I Challenge You to Name a Better Year For Movies Than 1999....

I think the year 2058 will surpass them all.

After consulting my top 100 list of favourite films (which is constantly evolving), I’ve noticed that (currently) the 1960s is the most represented decade with 32 entries… 1964, 1967, 1968 and 1975 are (currently) the most represented years, with 5 each.

I haven’t seen many films, though :P

I haven’t seen too much from 1962 but so far, I’d say it was a pretty spectacular year.
four in my top thirty or so!

Ivan’s Childhood
Knife in the Water
L’eclisse
Harakiri
La Jetee
Winter Light
Lolita
Ride the High Country
Cleo from 5 to 7

Not saying it was the best, but if this is for those “big name” films, 1980 had some:

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, including T.V.)
Every Man for Himself (Godard)
Out of the Blue (Hopper)
The Shining (Kubrick)
The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner)
Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky) (79’ film but was in 1980’s Cannes I believe)
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Vladimir Menshov)
Being There (Hal Ashby) (same as Stalker)
The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller)
The Elephant Man (Lynch)
Popeye (Robert Altman)
Gloria (John Cassavetes)
Kagemusha (Kurosawa)
Tess (Polanski)
Bad Timing (Roeg)
Dressed to Kill (De Palma)
Cruising (William Friedkin)

Oscar winners like Ordinary People and Coal Miner’s Daughter.

Also comedy films like Airplane!, Caddyshack, and The Blues Brothers.

If you look at the five Best Picture nominees for a given year (which is an entirely different discussion, I know), 1975 looks like a winner.

Nashville
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Dog Day Afternoon
Jaws
Barry Lyndon

1999 was a great year, at least for the Hollywood auteurs. Three of my top five favorite movies of all time are from 1999.

Fight Club (Fincher)
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)
Magnolia (P.T. Anderson)

I know these aren’t obscure enough to be cool around here, but so what? These are great films by great filmmakers.

it’s not about being obscure- obscurity is a bi-product of not having mass appeal. having mass appeal almost certainly means your experimentation is limited, which means you can’t make great strides in pushing the form or create singular, spiritual (for example) experiences. fight club and magnolia have both been in my top ten at some point in my life, it’s just that as my experiences and time with film went on I learned that there are other approaches and my mind wanted more, I naturally came to appreciate and love things that succeeded in other areas and ways besides those of the directors that first grabbed my attention. I think they’re great as well, but they guide you through, they control your experience. I want to search, I want to be the traveler engaging in the films, not just the viewer. they are obscure because they present too great a challenge to most people, but I say that challenge, the questions posed make the result and eventually (when you start to get your bearings) the experience all the more valuable. you can have a good time watching Fight Club, but can it change you?

1957:

Paths of glory
12 angry men
Aparajito
Nights of Cabiria
Witness for the prosecution
The Cranes are flying
The seventh seal
Throne of blood

1994:

Pulp Fiction, Death and the Maiden, To Live, Exotica, Forrest Gump, Three Colors: Red, The Shawshank Redemption, Before the Rain, Bullets Over Broadway, Three Colors: White, The Lion King, Chungking Express, Burnt by the Sun………

.
Not a big fan of 1962 but had very famous titles:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
El ángel exterminador
Lolita
Lawrence of Arabia
Ivanovo detstvo
Knife in the Water
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Trial
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The Great Escape
Mamma Roma
The Eclipse
Vivre sa vie

@ William Honeycut

There’s tons of “challenging” and thought-provoking stuff in Fight Club if that’s what you’re looking for. Tons of essays have been written about Fight Club. So yeah, I think it can change you. And on top of that, Fight Club is also incredibly entertaining and engaging. That’s why I think Fight Club is a great film, it’s thought-provoking and fun to watch. Why do cinema snobs act like these two things are mutually exclusive? As if a film couldn’t possibly be intellectually stimulating and entertaining at the same time?

