Ordinarily this is where I'd mention who won Best Picture in 1925, but they didn't give out Oscars yet that year so we'll skip straight to my list:
1. KIPHO
Directed by Julius Pinschewer
Yes, I'm rating the advertisement above the agitprop. Purge me if you must.
2. The Battleship Potemkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Written by Nina Agadzhanova, Nikolai Aseyev, and Sergei Tretyakov
It's really good agitprop, though. And this is the 1905 revolution—the one that my great-grandfather was said to be mixed up in somehow—so it's not like you're cheering for future dictators here.
3. The Freshman
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Written by Taylor, John Grey, Tim Whelan, and Ted Wilde
The first great football comedy.
4. Seven Chances
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Ever see Cops? Imagine a horde of rocks instead of a horde of police.
5. Variety
Directed by E.A. Dupont
Written by Dupont and Felix Hollaender
Expressionist sleaze.
6. Strike
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Written by Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valerian Pletnev
The year's other serving of artful Eisenstein agitprop.
7. Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse
Directed by Henri Chomette
See Paris by train (may be out of date).
8. The Mystic
Directed by Tod Browning
Written by Browning and Waldemar Young
Long before Freaks, Browning was already the king of carny horror.
9. The Phantom of the Opera
Directed by Rupert Julian
Written by Walter Anthony, Elliott J. Clawson, Bernard McConville, Frank M. McCormack, Tom Reed, Raymond L. Schrock, Jasper Spearing, and Richard Wallace, from a novel by Gaston Leroux
Like that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but blessedly free of Andrew Lloyd Webber's music.
10. Go West
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Keaton and Lex Neal
Ever see Seven Chances? Imagine a herd of cattle instead of a horde of rocks.
I don't have an honorable mentions list for this year, but I'll give a shoutout to Rebus-Film Nr. 1 just for the sheer strangeness of it. Neither high art nor low art, this is accidental art: It's a crossword puzzle, from the days when some theaters thought it might be fun to project an interactive, visual crossword between the "real" movies. Turns out that when you view it outside of that context, it comes off as an insane avant-garde experiment—much as a regular crossword might if some future archeologist tried to read it as a piece of prose.
Of the films of 1925 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge.
I haven't watched enough good movies from 1915 to give you a top 10 for that year, so I'll stop this batch of lists here. For the record, my favorite film of 1915 is Les Vampires, or at least its early installments. (I've got nothing against the later chapters; it's just that they came out in 1916.) My favorite of 1905 is El Hotel Electrico. My favorite of 1895 is The Mechanical Butcher. And my favorite movie of 1885 must be L'Homme Machine, by default—it's the only thing I've seen from that year that even arguably qualifies as a movie. It's OK, I guess.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1935, it gave its Best Picture award to Mutiny on the Bounty. That's an excellent movie, and it's close to the top of my list. But another picture is even better:
1. The Bride of Frankenstein
Directed by James Whale
Written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston
A young scientist named Frankenstein feels torn between a conventional marriage and a same-sex liaison with his mentor, an old queen named Pretorius. The latter persuades the protagonist to reproduce with him through unnatural means. Upon succeeding, Pretorius proclaims himself "the bride of Frankenstein." Careless viewers assume he's referring to the couple's creation.
2. Mutiny on the Bounty
Directed by Frank Lloyd
Written by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, and Carey Wilson, from a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Revolution on the high seas.
3. Top Hat
Directed by Mark Sandrich
Written by Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, Ben Holmes, and Ralph Spence
"You mean to sit there and tell me that that girl slapped your face in front of all those people for nothing?" "Well, what would you have done? Sold tickets?"
4. Ruggles of Red Gap
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thompson, and Humphrey Pearson, from a novel by Harry Leon Wilson
The first great comedy western.
5. The 39 Steps
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, from a novel by John Buchan
Hitchcock wouldn't perfect the lightly comic conspiracy movie til he made The Lady Vanishes, but I think it's fair to say that this is where he mastered it.
6. A Night at the Opera
Directed by Sam Wood
Written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind
The taming of the Marx Brothers begins here, but in this case the film is so funny that you barely notice. Later, alas, that will change.
