Here’s my top 5 for the year thus far, only including DVDs I own:

1. Eclipse Series: Late Ozu and Early Samuel Fuller. Fine transfers of some great, previously unavailable films at a reasonable price. Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight and The Steel Helmet are as good as any new movie I’ve seen this year.

2. Dragon Dynasty: The Weinstein Company finally does something good for Asian Cinema, putting out outstanding versions of Hong Kong classics at pretty cheap prices: The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, Five Fingers Of Death, One-Armed Swordsman, Police Story 1 & 2, Last Hurrah For Chivalry, The Protector and Hard-Boiled. The RZA’s commentary on 36th Chamber isn’t the most awesome thing in the history of the world, but it’s pretty good. The Police Story discs are plagued by Brett Ratner commentaries, but they aren’t as bad as you’d think.

3. Criterion: The best DVD company in the world continues to put out great products. This year, I’ve got: Yojimbo/Sanjuro, The Third Man, La Jetee/Sans Soleil, Stranger Than Paradise/Night On Earth, Days Of Heaven, and Breathless. Days Of Heaven’s probably the best of them, the Jarmusches next. Two-Lane Blacktop doesn’t arrive until next week.

4. Masters Of Cinema: Britain’s counterpart to Criterion puts out editions that are even more deluxe, though they’re more obscure and, unfortunately, there aren’t as many of them. This year, I’ve got a pair of FW Murnau classics, Nosferatu and Tabu. They’ve also started releasing Kenji Mizoguchi DVDs, with their version of Sansho The Bailiff (paired with the previously unavailable Sisters Of Gion) tempting me to double dip.

5. The Stanley Kubrick Collection: Long-rumored and finally released. I’d been waiting over two years to buy any Kubrick DVDs in anticipation of this. With 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut (uncensored!) the only complaint is that it isn’t big enough to include Barry Lyndon, Paths Of Glory, The Killing, Killer’s Kiss and Spartacus.

Honorable Mention: Rio Bravo and Funny Face, the best regularly priced DVDs of the year, great films, great transfers.

Three things I think would be great, but I don’t have them yet: Jean-Luc Godard’s 4-disc Histoire(s) du cinéma, which I have every reason to believe is one of the most important and best things he ever did. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, whose cost is prohibitive for a 15 hour, 7-disc TV series I’ve never seen. Finally, the mammoth 21 disc Ford At Fox boxset, perhaps the best DVD box ever.

As you can tell, I have had no time for The End lately, what with holidays and family and Metro Classics sucking up all my spare moments/brain space over the last couple months. My movie watching is way down as well, as I’m trying to reconnect with the NBA after several years away. Still, I’ve got quite a few new additions to The Big List, and I figured I’d just list them all here, sans capsules. If you’d like to know details of what I thought about any of these films, or why I ranked them where I did, feel free to ask in the comment section.

The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers: 12, 1946
Executive Suite: 13, 1954
Grizzly Man: 5, 2005
The Steel Helmet: 2, 1951
The Tall T: 9, 1957
Blood On The Moon: 19, 1948
Vivacious Lady: 7, 1938
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde: 11, 1941
The Charge Of The Light Brigade: 8, 1936
The Affairs Of Dobie Gillis: 11, 1953
Pat And Mike: 18, 1952
Macao: 12, 1952
The Ox-Bow Incident: 4, 1943
His Last Game: 1909
The Ball Player And The Bandit: 1912
The Bigamist: 20, 1953
À nous la liberté: 3, 1931
To Be Or Not To Be: 5, 1942
Lust, Caution: 2007
Blond Cheat: 9,1938
Maid’s Night Out: 10, 1938
Passport To Suez: 14, 1943
Brigadoon: 10, 1954
Lust For Life: 15, 1956
Michael Clayton: 2007
Words And Music: 17, 1948
Mean Girls: 18, 2004
Lars And The Real Girl: 2007
No Country For Old Men: 2007
I’m Not There: 2007
The Newton Boys: 22, 1998
The Mask Of Dimitrios: 13, 1944
The Last Laugh: 2, 1924
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 7, 1935
Beowulf: 2007
Waitress: 2007
Rescue Dawn: 4, 2006

Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just – Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and… growing and… just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they – they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is – is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever… goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists has – has created in anger. It’s the only land where – where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at – at what’s around us there – there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of… overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle – Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation – we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban… novel… a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication… overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the – the stars up here in the – in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.