Brandon's movie memory

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Sorry so obvious.

2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
The only one on the list that I watched twice.

3. Finisterrae (Sergio Caballero)
4. Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
5. The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)
I was glad to see these last two on so many year-end lists, because at the time I watched them they felt like secrets – in Atlanta, at least. Finisterrae is still a secret.

6. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
7. Tabloid (Errol Morris)
8. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)
9. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Bromberg, Medrea & Clouzot)
10. And Everything Is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh)
11. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
12. Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)

Runners-up:
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
The Muppets (James Bobin)
True Grit (Coens)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Best Local Film: The Little Death (Bret Wood)

Best New Horror: Red State (Kevin Smith)

The Hobo With a Shotgun Award
for the most entertaining fake-grindhouse feature of the year goes to:
Machete by Robert Rodriguez
Runner-up: Hobo With a Shotgun

1. Three by Raoul Ruiz: City of Pirates (1984), Manuel on the Island of Wonders (1985), and That Day (2003)
City of Pirates has been the one to beat since I watched it this summer. I can’t say Manuel beats it exactly, but they are highly complimentary (both concern islands, pirates, children with identity issues, etc). The other (and of course Mysteries of Lisbon) is happy proof that Ruiz never stopped making brilliant work to the end of his life. I look forward to catching up with all the rest.

2. Three by Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Magician (1958) and The Virgin Spring (1960)
I didn’t even think I liked Bergman very much until I saw Monika at Emory early this year. Then I watched each of these expecting to be let down, but I never was. So I’m grudgingly redefining myself as a huge Bergman fan.

3. Four by Josef von Sternberg: Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928), Docks of New York (1928) and Dishonored (1931)

4. Russian Silents: Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), By the Law (Kuleshov), Mother (Pudovkin) and Arsenal (Dovzhenko)

5. A Tale of the Wind (1988, Ivens & Loridan)
6. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

7. Victor Sjostrom: The Phantom Carriage (1921) and He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

8. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

9. Renoir in the 1930′s: La Chienne, Night at the Crossroads, Boudu Saved From Drowning and Toni
I didn’t get to Grand Illusion in time.

10. Kaneto Shindo horrors: Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968)

I don’t care if it’s cheating to put 25 titles in my top-10.

11. Finis Terrae (1929, Jean Epstein)
12. Nostalghia (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky)
13. I Was a Male War Bride (1949, Howard Hawks)

14. Two by Alain Resnais: Love Unto Death (1984) and Melo (1986)
Too bad about I Want To Go Home.

15. Century of the Self (2002, Adam Curtis)
16. For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert)
Two extremely different documentaries.

17. Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray)
18. The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
19. La Pointe-courte (1956, Agnes Varda)
20. Withnail & I (1986, Bruce Robinson)

21. Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
22. Center Stage (1991, Stanley Kwan)
23. Powell & Pressburger: A Canterbury Tale and Gone to Earth
24. Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)
25. Gothic (1986, Ken Russell)
26. The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)

Runners-up:
My Life to Live (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Last Bolshevik (1992, Chris Marker)
L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941, Christian-Jaque)
The Marquise of O (1976, Eric Rohmer)
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970, Werner Herzog)
The Last Mistress (2007, Catherine Breillat)

Finally, because his films don’t like to mingle with the others,
Jacques Rivette of the year: L’Amour Fou (1969)

1. Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
Didn’t used to think I was a Bergman fan.

2. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
Didn’t used to think I was a big Polanski fan either, until watching this on the big screen at Emory.

3. Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
Cheating: I had this same movie on the same list six years ago.

4. The Dead (1987, John Huston)
5. Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski)
6. Bound (1996, Wachowskis)
7. The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)
8. Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
The previous eight films were all shown at Emory on 35mm, for which I am grateful.

9. The Gate (1987, Tibor Takacs)
One of these things is not like the others… a low-profile 80′s horror flick at the Plaza, an old fave from childhood HBO screenings seen for the first time on the big screen.

10. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Bonus mentions to The Mark of Zorro (1920, Fred Niblo) for the nice presentation (including a live organ score) at the Fox, and to The Lion King (1994) for looking pretty sweet in 3-D and making my wife so happy.

I didn’t watch a ton of shorts, not like I did a couple years ago.
But these were all excellent.

