Not every 2016 must-see, but a few notable ones.

I don’t understand theatrical distribution, never know what’s gonna play in town. Some movies I definitely missed or they came out on video without playing theaters here. Some have either been announced to play here in Jan/Feb or IMDB lists a U.S. release in 2017. And some exist in that Queen of the Desert limbo where nobody’s currently talking about it and you can’t tell if it’s opening next weekend or in six months or never. Anyway the distinction is important when deciding what’s safe to watch on video.

Movies I (Probably) Missed:

April and the Extraordinary World
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Manchester By The Sea
Kate Plays Christine
Creative Control
Under the Shadow
American Honey
Lo and Behold
Cameraperson
Indignation
Happy Hour
Creepy
Fences
Loving
Krisha
Demon
13th

Movies (Probably) Still to Come:

I Am Not Your Negro
The Lost City of Z
Personal Shopper
The Red Turtle
Things to Come
The Salesman
Toni Erdmann
Fire At Sea
Evolution
Paterson
Julieta
Silence
Jackie
Elle

Movies In Limbo:

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki
Yourself and Yours
The Ornithologist
The Dreamed Path
Hermia & Helena
A Quiet Passion
Endless Poetry
Voyage of Time
Son of Joseph
Daguerrotype
Kékszakállú
Aquarius
Christine
Nocturama
Neruda
Tower

I’ve done this before many times, and there’s no point, but I can’t help myself. The only thing I like more than movie lists are lists of movie lists, and the BBC’s got a new one. I must turn it into a viewing list for myself, even though it’s Criterion Month now, and SHOCKtober is coming up, and when that’s over I will have forgotten all about this until I stumble upon it two years from now and get annoyed that I still haven’t watched any of these. Movies like Innocence keep showing on these lists – it’s also here and here – but if I ever make a list comparing the frequency of titles on my various lists, someone will need to take this blog away from me. Anyway.

–
Movies from the Top 100 that I’ve never seen, or never written about so should probably watch again, in increasing order of greatness
–

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)
The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)
Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)
Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

–
Must-see titles from the individual lists
–

Sam Adams in Slate:

As always, the real action is in the individual ballots, all 177 of them. That’s where you’ll find the outliers, the beloved orphans and oddball singularities … Polls tell us what everyone likes, but sometimes it’s more interesting to focus on the movies that just one person truly loves.

–

Simon Abrams
The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2009)
Night Across the Street (Raoul Ruiz, 2012)
Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)
Fados (Carlos Saura, 2007)

Thelma Adams
Snow White (Pablo Berger, 2012)
Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008)
Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)

Matthew Anderson
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009)
Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín, 2008)

Adriano Aprà
These Encounters of Theirs (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 2006)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)
The Profession of Arms (Ermanno Olmi, 2001)
Gostanza da Libbiano (Paolo Benvenuti, 2000)

Michael Arbeiter
The Comedy (Rick Alverson, 2012)
The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013)

Cameron Bailey
Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)
Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

Lindsay Baker
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

Diego Batlle
The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
Extraordinary Stories (Mariano Llinás, 2008)

Mahen Bonetti
Cuba: An African Odyssey (Jihan El-Tahri, 2007)
Sexe, gombo et beurre salé (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2008)
Shoot the Messenger (Ngozi Onwurah, 2006)
The Colonial Misunderstanding (Jean-Marie Téno, 2004)

Richard Brody
Butter on the Latch (Josephine Decker, 2013)
Heaven Knows What (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2014)
The Future (Miranda July, 2011)

Enrico Chiesa
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)

Robbie Collin
You, The Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

Colin Covert
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

Mike D’Angelo (via letterboxd)
Afterschool (Antonio Campos, 2008)

Ken Dancyger
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Fernand Denis
Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008)

Lindiwe Dovey
Hooligan Sparrow (Nanfu Wang, 2016)

Alonso Duralde
Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Bilge Ebiri
An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson, 2002)
Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000)

David Ehrlich
Girl Walk: All Day (Jacob Krupnick, 2011)

Kate Erbland
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)

Joseph Fahim
Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, 2002)

David Fear
Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004)

Kenji Fujishima
In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman, 2015)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

Owen Gleiberman
Chuck & Buck (Miguel Arteta, 2000)
Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002)

Ed Gonzalez
Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

Jean-Philippe Guerand
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)

Tom Gunning
Daylight Moon (Lewis Klahr, 2002)
The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser, 2000)
Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)