7. The Good Fairy
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Preston Sturges
If I just wrote "Frank Morgan delivers Preston Sturges' lines," that would be self-recommending, right?
8. Toni
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Renoir and Carl Einstein, from a story by Andre Levert
Neorealism was born in Italy in the 1940s, yet somehow Renoir made a neorealist film in France in the 1930s. Go figure.
9. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life
Directed by Fred Waller
Written by Milton Hockey and Fred Rath
I know that I just listed Messeurs Waller, Hockey, and Rath, but the real auteur here is Duke Ellington.
10. Scenes of City Life
Written and directed by Yuan Muzhi
The only film on this list to feature a future member of the Gang of Four.
Honorable mentions:
11. Happiness (Aleksandr Medvedkin)
12. La Bandera (Julien Duvivier)
13. Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka)
14. A Colour Box (Len Lye)
15. Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz)
16. The Hyp-Nut-Tist (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Magic Atlas (George Pal)
18. The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg)
19. Les Berceaux (Dimitri Kirsanoff)
20. The Black Room (Roy William Neill)
Let's give a shoutout as well to Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935. If this had consisted of nothing but the "Lullaby of Broadway" sequence, it would have made the top 10. But even with all the filler—a.k.a. "the plot"—it's still good fun. The film is frequently funny, and you have to appreciate a Gold Diggers movie that fully deserves its title: Every character here who isn't already rich is trying to scam their way into riches, with only Dick Powell displaying a scruple or two. And the rich ones aren't always above digging for a little more gold themselves.
Speaking of Dick Powell, let's also give a shoutout to Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream: a picture for people who like high camp in their high art. They say Powell wasn't sure what all his lines in the movie meant—and whether or not that's ideal for appreciating Shakespeare, it certainly makes for a memorable sort of entertainment.
Of the films of 1935 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Eternal Mask.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1945, it gave its Best Picture award to Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. That is by no means a bad movie, but it manages on the one hand to feel heavy-handed while on the other hand bowdlerizing its source material. I think it's one of Wilder's weaker efforts.
1. I Know Where I'm Going!
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A romantic comedy with something pagan simmering beneath it.
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part One
Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Stalin had an infamously ambivalent attitude toward this film and its sequel: He endorsed the first installment, then suppressed the second when he realized the parallels to his career weren't so flattering after all. Both pictures are deliberately, grandly overstylized, like an opera or a superhero comic.
3. Scarlet Street
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Dudley Nichols, from a play by Andre Mouezy-Eon and a novel by Georges De La Fouchardiere
"Who do you think you are? My guardian angel?" "Not me, honey. I lost those wings a long time ago."
4. Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini
A ground-eye view of the Resistance.
5. Isle of the Dead
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Josef Mischel and Ardel Wray
As is often the case with Val Lewton's horror pictures, this illustrates the Thomas Theorem: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
6. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Directed by Robert Bresson
Written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau
Apparently, if you combine Cocteau with Bresson you get a Buñuel melodrama.
7. The Spiral Staircase
Directed by Robert Siodmak
Written by Mel Dinelli, from a novel by Ethel Lina White
Siodmak pumped out a bunch of atmospheric noirs in the ‘40s. An awful lot of them hold up well.
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Directed by Albert Lewin
Written by Lewin, from a novel by Oscar Wilde
Wilde inspired so many bad movies—delicate, middlebrow piles of reverence whose creators never forgot they were adapting a canonized Great Author. It's a pleasure when someone actually does justice to one of his works.
9. Children of Paradise
Directed by Marcel Carne
Written by Jacques Prevert
"Novelty is as old as the hills."
10. Detour
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Martin Goldsmith, from his novel
I like the theory that this whole delirious tale is one man's dubious alibi for some crimes he really did commit, and that the film's inconsistencies and glitches are actually just the holes in his story.
