We could end up fitting one more movie in this year, but we probably won’t so Shaun and I did our annual sitting in a pub making our best-five-movies-of-the-year lists last weekend.
So again, the rules are these: the movie had to be seen, by me, in the theater during the calendar year in question to be considered. It looks like we did a pretty good job of seeing most of the 2007 movies in 2007, so unlike previous years we don’t have a ton of last year’s Oscar movies on this year’s list.
So here they are – links are to the Movie Review Query Engine.
No-brainer choices that would be on my list every time I made it:
The rest. These might change from day-to-day. There were a number of contenders – many of which ended up on Shaun’s list (ETA: Shaun’s list):
The thing is this – this list is seriously idiosyncratic. The movies that make the list tend to be movies that stick with me. They may not be the movies I recommend most frequently to other people, they may not be the movies I can make the best arguments for why they are good or even exceptional. They may not even be the movies I feel the best about at the moment when I leave the theater. But when at the end of the year I have found myself revisiting a particular movie, performance or even movie moment more than once – that is the kind of film that tends to make this list.
This year, the movie that was probably most affected by this quirk was Rachel Getting Married. I really liked that movie, but we just saw it a couple of days ago. My brain wasn’t able to put it on the list that soon because I can’t separate out if it is near the top because it is the most recent good movie I have seen or because it will still be in that number six months from now.
The full list – WAY down from last year. This is mostly because puppy-having and movie-going do not mix well.
Charlie Wilson’s War
Juno
The Savages
There Will be Blood
Definitely, Maybe
Be Kind Rewind
The Bank Job
Girls Rock!
The Tracey Fragments
Iron Man
RedBelt
Outsourced
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
The Incredible Hulk
My Blueberry Nights
Wall-E
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
The Dark Knight
Gonzo
American Teen
Burn After Reading
Man on Wire
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
Bottle Shock
Synecdoche, New York
Rachel Getting Married
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