Angie Han
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)

Aisha Harris
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)
Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005)

Tina Hassannia
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, 2013)
Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)

Shiguehiko Hasumi
Triple Agent (Éric Rohmer, 2004)
Seventh Code (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2013)

Katarina Hedrén
Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley, 2011)
Tey (Alain Gomis, 2012)
Eat, Sleep, Die (Gabriela Pichler, 2012)
Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay, 2012)

Alexander Horwath
Wolff Von Amerongen: Did He Commit Bankruptcy Offences? (Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, 2004)
Longing (Valeska Grisebach, 2006)
The External World (David O’Reilly, 2010)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, 2004)

David Jenkins
Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)
Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

Kent Jones
My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)
The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)

Butheina Kazim
Theeb (Naji Abou Nowar, 2014)
A Time for Drunken Horses (Bahman Ghobadi, 2000)

Andreas Kilb
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)
5×2 (François Ozon, 2004)

Uri Klein
The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)

Eric Kohn
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)

Dan Kois
You Can Count On Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2012)
Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2010)

Tomris Laffly
Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009)

Rebecca Laurence
The Consequences of Love (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004)

Maggie Lee
Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003)
Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

Fiona Macdonald
The Taste of Others (Agnès Jaoui, 2000)

Hans-Christian Mahnke
Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006)
Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

Calum Marsh
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)

Lee Marshall
Silent Souls (Aleksey Fedorchenko, 2010)

Adrian Martin
Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2011)
Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, 2015)

Joe McElhaney
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
The Blues: Warming by the Devil’s Fire (Charles Burnett, 2003)

Farran Smith Nehme
About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

Michael Phillips
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)

Hannah Pilarczyk
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012)

Agnès C Poirier
Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002)
The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)

Claudia Puig
Sin Nombre (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009)
Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alberto Ramos Ruiz
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers, 2015)
From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014)
Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello, 2015)

Isabelle Regnier
The Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002)
Shara (Naomi Kawase, 2003)
Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola, 2011)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)

Scott Renshaw
Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008)

Vadim Rizov (via twitter)
In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)
Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2015)
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)
Could See a Puma (Eduardo Williams, 2011)

Antonio Mazón Robau
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

Tim Robey
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Jonathan Romney
The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Rasha Salti
The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009)

Matt Zoller Seitz
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amselem (Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, 2014)
The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014)
Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014)

Avner Shavit
No (Pablo Larraín, 2012)

Matt Singer
Step Brothers (Adam McKay, 2008)

Justine A Smith
Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

Fernanda Solórzano
Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

David Stratton
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)
The Man Without A Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002)

Cédric Succivalli
Secret Things (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2002)
La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

Ella Taylor
Burning Bush (Agnieszka Holland, 2013)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

Jake Wilson
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006)

Raymond Zhou
The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen, 2007)
Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)

–

My own top fifteen, at the moment, unranked:

2046
25th Hour
Boyhood
The Forbidden Room
Holy Motors
Hot Fuzz
Inglorious Basterds
Le Havre
Mulholland Dr.
The New World
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Trap
The Turin Horse
Up
World of Tomorrow

Happy New Movie Year! Here is a look back at the movie year that was.

The Lists

Favorite New Movies, 2015
Favorite Older Movies watched in 2015
Series and Retrospectives, 2015
Favorite Shorts of 2015
2015 Movies To Watch
2010 Favorites Redux
Previous year lists

–
Television

Strong showing from television this year. Favorites:

1. Parks & Recreation seasons 5-7
2. Rick & Morty season 1
3. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season 1
4. Inside Amy Schumer seasons 1-2
5. Over The Garden Wall
6. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
7. True Detective season 1
8. Girls seasons 2-3

TV series abandoned in 2015: Sense8 (watched three episodes), Always Sunny (one episode), M*A*S*H* (most of season one, I think), and Transparent (half of season one).

–
SHOCKtober

It’s not fair to expect the horror movies to compete with the others.
Here are eight really good ones.

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014)
Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo Del Toro)
Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968, Ingmar Bergman)
The Hunger (1983, Tony Scott)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Siegel)
Let Us Prey (2014, Brian O’Malley)
The Nightmare (2015, Rodney Ascher)
Proxy (2013, Zack Parker)

–
The Year In Bad Movies

I didn’t much enjoy watching Godard’s Film Socialism, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out afterwards, reading articles about it, writing it up. I feel like there’s value in watching Godard movies, that Film Socialism gave me more of a sense of his late work, tying together threads from Eloge de l’amour and Histoire(s) du Cinema, and that his movies contain unique ideas. Here instead are some movies I watched this year (each out of obligation to a favorite filmmaker or critic) that I wish I hadn’t, containing nothing of interest.

