Top 10 - 2025

 

2025 was an exceptionally stellar year for cinema, its greatness profoundly, inversely proportionate to 2025 as a year for basically anything else. The cinematic richness and the sociopolitical direness (especially in the United States) were often hard to separate. Films such as Eddington, One Battle After Another, and Bugonia furiously and creatively captured the head-spinning derangements of the country's current dystopia, reviving a spirit of acerbic political critique that perhaps hasn't been truly seen on the big screen since the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Such invigorated social consciousness resonated in national cinemas around the world, taking shape in stories about political prisoners, military dictatorships, washed-up poets, imperialist conquests, and possessed household appliances. It was exciting to see, and proof that art remains among our most vital and versatile tools for processing the mess of the world.

My top ten films of 2025 are after the jump...

Top 10 - 2024

 

There's no two ways about it: as a year, on the global scale, 2024 was a real annus horribilis. It was also an exceedingly strange film year, due at least in part to the lingering effects of the 2023 writers' strike. I saw plenty of movies I liked, but far fewer than normal that I really loved, and for the second year in a row, I had deep ambivalences about many of the most critically lauded titles, including the Palme d'Or and Oscar Best Picture recipient Anora. As a result, my list arguably looks more idiosyncratic than ever, with a flavorful array of (largely underrated) American and international independents flanking one bonafide Hollywood blockbuster. 

Find my top ten films of 2024 after the jump!

Top 10 - 2023

 

This list is already late to arrive, so I'm not going to spend much time writing an introduction. I'll just say that 2023 was a good year for film, as every year is when you see enough, and that there was plenty to savor even when looking beyond the "big" titles that, more often than not, I had significant qualms about (looking at you, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, and Killers of the Flower Moon)! As ever, American independents and international cinema kept the quality high - which isn't to say I didn't find room for one particular (pink) blockbuster. 

After the jump, I proudly present my top ten films of 2023...

Top 10 - 2022

 

Were the films of 2022 unconsciously trying to revive the excesses of the Roaring Twenties? One title, the 189-minute bacchanal that is Babylon, actually took place then. An atypical number of other Hollywood titles flirted with or stretched past the three-hour mark: Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Blonde, TÁR, Elvis. There was also the crossover Tollywood sensation RRR adding a further epic dose of maximalism to the year's cinematic landscape. Meanwhile, the 139-minute Everything Everywhere All at Once delivered on its title with a deliberately overstuffed, enervating/innervating cornucopia of genre-trotting action. Maybe it was high time to indulge in the wake (can we call it that?) of pandemic-era deprivations and sociopolitical unease. Of course, 2022 offered plenty of smaller-scaled gems as well, many of which proved more enriching than their distended counterparts.

My top ten films of the year are after the jump:

Top 10 - 2021

 

What a pleasure it was to have cinema back! Following the COVID-induced moviegoing privations of 2020, it was immensely satisfying (and more than a little overwhelming) to be inundated by the rich cinematic surplus of 2021. While theatrical exhibition as an aesthetic experience continues to feel somewhat endangered - a reality dispiritingly reflected in the box-office successes of factory-assembled IPs at the expense of all else - this past year proved that quality filmmaking is as alive as ever, and that we shouldn't take for granted the ability to sit in the dark with strangers gazing up at a silver screen. 

Many of the great movies of 2021 were big in a way that seemed to propitiously answer our frustrated thirst for the big-screen experience. Musicals made a huge comeback, from the exuberant In the Heights in the summer to the dazzling old-fashioned spectacle of Spielberg's West Side Story to close out the year. The only way to truly take in the maximalist Dune: Part One - and to feel its churning, bombinating soundscape in your bones - was to go to the theater. There were also a remarkable number of high-profile black-and-white features (Passing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, C'mon C'mon, and Belfast among them) that helped distill the pure, fundamentally photographic pleasure of images sculpted from light. Meanwhile, a sublime opus from one of contemporary cinema's most indispensable artists literally demanded to be seen on the big screen - its director and distributor have no intention of ever releasing it for home viewing. No wonder it's also the clear best film of 2021 (no credit if you can guess what it is)!

Note: there are still some major titles I've been unable to see, namely Flee, The Worst Person in the World, Mass, and Parallel Mothers.

On to my Top 10 after the jump...

