As I start this, Boston’s up two games to one in the NBA Finals. Basketball’s been a lot of fun this year, I’m glad I decided to start watching it again, even if the Sonics are probably going to disappear.

Come Drink With Me – King Hu’s kung fu epic redefined the genre in a myriad of ways, not the least of which was in the casting of a woman (Cheng Pei-pei, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, #1, 2000) in the lead role. Not as expansive or mystical as Hu’s great A Touch Of Zen (#2, 1969), the first half is nonetheless some of the most inspired atmospheric filmmaking in the genre’s history. Things get a bit silly in the second half, and the focus shifts too much away from Cheng (both reportedly the result of interference which led to Hu leaving haw Brothers after this, his only film for them), but the action scenes are always great. The #8 film of 1966.

Heroes Of The East – More on the entertainment-only side of the wuxia world is this Lau Kar-leung film reuniting him with his 36th Chamber Of Shaolin (#2, 1978) star Gordon Liu. Liu marries a Japanese girl, and after the two repeatedly quarrel over who’s martial arts are superior (Japan or China), she runs away and a gang of Japanese experts turn up to show him what’s what. He takes them all on, Shaolin style. Lots of fun with some great fight scenes, the movie isn’t really about anything more than that. The original US title was Shaolin Vs. Ninja, which captures the whole enterprise better, I think. The #9 film of 1979.

Jezebel – Bette Davis’s brilliant performance and William Wyler’s fine direction save what is otherwise a ridiculous film from the realm of only-enjoyable-as-camp. Davis plays an independent-minded Southern Belle who wears a scandalous red dress to a ball despite the protestations of society, her family, and her boyfriend (Henry Fonda). The ball scene has a real masochistic thrill to it as Fonda forces Davis to dance before the outraged crowd after she realizes just how much she’s humiliated herself. After that, the last two-thirds of the movie become a rather tedious account of how Fonda rejects her and she redeems herself by catching yellow fever, or something. It’s all very silly, but that one scene sizzles. The #16 film of 1938.

I Was Born But . . . – Generally regarded as the first great Yasujiro Ozu movie, though I think that distinction should belong to Tokyo Chorus (#4, 1931), it’s also the film he reworked late in his career as Good Morning (#10, 1959). Both films follow a group of suburban children as they become disenchanted with the grownups in their lives and eventually go on a hunger strike. But really, they’re quite different in tone. The latter film is much more comic (Ozu being one of the few Great Auteurs who managed to build a film around fart jokes) and the source of the kid’s disillusionment is both more material (they want to watch a wrestling match on TV) and more abstract (they point out the shallow emptiness of the politeness adults use to mediate their social interactions (the omnipresent “Ohayo” of the title)). In I Was Born But . . . the kids are new in town, and must deal with integrating themselves with the local gang of bullies, eventually becoming the leaders of the gang. Their crisis with with their parents (really their father, the mother is almost absent from the film, whereas she more prominent in the later film) is more concrete: at a gathering with their dad’s co-workers, they see him clowning around on film and realize that the man they had seen as a hero is viewed as a clown by his friends. I Was Born But . . . is therefore more poignant and tragic, while Good Morning is more general and less dramatic. Both films are profound in Ozu’s unique way of transforming specific realities into grand statements about the human condition. The #2 film of 1932.

Passing Fancy – The third, and unfortunately final, film in Criterion’s Silent Ozu Eclipse boxset is apparently one of David Bordwell’s favorite movies, though since I haven’t gotten around to reading his Ozu book (available as a free PDF on his website) I’m not sure why. As I’ve said, with Ozu it’s exceedingly difficult to make distinctions of quality between his works, but as far as I can tell, this was my least favorite of the films. It’s still a great film, of course, following a poor man and his son who eke out life in a tenement. The dad’s got a crush on a much younger woman, the boy isn’t a fan and the two get into a very dramatic fight. These two main characters are terrific, and the film is even closer to Ozu’s mature style than the two before it, but something about it didn’t click with me in the way the other two did. But the ending is wonderful, as joyous as anything I’ve seen in his films. The #6 film of 1933.

Romeo And Juliet – George Cukor’s version of the Shakespeare play, with an absurdly old cast playing the teenaged star-crossed lovers. Trevor Howard plays Romeo, Norma Shearer Juliet, and despite the best efforts of these fine actors, and Cukor’s usual deft camera style, it never, ever works. The #15 film of 1936.

Yang Kwei-fei – Kenji Mizoguchi’s adaptation of the classic Chinese (and Japanese) legend of the Imperial Concubine (Michiko Kyo) who almost lost an empire thanks to who greedy and corrupt family, but instead sacrifices herself for the Emperor (Masayuki Mori) she loves. Mizoguchi gives this, his first color film, a kind of fairy tale staginess, reminiscent of both John Ford’s 7 Women (#4, 1966) and Seijun Suzuki’s Princess Raccoon (#9, 2005) that only intensifies the romanticism. The great critic Tony Rayns, in his talk on the film on the Masters Of Cinema DVD seems to hate it, as do, apparently, a lot of other critics, which makes me wonder if I totally wrong, or a sap, or if these guys simply don’t have souls. The #11 film of 1955.

Cheyenne Autumn – John Ford’s farewell to Monument Valley, which gets a little silly as it’s the chronicle of the march the Cheyenne made from their reservation in Oklahoma to their homeland in Montana, all without leaving Arizona. Richard Widmark gives another fine performance as the cavalry officer trailing the nation on the march, and James Stewart is great in a comical interlude as Wyatt Earp. That interlude is one of the wonderful things about the film, so tonally different from the rest of the movie that it caused some degree of critical outrage at the time. Also wonderful is the way the film never really comes to a traditional climax, with possibly the most dramatic part of its conclusion filmed totally in longshot. Unfortunate, though, is that Edward G. Robinson was brought in to replace an ailing Spencer Tracy at the last minute. Not because Robinson’s bad, but because it necessitated filming the conclusion of the Cheyenne’s quest against a comically bad rear-projection, made all the more jarring by the typical beauty of Ford’s location shooing. The #13 film of 1964.

20 Million Miles To Earth – Cheesy B monster movie with great special effects and nothing else to recommend it. An American spaceship crash lands off the coast of Sicily after traveling to Venus. Child unwittingly rescues monster egg from the ship. It grows rapidly and destroys much of Rome. There’s a fantastic fight scene between the monster and an elephant. The #24 film of 1957.

The Mask Of Fu Manchu – Camp classic totally racist adventure film. Boris Karloff is great as the evil titular genius, Myrna Loy is a revelation as his perverse daughter (not as awesome as Gene Tierney in Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture(#8, 1941), but a lot of fun nonetheless), but those two seem to be the only ones who know they’re in a terrible movie. Everyone else is really bad. But there’s a convenient laser, which is nice. The #17 film of 1932.

