Every year, disgruntled movie critics overstuffed with aging popcorn write some long diatribe about how far the great movie has fallen in recent years. Every year, we keep going to the movies.
Did something change this year? I looked over IMDb’s list of U.S. releases for the year and, though I feel like I barely got to half of the ones I wanted to see, I still found 15 I felt were amazing in one way or another. Has the rise of online media upped the stakes for movie quality? Are there better mechanisms for finding great, talented people now that they can post their work online for free? Is Netflix really raising movie literacy? Or did we just get lucky this year?
Here’s my list of favorites from the year, ordered as they appear in IMDb’s release list:
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Good Night and Good Luck(came out last year – thanks, Andrew) - The Three Burials af Melquiades Estrada
- Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
- Inside Man
- Brick
- An Inconvenient Truth
- District B13
- Wordplay
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Half Nelson
- The Departed
- The Queen
- Flags of Our Fathers
- Stranger Than Fiction
- Casino Royale
I’m disappointed there aren’t more great documentaries on that list. Though I didn’t see Borat, my pick for worst of the year has to be Talladega Nights, though I’ve been told again and again this means I am essentially humorless, stupid, and dead. Whatev! I’m most sorry not to have made it to Last King of Scotland, yet, anyways. And there are still some great ones coming this month.
(Also, The Big Animal finally made it to DVD in the U.S. this year. I saw this at the SF International Film Festival several years ago and it completely blew me away. Get it.)
A great year for the movies all around. If it’s not the net driving up quality, I hope whatever it is will continue.