18. Hurt (Mark Romanek)
19. My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn)
20. Cunnilingus in North Korea (Young-Hae Chang, Marc Voge)
And I guess I should give a shout-out to Dogville, if only because anyone writing about the films of 2003 is probably obliged to take a stand one way or another on Dogville. I am pro-Dogville, mostly. I grant you that it is misanthropic, but plenty of good art is misanthropic. What's less forgivable is that it's too long.
Of the films of 2003 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Flower of Evil.
9. Orphan Black
Written by Graeme Manson, Karen Walton, Alex Levine, Will Pascoe, and Tony Elliott
Directed by John Fawcett, T.J. Scott, David Frazee, Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan, and Ken Girotti
This science-fiction series about assassins, clones, and conspiracies would later fade in quality; I never even finished the final season. But if you treat this year's episodes as an (almost) self-contained miniseries, you won't have to worry about that.
10. The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Terence Winter, from a memoir by Jordan Belfort
Early in this movie, a Forbes exposé of the title character's misdeeds ends up serving as an advertisement for the article's target, with a flood of young brokers begging to work for him. On some level, Scorsese must have realized that this stock-fraud Goodfellas would do something similar for Wall Street. But look: We respect talent here, and the quaalude/Popeye sequence alone is great enough to earn this movie a spot in the top 20. The infomercial arrest boosts it into the top 10.
Honorable mentions:
11. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
12. The Americans (Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields)
13. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
14. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
15. Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry)
16. Frozen (Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck)
17. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)
18. Twenty Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville)
19. American Reflexxx (Alli Coates)
20. Skinner Box Head (Sholim)
That item at #12 is a TV show, so the names in parentheses after it are showrunners, not directors. And that item at #20 is a GIF, so the name in parentheses after it is a GIF artist. For years I swore that one day I'd put a GIF on one of these lists, and now I have. We're throwing all the rules out the window, baby!
Of the films of 2013 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.