Sometimes obscure movies are obscure not because they’re too intellectually challenging for the poor, unwashed masses, but simply because a lot of these obscure art films (a la Last Year at Marienbad) are boring as fuck. A good film shouldn’t be a tedius intellectual exercise comparable to listening to a boring lecture, it should be an engaging and enjoyable intellectual exercise.

Great films = thought-provoking and entertaining.

What if I find Last Year at Marienbad engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking and find Fight Club to be a tedious exercise?

The problem with that platitude is it’s just that; a meaningless platitude that says absolutely nothing about any film.

Films should be fun? No, films should be good. Baseball and X-box should be fun.

Fortunately, film is a large and varied enough medium that we don’t have to choose. Both Fight Club AND Marienbad are great films, and if its for very different reasons, that’s to our benefit.

I don’t know how can anyone really say that cinema as an Art is “fun”.

Are Goya’s paintings fun or Matsuo Basso’s poems fun?

Shakespeare’s comedies are fun. Would you care to argue that they’re not art?

^ Wilde’s satires are charming and hilarious too but funny is one thing and “fun” as in amusement park fun is another.

This is why masses feel that poetry and theatre and painting and sculpture and even epics are part of an “elitist” culture (and pseudo-academia), which is why they hardly give a shit about and that’s why music and cinema are still part of the mass media “culture”.

That’s one giant straw man you’re tearing down, Westley.

@ Wu Yong

Well, I guess different people find different things engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking. If you think those things about Last Year at Marienbad, that’s good for you.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that a film can be popular and intelligent and thought-provoking. Just because Fight Club is a film that a lot of people enjoy doesn’t make it intellectually inferior to films that most people would find boring (like Last Year at Marienbad). I just get so tired of the snobbery on this board with people thinking that they’re somehow smarter or better than others because they’ve sat through a lot of movies that most people would find boring or haven’t heard of. It’s like listening to classical music because you think it makes you cultured and classy and superior to people who listen to “less challenging” pop music. It’s just so damn pretentious.

Also, I never said that a film should be “fun”. I said that a film should be entertaining, and what I mean by that is that it should engage the viewer’s interest. That’s what I mean by entertaining —engaging, interesting. And yes, as you said, different people are going to find different things entertaining (like you and Marienbad). I guess I’m just sick of certain cinephiles implying, subtly or not so subtly, that people who don’t like the movies they (the cinephiles) like must not like those movies because they (the other people) are too stupid or lazy to “understand it.” That’s just snobbery.

Ahhh the eternal question. We used to have this very debate in film school. 1999 was a damn fine year and it has got three of my favorite films of the decade (The Insider, Eyes Wide Shut, and Magnolia).

But of course there is also the obvious 2007, with No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Shotgun Stories among others.

Every year has great movies, this goes without saying. But for me personally, 2009 might take the cake. No movie has ever effected me on such an emotional level the way Where the Things Are did. Plus I love The White Ribbon, Antichrist, White Material, A Single Man, Bad Lieutenant, Julia, The Father of My Children, and Everyone Else

Westley, you’re arguing with a position that no one actually agrees with. You’ll probably win that argument.

“I guess the point I was trying to make is that a film can be popular and intelligent and thought-provoking. Just because Fight Club is a film that a lot of people enjoy doesn’t make it intellectually inferior to films that most people would find boring (like Last Year at Marienbad).”

Yeah, like Flip says no one actually believes that, so the point is moot.

Really, if we’re being truthful, the most pretentious position one can hold is believing they know exactly why someone dislikes any kind of work of art. Meaning the, “you just disliked it because it was popular” mindset is by far the most snobbish, pretentious argument one can make.