1. The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)
This totally made up for The Illusionist.

2. The Chorus (1982, Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Toby Dammit (1968, Federico Fellini)
4. The House Is Black (1963, Forugh Farrokhzad)
5. The Way to Shadow Garden (1954, Stan Brakhage)
The only Brakhage I watched this year. I rented the second Criterion set but wasn’t sure if I should watch it or hold out for the blu-ray. Of course there’s no reason to delay ’cause I can always watch the films a second time…

6. Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)
7. Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)
After reading about this for years, I felt like I’d seen it before I saw it.

8. Monsieur Fantomas (1937, Ernst Moerman)
9. Three by Agnes Varda: 7p., cuis., s. de b. (1984), Ydessa, The Bears and etc. (2004) and Le Lion volatil (2003)
10. Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)
The short – not the feature, which was overbaked.

2011 Movies I Obviously Need To See:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
The Artist
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Carnage
Contagion and Haywire
Crazy Horse
A Dangerous Method
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Remake
Harakiri
Into the Abyss
Insidious
Keyhole
Pina
The Rum Diary
Super 8
Take Shelter
This is Not a Film

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to many critics:

The Arbor
The Deep Blue Sea
Elena
Faust
The Guard
Le Havre
Kid with a Bike
Kill List
Margaret
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Nostalgia for the Light
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Poetry
The Portuguese Nun
A Separation
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
To Die Like a Man
Two Years at Sea and Slow Action
Tyrannosaur
We Can’t Go Home Again
We Have a Pope
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Weekend

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to a single, highly convincing critic:

Attenberg (Cinema Scope)
The Catechism Cataclysm (Grady Hendrix)
Confessions (Pamela Jahn)
Coriolanus (Demetrios Matheou)
Disorder (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Dreams of a Life (Peter Bradshaw)
The Forgotten Space (Sukhdev Sandhu)
The Future (AV Club)
Impardonnables (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
The Interrupters (A.A. Dowd & Ben Kenigsberg)
Kaboom (John Waters)
Kinyarwanda (Roger Ebert)
Margin Call (JR Jones)
My Joy (Nick Roddick)
Photographic Memory (David Jenkins)
Post Mortem (Frances Morgan)
Red White and Blue (Virginie Selavy)
El Sicario, Room 164 (Chuck Bowen)
Super (Grady Hendrix)
The Yellow Sea (Wendy Ide)

It’s the five-year anniversary of the movie journal! Since that first short post on a Seijun Suzuki movie which Katy so hated, I’ve chalked up over 1100 features and over 800 shorts, many of which Katy has hated. She married me anyway.

In celebration of five years of movies, I’ve rescued a pile of must-see lists from my email archive. After all, the blog was started partly because of my obsession with movie lists, and it has happily coincided with them ever since (via the sortable list of entries and various other must-see lists posted every few months, all collected here). So these are project or theme-month lists left uncompleted, with titles I actually watched removed, and overlaps kept to a minimum.

-
Musicals Month

In October (and November) 2007, Katy and I watched a bunch of musicals. I even made a musicals-month soundtrack CD. There were some rocky selections – Katy walked out on Pennies From Heaven and declared that Red Garters was not a proper musical, but she got to pick Grease and Fiddler on the Roof. This looks like a list of my own leftover picks, with a few Katy-concession titles and a couple recommended by Joanna.

New York, New York
Hairspray
Tommy
Quadrophenia
Hallelujah
Performance
A Star Is Born
Topsy Turvy
On the Town
Funny Face
42nd Street
Top Hat
A Night at the Opera
I Love Melvin
Dangerous When Wet
Annie Get Your Gun
Bells Are Ringing
High Society
The Muppet Movie
Hello Dolly
Les Girls
Blackfly / The Cat Came Back
Rhapsody Rabbit
Dixieland Droopy

-
Documentary Month

From June 2008. One of the more successful theme months – we watched nine.

anything by Ross McElwee
The War Room
Lessons of Darkness (Herzog)
White Diamond (Herzog)
The Big One
The House Is Black
Forgotten Silver
The Power of Nightmares
Salesman (Maysles)
Sorrow and the Pity
Darwin’s Nightmare
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
My Kid Could Paint That
Taxi to the Dark Side
Nanook of the North
One Day in September
In the Shadow of the Moon
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981 punk)
The Filth and the Fury
No Direction Home
Thin Blue Line (Morris)
God’s Country (Malle)
Calcutta (Malle)

-
Documentary Month 2

This January Katy said she wanted to do another doc month, so I made this list of movies I’ve already got which we could watch, but then we ended up doing a political-films month instead, during which we only watched two movies (the three-part The Trap, and Standard Operating Procedure).

