The Best Movies of 2019

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2019
Our annual ballot is open. I predict more superheroes again this year. :-P

What were your favorite movies of the year, or the ones that you most wanted to see that got away?

Scott Hardie | December 29, 2019
Time's almost up to record your votes.

Scott Hardie | January 1, 2020
It's little surprise that one year after choosing Avengers: Infinity War, we chose Avengers: Endgame this year. It was the one movie that all five of us included on our lists, and it's by far the biggest margin separating the #1 and #2 movie of the year since we started this little annual tradition seven years ago.

Most years have included several superhero titles on our list -- ask Marty Scorsese; they're all that Hollywood makes any more -- and this year continues the trend. Evie, I was kind of surprised that you picked Joker over Endgame; it really must have been something. Samir, I'm even more surprised that you liked Joker at all, given its reputation. I guess what I'm saying is, I really need to see Joker.

I want to apologize for slight tweaks to a few quotes (I deliberately don't use MLA formatting, just as with RB artist quotes) and for picking a few less-than-ideal quotes. I was trying to keep a balance so that everybody got quoted the same number of times, and I think I went overboard with it to the point where I could have picked much better quotes for some movies. Oh well; I'm not changing it now.

Thank you all for participating again this year. I have really come to enjoy this silly little annual ranking game of ours. :-) I hope to see more and better movies in 2020 so that I can have a better top ten list next time.

Samir Mehta | January 1, 2020
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | January 1, 2020
Yes, definitely. The most popular films have a big advantage. But they still have to be at the top of our lists to get the overall top spot. If they were near the bottoms of our lists, a single highly-rated film could top them all. No movie has ever been at the top of our collective list without coming in at either #1 or #2 on a voter's ballot.

To me, if there's a problem with this exercise, it's that we too often don't see enough good movies to have true top tens, and lesser films find their way onto our lists. Five times now, someone has rated a movie "it sucked" and still included it on their ballot. For me, long gone are the days in the 2000s when I would see dozens of new movies every year and I could sincerely recommend ten of them as excellent, so I wind up letting a lot of "ok" or "sucked" movies onto my ballot, and that's not really in the spirit of this. I have considered limiting the ballot to "ruled" movies only, but I fear people overrating movies just to qualify them for the ballot, and if I'm not willing to self-limit my own voting to "ruled" movies only, then I can't expect anyone else to want to be limited either.

I plan to see more movies in 2020 to improve my ballot (and improve my life overall, ahem), but I plan to do that every year and it rarely happens, so who knows if it will pan out.

Chris Lemler | January 1, 2020
The movie I want to see in 2020 is impractical jokers movie. I love the show I hope the movie is as good as the show.

Scott Hardie | January 1, 2020
Yeah, I heard that's coming and it should be funny. Since one of the biggest hits of 2019 was Joker, I wonder if the Impractical Jokers movie will make some kind of reference to it, like dancing on the stairwell or something.