Ten Best Films

Ten Best Films of 2025

2025-12-31T15:03:00.000-08:00

1. Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, Georgia / Germany)

With What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? already rating as one of the biggest critical breakthroughs—and best films—of this current decade, Koberidze follows it up with an even more experimental and stylistically audacious portrait of his Caucasus homeland. Rendered through the obsolete Ericsson Mobile technology of the director's 2017 debut, Let the Summer Never Come Again, the richly Kiarostamian Dry Leaf introduces a painterly world of sometimes barely legible low-resolution spaces, of disused football pitches and depopulated Soviet small towns, that are marked by the ghosts of the past—and literally invisible characters in the present. At a moment of deep distrust of photo-reality, Dry Leaf creates a new, abstracted form of the index that renews our contact with the real, even if its a reality that is disappearing.

2. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, Iran / France / Luxembourg / United States)

One of the most courageous works of cinema ever produced (for which the director has already received another prison sentence), Panahi shows us sides of Iranian life—from the trauma suffered by the nation's political prisoners to women not wearing hijabs—that have been explicitly or implicitly forbidden filmmakers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Though it is more straightforward in its storytelling than many of his recent films, this isn't to suggest that It Was Just an Accident lacks formal achievement. Indeed, Panahi masterfully deploys off-screen space and establishes a thematic emphasis on knowing through hearing, a very cinematic idea ultimately, which will find its fullest expression in the film's haunting final shot.

3. Magellan (Lav Diaz, Philippines / Spain / Portugal / France / Taiwan)

Charting Ferdinand Magellan's near complete path around the globe from an especially vivid and singular rendering of first contact between European explorers and the indigenous people of Malacca to his anticlimactic slaying in the Philippines after crossing the Pacific a decade later, Diaz's latest slow cinema opus extends his national historical project, claiming the eponymous heroes' death as an anti-colonial cultural inheritance. Despite a truncated 160-minute running time for the legendarily long-form Diaz, Magellan evokes expansive duration like only the Filipino master can, reimagining an experience of a life (fruitlessly) lived years away from home.

4. Yes (Nadav Lapid, Israel / France / Cyprus / Germany)

Israel's most critically lauded contemporary filmmaker returns with a wildly free, impressionistic, and characteristically scathing look at life in his literally embattled homeland, as seen through a pair of libertine lovers who (as the title partially suggests) always say yes. A pulsating, absurdist portrait of a deeply degenerate people, Yes shifts tones in its second part to consider the psychological impact of October 7th on the Israeli people—a nation whose lived experience, where the choice is between being killed and killing, is no less easy to comprehend than that of Palestinians—before returning to the actual propaganda that this national trauma has yielded.

5. What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Making use of the autobiographically inspired myopic focus of 2023's in water, Hong's 33rd feature, in fewer than three decades, is, like its immediate predecessor By the Stream, a bigger film, suggesting an increased interest in creating discrete works of craft after a historically unparalleled decade of extremely subtle theme-and-variation artistry. The comparatively lyrical What Does That Nature Say to You tells its familiarly Hongian story across a single day, night, and morning, seeing its visiting new poet boyfriend through the shifting perspectives of the film's family of four, before he suddenly loses the good will of his paternal (and fellow artist) hosts.

6. Mirrors No.3 (Christian Petzold, Germany)

Bringing the director's loose elemental trilogy (Undine, Afire) to its graceful conclusion, Mirrors No. 3 is perhaps most remarkable for the persistent winds that whirl through the film's northeastern German setting, and mess houseguest Paula Beer's hair; in this sense, Petzold brings cinema back to its first source of spectacle—to the movement of the natural world on film that was present from the Lumière brothers' first experiments with the moving image. Mirrors No. 3 ultimately exchanges Afire's literary subject for recorded and performed music as Petzold continues to make some of the most finely crafted and emotionally resonant films anywhere.

7. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, Spain / France)

Though there is something somewhat conventional about aspects of Laxe's filmmaking (his shot lengths, camera positions, etc.), his Cannes breakthrough is in another sense the most singular and contemporary cinematic experience of 2025, a shockingly melodramatic and immediate art-house Mad Max that transverses the deserts and mountains of 21st century Morocco. This is truly a film of pure movement, exemplified in the pulsing EDM soundtrack that carries the film's makeshift community from rave to rave, as world war and a global migrant crisis transform Laxe's fictional world into one that doesn't seem so far removed from our own.

8. Kontinental '25 (Radu Jude, Romania / Switzerland / Luxembourg / Brazil / United Kingdom)

Like all films a document on some level of its (exceedingly inexpensive) production, the Godardian Jude uses his frontal cellular setups to take the temperature of Europe circa 2025, exploring the contradictions of modern Romania in particular through a series conversations meant to assuage the bailiff's liberal guilt following the suicide of a homeless man. Kontinental '25 is Lumière to Dracula's Méliès, a more conceptually modest, but ultimately far more successful tour through modern-day Transylvania whose references include Rossellini's Europa '51 and Wenders' Perfect Days, before ending in an unexpectedly artful city symphony.

9. Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / France / Germany / Netherlands / Latvia / Romania / Lithuania)

Absolute in its moral clarity and among the year's most clear-sighted works, Loznitsa's latest portrait of Stalinist Russia efficiently follows a young prosecutor as he miraculously receives news of a Soviet hero's mistreatment in a provincial prison—and pursues justice to its inevitable conclusion, his own final-act reckoning for questioning the Soviet state's actions. A work of spare prison cells and bare stonewalls, crowded country trains and the comforts of first class, blacks and whites and brown wood paneling, Two Prosecutors balances its visual austerity with the labyrinthine interiors and endless queues constructed to break the Soviet people's will.

10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, United States / United Kingdom)

Continuing the director's streak of best work that began with the especially comic First Cow and extended into her art-school-themed Showing Up, the director's anti-heist film latest gets the Arthur Dove theft done quickly as attention soon shifts to passing time, first with the labor of stashing the stolen paintings in a barn loft and then hiding out in dank hotel rooms as news of the titular mastermind's identity splashes across newspapers. Impulse trumps deliberation, and reality expresses itself most of all in Reichardt's tragicomic genre effort, where most of the effort goes into recreating a particular time and texture and moment in American cultural life.

Ten Best Films: 1930-2025

2025-12-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

1930
1. Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
2. Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Soviet Union)

3. That Night's Wife (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
4. Her Man (Tay Garnett, United States)

5. The Dawn Patrol (Howard Hawks, United States)
6. Laughter (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, United States)

7. L'Âge d'or (Luis Buñuel, France)

8. The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, France)
9. Prix de Beauté (Augusto Genina, France)
10. The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany)

1931
1. M (Fritz Lang, Germany)
2. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, United States)
3. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, United States)

4. Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, United States)

5. The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (Heinosuke Gosho, Japan)
6. À nous la liberté (René Clair, France)

7. Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth, United States)
8. La Chienne (Jean Renoir, France)
9. The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, United States)
10. Le Million (René Clair, France)

1932
1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. Scarface (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, France)
4. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, United States)
6. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, United States)
7. The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
8. The Old Dark House (James Whale, United States)
9. Back Street (John M. Stahl, United States)
10. Hot Saturday (William A. Seiter, United States)

1933
1. Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Liebelei (Max Ophüls, Germany / Austria)

3. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, United States)
4. Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, France)

5. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, United States)

6. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (Lewis Milestone, United States)

7. Bombshell (Victor Fleming, United States)

8. Little Toys (Sun Yu, China)

9. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, Germany)

10. Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, United States)

1934
1. La Signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, Italy)

2. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
3. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France)
4. Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

5. Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, United States)
6. Judge Priest (John Ford, United States)

7. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
8. Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, United Kingdom)

9. The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, China)

10. Little Man, What Now? (Frank Borzage, United States)

1935
1. Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, United States)
2. Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
3. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
4. Steamboat 'Round the Bend (John Ford, United States)
5. Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)
6. The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
7. An Inn at Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
8. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, United States)
9. The Wedding Night (King Vidor, United States)
10. Poppy (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

1936

1. By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)

2. Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

3. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, France)

4. A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, France)

5. Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, United States)

6. Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)

7. Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, France)

8. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)

9. Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, United States)
10. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

1937
1. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, United States)
2. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, United States)
3. Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
4. You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, United States)

5. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)

6. The Straits of Love and Hate (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. Stella Dallas (King Vidor, United States)
8. Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
9. Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
10. The Great Garrick (James Whale, United States)

1938
1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, United States)
2. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
3. Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, Germany)
4. You and Me (Fritz Lang, United States)
5. Flowers Have Fallen (Tamizo Ishida, Japan)

6. The Masseurs and a Woman (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
7. La Bête humaine (Jean Renoir, France)

8. Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, United States)

9. Holiday (George Cukor, United States)

10. Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (Mikio Naruse, Japan)

1939

1. The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

2. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France)

3. Stagecoach (John Ford, United States)
4. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Love Affair (Leo McCarey, United States)
6. Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, United States)

7. There's No Tomorrow (Max Ophüls, France)

8. When Tomorrow Comes (John M. Stahl, United States)

9. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)

10. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, United States)

The Ten Best Films of the 1930s (in alphabetical order)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France)
By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, United States)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France)
Scarface (Howard Hawks, United States)
The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
La Signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, Italy)
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

1940
1. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, United States)
4. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
5. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, United States)
7. Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, United States)
8. The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
10. London Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings, United Kingdom)

1941
1. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, United States)
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, United States)
4. Hellzapoppin' (H. C. Potter, United States)
5. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
6. Remorques (Jean Grémillon, France)
7. The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, United States)
8. Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
9. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
10. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)

1942
1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, United States)
2. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, United Kingdom)
3. Aniki Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
4. There Was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, United Kingdom)
8. The Loyal 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
9. To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, United States)

1943
1. Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
5. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, United States)
6. Les Anges du péché (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Air Force (Howard Hawks, United States)
8. Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
9. Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Wild Flower (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)

1944
1. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
4. Laura (Otto Preminger, United States)
5. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)
8. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, United States)
9. At Land (Maya Deren, United States)
10. The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, United States)

1945
1. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, France)
2. They Were Expendible (John Ford, United States)
3. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, United States)
5. The Southerner (Jean Renoir, United States)
6. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, France)
7. I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
8. The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
9. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, United States)
10. The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, United States)

1946
1. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, United States)
2. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
5. Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
8. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France)
9. The Girl I Loved (Keisuke Kinoshita, Japan)
10. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)

1947
1. Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, United States)
2. Antoine and Antoinette (Jacques Becker, France)
3. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
4. The Love of Sumako the Actress (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
5. Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
6. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
7. The Exile (Max Ophüls, United States)
8. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, United States)
9. The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz, United States)
10. Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, Japan)

1948
1. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, United States)
2. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, China)
3. La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
4. Red River (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
6. Fort Apache (John Ford, United States)
7. Children of the Beehive (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
8. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
10. They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, United States)

1949
1. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, United Kingdom)
3. Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, China)
4. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. White Heat (Raoul Walsh, United States)
6. Rendezvous in July (Jacques Becker, France)
7. The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, United States)
8. Mahal (Kamal Amrohi, India)
9. The Third Man (Carol Reed, United Kingdom)
10. Mr. Shosuke Ohara (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)

The Ten Best Films of the 1940s (in alphabetical order)
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, France)
Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, United States)
I van the Terrible, Part I and II (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, United States)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, United States)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, China)

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

1950
1. The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
2. Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, France)
3. Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
4. Wagonmaster (John Ford, United States)
5. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, United States)
6. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, United States)
7. La Ronde (Max Ophüls, France)
8. Born to Be Bad (Nicholas Ray, United States)
9. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. The Gunfighter (Henry King, United States)

1951
1. Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. The River (Jean Renoir, France / India / United States)
3. Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France)
4. Awaara (Raj Kapoor, India)
5. Édouard and Caroline (Jacques Becker, France)
6. The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, United Kingdom)
7. Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, United States)
8. The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, United States)
9. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
10. The Prowler (Joseph Losey, United States)

1952
1. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Limelight (Charles Chaplin, United States)
3. Él (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
4. Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, France)
6. Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, United States)
7. Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, United States)
8. Lightning (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)

1953
1. Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

3. The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, France / Italy)
4. The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, United States)
5. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, France)
6. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, United States)
7. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
8. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, United States)
9. The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, France / Italy)
10. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, United States)

1954
1. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, Italy / France)
4. A Star is Born (George Cukor, United States)
5. Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
6. Chikamatsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, United States)
8. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
10. Track of the Cat (William A. Wellman, United States)

1955
1. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
3. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, India)
4. Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, France / West Germany)
5. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, United States)
6. Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, France / Spain / Switzerland)
7. Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
8. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
9. To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)

