The Films of 2013 Ranked and Rated

It's probably true that every year is a good year for film, if you're willing to dig hard enough to find the stuff that's truly exciting, but it seems like 2013 was one of those years that was especially good. A handful of new faces emerged, a ton of old favorites put out new releases, and in general it just felt like most everything that came out ended up living up to its potential. Okay, so a lot of the summertime releases were pretty bleak, but the American independents just killed it this year, and there really weren't any huge misfires at all once the end of the year awards hopefuls started rolling out.

On a personal level too, 2013 was a year where I finally allowed myself to skip a lot of stuff that just didn't interest me and that didn't generate any buzz after its release to indicate that I might have prejudged it harshly. Going to see a bad movie can be fun every once in a while, but when you really make it a point to go see as many things as you can, no matter how little you're looking forward to them, you can start to taint the meditative and holy experience of going to the theater and putting all of your focus on one thing for a couple of hours. This year I mostly only went to see things that I at least had some sort of cursory interest in, and that resulted in me ringing in 2014 while feeling more appreciative of the therapeutic nature of cinema than I have in a while.

Now, before we get too off topic, here are the 2013 movies that I saw in 2013 (as far as I can tell), ranked and rated. My top ten of the year are in bold, if you're the sort of person who puts value in things like numbered lists with a strict cutoff. Hopefully this will help at least one person find a good movie to watch, or maybe a terrible movie to avoid.

The ABCs of Death (2013) in 26 Tweets

Seeing as they’re usually comprised of varying-in-quality shorts made by varying-in-talent directors, anthology movies can be fairly difficult to review. Critiques generally come down to “some of the segments were better than others,” or “whether it’s worth sitting through the two bad stories to get to the good one is a matter of opinion.” That’s a difficult enough challenge with the usual anthologies, which generally have no more than 4 or 5 segments, so effectively reviewing an anthology movie like The ABCs of Death, which is comprised of 26 short segments made by 26 different directors, feels like something of an impossibility. Because of this, instead of writing a traditional review, I decided to take to Twitter and compose a quick reaction to each segment (one for each letter of the alphabet, if you haven’t caught on to the gimmick yet). Here were the results...

A) Over the top violence featuring some fun, practical gore. But nothing more. #ABCsOfDeath

B) Getting a little girl to go to bed by terrifying her is darkly funny, but there’s nothing too clever here. Features boobs. #ABCsOfDeath

C) Time loop story that unironically goes nowhere. Laughable acting. Low budget look. No bueno. #ABCsOfDeath

2012 Ratings and Rankings

Since it's no longer 2012, I suppose it's no longer necessary to keep track of 2012 movies. Here's everything I ended up seeing and the rough order I liked them in, just in case you were looking for stuff to watch.

Beasts of the Southern Wild *****

The Silver Linings Playbook *****

Amour ****

The Avengers ****

Your Sister’s Sister ****

Moonrise Kingdom ****

Zero Dark Thirty ****

The Raid: Redemption ****

This Must Be the Place ****

Killer Joe ****

5 Days at TIFF: Day 5: ‘Cuchera’ and ‘Damsels in Distress’

I can do all of the complaining about celebrity worship and corporate sponsorship in the world, and believe me, I will; but none of the bad things that come along with a big film festival can come close to overshadowing the fact that TIFF is a giant event where thousands of people come together to celebrate the movies. The thing I’m probably most passionate about. In my day to day life it would seem impossible to get a bunch of people together and have them commit to going to see 3 or 4 movies a day, but here, that is the reality. And people do it enthusiastically. They talk about what they’ve seen; they chat about what they’re enthusiastic to see next. They compare notes, compare tastes, and generally just celebrate the art of filmmaking.

From just tooling around on the Internet all day looking to talk movies, you might get the impression that real film buffs mostly all fall into the same category of person. That category being slightly socially awkward white males in their 20s. The biggest thing that going to a film festival teaches you is that there are people passionately into movies of all shapes and sizes and from all over the world. In my five days hanging out and watching movies I struck up conversations with people from all age groups, all shades of skin color, and from a good number of different countries. And they knew all the right names, all the good directors, they adored all of the same less than well-known actors that I did. They spoke the language.