Bye Bye Africa
The Living Dead (Adam Curtis)
The Way of All Flesh (Adam Curtis)
Showman (Maysles)
Disgraced Monuments
Listen To Britain
Qallunaat!
Monitor: Elgar
Canal Zone (Wiseman)
High School (Wiseman)
Nollywood
VHS Kahloucha
Sisters In Law
The End of Suburbia
Gershwin
Kestrel’s Eye
Winged Migration
Antonio Gaudi
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

-
2007 Movies

At the end of 2009 I thought I hadn’t seen enough 2009 movies to make any sort of best-of-year list, so I made a best-of-2006 list instead. At the end of 2010 I figured I’d do the same for 2007 movies and make it a tradition, but then decided that was boring and obsessive. This was my must-see list of ’07 movies to watch in ’10.

The Mourning Forest
Silent Light
Control
Aleksandra
The Last Mistress
Breath
Beaufort
Secret of the Grain
L’Aimée
Christopher Columbus, The Enigma
Go Go Tales
You, The Living
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Gone Baby Gone
Trapped in the Closet
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie
Dr. Plonk
Nightwatching
In the City of Sylvia

-
2005 Movies

Apparently I’d had the same idea in 2008, to watch a bunch of movies I’d missed from three years before. Looks like a list of stuff I thought I’d like, stuff I thought I’d hate, and critical favorites.

Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
The Sun
The Wild Blue Yonder
Sileni
The Bow
The Constant Gardener
Brick
Alone in the Dark / Bloodrayne
Manderlay
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
La Moustache
Junebug
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Thank You For Smoking
The Baxter
Don’t Come Knocking
Fearless Freaks

-
1930′s Month (August 2008)

Between Trouble In Paradise and Rules of the Game, Katy and I watched seven 1930′s movies, and I watched one more when she wasn’t around. These are the others I tried getting her to watch, along with my brief descriptions. I hardly ever give descriptions… must have been trying especially hard that summer.

Enthusiasm (groundbreaking russian experimental drama)
Gabriel Over The White House (angel-as-president drama)
Daybreak (french romantic tragedy, dir. of children of paradise)
Land Without Bread (bunuel’s mountain documentary)
L’Idee (30-min pioneering animated film)
À Nous la liberté (french left-wing satirical comedy)
Movie Crazy (harold lloyd wants to be in the movies)
Man’s Castle (pre-code spencer tracy romance)
The Milky Way (harold lloyd talkie, milkman becomes a boxing star)
Edge of the World (ahead-of-its-time british drama, scenic, tragic)
Grand Illusion (french war drama often voted a top-ten-ever film)
The Blue Angel (the musical that made marlene dietrich a star)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (renoir comedy w one of my fave french actors)
Sylvia Scarlett (cukor/grant/hepburn romantic comedy!)
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (some kinda japanese masterpiece)
Threepenny Opera (musical from director of pandora’s box)
Scarface (howard hawks’ original gangster drama)

-
Christmas Movies

Christmas Movie Week comes every December – this is the 2010 list, in descending order by how much I thought Katy would enjoy watching them.

The Bells of St. Mary’s
Comfort and Joy
I’ll Be Seeing You
Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
A Midwinter’s Tale
Christmas Holiday
‘Til We Meet Again
Bad Santa
Jesus of Montreal
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
A Tale of Winter
The Ref
Frozen River
‘R Xmas
A Midnight Clear

-
Westerns Month (Dec. 2010)

A very enjoyable six-movie theme month with Katy. And eighteen left on the list I made, so we only got to a quarter of it, which still seems an unusually high ratio. Other lists I make (things to fix around the house, albums to buy, restaurants to try) are just as unrealistic and unrealized as my way-too-long movie lists. Westerns are tough because all their titles sound the same to me.