From a personal point of view, these years look pretty good

1927 Sunrise (Murnau)
Metropolis (Lang)
The Chess Player (Bernard)
Napoleon (Gance)
October (Eisenstein)
Girl with a Hatbox (Barnet)
Bed and Sofa (Room)
An Italian Straw Hat (Clair)?
The Kid Brother (Wilde)
The Unknown (Browning)

1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Spies (Lang)
Street Angel (Borzage)
Zvenigora (Dovzhenko)
The Eleventh Year (Vertov)
The Wind (Sjostrom)
The Cameraman (Sedgwick)
The Bridge (Ivens)
The Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein)
Steamboat Bill Jnr (Keaton)
Queen Kelly (Von Stroheim)
Storm over Asia (Pudovkin)
The Little Match Girl (Renoir)
The Fall of the House of Usher (Watson, Webber)

1933 Duck Soup (McCarey)
King Kong (Cooper, Schoedsack)
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang)
Liebelei (Ophuls)
Daybreak (Sun Yu)
Japanese Girls at the Harbour (Shimizu)
Sons of the Desert (Seiter)
The Water Magician (Mizoguchi)
Betty Boop’s Snow White (Fleischer)
Design for Living (Lubitsch)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Leroy)
Night on Bald Mountain (Alexeieff, Parker)
Dinner at Eight (Cukor)
Zéro de Conduite (Vigo)

1934 L’Atalante (Vigo)
It Happened One Night (Capra)
The Scarlet Empress (Von Sternberg)
Our Neighbour Miss Yae (Shimazu)
Happiness (Medvedkin)
Song of Ceylon (Wright)
The Goddess (Wu Yonggang)
Masquerade (Forst)
The Mascot (Starewicz)
El Compadre Mendoza (De Fuentes)
It’s a Gift (McLeod)
The Black Cat (Ulmer)
Twentieth Century (Hawks)

1946 The Big Sleep (Hawks)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
A Matter of Life and Death (Powell, Pressburger)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
La Belle et la Bete (Cocteau)
Gilda (C.Vidor)
Ivan the Terrible 2 (Eisenstein)
Great Expectations (Lean)
My Darling Clementine (Ford)
The Killers (Siodmak)
The Best Years of our Lives (Wyler)
Canyon Passage (Tourneur)
Paisa (Rossellini)
A Diary for Timothy (Jennings)
The Postman always Rings Twice (Garnett)

1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu)
The Red Shoes (Powell, Pressburger)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle)
Fallen Idol (Reed)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Force of Evil (Polonsky)
The Pirate (Minnelli)
They Live by Night (N.Ray)
Thieves Highway (Dassin)
Oliver Twist (Lean)
Hamlet (Olivier)

1949 Late Spring (Ozu)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
The Third Man (Reed)
White Heat (Walsh)
The Reckless Moment (Ophuls)
The Heiress (Wyler)
Begone Dull Care (Mclaren)
Gun Crazy (Lewis)
My Love has been Burning (Mizoguchi)
Stray Dog (Kurosawa)
The Set-Up (Wise)

1952 Singin in the Rain (Donen, Kelly)
The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi)
Casque d’Or (Becker)
Le Plaisir (Ophuls)
Othello (Welles)
Baiju Bawra (Bhatt)
Outcast of the Islands (Reed)
The Golden Coach (Renoir)
The Quiet Man (Ford)
The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (Ozu)
High Noon (Zinnemann)
Forbidden Games (Clement)

1953 Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Band Wagon (Minnelli)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
Madame de (Ophuls)
Voyage to Italy (Rossellini)
White Mane (Lamorisse)
Roman Holiday (Wyler)
El (Bunuel)
The Big Heat (Lang)
A Geisha (Mizoguchi)
The Wages of Fear (Clouzot)
Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Resnais, Marker, Cloquet)
Duck Amuck (Jones)

1954 Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
Senso (Visconti)
Sound of the Mountain (Naruse)
Johnny Guitar (N.Ray)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
Track of the Cat (Wellman)
The Woman of Rumour (Mizoguchi)
Chikamatsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
La Pointe Courte (Varda)
The Far Country (A.Mann)
Hobson’s Choice (Lean)