Chikamatsu monogatari – Kenji Mizoguchi’s Tale Of The Crucified Lovers is, like a lot of Mioguchi, terribly depressing. A printer is accused, falsely, of having an affair with his boss’s wife. Since the punishment for adultery is crucifixion, the two run off into the mountains, where they fall in love, with tragic, and predictable, consequences. Mizoguchi’s concern seems to be much more with the society that condones such draconian punishments than with the characters themselves, whose motivations lack any kind of sense for most of the film. This prevents the film, for me, from reaching the transcendent heights of his greatest work. The #12 film of 1954.

Royal Tramp – Totally insane kung fu comedy starring Stephen Chow, from the year in which the top five grossing movies in Hong Kong all starred Stephen Chow. He plays the clownish brother of a brothel owner who gets himself inducted into a secret society and becomes involved in a dizzying array of palace intrigue. A seemingly endless series of puns, double entendres, manic violence and double crossings make the film near-total chaos, but somehow, in the end, everything resolves itself neatly and makes perfect sense. I think. The #28 film of 1992.

The Color Of Pomegranates – Director Sergei Parajanov’s mind-boggling anti-narrative account of the life of medieval Armenian poet Sayat Nova is the most difficult film I’ve had to rank in awhile. How can one possibly compare a film with no dialogue, no camera movement and no plot where only half the images make any kind of logical sense to the other films that make up the best of 1968 list (The Lion In Winter, Once Upon A Time In The West, Night Of The Living Dead, etc)? The closest film in style I’ve seen from that year is 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I’ve seen countless times over the past 20 years. But after one viewing of a very subpar Kino DVD of Parajanov’s film, how can I possibly do it justice. It might be one of the greatest films ever made, it might be an incoherent art exercise, I really don’t know. What I do know is that I liked it and I’ll see it again, hopefully in a format that does it justice. For now, I’ll conservatively call it the #7 film of 1968.

The Incredible Hulk – I like Ang Lee’s version a lot, and everything that is great about that film (the visual style, the acting, the devotion to the psychological reality of the comic book characters) is either totally lacking or merely mediocre in this sequel. But there’s more Hulk smash!, which should make the philistines happy. It’s not comically bad like the worst of the Marvel adaptations, but it isn’t the least bit memorable either.

Wings – The film that arguably beat out Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans for the first Best Picture Oscar is a fine WWI movie from director William Wellman. The plot is more or less the same as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (two guys, in love with the same girl, go off to fly planes in war), but even more so than in Bay’s film, the film is hurt by the sheer idiocy of the main character, who prefers the totally bland girl from the city to the totally hot girl next door (Clara Bow). The ground-breaking aerial photography is truly excellent, and a very young Gary Cooper is more cool than ever in a very small role. There’s a none-too-subtle homosexual subtext to the film, the becomes quite obvious by the end of the movie, which is weird, but interesting. The #3 film of 1927.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic – She’s funny. It’s a standard concert film, for the most part, though there are attempts to liven it up with some of the same actors that later costarred on her TV show, and those scenes are funny too, for the most part. The songs, however, are subpar. The #26 film of 2005.

The Happening – The latest victim of critical groupthink, though apparently M. Night Shymalan’s more deserving of it than Wong Kar-wai was. It’s only the second of his films I’ve seen, and it’s not terrible. Very much a 50s B sci-fi film, right down to the stiff acting and overly earnest attitude, and I dug that. I admire the lack of post-modern winkiness and Shyamalan’s longer take style and Zooey Deschanel’s performance has some nice moments, notably two close-ups that bookend the film. It reminded me of Dn Siegel’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (#10, 1956), or what the remake of The Birds will be like, you know, the one where the director is going to fix the “flaw” in Hitchcock’s version, which was that he never explains what the birds’ motivation for attacking people is.

Becoming John Ford – The documentary about Ford that accompanies the mammoth (and wonderful) Ford At Fox boxset. It’s got a lot of good content, though focusing mostly on Ford’s relation with Darryl Zanuck and pretty much ignoring any film that doesn’t come in the box. Still, there’s some interesting stuff, despite the artiness of the direction (which you can be sure Ford would have despised). Peter Bogdanovich’s Ford documentary is a lot better, but I’ve yet to see one that fully explores his whole career, which may not be possible. The #31 film of 2007.

The File On Thelma Jordan – Decent film noir with Barbara Stanwyck is terrific as usual as the titular Thelma who may or may not have killed her aunt. Fortunately for her, she’s having an affair with the Asst. District Attorney (Wendell Corey, a capable sap). Robert Siodmak directed, but the film doesn’t have nearly the visual panache of his great The Killers (#7, 1946), with its iconic opening sequence. The #15 film of 1950.

The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father – Light domestic melodrama with Glenn Ford as a widower searching for a new wife that’ll make his son (Ron Howard) happy. Too sweet at times, despite the great Vincente Minnelli directing it feels too much like the sitcom it would ultimately become. Come to think of it, it bears more than a slight resemblance to Ozu’s Passing Fancy. That Ozu was able to make a better film out of it says a lot about him as a director, I think. The #15 film of 1963.

(And as I finish, the Celtics and Lakers are about to tipoff Game 6, which shows either just how slowly I can write or how absurdly long the NBA’s managed to stretch its playoffs.)

Time for the next decade in the Best Movie Years project, the 1960s, a decade defined by both an explosion of world cinema and the death of the Hollywood studio system. As always, the years are ranked by both peak (the quality of the best films of the year) and depth (the volume of good films in the year).

10. 1969 – For every other year this decade, I’ve seen an average of almost 22 movies. But somehow, for 1969, I’ve only managed to see ten. I don’t know if that’s just random chance, or a blind spot on my part, or if it just wasn’t a very good year. Regardless, despite the fact that the year is lead by one of my all-time favorites (Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev), and one of the very best martial arts films ever made, King Hu’s A Touch Of Zen, the year is severely lacking in both peak and depth. Best: Andrei Rublev. Most Underrated: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Most Overrated: Easy Rider.

9. 1965 – Led by what are arguably the two best films by two of my favorite directors (Chimes At Midnight and Pierrot le fou), 1965 has a very fine peak and some solid, if unspectacular depth. To personal favorites of mine (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and A Charlie Brown Christmas) and fun films by Jean-Luc Godard and Otto Preminger easily push this year ahead of 1969. Bonus points for ninjas. Best: Pierrot le fou. Most Underrated: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Most Overrated: The Sound Of Music or Dr. Zhivago.

8. 1960 – A huge leap forward for what is nonetheless the eighth best year of the decade. Led by classics like Psycho, Shoot The Piano Player, L’Avventura and Breathless, with some solid depth in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell, Federico Fellini, Billy Wilder, Akira Kurosawa and Budd Boetticher. A good year, but this is a great decade. Best: Psycho. Most Underrated: Late Autumn. Most Overrated: La Dolce Vita or The Magnificent Seven.

7. 1966 – The first of seven truly amazing years this decade is led by masterpieces from Robert Bresson, Sergio Leone, Gillo Pontecorvo, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. there’s also John Ford’s final film, 7 Women, one of his best and most neglected, King Hu’s revolutionary wuxia masterpiece Come Drink With Me, and possibly the greatest pure (ie, non-satirical) samurai film ever made, Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword Of Doom. Not to mention fine films from Seijun Suzuki, Jiri Menzel, Charles Schultz, Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss, Doris Day and Frank Tashlin, Mike Nichols and Woody Allen’s first great comedy. Best: Au hasard Balthazar. Most Underrated: 7 Women. Most Overrated: Persona.

