Ordinarily at this point I would tell you who won the Oscar for Best Picture, sometimes to praise the choice but usually to use it as a foil. But the Oscars didn't exist yet in 1924. The champion at the box office was The Sea Hawk, but that doesn't work well as a substitute, since I haven't seen it. I guess I should just jump into the list:
1. Sherlock Jr.
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Here sit the seeds of both The Purple Rose of Cairo and Duck Amuck.
2. L'Inhumaine
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Written by L'Herbier, Pierre Mac Orlan, and Georgette Leblanc
A brilliantly demented spectacle that eventually becomes science fiction. Among its many attractions: a vision of television in which the performer views her audience instead of the other way around, changing channels to watch one fan after another.
3. Cartoon Factory
Written and directed by Dave and Max Fleischer
My kinda Clone War.
4. Ballet Mécanique
Directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Written by Léger
A Cubist ballet.
5. Au Secours!
Directed by Abel Gance
Written by Gance and Max Linder
A haunted-house farce, featuring a flurry of gags, camera tricks, and surrealist insertions.
6. He Who Gets Slapped
Directed by Victor Sjöström
Written by Sjöström and Carey Wilson
The slapping routine just might be the darkest comedy act in Hollywood history.
7. Girl Shy
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Written by Taylor, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde, and Thomas J. Gray
In the climactic chase, Harold Lloyd's character commits a series of larcenies and puts dozens of people's lives at risk, all to prevent a wedding that could have been easily annulled after the fact. But it's OK, because it's funny.
8. The Last Laugh
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Carl Mayer
The most silent of silent dramas.
9. The Crazy Ray
Written and directed by René Clair
This list didn't have room for Clair's most celebrated film of the year, the enjoyably loopy experiment Entr'acte. But I couldn't leave out this sci-fi comedy about a machine that freezes a city in time.
10. The Navigator
Directed by Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp
Written by Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
"He had completed all arrangements—except to notify the girl."
* * *
Of the films of 1924 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Aelita: Queen of Mars.
I have not watched enough good movies from 1914 for a top 10 list, so we'll stop the tour here. For the record, my favorite film of 1914 is Les Vampires (or at least those installments of the serial that came out that year) and my favorite film of 1904 is The Impossible Voyage. And of the handful of motion pictures I've seen from 1894, I guess the best is Autour D'une Cabine. If I've missed a masterpiece from that year, let me know.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1934, it gave its Best Picture award to the proto-screwball classic It Happened One Night. This is one of those rare years where the prize at least arguably went to the right movie. But on my list, another film edged it out:
1. The Black Cat
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Ulmer and Peter Ruric
This isolationist fable is Ulmer's best feature, the best film to star Karloff and Lugosi together, and perhaps the purest example of a picture that claims to be based on a Poe story while ignoring Poe's plot entirely.
2. It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Robert Riskin, from a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
There's a lot to love in this movie, but it's the "Flying Trapeze" scene that's closest to my heart.
3. L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
Written by Vigo and Albert Riéra, from a story by Jean Guinée
Romance on a floating Cornell box.
4. The Thin Man
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
"Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?" "Oh, that's all right, we're married."
5. Dames
Directed by Ray Enright with Busby Berkeley
Written by Delmer Daves
This cheerfully amoral musical feels like a product of the pre-Code period, though it appeared about a month too late for that. It spends about an hour mocking the bluenoses, then morphs into a series of psychedelic Busby Berkeley sequences that feel more like 1960s pop art than 1930s pop culture.
6. The Scarlet Empress
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Written by Eleanor McGeary
A thoroughly ludicrous drama, and I mean that in the most favorable way possible.
7. Granton Trawler
Directed by John Grierson
One decent movie that didn't make it onto this list is Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. Like Flaherty's film, Grierson's documentary about a Scottish fishing boat is a lyrical look at lives lived close to northern Europe's waters. But while Flaherty's film is a romanticized recreation of the way people may have lived long before the movie was made, this attempts to show us what fishermen were experiencing in 1934.
8. The Mascot
Written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz
The Nightmare Before Christmas of the '30s.
