1. Black Narcissus – I enjoyed this so much that the review I wrote that night is raving nonsense. I did call it one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, so I’ll take my word for it.
2. The Double Life of Veronique – beautiful in a way that doesn’t even make sense… will have to see it again and again.
3. Spaced, season 1 – good thing I’m accountable to no one with my end-of-year lists, so I can put a TV series up here among all the movies. Watched the whole season twice, and I’d do it again… hilarious and brilliant.
4. Edvard Munch – such a powerful movie, it troubled my mind all year.
5. Scarlet Street – I almost want to lower its ranking to punish Fritz Lang for being so cruel to Edward G. Robinson. So very dark… best noir I’ve seen since Out of the Past.
6. F.W. Murnau’s Faust – c’mon, it’s Faust.
7. Moolaade – best movie on female genital mutilation I’ve ever seen.
8. Dazed and Confused – a good time, a very happy movie.
9. Tokyo Story – not as happy, but an emotional trip… gotta see more Ozu soon.
10. Kageroza – glad to see what Seijun Suzuki did during his “time off” from filmmaking.
11. Touch the Sound
13. Greed (The TCM reconstructed version)
14. La Strada
15. Wages of Fear
16. Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting – made the list as soon as the curator fell asleep and the disembodied narrator started whispering so as not to wake him.
17. Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths
18. Petulia
19. Mr. Arkadin (corinth version) – Orson Welles in full-on crazy mode… a bunch of amazing scenes loosely stitched together with a ridiculous (and poorly dubbed) framing device. Too weird not to love.
Honorable mentions to The Thief of Bagdad, The Newton Boys, Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge, the Judex silent serial, and Fritz Lang’s While The City Sleeps, among many others.