I wrote about film regularly between 1998 and 2005, and at the end of that time I drew up a double-barreled list of the movies I’d reviewed that I liked best.
These were the top twenty: The Apostle, Barbershop, Bright Young Things, Croupier, The Dreamlife of Angels, Election, Ghost World, High Fidelity, The Incredibles, The Last Days of Disco, Look at Me, Lost in Translation, Next Stop Wonderland, Out of Sight, Panic, The Sixth Sense, Spellbound, The Station Agent, Topsy-Turvy, and You Can Count on Me. (Junebug should have made that list as well, but I saw it a week after I filed my last review.)
These were the runners-up: About Schmidt, Being John Malkovich, The Cooler, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Garden State, Guinevere, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Lilo & Stitch, The Limey, Lovely and Amazing, Magnolia, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Pi, Ripley’s Game, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Sideways, Sunshine State, Talk to Her, The Tao of Steve, The Whole Nine Yards, and Three Kings.
Those were the days!