9. Lieutenant Kijé
Directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer
Written by Yury Tynyanov
A brief thaw in Soviet cinema allowed a movie like this to be released: an anti-authoritarian satire where a bureaucratic error creates an imaginary officer and then the SNAFU Principle lets him rise through the ranks. The story had to take place in czarist times, of course—but before long, even that wouldn't work as camouflage.
10. Soldier's Story
Directed by Čeněk Zahradníček and Vladimír Šmejkal
Written by Šmejkal
It's an eight-minute abstraction of every antiwar saga set in World War I, and it's more effective than at least 90% of them.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch)
12. Ship of the Ether (George Pal)
13. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
14. Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur)
15. We Live in Prague (Otakar Vávra)
16. Ha! Ha! Ha! (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright)
18. The Old Fashioned Way (William Beaudine)
19. A Dream Walking (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel)
20. Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins, Charles Rogers)
Of the films of 1934 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Accordion—the movie that prompted Joseph Stalin to say, "Never make such rubbish as Accordion again." (I said the Soviets saw a thaw. I didn't say they were free.)
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1944, it gave its Best Picture award to Going My Way. That's not a bad movie, but it's a trifle; it feels perverse to hand it the prize in a year that produced as many great films as this one.
1. Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M. Cain
It's a bleak and ugly story about murder and betrayal, and at times it's as funny as any of Wilder's comedies.
2. To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a novel by Ernest Hemingway
A lot like Casablanca, but better.
3. Laura
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, from a novel by Vera Caspary
Roger Ebert called this film's allure "a tribute to style over sanity." He didn't mean that as a put-down, and I don't either.
4. The Curse of the Cat People
Directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch
Written by DeWitt Bodeen and Val Lewton
This sweet fantasy film about a lonely child has what just might be the most misleading title in Hollywood history.
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
"You don't need reasons. Although they're probably there."
6. The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Written by Olivier, Dallas Bower, and Alan Dent, from a play by William Shakespeare
It's a propaganda picture, but don't get hung up on that. It's also the most visually inventive Shakespeare movie I've seen, a film that feels like an illuminated manuscript come to life.
7. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
Between this and Conquering Hero, you'd never dream Sturges' career was about to crash.
8. A Canterbury Tale
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A tale of love, war, and a mysterious figure who assaults women by pouring glue in their hair. And it's actually even stranger than that makes it sound.
9. It Happened Tomorrow
Directed by René Clair
Written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, from a story by Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder and a play by Lord Dunsany
This one was nearly made by Frank Capra instead, and the story is certainly suited for the Capra treatment. But it works as one of Clair's American fantasies too. Indeed, it comes in a slot ahead of the bona fide Capra movie on this list.
10. Arsenic and Old Lace
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by Joseph Kesselring
Surely the finest portrait of Teddy Roosevelt ever to grace the screen.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Old Grey Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk)
13. At Land (Maya Deren)
14. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock)
15. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang)
16. The Suspect (Robert Siodmak)
17. Jammin' the Blues (Gjon Mili)
18. Little Red Riding Rabbit (Friz Freleng)
19. The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang)
20. The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville)
Plus a nod to the Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis. The rest of the picture doesn't do much for me (aside from "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"), but if the Halloween segment were a standalone short it might make it into my top 10.
Finally: Having wrapped up my 1954 list with a shoutout to what is probably the only Ingmar Bergman movie to climax with a girlfight in a jazz club, I'll wrap up 1944 with a shoutout to what is probably the closest Bergman ever came to writing a film noir. Torment was his first produced screenplay, he got an assistant director credit too, and it's a pretty solid debut.
Of the films of 1944 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Battle of China.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1954, it gave its Best Picture award to On the Waterfront. You will find that one below, but not at number one:
1. Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a story by Cornell Woolrich
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a comedy. The second time, I thought it was a thriller. The third time, I mostly thought the Jimmy Stewart character was kind of creepy. I was right each time.
2. Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
"Since it's impossible to kill them all, I usually run away."
