The Real Best

As an addendum to the end of the year list-making hysteria, an interesting thread popped up recently on the DVD Beaver mailing list about the best movies you saw for the first time in 2006 that are older than a year or two old. 2006 was a fun year for me as I rediscovered my cinephilia after five years of post-college wandering in the wilderness. I spent it catching up with as much of what I've missed as I could, and discovering countless films and filmmakers I'd never even heard of before. As all regular readers of The End Of Cinema are aware, I watched a whole lot of films for the first time last year (183, to be exact), each of which has at least a capsule review somewhere on the site. Here's the top 25% or so, presented in alphabetical order:

A Woman Is A Woman (Godard)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
April Story (Iwai)
Archangel (Maddin)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Band Of Outsiders (Godard)
Beauty And The Beast (Cocteau)
Blow Up (Antonioni)
Cafe Lumiere (Hou)
Centre Stage (Kwan)
Day Of Wrath (Dreyer)
Days Of Being Wild (Wong)
F For Fake (Welles)
Floating Weeds (Ozu)
Flowers Of Shanghai (Hou)
Gun Crazy (Lewis)
Heaven's Gate (Cimino)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Resnais)
I Married A Witch (Clair)
I Walked With A Zombie (Tourneur)
Irma Vep (Assayas)
Ivan The Terrible Parts 1 & 2 (Eisenstein)
La Strada (Fellini)
Last Life In The Universe (Ratanaruang)
Millenium Mambo (Hou)
Nights Of Cabiria (Fellini)
Ninotchka (Lubitsch)
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
Pickpocket (Bresson)
Satantango (Tarr)
Seven Men From Now (Boetticher)
Seven Women (Ford)
Solaris (Tarkovsky)
Stromboli (Rossellini)
Sword Of Doom (Okamoto)
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Dreyer)
The River (Renoir)
The Set-Up (Wise)
The Shanghai Gesture (Von Sternberg)
The Young Girls Of Rochefort (Demy)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
Week End (Godard)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai)
Winchester '73 (Mann)
Written On The Wind (Sirk)
Yi Yi (Yang)
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford)