"Shania hates chicken salad. She HATES it!"

Best of 2004: "Before Sunset"

"I just wanted to see if you'd stay together or dissolve into molecules." 

Best of 2004: "Sideways"

"We are NOT drinking any fuckin' Merlot!"

Best of 2003: "Cold Mountain"

"Let's go cook this rooster!"

Best of 2003: "Kill Bill: Vol. 1"

"O-Ren Ishii! You and I have unfinished business!"

Best of 2003: "Lost in Translation"

"Evelyn Waugh is a man."

Best of 2002: "The Hours"

"I think I'll buy the flowers myself."

Best of 2001: "The Royal Tenenbaums"

"This is my adopted daughter Margot." 

Best of 2005: "A History of Violence"

Don't fuck with Viggo.

Best Picture of 2004: "Before Sunset"

Nothing compares to the magical realism of articulated honesty between adults.  And so, joining Jesse & Celine on their 80-minute stroll through Paris, a decade after that one night in Vienna depicted in "Before Sunrise," amounts to the decade's most extraordinary film experience.

Great Expectation: Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" opens March 12

Following "The Squid and the Whale" (2005) and "Margot at the Wedding" (2007), writer/director Noah Baumbach's next portrait of narcissistic adulthood at its most verbally acute was always going to be anticipated as a likely great.  This just-released trailer for "Greenberg" (Focus Features; March 12) has definitively amped up that anticipation to 11. 

Set in motion to the tune of LCD Soundsystem's heartbreaking pop masterpiece "All My Friends," with its blistering nostalgia building toward a momentous crescendo, the "Greenberg" trailer means business.  Big time. 

Ben Stiller atones for "Night at the Museum," etc. with an apparently outstanding performance that looks to be a game-changer for the usually generic actor.

Still on Top...

It opened way back in February, but nothing I've seen since has fully eclipsed "Two Lovers" as the best film of 2009.  With eviscerating simplicity, James Gray's oestensibly romantic melodrama infuses richly details with incisive philosophical implication, revealing itself in greater depth upon consecutive viewing.

Happy New Year!

2010 doesn't kick into gear until January 1 in the real world, but it's first day of Year 1 at Best Pictures of the Year and it's a happy occasion, indeed.  Delineated on specific annual terms, BPotY looks forward to creating a yearbook that chronicles each annual collective as the sum of its cinematic parts.  The films of current and future years will always be related to those of the past, reflected across the time continuum to reveal essential cinematic trends that differentiate cinema from every other art, parallel insights that collectively forge the treacherous gap between art and commerce.  Year after year, as audiences alternately ignore (Richard Kelly's "The Box" is 2009's latest arty flop) and embrace (Kelly's debut "Donnie Darko" was ignored in its brief theatrical go, discovered on DVD by smart fans) movies that truly deserve to be seen by an invested audience, they're showing up in predictable masses to see the latest robots vs. aliens spectacle, or worse (unfathomable success for "Alvin and the Chipmunks" made the "Squeakuel" inevitable). 

These patterns of divergence in both quality and quantity didn't begin with movies; comparative literature employs historical framework to illuminate the invisible fabric of the art form through time.  So begins The Best Pictures of the Year, with scholarly earnest and an eye of the calendar. Fireworks!