2014 was a very strong year for movies. In particular, my top 8 films were all terrific and 8 through 3 could have been listed in pretty much any order. Not enough strong lead acting opportunities for women, though I did not get a chance to see Still Alice or Two Days, One Night yet ( Read more... )

2013 was another strong year for movies. Of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture I saw, all of them are in my top 9. Her was easily my favourite movie of the year though; an amazingly profound work from Spike Jonze, particularly impressive in that it was the first time he directed from his own screenplay ( Read more... )

2012 was an excellent year for movies, and unlike last year I am in agreement with quite a few of the Oscar nominations. I would like to have seen either Moonrise Kingdom or The Master as the 10th Best Picture nominee, but otherwise they did a pretty good job. And just as in 2008, I go with Kathryn Bigelow over Quentin Tarantino ( Read more... )

All in all, 2011 was a good year for movies but a horrible year for Oscar nominations. I have only seen 4 of the Best Picture candidates and am not terribly interested in seeing any of the others. Also note that none of my top picks for the acting categories were nominated; in particular Michael Fassbender and Albert Brooks were completely and ( Read more... )

2010 was an excellent year for movies, the best since 2007. I only saw 25 in all but of those 9 were nominated for Best Picture and I would have been happy with any of my top 15 being in my top 10. I was disappointed that The King's Speech beat out The Social Network at the Oscars but at least it was still a very good film. On the other hand, ( Read more... )

2009 was a pretty good year for movies but for various reasons I only saw about a third of the total I normally see. So I have limited my list to a top 10 instead of top 20 to avoid including some mediocre movies. I did see 8 out the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, missing only The Blind Side and Avatar. Yes, I am the only ( Read more... )

2008 was not a great year for movies, and not even a particularly good one, though it would be hard to live up to the amazing films of 2007. This was in fact the easiest year in recent memory for me to come up with my lists, once I saw enough year-end movies to actually find enough good female performances for the lead category. And hey, for once ( Read more... )

2007 was a great year for movies, the best this decade for sure, and thus it was even harder than usual to narrow down to the top 20 films. Lots of great performances too although despite the large number of great films there were actually fewer strong female roles than usual ( Read more... )

I saw 4 excellent movies this past weekend, which inspired me to post reviews of all the movies I have seen recently.

( Rendition )

8 brief reviews, in order from best to worst.

( Michael Clayton )