BEST MOVIES OF 2010 -- so far

[Chris Knipp]

Lists
I will add my list eventually but I think I would rather wait until the end of the month because, unlike you, I haven't seen everything from 2010 that I want to.
When I do publish my list, they will be ranked in order from 1-20. They will also be my choice of my favorites not divided into any categories.
I do understand your desire to do this, however, because you have seen so many more films than I have and it would seem daunting to have to limit it to 20. On the other hand, however, one does not get a clear sense of which films you liked the most when your list consists of 40+ films.. -- HOWARD SCHUMANN

It's unusual for me too to be done so early, but I don't think there are any serous contenders that I haven't seen. I say definitely that my favorite American film of the year is THE SOCIAL NETWORK. I'd definitely say my favorite foreign one is A PROPHET. Beyond that, as I said, if they get into the list, that should be enough, and it's a finicky game to try to rank 10- or 20 or 40 films in order of merit. Would you like to do that with books? With friends? I don't think so. I did see upwards of 250 new movies this year and a lot of them were good, more than I can put in the list. A few stand out, and they are at the top of my lists. But I don't think it's a matter of how many movies one's seen. It's just been a principle of mine for years that I preferred to list groups alphabetically rather than rank every single film into a strict pecking order, which seems to be too arbitrary. There are lots of different approaches to the end of year selection process, many equally valid. Of course my method of having lists for English language, foreign, documentary, and shortlisted allows me to list more movies, but I also did that before I was seeing as many as I am now.