Top 10 - 2020

No, you're not going crazy: we're just over a month away from 2022 and I'm only now getting around to posting my top ten list for 2020. The reasons for this rather extreme tardiness mostly have to do with the fact that 2020 was a strange and tumultuous year; its many intersecting disruptions hardly need to be recapitulated. That perhaps the biggest personal impact the pandemic had on my life was how it threw my moviegoing out of whack reveals that I don't really have much to complain about. Still, with theaters shut down and so many films locked behind the paywalls of the seemingly hundreds of streaming services in existence, it was a weird and unsettling time to be a cinephile. I saw fewer new movies than in any other year of my adult life, and was playing catch-up long into 2021. Some notable titles, such as American Utopia and Wolfwalkers, I still have not been able to see. 

After all the real-world turbulence and my own temporizing, I decided to just make the damn list already (I am a completist, after all; I couldn't let a lacuna in my archives perpetuate the idea that 2020 was just one big void in time). Even more than usual, this feels like a provisional ranking, culled as it is from a relatively small pool of films to which I really responded. Notably, it includes more documentaries than I've ever had on any previous top ten, with non-fiction films taking up exactly 50% of the list. Chalk it up to a year in which facing ugly realities proved to be unavoidable.

My top ten, comprised of stills and a few words, is after the jump...

Top 10 - 2019

For whatever reason, it was the year of the pas de deux. From duos chummy (DiCaprio/Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) to psychotic (Pattison/Dafoe in The Lighthouse) to acrimonious and yearning (Driver/Johansson in Marriage Story) to aching from absences of affection (LaBeouf/Jupe in Honey Boy) to galvanized by the possibilities of a gaze fleetingly liberated (Haenel/Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, seen above), to... papal (those Two Popes), cinema in 2019 offered abundant proof that one of the medium's greatest effects is the frisson created by a couple of human beings interacting with each other.

It was also the year of auto-fiction, with a remarkable number of directors using the form to ruminate on their lives and careers, often in ways that seemed confessional and self-exorcising. In addition to Tarantino's grandiose ego trip, a paean to a lost Hollywood that was also, by extension, a fetishistic self-monument, there was Scorsese's autumnal gangster culmination The Irishman, Joanna Hogg's fictionalized origin story The Souvenir, Pedro Almodóvar's warm, wistful retrospective Pain and Glory, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, informed by the experience of his own divorce, and the wrenching Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf as a therapeutic exercise while he was in rehab.

Also, Netflix expanded its influence over the market, and Disney continued to grow its quasi-monopolistic media hegemony. But you've read about this elsewhere (resist!). All said, it was a pretty terrific year for movies.

My Top 10 films of this last year of the decade, to follow...

Top 10 - 2018

The year 2018 on the Gregorian calendar may have ended three whole months ago, but I will let neither this fact nor a plethora of extenuating circumstances (plus possible procrastination) prevent me from putting together a Top 10 list! This annual feature and mainstay of critics everywhere is also a tradition I hold dear – it both helps put a movie year into perspective and embodies one’s (hopefully?) idiosyncratic tastes and sensibilities. And for the future, it reminds us of what we were watching and taking pleasure in. Ideally, that pleasure extends far beyond the 365 days that delimit the scope of the list.

So treat this as a testament to that transcendent pleasure, to the ways in which the following films continue to affect me and make me think, their images and sounds and gestalt effects reemerging to remind me that they are now embedded in my existential being for the better.

One note on something different this year: because it has taken so damn long for me to publish this list, and because my time has been so diffused across various personal and vocational obligations, the blurbs here will mostly, regrettably, be ones I have previously posted to the blog, with some adjustments for space. To riff on one of the titles included below, turning a beseeching question into a desperate command: please forgive me!


Sorry, I STILL have not seen:  Blindspotting, Private Life, Bisbee '17, Capernaum, Wildlife, At Eternity's Gate, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Wild Boys (if 2018).

Special mention to: Abbas Kiarostami's hypnotic neo-structuralist swan song 24 Frames, certainly one of the best films of any year but I'm counting it as a 2017 work.


On to the Top 10, after the break!

Top 10 - 2017

Last year, I introduced my Top 10 by enumerating some of the year's cinematic moments that left an indelible impression on me, those transcendent scenes that elicited in me sensations and perceptual states that exceeded language. I was in the midst of my cinema studies Master's program at UCLA and, about to take the concept on as one of my primary scholarly subjects, had affect on the mind.