Being a film-obsessed person can be a bit of an isolating experience. Everybody, if you ask them, will tell you that they love to go to the movies. But really they don’t mean it. They see, maybe, a movie a month in theaters. They only watch the biggest releases. They only know the biggest stars. And forget naming any directors. When you try to show them something art house, or something foreign, they get bored and leave the room. These people do not love going to the movies. They love eating popcorn. They love going out on dates. Finding someone else who is really passionate about all kinds of cinema is a rare, life-affirming experience, even in this modern age of online congregation. If you would have told my budding film nerd 12-year-old self that there was a whole city out there where everyone knew as much about movies and was as enthusiastic about watching them as he was, he would call you a liar. Then he would put on his headphones and sulk. TIFF brings that dream to a reality, even if only for a week or so, and it’s really a special experience.

5 Days at TIFF: Day 4: ‘Rampart’, ‘Low Life’, and ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

Earlier today I heard a girl use the word TIFFing as a verb. She said she made an excuse to get off work so that she could go TIFFing all day long. I thought it was thoroughly ridiculous, so I’m going to use the word here. TIFFing is harder work than you might think it’s going to be at first. When you first see the film schedule you figure that you’ll be able to watch like 5 films a day, really pack them in there, no big deal. I mean, all you’re doing is sitting in comfy chairs and watching movies all day, what is more relaxing than that? I could keep this up forever.

There are a lot of little things you have to deal with that don’t get factored into your initial schedule though. There’s walking to and from theaters. Most of the theaters are grouped together in two little areas of downtown Toronto, one around the Yonge/Dundas area and the other in the entertainment district; but depending on how your films get scheduled you can have a 25 minute or so walk from theater to theater. There are trolley cars, taxis, and a subway, but that’s for wimps. The other thing that you don’t factor in is all the little extras that come along with a screening. There are introductions, reading of sponsor acknowledgments, the same four ads that you have to sit through before every movie, Q&As after the screening; once you add them all up they can add a significant amount of time to the film’s runtime and cram your schedule.

But probably the biggest time waster that comes along with TIFFing is time that you spend standing in the lines. If you want to get a decent seat in the theater you should probably show up an hour early; some people show up significantly earlier than that. If you’re seeing multiple films a day, that ends up being a lot of time standing in lines. Add to it the awesome weather that Toronto has been giving TIFF this year, and that’s a lot of time spent standing in lines with the sun beating down on you, sweating in the concrete jungle.

5 Days at TIFF: Day 3: ‘Dark Horse’, ‘Machine Gun Preacher’, and ‘Shame’

Shame in the Princess of Whales Theatre: front row balcony, dead center.

One of the biggest continual to-dos you have to deal with when you’re attending a film festival is the mad dash to the theater seats. People line up for hours in front of the theaters, and then, all at the same time, everyone is allowed in about a half hour before the screening starts. That’s when the fast walking begins. The more people in your party, the harder it is for you to stake out property. Everyone wants to be as close to the screen, as close to where the filmmakers will be answering questions on stage, as possible. The quickest squat on the best spots, and then they leave one person behind to save seats while everybody else goes to the bathroom, gets drinks, etcetera. That’s when the hovering starts. The people who weren’t so quick now have to hover around the area that’s already been picked clean and try to find scraps. Is that one open? How about those there? If somebody moves down is there enough room for all three of us? The experience of having people hover over you, eyeballing the seats next to you suspiciously, ready to strike, can be more than a bit uncomfortable. Not to mention the fact that you’re forced to answer the same stupid question over and over. Yes that one is taken. Yes that one is as well. Yes I’m certain.

Instead of dealing with all this I handle the seating dilemma a different way. While everyone is walking around in circles, looking lost like a tribe of persecuted folk stuck wandering in the middle of the desert, I just walk in and go immediately to the balcony. This is a good idea for several reasons. Firstly, it’s going to afford you the best view of the screen in the house. Sitting on the floor where the seats are barely sloped is just stupid, and being pulled back a bit from the giant screens in these big theaters offers the best perspective. Secondly, you don’t have to deal with the hoverers for nearly as long. Sure, eventually the weakest of the pack all make their way upstairs and start to look for seats there, but by that time the movie is about to start anyways, so you only have to deal with about five minutes of people who brought their twelve cousins to a movie and they all need to sit together staring at you. Thirdly, you can stand in line about half as long as the people who get themselves right up in the front row, and have a better view of the film than them to boot.