1955 Pather Panchali (S.Ray)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
Kiss me Deadly (Aldrich)
Tales of the Taira Clan (Mizoguchi)
Ordet (Dreyer)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
East of Eden (Kazan)
All that Heaven Allows (Sirk)
Lola Montes (Ophuls)
Merry Go Round (Fabri)
Death of a Cyclist (Bardem)
Le Amiche (Antonioni)
The Criminal Life of Arcibaldo de la Cruz (Bunuel)
Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman)
Rififi (Dassin)
Blinkity Blank (McLaren)

1956 The Searchers (Ford)
Crazed Fruit (Nakahira)
A Man Escaped (Bresson)
Aparajito (S.Ray)
Line of Destiny (Peries)
The Court Jester (Panama, Frank)
Kanal (Wajda)
Street of Shame (Mizoguchi)
Early Spring (Ozu)
Bob le Flambeur (Melville)
The Killing (Kubrick)
The Burmese Harp (Ichikawa)
Toute la Mémoire du Monde (Resnais)
Mirror Animations (H.Smith)

1959 North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
Some Like it Hot (Wilder)
Hiroshima mon Amour (Resnais)
Human Condition 1 (Kobayashi)
The World of Apu (S.Ray)
Time Stood Still (Olmi)
Paper Flowers (Dutt)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut)
La Tete Contre les Murs (Franju)
Night Train (Kawalerowicz)
Ballad of a Soldier (Chukhrai)
Nightingale’s Prayer (Barakat)
Imitation of Life (Sirk)
Poet in the Castle (Andrade)
Astronauts (Borowczyk, Marker)
Nazarin (Bunuel)
The Lin Family Shop (Zhang Shuihua)
Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger)

1960 L’Avventura (Antonioni)
The Apartment (Wilder)
Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak)
The Human Condition 2 (Kobayashi)
Mughal-e-Azam (Asif)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
Le Trou (Becker)
L’Amour Existe (Pialat)
Universe (Kroitor, Low)
The Young One (Bunuel)
Wild River (Kazan)
Shoot the Pianist (Truffaut)
Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young)
Peeping Tom (Powell)
Paris nous Appartient (Rivette)
Spartacus (Kubrick)

1961 The Human Condition trilogy 3 (Kobayashi)
La Notte (Antonioni)
The End of Summer (Ozu)
Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman)
The Innocents (Clayton)
El Cid (A.Mann)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
One-Eyed Jacks (Brando)
Pigs and Battleships (Imamura)
Teen Kanya (Ray)
Bitter End of a Sweet Night (Yoshida)
Made of Clay (Val del Omar)
Il Posto (Olmi)
Mother Joan of the Angels (Kawalerowicz)

1963 8 1/2 (Fellini)
Judex (Franju)
Contempt (Godard)
The Leopard (Visconti)
The Great Escape (J.Sturges)
High and Low (Kurosawa)
Insect Woman (Imamura)
The House is Black (Farrokhzad)
The Servant (Losey)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Kramer)
Charade (Donen)
The Pink Panther (Edwards)
Barren Lives (Dos Santos)
Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey)
The Silence (Bergman)

1964 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick)
Gertrud (Dreyer)
Marnie (Hitchcock)
Kwaidan (Kobayashi)
The Gospel according to St Matthew (Pasolini)
Charulata (S.Ray)
Goldfinger (Hamilton)
The Pumpkin Eater (Clayton)
Forest of the Hanged (Ciulei)
Noite Vazia/ Eros..the Bizarre (Khulei)
I am Cuba (Kalatozov)
Black God White Devil (Rocha)
The Naked Kiss (Fuller)
Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara)
Onibaba (Shindo)
Blind Child (Van der Keuken)
The Train (Frankenheimer)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Paradjanov)
Lilith (Rossen)
Cast Iron (Iosseliani)
My Way Home (Jancso)
GoGo! (Menken)

