The Best Years in Cinema, pt. 1

While every year’s got something—there are some years that’ve got just a little extra. There was something in the water that year. In the world of film, it’s when new directors with new visions begin to appear, old directors release their greatest work, and audiences flock to theaters to be part of a cultural moment. Years like that roll around now and again, but we often don’t recognize them (let alone appreciate them) until long after they’re gone. 

In an effort to appreciate some of those years—and because nothing gives me greater pleasure than declaring something as the best—I want to dedicate the month of March to the greatest years in the history of film. For the first couple weeks, I’ll survey some of the major contenders (five this week; four next week), but don’t worry: we’ll conclude by crowning one year the greatest of them all.

Before we get into it, though, I want to acknowledge some special years in film that didn’t quite break my top ten, including 1928 with The Passion of Joan of Arc (notable also for the transition to sound), 1955 with Rebel Without a Cause, 1960 with Psycho, 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1969 with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1971 with The French Connection, 1974 with Chinatown, 1976 with Rocky, 1977 with Star Wars, 1979 with Apocalypse Now, 1984 with Amadeus, 1989 with Do the Right Thing, 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs, 1998 with Saving Private Ryan, 2006 with Pan’s Labyrinth, 2010 with Inception, 2012 with The Master, 2013 with The Act of Killing, 2019 with Parasite, and 2022 with Everything Everywhere All at Once. For each of those years, there’s a half-dozen other great movies, and so it should be clear that to be one of the great movie years requires more than a few hits.

The earliest year for our contenders this week, 1946, could earn its spot purely as the all-time highest movie attendance year, with more than 90 million weekly admissions (around 60% of the population of North America). If that weren’t enough, you have three of the great directors operating at the height of their powers—Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious), John Ford (My Darling Clementine), and Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep)—as well as a personal favorite, It’s a Wonderful Life. More than a holiday classic, the latter movie represents another important aspect of that year: its wrestling with a post-World War II reality. Over in Europe, Italy began to reflect through the emerging genre of neorealism, and the film that took home Best Picture that year at the Oscars was William Wyler’s (another great director) sobering confrontation with war in The Best Years of Our Lives. 

Speaking of William Wyler. In 1959, we get the absolute juggernaut of a film—a movie that could singlehandedly make a year a contender—Ben-Hur. Technically a remake, it was, at that time, the most expensive movie ever filmed, with the largest sets ever constructed. But after wrapping filming in Rome and premiering in New York City, it quickly became the highest grossing movie of the year (second all-time only to Gone with the Wind). It won a record-breaking 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, an achievement that has never been broken and was only tied after 40 years. If William Wyler’s magnum opus were not enough, we add to it classics like Some Like It Hot, North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, and Sleeping Beauty (the peak of pre-Renaissance Disney). The French New Wave entered the spotlight with François Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and the year takes on further symbolic significance with the release of the final Three Stooges film and the death of Errol Flynn.

Whereas the previous year can be described as the height of certain forms of filmmaking, it is in 1967 that we get one of the most revolutionary years in cinema. Influenced by filmmaking across the Atlantic, American cinema took on more politically progressive, darker, and more erotic tones—see: The Graduate (somehow the highest grossing of the year), Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen, In Cold Blood, and In the Heat of the Night (the Best Picture winner). Even the seemingly good-time movies, like Camelot or The Jungle Book, took on a tragic or more melancholy air. Just as The Jungle Book, the last Disney film released under Walt, signaled a real shift in the studio’s future, so the entire year signaled a shift in Hollywood that would persist for the next decade.

I imagine as we move into the twenty-first century, and specifically 2001, we get closer to a year most modern moviegoers care about. And really, they’re in good company. According to Daniel Parris, a lover of stats and pop culture, 2001 is objectively the greatest year in cinema, possessing the highest average rank across online database ratings (like IMDb and Letterboxd), critical acclaim (measured by appearance in film critic top 100 lists), and box office performance. While 2001 doesn’t score particularly high critically, it crushes in terms of user ratings—with movies like Spirited Away, The Lord of the Rings, Amélie, Shrek, Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko, Monsters Inc., and The Royal Tenenbaums—and in terms of box office—with moneymakers like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Fellowship of the Ring, Monsters Inc., Shrek, Ocean’s Eleven, Pearl Harbor, and The Mummy Returns. The year launched several massive franchises, including, in addition to those just mentioned, The Fast and the Furious and Spy Kids. But if it had only given us Ocean’s Eleven, that would have been enough for me. (Also worth mentioning are important films like Moulin Rouge!, Christopher Nolan’s breakout hit Memento, and A Beautiful Mind—the Best Picture for that year.)

And in 2007, we get a particularly rare treat, even by the standards already established: several major directors released career-defining works at the same time, producing an unusual convergence of art-house excellence, mainstream success, and awards recognition. In something of symbolic fashion, in the same year that Martin Scorsese wins best director for the previous year’s The Departed, an award both earned and given in recognition for his decades of mastery, the next generation of directors, in a sort of changing of the guard, all release their greatest works: the Coen brothers release No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson releases There Will Be Blood, and David Fincher releases Zodiac (the former two battling it out at the Oscars, with the Coens taking home Best Picture). Beyond these, indie films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Juno, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Into the Wild reached a wider-than-usual audience. Although it is the last year to not have a movie reach a billion dollars, it still sees massive success at the box office with the conclusion of the Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man, and Shrek trilogies and the introduction of new box-office giants like Transformers and 300. Even some of the year’s more popular movies are seen as artistic triumphs, like Pixar’s Ratatouille, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Superbad.

And looking at these five years in cinema, it’s hard to imagine there are five more that are even better.