Unlike in the musical arena, my cinematic tastes are pretty wide-ranging and by no means restricted to a single genre. Thus, I count six films as worthy of unambiguous recommendation — The Queen, The Descent, The Departed, Talladega Nights, Tristram Shandy, and Brick. I’m having a great deal of trouble working those into an ordinal ranking. I would say Tristram Shandy and Brick are probably movies for cinephiles, while Descent and Departed have the most mainstream appeal. For whatever reason, a healthy number of people who I would have thought would like Talladega Nights didn’t, in practice, enjoy it. Thus The Queen is probably the best movie of the year in some sense, though I’d say I liked Tristram Shandy the best personally.
That leaves the need for four more movies to fill out a top-ten list and I’m going to go with Half Nelson, V for Vendetta, Little Miss Sunshine, and Casino Royale but the exclusion of Apocalypto, Little Children and The Road from Guantanamo from that list is a bit arbitrary since I liked those three a lot, too. I haven’t re-viewed any of these movies, so it’s possible that my rankings will change over time.
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