1965 Pierrot le Fou (Godard)
Subarnarekha (Ghatak)
Brick and Mirror (Golesatan)
With Beauty and Sorrow (Shinoda)
Chimes at Midnight (Welles)
The Saragossa Manuscript (Has)
Ordinary Fascism (Romm)
Le Bonheur (Varda)
The Mistral (Ivens)
A Fugitive of the Past (Uchida)
Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer)
The Hand (Trnka)
Red Beard (Kurosawa)
Le Bonheur (Varda)
Alphaville (Godard)
The Man who had his Hair Cut Short (Delvaux)

1966 Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
Persona (Bergman)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
Closely Observed Trains (Menzel)
The Pornographers (Imamura)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone)
Black Girl (Sembene)
Father (Szabo)
Red Angel (Masumura)
Blow Up (Antonioni)
Trans-Europ Express (Robe-Grillet)
The Party and the Guests (Nemec)
Romance (Jires)
Very Nice, Very Nice (Lipsett)

1967 Marketa Lazarova (Vlacil)
The Attached Balloon (Zheliazkova)
Belle de Jour (Bunuel)
Mouchette (Bresson)
The Red and the White (Jancso)
Playtime (Tati)
Switchboard Operator (Makaveyev)
Flame and Women (Yoshida)
Branded to Kill (Suzuki)
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn)
The Graduate (Nichols)
The Night it Rained (Shirdel)

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
The Colour of Pomegranates (Paradjanov)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone)
Goto, Isle of Love (Borowczyk)
Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas)
L’Enfance Nue (Pialat)
Hour of the Wolf (Bergman)
I was Nineteen (Wolf)
Fall of Leaves (Iosseliani)
Petulia (Lester)
If (Anderson)
Shame (Bergman)
Reconstruction (Pintilie)
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub, Huillet)
La Femme Infidele (Chabrol)
Nocturno 29 (Portabella)

1973 Spirit of the Beehive (Erice)
Krystyna M (Karabasz)
Badlands (Malick)
The World at War (BBC)
The Mother and the Whore (Eustache)
Touki Bouki (Mambety)
Don’t Look Now (Roeg)
Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
The Day of the Jackal (Zinnemann)
Through and Through (Krolikiewicz)
Paper Moon (Bogdanovich)
The Wicker Man (Hardy)
Sleeper (Allen)
Day for Night (Truffaut)

1974 Celine and Julie go Boating (Rivette)
Alice in the Cities (Wenders)
Hearts and Minds (Davis)
The Godfather 2 (Coppola)
Chinatown (Polanski)
They Do Not Exist (Abu Ali)
The Phantom of Liberty (Bunuel)
Edvard Munch (Watkins)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog)
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (Herzog)
The Conversation (Coppola)
A Thousand and One Nights (Zeman)
The Seedling (Benegal)

1975 Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Jeanne Dielman (Akerman)
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir)
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
Adoption (Meszaros)
Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet)
Hedgehog in the Fog (Norstein)
L’Important, c’est d’Aimer (Zulawski)
Three Days of the Condor (Pollack)

1979 Tale of Tales (Norstein)
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Manhattan (Allen)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder)
The Life of Brian (Jones)
Raining in the Mountain (King Hu)
Vengeance is Mine (Imamura)
Christ Stopped at Eboli (Rosi)

1986 The Green Ray (Rohmer)
Comrades (Douglas)
Street of Crocodiles (Quay bros)
Blue Velvet (Lynch)
Wanderers of the Desert (Khemir)
The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky)
Bashu the Little Stranger (Beiza’i)
Hannah and her Sisters (Allen)
Jean de Florette/ Manon des Sources (Berri)
Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang)
From the Pole to the Equator (Gianikian, Lucchi)
Something Wild (Demme)

1987 My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (Rohmer)
Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou)
Yeelen (Cisse)
Au Revoir les Enfants (Malle)
The Untouchables (De Palma)
Rouge (Kwan)
The Dead (Huston)
Wings of Desire (Wenders)
Hope and Glory (Boorman)
Pelle the Conqueror (August)
A Taxing Woman (Itami)
Black Widow (Rafelson)
The Way Things Go (Fischli, Weiss)