3. Johnny Guitar
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Ben Maddow, from a novel by Roy Chanslor
I think the films of the '50s tend to be step down from the films of the '40s, but I do like how the westerns got weirder.
4. Wuthering Heights
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, Dino Maiuri, and Pierre Unik, from a novel by Emily Brontë
I would not be unhappy if every adaptation of a highbrow literary classic was made by a surrealist slumming in the Mexican melodrama market.
5. The Age of Swordfish
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
Here is where the boundary between documentary and neorealism breaks down entirely.
6. Sansho the Bailiff
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda, from a story by Mori Ōgai
"Humans have little sympathy for things that don't directly concern them. They're ruthless."
7. On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
My friend Shawn once asked if I'd ever heard "Noam Chomsky's analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire." I did a double take and said, "What? No, I haven't. What does Noam Chomsky have to say about A Streetcar Named Desire?" Shawn then realized that he'd had a brain fart and that he'd meant to say "Noam Chomsky's analysis of On the Waterfront," which further discussion revealed to be exactly what you'd expect Chomsky's take on On the Waterfront to be. But I still sometimes wonder what ol' Noam thinks of A Streetcar Named Desire.
8. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Aleister Crowley's home movies.
9. Journey to Italy
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Rossellini and Vitaliano Brancati, from a novel by Colette
More or less the opposite of a love story.
10. Track of the Cat
Directed by William Wellman
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by William Van Tilburg Clark
Beulah Bondi steals every scene she's in.
Honorable mentions:
11. Illusion Travels by Streetcar (Luis Buñuel)
12. Corral (Colin Low)
13. The Far Country (Anthony Mann)
14. Closed Vision (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin)
15. Islands of Fire (Vittorio De Seta)
16. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse)
17. Father Brown (Robert Hamer)
18. Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton)
19. La Strada (Federico Fellini)
20. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
Finally, a shout-out to A Lesson in Love. It may be just a mid-tier movie in the grand scheme of Ingmar Bergman's filmography, but how many of his pictures climax with two girls having a catfight in a seedy jazz club?
Of the films of 1954 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Musashi Miyamoto.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1964, it gave its Best Picture award to My Fair Lady, a movie that takes on new dimensions if you assume that Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering are having sex. The film's reputation has suffered somewhat since '64, but I like it. It isn't in the top 10, though:
1. Dr. Strangelove
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern, from a novel by George
"Mein führer! I can walk!"
2. Woman in the Dunes
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Written by Kobo Abe, from his novel
Spooky and beautiful. The book is good, but the movie is perfect.
3. Diary of a Chambermaid
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, from a novel by Octave Mirbeau
I love Renoir as much as the next cineaste, but this is so much better than the Renoir version.
4. The Killers
Directed by Don Siegel
Written by Gene L. Coon, from a story by Ernest Hemingway
In which Ronald Reagan delivers the immortal line: "I approve of larceny. Homicide is against my principles."
5. Kwaidan
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Written by Yoko Mizuki, from a book by Lafcadio Hearn
Four Japanese ghost stories. The first is mediocre, but the rest are riveting—especially "Hoichi the Earless," which feels like an epic medieval poem but bears no resemblance to Hollywood's "epics" at all.
6. The World of Henry Orient
Directed by George Roy Hill
Written by Nora and Nunnally Johnson, from Nora's novel
Two children make a magical dérive through New York, then are initiated into adulthood. Between this and The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury was clearly going through the "bad mom" phase of her career.
7. Onibaba
Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo
This, Kwaidan, Woman in the Dunes—what an amazing year for Japanese horror pictures.
8. A Shot in the Dark
Directed by Blake Edwards
Written by Edwards and William Peter Blatty, from plays by Marcel Achard and Harry Kurnitz
Not every Pink Panther movie holds up, but I watched this again with one of my kids a few months ago and I think it's a goddamn piece of art.
9. The Americanization of Emily
Directed by Arthur Hiller
Written by Paddy Chayefsky, from a novel by William Bradford Huie
Reminds me a bit of Stalag 17, except it has the courage of its convictions.