MacGruber (2010, Jorma Taccone)
Maps to the Stars (2014, David Cronenberg)
Story of My Death (2013, Albert Serra)
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher)
Willow Creek (2013, Bobcat Goldthwait)
Burying the Ex (2014, Joe Dante)

and I’m still mad at The Martian, but won’t go as far as calling it a bad movie.

–
Favorite Rediscovery
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Buñuel)

Also watched/enjoyed for the first time in years (in no order):

Nightbreed (1990, Clive Barker)
Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
Our Hospitality (1923, Buster Keaton)
Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)
A Bug’s Life (1998, John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton)
Monsoon Wedding (2001, Mira Nair)

–
Viewing Projects & Lists

I made a bunch more must-see lists and made serious progress on none of them. But hey, I finished my Chris Marker project after a decade, which seems pretty tremendous. As ever, I’ve got big plans for exciting stuff to watch in 2016, which I’m not mentioning here because I’ll inevitably change those plans, make a ton of new plans, then feel foolish when I go back and read this.

“It’s more pleasant to work in such a way that things multiply instead of dividing.”
– Jacques Rivette

No particular progress on this blog itself, other than to keep it going (for nearly ten years now!). Sometimes I mean to work on improving my writing, but I have little motivation for doing so. Inspiration from hero blogger and accomplished filmmaker and horror writer David Cairns: “I think it’s all creative work, or I try to make it so. When I write about a movie, it’s never ‘How can I express my opinion?’ it’s ‘What fun can I have with this?'”

1. World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt)
2. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
3. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)
4. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
5. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)
6. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
7. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-Liang)
8. Inside Out (Pete Docter)
9. The Double (Richard Ayoade)
10. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)

I don’t have strong feelings about the ranking order of the next ten:

11. Shaun the Sheep (Mark Burton & Richard Starzak)
12. Room (Lenny Abrahamson)
13. Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)
14. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)
15. They Came Together (David Wain)
16. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
17. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
18. 20,000 Days on Earth (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard)
19. You and the Night (Yann Gonzalez)
20. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Julie Taymor)

Honorable mentions, alphabetically:

Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis)
Blackhat (Michael Mann)
Brooklyn (John Crowley)
Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman)
Girlhood (Céline Sciamma)
Junun (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
Tehran Taxi (Jafar Panahi)
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow)

Bill Plympton’s Cheatin’ was a favorite, but got moved to another list.

This is from a pool of about seventy titles, most of which I liked since I research movies before seeing ’em. I think the cutoff, determining which (and how many) movies I list here, is “would I watch this again right now?” So what I’m saying is that I’d strongly recommend any/all of these, including the honorable mentions list.

Top ten, chronologically since there’s really no comparing these.

Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
My Name Is Ivan (1962, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)
Hairspray (1988, John Waters)
What Time Is It There? (2001, Tsai Ming-Liang)
Damsels In Distress (2011, Whit Stillman)
Her (2013, Spike Jonze)

Ten more:

Little Women (1933, George Cukor)
High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
Twelve Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)
What a Way to Go! (1964, J. Lee Thompson)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
Far From Vietnam (1967, Marker, Resnais, Godard, Varda, Klein, Ivens, Lelouch)
Doomed Love (1978, Manoel de Oliveira)
Blue Remembered Hills (1979, Brian Gibson)
Secret of Kells (2009, Tomm Moore)

Since I made a separate 2010 list, I couldn’t justify a whole other list just for 2011-2013, so “older movies” includes everything I could’ve technically seen before this year. That means all the stone classics have edged out last year’s popcorn flicks, so some special recognition is needed.

Best Traditional Comic-Book Action Blockbuster: X-Men 5: Days of Future Past

Best Non-Traditional Comic-Book Action Blockbuster: Speed Racer

I feel there are things that don’t fit neatly into one of my best-movies lists, so they can have their own special list. This isn’t ranked.

Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons

I saw Summer’s Tale late last year in theaters, Winter’s Tale and Tale of Springtime this year at Filmstreams, then Autumn Tale at home on blu-ray to complete the series. All four were great, the most I’ve ever enjoyed Rohmer’s work.

