Tag: best of
-
Revisiting my top films of 2008
Ten years ago I ranked my top 10 films of 2008. (I also started filmlogging.) Since last year’s revisit of my top films of 2007 was so fun, I thought I’d make this an annual tradition. Here’s my original 2008 list: Lots of interesting choices here. Kinda shocked Happy-Go-Lucky was so high and that Milk…
-
Top 5 films of 2018 so far
The Death of Stalin. I’m a sucker for dark and irreverent political satires. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? This documentary about Fred Rogers didn’t make me cry, but it did make me sad about the Kids These Days who don’t know of him and his anti-television TV show. First Reformed. I’m also a sucker for…
-
Favorite Books of 2017
Goodreads tells me I read one less book this year than last. Though always tempted to read ever more and more, I’ve become less concerned about hitting arbitrary reading quotas, so I’m able to better enjoy the books I do read. Here are the 2017 books I enjoyed the most, with links to reviews I…
-
#SheToo: Favorite Films of 2017
The overarching theme of the year in film, to me, was Wonder Women. Not only was the Wonder Woman film good, but in a year when badly behaving men dominated the news, I’m grateful there were so many richly drawn female protagonists who ran the gamut of strong, vulnerable, funny, and complicated, and who made…
-
Top films of 2007: will ‘There Will Be Blood’ be there?
Filmspotting’s recent Sacred Cow review of There Will Be Blood inspired me to rewatch it for the first time since seeing it in theaters, and go back and look at my top films of 2007. They were: 1) The Lives of Others (technically 2006, but released in the U.S. in 2007) 2) Once 3) Waitress 4)…
-
Favorite Films of 2016
According to my records I watched 83 films in 2016, 33 of which came out this year. As is the case with my reading, I’m in a “watch as much as I can” zone because I love movies and there’s so much great stuff and there are too many movies and I’ll never have this…
-
Favorite Books of 2016
According to my records I read more than ever in 2016. Partially this was due to starting as a book reviewer for two library trade journals, thus increasing the volume of pages coming my way. But I also made more time overall for reading, because I love it and I work at a library and…
-
Favorite Films, Books & Albums of 2015
Resurrecting my 2013 choice to include all my best-ofs into one omnilist, here are 15 films, books, and albums I loved from 2015. Film 1. BrooklynThere’s a scene about five minutes into Brooklyn that setup the whole film for me. Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), soon bound for a new life in 1950s America, watches as her…
-
Favorite Books of 2014
My favorite books from 2014 are all nonfiction, a thoroughly unsurprising result of it being way easier for me to get through a 700-page historical tome than a 200-page novel. Sorry, novels: this year it was especially true that the truth is stranger and more fascinating than fiction. Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us…
-
Favorite Films of 2014
Because synchronicity has been on my mind recently, I wondered while considering my favorite films of 2014 if any of them were thematically aligned, explicitly or otherwise. Turns out they are. The ten-ish films that lodged themselves into my brain this year naturally arranged themselves into pairs or groups—some odd ones, to be sure, but nevertheless interesting. I…
# best of, Boyhood, Calvary, film, Ida, Interstellar, Life Itself, lists, Locke, movies, Noah, review, Snowpiercer, The LEGO Movie, They Came Together, Whiplash -
2013 In Film: The Best Of The Rest
I tried something different with my recent 2013 Omnilist, naming 13(ish) of my favorite films, books, TV shows, and albums from the last year instead of a traditional top-10 list for each medium. But in that process I had to cut out a lot of films from the final list I otherwise would have loved…
-
13 In ’13: A Pop Culture Omnilist
Standard operating procedure for making year-end culture lists says to rank your ten favorite films/albums/books, but I’ve recently soured against this convention. Choosing a pre-determined number of “the best” among many great works, as all award shows do, is great entertainment but entirely arbitrary. So this time around, I decided to institute my own arbitrary…
# 12 Years A Slave, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Before Midnight, best of, books, Chris Hadfield, film, Francis Spufford, Gravity, Haim, Her, House of Cards, Like Someone in Love, lists, Lucius, movies, music, Neil Gaiman, review, Rod Dreher, Short Term 12, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, This Is Martin Bonner -
Favorite Music of 2012
To me, music is blood. It runs through me, providing life and warmth in even the coldest and loneliest times. Here are a few albums from the last year, with a song from each, that gave me life and color in 2012. Lord Huron, Lonesome Dreams (Song: “Ends of the Earth”) First Aid Kit, Lion’s Roar (Song: “Emmylou”) Good…
-
Favorite Films of 2012
With a fortnight now between us and 2012, I’ve had time to consider which films I liked in what I think was overall a weaker year for films than previous ones. Keeping in mind I’ve yet to see a few key films, here (in alphabetical order) are seven movies from last year that grabbed hold of…
-
Favorite Films of 2011
I saw a number of fine films in 2011. Here, I talk about the great ones and what I thank them for. Beginners, for Christopher Plummer’s exuberance as a recently-out elderly gay man; for Ewan McGregor’s hopeful melancholia as his perpetual bachelor son, and for this exchange between them: “HAL: Well, let’s say that since…
-
My Favorite Albums of 2011
Happy List-Making Month everybody! It’s my favorite of the year. To celebrate, I present my list of albums that I love from 2011. There was a lot of good stuff, but these top few were the ones that kept me coming back. The Book of Mormon by Trey Parker, Matt Stone & Bobby Lopez Admittedly, I…
-
Best Films of 2010
Toy Story 3How great was the epic Western opening sequence? (It was actually a recreation of the original film’s opener.) I couldn’t stop smiling throughout this movie. It does a remarkable job of marrying old characters with new challenges. But the reason this is the best of the year is its ending. Andy decides to…
-
Best Films of the 2000s
The Lives of Others (2006) – A German film about a surveillance expert who spies on a playwright in Communist Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Lives of Others won the Best Foreign film at the Oscars and for good reason. Unbearably suspenseful and surprisingly moving, The Lives of Others shows that…