Big Sky
Duel in the Sun
Annie Get Your Gun
The Gunfighter
Wagon Master
The Lusty Men
Silver Lode
Wichita
Man of the West
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Fort Apache
Red River
Bend of the River
The Far Country
The Misfits
Ride the High Country

-
Late Films (Dec. 2010)

For the Shadowplay Late Films Blogathon I watched a week’s worth of final or near-final films by writers, directors and in one case, actors. These are others that I considered:

Lang: The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
Franju: Shadowman
Chaplin: A King In New York
Nick Ray: Lightning Over Water
Walerian Borowczyk
Demy: Trois places pour le 26 or Varda’s Demy double-feature
Corman: Frankenstein Unbound
Jarman: Blue
John Hubley: The Cosmic Eye
Lubitsch: Cluny Brown, That Lady In Ermine
Melville: Un Flic
Oshima: Taboo
Satyajit Ray: The Visitor, Branches of the Tree
Sturges: Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, The French are a Funny Race
Borzage: The Big Fisherman
Borzage/Ulmer: Journey Beneath the Desert/Siren of Atlantis
Jerry Lewis: Hardly Working, Cracking Up

-
Russian Movies

Just last month I decided I need to see all the silent Russian masterpieces, and a bunch more Russian movies for that matter. I only watched one feature and a short. Anyway, I’ll get to it later.

Starewicz 1912 Cameraman’s Revenge :13
Bauer 1914 Child of the Big City :37
Bauer 1915 After Death :46
Protazanov 1924 Aelita 1:51
Eisenstein 1925 Potemkin
Vertov 1926 A Sixth Part of the World 1:14
Vertov 1926 Man with the Movie Camera 1:07
Kuleshov 1926 Dura Lex 1:18
Eisenstein 1927 October
Dovzhenko 1929 Arsenal
Dovzhenko 1930 Earth
Vertov 1931 Enthusiasm 1:05
Dovzhenko 1932 Ivan
Kuleshov 1933 The Great Consoler
Pudovkin 1933 Deserter 1:45
Medvedkin 1938 New Moscow 1:16
Eisenstein 1945 Ivan the Terrible
Kalatozov 1959 Letter Never Sent 1:32
1967 Viy, Spirit of Evil 1:12
Protazanov 1969 The Queen of Spades 1:03
Tarkovsky 1975 Mirror 1:48
Sokurov 1979 Sonata For Hitler :43
Parajanov 1984 Legend of Suram Fortress 1:28
Klimov 1985 Come and See 1:13
Sokurov 1988 Days of Eclipse 1:06
Muratova 1990 Asthenic Syndrome 2:33
Petrov 1992 The Cow :10
Mikhalkov 1994 Burnt by the Sun 2:15
Sokurov 1994 Whispering Pages 1:17
Petrov 1999 Old Man and the Sea :20
Iosseliani 1999 Adieu Plancher 1:52
Fokin 2002 Metamorphosis 1:24
Muratova 2004 The Tuner 2:35
Sokurov 2007 Aleksandra 1:31
Zvyagintsev 2007 The Banishment 2:30

-
SHOCKtober 2010

Going along with my plan to watch some of the “best films of the decade“, I thought for SHOCKtober last year I’d confine myself to horror movies from 2000-2010. But I didn’t end up doing that at all. So here’s the list I’d planned to use:

Taxidermia
Fear(s) of the Dark
In My Skin
The Orphanage
Inside
Wendigo
The Last Winter
Mother of Tears
Mysterious Skin
The End of Suburbia / Darwin’s Nightmare
Demons (Mario O’Hara)
Memories of Murder (bong)
Anatomy of Hell
They Came Back
K Kurosawa: Seance, Bright Future, Doppelganger
The Devil’s Backbone
Irreversible
Twentynine Palms
13 Tzamedi
Deanimated
Demon Pond
Vital

-
SHOCKtober 2009

Told myself I’d watch stuff that I’d bought and rented, but of course that never happens – I just rent new ones. I think this is a mash of lists from 2007-2009.

Dr. Caligari 80min
Organ 104min
Vampyres 88min
The Baby’s Room (2006) 76min
Crawlspace 80min
To Sir With Love (2006) 93min
The Old Dark House 72min
Death Bed (1977) 78min
2000 Maniacs 84min
Mansion of Madness 84min
Midori 49min anime
Atrocity Exhibition 102min
Haxan Witchcraft 76min
Rubber’s Lover 91min
Cthulhu
Fear Itself episodes
Possession by zulawski
Tideland
The Woods (2006)
Wizard of Gore
Sheitan
The Hunger
Necronomicon (1993)
Dr. Caligari
Curse of Frankenstein 1957
The Mummy 1959
Strange Circus
Season of the Witch

-
Shorts Month

November 2009 was Shorts Month, when I watched so many shorts that I’m still kind of sick of them. Here are some (not counting the ones that ended up on the auteur list) I’d intended to watch that month before I took a less focused approach and just devoured all the ones on my laptop.