1993 Abraham Valley (Oliveira)
The Age of Innocence (Scorsese)
Groundhog Day (Ramis)
Three Colours Blue (Kieslowski)
The Wrong Trousers (Park)
Africa, I Will Fleece You (Teno)
Schindler’s List (Spielberg)
Short Cuts (Altman)
The Piano (Campion)
The Secret of Roan Inish (Sayles)
Ursa Minor Blue (Tamura)
Darkness in Tallinn (Jarvilaturi)
Sonatine (Kitano)

2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr)
At the Height of Summer (Tran Anh-Hung)
Eureka (Aoyama)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
Heart of the World (Maddin)
The Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo)
La Cienaga (Martel)
Platform (Jia Zhangke)
Suzhou River (Lou Ye)
The Claim (Winterbottom)
The Day I Became a Woman (Meshkini)
Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek)
La Ville est Tranquille (Guedigian)

2002 The Name of a River (A.Singh)
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong)
Far from Heaven (Haynes)
Talk to Her (Almodovar)
Waiting for Happiness (Sissako)
Snake of June (Tsukamoto)
Pistol Opera (Suzuki)
The Pianist (Polanski)
Lifeline (Erice)
Bus 174 (Padilha)
Broken Wings (N.Bergman)
Abouna (Haroun)
Le Chignon d’Olga (Bonnell)
The Magdalene Sisters (Mullan)

@Muleyhaven – I’m glad you didn’t include The Matrix in your original list from 1999. A lot of people think that was the best movie of that year (so it’s refreshing to see someone who doesn’t think that). :)

Those are some great lists, Kenji! :-)

Maybe he just hasn’t seen it… ;)

what I was trying to say was that at a certain point those films stopped being what engaged me the most. not that they’re unintelligent- check my favorites, plenty of the kind of movie you’re talking about as well as some just plain entertaining stuff! I still like these movies but the questions they ask and their approach started to feel somewhat homogeneous the more I watched. there’s a whole other world of exciting film that doesn’t move or speak that way. boring is completely tied to what you’re interested in feeling or thinking or seeing. people don’t just love to suffer, these films really move them! you think classical music exists just because people want to pretend to be intellectual? Resnais for example (since you mentioned Hiroshima) is exciting and engaging and beautiful to me, it doesn’t matter how many people disagree they can’t take that away from me

that’s an important category for me that isn’t about entertainment or intellect, the one that developed last- beauty.
I seek experiences and images that can overwhelm and unnerve me, make my heart soar, and yes, at times sore if the beauty is tragic. cathartic, deep-felt emotion that lasts beyond the moment of a revelation, natural conclusion, or the _payoff of a setup. it’s very subjective thing, you can’t decide that I don’t see beauty in the films I like and I can’t deny what you feel in those you like

The idea that people like classical music just to be pretentious is laughable beyond discussion.

1939 is widely regarded as the BEST year EVER…but…my vote goes to …

1974 -

The Godfather II
Chinatown
Lenny
Harry & Tonto
The Conversation
The Mouth Agape
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
Young Frankenstein
Murder on the Orient Express
The Beast Must Die
Zardoz
Mahler
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Arabian Nights
A Woman Under the Influence
Sweet Movie
Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
The Black Windmill
Celine & Julie Go Boating
Freebie & the Bean
Dark Star
Stavisky
Kaspar Hauser
Going Places
It’s Alive
The Gambler
Lacombe, Lucien
The Longest Yard
The Phantom of Liberty
The Tamarind Seed
The Taking of Pelham 123
The Parallax View
Female Trouble
Caged Heat
California Split
The Night Porter
Swept Away
The Sugarland Express

1999!

1. 1999 (Man on the Moon, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Insider)
2. 2007 (No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
3. 2005 (Syriana, Munich, Jarhead)

“1939 is widely regarded as the BEST year EVER”

Best Hollywood year, perhaps…Hollywood is different to World Cinema…

(Hollywood doesn’t even represent American cinema as a whole…)

based on OP I assumed we were talking mostly about Hollywood cinema.