Updated Two Favorite Films for Every Year List

Updated my list of two favorite films per year. There are certain years where I don't think I have a strong enough pool to draw from and I researched some films from those years that might be worth checking out. This will guide my viewing next time I have a classic film to pick:

2019 Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles)/Knives Out (Riann Johnson)

2018 Green Book (Peter Farrelly)/First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

2017 Florida Project (Sean Baker)/Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, MO (Martin McDonagh)

2016 Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood)/La La Land (Damien Chazelle)

2015 Martian (Ridley Scott)/Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy)

2014 Gone Girl (David Fincher)/Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

2013 Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)/American Hustle (David O Russell)

2012 Dark Knight Rises (Chris Nolan)/Flight (Rob Zemeckis)

2011 Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)/Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

2010 Inception (Chris Nolan)/Scott Pilgrim vs the World (Edgar Wright)

2009 Up in the Air (Jason Reitman)/Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

2008 Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood)/FrostNixon (Ron Howard)

2007 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold)/Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie)

2006 Little Miss Sunshine (Jonothan Dayton and Valerie Harris)/Departed (Marty Scorsese)

2005 The New World (Terrence Malick)/Junebug (Phil Morrison)

2004 The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)/Life Aquatic (Wes Anderson)

2003 Cold Mountain (Anthony Minghella)/Last Samurai (Edward Zwick)

2002 City of God (Fernando Meirelles)/Chicago (Rob Marshall)

2001 Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)/Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff)

2000 Gladiator (Ridley Scott)/Wonderboys (Curtis Hanson)

1999 Three Kings (David O Russell)/Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen)

1998 Truman Show (Peter Weir)/Enemy of the State (Tony Scott)

1997 Titanic (James Cameron)/Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant)*.................................. Lolita, Full Monty, Devil’s Advocate

1996 Independence Day (Roland Emmerich)/Evita (Alan Parker)

1995 Apollo 13 (Ron Howard)/Batman Forever (Joel Schumacher)

1994 Ed Wood (Tim Burton)/Quiz Show (Robert Redford)

1993 Fugitive (Andrew Davis)/Pelican Brief (Alan Pakula)*….True Romance, Short Cuts

1992 The Player (Robert Altman)/A League of their Own (Penny Marshall)

1991 Terminator 2 (James Cameron)/Fisher King (Terry Gilliam)

1990 Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)/Misery (Rob Reiner)

1989 Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir)/Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Stephen Spielberg)

1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Rob Zemeckis)/School Daze (Spike Lee)

1987 Good Morning Vietnam (Peter Weir)/Princess Bride (Rob Reiner)

1986 Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines)/Star Trek IV (Leonard Nimoy) *…Highlander, Labyrinth, Stand By Me, Space Camp

1985 Back to the Future (Rob Zemeckis)/Witness (Peer Weir)

1984 Amadeus (Milos Forman)/Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Stephen Spielberg)

1983 Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir)/Return of the Jedi (George Lucas)* …Outsiders, Local Hero, Silkwood Meaning of Life, Blue Thunder

1982 Verdict (Sidney Lumet) /ET (Stephen Spielberg)*….Tron, Fanny and Alexander, King of Comedy

1981 On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell)/Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson)

1980 Gods Must be Crazy (Jamie Uys)/Shining (Stanley Kubrick)*…Urban Cowboy, Xanadu, Flash Gordon

1979 Being There (Hal Ashby)/China Syndrome (Jeff Bridges)

1978 Badlands (Terrence Malick)/Every Which Way But Loose (Hal Ashby)*….Deer Hunter, The Boys from Brazil

1977 Star Wars (George Lucas)/High Anxiety (Mel Brooks) *…Smokey and the Bandit, Turning Point, Close Encounters

1976 Network (Sidney Lumet)/All the President’s Men (Alan J Pakula)

1975 The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)/Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel)*…Nashville, Three Days in the Condor

1974 Chinatown (Roman Polanski)/Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet)

1973 American Graffiti (George Lucas)/Three Musketeers (Richard Lester)

1972 Poseidon Adventure (Roland Neame)/Cabaret (Bob Fossee)*…Slueth, Deliverance, Discreet Cham of the Burgoisee

1971 McCabe & Mrs Miller (Rob Altman)/Live and Let Die (Terrence Young)*….Andromeda Strain, Straw Dogs, Klute

1970 MASH (Rob Altman)/Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson)

1969 Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)/They Shoot Horses Don’t They (Sydney Pollock)

1968 Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey)/Odd Couple (Gene Saks)

1967 In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison)/Wait Until Dark (Terrence Young)

1966 Our Man Flint (Daniel Mann)/Walk Don’t Run (Charles Walters)

1965 Great Race (Blake Edwards)/Cat Ballou (Elliot Silverstein)

1964 Beckett (Peter Glenville)/Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton)

1963 It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Stanley Kramer)/Great Escape (John Sturges)

1962 Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)/To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert  Mulligan)