Honorable mentions:
11. Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger)
12. The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise)
13. My Name is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis)
14. Draftee Daffy (Bob Clampett)
15. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz)
16. Le Vampire (Jean Painleve)
17. Swing Shift Cinderella (Tex Avery)
18. Wonder Man (H. Bruce Humberstone)
19. The Screwy Truant (Tex Avery)
20. The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss)
Plus a shout-out to the concerto sequence in Hangover Square.
Of the films of 1945 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Bells of St. Mary's.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1955, it gave its Best Picture award to Marty, a film that's pleasant but hardly great. I prefer these:
1. One Froggy Evening
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
This feels like folklore, doesn't it? The legend of the singing frog?
2. The Trouble with Harry
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a novel by Jack Trevor Story
The most appealing portrait of rural life that I've ever seen onscreen, which may say more about me than it says about the movie.
3. Smiles of a Summer Night
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
The phrase "life-affirming Bergman comedy" may sound about as plausible as “Theo Von's four-hour Shakespearean drama." But that—the Bergman comedy, not the Von epic—is nonetheless what this is.
4. The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton
Written by James Agee, from a novel by Davis Grubb
"Parkersburg, Cincinnati...one of them Sodoms of the Ohio River."
5. Kiss Me Deadly
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by Mickey Spillane
Cold War noir.
6. Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot, Jerome Geronimi, Frederic Grendel, and Rene Masson, from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
The Hitchcockian thriller that inspired Columbo and, less happily, a terrible remake with Sharon Stone.
7. East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Paul Osborn, from a novel by John Steinbeck
"I'm not my brother's keeper."
8. Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
Written by Ray and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, from a novel by Bandyopadhyay
Another portrait of rural life. It doesn't have much in common with The Trouble with Harry.
9. The Man from Laramie
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by Philip Yordan and Frank Burt, from a story by Thomas T. Flynn
Lear in the old west.
10. Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Stewart Stern and Irving Shulman, from a story by Ray
Forget all the vague vibes that have gathered around this movie's memory—the James Dean posters, the '50s teen nostalgia—and approach it with fresh eyes. By the time Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo take over that deserted mansion, you should see just how much stranger and more interesting this is than its reputation.
Honorable mentions:
11. Ordet (Carl Dreyer)
12. Rififi (Jules Dassin)
13. Water-Mirror of Granada (José Val del Omar)
14. Mama Don't Allow (Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson)
15. Cellbound (Tex Avery)
16. Hare-Brush (Friz Freleng)
17. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz (Luis Buñuel)
18. Gumbasia (Art Clokey)
19. Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick)
20. The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick)
Best beginning that a film can't live up to: Sure, The Tall Men is good. But it isn't nearly as good as the movie we seem to be watching instead for the first 13 minutes.
Of the films of 1955 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Moonfleet.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1965, it gave its Best Picture award to The Sound of Music. It's easy to denigrate that movie, but I'm willing to defend it. I'm not going to put it on my list, though:
1. Repulsion
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, and David Stone
The most claustrophobic and horrific of Polanki's claustrophobic horror movies.
2. The Saragossa Manuscript
Directed by Wojciech Has
Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, from a novel by Jan Potocki
This makes Inception look like Teletubbies.
3. The Loved One
Directed by Tony Richardson
Written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood, from a novel by Evelyn Waugh
The Duck Soup of pet cemetery movies.
4. King Rat
Directed by Bryan Forbes
Written by Forbes, from a novel by James Clavell
"If you don't want to eat it, you can sit and watch. It's a free prison!"
5. It Happened Here
Written and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
An alternate history in which Britain falls under Nazi rule. A story about life under occupation, and the ease with which people can become collaborators.
6. A Game with Stones
Written and directed by Jan Švankmajer
The stones of the title arrange themselves into simple shapes, into more intricate patterns, and eventually into human beings who swallow each other. If that doesn't sound good enough to belong on one of these lists, well, it isn't easy to describe the plot of a Dalí painting either.
7. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Directed by Martin Ritt
Written by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, from a novel by John Le Carré
In Le Carré's bleak tale, the intelligence agencies of the Cold War aren't entirely separate—more like competing forces within one vast corrupting system.
8. Mickey One
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Surgal
This prototype for the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s is the most surreal mob movie I've seen.
