First Half

I think I set a goal to watch 180 movies or so this year. It might have been as low as 150. Well, I'm on track for 200.

Anyway, most of the stuff I've watched has been at least good, and some of it great. I tried to select ten things, not necessarily the ten that I enjoyed the most, but the ten that I would make you watch if I could*, perhaps the ten I would program if I had a film series. They are unordered.

• Slacker [Richard Linklater, 1991]
• The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [Tommy Lee Jones, 2005]
• Histoire(s) du Cinema [Jean-Luc Godard, 1997]
• L'enfant [Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2005]
• La Ciénaga [Lucrecia Martel, 2000]
• Innocence [Lucile Hadzihailovic, 2005]
• Le Trou [Jacques Becker, 1960]
• 2046 [Wong Kar-Wai, 2004]
• The Death of Mr. Lazarescu [Cristi Puiu, 2005]
• 3-Iron [Kim Ki-Duk, 2005]

You may notice that only two are American. Three are French, four if you count the Franco-Belgian L'enfant, one is Argentinian, one from Hong Kong, one Romanian, and one Korean. There are probably many reasons why this is so, many of them logistical.

* Of course, the premise is that you care about movies in the first place, enough to expend at least a little effort on your part as the viewer.