Bill Plympton

I watched two of his great features (Cheatin’ and Idiots and Angels), countless shorts, and got to meet and talk with the man himself.

Chris Marker

After watching and rewatching a few remaining films, I declared my quest to watch everything by Chris Marker a success and did a write-up on everything I’d seen.

Linklater’s Before Trilogy

In preparation for Before Midnight, Katy and I rewatched Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, a great Monday night ritual in January that we didn’t manage to build on throughout the rest of the year.

Chaplin Mutuals

Watched all of the great HD restorations of these in the first half of 2015, most of them for the first time.

Retro Screenings in Theaters

Between the Ross, Filmstreams, the Grand (via Fathom/TCM), the Cube, and now the Alamo, we’ve got bunches of ways to go out and see classic movies. Highlights this year:

Man with the Movie Camera, restored print with Alloy Orchestra
John Waters double-feature (Polyester and Hairspray)
Katharine Hepburn double-feature (Philadelphia Story and Little Women)
Evil Dead double-feature (free movies with free beer)
and Roman Holiday

Not included: World of Tomorrow, which transcended the shorts category and made the main list, and all the Chaplin and Plympton I watched, which got their own section.

Top ten, chronologically:

The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918, Winsor McCay)
Trade Tattoo (1937, Len Lye)
Portrait d’Henri Goetz (1947, Alain Resnais)
Closed Mondays (1974, Will Vinton & Bob Gardiner)
Zerox and Mylar (1995, Joel Brinkerhoff)
The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg (2000, Paul Driessen)
The Skywalk Is Gone (2002, Tsai Ming-Liang)
Winnipegiana (2014, Evan Johnson)
Deloused (2014, Robert Morgan)
Fears (2015, Nata Metlukh)

Runners-up:

Night Mail (1936, Harry Watt & Basil Wright)
Temptation of Mr. Prokouk (1947, Karel Zeman)
Uncle (1959, Jaromil Jires)
Game of the Angels (1964, Walerian Borowczyk)
Only Dream Things (2012, Guy Maddin)
A Single Life (2014, Blaauw & Oprins & Roggeveen )
The Dam Keeper (2014, Robert Kondo & Daisuke Tsutsumi)
Feast (2014, Patrick Osborne)

Since I read festival reports and Cinema Scope, when a new movie premieres in 2015 (say, Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, which played in Berlin back in February), I say “ooh, gotta see that” and add to my 2015 list. Then at the end of the year I list some movies I missed in 2015, and Queen of the Desert goes on there even though it never played theaters or blu-ray, so I’ve never had a chance to see it. I’m gonna try to separate those out this time, only so that later I can remember which movies I actually had a chance to see this year.

Missed in 2015:

The Assassin
In Jackson Heights
Bridge of Spies
Spring
Slow West
Experimenter
Bone Tomahawk
Tangerine
Sicario
Mission Impossible 5
The Good Dinosaur
Joy
Sisters

Festival Premieres and Limited Releases 2015:

Queen of the Desert
Knight of Cups
The Lobster
The Forbidden Room
Cemetery of Splendor
The Pearl Button
Arabian Nights
Carol
Chevalier
11 Minutes
Cosmos
Right Now, Wrong Then
Sunset Song
Office
The Mend
Evolution

Opening Here in January:

Youth
Anomalisa
Mustang
The Wonders
Chi-raq
45 Years
The Hateful Eight
Son of Saul
The Revenant

Critic-recommended but I’m suspicious:

The Big Short
Entertainment
Magic Mike XXL
The Smell of Us
Diary of a Teenage Girl

–
Consensus favorites are important, but I like to comb the Sight & Sound top-five lists for strays, unusual films that were only seen or loved by one or two critics. And every time I do this, I think what an interesting list, I need to watch all of these. But the consensus faves end up winning… hard to seek out the one-offs when I haven’t made it to Force Majeure or The Assassin or Carol or Bridge of Spies or Whiplash or Nightcrawler or Horse Money or The Look of Silence yet. And of course I’ve made lists like this before, in 2014 and 2011, from Sight & Sound’s big 2012 poll, their 2014 documentary poll and some lists from the last decade and I never do much with them. But hope springs eternal, so here’s another!