Philips-Radio (Joris Ivens)
Un Chant D’Amour
more Chaplin
Borzage: Nugget Jim / Pilgrim
Free Cinema DVDs
Entr’acte (René Clair)
La Villa Santo-Sospir (by Cocteau)
Paris du par (anthology)
Godard/Mieville DVD
Greenaway: 26 Bathrooms, Fear of Drowning, Writing on Water
Herzog: Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Unprecedented Defence of Deutschkreuz, Nobody Wants to Play with Me, Handicapped Future
Hubleys: The Hat, Moonbird, Whither Weather
Kiarostami: Breaktime, The Chorus
Rohmer: Changing Landscapes
Ken Russell: From Spain to Streatham, London Moods, Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, Prokofiev, Variations on a Mechanical Theme, Antonio Gaudí
various by Terayama Shuji

-
TCM Essentials Month (Feb. 2011)

This was short-lived because Katy didn’t have much time to waste on movies, but we’ll come back to it. She missed having cable, so I looked up lists of Turner Classic’s “essentials”, then after each movie we’d read their online article explaining why it was so essential.

A Face in the Crowd
A Place in the Sun
A Star is Born (’54)
An Affair to Remember
An American in Paris
Ben-Hur
Black Orpheus
Bonnie and Clyde (’67)
Brief Encounter
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Duck Soup
Fort Apache
Gaslight
Gilda
Grand Illusion
Gunga Din
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Imitation of Life
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Jezebel
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Lawrence of Arabia (’67)
Leave Her to Heaven (’46)
Lolita
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Notorious
Now, Voyager
Out of the Past
Paper Moon
Paths of Glory
Psycho
Rebecca
Ride the High Country
Saboteur
Seven Samurai
Some Came Running
Stalag 17
Strangers on a Train (’51)
Sweet Smell of Success
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Big Sleep
The Four Feathers
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Escape
The Hustler
The Letter
The Maltese Falcon
The Manchurian Candidate
The Merry Widow
The Misfits
The Mouse that Roared
The Quiet Man
The Sea Hawk (’40)
The Snake Pit (’48)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
They Were Expendable
To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
Tom Jones
Tootsie (1982)
White Heat
Winchester ’73
Witness for the Prosecution
Wuthering Heights

-
Bonus List: Criterion Laserdiscs

I found a list of movies Criterion released before the DVD era, made note of the 80-ish I’ve never seen. I have an ongoing urge to watch everything the company puts out (as do many cinephile/collectors, I’m sure), but between their main label and Eclipse, I’ll never actually catch up to the point that I need to worry myself over these. It’s still an interesting group of films, though.

High Noon
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Sabotage
Secret Agent
Young and Innocent
The Asphalt Jungle
Scaramouche (george sidney)
Show Boat (whale)
Forbidden Planet
Zulu
Darling (john schlesinger)
West Side Story
Shampoo
Miracle in Milan (de sica)
La Cage aux Folles
Burn! (gillo pontecorvo)
The Lacemaker (claude goretta)
King of Hearts (philippe de broca)
Silverado
Last Tango in Paris
The Big Chill
Dr. No
From Russia with Love
Goldfinger
Bad Day at Black Rock
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (alexander hall)
Lady for a Day (capra)
Carnal Knowledge (mike nichols)
Tootsie
Sunday Bloody Sunday (john schlesinger)
Blackmail
The Prince of Tides
Jason and the Argonauts
A River Runs Through It
Damage (malle)
City of Hope (sayles)
Confidentially Yours
Edward II (jarman)
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (bertrand blier)
Evergreen (victor saville)
Macbeth (polanski)
Polyester
Salt of the Earth (berbert biberman)
Bodies, Rest & Motion (michael steinberg)
Menace II Society
Two English Girls
The Prince of Tides
Woman Next Door
Soft Skin
Dersu Uzala
Three Cases of Murder (david eady)
In Which We Serve (noel coward)
Odd Man Out
Once Were Warriors (lee tamahori)
The Atomic Cafe
Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?
Waltz of the Torreadors (john guillermin)
El Cid (anthony mann)
Diva
The Entertainer (tony richardson)
Swept Away (lina wertmuller)
The Return of Martin Guerre (daniel vigne)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Montenegro (makavejev)
Purple Noon
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
Supercop
Olympia I and II
Pink Flamingos
Five Corners (tony bill)
Breaker Morant
Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
Godzilla vs. Mothra
Godzilla vs. Monster Zero
Godzilla’s Revenge
Terror of Mechagodzilla
Sonatine
Switchblade Sisters

