Celebrating 20 years: Picks of the years

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed put­ting togeth­er annu­al “Best of the year” columns so I thought this might be a good oppor­tun­ity to high­light my favour­ites for each year that I have here. (See the links at the top of the page for the full articles.)

2007: Into the Wild

Perhaps a bit of recency bias slip­ping in here but I did think enough of Into the Wild to own a copy and have re-watched it more than once. Fascinatingly, in the extras on the Blu-ray I learnt that the flash­back struc­ture that Penn so effect­ively deploys was not in the ori­gin­al script but dis­covered dur­ing the edit­ing pro­cess. Editing is writ­ing, as they say.

As beau­ti­ful to look at and listen to as the finest art film, but remain­ing down to earth, it fea­tures a star-making per­form­ance from Emile Hirsch lead­ing an ensemble of fine screen act­ors and it ulti­mately deliv­ers a mes­sage that is com­pletely dif­fer­ent to the one you expect: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

2008: No Country for Old Men

I did­n’t write any­thing about No Country except to name it the year’s best, so here’s what I wrote in my ini­tial review from February 2008:

… essen­tial cinema in two senses of the word. First and fore­most you must see it, prob­ably more than once. But it is also cinema reduced to its essence.

2009: Slumdog Millionaire

Mashing togeth­er sev­er­al archetyp­al stor­ies with a vivid visu­al style and a per­cuss­ive energy, Slumdog may not rep­res­ent India as it actu­ally is but instead suc­cess­fully evoked what India feels like, which is argu­ably more import­ant. After Slumdog everything I saw seemed, you know, old-fashioned and noth­ing has been any­where nearly as thrill­ing since.

2010: A tie

First, the keep­ers: a sur­prise for some will be Fantastic Mr. Fox which was released after my 2009 Year in Review was sub­mit­ted and the only film in the list that I already own. Animal Kingdom was the film I most recom­men­ded this year – a stun­ning, tense piece of work that gripped me totally.

Taika Waititi’s Boy has a lot more going on than just cheeky com­edy and I look for­ward to revis­it­ing it often. And Toy Story 3 com­pleted the best fam­ily enter­tain­ment fran­chise in such a per­fect, mov­ing, thrill­ing way. It was Pixar’s finest achieve­ment to date and yes, read­ers, I cried.

2011: Another tie

By this time I was delib­er­ately not singling films out as “best” (and I have already praised The Tree of Life earli­er on this week):

Keepers are the films that I loved so much I want to own them – films that make me feel bet­ter just hav­ing them in the house. The first film I adored this year was slushy Disney horse racing story Secretariat. It should have been everything I hate – manip­u­lat­ive, worthy, a faith-based sub­text – and yet I cried like a baby – expert button-pushing from dir­ect­or Randall Wallace. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was my favour­ite block­buster. Superb dir­ec­tion by Rupert Wyatt over­came the flaws (ahem, James Franco, ahem) and it care­fully walked the tightrope of both respect for its pre­de­cessors and kick­ing off some­thing new.

2012: This Must Be the Place

The film I fell in love with, though (and now sleep with under my pil­low) is the strange and won­der­ful This Must Be the Place star­ring Sean Penn as a retired rock star who becomes a Nazi hunter. Disarming.

2016: Toni Erdmann

In 2016, my list was pub­lished at RNZ rather than here:

My favour­ite film of 2016 – and one that could become an annu­al Christmas ritu­al view­ing  –  Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) man­aged to win over every­one this year except the Cannes jury. Its bounty is not imme­di­ately appar­ent from a simple plot sum­mary so ignore them when you see them and just go when the film comes out in cinemas next year.

2024: Perfect Days

In 2024 I also wrote a review of the year for RNZ but mis­un­der­stood the brief and it was rejec­ted, so sent it out to the Substack news­let­ter sub­scribers instead:

… my favour­ite film of 2024 was by the almost-80 Wim Wenders. Perfect Days was about a med­it­at­ive middle-aged clean­er of Tokyo pub­lic toi­lets and was a pro­found les­son in con­tent­ment. Almost the per­fect film, you might say.

December 2026 is hurt­ling towards us so I had bet­ter start think­ing about a list. Have I seen enough this year, though?

Thanks for indul­ging me through this anniversary week. Normal – sporad­ic – ser­vice will resume next week.