1. The Phantom Carriage
2. Nosferatu the Vampyre
3. All That Jazz
4. Weekend
5. The Cremator
6. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
7. Cries and Whispers
8. Dead Ringers
9. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
10. Resident Evil: Retribution
Honourable mentions:
Sans soleil, Stroszek, Southern Comfort, World on a Wire, Pather Panchali, Badlands, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Au hasard Balthazar, A Man Escaped, Ace in the Hole, Scenes from a Marriage, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Inferno (1980),
All About My Mother, Encounters at the End of the World, Burden of Dreams, Heart of Glass, Krysař, Lessons in Darkness, Land of Silence and Darkness, Holy Motors, SPL, A Zed and Two Noughts, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Life Itself, 48 Hrs, Smiles of a Summer Night, Leviathan, The Double, The Return.
Another spectacular year (final numbers - 637 films watched, 138 rewatches). Picking this top ten always proves both more fun and more challenging than the typical end-of-year top 10, but almost every film here aside from the top two is a
so the order does seem a little arbitrary. In any case, I decided to go representative with the actual top 10 and so...
The Phantom Carriage carries Ingmar Bergman's seal of approval and so much of it does carry a "can't believe this was made in 1921" vibe, plus it really does tell a surprisingly effective
Christmas Carol-ish story of a cruel man being forced to reckon with his flaws by the ghosts of his past. It's at the point where I don't even want to watch it again because I want to preserve that initial experience.
Nosferatu the Vampyre - yeah, I finally got around to watching the 1922 version and only gave it a respectable
(which is my "good, but I didn't love it" rating) before getting ready to watch this. The part where Lucy walks through the town square was what convinced me to push it up to a first-time
(plus, as the honourable mentions show I already watched a lot of Herzog this year so I figure this is as good a representation as any).
All That Jazz is the ideal blend of Old Hollywood magic and New Hollywood cynicism, so of course it is very much my jam.
Similarly,
Weekend is the kind of movie I've always kind of hoped to get from watching Godard but haven't quite managed to get before and it's nice to see that it's as much of a brain-melt as its reputation suggested.
The Cremator...good Lord.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul came from me running through a bunch of Fassbinder a while back. He's a director who I tend to find rather hit-and-miss (and I could easily swap it out for
World on a Wire), but this might well be his best hit.
Cries and Whispers is my representative for Bergman (who also shows up a lot in the honourable mentions). I don't need to tell you how good he and this film in particular are.
Dead Ringers - Cronenberg, you magnificent bastard.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a masterful juggling of comedy, drama, high-concept sci-fi, and overall just a real emotional rollercoaster that I always hope to find at the movies.
As for
Resident Evil: Retribution - yeah, I may be being a little deliberately contrarian with this pick (especially considering what kinds of respectable films did and didn't make either the top 10 or the honourable mentions), but again, this is a representative list, and I can't think of a better film to illustrate the ways in which I learned to ditch arbitrary snobbery and excessive negativity for the sake of just liking whatever I want.
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