10. A Fistful of Dollars
Directed by Sergio Leone
Written by Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena, and Jaime Comas, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
In the days since Hammett started to write Red Harvest, his story has taken the form of a great hardboiled detective novel, a great samurai movie, and a great spaghetti western. It would make a great Bugs Bunny short too, but y'all ain't ready for that conversation.
Honorable mentions:
11. Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder)
12. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich)
13. I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov)
14. Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes)
15. Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer)
16. Mermaid (Osamu Tezuka)
17. The Train (John Frankenheimer)
18. Culloden (Peter Watkins)
19. Becket (Peter Glenville)
20. Evil of Frankenstein (Freddie Francis)
Of the films of 1964 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Topkapi.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1974, it gave its Best Picture award to The Godfather Part 2. In another year that might have topped my list as well, but in 1974 it wasn't even the best Coppola movie:
1. Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Robert Towne
The bridge between the film noir of the '40s and the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s.
2. The Conversation
Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola
The ultimate 1970s movie: It's got paranoia, guilt, a lone wolf locked into an uneasy relationship with the system, and Gene Hackman.
3. Lenny
Directed by Bob Fosse
Written by Julian Barry
Sometimes Dustin Hoffman did Lenny Bruce's routines better than Lenny Bruce did Lenny Bruce's routines.
4. California Split
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joseph Walsh
The next time someone tries to tell you Hollywood always fucks things up, remind them that this one almost got directed by Spielberg instead.
5. The Godfather Part 2
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Written by Coppola and Mario Puzo, from a novel by Puzo
A short history of America.
6. Primate
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
The darkest comedy, most gruesome horror film, and least erotic sex flick of the year.
7. Swept Away...by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August
Written and directed by Lina Wertmüller
A comedy about the complexities of love, lust, and power, and the difficulties in discerning who wields the third when the first two are in play.
8. Phantom of the Paradise
Written and directed by Brian De Palma
The Phantom of the Opera meets The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Faust meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
9. Young Frankenstein
Directed by Mel Brooks
Written by Brooks and Gene Wilder
Try to find a better version of "Puttin' on the Ritz." Just try.
10. Thieves Likes Us
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Altman, Joan Tewkesbury, and Calder Willingham
Extra credit for ending a bank-robbing movie with a Charles Coughlin broadcast.
Honorable mentions:
11. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)
12. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah)
13. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent)
14. Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks)
15. TV Buddha (Nam June Paik)
16. The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula)
17. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
18. Every Man for Himself and God Against All (Werner Herzog)
19. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
20. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
Of the films of 1974 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Harry and Tonto.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1984, it gave its Best Picture award to Amadeus. That one made it into my top 10, but it isn't at number one—not in the year that gave us what might be my favorite film of my lifetime:
1. Repo Man
Written and directed by Alex Cox
"It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes."
2. Love Streams
Directed by John Cassavetes
Written by Cassavetes and Ted Allan, from a play by Allan
"All through the making of this picture," Cassavetes later said, "I kept reliving my father's words. 'For every problem there's an answer.' But since Love Streams is about a question of love, there didn't seem to be an answer I could find....Even now, I still don't know what the brother and sister really feel about each other."
3. This Is Spinal Tap
Directed by Rob Reiner
Written by Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer
The best rock movie, the first and funniest of the Christopher Guest troupe's semi-improvised comedies, and the strongest evidence that the now-insufferable Reiner was once capable of doing good work.
4. Once Upon a Time in America
Directed by Sergio Leone
Written by Leone, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, and Stuart Kaminsky, from a novel by Harry Grey
One of the great gangster pictures, arguably even better than The Godfather.
5. Nothing Lasts Forever
Written and directed by Tom Schiller
This movie harkens back to so many different film styles that it seems to take place in the entire 20th century at once. But it's a different 20th century—one where the Port Authority has seized dictatorial powers in Manhattan, a benevolent conspiracy of tramps guides people's destinies from a hidden base beneath New York, and the U.S. government first went to the moon in 1953, where it set up a secret shopping district for elderly American tourists.
