By way of intro..

The movie was "A High Wind in Jamaica." Sea adventure, kids kidnapped by pirates, great dramatic gravitas, adolescent stirrings. Color, 1965. I was 9. It was 1970.
My eyes beheld the color TV in grandma’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon. Channel 11. Anthony Quinn was the main pirate, and I thought he was great; I didn’t yet know who Quinn was, but I didn’t care, because on the screen was a 10-year-old actress, Deborah Baxter, dominating the film and my heart. My love affair with cinema had begun.

I suppose this is no surprise. As Godard said, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Baxter, as the English girl, Emily, was charming the pirates ultimately to their own peril, and to mine as it turned out.

I had seen films before, mostly Disney fare, but this was something different. I cared about what was going on on the screen. The finale of the film was shattering, disturbing to my young mind. Love and a betrayal, the children blithely playing as if nothing had happened. This was big stuff.

I developed a taste for old horror films and classic comedies in the early 70s and by the late 70s and early 80s was a committed frequenter of the art cinemas. A viewing of films in high school, including “The Grapes of Wrath” and Chaplin’s “Easy Street” compounded the problem. By the time I saw “The Third Man” at Louisville’s main arthouse venue The Vogue Theatre in 1978, I was pretty much a hopeless case. In the early 80s I began to seek out rarer fare on video and that pursuit continues.

I started compiling lists of films I wanted to see in 1978. With help from various movie guides and catalogs — some that I owned and some in the high school library — I came up with a solid listing of international classics and intriguing obscurities. Eventually that list morphed into lists of what I’d seen, and inevitably into top 10 lists.

These lists sort of codify the anal nature of film obsession; they are not so much a side effect as they are part and parcel of the whole experience. They are like the notches on the belt, the slashes on the side of a fighter plane. They are the bragging rights of geeks. And they also are a tool, not so much reminding us what we’ve seen but what we still haven’t. They are living, mutable things, these lists — never fully satisfactory. They are, without sufficient critical explanation, lacking context. However, a glance at them provides insight into the listmaker’s critical tastes, acumen and sensibilities.

I’ve herein attempted a listing of favorite films, those that have provided enjoyment or great enrichment. It becomes necessary to do so, because in amassing so much viewing one begins to forget what one has seen. By a crude preliminary count, I’ve seen 10,000+ films (shorts and features). This listing pulls my favorites from that vast number. I’ve decided for the sake of historical context to start the yearly lists with some early experimental “pre-cinema” moving images and work up through the cinema’s official birth year, 1895, up to the years 2001-2003. I simply have not seen enough films from the 2000s to make satisfactory lists.

There’s a top 10 list for each year, followed by close runner-ups or just flicks that delighted me. One will detect a certain lack of discipline about my top 10 lists — as most of them number more than 10 titles; often they are more like top 15 or top 20 lists. Since this is supposed to be fun, I feel no need to pressure myself into the agony of absolutism, cutting one favorite from the list in preference to another. No, no reason to restrict myself. It’s my list, after all.

Except for the early stuff (which requires some context and willpower to engage), this listing consists mostly of personal favorites; flicks I can recommend without a lot of qualifiers. Even though I've seen every famous film ever made, I've omitted many of these classics from the lists in cases where the films simply don't resonate with me. 'Sergeant York', 'Gone With the Wind', 'The Lost Weekend,' and 'Ben-Hur' ('59), are not bad films, per se, just overrated in my opinion. Just because something isn't listed here doesn't mean it isn't good -- it's just not a favorite.

Conversely, I've listed many obscurities and guilty pleasures, some of which I like for inexplicable reasons (eg., 1943's kitschy musical 'The Gang's All Here').

Next to each year is a small number in a bracket indicating the number of films I've seen for that particular year. Some films have been omitted or overlooked in the count, thus the numbers are skewed toward the low end. I've added a (+) in cases where I know I've undercounted, omitting some cartoons, short subjects or minor features. This bracketed number gives an idea of the size of the pool from which the favorites were selected -- an important factor in determining the quality of any lists. Titles are ordered top to bottom in rough preference rank. An asterisk * indicates favorites of the early cinema. Some "honorable mention" and 'runners-up' lists note additional favorites that didn't quite make the top cut.

WHAT THIS LIST IS, AND WHAT IT AIN'T

This is not a list of every movie I've seen -- just the ones I liked and/or admired the most. So if you see one of your own favorites missing or a famous or classic title absent, it does not mean I haven't seen it. It just means that I probably didn't care for it. I might even have admired it and enjoyed it to some degree, but can't in all honesty to myself and others list it. In some rare cases, I may not have seen it. There are quite a few popular hits that I don't think much of. I love most of the classics, but not all of them; likewise I love a lot of movies that are not classics but in my opinion should be.

I'm a snob, but that doesn't mean I give carte blanche to every "art" movie either -- not by a long shot. Some of those I do not like, to say the least. You won't find any Abbas Kiarostami on here, for instance, because all the pretentious hot air penned over his tedium does not make it any less a bore to watch (interestingly, when his scripts are filmed by other directors the results are much better). I daresay almost everyone has videotaped themselves driving and talking and come up with results equally as compelling or equally as dull as A Taste of Cherry. (Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi are the best Iranian directors, but because they make thought-provoking films that are also watchable they are suspect). And I have yet to see a film by Claire Denis or Michael Haneke or Catherine Breillat that I find worth a damn. No human should have to sit on a couch or in a theater chair and develop deep vein thrombosis of the ass over such stuff. I have issues with the notion of directorial provocation; any bully can provoke, it requires no special talent. By the same token I understand well the sentimental manipulative tactics and formula of mainstream cinema. I also understand that when Euro artistes such as Chantal Akerman or Eric Rohmer make their curate's eggs they populate them with beautiful people to keep us watching, which begs the question: If the people in the film were average-looking or worse would we even care? (BTW, I tend to enjoy Rohmer's plush cocktail-party fizzies more than Akerman's austerities).

