Favorite movies by year and alphabet
Making a list of all-time favorite movies is a difficult task. There are very few movies I've seen more than once, and none recently. It's hard to recall the state of mind before, during, and after watching each movie. Furthermore, it's much easier to do pairwise comparisons than actual rankings, which require more comparisons and often reveal the inconsistency of the ordering. On the other hand, a loose list of "very good" movies is so unstructured as to be meaningless. Therefore, in an attempt to give the question just enough structure to be interesting, I've tried to compile lists of my favorite movies alphabetically and by year. The alphabetical list is partly inspired by Megan's Movie Alphabet.
There are some oddities, here, of course. On the list organized by year, I stopped at 1994, because, before that, the list becomes mostly a list of individual movies I've seen rather than a true competition. I have seen no movies from 2000 which I consider to be good enough to put on the list, although there are a couple supposedly excellent movies from that year which I have yet to see.
Unsurprisingly, the alphabetical list is much more uneven that the yearly list. By count, movies are well distributed across years, and so excellent movies are relatively evenly distributed (although 2000 has none from my list and 2008 seems to have been unusually good). On the other hand, the first letters of movies titles are definitely not well distributed, so some letters (A and S, in particular) are a bloodbath of excellent movies while I had to stretch the criteria for a couple of other letters and at the end of the alphabet.
For the pedantic: I've chosen to count Much Ado About Nothing as a 2013 film, as that's when it had it's first major release and when I saw it, even though Wikipedia et al. list it as a 2012 film.
By year:
2013ytd: Much Ado About Nothing
2012: Moonrise Kingdom
2011: The Descendants
2010: Exit Through the Gift Shop
2009: Up in the Air
2008: Slumdog Millionaire
2007: Juno
2006: Little Miss Sunshine
2005: Serenity
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2003: Lost in Translation
2002: About a Boy
2001: Amelie
2000:
1999: American Beauty
1998: Pleasantville
1997: Gattata
1996: Independence Day
1995: Before Sunrise
1994: The Shawshank Redemption
By Initial:
A: Amelie (2001)
B: Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight (1995/2004/2013)
C: Casablanca (1942)
D: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
E: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
F: The Fifth Element (1997)
G: Gravity (2013)
H: Hot Fuzz (2007)
I: Independence Day (1996)
J: Juno (2007)
K: King King (2005)
L: Lost in Translation (2003)
M: Much Ado About Nothing (2013)
N: Notorious (1946)
O: Office Space (1999)
P: Pleasantville (1998)
Q: The Queen of Versailles (2012)
R: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
S: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
T: To Catch a Thief (1955)
U: Up in the Air (2009)
V: Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)
W: WALL-E (2008)
X: X-Men (2000)
Y: You Only Live Twice (1967)
Z: Zoolander (2001)
There are some oddities, here, of course. On the list organized by year, I stopped at 1994, because, before that, the list becomes mostly a list of individual movies I've seen rather than a true competition. I have seen no movies from 2000 which I consider to be good enough to put on the list, although there are a couple supposedly excellent movies from that year which I have yet to see.
Unsurprisingly, the alphabetical list is much more uneven that the yearly list. By count, movies are well distributed across years, and so excellent movies are relatively evenly distributed (although 2000 has none from my list and 2008 seems to have been unusually good). On the other hand, the first letters of movies titles are definitely not well distributed, so some letters (A and S, in particular) are a bloodbath of excellent movies while I had to stretch the criteria for a couple of other letters and at the end of the alphabet.
For the pedantic: I've chosen to count Much Ado About Nothing as a 2013 film, as that's when it had it's first major release and when I saw it, even though Wikipedia et al. list it as a 2012 film.
By year:
2013ytd: Much Ado About Nothing
2012: Moonrise Kingdom
2011: The Descendants
2010: Exit Through the Gift Shop
2009: Up in the Air
2008: Slumdog Millionaire
2007: Juno
2006: Little Miss Sunshine
2005: Serenity
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2003: Lost in Translation
2002: About a Boy
2001: Amelie
2000:
1999: American Beauty
1998: Pleasantville
1997: Gattata
1996: Independence Day
1995: Before Sunrise
1994: The Shawshank Redemption
By Initial:
A: Amelie (2001)
B: Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight (1995/2004/2013)
C: Casablanca (1942)
D: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
E: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
F: The Fifth Element (1997)
G: Gravity (2013)
H: Hot Fuzz (2007)
I: Independence Day (1996)
J: Juno (2007)
K: King King (2005)
L: Lost in Translation (2003)
M: Much Ado About Nothing (2013)
N: Notorious (1946)
O: Office Space (1999)
P: Pleasantville (1998)
Q: The Queen of Versailles (2012)
R: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
S: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
T: To Catch a Thief (1955)
U: Up in the Air (2009)
V: Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)
W: WALL-E (2008)
X: X-Men (2000)
Y: You Only Live Twice (1967)
Z: Zoolander (2001)