As an affect-generating machine, film is uniquely bound up with our material and psychical existences, possessing the ability to shape and intensify ordinary life experience. The best films of 2017 were not only enriching and elating, but were able to cut through the mundanely representational to access the primal and the ineffable. Perhaps it is no coincidence that three of the films that appear on my list deal explicitly with memory - the province of affect.

Some notable films I have not yet seen at the time of this list-making: Lady Macbeth, A Fantastic Woman, Loveless, Darkest Hour.

TOP 10 after the jump...

Top 10 - 2016

When I reflect on the best films of 2016, I return to moods, sensations, and melodies that, taken as gestalt, seem to evoke the entire spectrum of human feeling. I remember the almost unbearably overwhelming catharsis of a son seeing his mother for the first time in 25 years after he went missing as a boy; the indignation of a free-thinking student forced to defend himself from the patronizing harangue of a despotic dean; the excruciating awkwardness but even greater ecstasy of a birthday celebration literally stripped naked, a nightmare scenario transformed into a gesture of anything-goes abandon; the pervasive air of dread, disorientation, and grief experienced by a woman and a country following a national tragedy; the boundless exhilaration of a ragtag group of kids on the road pumped up by communal sing-a-long; the mournfulness, inquisitiveness, and compassion of a woman who sees the world through a camera. Certainly any movie year produces a plethora of these indelible moments, but in a year that saw as much callousness toward our basic humanity as 2016 did, the feelings somehow resonated just a bit stronger. 

It was noticeable, also, just how many of the year's greatest films were inextricably tied to music, whether they were actual musicals or dramatic films emboldened by unique, unpredictable, and exuberant incorporations of song. Many scenes are now emblazoned into the memory thanks to, among others, Rihanna's "We Found Love," Richard Harris's "Camelot," the SOS Band's "Take Your Time, Do it Right," and the most hysterical rendition of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" ever recorded. 2016 was a rollercoaster of a year, mostly not in the good way. Its best films, however, are reminders of the full register of humanity we cannot stand to ignore.

One note up top: as always, tricky release dates have complicated my determinations of what I deem a 2016 film. To keep with consistency, I will continue to go by the year in which the film in question had its major premiere. Therefore, despite it showing up on several critics' lists this year (and receiving an Oscar nomination!), I am considering Yorgos Lanthimos's brilliant The Lobster as a 2015 release. If this were not the case, it would be on my list - very high on it, in fact.

On to the Top 10 after the jump!

Top 10 - 2015

This is the latest I have made a Top 10 list since I began this blog in 2010. As I outlined in a past post, the reason is that I’ve been waiting to see significant 2015 titles that I either missed or that never came to my area, and I didn’t want to compose my list without being able to consider such notable (and obnoxiously late) releases such as Anomalisa and Son of Saul, or streamables available on Netflix and elsewhere. My plan, it turns out, proved to be only partially useful: as of this writing, the second film was only released here last week, and the first is still absent from any theater near me. I suppose it’s my fault for missing them when they were at CIFF back in October…

But something else has delayed my list, something I also made note of in my prior post. It’s that 2015 felt like kind of a bizarre movie year, the rare one in which no single film stood out as a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest favorite. In other words, you can essentially consider all ten excellent films on my list as equal top-rankers.

One theme emerged, however: cinema. Many of the 2015 films that most spoke to me were the ones that took cinema history and theory as their driving creative forces, building experiences that exploited the material and psychological faculties of the medium. These films were conceptually audacious, aestheticaly indelible, and wonderfully exciting in their understanding, and practicing of, film's boundless formal and narrative potentials.

2015 films of note I still, regrettably, have not seen: In Jackson Heights, Queen of Earth, Anomalisa, Mustang, Joy, Chi-Raq, Arabian Nights, Victoria

TOP 10 AFTER THE JUMP!

Top 10 - 2014

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, but you needn’t look at them to know what the greatest cinematic accomplishments of 2014 were (as if the Academy would tell you, anyway). Listed below are my Top 10 films of the year, ranked in general order of preference, with runners-up and honorable mentions.

A quick note on the year before we get down to it: like any other year, 2014 had plenty to offer in the way of diverse, compelling, thought-provoking, and artistically and culturally prodigious cinema. If it seems to somewhat pale in comparison to 2013, at least for me, that’s because there were fewer films I unabashedly loved, and decidedly none I would deem masterpieces. In other words, there was no Inside Llewyn Davis. I awarded only one film all year the full four stars, although a few others came close. But in the absence of undeniable knockout punches, there was a lot to like.

TOP 10 after the jump!