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.