10. French Cancan (Jean Renoir, France / Italy)

1956
1. The Searchers (John Ford, United States)
2. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, France)
3. Streets of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
4. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, United States)
5. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, United States)
6. There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, United States)
7. Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, United States)
8. The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank Tashlin, United States)
9. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
10. Undercurrent (Kôzaburô Yoshimura, Japan)

1957
1. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, India)
2. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
3. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
4. Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, United States)
5. A King in New York (Charles Chaplin, United States)
6. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, Italy / France)
7. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, United States)
8. Le Notti bianche (Luchino Visconti, Italy / France)
9. An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, United States)
10. The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, United States)

1958
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
2. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, France / Italy)

4. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
5. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, India)

6. Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, United States)
7. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, United States)

8. Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (Leo McCarey, United States)

9. Madhumati (Bimal Roy, India)

10. Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, United States)

1959
1. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, United States)
2. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France)
3. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Kaagaz Ke Phool (Guru Dutt, India)
5. The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, India)
6. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, France / Japan)

7. Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, United States)
8. Nazarin (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
9. The Sign of Leo (Eric Rohmer, France)
10. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, France)

The Ten Best Films of the 1950s (in alphabetical order)
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, France / Italy)
Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, United States)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
The Searchers (John Ford, United States)

L'Avventura (1960)

1960
1. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy / France)
2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
5. Wild River (Elia Kazan, United States)
6. The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, India)
7. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, United States)
8. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, Italy/France)
9. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, France/Italy/United Kingdom)
10. The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, South Korea)

1961
1. Lola (Jacques Demy, France / Italy)
2. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, Spain / Mexico)
3. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
4. Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy)
5. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France / Italy)
6. Two Daughters (Satyajit Ray, India)
7. The Aimless Bullet (Yoo Hyeon-Mok, South Korea)
8. A Wife Confesses (Yasuzo Masumura, Japan)
9. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy / France)

10. Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol, France / Italy)

1962
1. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy / France)

3. Hatari! (Howard Hawks, United States)

4. Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
5. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, United States)
6. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)

7. The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, France)

8. Alyonka (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)

9. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, France/Italy)

10. La Jetée (Chris Marker, France)

1963
1. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, France / Italy)
2. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Italy / France)
3. Muriel (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
4. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
5. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran)
6. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
7. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
8. The Big City (Satyajit Ray, India)
9. Whistle Stop (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)

10. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, United States)

1964
1. Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
3. The Enchanted Desna (Yuliya Solntseva, Soviet Union)

4. Yearning (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France / West Germany)
6. Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, France / Italy)
7. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
8. Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, Brazil)
9. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy / France)
10. Dry Summer (Metin Erksan, Turkey)

1965
1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France / Italy)
2. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, United States)
3. Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, France)
4. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, France/Senegal)
5. Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, United Kingdom)
6. Guide (Vijay Anand, India)
7. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Paradjanov, Soviet Union)
8. Outer and Inner Space (Andy Warhol, United States)
9. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, Spain / Switzerland)
10. Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, France)

1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France / Sweden)
2. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
3. 7 Women (John Ford, United States)
4. The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, France)
5. Unsere Afrikareise/Our African Journey (Peter Kubelka, Austria)
6. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, United Kingdom / Italy)
7. The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura, Japan)
8. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, Italy / Spain)
9. Daisies (Vera Chytilová, Czechoslovakia)
10. Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)

1967
1. Playtime (Jacques Tati, France)
2. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, France)
3. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary / Soviet Union)
5. Wavelength (Michael Snow, Canada)
6. Mouchette (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
8. Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, France / Italy)
9. La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, France)
10. Jewel Thief (Vijay Anand, India)

1968
1. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, Italy / United States)

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
3. Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
4. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov, Soviet Union)
5. Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba)
6. The Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, West Germany / Italy)
7. High School (Frederick Wiseman, United States)
8. Faces (John Cassavetes, United States)
9. Carry On... Up the Khyber (Gerald Thomas, United Kingdom)
10. Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, United Kingdom)

1969
1. My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Boy (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. L'Amour fou (Jacques Rivette, France)
4. The Unfaithful Wife (Claude Chabrol, France / Italy)

5. Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)

6. Antonio das Mortes (Glauber Rocha, Brazil / France / West Germany)
7. Kes (Ken Loach, United Kingdom)
8. The Confrontation (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary)

9. The Structure of Crystal (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland)
10. Le grand amour (Pierre Étaix, France)

The Ten Best Films of the 1960s (in alphabetical order)
Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France / Sweden)
An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy / France)
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, France)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, France)

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

1970
1. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Tristana (Luis Buñuel, Spain / France / Italy)
3. The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, France / Italy)
4. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy / France / West Germany)

5. Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, India)

6. Le Cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, France / Italy)

7. There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, Soviet Union)

8. Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, United States)

9. Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, France / Italy)

10. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, United Kingdom)

1971

1. Out 1: Noli me Tangere (Jacques Rivette, France)
2. La Région centrale (Michael Snow, Canada)
3. Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, France)

4. (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, United States)
5. The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
6. The House in the Woods (Maurice Pialat, France)
7. Love (Károly Makk, Hungary)

8. A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Taiwan)
9. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, United States)

10. A New Leaf (Elaine May, United States)

1972
1. Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, India)
2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, France/ Italy/ Spain)
3. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
4. Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini, Italy / France)

5. Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
6. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
7. Ulzana's Raid (Robert Aldrich, United States)
8. Travels with My Aunt (George Cukor, United States)
9. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, West Germany / Peru / Mexico)
10. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders, West Germany / Austria)

1973
1. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain)
2. Badlands (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. The Age of Cosimo de Medici (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, France)
5. Reed: Insurgent Mexico (Paul Leduc, Mexico)
6. A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak, India / Bangladesh)
7. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal)
8. Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Austria / France / West Germany / Italy)

9. Breezy (Clint Eastwood, United States)

10. Duvidha (Mani Kaul, India)

1974

1. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France)

2. Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson, France)

3. Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy / France)

4. F for Fake (Orson Welles, France / Iran / West Germany)

5. Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, West Germany)

6. Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)

7. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, United States)

8. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, West Germany)

9. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)

10. The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)

1975
1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France)
2. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
3. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
4. The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
5. The Messiah (Roberto Rossellini, Italy / France)
6. Xala (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal)
7. Benilde, or the Virgin Mother (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
8. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, France / Italy / United States / Spain)
9. Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka, Philippines)

10. India Song (Marguerite Duras, France)

1976
1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, United States)
2. Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, West Germany)
3. Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, United States)
5. The Shootist (Don Siegel, United States)
6. The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, West Germany / France)
7. In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, Japan / France)
8. Duelle (Jacques Rivette, France)
9. Insiang (Lino Brocka, Philippines)
10. Nuts in May (Mike Leigh, United Kingdom)

1977
1. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, France / Spain)
2. Providence (Alain Resnais, France / Switzerland)
3. The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, France)

4. Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)

5. Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany / France / United Kingdom)

6. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, United States)

7. News from Home (Chantal Akerman, France / Belgium / West Germany)

8. The Gauntlet (Clint Eastwood, United States)
9. Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, India)

10. Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal)

1978
1. Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. Perceval (Eric Rohmer, France / Italy / West Germany)
4. Fedora (Billy Wilder, France / West Germany)
5. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France / West Germany)
6. Violette (Claude Chabrol, France / Canada)
7. The Driver (Walter Hill, United States)
8. Halloween (John Carpenter, United States)
9. Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, France)
10. Alexandria... Why? (Youssef Chahine, Egypt / Algeria)

1979
1. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
2. Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, Soviet Union)
3. "10" (Blake Edwards, United States)
4. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
5. The Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (Raoul Ruiz, France)
6. L'enfant secret (Philippe Garrel, France)
7. From the Clouds to the Resistance (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy / West Germany / United Kingdom / France)
8. Eureka (Ernie Gehr, United States)
9. West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (Med Hondo, France / Algeria / Mauritania)
10. Raining in the Mountain (King Hu, Taiwan / Hong Kong)

The Ten Best Films of the 1970s (in alphabetical order)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France)
Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, France)
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, United States)
Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France)
Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, India)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)

The Sacrifice (1986)

1980
1. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
2. Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood, United States)
3. Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, United States)
4. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
5. Loulou (Maurice Pialat, France)
6. Mon oncle d'Amérique (Alain Resnais, France)
7. Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Austria/West Germany/Switzerland)

8. Bona (Lino Brocka, Philippines)

9. Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis, United States)

10. Gregory's Girl (Bill Forsyth, United Kingdom)

1981
1. Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
2. The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, France)
3. Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
4. Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, United States)
5. Mandala (Im Kwon-taek, South Korea)
6. Man of Iron (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
7. Lola (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
8. Orderly or Disorderly (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
9. Thief (Michael Mann, United States)
10. The Prodigal Son (Sammo Hung, Hong Kong)

1982
1. Une chambre en ville (Jacques Demy, Italy / France)
2. Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, France / Switzerland)
3. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden / France / West Germany)
4. Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France / Netherlands / Canada)

5. A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, France)

6. Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, France)
7. Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia)
8. Danton (Andrzej Wajda, France / Poland / West Germany)

9. Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski, United Kingdom / West Germany)

10. Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, United States)

1983
1. L'Argent (Robert Bresson, France)
2. Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, France)
3. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France)
4. À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, France)
5. Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, France)
6. Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, United States)

7. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy / France / Soviet Union)
8. El Sur (Victor Erice, Spain / France)

9. Razia Sultan (Kamal Amrohi and G. P. Pawar, India)
10. My Brother's Wedding (Charles Burnett, United States)

1984
1. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, United States)
2. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, United States)
3. A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
4. Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, China)
5. Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer, France)
6. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, Italy / United States)
7. My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei German, Soviet Union)
8. Long Arm of the Law (Johnny Mak, Hong Kong)
9. A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier, France)
10. Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, United States)

1985
1. Taipei Story (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
2. The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
3. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France)
4. The Satin Slipper (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
5. Lost in America (Albert Brooks, United States)
6. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, United States / Japan)
7. No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
8. Vagabond (Agnès Varda, France)
9. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, United States)
10. Typhoon Club (Shinji Sômai, Japan)

1986
1. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden / United Kingdom / France)
3. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, United States)
4. Mélo (Alain Resnais, France)
5. Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
6. Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)
7. The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China)
8. Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, United States / West Germany)
9. Terrorizers (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
10. Mon cas (Manoel de Oliveira, France / Portugal)

1987
1. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Where is the Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
3. Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, Mali / Burkina Faso / France / West Germany)
4. Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
5. The Dead (John Huston, United Kingdom / Ireland / United States)
6. King of the Children (Chen Kaige, China)
7. Hope and Glory (John Boorman, United Kingdom)
8. Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, France)
9. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, West Germany / France)
10. Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, United States)

1988
1. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
2. My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
3. Damnation (Béla Tarr, Hungary)
4. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, Canada / United States)
5. Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece /
France / Italy)
6. Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland)
7. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, United States)

8. A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
9. Rouge (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong)
10. A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, France / West Germany / United Kingdom / Netherlands)

1989
1. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
3. The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, Soviet Union)
4. Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, France / Switzerland)
5. The Killer (John Woo, Hong Kong)
6. Recollections of the Yellow House (João César Monteiro, Portugal)
7. O Sangue (Pedro Costa, Portugal)
8. Revenge (Ermek Shinarbaev, Soviet Union)

9. Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Ulrike Ottinger, West Germany / France)
10. Notebook on Cities & Clothes (Wim Wenders, West Germany / France)

The Ten Best Films of the 1980s (in alphabetical order)
L'Argent (Robert Bresson, France)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
Une chambre en ville (Jacques Demy, Italy / France)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, France)
The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden / United Kingdom / France)
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France)
Taipei Story (Edward Yang, Taiwan)

Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

1990
1. Close-up (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
2. Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)

3. An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, Australia / United Kingdom / New Zealand)
4. No, or the Vainglory of Command (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / France / Spain)
5. To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, United States)
6. Boiling Point (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
7. The Second Circle (Aleksandr Sokurov, Soviet Union)
8. Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

9. White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood, United States)
10. The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland / Sweden)

1991
1. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
2. Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong)

3. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, France / Switzerland)

4. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, France / Poland / Norway)
5. The Stranger (Satyajit Ray, India / France)
6. Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, France)

7. Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, United States)
8. J'entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel, France)
9. A Scene at the Sea (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
10. Side/Walk/Shuttle (Ernie Gehr, United States)

1992
1. The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice, Spain)
2. Life and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
3. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
4. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, United States)

5. A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, France)
6. Guelwaar (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal / France / Germany)
7. Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, Germany / France / United Kingdom)
8. Simple Men (Hal Hartley, United States / Italy / United Kingdom)
9. Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal)

10. Careful (Guy Maddin, Canada)

1993
1. Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / France/ Switzerland)
2. A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, United States)
3. The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
4. Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
5. D'Est (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France / Portugal)
6. Naked (Mike Leigh, United Kingdom)
7. Moving (Shinji Sômai, Japan)

8. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, United States)

9. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, United States)

10. Swing (Aktan Abdykalykov, Kyrgyzstan)

1994
1. Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran / France)
2. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, Hungary / Germany / Switzerland)
3. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
4. Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
5. Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, France)
6. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, United States)
7. JLG/JLG (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

8. Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/ Germany)
9. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, Canada)
10. Joan the Maid (Jacques Rivette, France)

1995

1. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
2. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, United States / Germany / Japan)
3. Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, United States / Austria / Switzerland)

4. The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, United States)

5. Heat (Michael Mann, United States)
6. La Ceremonie (Claude Chabrol, France / Germany)
7. The Convent (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / France)
8. Rendezvous in Paris (Eric Rohmer, France)
9. The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
10. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondô, Japan)

1996
1. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, United Kingdom / United States)
3. Crash (David Cronenberg, Canada / United States)
4. My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
5. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Denmark / Sweden / France / Netherlands / Norway / Iceland)
6. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, France)
7. Nenette and Boni (Claire Denis, France)
8. Drifting Clouds (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland)
9. Mother (Albert Brooks, United States)
10. Tierra (Julio Medem, Spain)

1997
1. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
2. Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, Germany / Russia)
3. Hana-bi/Fireworks (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
4. L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, United States)
5. Fragments * Jerusalem (Ron Havilio, Israel)
6. The River (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
7. Same Old Song (Alain Resnais, France / Switzerland / United Kingdom)
8. Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
9. La Vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, France)
10. Ulee's Gold (Victor Nunez, United States)

1998
1. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. An Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer, France)
4. Inquietude (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / France / Spain / Switzerland)
5. The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
6. The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
7. Rushmore (Wes Anderson, United States)
8. From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, United States)
9. There's Something About Mary (Bobby & Peter Farrelly, United States)
10. Dil Se.. (Mani Ratnam, India)

1999
1. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran / France)
2. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, United States / United Kingdom)
3. Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, France / Italy / Portugal)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France)
5. Gohatto/Taboo (Nagisa Oshima, Japan / France / United Kingdom)
6. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, France / Germany / United States / Japan)
7. Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, France / Belgium)
8. The Letter (Manoel de Oliveira, France / Spain / Portugal)
9. Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy / France / Germany)

10. The Mission (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)

The Ten Best Films of the 1990s (in alphabetical order)
Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal /
France / Switzerland)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong)
Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, United States)
The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice, Spain)
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, Hungary / Germany/ Switzerland)
The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, United States)
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran / France)

Blissfully Yours (2002)

2000
1. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary / Italy / Germany / France)
2. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan / Japan)
3. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, United Kingdom / France / Germany / United States)
4. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong / France / Thailand)
5. Platform (Jia Zhangke, China / Hong Kong / Japan / France)
6. Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, Japan)
7. The Circle (Jafar Panahi, Iran / Switzerland / Italy)
8. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, United States)
9. Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden / Norway / Finland)
10. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

2001
1. I'm Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, France / Portugal)
2. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, United States / France)
3. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
4. The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, France)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, United States)
6. La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina)
7. Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan / France)
8. Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)
9. La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / France / Spain)
10. Batang West Side (Lav Diaz, Philippines / United States)

2002
1. Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia / Germany)
2. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Iran / United States)
3. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / France)
4. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, China)
5. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)
6. The Son (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium / France)
7. Friday Night (Claire Denis, France)
8. Spider (David Cronenberg, Canada / United Kingdom)
9. Springtime in a Small Town (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China / Hong Kong / France / Netherlands)

10. Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhangke, China / South Korea / France/ Japan)

2003
1. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
2. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, United States)
3. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, France / Italy)
4. Five (Dedicated to Ozu) (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
5. Zatôichi (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
6. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
7. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan / Taiwan)
8. A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / France / Italy)
9. Doppelgänger (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
10. Ana and the Others (Celina Murga, Argentina)

2004
1. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / France / Germany / Italy)

2. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, United States)
3. Collateral (Michael Mann, United States)

4. Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / France /

Netherlands / Switzerland)

5. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, China / France / Germany / Hong Kong)

6. The World (Jia Zhangke, China / Japan / France)

7. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Belgium / France / United Kingdom)

8. 13 Lakes (James Benning, United States)
9. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, United States)

10. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

2005
1. The New World (Terrence Malick, United States)
2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, United States)
3. The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia / France / Italy / Switzerland)
4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
5. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
6. Caché (Michael Haneke, France / Austria / Germany / Italy)
7. L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium / France)
8. Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, China)
9. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, France)
10. Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan)

2006
1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / France / Austria)
2. Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France / Italy)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China / Hong Kong)
4. Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, United States)
5. Longing (Valeska Grisebach, Germany)

6. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, Portugal / France / Switzerland)
7. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / France)
8. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
9. Kodak (Tacita Dean, United Kingdom / France / United States)
10. Les signes (Eugène Green, France)

2007
1. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France)
2. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico / France / Netherlands / Germany)
3. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, France/ Italy / Spain)
4. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)
5. Zodiac (David Fincher, United States)

6. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, United Kingdom / Canada / United States)

7. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, United States)
8. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

9. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France / Italy)
10. RR (James Benning, United States / Germany)

2008
1. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain)
2. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
3. Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
4. Extraordinary Stories (Mariano Llinás, Argentina)

5. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
6. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / France / Netherlands / Germany / Spain)
7. Two Lovers (James Gray, United States)
8. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France / Germany)
9. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
10. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes, Portugal / France)

2009
1. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
2. Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany)

3. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, France / Italy)

4. White Material (Claire Denis, France / Cameroon)
5. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, United States)

6. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, United States / Japan)
7. Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, China)
8. I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, Italy)
9. Bright Star (Jane Campion, United Kingdom / Australia / France)
10. Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, France)

The Ten Best Films of the 2000s (in alphabetical order)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France)
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain)
I'm Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, France / Portugal)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, United States / France)
Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, United States)

Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia / Germany)

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/ France / Germany / Italy)

Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary / Italy / Germany / France)

Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan / Japan)

Certified Copy (2010)

2010
1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / United Kingdom / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / United States)
2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Iran)
3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz, Portugal / France / Brazil)
4. Aurora (Cristi Puiu, Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany)
5. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, Romania)
6. The Social Network (David Fincher, United States)
7. Winter Vacation (Li Hongqi, China)
8. My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany / Ukraine / Netherlands)
9. The Strange Case of Angélica (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal / Spain / France / Brazil)

10. Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / Germany / Switzerland)

2011
1. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / Bosnia and Herzegovina)
2. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary / France / Germany / Switzerland / United States)
3. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
4. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, United States)
5. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran)
6. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, United Kingdom / United States)
7. Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland / France / Germany)
8. Old Dog (Pema Tseden, China)
9. Hugo (Martin Scorsese, United States / United Kingdom)

10. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, United States)

2012
1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France / Germany)
2. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, United States)
3. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, France / United Kingdom / United States)

4. Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal / Germany / Brazil / France)
6. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, United States)
7. Three Sisters (Wang Bing, China)
8. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil)
9. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, France / Germany)
10. A Woman's Revenge (Ruth Azevedo Gomes, Portugal)

2013
1. Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, Iran)
2. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan / France)

3. Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz, Philippines)

4. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, China)

5. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong / China)
6. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy)

7. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)
8. The Immigrant (James Gray, United States)
9. Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, Nepal / United States)
10. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, Germany)

2014
1. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)
2. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany / Poland)
3. Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
4. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

5. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / Denmark / France / Mexico / United States / Germany / Brazil / Netherlands)
6. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, United States)
7. From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, Philippines)
8. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / France / Germany)
9. The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid, Israel / France)
10. Maïdan (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / Netherlands)

2015
1. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / France)
2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / United Kingdom / France / Germany / Malaysia / South Korea / Mexico / United States / Norway)

3. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

4. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, United States)

5. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

6. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France)

7. Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary)

8. The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania / France)

9. Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece)

10. Tharlo (Pema Tseden, China)

2016

1. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, United Kingdom / Belgium)

2. Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

3. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, France / Germany / Belgium)

4. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, Germany)

5. Elle (Paul Verhoeven, France / Germany / Belgium)

6. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, United States)

7. Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude, Romania / Germany)

8. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Lav Diaz, Philippines)

9. Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra, France / Portugal / Spain)

2017

1. The Day After (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

2. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Netherlands / United States / Brazil / Mexico / Portugal / Lebanon / Switzerland)

3. Western (Valeska Grisebach, Germany / Bulgaria / Austria)

4. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, United States)

5. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, France)

6. Milla (Valérie Massadian, France / Portugal)

7. Downsizing (Alexander Payne, United States / Norway)
8. Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR, France)
9. Ghost in the Mountains (Yang Heng, China)

10. Lover for a Day (Philippe Garrel, France)

2018

1. An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, China)

2. La Flor (Mariano Llinás, Argentina)

3. The Mule (Clint Eastwood, United States)

4. Transit (Christian Petzold, Germany / France)

5. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

6. The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Blige Ceylan, Turkey / Macedonia / France / Germany / Bosnia and Herzegovina / Bulgaria / Sweden)

7. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, China / France / Japan)

8. Dead Souls (Wang Bing, Switzerland / France)

9. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, China / France)

10. Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont, France)

2019

1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, Portugal)

2. To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan / Uzbekistan / Qatar)

3. State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands / Lithuania)

4. Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, France / Israel / Germany)

5. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec, Germany / Serbia)

6. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, Italy / France / Germany)

7. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, South Korea)

8. Atlantics (Mati Diop, France / Senegal / Belgium)

9. The Halt (Lav Diaz, Philippines / France)

10. The August Virgin (Jonás Trueba, Spain)

The Ten Best Films of the 2010s (in alphabetical order)

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / France)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Iran)

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, China)

La Flor (Mariano Llinás, Argentina)

Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / Bosnia and Herzegovina)

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, United Kingdom / Belgium)

Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary / France / Germany / Switzerland / United States)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / United Kingdom / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / United States)

The Woman Who Ran (2020)

2020

1. Days (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

2. The Calming (Song Fang, China)

3. Wife of a Spy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)

4. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

5. Undine (Christian Petzold, Germany / France)

6. The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel, France / Switzerland)

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, United Kingdom)

8. City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, United States)

9. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter & Anders Edström, United States / Sweden / Japan / United Kingdom)

10. Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, Romania / Serbia / Switzerland / Sweden / Bosnia and Herzegovina / North Macedonia)

2021

1. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, Germany / Georgia)

2. In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

3. Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

4. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, United Kingdom / Canada / Australia / New Zealand / United States)

5. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

6. Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / France / Germany)

7. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Colombia / Thailand / France / Germany / Mexico / Qatar / United Kingdom / China / Switzerland)

8. The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher, Switzerland)

9. Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid, France / Israel / Germany)

10. The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, Portugal / France)

2022

1. Pacifiction (Albert Serra, France / Spain / Portugal)

2. The Novelist's Film (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

3. Walk Up (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

4. De humani corporis fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, France / Switzerland)

5. No Bears (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

6. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, United States)

7. Coma (Bertrand Bonello, France)

8. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland)

9. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, Argentina / Germany)

10. EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland / Italy / United Kingdom)

2023

1. Afire (Christian Petzold, Germany)

2. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / France / Germany / Sweden)

3. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, United States / Germany)

4. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland / Germany)

5. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, United States / United Kingdom / Poland)

6. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice, Spain / Argentina)

7. In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

8. Here (Bas Devos, Belgium)

9. Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / France / Portugal)

10. Music (Angela Schanelec, Germany / France / Greece / Serbia)

2024

1. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, Portugal / Italy / France / Germany / Japan / China)

2. By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

3. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, France / Spain / Portugal)

4. The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, Canada / France)

5. Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-liang, United States / Taiwan)

6. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke, China)

7. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, United States)

8. Youth (Homecoming) (Wang Bing, France / Luxembourg / Netherlands)

9. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, France / India / Netherlands / Luxembourg / Italy)

10. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, United States / Canada)

2025

1. Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, Georgia / Germany)

2. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, Iran / France / Luxembourg / United States)

3. Magellan (Lav Diaz, Philippines / Spain / Portugal / France / Taiwan)

4. Yes (Nadav Lapid, Israel / France / Cyprus / Germany)

5. What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

6. Mirrors No.3 (Christian Petzold, Germany)

7. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, Spain / France)

8. Kontinental '25 (Radu Jude, Romania / Switzerland / Luxembourg / Brazil / United Kingdom)

9. Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / France / Germany / Netherlands / Latvia / Romania / Lithuania)

10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, United States / United Kingdom)

Ten Best Films of 2024

2025-01-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

1. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, Portugal / Italy / France / Germany / Japan / China)

Gomes's classically postmodern masterpiece is two films at once: luxuriant non-fiction travelogue and heavily narrated tale of missed connection. The former film critic turned leading light of serious art cinema allows his many contradictions to remain unresolved, creating a new, unashamedly anachronistic, vibe-filled form of period film that relies heavily on the two-part story's overlapping Asian settings. In turns an heir to Apichatpong, Oliveira, and always Godardian in its approach, Gomes's thick, pregnant black-and-white images gesture back equally to an outmoded era of Hollywood exoticism. That I would choose Grand Tour as the year's best was never in doubt.