I put little truck in the auteur theory, or any other film theory for that matter (see Barry Salt); I find it a lazy and simplistic method of categorization; it makes things manageable but leads to lesser stuff being praised all out of proportion to its actual worth and elevated over some better fare made by "lesser" filmmakers excluded from the limited pantheon (but that's all another rant).

So, this is a list of my favorites -- things I consider well-enough baked -- and by extension the best, in my estimation. I'm more of a classicist in my outlook, not so much a post-modernist who elevates every cheesy horror film or B western of the 50s, 60s and 70s to masterpiece status, or puts lesser directors like Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher (no brickbats please, read on) on a pedestal (even though I do like a lot of their films; I think the critical pendulum has swung way too far; anyone perceived as a rebel outside the system generally always receives compensatory reappraisal to make up for past neglect; I tend to see the balance). I've seen the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns and as entertaining as they are I can't recall a dime's worth of difference between them, or between them and most other westerns. As for Fuller, I'm a particular fan of Forty Guns, Fixed Bayonets! and The Naked Kiss. Even so, Fuller never made anything remotely as good as the best of Nicolas Ray (to pick a contemporaneous rebel auteur hero of the Cahiers du cinema crowd). But I digress...

I embrace old Hollywood, and indeed defend it, but I am not blind to its limitations. Nonetheless, I make no secret of my adoration of films made in Hollywood between roughly 1930 and 1955; they are my favorites and when it comes down to choice of viewing, I will nearly always choose a title from that period and place over most anything else.

That said, my tastes are highly eclectic and not always predictable. For instance I love some of Jean-Luc Godard, but not all. I do tend to like the Great White Fathers of the classical arthouse cinema: Pabst, Dreyer, Clouzot, Renoir, Powell, Welles, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, Bunuel and their Asian counterparts such as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, etc. It's taken me awhile but I have come around to Ozu in a big way. By the same token I'm equally in awe of lesser regarded craftsmen of the studio era, directors with panache such as Roy del Ruth, Michael Curtiz and W.S. Van Dyke. I love the poetic sensibility of Frank Borzage, but, again, I think the auteurists go way too far with him.

My friends tend to see my tastes as too highbrow (they wonder why I am not running to see the director's cut of "Joe Dirt"), but compared to a lot of critics and buffs I probably look more middlebrow. I tend to take filmmakers such as Bela Tarr with a huge grain of salt, especially when cineastes without breaking ranks never seem to question if it is truly something reasonable to expect anyone to sit through a tedious 7-hour opus of human misery when life is so short and there are so many other life-affirming things to do with one's time. Such things bring out the Pauline Kael side of me. I think I would trade every 10 movies I've seen for a good fuck.

In the experimental realm I tend to prefer Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Germaine Dulac, Oskar Fischinger and the like to Michael Snow, Jack Smith and some others. Again, it's the classicist in me. I believe that a good deal of the cinema is a con job; I am highly skeptical of obscurantism. There's only one Stan Brakhage film that I really love, Window Water Baby Moving because it speaks truth. I like Mothlight for its beauty and simple poignancy. I believe there is a happy medium that can be achieved between art and entertainment. One thing I won't do is add something to my list just because it is fashionable to do so in certain critical quarters.

I do believe that truly good top 10 lists can only happen with fulsome viewing -- that is, a list of any quality presumes that the viewer/reviewer has seen approximately 100 films from each of the respective years, and a good variety of fare at that: domestic, foreign, short subjects, documentaries, avant-garde films, you name it. My lists include all genres and types of film, and I don't bother to specify which films are features or shorts. A film is a film, period. A 7-minute Bugs Bunny cartoon is a self-contained work and very likely every bit as good or better than most features released in that particular year.

I've recently acquired a large number of rare international classics that I will be watching over the next few months, and which will be making their way onto the lists, no doubt, so don't treat this list as quite done. A lot of these came via torrent networks and renegade sites and forums in Russia and elsewhere. There was simply no other way to get them. Even at that, until the inexplicably suppressed films of greats like Werner Hochbaum are finally made available a huge gap in our movie knowledge remains, and our lists thus wanting.

To give a clue to my critical predilections, it might help to know that my favorite periods in filmmaking were roughly 1927-1929 in Europe; 1930-1950 in the US (Hollywood); 1950-1970 in Europe and Japan; and 1970-1977 in the US (the American auteurs). There are, of course, other movements and periods I like: the Czech New Wave of the 60s and the commercial and artistic Hong Kong films of the 80s and 90s, for instance.

So if you look at the list and wonder why I extol some John Cassavetes (Faces, Killing of a Chinese Bookie, etc.) and not others (Love Streams), it's partly because I'm not an auteurist but mainly because, as the Philistine says, I know what I likes.

In the last two years I've taken some breaks from film viewing in order to experience other things in my life, such as reading neglected books and relating to neglected people. In many ways I wish I had never become obsessed by cinema, but it's a sickness, like anything that consumes and subsumes one and preoccupies all out of proportion. This is the cream of the crop from roughly 30+ years of moviegoing. I have to convince myself that it was all a good use of my time. -EG