A “new movie” is defined herein as any of the following:
- a movie released in 2010 (e.g. Black Swan)
- a non-2010 movie I saw in theaters in 2010 (e.g. The White Ribbon)
- a non-2010 movie I saw on video in 2010 which I couldn’t reasonably have seen sooner (e.g. The Headless Woman)

1. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
The only movie I saw twice in theaters this year, so I am sure about this.

2. Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
Perhaps if I understood it, I’d enjoy it less. Finally Resnais’s wild sense of mystery has returned.

3. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
One of everybody’s favorite movies of last year is now one of my favorite movies of this year.

4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Maybe only my second-favorite Weerasethakul movie I watched this year, but they’d sure be close. It’s the one on this list which I still think about most often.

5. The Social Network (David Fincher)
Everyone else’s favorite movie of the year is at least my favorite one in the English language.

6. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
7. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright)
8. Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
9. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
10. A Single Man (Tom Ford)
11. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)
12. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

Honorable mentions: Revanche, The Headless Woman, the weirdly awesome It Felt Like a Kiss, music doc It Might Get Loud, Miike’s Yatterman, and Shutter Island.

Best pre-2000 movies I watched on video (and at Emory) this year. As usual, there are lots.

1. City Girl (1930, FW Murnau)
2. Robin and Marian (1976, Richard Lester)
3. The Cranes are Flying (1957, Mikheil Kalatozishvili)
4. Lucky Star (1929, Frank Borzage)
5. The Band Wagon (1953, Vincente Minnelli)

Two silents in the top five – a first.

6. La Vie est un roman (1983, Alain Resnais)
7. The Blood (1989, Pedro Costa)
8. I Walked With a Zombie (1943, Jacques Tourneur)
9. Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)
10. The Last Movie (1971, Dennis Hopper)

Only two of the top ten were watched with Katy. She liked them both, though, and I imagine she’d love the silents and Robin and Marian.

11. Small Change (1976, Francois Truffaut)
12. The Ceremony (1995, Claude Chabrol)
13. Underworld U.S.A. (1961, Samuel Fuller)
14. Branded to Kill (1967, Seijun Suzuki)
15. Force of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky)

I’d seen two of these before, but no matter.

16. Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)
17. Jean Renoir’s Elena And Her Men (1956) and Petit Theatre (1970)
18. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955, Luis Bunuel)
19. My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford)
20. Aparajito (1957, Satyajit Ray)

Runners-up: The Saragossa Manuscript (I can’t tell if I would’ve liked this more or less had I not just read the novel), the first three Thin Man movies, Royal Wedding (advantage: Fred Astaire’s dancing, disadvantage: Jane Powell’s singing) and The White Sheik.

Last November I held the “month of 121 shorts” and burned myself out, so I didn’t feel like watching many in 2010. Thirty made the list last year including runners-up, but I barely watched that many in total this year. Anyway, here are twelve that I loved.

1. 11’09″01 (2002)
Specifically, the two entries with children in them, by Samira Makhmalbaf and Idrissa Ouedraogo. They’re the only two that dared to treat the subject with lightness or humor, and their bravery paid off.

2. Day & Night (2010, Teddy Newton)
Remember that thing before Toy Story 3 with the visual concept that I loved but have trouble explaining? That one.

3. Cry For Bobo (2001, David Cairns)
Best clown movie ever.

4. Guy Maddin’s Night Mayor and Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair and The Little White Cloud That Cried

5. Narcissus (1983, Norman McLaren)

6. Gauguin and Van Gogh (Alain Resnais)

7. Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

8. Talking Heads (1980, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Runners-up: Spike Jonze’s robot thing I’m Here, Lindsay Anderson’s diary Is That All There Is (if that counts as a short – I’m starting to reconsider) and, though I’d seen it before, Bert Haanstra’s awesome Zoo.