1961 West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins)/Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)

1960 The Apartment (Billy Wilder)/Magnificent Seven (John Sturges)

1959 North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)/Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder)

1958 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)/Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

1957 Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean)/12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)

1956 Searchers (John Ford)/Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)

1955 East of Eden (Elia Kazan)/Kismet (Vincente Minnelli)*….Blackboard Jungle, Desperate Choirs

1954 Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk)/Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman)

1953 From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)/Roman Holiday (William Wyler)

1952 Singing in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)/High Noon (Fred Zinnemann)

1951 African Queen (John Huston)/Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise)

1950 All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz)/Harvey (Henry Koster)

1949 The Third Man (Carol Reed)/Pinky (Elia Kazan)

1948 Key Largo (John Huston)/Treasure of the Seirra Madre (John Huston)

1947 Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)/Bishop’s Wife (Henry Koster)*…Ghost and Mrs Muir,  Odd Man Out, Secret Life of Walter Mitty

1946 Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)/It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)

1945 Detour (Edgar Ullmer)/Scarlett Street (Fritz Lang)*…Along Came Jones, Mildred Pierce, Blithe Spirit

1944 Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)/Meet me in Saint Louis (Vincente Minnelli)

1943 Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)/Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges)*…Song of Bernadette, The More the Merrier, Five Graces to Cairo

1942 Sabetour (Alfred Hitchcock)/Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder)*... Ox-Bow Incident, Tortilla Flat, Talk of the Town, Now Voyager

1941 Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks)/Meet John Doe (Frank Capra)

1940 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)/Go West (Leo McCarey) *…Great McGinty, Phantom of Chinatown, Great Dictator

1939 Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)/Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)

My favorite film for each letter of the alphabet: Alphabet Meme

This was started by a guy who runs the website blogcabins.blogspot.com/ and it's made it's way around the internet like chain mail. I was tagged by Dan Johnson at filmbabble.blogspot.com:

A is for Apollo 13 (1995), my favorite film from my childhood. It's an amazingly tight and exciting docudrama that even made me want to go to space camp and be an astronaut. Ron Howard has rarely ever been so good. There are a lot of good As, however: American Graffiti, the best coming-of-age film ever, in my opinion, as well as

B has a lot of good sci-fi flicks: Blade Runner, Brazil....but I'm going to go with Back to the Future (1985), another classic film that I grew up on and I find unforgettable.

C is for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1973), neo-noir film and one of the greatest classics of all time. A great story of such emotional resonance and poetry. The dialogue and performances by John Huston and Faye Dunaway are to die for. Charade, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of God, City Confidential, and a family film I really like called Cheaper by the Dozen were all ones I considered

Although, I was thinking of drawing attention to the old-school sci-film The Day the Earth Stood Still which is being remade, D is for Double Indemnity (1944). When we talk of good dialogue, the way Billy Wilder was superhuman in his ability to write sharp stylized dialogue, and there's no better example of this than the interplay between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck's characters as they attempt to plan a perfect murder.

For E, I couldn't really think of too much, except the musical Evita (1996), which made a splash in the 90's but had a rather short shelf-life and only people who followed Madonna's career incessantly would even remember this. Perhaps, Alan Parker's dismal rep or the timing (musicals didn't really regain their steam until Moulan Rouge or Chicago, let alone operettas) sunk the film, but it was an interesting piece of work. The score was great, Antonio Banderas did his best work here, and the subtext is almost as detailed as a textbook on Latin American history.

F is for From Here to Eternity (1953) which stands as my favorite war film. Montgomery Clift plays a tragic antihero in an army private in Hawaii during World War II who refuses to play the bugle or box for his company, out of principle and Frank Sinatra won an Oscar as the man who befriends him and lives to tell the tale. Also famous for the make-out scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.

G is for Grand Hotel a Best Picture Oscar winner that doesn't get much credit for anything these days. It starred five of the biggest stars of the 1930's and was set in a hotel where the lives of five guests intertwine, it’s breezy, lively and light-hearted enough to rival an art deco musical in escapist value. At the same time, it is a very telling story of class conflict that resonates with a lot of weight when the five stories come together so serendipitously

H is for High Noon, socially powerful, tightly coiled, notable for its score, cinematography, social climate in which the film was made, the gun battle at the end, and its real-time gimmick that was the precursor to the TV show 24. I can't really think of too many other H's but House of Sand and Fog comes to mind, or from the same year (2003) Hollywood Homicide. In the latter, Harrison Ford sort of mails it in as a cop who doesn't care about his job and wants to sell real estate while on duty. Not many people got the joke but I did.