2. By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Even if Hong's breathtaking recent productivity--sixteen features since 2015--is best understood as a single monumental text, his ever-renewable capacity for variation has continued to yield one major new work after another. The autumnal By the Stream, his second feature of 2024 after A Traveler's Needs, may be the most vertical and expansive of his recent films, tracing a theatrical artwork from inspiration and authorship through rehearsal, production and reception. Here, Hong gives us as much drama and romance as he has in some time, while his real-life lover-collaborator Kim Min-hee claims creative agency as a fictional art instructor.

3. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, France / Spain / Portugal)

Beautifully capturing Southern France's cool late autumn through the damp, overgrown forests and cobblestone village settings to which the film's enigmatic lead returns repeatedly, Misericordia is engrossing cat-and-mouse business built on quotidian repetition. Balancing these seemingly oppositional qualities is Guiraudie's sense of the absurd and his preference for actions that resist easy psychological interpretation. What emerges instead is a film filled with gender fluid, often unexpressed desires, and the accompanying thanatos. When the film's priest springs up in the midst of the concluding chase, the Stranger at the Lake director reaffirms his leading position among French cinema provocateurs.

4. The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, Canada / France)

Could The Shrouds be the ultimate Cronenberg film? With Vincent Cassel unambiguously adopting the position of the director's surrogate, bereft at the loss of his longtime partner, the Canadian master enters his deceased wife's grave. Underground, with Cassel spying her decaying corpse as the corporeal is transposed into digital code (as some more perceptive critics have noted), Cronenberg bears witness to the greatest horror to befall the body--along with her disfiguring cancer that populates Cassel's virtual memories and dreamlife. Pure in its classical decoupage, the filmmaker's latest is darkly humorous and very palpably erotic, despite its funereal subject.

5. Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-liang, United States / Taiwan)

Tsai's tenth installment in his experimental "Walker" series masterfully proposes an empathetic, almost sculptural form of spectatorship where the viewer feels the heaviness of Lee Kang-sheng's limbs as he glacially crosses the film's Washington, DC landscape. In his latest gallery-adjacent effort, Tsai invites new comparison to his larger fictional corpus as Anong Houngheuangsy reprises his Days role as an alternating presence to the monumentally slow Lee. The Buddhist Abiding Nowhere heightens and focuses our perception of stasis and movement like no other film this year, encouraging its more active spectators to consider the medium's grounding in discrete still images.

6. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke, China)

Stitched together with digital remainders captured during his Unknown Pleasures and Still Life productions (and newly shot 2020s material), Caught by the Tides is Jia's COVID-period project, both in the subject of the film's third part and in its editing room form of production. In returning to these previous texts, Jia has created a survey of China's most consequential twenty-first century events, from the euphoria of the Beijing Olympics to the displacement of the Three Gorges Dam and the Wuhan virus. A melancholic platform for Zhao Tao's spectacular beauty, Caught by the Tides measures China's unseen advancement to global superpower.

7. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, United States)

A welcome return to the nimble classicism of 1990s-era Eastwood, this supremely well-paced and involving courtroom drama revives Eastwood's decades-long interest in questions of justice, framing it within a system ruled by personal motivations and prejudices. Culpability, both legal and moral, is a central concern here as we motor toward a final silent showdown that expertly replaces dialogue with shot/reverse-shot strategies. Juror #2 contains many markers of prime Eastwood, from its extra-legal investigations to its spirit of professionalism that inhabits its many un-showy performances. Ultimately, Hollywood mercilessly ignored one of the best films it produced this year.

8. Youth (Homecoming) (Wang Bing, France / Luxembourg / Netherlands)

China's greatest living documentarian concludes his massive, nine-hour-plus "Youth trilogy" with this compulsively watchable and distinctive final installment. Over their new years' holidays, Wang travels with his subjects in packed railcars and over perilous, if scenic mountain roads, which lead to their economically disadvantaged small towns. After sharing a family meal, celebrating a wedding or simply passing the time, Wang's young factory workers will again return to the sweatshops, grim workers' housing and to the chaotic fraternization that dominated the first two films. The essential, observational 'Youth' films reveal the foundations of our global consumer life like no other films this year.

9. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, France / India / Netherlands / Luxembourg / Italy)

For her richly nocturnal Night of Knowing Nothing follow-up, Kapadia provides an expansive portrait of what it is to live in Mumbai with its transplanted rural masses, and its flooding monsoonal rains. City and countryside, Hindu and Muslim, and arranged marriage and romance provide the structuring conflicts in this bifurcated story of two women as they travel south from the global megacity and cinema capital. This assured instance of international art cinema, with its tangible eroticism and its twenty-first century admixture of fiction and non-fiction, may be familiar, but it still stands as conspicuous counter-cinema to India's dominant commercial modes.

10. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, United States / Canada)

Among the more overtly personal films of Shyamalan's critically marginalized career, Trap relies on director's daughter Saleka's very credible turn as a popstar, before the film's uber-Hitchcockian focalization shifts to her from Josh Harnett's suspected serial killer. Up to that point, the horror-thriller auteur has given us his own B-film take on Bresson's A Man Escape--not to mention a literal Parent Trap--with Harnett's scheming, paternal psycho plotting his slip from the tightening dragnet. Graced with thematically potent frontal close-ups and fluid overhead takes, Shyamalan's visual pyrotechnics invigorate this new-school collage of 21st-century tech, social media and fan culture.

More 2024 Lists: Ten Best Older Films + Favorite Reappraisals and English-language Cinema

2025-01-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

Ten+ Favorite Older Films (viewed for the first time in 2024; in chronological order):

Kohlhiesel's Daughters (Ernst Lubitsch, 1920)

Johan (Mauritz Stiller, 1921)

Girl Shy (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1924) + For Heaven's Sake (Taylor, 1926)

As this first set of films should suggest, I made a concerted effort to see more silent cinema in 2024 (after realizing that I had mostly neglected this field of cinematic inquiry the year before). Among my biggest viewing highlights last year was Lubitsch's deliriously entertaining Kohlhiesel's Daughters, which I saw at the Berlinale with live orchestral accompaniment. I also remade my acquaintance with the early Swedish masters, Stiller and Victor Sjöström, and the great Harold Lloyd, who belongs forever in the company of the better remembered Chaplin and Keaton.

There's No Tomorrow (Max Ophüls, 1939)

Mr. Shôsuke Ohara (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1949) + Dancing Girl (Shimizu, 1957) + Image of a Mother (Shimizu, 1959)

For me, Shimizu is the fourth figure of the classical Japanese cinema, after Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Naruse. Having the opportunity to attend a long weekend of late Shimizu films at the Japan Society in New York, I was able to fill in some important gaps (of which I was not previously aware). The great Shimizu of the 1930s and early 40s was more or less present in these post Children of the Beehive films, but even where the idiom was a little less familiar, he invariably brought a depth of feeling and visual grace that reaffirmed the director as one of his industry's best, through the end of the 1950s.

West Indies: The Fugitive Slave Ship of Liberty (Med Hondo, 1979)

Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980)

Brocka showed a true mastery of constricted, interior spaces and crowds, while Hondo's master-shots introduce leaps in time and conceptual space that very much belong to the same art-historical moment as Greek master Theo Angelopoulos.

Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman, 1982; pictured)

A work of extraordinary purity, and easily one of the best films I saw in 2024, period, this rediscovered masterpiece helped to bring to a close Akerman's greatest period, when she rated with Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, and few others as one of her moment's top filmmakers.

Maine-Ocean Express (Jacques Rozier, 1986)

Very of its mid 80s moment, and perhaps the most pleasurable of Rozier's highly aleatory post-Adieu Philippine efforts.

Moving (Shinji Sômai, 1993)

Best Reappraisals (where my opinion moved furthest in a positive direction; in chronological order):

That Night's Wife (Yasujiro Ozu, 1930)

A film where the actors' hands are consistently the source of narrative content. One of Ozu's greatest silent films.

The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977; pictured)

I was, rather ironically, as a young Christian viewer, too young when I first saw this on videotape a quarter century ago. No one else made movies exactly like this, and seeing it a quarterly century later, any confusion I once had evaporated in the sight of the the magnificent control that Bresson asserted over his mise en scène.

Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023)

The same quality of singularity as Bresson, seeing it on the big screen--rather than on a screener--made a huge difference for this gem-like, and more crystalline than I remember, art film. Sometimes it takes me twice with Schanelec.

Ten Favorite (Predominately) English Language Films (in order of preference):

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)

Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)

Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)

Anora (Sean Baker)

Despite liking his previous work and especially The Florida Project, I didn't expect to be as captivated as I was by Baker's profane, propulsive and populist Cinderella, led by the undeniable Mikey Madison and her very creditable supporting cast. I guess it really does belong to 2024.

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

Friendship (Andrew DeYoung; pictured)

About the very poignant homosocial anxiety of losing a friend (who is much too cool to be your friend) as a result of one small, easily avoidable mistake. The optimal Tim Robinson vehicle.

Eephus (Carson Lund)

Harvest (Rachel Athina Tsangari)

A threshold story of the shift from subsistence to the land as profit-generating, Tsangari's work equally suggests Peter Watkins and zoom-lensed 1960s and 70s English cinema.

Rap World (Conner O'Malley & Danny Scharar)

Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)

For my "Ten Best Films of 2024," click here. For my best films for each year since 1930, click here, and for the silent era, here. Note that all of these lists are updated as I feel it necessary, and are subject to revision. While many of the above older films cracked their respective top tens, in some stronger years I couldn't find space--a testament to how much great cinema has been created (and how much remains for discovery and rediscovery).

Ten Best Films of 2023

2023-12-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

1. Afire (Christian Petzold, Germany)

It seemed inevitable that one of our greatest living filmmakers, Berlin School master Petzold, would eventually top one of this site’s yearly lists. Two films into his Rohmerian cycle on the elements, the director's La Collectionneuse makes consequential use of fire, wind and water all within a brilliantly controlled narrative that is so infected by its central figure's self absorption that we frequently have our viewing hopes dashed. A writer, director and actors' film equally, Afire adds some of Petzold's most lyrical and surreal images, the year's most vibey needle drop and a final act narrational recalibration that is worthy of the filmmaker's 2014 masterpiece Phoenix.

2. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey / France / Germany / Sweden)

Ceylan’s latest masterclass in human motivation possesses the thematic density and character complexities of the Russian novelists for whom the director has cited his admiration—with a marathon running time to match. Structured around a series of nuanced conversations, Ceylan’s rural Anatolian epic teases out accusations of impropriety against two male middle school teachers, before their romantic rivalry, focusing on a new teacher, takes center stage. Ceylan, in this work of genuine moral seriousness, refines his now signature high-definition video aesthetic and post-Kiarostami observational style, replete with its own unexpected moment of non-fictional address.

3. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, United States / Germany)

In this conceptual sequel to and massive improvement on The French Dispatch, Anderson finds encyclopedic inspiration in the American cinema and popular culture of the 1950s, stacking medium-specific metaphors (trains, dreams, open-air theater) on top of pulp genres (westerns, musicals, science fiction). Done in the service of a highly entertaining dioramic narrative that gestures at a bygone nuclear age, this archly American object rivals 2012's great Moonrise Kingdom in its thematic rigor. Yet, Anderson's very personal Asteroid City also admits uncertainty too as it looks to move beyond autobiography to something more cosmic.

4. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland / Germany)

This refreshingly crisp and compressed romantic comedy makes masterful use of the director’s renowned expressionless performance style that fuses very funny Finnish cultural clichés of emotional impassivity with the uber-serious cinema of Robert Bresson. The latter’s L’Argent is one of a number of references that Kaurismäki underlines—others include Chaplin, Ozu, Fassbinder, Clair and 1930s proletarian Hollywood—in what proves a celebration of the director’s sources, such cinematic fellow travelers as Jim Jarmusch, and even the director's own past output (Drifting Clouds). Blissfully entertaining and one of the director's very best.

5. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, United States / United Kingdom / Poland)

Glazer’s harrowing and very Kubrickian The Zone of Interest recreates the mostly bucolic home life of Auschwitz’s commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they pass their days and evenings, literally, on the other side of the infamous prison camp’s wall. The product of meticulous historical research, Glazer uses the contrapuntal language of cinema to tell us what is going on in Auschwitz (through its more and less faint soundscapes) without visualizing the Nazi’s atrocities. Alongside 2015's Son of Saul, The Zone of Interest is one of the 21st century's most novel and impactful Holocaust narratives. A film that seems custom built for future intro to cinema syllabi.

6. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice, Spain / Argentina)

For his first fiction feature in four decades and his first feature-length film of any variety in three, Spain's great maestro Erice has created a very personal and moving apologia for his lost filmmaking decades. After a historical preface that references the classical Hollywood cinema that Erice began his career revising with The Spirit of the Beehive—here the reference is Sternberg with a blissful Rio Bravo diversion still to come—a more televisual aesthetic obtains for much of the loose, episodic film's near three-hour runtime, before projected cinema is brought to bear to explain the present in the film's Shirin-inspired conclusion.

7. In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Korean art-house giant Hong's thirtieth feature since 1996 once again finds the director in The Novelist Film's autobiographical territory, in this case exploring the often comic daily interactions of the director's surrogate (in the figure of the poet Hong) and that of his lover and late-period axiom, Kim Min-hee. As the director contends on and off-screen with admiring acolytes and diminished health in his half of this two-parter, In Our Day extends the philosophical bent of Hong's most recent work, suggesting an answer to the biggest of questions in our ability to appreciate what is in front of us, to be thankful for existence without searching for deeper meaning.

8. Here (Bas Devos, Belgium)

Following his luminous, nocturnal 2019 arthouse discovery Ghost Tropic, Devos once again traverses an often depopulated Brussels, in this case bringing together a Belgian-Chinese doctoral candidate and a Romanian laborer, just before the latter is preparing to return home. Devos's film is almost uniquely attuned to the acts of seeing (in microscopic detail) and listening, with the film's mise-en-scene lingering on sparkling nightscapes and to a series of magical incursions of the natural world into Brussels's industrial metropolis. A genuinely moving sense of romantic possibility decorates the film's gentle coupling in this exquisite Berlinale highlight.

9. Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / France / Portugal)

Though it failed to secure a competition slot at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Alonso's long-waited return may be that festival's most meaningful exploration of American Indigenous trauma. Eureka is structured in three parts that successively move backward in time and mediate Native experience respectively through a black-and-white western, an elegantly lensed if emotionally gutting Cops-style night in the life of a Pine Ridge police officer, and in an Amazonian mining camp where narrated dreams bring about tragedy. Civilization is a blight in this object of enhanced realism from the celebrated Argentine author of La Libertad and Los Muertos.

10. Music (Angela Schanelec, Germany / France / Greece / Serbia)

A film that is almost pathological in its exclusion of expository dialogue, Schanelec generates affect through crystalline images and a bracing use of baroque music in her I Was at Home, But... follow up. If that film represented her festival breakout, Music reaffirms Schanelec's singular position in the contemporary global cinema as an auteur of complete singularity of vision and approach unlike anyone save her most obvious ancestor, Robert Bresson. Subject to criticisms that it is pretentious and opaque, Schanelec has created something that works differently, and when the viewer allows it to, works with a greater intensity than far more familiar art cinema.

Ten Best Films of 2022

2022-12-18T08:30:00.004-08:00

1. Pacifiction (Albert Serra, France / Spain / Portugal)

In this magisterial portrait of France's diminished place in the 21st-century world, Spaniard Serra deftly introduces the intoxicating, hazy metaphor of politics as a nightclub within a false Polynesian paradise. This is the post-twilight of the colonial order with Benoît Magimel's white-suited high commissioner, embodiment of an exhausted libertine archetype and perfectly juxtaposed against the film's gender-fluid non-professionals, tilting at a power structure beyond his influence. Pacifiction is next level in both its ambition and achievement.

2. The Novelist's Film (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

The first of two equally extraordinary new films on this list by the world's most prolific master, The Novelist's Film explores art cinema production from writer to programmer throughout its La Ronde-style structure. However, it is in its closing, first-person declaration of love for star Kim Min-hee that Hong's Berlin prize-winner truly takes its privileged place in one of the cinema's great bodies of work.

3. Walk Up (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Expansive and retrospective in its view of Hong's alternately comedic and dramatic art, Walk Up is most surprising for its destabilizing narrative gaps that present the latest, novel means for introducing his signature repetitions. New loves come, go and contend with estranged daughter Jeong-su in this story of generational turn and the difficulties of making films (which is belied by Hong's real-world productivity).

4. De humani corporis fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, France / Switzerland)

In the hands of Leviathan's filmmaking duo, the stuff of surgery television is transformed into mystifying documentary cinema—when it isn't palpably visceral in its effect. As the camera dives deep below the skin's surface, this singular work of experimental non-fiction offers up visually arresting images of undefined anatomy, reframing the human body as a site of unknown mysteries (in our illness-obsessed age).

5. No Bears (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

COVID-age video conferencing technology provides a new means for Panahi to circumvent his 2010 travel and filmmaking prohibitions, temptations that the Iranian auteur pairs with the film's metaphorical and literal boundary crossings. That No Bears also returns to the socio-political orientation of his pre-ban corpus, within the more reflexive framework of his 2010s features, makes this his ultimate provocation.

6. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, United States)

Linklater structures his deeply personal rotoscoped narrative—the finest of his career—around a child's counter-factual moon landing ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. Time, memory, dreams, dead time, and just hanging out, often in front of a television, combine in this signature work by the director, a film that's at its most exhilarating during its endless passages of consumer culture-obsessed digression.

7. Coma (Bertrand Bonello, France)

Mining a personal canon that draws heavily on Lynch, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Linklater's aforementioned rotoscoping, Coma unfolds in a series of dreams and nightmares that center around a COVID-confined teen and a YouTube-style celebrity. This film for our time uniquely understands the disproportionate toll that lockdown policies have had on the young, while it awaits their future stories.

8. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland)

Time and space in Unrest are subject to constant measurement, whether it is the work of a Russian cartographer, the persistent photographing of a Swiss factory town or the four different clocks that regulate time as the modern world approaches. Schäublin's feature was one of 2022's great discoveries thanks to its extraordinary thematic rigor and a precise artistry worthy of its anarchist watchmaker heroes.

9. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, Argentina / Germany)
The latest long-form opus from Argentina’s El Pampero Cine, the production company behind La Flor, Trenque Lauquen displays a similarly Borgesian approach to narrative: stories embed within stories and mysteries compound as the film searches for a botanist Laura, played by co-writer Laura Paredes, who may not want to be found. Director Laura Citarella has made a captivating, no-less protean, and ultimately very worthy successor to the 2018 masterpiece.

10. EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland / Italy / United Kingdom)

Skolimowski's panoramic road movie, structured around the travels of the eponymous donkey, explores a very different landscape from its Au hasard Balthazar inspiration—save for man's evergreen inhumanity—with its new Europe of migrant movements and disappearing hard labor. EO signals a long-eclipsed baroque art cinema that is refreshed by drone passages that announce its new form of pure cinema.

Ten Best Films of 2021

2021-12-28T18:56:00.007-08:00

1. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, Germany / Georgia)

Combining the ordinary and every day with the utterly fantastic, Georgian director Koberidze introduces a productive dissonance that finds the fairytale, through omniscient narration, embedded deep in the real (of a very specific time—in the midst of World Cup madness—and place). Free, playful, and apologetically escapist from a moment we’d all like to flee.

2. In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

For feature twenty-six, Hong uses one of his simplest structures of replication—days one and two—to tell the story of a former actress whose return to Korea follows devastating health news (and coincides with a potential job offer). The resplendent Lee Hye-young overwhelms in this oversaturated exploration of grace—and variation on film twenty-five, Introduction.

3. Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

Drive My Car is the film where it all seems to come together for Hamaguchi. Adapting a Murakami short story of the same name, the director’s three-hour opus pulls equally from Chekhov, the subject of the play-within-the-film (which foregrounds the filmmaker’s unique method of rehearsing actors). Exquisitely crafted, emotionally resonant, and big in its impact.

4. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, United Kingdom / Canada / Australia / New Zealand / United States)

One of the greatest figures of the 1990s art house returns to Netflix—in a sign of the times—for her first feature in more than a decade. Displaying a Fordian compositional grace and late-classical storytelling, Campion’s queer take on hetero male values in the Old West transforms Kodi Smit-McPhee’s extraordinarily slim physique and slight manner into a site for spectacle.

5. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

Confirmation that it is the year of Hamaguchi—he also wrote the screenplay for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s astonishing, 2021 commercial release Wife of a Spy—this three-part anthology makes expert use of the Japanese director’s great facility for the erotic and a set of surprising narrative turns. Time passes whether it’s marked by a belated reunion, the reading of an explicit passage or a long conversation.

6. Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy / France / Germany)

The Le Quattro Volte's director's first feature in more than a decade, Il Buco plunges hundreds of meters below the earth's surface, recreating the 1961 discovery of Southern Italy's deepest cave. Frammartino moves along specular verticals, up the side of skyscraper and with a shepherd into the Calabrian highlands and into breathtaking cavernous depths in this poetic exploration of emergent modernity.

7. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Colombia / Thailand / France / Germany / Mexico / Qatar / United Kingdom / China / Switzerland)

Making extraordinary use of his surveillance camera and a piercingly metallic soundtrack, Memoria follows one of the world’s great directors to Colombia for his latest audio-visual immersion. With his shift away from Thailand, Apichatpong’s art becomes more conventionally surreal, creating a landscape that more fully belongs to dream and the cinema than to Thai history or myth.

8. The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher, Switzerland)

No one quite tells a “story” like the Zürcher brothers. Penetrating glances do the heavy lifting in a series of shifting interactions that are latently erotic, violent or both. More comic than dramatic in tone, the action unfolds mostly indoors—just as it did in Ramon’s The Strange Little Cat—as one of the principal’s packs up and moves with the help of family, friends, and a compelling ex.

9. Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid, France / Israel / Germany)

A goodbye to mothers—to Lapid’s own late collaborator mother and to his Israeli motherland—Ahed’s Knee plays with his surrogate’s ambiguous motivations and the palpable romantic chemistry he shares with outstanding newcomer Nur Fibak, up to the point where it’s time for his goodbye. An explosive denunciation of Israel ensues in this scalding Synonyms follow-up.

10. The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, Portugal / France)

Moving from end to beginning in a spiritual sequel to Gomes’s breakthrough Our Beloved Month of August (2008)—“tsugua” is “august” in reverse, naturally—the co-director and his filmmaking partner Fazendeiro introduce a structure that emphasizes the collaborative labor underlying their production. COVID also emerges as a context in this experimental fiction-documentary hybrid.

Ten Best Films of 2020

2020-12-31T11:08:00.026-08:00

1. Days (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

Days is one of the more Warholian of the director's feature-length works with Tsai emptying his film of faces and especially bodies (and backpain) of all but the most minimal of narratives—unfolding over exceptional durations and deeply repetitive gestures. It is also a film of profound loneliness and the desire for human touch, premiering just before the world shut down.

2 The Calming (Song Fang, China)

There is something quite special about Song Fang’s quiet critical breakthrough, where a surrogate for the female writer-director models our own viewing experience as she passes alone looking at and listening to a succession of richly detailed poetic landscapes. The Calming is the most Japanese of contemporary Chinese films.

3. Wife of a Spy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)

One of the most constant investigators of Japanese identity, Kurosawa's first attempt at period drama provides a confrontative portrait of its former war atrocities. Progressing through a series of sharp, character-powered reversals, Kurosawa's mastery is present in full force—as is his deep knowledge of film history (as we see in a pitch perfect film-within-the-film that doubles as plot commentary).

4. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

The Woman Who Ran ingeniously finds yet another way of retelling the same story in the space of a single feature—in this case relying on Hong axiom and muse Kim Min-hee to tell friends and acquaintances what’s been going on in her life (when she’s not re-watching the same movie twice in a brilliant self-reflexive aside).

5. Undine (Christian Petzold, Germany / France)

This bewitching Berlin highlight by the mid-career Petzold is a film of layers and of depths—literally of the historical strata of the Berlin cityscape that mythic heroine Paula Beer brings to life and the murky deep that her human lover Franz Rogowski dives. A film of exquisite mystery from one of giants of contemporary storytelling.

6. The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel, France / Switzerland)

At this point an old master who has been experiencing a long, late-career renaissance (since at least 2013's extraordinary Jealousy), the post-New Wave Garrel returns with one of his most purely entertaining tales of romantic coupling and parting—complete with a liberated heroine who turns the table on the film’s noncommittal male.