5 Days at TIFF: Day 2: ‘Into the Abyss’ and ‘Hick’

Attending a film festival alongside a bunch of industry people really drives home the fact that movie making is much more about the business than it is the show. I might go as far as to describe seeing a film premiere on Toronto’s advertising packed Yonge Street as the pinnacle of consumer Hell. You’re surrounded by billboards as big as the buildings they’re attached to, a Coca-Cola executive is handing everybody tiny bottles of Diet Coke as they wait in the line, a candy company comes by stuffing everybody’s face with sugary treats, top 40 music is pumping out of a speaker from God knows where, you get in the theater and a bunch of the best seats are reserved by corporate sponsors who don’t even show up to the screening, and then before the movie starts you have to sit through a festival employee reading the same lengthy list of said sponsors before every film. Even once the screen flickers alive you get regaled with commercials for Bell and Cadillac.

The streets here are packed with people carrying Starbucks cups, fast food wrappers, and cell phones. One of the biggest shopping malls I’ve ever seen looms over half of the festival village, and the whole town has a maze of shopping centers underground (meanwhile there’s two measly subway lines that go almost nowhere). Half the cars that drive by have corporate logos stuck to them; any inch of real estate that isn’t taken up by storefronts has a makeshift stand set up on it. People are asked to sign up for free offers, fiddle with new gadgets, get free makeup samples slathered on their faces. There is so much consuming going on in such a concentrated area that all of the garbage cans are stuffed full to overflowing. When the trash section fills up, people just start sticking their garbage in with the recyclables. Then they pile their cups on top of the bin, and eventually just cover the surrounding ground. It’s manifest destiny for refuse.

5 Days at TIFF: Day 1: ‘Elles’ and ‘God Bless America’

When you get to the Toronto International Film Festival, the first thing that really hits you is how far the city’s dedication to Sparkle Motion goes where this festival is concerned. TIFF is different from that other big North American film festival Sundance in that it’s held right in the middle of a huge, functioning city rather than out in the middle of nowhere. The amount of the city’s downtown that gets completely taken over by the festivities is astounding. There are festivalgoers everywhere, festival volunteers on every corner, and booths hocking free samples of who knows what as far as the eye can see.  Take that picture to the right for instance. That’s one of the city’s main arteries, Yonge Street, blocked off for blocks so that celebrities can step right out of a car, directly onto a red carpet, and into the theater where their film is being shown. Well la-de-da.

The other thing that has surprised me most about a film festival packed full of so many interesting movies is that the talk around town isn’t much about the movies at all, it’s all about the actors; or the “movie stars” in the parlance of the man on the street. You get a lot of people crowded together in lines and behind barricades, and none of the talk is about which movies are the best, or which ones were disappointments. It’s all about, which movie star did you see? Who drew the biggest crowd outside their premier? Were Brad and Angelina enough to steal some of Clooney’s thunder? Which stars are going to be at this theater tonight? Where is Bono going next? Sure, you get a lot of people fully engaged in the festival and going to lots of movies; but they don’t seem to have any idea what they’re seeing going into the theater. They’re here collecting film titles like Pokemon Cards: gotta catch ‘em all. Did you meet the director after the film? Wasn’t he lovely? I’ll have to remember his name. I can’t wait to txt Nancy!

After the three-hour ordeal of standing in line at the main festival box office and collecting my tickets, I did end up seeing a couple movies on day one. Check out my thoughts after the break.

The Top Ten Films of 2007

What do I remember about 2007? I think that I graduated from college that year, but I’m not completely certain. Mostly what I remember is that it was probably the best film year I’ve ever experienced in my life. There were just so many movies that I enjoyed that came out over the course of the year, and then the last month, when all of the art films hit theaters, I had almost a complete overload of cinematic love going on inside of me. I’m pretty sure when other people saw me walk into a room they probably heard “Walking on Sunshine” playing in their brains. 1994 was the year that I had seen so many interesting movies that I became a real cinephile, and 1999 was probably my favorite film year to this point. Comparatively, the first half of the 2000s felt like a pretty big letdown, and possibly the beginning of the end as far as humanity was concerned. And then 2007 came around and everything suddenly seemed right again. Before December rolled around, this would have been a pretty strong year already, but then two of the greatest movies ever made were released by two of my favorite filmmakers back to back, and the experience threw every all-time list I had ever made into complete upheaval. Were these my favorite films ever made? How did they manage to come out right after one another? And which one did I like better?