I could be for It's a Wonderful Life or another Frank Capra classic It Happened One Night, but I'll go with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

J is for Junebug (2005), the North Carolina-set family melodramedy (new word I just coined) that launched Amy Adams' career. The other ones that come to mind are the historic picture Jazz Singer, Sam Mendes' docudrama of an uneventful war Jarhead, and the recent It film Juno. However, Juno tried just a little too hard to be hip, and Junebug just let it all flow naturally.

K could easily be for King Kong, but I wasn't crazy about the old King Kong and have yet to see the new one, so I now have a choice between two older films, neither of which is regarded as a great classic but which I'm personally fond of. There's Vincente Minelli's musical Kismet which came at a later point in his career and he denounced as a failure in his autobiography. Don't be so hard on yourself, Mr. Minelli, I personally loved the musical take on the Arabian Nights tale with the enchanting songs including "Stranger in Paradise." However, in honor of my grandmother's birthday, I will go with the John Huston film Key Largo (1948) where the bar where much of the film was shot at, still stands on Key Largo. Modern-day gangster films need to show a lot of carnage to illustrate just how bad the gangster is, but Edward G. Robinson showed that all you need is some flair and style and a muggy facial expression.

L is for Last Samurai (2003). The art direction is superb and it stands out quite a bit from all the recent historical epics because of its sincerity. Ken Wattanabe gives a great performance that's deserving of that Oscar nomination and as an interesting footnote, it was Tom Cruise's last big successful role before Oprahgate derailed his career.

M is for Manchurian Candidate (1962), an amazing story, political thriller, mystery, and showcase of great acting. This movie had people worrying about ammending the constitution to include foreign-born citizens as eligible for the President and had me worrying about John McCain, a former P.O.W., as being President as well.

N was originally for Network, before I remembered that North by Northwest (1959) also begins with this letter. Thrilling, romantic, endearing, shot in great locations, everything a good film should be, and it's the epitome of Hitchcockian style

O is for On Golden Pond (1981), the story of a somewhat dysfunctional father-daughter relationship that a daughter attempts to fix in her father's last days, starring real-life father and daughter Jane and Henry Fonda. Katherine Hepburn was also in the film. To show that I don't completely dislike the Coen Brothers, I would have included their Mississippi-set epic Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and truth be told, it was pretty much a tie between these two great films.

P was one that I had the most difficult time with, I could think of three that I really liked: Prairie Home Companion, Pirates of the Carribean and Paths to Glory, but I chose Prairie Home Companion (2006) largely because I already have enough from the action/blockbuster genre on my list. PHC was Altman's swan song and was an eerie foreshadowing of his imminent death within a few months of the film being released. The movie is highly entertaining, quietly profound, and has all the strengths of an Altman film.

Q is for Quiz Show (1994), Rob Redford's gripping docudrama about the Game Show scandal of the 1950's with performances by John Turturro and Ralph Feinnes that make for two very interesting portrayals of real-life figures who everyone knew so little about beneath the surface (i.e. they are basically remembered as two guys who cheated on a game show but no one even knew why)

For R, I'm going to go a little foreign with Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), rated consistently near the top of the best films of all time by Sight and Sound's decennial poll.

S, like P, has a lot of options I consider of equal merit: Star Wars, Singing in the Rain, Swing Time, Stagecoach, Searchers, etc. To break this tie between musicals and Westerns, I'm going to go with a biopic, Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis (1957), which I saw in 9th grade and absolutely loved. It was quite an achievement to be able to make us engaged to what was essentially a one-man show.

People will always remember Citizen Kane, but for me Orson Welles is a genius because of his last film (in America, at least) Touch of Evil (1958) which is my T.

The letter that took me the longest to think up a film is Undeclared (2006) for the U. Starring Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Lewis Black and Maria Thayer, the film is a spot-on comedy that brought me back to the days in high school where I was scared to death over not getting into my top choice college.

V is for Vertigo (1958). Just the story alone makes it a winner. Tell a three-line summary of this film to anyone and see if they're not intrigued. I imagine that there was the most consistency on this letter among the other lists without actually looking.

For W, I'll go with the culturally delicate and serene cop drama Witness (1985) in which Harrison Ford must hide an Amish boy from corrupt cops in an Amish community where he is a fish out of water. I was also strongly considering Wild Strawberries, just to prove that I've seen more than one foreign film, but no need.

X is for X-Men 2 (2003), the best in the trilogy although I will take a bold stand in saying that X-Men 3 is almost as good.

Y is for You Can Count on Me (2000), the brother-sister relationship piece which launched Laura Linney and Mark Ruffallo's careers. It almost won Kenneth Longorean an Oscar for screen-writing as well.

Z is for Zoolander (2001). To be clear I don't really like this movie and only find it mildly tolerable, but Z is a letter which gives me very little manuevering room