6. 1968 – The craziest year of a crazy decade sees a half dozen masterpieces at the top along with a handful of other fine films. Stolen Kisses, Barbarella, Kill!, The Immortal Story and Bullitt make for decent depth, but it doesn’t compare to the years higher up on the list. This year’s case is made by it’s peak: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon A Time In The West, Rosemary’s Baby, Night Of The Living Dead, Hell In The Pacific and personal favorite The Lion In Winter. Best: Once Upon A Time In The West. Most Underrated: Hell In The Pacific. Most Overrated: The Producers.

5. 1962 – Four masterpieces at the top, with The Manchurian Candidate, Lawrence Of Arabia, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and L’Eclisse, solid depth with films from Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Masaki Kobayashi, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, and François Truffaut. Best: The Manchurian Candidate. Most Underrated: Sanjuro. Most Overrated: Jules And Jim.

4. 1963 – At least six more masterpieces here and arguably nine. Old Hollywood holds its own against the onslaught of foreign art directors, with John Sturges’s The Great Escape, Stanley Donen’s Charade, John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef, Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corrider and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds matched up against Fellini’s 8 1/2, Kurosawa’s High And Low, Godard’s trio of Contempt, Les Carabiniers and Le petit soldat and Visconti’s The Leopard. There’s even the best james Bond movie (From Russia With Love) and possibly the best Jerry Lewis movie (The Nutty Professor). Best: 8 1/2. Most Underrated: Donovan’s Reef. Most Overrated: The Nutty Professor.

3. 1961 – Arguably the deepest year of the decade, with a whopping 19 quality films ranging from certified classics like Yojimbo, Last Year At Marienbad, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Viridiana, The Hustler, and West Side Story to auteur favorites A Woman Is A Woman, La Notte, Cleo From 5 To 7, The End Of Summer, Two Rode Together, One, Two, Three and Underworld, USA to more obscure gems like Jacques Demy’s Lola, Nicholas Ray’s King Of Kings and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan Of The Angels. Best: A Woman Is A Woman. Most Underrated: Lola. Most Overrated: West Side Story.

2. 1967 – Not quite as deep, but even stronger at the top is this year, led by Jacques Tati’s masterpiece Playtime, Jean-Luc Godard’s era-ending Week End, Jacques Demy’s apotheosis The Young Girls Of Rochefort, DA Pennebaker’s genre-defining Don’t Look Back and Arthur Penn’s Hollywood-killing Bonnie And Clyde. Great films also include America’s The Dirty Dozen, Point Blank, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke and Who’s That Knocking At My Door?; Europe’s 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her, Le Samouraï, Belle de jour, and The Fearless Vampire Killers; and Asia’s Samurai Rebellion and The One-Armed Swordsman. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this year (that, or just an odd coincidence) is that there isn’t a single film out of the 22 I’ve seen that I’d classify as bad. At the bottom of my list are Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? and In The Heat Of The Night, two Oscar-nominated films starring Sidney Poitier that deal with race in rather problematic ways but are nonetheless not terrible movies at all. Best: Playtime. Most Underrated: The Young Girls Of Rochefort. Most Overrated: In The Heat Of The Night.

1. 1964 – Similarly, there isn’t a bad film in the 21 I’ve seen from this, the best year of the decade. It’s the amazing peak value that pushes ’64 to the top of the list, with somewhere between nine and fifteen masterpieces, depending on how you look at it. Starting from the top, there’s Stanley Kubrick’s best film Dr. Strangelove, Jacques Demy’s classic New Wave musical The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, Mikhail Kalatozov’s flashy yet stunning I Am Cuba, arguably the best war movie of all-time: Cy Endfield’s Zulu, possibly Jean-Luc Godard’s most crowd-pleasing film (Band Of Outsiders), perverse classics from Alfred Hitchcock, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Samuel Fuller (Marnie, Woman In The Dunes, The Naked Kiss) and Carl Theordor Dreyer’s final film, the magisterial Gertrud. On the second tier are the second best Bond film (Goldfinger), A Hard Day’s Night, A Fistful Of Dollars, Mary Poppins, John Frankenheimer’s The Train, Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations Masque Of The Red Death and The Tomb Of Ligeia and Blake Edwards’s A Shot In The Dark and John Ford’s Monument Valley farewell Cheyenne Autumn. At the bottom of my list is George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, a beautiful film that isn’t bad at all. Best: Dr. Strangelove. Most Underrated: Zulu. Most Overrated: My Fair Lady.

Director Roundup:

Starting a new feature, adding up which directors have the most films in the top tens for each year of the decade. Here’s every director with at least two:

Jean-Luc Godard: 11
Akira Kurosawa: 4
Michelangelo Antonioni: 4
Stanley Kubrick: 3
Alfred Hitchcock: 3
John Ford: 3
Jacques Demy: 3
Orson Welles: 2
François Truffaut: 2
Sam Peckinpah: 2
Yasujiro Ozu: 2
Kihachi Okamoto: 2
Sergio Leone: 2
Samuel Fuller: 2
Federico Fellini: 2
Luis Buñuel: 2
Robert Bresson: 2
John Boorman: 2
Woody Allen: 2

And since I missed it last time, here are the numbers for the 50s:

Alfred Hitchcock: 7
Yasujiro Ozu: 6
Akira Kurosawa: 5
Kenji Mizoguchi: 4
John Ford: 4
Billy Wilder: 4
Nicholas Ray: 4
Anthony Mann: 4
Stanley Kubrick: 3
Douglas Sirk: 3
Orson Welles: 3
Vincente Minnelli: 3
Samuel Fuller: 3
Budd Boetticher: 2
Federico Fellini: 2
Max Ophuls: 2
Jacques Tati: 2
Stanley Donen: 2
Robert Bresson: 2
Howard Hawks: 2
Jean Renoir: 2
Roberto Rossellini: 2
Joseph L. Mankiewicz: 2

The pace has slowed significantly, but this is the 59th Movies Of The Year list I’ve done here, more than two-thirds of the way to completion. I find I’ve been a lot less motivated to write them since I figured out and posted all the lists in one spot (well, three spots) as The Big List. A large part of my motivation before was finding out what films would have to be ranked against each other with each new year. On the other hand, I really like having them all there for my own reference, if nothing else. Plus, I’ve already written about a lot of these older films in the roundups, which makes it more difficult as I’d try to not repeat myself. So I’m going to try quoting myself more and see if that speeds things up.

1950’s not a bad year, but it’s still only the 8th best of the decade.

15. Cinderella – Generic Disney movie, annoying comic relief animals, lame songs, though the animation manages to be nicely abstract at times.

14. Where Danger Lives – I wrote about this a little over a year ago:

Decent enough John Farrow noir starring Robert Mitchum as a doctor who gets suckered by a crazy woman. Her husband ends up dead and the two of them try to flee to Mexico, while Mitchum’s got a concussion and the girl gets crazier and crazier. Great supporting actors are largely wasted in much too small roles, namely Claude Rains and Farrow’s wife, Maureen O’Sullivan.