The Top Ten Films of 2006

For most of 2006 I was submerged eyeball deep in academia.  I took hard classes, lots of them, and didn’t have the time or energy to focus on much else.  With a full to bursting load of literature classes and a daunting requirement to learn another language, it turned out I had a lot of reading to do. I mean like 12-14 hours a day in school and reading.  For a guy that had been mostly a lay about to that point, this was serious stuff.  I essentially lived in a 24-hour café during the week, subsisting only on caffeine.  And I completely shut down my brain on the weekends, taking in nothing but booze.  It was, in some ways, the quintessential college experience.  It didn’t leave much time to watch movies and it certainly left no time or inclination to follow the film industry.  But the student union at my college did show a free movie every weekend.  Most of what I saw in 2006 came from taking advantage of that program.  It was the first time I ever walked into a theater not knowing what I was going to see.  It was a year where a lot of movies came out from filmmakers that I wasn’t familiar with.  And I was reading very few bits of criticism or film news online.  Never in my adult life have I had as many surprises as I did in 2006.  Usually by the time a movie comes out I’ve almost already formed my opinion of it, almost already written my review.  Sometimes it can be hard to push all preconceived notions aside and make sure you’re looking at a movie fresh.  I’ll remember 2006 as the year no effort had to be made, and the year where unexpected treasures got to be unearthed.     

The Top Ten Films of 2005

Fresh off of a rehabilitation program made necessary by the soul crushing experience of attempting to attend classes at Purdue University and live in the isolated industrial hell of West Lafayette Indiana, I decided in 2005 that it was time I gathered up all of my gumption and got that little problem of graduating college out of the way.  So, lump in my throat and doubt in my heart, I packed up a collection of clothing and hand me down furniture and moved down to the mystical fairy woodland known as Bloomington Indiana; home of Indiana University.  If you are a kid who grew up in Indiana you have exactly two choices of where you will go to college: IU or Purdue.  IU is the sober yin to Purdue’s raging yang.  Where the landscape of Purdue is bleak and empty with boxy brick buildings, IU is wooded and natural and populated with architecturally interesting buildings made out of local limestone.  Where Purdue caters to the engineering and agricultural pursuits of the world, IU is a hotbed of art and culture.  Suffice to say, my time attending IU went much more smoothly than my attempts at wedging a round peg into a square hole at Purdue.  Why I tried to go to Purdue instead of IU in the first place is a mystery.  What can I say?  I was the first person in my family to go to college and I just blindly followed the majority of my friends into the gates of hell.  A little advice leading me in the opposite direction would have probably been nice.  A few years out from my graduation and I now question why I had to go to one of these big state schools at all, and why I couldn’t have just put myself somewhere in Chicago, where I would have gotten a head start at getting out of the rural and suburban black hole that is life in Indiana.  Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.  Or at least that’s what people say.  With all of this life changing stuff going on in 2005 I didn’t have much mental energy left to direct toward movies.  I went to the theater pretty regularly, and yet film was never at the forefront of my mind.  But somehow, the first rumblings of my future as an obscure online film critic began to emerge.  That summer after my first semester at IU I tried to better structure some of my time by writing my very first movie reviews.  Looking back on them they were a bit too snarky and gimmicky; but the basic idea that this was something that I could do was there.  Ultimately I had too much change going on in my life to stick with the pursuit and make something out of it, and by the time I had to head back to college that fall there was little time left to write any reviews at all.  But still, it was this period that I looked back on earlier this year when a desire to better structure my free time reached critical mass.  And it was probably the work ethic that I acquired getting through all of my literature classes at IU that has allowed me to stick with this review writing thing on a weekly basis for almost a whole year now.  I guess I had the desire to put the puzzle together back then, but I’d yet to get my hands on all of the pieces.  Early on in my teen years my obsession about film developed, and then into my early twenties it took a backseat to more pressing life concerns; but when nearing my thirties it became a more focused way of forgetting about that slow slide into oblivion?  Oh brother, that’s bleak.       