Film (director) – who suggested it
Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra) – Kogonada
High-Rise (Ben Wheatley) – Tom Charity
Aferim! (Radu Jude) – Geoff Andrew
Marshland (Alberto Rodriguez) – Anne Billson
The Dream of Shahrazad (Francois Verster) – Lizelle Bisschoff
Sun Choke (Ben Cresciman) – Anton Bitel
Observance (Joseph Sims-Dennett) – Anton Bitel
Violator (Dodo Dayao) – Anton Bitel
Olmo & the Seagull (Costa & Glob) – Ela Bittencourt
I Remember Nothing (Zia Anger) – Ela Bittencourt
Wake (John Gianvito) – Ferroni Brigade
88:88 (Isiah Medina) – Jordan Cronk
Exotica, Erotica, Etc (evangelia kranioti) – Kiva Reardon
Counting (Jem Cohen) – Gareth Evans
Night and Distance (Lois Patiño) – Adam Nayman
I, Dalio (Mark Rappaport) – Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Thom Andersen) – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Things of an Aimless Wanderer (Kivu Ruhorahoza) – Suzy Gillett
Death of the Serpent God (Damien Froidevaux) – Suzy Gillett
Duty Free Art (Hito Steyeri) – Melissa Gronlund
Bopem (Zhanna Issabayeva) – Peter Hames
Following Nazarin (Javier Espada) – Nick James
Body (Malgorzata Szumowska) – Ania Ostrowska
Chris Robinson picked all animated shorts: The Master (Riho Unt), Pig (Steven Subotnick), Unhappy Happy (Peter Millard), Teeth (Daniel Gray & Tom Brown)
Cows Wearing Glasses (Alex Santiago Perez) – Chloe Roddick
By Our Selves (Andrew Kotting) – Sukhdev Sandhu
Big Gold Dream (Grant McPhee) – Sukhdev Sandhu
Black Code/Code Noir (Louis Henderson) – Sukhdev Sandhu
Rigor Mortis (Juno Mak) – Virginie Selavy
The Death and Resurrection Show (Shaun Pettigrew) – Jasper Sharp
Life May Be (Mark Cousins & Mania Akbari) – The Brad Stevens
Fires on the Plain (Shinya Tsukamoto) – Sato Tadao
Winter Song (Otar Iosseliani) – Celluloid Liberation Front
The Royal Road (Jenni Olson) – Thirza Wakefield
Stand By for Tape Back-up (Ross Sutherland) – Harriet Warman
Toponymy (Jonathan Perel) – Neil Young

And some non-film suggestions from Jonathan Rosenbaum: “This was a strong year for film criticism in general, considering the publications of Girish Shambu’s The New Cinephilia and Adrian Martin’s Mise En Scène and Film Style (among others), not to mention the still burgeoning video output of Kevin B. Lee.”

Found in my notes: “My art/culture life would be easier if I developed a point of view, instead of proclaiming every critic recommendation a must-see.”

As noted on my original list of favorite 2010 movies, the end-of-year lists only include new-ish movies I saw during the calendar year, not necessarily movies the IMDB would consider 2010 movies (I think only 5 of the 12 I saw in 2010 would count). At the end of any given year, thanks to not-yet-distributed festival films and award nominations and critics’ favorite lists, I end up with more must-sees than seen titles (example list from 2010). And as noted in my Four Lions write-up, this year I’ve been trying to avoid watching foreign and indie films as soon as they’re available on blu-ray and streaming, since movies I’ve watched at home (most recently Phoenix) get belated theater openings here, then I feel dumb for having already seen them. So I tried to focus on the year 2010 – five years ago, old enough that everything should be out on video. Therefore I thought it’d be fun to make a new list of favorite 2010 movies. Maybe not too exciting since these have mostly shown up on my other lists already, but hey, I enjoy making lists.

Top Twenty-Five of 2010:

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright)
3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)
4. The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)
5. Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)
6. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
7. Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
8. I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-Ke)
9. The Social Network (David Fincher)
10. Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-soo)
11. Surviving Life: Theory and Practice (Jan Svankmajer)
12. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
13. Finisterrae (Sergio Caballero)
14. Tabloid (Errol Morris)
15. The Oath (Laura Poitras)
16. El Sicario Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi)
17. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)
18. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
19. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
20. Super (James Gunn)
21. Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham)
22. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
23. Oddsac (Danny Perez)
24. True Grit (Joel Coen)
25. Submarine (Richard Ayoade)