9. Le Bonheur
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Somewhere between Éric Rohmer's moral tales and The Stepford Wives, you'll find this horror film disguised as a romance.
10. Time Piece
Written and directed by Jim Henson
You could make a case that this is more Joycean than the film at #20.
Honorable mentions:
11. Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)
12. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)
13. The Shop on Main Street (Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos)
14. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)
15. Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa)
16. Looking for Mushrooms (Bruce Conner)
17. Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah)
18. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet)
19. The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessari)
20. Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Mary Ellen Bute)
Of the films of 1965 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Red Line 7000.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1975, it gave its Best Picture award to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That made it only as far as #4 on my list, but there's no shame in that—there's a movie in the honorable mentions this time that would've made the top five in a less stellar year.
1. Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
Some of my friends dismiss Nashville as a smug left-coaster giving a raspberry to flyover country. To them I point out that the two of the least sympathetic characters in the whole vast cast are the British reporter and the L.A. rocker. Altman's scorn is nothing if not universal.
2. Seven Beauties
Written and directed by Lina Wertmuller
A pitch-dark comedy about sex, fascism, domination, submission, cruelty, conformity, and machismo.
3. Welfare
Written and directed by Frederic Wiseman
The great epic of American bureaucracy.
4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Miloš Forman
Written by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, from a novel by Ken Kesey
People call this a countercultural movie, but that could mean more than one thing. The counterculture had its McMurphys, and it turned out to have some budding Nurse Ratcheds too.
5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
Written by Gilliam, Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin
Years of inept quotation by teenage geeks affecting bad English accents can't smother the comic genius of this movie.
6. Love and Death
Written and directed by Woody Allen
"Boris, you're a coward!" "Yes, but I'm a militant coward."
7. Dog Day Afternoon
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Written by Frank Pierson
Best bank-robbery movie ever.
8. Night Moves
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Sharp
"Do you ask these questions because you want to know the answer or is it just something you think a detective should do?"
9. Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Cliff Green, from a novel by Joan Lindsay
Even when nothing seems to be happening, there's a pulsating dread. Like a horror movie where the horror is always just offscreen.
10. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
Directed by Thom Andersen
The prehistory of the movies.
Honorable mentions:
11. Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
12. Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
13. Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer)
14. Organism (Hilary Harris)
15. The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)
16. Shivers (David Cronenberg)
17. Posse (Kirk Douglas)
18. Monsieur Pointu (André Leduc, Bernard Longpré)
19. Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)
20. The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman)
How good a year for movies was 1975? That top 10 list features the best Wiseman film I've seen, the best Forman film I've seen, the best Gilliam (as director, at least), the best Allen, the best Lumet, the best Penn, and the best Weir. And down in the honorable mentions, the best Spielberg and Pollack are lurking about.
Of the films of 1975 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Gangsters.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1985, it gave its Best Picture award to Out of Africa, which is basically a coffee-table book masquerading as a story. These are all better:
1. Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown
Monty Python's 1984.
2. Crime Wave
Written and directed by John Paizs
Confusingly, there is another movie called Crimewave that also came out in 1985. That one, unfortunately, is not very good, even though Sam Raimi made it with some help from the Coen brothers. This one is great, though—an absurdist dark comedy whose place on the Weird Canada spectrum falls somewhere between Guy Maddin and The Kids in the Hall. (And indeed, Maddin and Paizs were in the Winnipeg Film Group at the same time, and Paizs went on to direct some Kids in the Hall sketches. It all ties together, man.)
3. Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide
The story of King Lear predates the Bard, so it shouldn't seem that odd that the best film the play inspired doesn't include a single line of Shakespeare.
4. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol
When I watched this in my teens, I thought it was pretty funny. Thirty years later I saw it again, and I realized it was a goddamn masterpiece.
5. Mix Up ou Meli-melo
Directed by Françoise Romand
A gloriously bizarre documentary—bizarre in content, bizarre in form—about what happened when two English families brought the wrong babies home from the hospital.
6. Vagabond
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Not a simple celebration of a free spirit, and not a disdainful condemnation of a marginal life either.