6. Antonio Gaudí
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
The next best thing to seeing Gaudí's buildings in person.
7. Amadeus
Directed by Milos Forman
Written by Peter Shaffer, from his play
"Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you."
8. Ghostbusters
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
A pleasant little comedy about a small business and its run-ins with the administrative state.
9. Secret Honor
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, from their play
Like a post-Watergate conspiracy picture, but instead of a thriller it's a one-man show.
10. Blood Simple
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
My favorite living American filmmakers make their debut.
Honorable mentions:
11. King Lear (Michael Elliott)
12. Before Stonewall (John Scagliotti, Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg)
13. Favorites of the Moon (Otar Iosseliani)
14. There Will Come Soft Rains (Nazim Tulyakhodzayev)
15. After the Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman)
16. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
17. Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth)
18. Return to Waterloo (Ray Davies)
19. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven)
20. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
Of the films of 1984 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Urusei Yatsura 2.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1994, it gave its Best Picture award to Forrest Gump, a movie with a simple message: It's better to be retarded than a hippie. It didn't make it onto my list:
1. Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Tarantino and Roger Avery
Tarantino is one of those artists, like Hunter Thompson or Marcel Duchamp, who it's better to admire than to imitate. But you can't blame him for that.
2. Crumb
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This has a sequence where a comic book slowly devolves into something else, the illustrations swept aside by page upon page of tiny, illegible words. I don't think I've ever seen a movie portray a man's descent into madness so effectively.
3. Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
Better than any scripted basketball movie.
4. Before the Rain
Written and directed by Milcho Manchevski
A Balkan time-loop.
5. The Secret of Roan Inish
Directed by John Sayles
Written by Sayles, from a novel by Rosalie K. Fry
Aside from Limbo, which doesn't entirely fit the mold anyway, I'm not a fan of Sayles' big-canvas pictures—those labored films where he tries to create a politically engaged portrait of an entire community but ends up producing a clockwork-powered speechmaking machine instead. But his small movies, like this eerie and endearing fantasy, can be wonderful.
6. Red
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
Written by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Surveillance, love, and coincidence.
7. Chungking Express
Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai
More surveillance, more love, more coincidence. There's a plotline in this movie about a woman who keeps sneaking into a man's apartment and rearranging his things. I'm a sucker for stories like that.
8. Ed Wood
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Alexander and Karaszewski's next two movies about misfits, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, were directed by Milos Forman, who turned them into somewhat sanctimonious biopics. Burton did much better, because he had the inspired idea to treat Wood's life as a fairy tale.
9. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Directed by Deborah Hoffman
It's a touching documentary about Alzheimer’s...and it's funny. No, really.
10. Pipsqueak Pfollies
Written and directed by Danny Plotnick
In the words of the filmmaker, this "painstakingly details all the crap little kids can get away with."
Honorable mentions:
11. Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov)
12. The Last Seduction (John Dahl)
13. The Kingdom (Lars von Trier)
14. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
15. The Madness of George III (Nicholas Hytner)
16. White (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
17. Faust (Jan Svankmajer)
18. Barcelona (Whit Stillman)
19. Fresh (Boaz Yakin)
20. True Lies (James Cameron)
Of the films of 1994 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in That's Entertainment! III. (And I still haven't sat through Satantango yet. One day, one day…)
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 2004, it gave its Best Picture award to Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, a reasonably good movie that lasts longer than it needs to. Here are some better efforts:
1. Bad Education
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
No one wrings meaning from melodrama the way Almodóvar does.
2. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
The second installment of the Kill Bill sequence deepens our sense of the story's characters, treats this objectively silly material seriously, and somehow makes me take it seriously too. Not by loudly proclaiming its seriousness, as so much trash aspiring to arthood does, but by earning my respect; by letting me get attached to these pulp characters with their truth serums, their kung fu superpowers, and their very human attachments and resentments and revealing little lies.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry
Written by Charlie Kaufman
Three years before the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" was coined, this subverted every Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie that would ever be made.
