Top Ten Films of the Year

Since we became film critics in 2006, we've been selecting our Top Ten best films of each year. Over the last few years, as we've grown more discerning, we've narrowed it down to a Top Five (due to the smaller quantity of mainstream movies - and perhaps as a protest against the Academy’s insistence upon ten “Best Picture” nominees, which is a shameless marketing gimmick - but below you can see every selection throughout the decades.

We generally see plenty of the biggest and most lauded films every year, but fewer and fewer resonate; as time marches on, we seem to agree less and less with our critical brethren, especially when it comes to pictures that surpass the two-hour mark. Are our attention spans becoming shorter, like the masses who consume too much social media? Or is it just increasingly unnecessary for all of these auteur filmmakers to insist upon excessive runtimes? It seems as if they favor unusual length just because they aren’t forced to trim their final cuts. It’s good, in a way, that creative control is returned to the makers of original ideas (it’s certainly the opposite when it comes to the many award-winning directors who go on to helm big-budget superhero flicks that inevitably bomb), but it’s also apparently giving them free range to leave in every scene, regardless of its value to the end product (and its undoubted detriment to pacing). Either way, we long for the days of the 90-minutes-or-less features, which didn’t have a problem telling a complete story with detailed characters, all while remaining mindful of a viewer’s patience.

On a side note, we are only able to choose movies for each list based on what was seen in the calendar year; several years we saw what would have been on the list - or at the top of it - after the year ended, which made certain popular and critically acclaimed titles ineligible. Nevertheless, click each image to read the full reviews!