Honestly, I don’t really remember much more than a wild car chase that was filmed such that the car actually looks like it’s driving really fast.

13. The Baron Of Arizona – Transitional Sam Fuller film with a restrained performance from Vincent Price. The story is crazy enough to be true and the lynch mob scene at the end is funny, chaotic and exciting, like the best of Fuller.

12. DOA – Killer premise for a noir (guy gets poisoned and has a limited amount of time to find out who did it and why), but I didn’t like Edmond O’Brien as the hero and the whole thing felt overlong despite being less than 90 minutes. Some great set pieces and the film is often visually stunning, director Rudolph Maté had been a great cinematographer (he shot Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc).

11. Born Yesterday – I wrote this, which pretty well sums it up, I think:

Corrupt capitalist hires four-eyed journalist to tutor his ditzy blonde girlfriend so she’ll be less embarrassing in high society. Blonde learns a thing or two and realizes her tycoon is a crook and outs him, while running off with the geeky writer, who turns out to be William Holden. An iconic performance from Judy Holliday is the highlight, and director George Cukor never quite allows the film to descend into the filmed-theatre genre it so desperately wants to join.

10. The Father Of The Bride – Very pleasant light comedy from Vincente Minnelli and starring the always great Spencer Tracy and the very cute Elizabeth Taylor. Much better than the remake, of course. I want Tracy to make me a martini.

9. Rio Grande – The third part of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy (it’s not really a trilogy, just three films about the cavalry, but whatever) is the least of the three. Not as deep as Fort Apache, nor as entertaining and pretty as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Still, it’s Ford and it stars John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, who are always great together. Wayne’s training new recruits, one of whom turns out to be his son. Complications ensue when mom shows up to take him home. And there’s a war on.

8. Sunset Blvd. – Billy Wilder’s very noir Hollywood satire has the classic performance from Gloria Swanson as the washed-up loony silent film star, and a clever opening with narration by the dead guy in the pool and great supporting work from directors Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille and even a cameo for Buster Keaton. The problem is, as it often is, William Holden. I really don’t like him, and the movie falls apart whenever Swanson’s not there chewing things up.

7. The Asphalt Jungle – John Huston heist film that manages to be both overrated and underrated at the same time. Overrated because it’s considered one of the best noirs ever by a lot of people who haven’t seen a lot of noir. The characters are cardboard, hackneyed and cheesy (think Sterling Hayden and his horses), the direction textbook noir with little style and the plot silly. Underrated because while all those things are true, it’s nonetheless very entertaining: the actors are terrific and Marilyn Monroe is at her most adorable in her small role.

6. In A Lonely Place – Nicholas Ray’s film is the second show business noir on the list (I don’t think you can make a case for there being three, but you’re welcome to try). Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter with writer’s block and an anger management problem who becomes the lead suspect in a murder case. Gloria Grahame plays the hot neighbor he becomes involved with, but it all ends, inevitably, in tragedy. One of Bogart’s greatest performances, the anger and the drinking feel very real. This is a movie I’ve seen, I believe, three times, but I still don’t fell I have a firm grasp on how great it really is. James Harvey writes about it at length in his great book Movie Love In The 50s. You should read it.

5. Stromboli – First saw this almost two years ago, it was my first Roberto Rossellini film and this is what I wrote:

stars Ingrid Bergman as a WW2 refugee who marries a young Italian man to escape the refugee camp. The young man takes her to his home island of Stromboli, a conservative little village dominated by an active volcano. The volcano metaphor isn’t exactly subtle, but neither is Bergman’s performance as she becomes increasingly hysterical in her struggle against the provincialism of small-town life. But somehow, teetering on the edge of camp, it manages to be sincere and moving.

Since then, I haven’t been able to get the film’s eerie final sequence out of my mind: Bergman staggering hysterically across the smoking volcano, as apocalyptic an image as anything in film.

4. Winchester ’73 – Most schematic of the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Stewart has the titular gun stolen from him, and has to track down the guy who took it along the way wandering through every Western plot point you can think of. As definitive a Western as Stagecoach, and as perfectly constructed. Even if Mann doesn’t fill his film with the quite flair for iconic imagery that Ford does, he ain’t bad.

3. Harvey – For those who wonder how I could contemplate placing these two entertaining, yet slight, James Stewart movies over the previous two auteur classics, I have this to say: In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. My love for this film may be wholly irrational, but I love it nonetheless.

2. All About Eve – Very difficult choice for the top spot this year, with two films that are not only among my all-time favorites, but also films that mark definitive stages in my cinephile life. Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film about Broadway and all its insecurities and manipulations is perfect: with an interesting structure, a brilliant script and a graceful visual style. Bette Davis’s iconic leading role is justly famous, but Anne Baxter’s Eve is just as good and George Sanders gives the most George Sandersy performance of his life. That the two other male actors are merely decent and not good as the leads (or Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter or Marilyn Monroe at her second most adorable either) is about the worst I can say about it. I remember very clearly being blown away by this film when I first saw it my freshman year in college, when every new movie was a revelation and I never knew old films could be so smart, so funny, so twisted and so . . . well, perfect.

1. Rashomon – This film, on the other hand, is not without its flaws. The hyperbolic acting (from Toshiro Mifune and Michiko Kyo particularly) can be off-putting, the Bolero-esque score is at best functional (it makes Donald Richie cringe at Kurosawa’s generic taste in classical music, but my taste is just as bad, so it doesn’t really bug me), and the addition of the coda (changing the original story) makes the film more uplifting and humanist and/or sentimental and cheesy, depending on how cynical you are. But I love it despite all these faults. I prefer the loud and crazy Mifune to the more normal, restrained Mifune, though all Mifunes are always awesome. Michiko Kyo and Masayuki Mori aren’t as good as they would later be in their Mizoguchi films, but they don’t bother me either. Takeshi Shimura is is usual brilliant self rounding out one of the greatest collections of actors ever in a single film. The puzzle of the film, about the nature of truth and whether or not everybody lies, to themselves and to others, is endlessly fascinating, and I’m simply not depressed enough to hate the ending. But the reason I owe Rashomon the top spot on this list is because it is the film that opened up foreign films for me. I’d seen The Seventh Seal before, and while I really liked it, it didn’t make me rush out and watch a bunch of non-English language films. Rashomon did. I watched it one afternoon and immediately after drove to the store and rented an armful of Kurosawa and spent the next several weeks doing nothing but watching his films, along with Fellini and Bergman and Truffaut and Eiesenstein and Renoir and before long, I wasn’t in college anymore. But I was much better off.

Some great Unseen Movies again this year. I sort of watched Wagon Master, but I need to see it again before I can properly rank it. Orphée I own but haven’t watched. I don’t know why I don’t have The Flowers Of St. Francis yet. It’s been near the top of my netflix queue for a couple of years now and there are reportedly great DVDs of it from both Criterion and Masters Of Cinema.