7. After Hours
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Joseph Minion
Other critics can weigh this picture's place in Scorsese's filmography. I'll just point out that it's the best movie Cheech and Chong were ever involved with.
8. Louie Bluie
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This is a charming documentary about the bluesman, artist, and porn aficionado Howard Armstrong. It is also utterly fake: The comfortable living room that it seems to have been filmed in is actually a movie set, some of the people reminiscing with Armstrong barely know him, and the director had to persuade his subjects to play the early string-band songs he loved rather than the more complex music they preferred. I go back and forth on whether all that artifice is a flaw or simply another hidden dimension to the story.
9. Static
Directed by Mark Romanek
Written by Romanek and Keith Gordon
Before he was shooting videos for Bowie, Beck, and Johnny Cash, Romanek made this terrific indie flick about a man who believes he's built a machine that lets you peek into heaven.
10. Return to Oz
Directed by Walter Murch
Written by Murch and Gill Dennis
This didn't find an audience at first, probably because most people's expectation when hearing the phrase "sequel to The Wizard of Oz“ is not "freaky, scary movie that strongly implies Dorothy is insane." Fortunately, the picture eventually attracted the underground following it deserves.
Honorable mentions:
11. Mishima (Paul Schrader)
12. Fool for Love (Robert Altman)
13. The Gospel at Colonus (Kirk Browning)
14. Taipei Story (Edward Yang)
15. Come and See (Elem Klimov)
16. Prizzi's Honor (John Huston)
17. Fluke (Emily Breer)
18. Chain Letters (Mark Rappaport)
19. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)
20. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)
Of the films of 1985 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Mala Noche.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1995, it gave its Best Picture award to Braveheart, which is not, alas, a sitcom where Mel Gibson opens an inn in Vermont. It does have some good bits, but I think these movies are better:
1. Safe
Written and directed by Todd Haynes
A parable about an egoless person who consumes her life rather than living it, even—or especially—when she turns her back on "consumerism."
2. Smoke
Directed by Wayne Wang
Written by Paul Auster
An ode to connections, coincidence, and place. Probably the best thing Paul Auster ever wrote.
3. Twelve Monkeys
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by David and Janet Peoples, from a story by Chris Marker
The shot of the giraffes galloping through the city is one of my favorite moments in any movie.
4. Maborosi
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Written by Yoshihisa Ogita, from a novel by Teru Miyamoto
Tricks of the light.
5. Toy Story
Directed by John Lasseter
Written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow, from a story by Lasseter, Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft
"This isn't flying. This is falling with style."
6. The City of Lost Children
Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by Caro, Jeunet, Gilles Adrien, and Guillaume Laurant
If Twelve Monkeys was 1995's best semi-surrealist science-fiction saga, this is the film for viewers who prefer all that without a "semi" prefixed to it.
7. Shanghai Triad
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Written by Bi Feiyu, from a novel by Li Xiao
A gangster movie in an opium haze.
8. Funny Bones
Directed by Peter Chelsom
Written by Chelsom and Peter Flannery
Jerry Lewis's best performance. And no, I'm not the sort of person who thinks the phrase "Jerry Lewis's best performance" is a punchline.
9. Get Shorty
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Written by Scott Frank, from a novel by Elmore Leonard
It's easy to mock so many of the movies that tried to surf the jetstream of Pulp Fiction. But this one's good.
10. Welcome to the Dollhouse
Written and directed by Todd Solondz
"All of junior high school sucks. High school's better....They'll call you names, but not as much to your face."
Honorable mentions:
11. La Ceremonie (Claude Chabrol)
12. Tierra (Julio Medem)
13. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondō)
14. Electronic Superhighway (Nam June Paik)
15. The Drivetime (Antero Alli)
16. Clueless (Amy Heckerling)
17. A Close Shave (Nick Park)
18. Underground (Emir Kusturica)
19. Casino (Martin Scorsese)
20. The Wife (Tom Noonan)
Full disclosure: I have a bit role in #15. But frankly, speaking as a critic, I think the movie would have been better without me.