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, United Kingdom)

The consensus peak of British director Steve McQueen’s powerful five-film historical portrait of London’s West Indian community (Small Axe), Lovers Rock rhythmically unfolds over the course of an underground blues party, culminating in an epic singalong to 1979 hit “Silly Games.” A group of films defined by McQueen's long narrative pauses.

8. City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, United States)

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh emerges as a Wiseman rarity in this surprisingly brisk, nearly-five-hour documentary portrait of big-city governance: a compelling human subject who anchors an archetypal American institution. We are living in the midst of one of Wiseman's greatest periods—as he blows past his ninetieth birthday.

9. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter & Anders Edström, United States / Sweden / Japan / United Kingdom)

Across its monumental, work-day runtime, Winter and Edström blend the real-world (Tayoko, her family, friends and the Kyoto countryside) and the artificial (professional actors and other phantoms) in the service of a vividly present—and remembered—quotidian reality. A film that respires with the immense beauty of the ordinary.

10. Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, Romania / Serbia / Switzerland / Sweden / Bosnia and Herzegovina / North Macedonia)

Occluded framings through open doorways—in the manner of Aurora—and a philosophical torrent of words (Sieranevada) made for one of the year’s most singular viewing experiences. Introducing a resurrection of sorts into its conversational structure, Puiu's dense text is literally one to read and re-read for all but the film's native speakers.

Ten Best Films of 2019

2020-01-07T18:02:00.010-08:00

1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, Portugal)
Modeling its Cape Verdean immigrant actors in extreme chiaroscuro to almost sculptural, and always exquisitely beautiful effect, this film of the year is foremost an exercise in making visible the presence of its non-professional actors and Lisbon’s demolished Fontainhas neighborhood. At once concrete and unstable, Costa’s masterpiece is very much realism without naturalism.

2. To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan / Uzbekistan / Qatar)
One of 2019’s most unexpected authorial turns, the latest from Japan’s horror maestro operates, to extraordinary effect, within an idiom very close to that of Abbas Kiarostami. Yet, this funny and moving humanistic ode to cross-cultural understanding, set in Uzbekistan, does not stop with the Iranian’s art cinema as it becomes something more like The Sound of Music in its joyous final moments.

3. State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands / Lithuania)

Comprised of the extraordinary footage captured across a multi-ethnic Soviet Union at the time of Stalin's 1953 death, this unparalleled historical document immerses the viewer in the dictator's quasi-religious cult of personality. This instant classic is also testimony to the same masterful handling of crowds or stirring repetition of Maidan, as well as Austerlitz's sense of paradox.

4. Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, France / Israel / Germany)
From its exceptionally funny comedy-of-errors opening set piece featuring the very bare Tom Mercier, 2019’s biggest in-front-of-the-camera revelation, Synonyms startles and enthralls in equal measure. Already Israel’s most interesting living filmmaker with the 2014 release of The Kindergarten Teacher, Lapid’s autobiographical opus changes the conversation for the filmmaker.

5. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec, Germany / Serbia)
In this long overdue festival-circuit breakthrough from the Berlin School’s most experimental and rigorous auteur, the filmmaker’s narrative eliminations point the way toward a cinema where psychological interpretation is unavailable and the only answer is the questions asked. Schanelec is a true heir to French great Robert Bresson. who nonetheless has found her own personal path.

6. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, Italy / France / Germany)
Unresolved though this Italian Jack London adaptation may be in its period, Marcello’s major leap forward still manages to express its 1970s aesthetic inspiration with crystal clarity, thanks especially to the director’s choice of 16mm stock. Socialist in its rhetoric, Martin Eden is also dizzyingly romantic on all levels—in its camera movements, editing, and in the chemistry of its beautiful cast.

7. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, South Korea)
No other twenty-nineteen film has had the universal impact of Bong’s mid-career best, Parasite. Lauded and debated for its politics—defined by the scarcity of economic resources shared by the film’s literally lower class and the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis—Parasite is also one of the year’s most satisfying and pleasurable watches, propelled by Bong’s sterling script.

8. Atlantics (Mati Diop, France / Senegal / Belgium)
Expansively African in its discourse and details, from the film’s inscriptions of rapid urbanization to its migrant maritime tragedies and even its possession rituals, Diop has made one of that continent’s best in ages. This poetic hybrid of social drama and zombie fiction, shot by the under forty niece of Africa’s iconic director Djibril Diop Mambéty, is the easy choice for 2019’s top world debut.

9. The Halt (Lav Diaz, Philippines / France)

Set in the midst of a deadly flu epidemic in the early 2030s—with a ruthless political strongman making his own deadly use of the crisis—The Halt feels prescient from the standpoint of the immediate future. One of a series of major 2010s works from Diaz, here the epic-length-auteur finds deep catharsis as the film, in its final of five hours, shifts from violent revolution to care for the dispossessed.

10. The August Virgin (Jonás Trueba, Spain)

A Madrileño Rohmer for the 21st century, Trueba hues closely to The Green Ray in his August home-for-the-holiday subject and setting and in his collaboration with his outstanding thirtysomething lead, Itsaso Arana. The August Virgin earns its title with an unreliable last act admission as the film maintains its characteristically gentle and genteel naturalism and romanticism.

Ten Best FIlms of the 2010s

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The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015, Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / France)
The first new feature in eight years by one of the medium's greatest artists, and one 2015's most outstanding achievements, The Assassin masterfully pursues its super-cinematic fetish to the point of conceptual exhaustion: rippling silks, a flickering candle, a fluttering branch. Hou returns to cinema's first source of spectacle in this lavishly detailed portrait of invisible presence.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010, France / Italy / Iran)
For Kiarostami's first fiction feature shot outside his native Iran, the director makes explicit the European sources (especially Rossellini and Resnais) of his half-neorealist, half-modernist idiom, while adding a new dimension to his art: a heretofore forbidden sensuality that as always relies upon spectator participation. A major return to narrative form for Kiarostami, and the best of the recent spate of Asian-made European art films.

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018, China)

An Elephant Sitting Still’s massive achievement resides in the crystalline clarity of first-time feature-filmmaker Hu's worldview, of his unshakable insistence on the irredeemable quality of life in contemporary China. Shot in a series of artfully mobile, shallow-focus long takes that collectively convey the inter-connectedness of his characters' tragic fates, Hu's novelistic opus is one of cinema's great what-ifs--a masterpiece completed just before the filmmaker's suicide. It also may be the best film from Mainland China this decade.

La Flor (Mariano Llinás, 2018, Argentina)

In a year of epic-length achievements, nothing could match the scale or scope of this 14-hour shapeshifter from the south. Protean in its survey of language in its many forms, both linguistic and cinematic, La Flor is first and foremost a film of its four female leads' faces, obsessively captured by Llinás. Equally a film about genres, cinematic again but also painterly, the face gives way to bathers and landscapes, up to and through a 40-minute credit sequence set on the bottom of the globe.

Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2014, France)
Dumont provides a masterclass in contradiction and tonal contrast throughout his four involving parts: the extreme violence of the crimes finds a bedfellow in frequent moments of levity and humor –many of which are a consequence of the film’s bumbling investigators; seriousness pairs with absurdity; and the sacred is brought into comic contact with the profane, especially in a first-part funeral passage that seems to confirm many a famous (and less than flattering) adage about small-town vicars. Once criticized for the bleakness of his worldview–as with 1999 Cannes prize-winner Humanité–Dumont, in Li’l Quinquin, has come to seize upon a rhetoric of comedic contradiction that nonetheless maintains his former outlook.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011, Turkey / Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Ceylan synthetically constructs his portrait of bi-continental Turkish national identity from the tissues of high-modernist European and Middle Eastern masters, from the metaphysical phantasmagoria of Tarkovsky to the cosmological landscapes of Kiarostami. With the sun setting on the autumnal latter, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia descends into an endless digital expanse of sensual blacks, cut by glowing high-beams, which in turn will give way to an unforgettable gas-lit interlude. Ceylan's latest, easily his best, is 2011's most inexhaustible work of cinema.

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, 2016, United Kingdom / Belgium)
Premiering out of competition at last February’s Berlin Film Festival, A Quiet Passion was almost singular this year in its concern for the inner life of its protagonist. This heartrending Emily Dickinson biopic, starring Cynthia Nixon in a career-best performance, was also the year’s most bitterly–and courageously–personal piece of auteur filmmaker, an emotionally overwhelming confessional object from Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; Sunset Song), the greatest poet of the British screen since Humphrey Jennings.

Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016, Romania)
After a virtuosically choreographed, pre-credits long-take that ranks among the year’s most exceptional sequences, Romanian master Puiu sets up inside a Bucharest flat, his camera moving from room to room as he maps a cavernous domestic space, complicated familial relationships, and the history, politics, and religious attitudes of the post-Communist nation. The director’s darkly comedic reinterpretation of the chamber drama feels sui generis, even as it proves to be the natural extension of the occluded, outside-the-threshold aesthetic of his 2010 feature Aurora.

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011, Hungary /
France / Germany / Switzerland / United States)
Purportedly Hungarian master Tarr's final film, The Turin Horse provides the most distilled expression of the director's style to date: Tarr's heavily choreographed, phenomenological long-takes bleakly inscribe a series of quotidian gestures on a perpetually windswept Central European plane. No less signature is Tarr's Nietzschean take on a European civilization that has already collapsed. This is Tarr bringing both his corpus and Europe's fin de siècle late modernism - in form and in content - to a highly masterful conclusion.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, Thailand / United Kingdom / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands / United States)
In what is likely the Thai auteur's greatest achievement to date, Apichatpong explores not only the past lives and origins of his terminal lead, but also those of his own cinematic career - and even of his chosen medium (down to a Platonic shadow-play) - constructing a dense web of self-reference that transforms the filmmaker's reincarnation narrative into a comprehensive career reexamination. Uncle Boonmee is the best new film in years.

Ten Best Films of 2018

2018-12-30T10:43:00.001-08:00

1. An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, China)

2. La Flor (Mariano Llinás, Argentina)
In a year of epic-length achievements, nothing could match the scale or scope of this 14-hour shapeshifter from the south. Protean in its survey of language in its many forms, both linguistic and cinematic, La Flor is first and foremost a film of its four female leads' faces, obsessively captured by Llinás. Equally a film about genres, cinematic again but also painterly, the face gives way to bathers and landscapes, up to and through a 40-minute credit sequence set on the bottom of the globe.

3. The Mule (Clint Eastwood, United States)
Hollywood's great late classicist, and one of its most reliably biographical auteurs, seeks redemption for his failures as a husband and father in this sharply self-critical portrait of the physically reduced filmmaker late in life. Eastwood's masterful latest is also a breezy road movie, filled with brilliantly underplayed supporting appearances--including that of the actor-director's mentee Bradley Cooper.

4. Transit (Christian Petzold, Germany / France)
Despite its strong connection to genre practice, there's really nothing else that feels like the Berlin School master's cinema. With Berlin Competition highlight Transit, Petzold provides a rigorously intellectual though still moving take on the period melodrama, staging past and present side by side in this joint presentation of World War II Europe and the modern-day refugee crisis in transitory Marseille.

5. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

The last remaining Cahiers master is perhaps more aware and concerned by the glut of moving images than any other, returning in The Image Book--with the title suggesting a mode of spectatorship and a new conceptualization of the filmmaker's art--to the collage form of his monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma. Godard's work models a life lived wholly in reference to the moving image.

6. The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Blige Ceylan, Turkey / Macedonia / France / Germany / Bosnia and Herzegovina / Bulgaria / Sweden)
Ceylan's epic and subjectively fluid treatment of fathers and sons possesses the philosophical density and textural richness of Russian literature and the referred-to Tolstoy. This is a film about Turkey's continued struggles with modernization, and the persistent estrangement between the country's liberal intellectual and conservative political classes, staged in the ancient city of Troy.

7. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, China / France / Japan)
A return to the three-part tour structure and gangster genre of Jia's A Touch of Sin, Ash Is Purest White is more broadly career retrospective filmmaking, pointedly recalling Unknown Pleasures and Still Life as a new China emerges around the film's leads. Jia's ambivalence once again emerges for the great fictional chronicler of China's transformative shift away from a command economy.

8. Dead Souls (Wang Bing, Switzerland / France)
There are important films, and then there are important films: essential historical records that can exist only in the moving image medium. Wang's eight-hour latest is just such a work, presenting the stories of the now deceased survivors of China's anti-rightist prison camps in their own words. That China is repeating history with its Muslim minority makes Dead Souls even more tragically meaningful.

9. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, China / France)
Like the director's startling 2015 debut, Kaili Blues, the even stronger Long Day's Journey Into Night divides between road reverie--staged in the first film's namesake backwater--and an epic single-take that closes the film. The latter serves as a dream-world rehashing of the film's Wongian concept, one that Bi adds decisive references to high-end art cinema of the likes of Tarkovsky. Bi aims for their ranks.

10. Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont, France)
Rivaled, as a television series, in its strangeness and its auteurist commitment only by Dumont’s previous series, Li'l Quinquin, and Twin Peaks: The Return, Coincoin and the Extra-Humans' anti-television returns to a gracefully composed, widescreen English Channel coast where the 'alien' African refugees mix with Dumont's cretinous French provincials. Exquisitely poor taste.

Ten Best Films of 2017

2018-01-02T14:30:00.002-08:00

1. The Day After (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
The best of the staggeringly prolific Korean master's three 2017 world premieres, Hong brilliantly shuffles sequence, crafting another archetypal (and biographical) narrative where competing stories challenge each other's veracity. It seems almost beyond dispute at this point to say that Hong is the filmmaker of the decade.

2. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina / Spain / France / Netherlands / United States / Brazil / Mexico / Portugal / Lebanon / Switzerland)
Martel returns after nine years with 2017's most singular piece of film art: richly textured diegetic and non-diegetic sound effects combine to articulate the increasingly disturbed psychological state of the marooned Don Diego de Zama. Aggravation eventually transforms into horror in this mythic look at the colonial experiment.

3. Western (Valeska Grisebach, Germany / Bulgaria / Austria)
Following an even longer layoff than her fellow female filmmaker Martel, Grisebach combines the perfectly calibrated naturalism of her first two features with the syntax of the eponymous genre. What results is a deeply incisive exploration of contemporary European reality, elegantly located on the continent's eastern frontier.

4. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, United States)

Diary of a Country Priest re-imagined within the secularized, contemporary landscape of Mainline American Protestantism, First Reformed considers the spiritual dimension of man's stewardship of the planet. Searingly personal, and culminating with a trio of powerful possibilities, First Reformed is one of Schrader's best.

5. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, France)
Adapting the unexpected form of the middle school musical pageant to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century writings of Charles Péguy, Dumont's Jeannette is another super skilled study in high contrast from the Li'l Quinquin auteur. Suffice it to say that Dumont's Straubian portrait of a youthful Joan is like none other.

6. Milla (Valérie Massadian, France / Portugal)
One of the great depictions of late adolescence, Milla perfectly renders a liminal moment, filled with play, that remains close to childhood. Time, however, presses on in the director's exquisitely natural portrait of young, working-poor motherhood—carried by its non-professional performances—and Massadian's inscriptions of the female body.

7. Downsizing (Alexander Payne, United States / Norway)
Payne's comparatively political entertainment couldn't be less current in its bleeding-heart Catholic take on environmental catastrophe, conspicuous over-consumption, and the refugee crisis. Downsizing is at once exceedingly old-fashioned in its form and one of the more idea-rich American films this year.

8. Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR, France)
The collaboration of Varda's Faces Places provides its iconic director with a new means for reaping the interpersonal rewards of her artistic practice. One of the last two remaining New Wave auteurs, and her fellow traveler JR—a dopplegänger for the other—cross the deep French countryside, fusing figure and landscape.

9. Ghost in the Mountains (Yang Heng, China)
Set amid China's depopulated and depressing rural provinces, Ghost in the Mountains is defined by a series of epic panning long takes—and a stunningly circular narrative structure that suits its ill-fated subjects. Yang's exquisitely composed feature provides a searing glimpse into China's uneven process of modernization.

10. Lover for a Day (Philippe Garrel, France)

Garrel's archly biographical fiction expertly explores the father-daughter dynamic, within a slightly shifting young lovers' paradigm, in this latest in a late-career creative surge from one of France's leading art-house lights post-nouvelle vague.

Ten Best Films' 2017 Mini-Poll

2018-01-01T14:29:00.001-08:00

1. Zama (Lucrecia Martel) - 74 points (AZ, LB, MA, RS)
2. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016) - 57 points (KW, LB, RS)
3 (tie). A Ghost Story (David Lowery) - 50 points (AZ, KW, MS)
3 (tie). Western (Valeska Grisebach) - 50 points (LB, MA, RS)
5. Get Out (Jordan Peele) - 49 points (KW, MS, SB)
6. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan) - 47 points (KW, ML, SB)
7. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino) - 44 points (AZ, LB, ML)
8. The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki) - 41 points (LB, MA, ML)
9. Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev) - 40 points (JS, LB, ML)
10. Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR) - 39 points (LB, MA, MS)

Though 2017 may have been one of the weakest year for world premiers in at least a decade, this is not the space for that assessment. The Mini-Poll, now in its tenth year, is a place instead to celebrate cinema's best—beginning with the preponderance of major films by women directors that made it onto our ballots this year. With her first film since the first year of the poll (when she placed second), Argentina's Lucrecia Martel tops this year's survey with Zama. Close behind, in a tie for third place, was Germany's Valeska Grisebach (for Western, her first film since the inception of the Mini-Poll). Left Bank master Agnès Varda also makes her first-ever appearance, in tenth place, while Valérie Massadian's Milla, Greta Gerwig's Ladybird, and Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled all just missed the cut. 2017, at its best, was the year of the woman director.

On that sign of cinematic life, I would like to announce that we will be retiring the Mini-Poll after this year. Thank you to all current and past participants, and especially to you the reader!

Voters: AZ- Alberto Zambenedetti (Ten Best Films); JS - Jeremi Szaniawski (Ten Best Films); KW - Karen Wang (You're Making a Scene); LB - Lisa K. Broad (Ten Best Films); MA - Michael J. Anderson (Ten Best Films); ML - Mike Lyon (Tits & Gore); MS - Matt Singer (Screen Crush), RS - R. Emmet Sweeney (Ten Best Films); SB - Soren Bailey: 1) Get Out, 2) Dunkirk, 3) Wonderstruck, 4) Logan Lucky, 5) Star Wars: The Last Jedi, 6) Baby Driver, 7) Spider-Man: Homecoming.

2017: Lisa K. Broad

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1. Western (Valeska Grisebach)
2. Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
3. Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev)
4. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
5. The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)
6. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
7. The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki)
8. The Square (Ruben Östlund)
9. Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR)
10. Columbus (Kogonada)

2017: R. Emmet Sweeney

2018-01-01T11:04:00.002-08:00

1. Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
2. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)
3. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (S.S. Rajamouli)
4. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2016)
5. Milla (Valérie Massadian)
6. Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
7. The Meyerwitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach)
8. On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo)
9. Brawl in Cell Block 19 (S. Craig Zahler)
10. Western (Valeska Grisebach)

2017: Jeremi Szaniawski

2018-01-01T10:53:00.002-08:00

1. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
2. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)
3. The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, 2016)
4. El Futuro (Luis Lopez Carrasco, 2013)
5. A Sea Change (Nina de Vroome, 2016)
6. The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2015)
7. Le Marquis de Wavrin: du manoir à la jungle (Grace Winter) + The Amazon Head Hunters (Marquis de Wavrin, 1932)
8. Doubleplusungood (Marco Laguna)
9. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsaye)
10. Train to Busan (Sang-ho Yeon, 2016)

Honorable mentions: Death by Death (Xavier Seron, 2016), Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev), Funérailles (de l'art de mourir) (Boris Lehman, 2016)

2017: Alberto Zambenedetti

2018-01-01T10:32:00.002-08:00

1. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison, 2016)
2. The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
3. Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
4. Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)
5. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)
6. Thelma (Joachim Trier)
7. Prototype (Blake Williams)
8. The Square (Ruben Östlund)
9. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
10. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

Alberto Zambenedetti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of World Film Locations: Cleveland (2016), World Film Locations: Florence (2014), and the co-editor of Federico Felllini: Riprese, riletture, (re)visioni (2016).

Ten Best Films of 2016

2017-01-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

1. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, United Kingdom / Belgium)
Premiering out of competition at last February’s Berlin Film Festival, A Quiet Passion was almost singular this year in its concern for the inner life of its protagonist. This heartrending Emily Dickinson biopic, starring Cynthia Nixon in a career-best performance, was also the year’s most bitterly–and courageously–personal piece of auteur filmmaker, an emotionally overwhelming confessional object from Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; Sunset Song), the greatest poet of the British screen since Humphrey Jennings.

2. Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
After a virtuosically choreographed, pre-credits long-take that ranks among the year’s most exceptional sequences, Romanian master Puiu sets up inside a Bucharest flat, his camera moving from room to room as he maps a cavernous domestic space, complicated familial relationships, and the history, politics, and religious attitudes of the post-Communist nation. The director’s darkly comedic reinterpretation of the chamber drama feels sui generis, even as it proves to be the natural extension of the occluded, outside-the-threshold aesthetic of his 2010 feature Aurora.

3. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, France / Germany / Belgium)
Too controversial, seemingly, for Cannes, this immensely immersive fiction of an intricately plotted Parisian terrorist attack, and its symbolically meaningful dead-time aftermath, is real-world relevant filmmaking done in its provocateur-director Bonello’s inimitable, de-contextualized way–as the film’s memorable lip-sync set-piece suggests. In a French film industry that often seems incapable of escaping the lures of nostalgia, the invigorating Nocturama feels as of our world as any film this year.

4. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, Germany)
Few films in recent years have achieved the degree of critical consensus surrounding Toni Erdmann, a film that seems to have been loved by absolutely everyone (except for Cannes’s George Miller-led jury). Ade’s third feature ups the cringe-factor of her less unambiguously comedic, though every bit as sharply observed Everyone Else, and brings gross-out humor worthy of the Farrelly brothers, before shifting into a surrealist register that culminates in the most spectacularly costumed–and un-costumed–set-piece in ages.

5. Elle (Paul Verhoeven, France / Germany / Belgium)
Covered by the gloss of bourgeois sophistication, Elle is down and dirty Verhoeven schlockery at its core, a rape-trauma narrative that replays the opening violent act from multiple angles, and in a mature video game that provides a platform for the director's taste for low-grade special effects. This is exceptional visual storytelling that pivots around one of the year's great performances, the legendary Isabelle Huppert in the more florid of her two roles on this list.

6. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, United States)
One of Jarmusch’s most moving films, Paterson unfolds over the course of a single week in which mundane routine gradually breaks down, giving way to profound personal crisis by week’s end. At the center of it all is poet-bus driver Paterson (an exceptional Adam Driver), one of many twins–he shares his name with his hometown–who populate the Ohio-born director’s decaying, if warmly rendered working-class, Rust Belt setting.

7. Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude, Romania / Germany)
Horizontal and bedridden as tuberculous tears through his body, Emanuel spends his days and nights in a Black Sea sanitarium in this exceptional example from Romania's most eclectic auteur. Emanuel's wheeled cot, framed perpendicularly to and diagonally from the camera, provides the visual focus for many of the film's sculptural frames–as well as a site for the sex and Nazi-era politics that distinguish this celebrated, semi-comic adaptation.

8. Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mysteries (Lav Diaz, Philippines)
History, legend, mythology, and fiction all meld together in a single story world in Diaz’s mammoth, slow-cinema novelization of the years surrounding the Philippines’ struggle for independence. Sculpting time–eight hours worth–in exquisite, high-contrast black-and-white, Diaz grafts the myth of cinema’s concurrent origins onto this new direction for one of world cinema’s most unique artists.

9. Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
At some point you would have to think that Hong will exhaust his signature story line, that he will no longer manage to make new his biographical template of artists, women, awkward conversation, and copious amounts of alcohol. Yourself and Yours confirms that we are certainly not there yet: borrowing his conceit from That Obscure Object of Desire, Hong’s looser, if even more emotionally satisfying latest turns, freshly, on the both/and possibilities of its storytelling.

10. The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra, France / Portugal / Spain)

As it always is for the human body, time is death in Serra’s film; the director simply slows its down as he turns his attention from story to the human presence–aging French New Wave axiom, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and his time-ravaged face–that fills his screen. One of the year’s best looking films, Serra's widescreen latest is dominated by the warm interior candlelight that illuminates Léaud's Sun King bedchamber as his character's life (and his too) slowly slips away.

2016: Lisa K. Broad

2017-01-07T09:46:00.001-08:00

1. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
2. My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)
3. Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015)
4. Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2015)
5. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)
6. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)
7. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, 2015)
8. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
9. Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2015)
10. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)

2016: Alberto Zambenedetti

2017-01-07T09:33:00.005-08:00

1. Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, Gianfranco Rosi)
2. It All Started at the End (Todo comenzó por el fin, Luis Ospina, 2015)
3. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
4. Jackie (Pablo Larraín)
5. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
6. Heartstone (Hjartasteinn, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson)
7. The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)
8. Daguerrotype (Le secret de la chambre noire, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
9. Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)
10. The Neon Demon (Nicholas Winding Refn)

11. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
12. Notes on Blindness (Pete Middleton and James Spinney)
13. Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015)
14. Flemish Heaven (Le Ciel Flamand, Peter Monsaert)
15. Paulina (La Patota, Santiago Mitre, 2015)
16. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
17. Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols)
18. Never Ever (À jamais, Benoit Jacquot)
19. Sami Blood (Sameblod, Amanda Kernell)
20. Like Crazy (La pazza gioia, Paolo Virzì)

Alberto Zambenedetti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of World Film Locations Cleveland (2016), World Film Locations Florence (2014), and the co-editor of Federico Fellini: Riprese, riletture, (re)visioni (2016).