Stars In My Crown
Los Olividados
Stage Fright
Orphée
Broken Arrow
Night And The City
Wagonmaster
No Way Out
Where The Sidewalk Ends
Les enfants terribles
The Flowers Of St. Francis
Scandal
La Ronde
The Sound Of Fury
Panic In The Streets
The Gunfighter
The Flame And The Arrow
Annie Get Your Gun

After two weeks of a leaky house, a sick dog and a computer breakdown, let’s get back to the roundup. I’ll try to get through this quickly.

Two Rode Together – Late John Ford Western with a plot rehashed from The Searchers that was forced on him by his bosses. Suffused with the nostalgia that became so dominant in his last films and acted beautifully by Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark. The film makes The Searchers‘s anti-racist message much more explicit (to much lesser effect) as we see exactly what happens when the hero brings back the poor kids who had been kidnapped by Comanche (it ain’t good). Worth watching if only for the now famous long shot of Widmark and Stewart by the river near the beginning of the film. The ending is great as well. The #11 film of 1961.

Tokyo Chorus – I don’t know how he does it, but even in this early silent Yasujiro Ozu manages to combine rather mundane plot elements, decent but unspectacular acting with his distinctive camera style and turn what should be a generic light melodrama into a perfect film, the kind of movie that makes you wonder if there’s anything else a film can possibly say about life. Again and again he does this: his films are all essentially the same, they vary in tonal shade but not in effect. This makes them extremely difficult to differentiate in memory (the generic titles don’t help), and nearly impossible to rank on the Movies Of The Year lists, but I wouldn’t change a single thing about any of them. Ozu, more than even Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Ford, Jean-luc Godard and Powell & Pressburger is the happiest discovery I’ve made since reconnecting with my cinephilia just over three years ago. The #4 film of 1931.

Our Daily Bread – Depression Era collectivist propaganda film from odd director King Vidor (who made The Fountainhead, the politics of which (if taken seriously) are exactly the opposite of this film’s). Filled with mostly non-famous actors and shot in a semi-realistic style, the film nonetheless has a surprising amount of energy: the climax of the building of a canal manages to be almost movingly triumphant. The #8 film of 1934.

Bluebeard – Director Edgar G. Ulmer, as far as I know, preferred to make B movies, wherein he could exercise complete control over his shoddy material. The result as far as I can tell, was a series of pretty lame films enlivened by the director’s expressionist style (Detour excepted). John Carradine plays a painter/serial killer in 19th century Paris. Cheap, fun, and often very cool looking. The #15 film of 1944.

Mother Joan Of The Angels – Interesting, highly stylized Polish New Wave film from director Jerzy Kawalerowicz about a group of nuns who believe they’re possessed by devils. Mieczyslaw Voit plays the priest who’s sent out to help them recover. Shot in a stark black and white, with the actors repeatedly isolated in their own frames, some really creepy images of crazy nuns (the long early sequence wherein the nuns are interrogated and exorcised is a miniature masterpiece) and a series of subjective tracking shots implicating the audience in the chaos, the film reaches a high point when the priest consults the local rabbi (also played by Voit) in a series of head-on medium shots. Either a profoundly moving theological story or a darkly funny joke about the evils of dogma, depending on how you look at it. The #10 film of 1961.

Nightfall – Fine film noir from Jacques Tourneur that was an obvious influence on Fargo. Aldo Ray and his amazing gravel voice star as a hunter who finds a case full of money in the mountains and is pursued by the thugs who own it. More flashily weird than his classic Out Of The Past, but not nearly as twisted as the greatest late 50s noirs like Touch Of Evil or Kiss Me Deadly. The #17 film of 1957.

The Red Balloon – Albert Lamorisse’s classic short film about a boy and his balloon is everything its cracked up to be: funny, sad, technically impressive and ultimately, ahem, uplifting. The #7 film of 1956.

Fantastic Planet – René Laloux’s pastel-pretty animated sci-fi film about humans enslaved by hyper-advanced giant aliens. The animation is surprisingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s work with Monty Python (the backgrounds, not the cutouts) as well as some of the odder Frank Tashlin Looney Tunes shorts (there’s a surreal Porky Pig short in particular I’m thinking of). The plot’s hippie hokum, but it’s fun nonetheless. The #10 film of 1973.

Speed Racer – The Wachowski Brothers’ biggest bomb yet is this adaptation of the popular cartoon series. The film’s a mess, with a fairly simple plot endlessly repeated and explained in way, way too much exposition. The racing scenes, though, are stunning: a fast-cutting CGI color swirl leading to a critical euphoria of metaphors and similes. For the 45 minutes of car racing, the movie is terrific, for the other 90 minutes the visual style is a lot of fun (the interminable exposition is often filmed in an endless series of wipes) but it all drags on far past the point of enjoyment. Not even the monkey can redeem the scenes focussing on the misadventures of Speed’s mind-numbingly annoying little brother.

Flight Of The Red Balloon – The exact opposite of Speed Racer is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon. Juliette Binoche stars as a puppeteer who hires a Chinese filmmaker (she’s remaking the Lamorisse) as a nanny to her young son. Befitting its inspiration, the film is the most sentimental of Hou’s last decade of work, but his austere, realist approach to plot makes the film anything but melodramatic. Instead, his camera’s implacable, drifting, objective point of view finds a perfect corollary in the eponymous balloon and its countless surrogates which constantly follow the main characters around (reflected out of focus stop lights and such) simply watching their lives unfold for a little while. Another masterpiece from the best director working today. The #2 film of 2007.

Keeper Of The Flame – Tonally misfit Tracy-Hepburn film, directed by George Cukor as almost a film noir. The style doesn’t work for any of them. Tracy plays a reporter investigating the death of Hepburn’s famous husband. It ends with a fun twist, but it’s a hard, strange slog to get there. The #12 film of 1942.

Harlan County, USA – Barbara Kopple’s verité chronicle of striking coal miners in Kentucky in the early 70s. The subject matter is certainly honorable, and Kopple’s commitment to her film and subject is very admirable, but frankly, I was bored. I know it sucks to be a coal miner. I know that corporations exploit their workers and the unions are good. The only thing new here is the oldest thing in the film: the recordings of Appalachian songs that litter the soundtrack are a folk music fan’s dream. The #7 film of 1976.

Earth – Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s masterful chronicle of the conflict between collective farmers and rich landowners is never less than visually stunning. The farmers get a tractor, the rich guys get angry and someone gets killed. The plot, such as it is, is of minor importance. Instead, it’s a beautiful combination of Soviet montage style and the kind of stylized imagery of German Expressionism, much like what Eisenstein did 15 years later in Ivan the Terrible. The hero dancing down the street at night is one of the most haunting images I’ve scene in awhile. The #3 film of 1930.

The Baron Of Arizona – Samuel Fuller’s second film is a step forward from his first, with more flashes of his distinctive noir style. Vincent Price gives a restrained (for him) performance as a forger and conman who almost convinces the US government that he’s the rightful owner of Arizona. Fuller shoots in in deep focus, and at least in the beginning shots, he uses it well, with multiple planes of action receding into the frame and objects looming massively in the foreground. It doesn’t consistently keep this style, however, looking much more conventional as the film rolls along. Notable is the film’s lynch mob climax, with the first hints of the antiracist message Fuller would return to again and again in his career. The #14 film of 1950.

