Best Year in Film?

[redacted]

What's your best year in film?

All I'm going to say is 1994 had, among others.. (in chronological order):

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
The Crow
The Lion King
Forrest Gump
True Lies
The Mask
Natural Born Killers
Ed Wood
Pulp Fiction
The Shawshank Redemption
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
Léon: The Professional
Dumb and Dumber
The Jungle Book

and of course.. Junior

[BillyShears]

Whatever year Gia came out in.

[MmzHrrdb]

As an animation fan, 2009 was incredible. I have Up and Coraline at a 10/10 (same with Princess and the Frog, but I think that will drop to a 9/10 shortly). Fantastic Mr. Fox was excellent, I recall really liking 9.

[igormachete]

I decided to check my highest rated year, which is apparently 1962, and was surprised by the lack of 10 as almost all of these movies are great and I tend to be pretty generous with my rankings

Lolita (9)
Lawrence of Arabia (9)
Harakiri (9)
Jules and Jim (9)
An Autumn Afternoon (9)
Vivre Sa Vie (8)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (8)
Ivan's Childhood (8)
Sanjuro (7)
Dr. No (7)
Cape Fear (7)

[mattorama12]

So hard to define something like this empirically, especially because of my (our?) viewing habits. For years pre-1980s, average tier is useful, but the small sample sizes lead to more extreme results. No year for which I've seen 5 or more films has an average tier over 9.0. But the problem is really selection bias. I'm unlikely to see anything older than 1980 or so unless it's either lauded as a great movie or was directed by somebody whom I already really like as a director. Some of the notable pre-1980 years for me:

1948 - Avg. Tier: 9.67, Total Films (3) - T8 or better: Bicycle Thieves, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Rope
1954 - 8.4 (5) - Seven Samurai, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, On the Waterfront
1974 - 9.25 (4) - The Godfather, Part II, Blazing Saddles, Chinatown
1975 - 7.4 (10) - Monty Python and the Holy Grail, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, 3 Days of the Condor

After that, yearly average is mostly useless, because I've seen so much crap. My yearly averages for all of 1990-2009 never reach 6.0. With the rise of things like Criticker, movie podcasts, Rotten Tomatoes, etc., as well as simply age and time, I've become more discriminating in what I'll see now. As a result, my yearly averages for each year this decade are over 6.0. Either way, I think a better metric for these more recent years (i.e., 1980s to present) is to look at the percentage of films that are in top tiers. Combining that with my sort of gut reaction, here are the years I think are the strongest:

1980 - 5/8 (Number of T8 or better out of total): Airplane!, The Shining, Empire Strikes Back, Kagemusha, The Elephant Man
1988 - 9/18: Coming to America, Die Hard, Stand and Deliver, The Land Before Time, The Naked Gun, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, Young Guns, Midnight Run
1994 - 13/42 (but 9 of those are T10): Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Dumb and Dumber, Hoop Dreams, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Lion King, Fear of a Black Hat, Clerks, Léon: The Professional, Forrest Gump, The Legend of Drunken Master, Quiz Show, Hated: G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies
1995 - 17/45: Toy Story, Before Sunrise, The Usual Suspects, Seven, 12 Monkeys, La Haine, Casino, Heat, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Clueless, Tommy Boy, Get Shorty, Apollo 13, Mallrats, Braveheart, Friday, GoldenEye
2014 - 21/51: Interstellar, Whiplash, 22 Jump Street, Boyhood, Blue Ruin, Gone Girl, They Came Together, Birdman, The One I Love, The Raid 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Life Itself, Neighbors, Nightcrawler, Edge of Tomorrow, The Lego Movie, Locke, The Imitation Game, Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, Enemy, John Wick

If you put a gun to my head, I'd probably go with 1994 just because nearly a quarter of the movies I've seen from that year are in my T10.

(Weirdly, the top 4 years for me may be 1954, 1974, 1994, and 2014. 2034 figures to be a great year for movies!)

[CosmicMonkey]

Huh, Before I had read anything past the thread title, the first year that popped into my mind was 1994, too. For most years I can only think of 7 or 8 films that I'd consider to truly be excellent, but for 1994 I can think of no less than 15:

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)
Crumb (Terry Zwigoff)
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell)
Hoop Dreams (Steve James)
Lamerica (Gianni Amelio)
Léon: The Professional (Luc Besson)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Quiz Show (Robert Redford)
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr)
The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont)
Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
Three Colors: White (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami)
To Live (Zhang Yimou)


Honorable Mentions for other great years would include 1955, 1961 & 1962, but I still think that none of those come close to high number of excellent films released in 1994.

It's interesting however that even though we both think that 1994 was the best year, and both (I swear, completely coincidentally) named 15 films, there were still only 4 films in common between the two of us. Is it possible that 1994 was a great year for even for people of varying tastes and preferences? And what is it that made 1994 so great? Were there particular changes or trends in the industry that led to a drastic spike in creative output, or is it just an outlier?


EDIT: I've realised I completely forgot Tsai Ming-Liang's masterful 1994 film Vive L'Amour. Make that 16 (!) excellent films from 1994.

[Kip Thorn]

In my opinion it is 1974: The Godfather Part II, Chinatown,The Conversation. All of them have cult following.

[djross]

x

[CosmicMonkey]

I think somebody already mentioned this here, but can we take a moment to appreciate how utterly fantastic 2009 was for animation?

Let's take a look at some of the major releases:

-Up
-Fantastic Mr. Fox
-Coraline
-The Secret of Kells
-The international release of Ponyo
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
- The Princess and the Frog


When the Disney Princess film (and a relatively well-received one too) is only the 6th or 7th best animated film of the year, you know you have a formidable line-up on your hands.

[MacSwell]

Got significantly more rankings from 1973 than any year around it, with loads of great movies:

American Graffiti
Badlands
Charley Varrick
The Day of the Jackal
Don't Look Now
Enter the Dragon
The Exorcist
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
High Plains Drifter
The Hourglass Sanatorium
Lady Snowblood
The Last Detail
The Long Goodbye
Mean Streets
Paper Moon
Spirit of the Beehive
The Sting
Theatre of Blood
Touki Bouki
The Wicker Man

Plus a host of others that aren't as good but still enjoyable - The Baby, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood, Westworld, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, My Name is Nobody, Sleeper, Flesh for Frankenstein, Disney's Robin Hood

So yeah 1973, what a year