A bonus Best Documentary prize goes to Nick Broomfield for Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. And a bonus Best Mockumentary prize goes to Peter Jackson and Costa Botes for Forgotten Silver.
Of the films of 1995 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Salaam Cinema.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 2005, it gave its Best Picture award to Paul Haggis's heavy-handed Crash. The only good thing about that choice is the entertaining possibility that it prompted some people to rent David Cronenberg's Crash by mistake. Here are 20 of the many, many better movies made that year:
1. Caché
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
I'll warn you upfront: This picture doesn't come out and tell you the solution to the mystery that drives its plot. But sharp-eyed viewers ought to be able to piece it together, and in any event the solution isn't really the point.
2. Live and Become
Directed by Radu Mihăileanu
Written by Mihăileanu and Alain-Michel Blanc
This would make an interesting double feature with Europa Europa.
3. Corpse Bride
Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Written by John August, Pamela Pettler, and Caroline Thompson
In which a spider sings that life is "just a temporary state/Which is cured very quickly when we meet our fate."
4. The Dying Gaul
Directed by Craig Lucas
Written by Lucas, from his play
"You can do anything you want, as long as you don't call it what it is."
5. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box
Written by Park, Box, Bob Baker, and Mark Burton
When this got the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, I got sucked into a weird online debate with someone who didn't like the movie because he was convinced it had a hidden anti-gun subtext. To me that's like claiming an Elmer Fudd cartoon has a hidden anti-gun subtext. At any rate, this is as clever and funny as a good Elmer Fudd cartoon, and that's pretty high praise.
6. Deadwood 2
Written by David Milch, Jody Worth, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Ted Mann, Victoria Morrow, Steve Shill, Regina Corrado, Sara Hess, and Bryan McDonald
Directed by Shill, Ed Bianchi, Alan Taylor, Gregg Fienberg, Michael Almereyda, Ted Van Patten, and Dan Minahan
In a year without The Wire, this became the best thing on HBO.
7. Hustle & Flow
Written and directed by Craig Brewer
I'd like the American conservative movement a lot better if it had embraced this as a loving, textured tribute to a regional culture instead of damning it for being a rapping-pimp movie.
8. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Faulkner on la frontera.
9. Noroi: The Curse
Directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Written by Shiraishi and Naoyuki Yokota
Proof that a found-footage horror flick doesn't have to be derivative or dumb.
10. Veronica Mars
Written by Rob Thomas, Jed Seidel, Diane Ruggiero, Dayna Lynne North, Phil Klemmer, Aury Wallington, Russell Smith, John Enbom, and Carolyn Murray
Directed by Mark Piznarski, Harry Winer, Michael Fields, Nick Gomez, Sarah Pia Anderson, Nick Marck, Guy Bee, Marcos Siega, John Kretchmer, David Barrett, and Steve Gomer
Forget High School Musical; I'll take high school noir.
Honorable mentions:
11. Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad)
12. Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller)
13. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
14. The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci)
15. Nine Lives (Rodrigo García)
16. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan)
17. Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs)
18. Happy Endings (Don Roos)
19. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
20. Rize (David LaChapelle)
Of the films of 2005 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Election. No, not the one with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick—that one already topped my list for 1999. I mean the Johnnie To movie from Hong Kong.
This viral clip recuts a few dozen classic Hollywood musicals into an unofficial video for "Uptown Funk." It's over in under five minutes and it barely even has a title, but I think I like it even better than That's Entertainment!
Honorable mentions:
11. The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
12. Florida Man (Sean Dunne)
13. Better Call Saul (Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould)
14. A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (Jumana Manna)
15. Mr. Robot season_1.0 (Sam Esmail)
16. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
17. Veep 4 (Armando Iannucci)
18. Weather Service (Kris Straub)
19. Thailand Moment (Les Blank)
20. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)
Note: Better Call Saul, Mr. Robot, and Veep are all TV shows, so the people in parentheses after those titles are showrunners, not directors. Though each of those folks directed at least one episode too, so I guess they're double auteurs.
Of the films of 2015 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Thoughts That Once We Had.