Top 6 Word: Year

Time is funny. You stop writing movie posts for a while, and suddenly it's twelve years later. I never meant to stop writing about movies, but one can't do everything. All I can say is that I miss it, and what better way to scratch that itch than to dive right back in?

Since we're talking about time, let's use a time word for this Top 6 list. My Top 6 "Year" movies follow, but first a few worthwhile movies that missed the cut. Coincidentally, they are all the kind of comedies that, in their retrospective eras, "they just don't make anymore": The Big Year (2011), a favorite of my avid birder parents; Leap Year, an Ireland-set romantic comedy; and My Favorite Year, with a great performance by Peter O'Toole playing a drunken matinee idol.

6. Woman of the Year (1942)

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their first of many iconic pairings. Their chemistry was legendary for a reason.

5. A Most Violent Year (2014)

Crime in New York City, 1981. The film isn't so much about individual crimes as how being entangled in the crime world consumes the whole of one's personal and in particular family life. The performances, particularly from Jessica Chastain, are terrific.

4. The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Marilyn Monroe moves into the apartment upstairs and drives Tom Ewell crazy in this Billy Wilder comedy. The film does two seemingly contradictory things: It defines, captures, and makes manifest the essence of her screen personality better than any other film (this is the one with that iconic image of Marilyn walking over a subway grate), and it sees past the superficiality of that image to the beating heart underneath. The film didn't need her to be more than a temptation for Tom Ewell's character, but it overdelivers with hilarious and touching results.

3. Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

This is the David Lynch movie of the French New Wave. Director Alain Resnais has no shortage of evocative imagery to fill the frame with. There is not much of a story in a literal sense, but the flow of emotions feels like one. It's pretentious as all get-out, but it's hard to argue Resnais' vision isn't striking enough to warrant it.

2. Another Year (2010)

Mike Leigh's exploration of an older married couple and their relationships with friends and family. Leigh's unique method of building characters with the actors and letting them find the story themselves once again bears uniquely compelling fruit.

1. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (2000)

John Travolta's pensive ruminations on life, guilt, redemption, love, loyalty, and space lasers, are exactly one thousand years ahead of their time. This evocative treatise on humanity and the erosion of social values provokes new thought and debate over the age old question: How long should a tongue really be?