4. The Wire 3
Written by David Simon, Ed Burns, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Rafael Alvarez, and Joy Lusco
Directed by Ed Bianchi, Steve Shill, Rob Bailey, Ernest Dickerson, Dan Attias, Leslie Libman, Tim Van Patten, Agnieszka Holland, Alex Zakrzewski, Christine Moore, and Joe Chappelle
In which reform turns out to be difficult for an individual and just about impossible for an institution.
5. Deadwood
Written by David Milch, Malcolm MacRury, Jody Worth, Elizabeth Sarnoff, John Belluso, George Putnam, Bryan McDonald, Ricky Jay, and Ted Mann
Directed by Walter Hill, David Guggenheim, Alan Taylor, Ed Bianchi, Michael Engler, Dan Minahan, and Steve Shill
Studies in state-building.
6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Directed by Wes Anderson
Written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach
"What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?" "Revenge."
7. Sideways
Directed by Alexander Payne
Written by Payne and Jim Taylor, from a novel by Rex Pickett
The movie that made the critical establishment take note of Virginia Madsen. (Me, I've been a fan since Candyman.)
8. Palindromes
Written and directed by Todd Solondz
If you want to see a bleak, sardonic comedy about abortion, this one is even darker than Citizen Ruth.
9. Team America: World Police
Directed by Trey Parker
Written by Parker, Matt Stone, and Pam Brady
I wouldn't say this explains the Bush era, but at least it'll give you a sense of what it was like to be there.
10. Nobody Knows
Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
One of the great—make that four of the great—child performances.
Honorable mentions:
11. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki)
12. Undertow (David Gordon Green)
13. In the Realms of the Unreal (Jessica Yu)
14. The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller)
15. Panorama Ephemera (Rick Prelinger)
16. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
17. Garden State (Zach Braff)
18. Light Is Calling (Bill Morrison)
19. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow)
20. Primer (Shane Carruth)
Finally, a note on The Incredibles: "Everyone's special" does not, in fact, mean that no one is special, because people can have different specialties. (But it is still a decent movie, especially by kidflick standards. I miss the days when this was the typical level of Pixar quality.)
Of the films of 2004 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
A lot of people missed this movie's underlying antiwar worldview, partly because they assumed a film based on Chris Kyle's memoir would reflect Chris Kyle's militarist outlook, but also because it isn't the sort of antiwar worldview that you usually see in even a pro-peace Hollywood picture.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy)
12. John Wick (Chad Stahelski, David Leitch)
13. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
14. Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)
15. Unedited Footage of a Bear (Alan Resnick, Ben O'Brien)
16. The Americans 2 (Joel Fields, Joe Weisberg)
17. BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg)
18. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
19. Peaky Blinders 2 (Steven Knight)
20. The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller)
The Americans, BoJack Horseman, and Peaky Blinders are TV shows, so the names listed after those titles are showrunners, not directors. Though in the case of Peaky Blinders, every episode this season had the same director—Colm McCarthy—so perhaps I should have inserted his name instead? Please don't report me to the DGA.
It is interesting, I note idly, that #8 and #14 would appear the same year. But I didn't call this the Year of the Fargo Extended Universe. I called it the Year of Time Loops, even though there is just one time loop movie in that list (The Infinite Man), because...well, not only have I seen several other time loop films from 2014 (Edge of Tomorrow, One-Minute Time Machine, and arguably Interstellar, all worth watching), but I'm told there are a ton of more, from a sex comedy (Premature) to an adaptation of the Heinlein story that I mentioned in my Infinite Man blurb (Predestination). Maybe I'll have watched them all by the time these lists loop back to 2014 again.
That said: Of the films of 2014 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Frank.
...well, now we stop. Sorry: I just haven't seen enough exceptional movies from 1923 to fill a top 10 list. For the record, my favorite film of 1923 is Safety Last! and my favorite from 1913 is the opening chapters of Fantômas. (That isn't a putdown of the later chapters—it's just that they didn't come out until 1914.) Hang tight til December; we'll start on the 4 years then.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1933, it gave its Best Picture award to Cavalcade, which isn't nearly as good as a film based on a Noel Coward play ought to be. Aside from a couple of montages and the song "20th Century Blues," the thing is a study in tedium. These are all better:
1. Duck Soup
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby with Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
A cinéma vérité documentary filmed at the White House during the invasion of Iraq.