Ten Best Films' 2016 Mini-Poll

2017-01-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

1. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
59 points (LB, MA, RS)
2. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
58 points (MA, ML, MS)
3. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, 2015)
51 points (LB, MA, RS)
4. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)
48 points (LB, MA, RS)
5. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)
27 points (ML, MH, MS)
6. Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2015)
41 points (LB, MA, RS)
7. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
35 points (AZ, MS)
8. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
34 points (AZ, MS)
8. Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015)
34 points (LB, RS)
10. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)
32 points (MS, RS)

11. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
29 points (MA, RS)
12. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
27 points (LB, MH)
13. Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen)
25 points (MH, MS)
14. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve)
24 points (MA, ML)

Eight years ago, in what has become an annual rite on this site, the first official Mini-Poll was conducted among ten present and former graduate film students in New York and New Haven, with the majority of that group coming from the NYU Masters in Cinema Studies class of 2005. This was not, in fact, the first time that the group shared their picks with each other; one year before, the alumni + shared their choices on Tativille and various other blogs, with three of the Masters group preferring Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and three more opting for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as the year's best film. This contentious split helped to inspire the first Mini-Poll one year later.

For the inaugural 2008 census. there was nothing but agreement, however, with Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale appearing on eight of the ten lists. A mere two years later, David Fincher's The Social Network was cited by nine of eleven besting A Christmas Tale's eighty percent share. Nine would also be the number reached by Terrence Malick's A Tree of Life, though with a twelfth participant in an all-time high for the latter metric. 2011 really was the high point for the Mini Poll, with A Tree of Life also managing the most points (on our not terribly sophisticated weighted scale) in Mini-Poll history. There was both consensus and passion backing Malick's then most recent.

Fast-forward five years, and though Malick has made a very warranted return appearance with Knight of Cups, as the top American vote-getter no less!, the Mini-Poll has basically reverted to its Tativille/Termite Art prehistory, in terms both of a more modest level of participation, and also a lack of anything approaching consensus. No film reached 50% this year, though that has much to do with the differing windows for festival and commercial releases as it does taste. After all, charter participant Mike Lyon cited top vote-getter Cemetery of Splendour on his ballot last year, while second place finisher Toni Erdmann is only now rolling out across the U.S., and won't reach some places until well into the new year. Perhaps the latter might have been a Social Network-scale juggernaut had it been screened to more voters by the end of 2016?

So here we are, seven brave souls and their choices for the best films of 2016. Yet, somehow, the results, as always, are as good as our much bigger survey competitors. For starters there are the seven English-language films that would make an extremely respectable best picture group: Knight of Cups, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Sunset Song, O.J.: Made in America, Arrival, and Hail, Caesar!.The Mini-Poll participants also came together and honored three films from East Asia in our top five, number one Cemetery of Splendour again, as well as two titles from South Korea, Right Now, Wrong Then, and the biggest surprise to me (though I was a fan), The Handmaiden. Finally, there are our four selections from Europe, and all by outstanding female directors, Toni Erdmann, Chevalier, No Home Movie, and Things to Come. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Contributors: Alberto Zambenedetti (AZ), Lisa K. Broad (LB), Michael J. Anderson (MA), Matt Hauske (MH), Mike Lyon (ML), Matt Singer (MS), and R. Emmet Sweeney (RS).

Postscript: Of those distinguished emeriti whose globe-trotting ways did not allow them to participate this year, I would be remiss were I note to share P.L. Kerpius's rather unconventional choices and Jeremi Szaniawski's more negative than positive assessment of 2016. For Pam the best films of the year were: 1) Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi), 2) Moonlight (Barry Jenkins), 3) Fire at Sea, 4) Fire at Sea, 5) Fire at Sea, 6) Fire at Sea, 7) Fire at Sea, 8) Fire at Sea, 9) Fire at Sea, and 10) Fire at Sea. Sorry, Pam, I'm not counting Fire at Sea nine times, but I would point out that she joins Alberto Zambenedetti in selecting the film as the year's best--so that is something. (Alberto had different ideas for 3-10.)

As for Jeremi, the obvious choice for the year's best was Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, which I concur was a very worthy choice (as is Fire at Sea for that matter). Jeremi also commends the re-released anime feature, Belladonna of Sadness, and Fever Room, which as Jeremi points out, is perhaps more "expanded cinema" than anything else. As for the year's most overrated, the choices were more robust for Mr. Szaniawski: 1) Neon Demon (Windig Refn) 2) Elle (Verhoeven) 3) Zootopia (whoever at Disney did that) 4) Finding Dory (whoever at Pixar did that) 5) Carol (Haynes). As a fan of the film, personally, the dislike for Elle among this year's participants and emeriti--let alone its complete lack of support on this year's poll--is the biggest surprise of all.

Ten Best Films of 2015

2016-01-10T10:57:00.003-08:00

1. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / France)
The first new feature in eight years by one of the medium's greatest artists, and one 2015's most outstanding achievements, The Assassin masterfully pursues its super-cinematic fetish to the point of conceptual exhaustion: rippling silks, a flickering candle, a fluttering branch. Hou returns to cinema's first source of spectacle in this lavishly detailed portrait of invisible presence.

2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / United Kingdom / France / Germany / Malaysia / South Korea / Mexico / United States / Norway)
An open and digressive masterpiece from the best director of his (post-Hou) generation, myth and remembrance find their place in a hospital ward populated by sleeping soldiers. Thai military rule intervenes accordingly, along with Apichatpong films past, in this latest expansion of the filmmaker's sprawling multiverse.

3. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

A return to the twice-told format that defined his pre-2008 body of work (cf. Virgin Stripped Bare by His Bachelors), Hong's 17th feature provides just enough variation to radically disassemble story from plot. A film about how stories can be told differently, Right Now, Wrong Then is filmmaking as the most potent form of film criticism.

4. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, United States)

Fragmented, lyrical and impressionistic to the most extreme of degrees, the suddenly prolific Malick's Pilgrim's Progress riff possess the same "similitude of a dream" as Bunyan's high-Protestant 17th c. original. To the Wonder looks less and less like a divertissement seen in light of this portrait of a Hollywood star's soul.

5. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

No less than the third (and certainly the most unambiguously entertaining) feature made by Panahi since receiving his 20-year ban from filmmaking, Taxi asserts the director's latest alibi in his car's dashboard security device. Talk of interrogators and its final-act theft also insure that this is the director's most overtly political film too.

6. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium / France)

2015 marked the tragic passing of Akerman, but not before the feminist film icon produced the year's most moving piece of essay cinema. No Home Movie also represented a seismic shift in our understanding of the director's art, a corpus, because of this latest, that now demands to be seen in reference to the filmmaker's mother.

7. Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary)

The most formally audacious Holocaust fiction of the 21st century, Nemes hues unwaveringly to his 'Sonderkommando'-lead's perspective, producing an immersive nightmare reality where spur-of-the-moment response is the only form of action. All is survival, in other words, as he fights ceaselessly for a single human gesture.

8. The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania / France)

The precisely structured latest from one of Romania's smartest auteurs, The Treasure plays off its Robin Hood intertext to produce a real-world fairy tail that continually subverts the expectations created by its art-cinema framework. A return to the thematic and stylistic territory -- not to mention the pleasures -- of the director's best, Police, Adjective.

9. Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece)

Staged on a rented private vessel in the Aegean Sea, Chevalier cunningly exposes the absurdities of male competition in its presentation of a game in which the participants are judged by each other in everything they do. The Attenberg director's latest is a new peak for Greece's exceedingly allegorical nascent art-cinema idiom.

10. Tharlo (Pema Tseden, China)

In Tharlo, leading Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden often prefers to shoot reflective surfaces. He visualizes -- and dramatizes -- conflicts between the old ways of life and new in practically every frame, which likewise register the film’s small-town and mountainous rural locales in lustrous black-and-white. A work about the contested arrival of modernity.

Ten Best Films' 2015 Mini-Poll

2016-01-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
76 points (AZ, KW, MS, RS, SB)
2. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
71 points (LB, MA, ML, RS)
3. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
58 points (MA, ML, RS)
4. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014)
54 points (KW, MA, RS)
5. Carol (Todd Haynes)
49 points (KW, MA, RS)
5. Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
49 points (AZ, KW, MS, SB)
7. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)
46 points (AZ, LB, MS)
7. Taxi (Jafar Panahi)
46 points (LB, MA, ML)
9. Tangerine (Sean Baker)
42 points (KW, MS, SB)
10. Out 1: Noli me Tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)
37 points (LB, MA)

Also receiving multiple votes: Inside Out (Pete Docter) - 36 points (MS, SB), Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg) - 33 points (MS, SB), It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) - 32 points (AZ, SB), Love (Gaspar Noé) - 30 points (AZ, ML), Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014) - 29 points (KW, LB), Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014) - 29 points (LB, MA), Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo) - 28 points (MA, RS), Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs) - 27 points (LB, RS), The Big Short (Adam McKay) - 26 points (KW, SB), The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson) - 26 points (LB, ML), Office (Johnnie To) - 25 points (ML, RS)

Eights years into the Ten Best Films' Mini-Poll, and we're down to all but the die-hards now, to eight NYU Cinema Studies masters' program alumni (circa 2005) who have managed, against all odds, to participate in every survey. What we lack for in numbers at this point, however, we seem to be making up for in greater consensus -- at least in this year of Mad Max and The Assassin and Carol, to name but three worthy (if predictable) favorites. In fact, in comparison to last year, when three or more voters agreed on a mere five films, this year we came together on nine of our top ten, and overall, there were two or more votes for 20 films. Like I said, a year of consensus.

Except when it comes to our choices for best film, where only one film was selected by more than one voter (Cemetery of Splendour, by Mike Lyon and R. Emmet Sweeney). Other choices included: The Assassin, Carol, Inside Out, It Follows, Li'l Quinquin (which received an additional first place vote last year), and Lost and Beautiful -- respectable choices all, if I do say so myself. Speaking of Cemetery of Splendour, it was, along with the 44 year-old Out 1, one of the two films selected as top three by each of their two or more voters. Interestingly, our winner Mad Max: Fury Road, finished no higher than third on any of this year's ballots, and averaged roughly a sixth place finish. Even more notable for the lack of passion it generated was Ex Machina, which placed on an impressive four ballots, but never higher than seventh on any one.

With that, I would encourage the poll's readers to click on the ballots below, with the caveat that mine links to my 2015 world premiere list and not to my (poll-fixing) ballot; for those interested in the choices I made to manipulate this year's tabulations, they were: The Assassin, Out 1, Cemetery of Splendour, Knight of Cups, Phoenix, Taxi, Jauja, No Home Movie, Right Now, Wrong Then, and Carol. All films I saw for the first time since last year's poll.

Here's to another great year of film-viewing, and to the hopes that we will be doing this once again a year from now. At the very least we need to hit double-digits for the world's least prominent film poll, right?

Contributors: Alberto Zambenedetti (AZ), Lisa K. Broad (LB), Karen Wang (KW), Michael J. Anderson (MA), Mike Lyon (ML), Matt Singer (MS), R. Emmet Sweeney (RS), Soren Bailey (SB)

2015: Soren Bailey

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1. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
2. The Martian (Ridley Scott)
3. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)
4. Tangerine (Sean Baker)
5. Inside Out (Pete Docter)
6. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
7. The Big Short (Adam McKay)
8. Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
9. Spectre (Sam Mendes)
10. Sicario (Denis Villeneuve)

Soren Bailey is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker with a M. A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

2015: Lisa K. Broad

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1. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2014)

2. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

3. Out 1: Noli me Tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

4. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)

5. Taxi (Jafar Panahi)

6. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)

7a. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)

7b. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)

8. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson)

9. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)

10. La Sapienza (Eugène Green, 2014)

Runners-up: Carol (Todd Haynes), Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014), Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014), Victoria (Sebastian Schipper)

Favorite Repertory: The Apu Trilogy (Satyajit Ray, 1955-1959), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985)

Favorite Streaming & Home Video: Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), The Blue Room (Mathieu Amalric, 2014), The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979), Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975), A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971), La Vie de Bohème (Aki Kaurismäki, 1992)