The reason I make lists of the top movies I’ve seen in a particular year rather than the top movies released worldwide in that year should be obvious – I don’t have access to most movies until a year or two after their release.
For example, in 2006 I watched 32 feature-length movies which the IMDB would count as original 2006 releases, but since then I’ve seen 35 more theatrically – that’s more than twice the number before even considering stuff I caught on video, which adds another 80.
So three years late, it seems right to make a best of 2006 list.
Pruning the ’05 titles from my original ’06 list and shuffling a couple others, this is how things would stand at the beginning of 2007:
1. Children of Men
2. A Scanner Darkly
3. A Prairie Home Companion
4. Slither
5. Borat!
6. The Fountain
7. Shortbus
8. Inside Man
9. The Hills Have Eyes remake
10. The Science of Sleep
Adding stuff I’ve seen since, and reassessing, I get:
1. Children of Men
2. Black Book
3. Bamako
4. Inland Empire
5. A Scanner Darkly
6. Brand Upon The Brain
7. The Host
8. Offside
9. The Screwfly Solution
10. Miami Vice
11. The War Tapes
A much better list! In the future I will be making best-of-year lists for every year at the end of every year!
I didn’t spend all of 2009 obsessively watching ’06 releases (although I considered it) so there are still plenty of unwatched acclaimed movies (Colossal Youth, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Half Nelson, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), award-winners (Indigènes, Red Road, Flandres, The Queen, An Inconvenient Truth) less-acclaimed movies that I expect to like anyway (Tideland, Perfume, Nacho Libre, Rescue Dawn, The Last Winter) and others (The Decay of Fiction, Klimt, Three Times, Cafe Lumiere, The Boss of it All). But that’s more the subject of the next list…