Park Row – A vast improvement is this, his fifth film about the rise of the modern newspaper in the 19th century, journalism being a subject much-loved by Fuller (he started his writing career as a reporter). Gene Evans (from The Steel Helmet) stars as the (fictional) journalistic genius who starts his own paper and introduces headlines, bylines, editorial cartoons, and the mechanized printing press and manages to raise enough money to build the pedestal for the Statue Of Liberty while fighting off the attempts of the rich woman owner of the biggest paper in town to destroy him. The film features some of the most elaborate and impressive tracking shots of Fuller’s career, running in and out of buildings and through the crowded street of his elaborate set. The #7 film of 1952.

House Of Bamboo – More conventional is Fuller’s color noir set in post-war Japan. Robert Stack’s infiltrating the criminal gang run by Robert Ryan to investigate the death of an American serviceman. Apparently a remake of The Street With No Name (which I haven’t seen), it’s an entertaining thriller (with the nice touch of a barely concealed homosexual subtext to Ryan’s character), but it lacks the crazy charge of Fuller’s best work. The #12 film of 1955.

Underworld, USA – Another good not great Fuller film, and the final in the mini-marathon I had, watching all the Fuller films that I’d had saved up on DVD or tivo over the last year or so. Cliff Robertson plays an excon out to get the crime bosses who murdered his father. A surprisingly conventional noir. The #16 film of 1961.

Easy Living – Very fine screwball comedy by director Mitchell Leisen from a screenplay by Preston Sturges. Jean Arthur plays a working girl (not that kind) who has an expensive fur coat fall on her head. Under the mistaken impression that she’s the mistress of the influential financier who threw said coat from his window, people proceed to shower her with all kinds of expensive gifts, including an audacious art deco hotel suite. Hijinks ensue. More slapsticky than the best of Sturges, but all the chaos is a lot of fun. The #6 film of 1937.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull – There are two things I blame for the decline of Lucas and Spielberg in their entertainment (as opposed to “serious”) films in the wake of their high points with The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders Of The Lost Ark: Lawrence Kasdan and ET. Kasdan wrote both of those films, and helped imbue them with the intelligent, dare I say Hawksian style they both share (frequent Hawks collaborator Leigh Brackett also did an early version of the Empire script). Other than the screenplay for Return Of The Jedi, after those films he focused on his own career as a writer/director. His absence is sorely missed in the childish sunniness of Lucas and Spielberg’s subsequent films. ET was Spielberg’s follow-up to Raiders, and its massive success I believe, convinced them that financial success lied in recapturing that film’s audience: 8 year-old children. Subsequently, all the darkness and edge has gone out of their films, to be replaced by cute animals and annoying children. In Raiders, the cute animal turns out to be an evil Nazi monkey that gets poisoned and killed and there are no kids anywhere to be seen (there’s a drinking contest instead). Temple Of Doom follows with baby elephants and a kid sidekick named after a Samuel Fuller character. The Last Crusade mercifully is animal-free, but John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliot see their grown-up characters from the first film reduced to silly comic relief. The Jurassic Park films are largely about children, and the Star Wars prequels provide not only a child lead for the first film, but a CGI abomination and some of the worst dialogue ever committed on celluloid. In Crystal Skull all the darkness and anger is purged from the Indiana Jones character, he wanders through the film passionless and uninspired, his dominant emotion is resigned bemusement. And CGI critters abound, from the opening prairie dogs that seem to think they’re in Caddyshack 3 to some helpful monkeys that teach Shia LeBeouf how to navigate some cartoon treetops. The last act of the film is terrible, totally without tension and making little sense. Great actors like Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt are totally wasted in underdeveloped, pointless and annoying (respectively) parts. And the plot, such as it is, is so full of holes it makes the sloppily constructed, acted and filmed Last Crusade look like a Kubrick film. But still, I found the first 2/3 of the movie enjoyable enough and I had fun with it. My expectations were higher though, if only because Spielberg’s matured so much as a director since Saving Private Ryan I’d hoped he’d put this kind of thing behind him and get back to his roots: make great entertainment films for adults (Jaws and Raiders being two of the best ever examples of that). Instead, it was silly, pointless, money-making trash.

Vera Cruz – Entertaining Technicolor Western by director Robert Aldrich, set during the Mexican revolution as two American mercenaries plot to steal the Emperor’s gold on the way to the title town. Starring Gary Cooper, an actor I’m warming up to as the years go by, and Burt Lancaster and his shiny, shiny teeth, all three of whom give very good performances: Cooper with his quiet confidence and Lancaster one intensity notch down from chewing up the screen. An action movie filmed more in the conventional vein of Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen than his hysterical noir masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly (the next film he would make, one year later), but the plot’s an entertaining series of twists and double-crossings. The #11 film of 1954.

Bunny Lake Is Missing – A twisted little puzzle film from director Otto Preminger about a woman (Carol Lynley) who loses her daughter on her first day of preschool after moving to London. The detective in charge (played with his usual charm by Laurence Olivier) begins to doubt the existence of the child as all evidence of her existence seems to have disappeared. Keir Dullea plays Lynley’s brother and Noël Coward provides some hilariously perverse comic relief as her flaming BBC radio personality landlord. A fine combination of police procedural and gothic noir, I like this crazy Preminger so much more than the epic Preminger of Exodus and In Harm’s Way. The #6 film of 1965.

Belle Starr: The Bandit Queen – Interesting attempt to make a Gone With The Wind-style epic as a vehicle for Gene Tierney. She plays the title Southern Belle who refuses to give up after the Civil War ends. Caught helping Rebel outlaw Randolph Scott, Union officer Dana Andrews burns her house to the ground. She marries Scott, joins the outlaws and becomes appalled when she learns the bandits are more interested in plunder than restoring the Glory Of Dixie. The plot’s totally ridiculous, and Belle never does anything remotely legendary (as it’s asserted she is in the prologue). The film is interesting though for it’s treatment of race and racism. Either it’s one of the most profoundly racist films I’ve seen since Birth Of A Nation, or it’s a subversive act exposing the racist stereotypes of Hollywood films. All the caricatures are there, there’s even a character called “Mammie”. In one scene after the war ends, there are carpet baggers giving speeches to freed slaves while carrying bags made out of carpet while Belle and her brother look on in horror. During an uncomfortable dinner scene, Belle’s brother (an honorable Southern soldier who accepts the surrender) attempts to break the tension by telling a joke that starts “So there was this old darkie. . .” whereupon he’s interrupted for some plot-related dialogue. The scene concludes with him returning to his joke, saying the line again with the shot fading to black on the slur. Later on, after he’s mistakenly shot by one of Scott’s men, his dying words are the third repetition of this line, cut off by his death. Either the director, Irving Cummings (who I’ve never heard of) is making explicit these characters’ racism, or he’s blatantly indulging in it himself. Besides all of this, the film is terrible. Tierney’s acting is laughably bad and in the final climactic sequence all sense of continuity is thrown out the window as Belle rides in one direction and Scott in the other. In one shot, Belle’s in nighttime, followed by a daytime shot of Scott, the Belle in daytime, Scott in night, Scott in day, Belle in night, etc. I hope it’s intentionally hilarious. The #16 film of 1941.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall – My favorite Apatow-related movie, an emotionally honest comedy about a guy trying to get over a breakup while sharing a hotel resort with the woman who dumped him. Jason Segal gives a fine performance as the broken-hearted composer and wanna-be puppeteer, without any of the unrealistic flamboyance of Seth Rogan or Steve Carrell. That kind of restraint is the dominant mode of this film, more reminiscent of Peyton Reed’s melancholy The Break-Up than the zaniness of previous Apatow productions. It’s also the only one of those films that doesn’t feel like it was 15 minutes too long. Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis make fine, adorable leads, Paul Rudd is reasonably funny as a stoned surfing instructor and Jonah Hill is occasionally annoying as a waiter infatuated with Bell’s charmingly vapid rock star boyfriend. The best film I’ve seen from 2008 thus far.

