30 Years of Film

I’ve recently been trying to decide what my favourite film of 2012 is/was and in thinking about it (pretty sure it’s Argo by the way) I have also started thinking about what my favourite films of previous years are. Like a lot of people I have a list of my favourite films of all time but this list is a little bit different than your standard top 10 or the like. Here I have decided to pick my favourite film from each of the years I have been alive on this Earth.

The one rule I put in place for myself was that the film(s) I have chosen for each year had to be cinematically released in the country in which I lived during that year. I’m also limiting myself to 4 selections – 1 favourite 3 and runners-up – for each year.

I found this to be an interesting exercise because (a) some years the competition was very (very!) close (b) other years there were no particularly strong candidates and (c) I didn’t really go to the cinema during my first 6 or 7 years of life and so the rules had to be slightly altered between 1983 and 1990.

The Filmsite website (www.filmsite.org) written and edited by Tim Dirks was an invaluable tool in this exercise and I also consulted the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) regularly for release dates, quotes and how to spell those tricky names.

Here we go:

30 Years of Film