The Top Ten Films of 2004

Looking back on the films that were released in 2004 and the specific memories that I have around going to see them makes me realize that 2004 was the first year that really felt like part of the 00 decade in a solid way.  Before that my memories and experiences blur with the previous.  There were flashes of things that feel like the aughts before this; Lost in Translation from the previous fall feels very this decade.  But still, up through 2003 I also have a lot of memories that feel like holdovers of the 90s. Every decade seems to take a few years to figure out what its identity is going to be and clearly this has become the digital decade.  A time defined by spending our time looking at screens and recreating our lives and identities as much as we can on the Internet.  It’s the decade of eBooks replacing weather worn heirlooms, digital downloads replacing trips to the CD shop, social networking bringing your night out back home with you into your bedroom.  This was the year when I started to see people carrying around iPods everywhere, when all of my friends packed their music collections into giant Tupperware containers and dragged them up to the attic.  And the movies, they felt like they had found their own unique voices.  Gone, finally, was the swarm of indie directors doing their best Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith impressions.  This year was all about the fresh, the new: springtime on the Internet and in the cinemas.  And I guess it had to be, we were only a year away from YouTube.  

The Top Ten Films of 2003

I really don’t remember 2003 as being this much of an abysmal year.  I suppose this must have been the time when I stepped away from movies for a while and focused on other things.  Of course, I don’t mean that I stopped watching movies, mind you.  I’m sure I probably saw just about everything important that came out this year; but I stepped away from the preoccupation of following the industry.  I watched things as they came out, instead of keeping track of what was in production and tracking their progress.  I hit up the multiplex and didn’t really venture out on road trips to check out too many limited release things.  Instead, I started a work out regiment to drop my depression weight.  I started putting together a new circle of friends.  I focused on making money and tried to put the failures of my first college stint behind me.  And dang, it’s a good thing.  What a sorry list of films it was that came out in 2003.  A guy paying much attention could have gone and got upset.  I hope there are a large handful of gems that have escaped under my radar over the years that will eventually fill this list out a bit more.  I hope, but I’m doubtful...

The Top Ten Films of 2002

I’ll always remember 2002 fondly as the year that I quit college.  As strangely backwards as it may sound, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.  Accepting the fact that I just wasn’t happy where I was and taking off to regroup elsewhere proved to be a marvelously effective way of pulling myself out of a funk and getting back on track.  Who says quitting’s for losers?  My perpendicular path with the film world continued this year as well, as a very bleak 2000 and a bottom heavy 2001 finally gave way to a year that introduced me to a lot of great new films.  What I find ironic is that looking over the list of movies that I really loved from this year, the themes are generally very dark, the humor pitch black, and there are some downright disturbing moments and images in a lot of the films that I loved from this year.  Yet, I look back at it as a pretty encouraging, positive time in my life.  Maybe there’s something very therapeutic and true about misery loving company.  Or maybe good filmmaking is just dang heartwarming no matter what the subject matter.

The Top Ten Films of 2001

After a rough 2000 I went into 2001 without much of a strong opinion on whether the world was ending or if it wasn’t.  The film landscape the previous year was a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.  Personally, I had never been worse.  Disillusioned with everything that Middle America had to offer, this was the year that I decided to quit college and enter a questionable world of mindless labor and inevitable demise.  In short, I really needed a bunch of great movies to come out to give me a jump-start and get me caring about life again.  2001 wasn’t quite that year.  Don’t get me wrong, the top four films on my list I completely love, and they went a long way in enriching my life that year, but the bottom three I could really take or leave.  And that leaves a lot of film watching below my list that was frustrating to say the least.  2001 was a very top-heavy year.  A handful of films that I loved and probably kept me going more than I even know now; but also a wasteland of suck that, on a day to day basis, had me feeling like there was no great meaning to it all, and that soon there was bound to be a raining down of hellfire and brimstone that would rightfully smite us of our weary, needless existences.  For me 2001 was a turning point, a crossroads, either an end or a beginning.

The Top Ten Films of 2000

My 2000 can probably best be described as a post-millennial malaise.  Stuck in the worst college town in the world without the benefit of yet being a drinker, you could probably smell the depression dripping out of my pores.  That this was one of the weakest years for film I had ever seen added to my angst in immeasurable ways.  My hobby, my passion, my one escape, was being taken away from me?  Was the death of cinema now accompanying the obvious death of popular music?  I lost a lot of faith in humanity that year, and while my top ten has been padded a bit by stuff I didn’t see at the time over the years, there still isn’t a single film that I would give five stars to that I’ve seen from 2000.  That’s just kind of awful for a film buff.  To go an entire year without absolutely loving anything?  What could be more hopeless and pitiful?