Recount – Dramatization of the events around the 2000 Presidential election in Florida manages to be just as traumatic as it was watching it all unfurl in realtime eight years ago. An all-star cast gives some very fine performances, especially Ed Begley, Jr and Tom Wilkenson, but also Laura Dern, Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary. Directed by Jay Roach, who did the Austin Powers movies and written by Danny Strong, who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who both manage to bring a touch of comedy to such a horrific bit of history. I would have liked more emphasis on the awful Supreme Court decision that concluded the election, as the account of David Souter’s reaction to it reported in Jeffrey Toobin’s great book The Nine is very moving. Hell, let’s just have a movie about Souter, he might be the most fascinating person in American politics that no one knows anything about.

No, I haven’t seen any more Ozu recently, but instead it’s summer in movie theatre-land as blockbuster season has begun. For the next several weeks, I’ll be watching a bunch of film’s hoping at least a couple of them end up ranked higher than 25th on my eventual Movies Of The Year: 2008 list.

Here’s some of what I’ve seen over the last couple of weeks:

My Blueberry Nights – An egregious victim of critical groupthink, as apparently every critic at Cannes last year decided Wong Kar-wai was no longer “cool” and took this opportunity to whine about the flaws of this film as if they aren’t as prevalent or more in every one of his earlier films. There’s even a nice tinge of racism to the criticism, with repeated references to the “fortune cookie” nature of Wong’s dialogue. They of course, conveniently overlook that this film’s strengths are, again, the same as with Wong’s earlier work: the breathless, dreamlike romanticism of the images first and foremost. The film can be seen as an exploration of what Faye Wong’s character in Chungking Express might have been up to in the year between standing up Tony Leung at the California Restaurant and her return as a flight attendant. Norah Jones, bummed over a bad breakup, takes some time before committing to Perfect Guy Jude Law and walks the Earth for awhile, traveling to Memphis and Nevada, where she encounters a trio of film noir characters (David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz in the first place, Natalie Portman in the second). Of the reviews I’ve seen, only Michael Wilmington’s at moviecitynews.com makes any connection to noir with this film, which is odd, considering Wong’s co-writer is the crime novelist Lawrence Block. Anyway, by witnessing each of these characters noir adventures, Jones gets over her troubles and makes her way back to Law, a nifty analogue of the healing power of movies if ever there was. The actors are all just fine, though only Strathairn and Portman are close to great (Portman’s work here is her most interesting in at least a decade). Chan Marshall (Cat Power) is also terrific in her single scene. The movie’s actually a bit like the Cat Power and Norah Jones songs that dominate the soundtrack: moody, romantic and maybe a little slight. For an antidote to the poor and negative criticism of the film, check out Matt Zoeller Seitz’s review at The House Next Door. The #6 film of 2007.

Monte Carlo – Part of the Criterion Eclipse boxset of Ernst Lubitsch musicals I’ve been slowly working my way through. Jeanette MacDonald stars as a countess on the run from a rich dud of a fiancé who ends up in the ritzy gambling mecca where she’s pursued by a count disguised as her hairdresser. Some decent, if not totally memorable songs and some fun pre-Code wordplay makes for an enjoyable experience. These musicals are still more interesting historically than as movies, halfway through the box. The #6 film of 1930.

I Shot Jesse James – Samuel Fuller’s first film is a solid, but unexceptional debut. It lacks the essential wild nuttiness of his best work and ascribes a conventional romantic motivation for Robert Ford’s betrayal of his friend that leaves no room for the mysteries at the core of last year’s The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (#6, 2007). Really, it’s hard to think of two films that take such opposite approaches to the same subject matter. I preferred the new version.

Talk Of The Town – Cary Grant stars as a factory whistleblower framed for arson who escapes from prison and hides in the attic of the house Jean Arthur’s renting to a stuffy law professor, played by Ronald Coleman. Not exactly screwball, it’s occasionally funny, but is too long and at times even a little preachy. Coleman actually manages to give a better performance than Grant or Arthur. Not one of my favorite George Cukor films, but not bad at all. The #11 film of 1942.

3:10 To Yuma – A fine attempt at a Western that goes horribly, horribly wrong in the last 30 minutes. Christian Bale is very good as a disabled Civil War vet struggling to make it as a farmer who gets caught up in the capture of Russell Crowe’s famous outlaw. Crowe, however, seems to be coasting, and Gretchen Mol, as Bale’s wife, isn’t in the film nearly enough. The ending is appallingly stupid and undoes almost everything good about the preceding hour and a half. The #33 film of 2007.

Iron Man – Better than any of the X-Men films or Spider-Man sequels, Jon Favreau’s adaptation of the Marvel comic is, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of fun. Robert Downey Jr gives the best lead performance in a superhero movie in a long time, if not ever. Gwynneth Paltrow sparkles more than she has in years and jeff bridges seems to be enjoying the taste of the scenery. The final action sequence, however, is lackluster. Whatever its faults, at least Michael Bay’s Transformers had the guts to film CGI action in daylight.

Casino Royale – This latest reinvention of the James Bonds series is really quite good. I loved the early action sequences (especially the first, parkour, sequence) and thought Daniel Craig was terrific. The last half hour or so was pretty bad, from the terrible dialogue between Craig and Eva Green to the final action sequence which was over the top and poorly cut and shot. Probably better than any of the Bourne movies, though, and certainly a return to form for the Bond series after the unfortunate Pierce Brosnan years. The #26 film of 2006.

The Importance OF Being Earnest – The Michael Redgrave version of Oscar Wilde’s play, directed by Anthony Asquith. Very much a filmed play, but it’s a great play and the actors are great with it. A little confused by the ending though: aren’t they still short an “Ernest”? the Technicolor, at least on the print TCM ran, is pretty ghastly. The #10 film of 1952.

