Though March of ’05 may seem a bit late to set about wrapping up the cinematic year that was ’04, by the industry’s calendar, we’re right on schedule. After all, January and February seem to have been designated as official victory-lap months for the prior year, full of award ceremonies, backslaps, hand wringing, and hand-jobs all culminating in the mother of all awards shows: the Oscars. (Don’t miss Neal Block’s coverage of the best and worst dressed in this very issue.) Though it’s fun to overdose on end-of-the-year releases, make snap judgments about movies seen only days prior, and then cram as much hyperbole and idiosyncrasy into a list of 10 as possible, there’s something to be said for sitting things out and searching for a little perspective.

Truth be told, we did get a little caught up in the madness this year. Our best-of list went up in our weekly www.indieWIRE.com column in late December, after polling taken throughout that month. Hence, our list doesn’t include late-year entries like Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator, both of which were adored by much of the staff. We went early because we were worried about great films getting lost in the shuffle and wanted to do our small part to push a Twentynine Palms or The Village into the discourse. Three months later, we could have gone back and revised the list, but something about its inclusions, exclusions, and the dialogues it sparked among our staff made it feel pretty correct. By asking our most faithful and prolific contributors to name their 10 favorite films in order of preference, we got a pretty accurate consensus of what tickled our fancy this year—the number one slot receiving ten points, number two nine points, and so on. That Before Sunset ended up at the top by a wide margin might partly have something to do with our generational biases, yet arguably it has more to do with our sense of film history: its classical Hollywood and European filmic tendencies must have seriously affected us, though it certainly has its detractors (read Eric Hynes’s piece).

Of course, each issue of Reverse Shot wouldn’t be complete without a bone to pick; and we have one we’d like to strip down to the marrow. Slate’s hopelessly myopic and irrationally defensive “movie club” circle jerk (a group of established, mostly veteran critics caught in a roundelay of emails about the year in film) perhaps was a good idea in theory. Yet, as we certainly know from our own experiences (and worst, sweaty self-loathing nightmares) that when you get a bunch of self-satisfied critics in the same room (chat or literal), there’s bound to be less art discussion than unbridled vitriol. Perhaps we bring it up only to respond to some of the elder critics’ wildly specious and hilariously self-mummifying claims that the new “hipster” generation of critics simply don’t understand cinema history and have no sense of aesthetic value. As much as we tried to laugh it off, it stuck in our craw. Not only have we devoted much of our lives to art appreciation of the movie sort, we here, many of us in our mid-twenties, have tried to bemoan the sort of Ain’t-It-Cool mugging and slavish writing proliferating the web. To use Harry Knowles to typify a generation of film lovers is to willfully and blindly deny the new generation of serious film culture itself and to trash the legacy of all great post-Cahiers critics. Shame on Slate’s elder bunch for not aging gracefully; maybe they really could learn something from our number one movie of 2004 after all.
--MK/JR