The Top Ten Films of 1999

The last year of the century felt like the end of the world both globally and on a personal level.  The Y2K bug was going to turn all of our toasters and cars against us, hordes of cannibals were going to storm our bunkers in the aftermath, and I was graduating high school.  That’s a lot of stuff to drop on somebody all at once.  I started this year with a stronger social circle than I had ever had in my life and a quickly firming status as somebody of value in my little bubble world, and by the end of it school had ended, everybody I knew moved on to more interesting places/things, and I stepped into the bleak world of community college; everything I had seemed to have been ripped away from me and I entered into a very dark place.  More than ever exploring cinema became an important part of my life.  It now served not only as an escape, but also as the last bastion of permanence in my life.  Everything I knew might have gone away, leaving me alone and confused, but the movie theaters were still there.  Some directors that I had come to love were back with new treats, a couple future favorites popped up with eye opening films.  Diving even deeper into film was a way of reminding me who I was, and a way of helping me feel like myself.  Factor in that this was the last year we were going to get any new films before the cameras exploded in our faces and the zombies ate our brains and 1999 ended up feeling like a pretty important year in film for me. 

The Top Ten Films of 1998

The summer and fall of 1998 were the summer in anticipation of and the beginning of my senior year of high school respectively.  I suppose it was a pretty important time for me, but it’s kind of funny (Ha-ha?) how few concrete memories I have that take up places of significance on a timeline of my life.  This was twelve years ago now, and if you asked me what kind of stuff I was doing while preparing for my last year of school, or what my thoughts were upon entering into it, I draw a bit of a blank.  What were the milestones?  What were the big moments?  What routines did my day-to-day existence consist of?  If I look at the year through the lens of it’s film releases, however, suddenly very specific memories of what theaters I saw movies in, who I saw them with, and what my reactions were to them come flooding back with no problem.  I guess that’s where a lot of my love of cinema has come from throughout the years; the lives of the people up on the screen have always been more memorable and satisfying than the mundanity of my own.  All of the lost loves, all of the big choices, all the moments of crisis in my life have been projected onto a big white screen and have happened to other, more fictional people rather than to myself.  What would I know of life and the world if not for what I learned through the movies?  Little more, I suppose, than eat, sleep, school, work, household chores, hygienic maintenance, self-medication, rinse, repeat…  Good lord, how depressing, let’s go to the movies!

The Top Ten Films of 1997

This was an interesting film year for me in that, for the first time, there were some movies coming up that I was looking forward to solely because I liked the previous work of the directors.  The era of relying on advertising campaigns and movie stars to decide what I was going to see came to an end.  This new crop of directors had started popping up the couple years previous, I was using gossip sites and IMDB to track what their next projects were going to be, and the whole film going experience was taking on a new sense of anticipation that it never had before.  Now I wasn’t just looking forward to seeing something for a couple of months while the trailers made the rounds, I was tracking the development of prospective films, building up what they might be in my head, and taking years long journeys from initial announcements to premiere weekend.

The Top Ten Films of 1996

In 1996 I was firmly entrenched in my freshman year of high school.  A lot of my free time was being spent watching movies, and it was starting to become pretty clear to me that the same wasn’t the case for most of my classmates.  Poll a room full of people about movies.  Invariably nine out of ten people will tell you how much they LOVE movies, “I just LOVE movies”.  But when you’re fifteen years old and you foolishly start questioning them further about what they’ve seen and you get nothing but blank stares and derisive comments after name droppings of countless cinema classics, foreign gems, and obscure indie delights, it starts to become clear to you that what people really love is going on dates.  The typical teenager munching popcorn and making out in the local multiplex doesn’t have much to do at all with you scouring the local video stores for the most interesting things you can find to watch alone in your parent’s basement.  You liked The Nutty Professor?  WHAT?!  I thought you LOVED movies!  I was turning into a very angry and arrogant young man.  Oy vey.  Thank God I’ve learned to mellow out over the years.  I mean… I have, right?  With no further adieu, here are the top ten best movies I’ve seen from 1996 so far.