Our Man In Havana – Tonally, a weird mix between The Third Man (Carol Reed and Graham Greene) and the 50s Ealing comedies (Alec Guinness). I like both aspects, and the mixture is unique even if the movie never really comes together, or even makes any kind of emotional sense. Burl Ives and Noel Coward are really great in supporting roles, but Maureen O’Hara is kind of wasted, her character never really works. Would make a great double feature with I Am Cuba, or maybe The Quiet American. The #11 film of 1959.

As I was updating The Big List just now, I got to wondering what were the best movie years of all-time. In putting these lists together, of course, the big ones jump out (1939 being the most famous), but I’ve never gotten around to actually ranking the individual years. So I might as well do that now. I’ll rank the years by decade, and when I’ve finished, come up with a Top 10 Years Of All-Time list.

The rankings are determined by considering both a year’s depth (the sheer volume of good movies) and height (the greatness the movies). As always, these are limited by the films I’ve seen from each year. We’ll start in the middle, with the 1950s.

10. 1951 – The weakest of a truly great decade for film, 1951 is topped by only two movies I consider truly great (Jean Renoir’s The River and Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet), the weakest peak of any year this decade, though it does feature some solid depth, including a few films I know other people like more than I do (Dairy Of A Country Pirest, Ace In The Hole and Strangers On A Train). Other highlights include The Thing From Another World, Flying Leathernecks, An American In Paris, Alice In Wonderland and Tales Of Hoffman. Best: The River. Most Underrated: The Steel Helmet. Most Overrated: The African Queen.

9. 1956 – Four great films from this year, led by John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers, one of my favorite films, along with Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring, Douglas Sirk’s Written On the Wind and Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men From Now. It’s a shallow year though, with only a few more films I’d call really good. Best: The Searchers. Most Underrated: Early Spring. Most Overrated: Giant?

8. 1950 – A good peak but this year is sorely lacking in depth. Rashomon and All About Eve are masterpieces, and Harvey, Stromboli, Winchester ’73 and In A Lonely Place are very god as well. After that are a few good but flawed films. With only 14 Movies I’ve Seen, this is my least watched year of the decade. Best: Rashomon. Most Underrated: Winchester ’73. Most Overrated: DOA.

7. 1958 – Like 1956, this year is lead by a phenomenal top four: Touch Of Evil, Vertigo, Mon Oncle and Ivan the Terrible, Part 2. But unlike that year, there’s a number of very good films backing up that great peak: The Tarnished Angels, The Hidden Fortress, Ashes And Diamonds, Some Came Running, A Night To Remember and Equinox Flower. Best: Touch Of Evil. Most Underrated: The Tarnished Angels. Most Overrated: Gigi.

6. 1955 – The most difficult year to rank, as there isn’t a single film I’d call a masterpiece, but an impressive depth of very good films. Headlined by Kiss Me Deadly, Ordet, Mr. Arkadin, All That Heaven Allows and Lola Montes, there are at least 17 films from this year I really liked (Street Of Shame, Rebel Without A Cause, Bad Day At Black Rock, The Big Combo, Smile’s Of A Summer Night, The Seven-Year Itch, It’s Always Fair Weather, etc etc) leaving out at least one wherein I’m of the minority opinion that it’s not all that good (Guys And Dolls). Best: Kiss Me Deadly. Most Underrated: Mr. Arkadin. Most Overrated: Guys And Dolls.

5. 1952 – A much better version of 1951, with two masterpieces at the top followed by a decent amount of very good films filling out spots 3-15, and even some films I may be underrating below that. Topped by one of my (and everyone’s) favorites in Singin’ In The Rain, and the film that even critics who don’t like Kurosawa concede is great, Ikiru. Several other very good films, including The Quiet Man, Limelight, Othello, Bend Of the River, On Dangerous Ground, The Life Of Oharu, The Big Sky, and Europa ’51 follow. Best: Singin’ In The Rain. Most Underrated: Limelight. Most Overrated: High Noon.

4. 1959 – The decade went out with a bang with 6 masterpieces: Hitchock’s North By Northwest, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, Hawks’s Rio Bravo, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Preminger’s Anatomy Of A Murder. A few other great films as well, with Ozu’s Floating Weeds and Good Morning, Bresson’s Pickpocket Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Sirk’s Imitation Of Life, which I think is a bit overrated. Unfortunately for ’59 partisans, the year just doesn’t have the depth past the top 10 that the top three years do. Best: North By Northwest. Most Underrated: Sleeping Beauty. Most Overrated: Ben-Hur.

3. 1953 – Four great non-American films headline this year, with arguably the best films by Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu), Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Max Ophuls (Madame de . . .) and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday. There’s plenty of good American films as well: Samuel Fullers Pickup On South Street, John Ford’s Mogambo and films by Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Vincente Minnelli, Howard Hawks and Ida Lupino. 1953 also features what is possibly the scariest, most disturbing film of the 50s, if not of all-time: Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda. Best: Ugetsu. Most Underrated: The Band Wagon. Most Overrated: Shane.

2. 1954 – 1954 has the highest peak value of the decade with two of my favorite films: my #1 film, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and my current favorite Alfred Hitchcock film (the fifth film to hold that honor over the last 15 years) Rear Window. Not far behind are another great Mizoguchi film (Sansho The Bailiff), Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, Federico Fellini’s La Strada, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder, Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, Anthony Mann’s The Far Country and William Wellman’s Track Of The Cat. there’s even some decent if unspectacular musicals: Brigadoon, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and A Star Is Born. Best: Seven Samurai. Most Underrated: The Barefoot Contessa. Most Overrated: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto.

1. 1957 – The best year of the decade features the two most popular Ingmar Bergman films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries), the second best Fellini film (Nights Of Cabiria), classic films from Kurosawa (Throne Of Blood), Stanley Kubrick (Paths Of Glory), Stanley Donen (Funny Face), Alexander Mackendrick (The Sweet Smell Of Success) and Leo McCarey (An Affair To Remember). Lesser known, but nonethless amazing films from foreign directors Mikhail Kalatozov (Cranes Are Flying) and Ozu (Tokyo Twilight). There’s a pair of films from Budd Boetticher, and a pair from Billy Wilder and some fine movies by John Ford, Samuel Fuller, David Lean, Sidney Lumet, and Vincent Minnelli. All in all, I count 22 films I consider worth seeing, more than any other year, with at least a half dozen masterpieces. Best: Throne Of Blood. Most Underrated: Tokyo Twilight. Most Overrated: Bridge On The River Kwai.

Still catching up after the vacation (pictured above is the actual faraway beach), I’m happy to have learned that Jonathan Rosenbaum finally got his new website online containing a vast archive of what appears to be everything he wrote for the Chicago Reader for the last 20 years, along with a bunch of other writings. I plan to spend quite a bit of time wandering around there, and recommend the same to anyone with any kind of interest in film.

On Some Faraway Beach – Brian Eno

Given the chance
I’ll die like a baby
On some faraway beach
When the season’s over

Unlikely I’ll be remembered
As the tide brushes sand in my eyes
I’ll drift away

Cast up on a plateau
With only one memory
A silver sail on a boat
Oh lie low lie low, li-li-li-li li-li-lo