A Top 25 Films of 2013 List, More or Less

It's the end of the year, so I'm going to go ahead and make a Best Films of the Year list, even though I haven't seen any of the big recently released films yet (Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle and so on). I'll have a more official list come Oscar time, to go along with my award nominees and winners. That list will follow the strict imdb definition of all the other lists here at The End, but for this one, I'm going to use the flawed, but more generally accepted US theatrical release "standard", by which I mean I'm going to include a bunch of 2012 movies and exclude a bunch that have only played festivals so far. Here's the list, with links to my reviews or podcasts.

1. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

2. Drug War (Johnnie To)

3. Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)

4. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)

5. Wolf Children (Mamoru Hosada)

6. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)

7. Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sangsoo)

8. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)

9. At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman)

10. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)

11. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

12. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

13. Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)

14. The World's End (Edgar Wright)

15. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)

16. When Night Falls (Ying Liang)

17. The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata)

18. Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)

19. Memories Look at Me (Song Fang)

20. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais)

21. Three Sisters (Wang Bing)

22. People's Park (JP Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn)

23. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

24. Blancanieves (Pablo Berger)

25. Emperor Visits the Hell (Li Luo)


And because I can't let it go, these are 10 films I saw in 2013 that I had to cut out because they haven't had a US theatrical release as far as I can tell. Call them the Best 2013 Films of 2014 (if they get released in New York next year):

1. La última película (Raya Martin & Mark Peranson)

2. The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh)

3. Blind Detective (Johnnie To)

4. Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo)

5. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers & Ben Russell)

6. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

7. Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (Chai Chunya)

8. Yumen (JP Sniadecki)

9. The Great Passage (Yuya Ishii)

10. Trap Street (Vivian Qu)