2. Zero for Conduct
Written and directed by Jean Vigo
Anarchy in the schoolhouse.
3. Snow-White
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Comparing this to the Disney movie is like comparing an R. Crumb comic to Richie Rich.
4. Land Without Bread
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Rafael Sánchez Ventura, and Pierre Unik
The first great mockumentary.
5. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by S.N. Behrman, from a story by Ben Hecht
When Harry Langdon and Al Jolson have their rhyming debate in the park, it's the closest an old-school Hollywood musical ever comes to being Marat/Sade.
6. I'm No Angel
Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Mae West
"I see a man in your life." "What? Only one?"
7. Design for Living
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Ben Hecht, from a play by Noel Coward
"A man can meet two, three, or four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of interesting elimination, he is able to decide which he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice."
8. Outskirts
Directed by Boris Barnet
Written by Barnet and Konstantin Finn
Like Dovzhenko's best work, this is part naturalistic, part surrealistic, and part slapstick, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, while never venturing anywhere near the dogmas of Socialist Realism. Despite the inevitable Bolshevik bits in the final 10 minutes, the politics feel more anarcho-pacifist than Stalinist. It's amazing that someone in the Soviet Union managed to make this as late as 1933.
9. Alice in Wonderland
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies, from two novels by Lewis Carroll
There was at least one genius involved with creating this film, and that was whoever got the idea to cast W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
10. International House
Directed by A. Edward Sutherland
Written by Neil Brant
Fields is in this one too—and so are Cab Calloway, and Bela Lugosi, and Burns and Allen, and Rudy Vallee, and Col. Stoopnagle, and...
Honorable mentions:
11. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley)
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy)
13. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green)
14. Lot in Sodom (James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber)
15. Is My Palm Read (Dave Fleischer)
16. The Wizard of Oz (Ted Eshbaugh)
17. The Mad Doctor (David Hand)
18. Three Little Pigs (Burt Gillett)
19. The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone)
20. The Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman)
Of the films of 1933 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Power and the Glory.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1943, it gave its Best Picture award to Casablanca—a great movie but a peculiar choice, since it actually debuted in 1942. Yes, I put it in my top 10 list for that year. No, I won't repeat it in this one.
1. Shadow of a Doubt
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell
Few film experiences are as enjoyably odd as watching Thornton Wilder's sensibility collide with Hitchcock's. Wilder's screenplay is an ode to conformity, and Hitch's picture drily undercuts the script at every turn.
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Written by Deren
The most contemporary-feeling entry on this list: It's easy to imagine a giffable fragment of the film flickering in a tweet, a Facebook status, or an Instagram story, lending its uncanniness to an internet that itself feels awfully uncanny already.
3. Le Corbeau
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot and Louis Chavance, from a story by Chavance
The Resistance denounced this Vichy-era story of small-town paranoia as an attack on the French people, but in retrospect it looks more like a critique of the culture of collaboration.
4. Red Hot Riding Hood
Written and directed by Tex Avery
The Male Gaze: A Comedy.
5. Ossessione
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccinim, from a novel by James M. Cain
The first and best of the pictures based on The Postman Always Rings Twice.
6. The Ox-Bow Incident
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Lamar Trotti, from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Ideologically I have mixed feelings about this noir western: I like its defense of due process, but I don't care for the implication—common in pictures from this period—that lynching was just a matter of mobs' passions getting out of control, rather than something a power structure did to keep people in line. Cinematically, on the other hand, this is practically perfect.
7. I Walked with a Zombie
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, from a novel by Charlotte Brontë
Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this movie gave us Jane Eyre and Zombies.
8. Five Graves to Cairo
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a play by Lajos Bíró
Like I said, Casablanca isn't on this list. But this sure feels a lot like Casablanca.
9. Day of Wrath
Directed by Carl Dreyer
Written by Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, and Mogens Skot-Hansen, from a play by Hans Wiers-Jenssen
This tale of a witch hunt would make an interesting triple bill with Ox-Bow and Le Corbeau.
10. The Eternal Return
Directed by Jean Delannoy
Written by Jean Cocteau
A fairy-tale romance. Remember, real fairy tales are cruel and weird.
Honorable mentions:
11. Tortoise Wins by a Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, Orson Welles)
13. Lumière D'Été (Jean Grémillon)
14. Dumb-Hounded (Tex Avery)
15. Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone)
16. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
17. The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace)
18. Tin Pan Alley Cats (Bob Clampett)
19. Falling Hare (Bob Clampett)
20. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Bob Clampett)
I'll spare you the trouble of counting: 6 of those 20 films are cartoon shorts, all from either Tex Avery or Bob Clampett. I've said before that if I allowed individual TV episodes onto these lists, there are years in the '90s that would be overwhelmed by installments of The Simpsons. I suppose this is the equivalent for World War II.
Of the films of 1943 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phantom Baron.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1953, it gave its Best Picture award to From Here to Eternity. I like that one, but I like these better:
1. Glen or Glenda
Written and directed by Ed Wood
It draws heavily on found footage, espouses radical sexual politics, and refuses to obey any genre constraints. It jumps merrily from B-movie drama to mock educational film to surreal dream imagery. Unlike all those "socially conscious" liberal studio movies of the '50s, it actually challenges the consensus of its day, sometimes with arguments that adopt the era's assumptions and sometimes in ways far removed from the mainstream. And it casts the guy who played Dracula as God. Isn't it time we recognized this picture as a landmark underground film, as daring and unconventional as anything by Brakhage, Deren, or Conner?
2. Duck Amuck
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Bugs and Daffy never had much use for the fourth wall to begin with, but in this short they pretty much obliterate it.
3. The Naked Spur
Written and directed by Anthony Mann
There's an intense psychological thriller lurking beneath this cowboy-movie setting, with James Stewart in one of his most complex and morally ambiguous roles.
4. Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu
Written by Ozu and Kôgo Noda
Self-absorbed adults grow emotionally estranged from their parents. Quiet but devastating.
5. Eaux d'Artifice
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Not much happens in this film—there's a woman walking in a garden, and there's water, and there's the color blue, and there's a burst of a different color. As far as I'm concerned, it's Anger's masterpiece.
6. Ugetsu Monogatari
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, from stories by Akinari Ueda
A samurai movie about potters, not a potted movie about samurais.
7. El
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, from a novel by Mercedes Pinto
Sometimes I think Buñuel was never better than when he was helming Mexican potboilers. He certainly had a knack for transforming them into something strange.
8. Niagara
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard L. Breen
A Hitchcockian nightmare about death and marriage.
9. Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Edwin Blum, from a play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski
I could do without some of the supporting cast, but it's still the funniest movie ever set in a wartime prison camp.
10. Summer with Monika
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Bergman, from a novel by Per Anders Fogelström
According to Eric Schaefer's Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, an abridged version of this movie—dubbed into American English, rescored by Les Baxter, and with marketing materials that played up the picture's nude scene—lit up the exploitation circuit while the full film was being screened in arthouses. I like to imagine that somewhere it landed on a double bill with Glen or Glenda.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
12. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang)
13. Pickup on South Street (Sam Fuller)
14. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli)
15. Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin)
16. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)
17. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
18. Daybreak Express (D.A. Pennebaker)
19. The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee)
20. Eneri (Hy Hirsh)
Great unsung performance: Richard Boone in Vicki.
Worst narration: Apparently, Anatahan was Jim Morrison's favorite movie. Does that mean we can blame Morrison's habit of reciting bad poetry over Ray Manzarek's sometimes-sublime keyboards on Josef von Sternberg's decision to recite his monotonic narration over his own sometimes-sublime photography? Probably not, but of everything wrong with Anatahan—and there is a lot wrong with it—surely the narration tops the list.
Of the films of 1953 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Roman Holiday.
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.
