The year of many movies

You know me well enough by now, reader, to know that I am pretty fond of books and reading. Since I was four years old I have never wanted anything out of life except to read all the books in the world and to add a few more to their number. You will never hear me say a bad work about books. I like people too, naturally – but the thing I like best about them is the books they write. In my heart of hearts I have always felt that anything else a person might do in life is trivial by comparison to those two mighty feats of the human spirit, reading and writing. In my eyes, the science of space travel dwindles into insignificance compared to what Milton wrote about travelling through space. I am glad and grateful for technology, of course I am. I am not one of those backward unadventurous souls who would use last year's computer or quibble over the expense of a few billion dollars per annum on space programs. Technology, I salute you! All I'm saying is that if (God forbid) a thousand years from now NASA and America itself have vanished from human memory, whatever kind of human beings are left on earth will still be reading Milton and marvelling at his description of the sight of our planet as seen from space:

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.

So please, reader, do not reproach me when I tell you that in this year of our Lord 2014 I have nourished my spirit more on images than words. If the IMDB records are correct, I have seen one hundred and thirty films this year – more than Milton ever saw in his whole life! I watched a lot of movies I'd never seen before and I watched a lot of old favourites again too. Babette's Feast I saw this year for the seventh or eighth time. Annie Hall and Bicycle Thieves I saw for the fourth or fifth time. The big themes of my Year of Many Movies were (a) early films, especially romance and comedy, (b) Italian neorealism, (c) anything with James Cagney in it, and (d) Hitchcock.

Early in the year I had youthful aspirations to watch all of Hitchcock but I got sick of it after the first dozen or so. To be honest, it was Psycho and North by Northwest that ruined it for me. Those famous Hitchcocks get a little bit worse every time you see them (North by Northwest could be used as a textbook study in bad plotting), whereas his great films from the 1930s and 40s get better every time. My favourite is his first (1935) version of The 39 Steps, a perfect film that seamlessly combines suspense, comedy, and romance. By the start of the 1960s all the comedy had drained out of Hitchcock's spirit, which is a shame for everybody.

Anyway in the interests of sharing useless information over the internet, I have copied below the list of movies I saw this year with my ratings out of 10.

	FILM	YEAR	RATING
	The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari	1920	10
	The Kid	1921	9
	Nosferatu	1922	10
	The Smiling Madame Beudet	1923	8
	The Navigator	1924	10
	Battleship Potemkin	1925	10
	The Lodger	1927	9
	Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans	1927	10
	The Public Enemy	1931	8
	Red-Headed Woman	1932	6
	Island of Lost Souls	1932	9
	42nd Street	1933	6
	Baby Face	1933	9
	Footlight Parade	1933	9
	The Testament of Dr Mabuse	1933	8
	It Happened One Night	1934	9
	The Man Who Knew Too Much	1934	7
	The 39 Steps	1935	10
	Modern Times	1936	9
	My Man Godfrey	1936	9
	The Lady Vanishes	1938	7
	Angels with Dirty Faces	1938	8
	Mr. & Mrs. Smith	1941	9
	Suspicion	1941	9
	Saboteur	1942	7
	Ossessione	1943	9
	Shadow of a Doubt	1943	9
	Lifeboat	1944	8
	Double Indemnity	1944	10
	Spellbound	1945	7
	Rome, Open City	1945	8
	Paisan	1946	10
	The Best Years of Our Lives	1946	8
	Black Narcissus	1947	7
	Bicycle Thieves	1948	10
	The Treasure of the Sierra Madre	1948	10
	Key Largo	1948	8
	Germany Year Zero	1948	9
	White Heat	1949	9
	Under Capricorn	1949	6
	Adam's Rib	1949	7
	Stage Fright	1950	10
	Strangers on a Train	1951	8
	High Noon	1952	9
	Stalag 17	1953	9
	Roman Holiday	1953	8
	Journey to Italy	1954	9
	Love Me or Leave Me	1955	10
	The Seven Year Itch	1955	10
	The Trouble with Harry	1955	7
	Rififi	1955	9
	The Wrong Man	1956	8
	12 Angry Men	1957	10
	Sweet Smell of Success	1957	10
	Touch of Evil	1958	9
	North by Northwest	1959	7
	Pillow Talk	1959	7
	The 400 Blows	1959	10
	Psycho	1960	9
	Elmer Gantry	1960	8
	Inherit the Wind	1960	8
	One, Two, Three	1961	9
	Judgment at Nuremberg	1961	10
	Lawrence of Arabia	1962	8
	The Great Escape	1963	8
	Dr. Strangelove	1964	10
	Frenzy	1972	8
	Scenes from a Marriage (TV series)	1973	10
	Annie Hall	1977	10
	Kramer vs. Kramer	1979	9
	Withnail & I	1987	8
	Babette's Feast	1987	10
	House of Cards (UK TV series)	1990	9
	The Castle	1997	10
	Opal Dream	2006	7
	Coraline	2009	9
	Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore	2011	10
	Looper	2012	5
	House of Cards (US TV series)	2013	8
	These Final Hours	2013	8
	The Lunchbox	2013	9
	12 Years a Slave	2013	10
	Ida	2013	10
	The Book Thief	2013	7
	The Broken Shore	2013	8
	The Babadook	2014	6
	What We Do in the Shadows	2014	8
	Calvary	2014	7
	The Infinite Man	2014	6
	The Grand Budapest Hotel	2014	10
	Transcendence	2014	5
	The Little Death	2014	8
	Guardians of the Galaxy	2014	7
	Magic in the Moonlight	2014	6
	The Newsroom (TV series, season 3)	2014	7
	Interstellar	2014	6

What's that you say? You want some highlights? OK then! The funniest movies I saw this year were The Navigator (1924) and The Seven Year Itch (1955); the scariest was Nosferatu (1922); the best love story was Sunrise (1927); the best thriller was The 39 Steps (1935); best gangster films were White Heat (1948) and Rififi (1955); best TV series was Scenes from a Marriage (1973); best war movie was Battleship Potemkin (1925); best film about religion was Elmer Gantry (1960); best courtroom drama was Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); most mind-bending was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920); and the best new movies I saw were Ida (2013) and Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

And in case you are starting to doubt my commitment to The Primacy of the Written Word, let me add one more highlight: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, a beautiful tribute to the power of books and reading. It's a short film available on YouTube. Watch it! Show it to children! Send the link to your librarian! And then go watch some more movies.