Because I will not get to see another movie again this year probably, and I would actually rather have discussion about some of my choices than list in the other topic!... huzzah!

The Best:

01 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Endlessly romantic and quirky comedy from Kaufman via Gondry. Jim Carrey easily gives his best ever performance as a man who tries to erase his memory to get even with his former girlfriend (Kate Winslet). Not all goes as planned... One of the best reviewed pictures of the year and easily one of the only ones that people will remember, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not only indie but also heartfelt, which is more rare than most want to admit.

02 Kill Bill, Vol. 2 - Kill Bill, Vol. 1 didn't even make my top ten last year, but as a whole, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 gives me everything that I wanted that Vol. 1 didn't have... i.e. story. Uma Thurman gives her best performance ever as the Bride tries to off the last three folks on her list. Madsen and Hannah are absolutely brilliant, the cinematography is devine, and the story is genuinely touching. I can't wait to see Kill Bill merged back into one picture, but in a way, it works as two pieces.

03 Collateral - I would love to say that this Michael Mann's best film but when your previous pictures are The Insider and Heat and Ali and The Last of the Mohicans, that's hard to do. Still, Collateral is his SECOND best film. Tom Cruise is pitch perfect as a bad guy, but not bad-one-dimensional, and Jamie Foxx continues to prove he's much more than everybody imagined when he was doing the crazy In Living Colour stunts. The music, the cinematography, the editing, it flowed. It's beautiful. It works.

04 Good Bye, Lenin! - When Alex's mother collapses at the end of the Cold War she doesn't wake up until the world has changed. However Alex's mom is an old socialist supporter of the state, a proud German, and the shock will kill her. Alex and his sister Ariane do everything possible to disguise their mother's world... VHS tapes of news programs, old newspapers, keeping her in the house, forcing her friends to lie... in order to keep her in the house and keep her unaware, even as Alex begins to explore this newfound capitalism and Ariane does her best to provide for the family while keeping her job at Burger King a secret. Good Bye, Lenin! explores the impact of world events on delicate family bonds and puts a more human face behind one of the more major political shifts in our lifetime.

05 Shaun of the Dead - I absolutely hate, loathe, detest horror movies. But I love Shaun of the Dead. Feast on that.

06 Dogville - Von Trier presents a... shall we say, "interesting"... view on the immigrant experience of the United States that tends to be unflattering, and a little bit untrue, but if you take the larger social points out of it, what you have is a quirky little film about evil, evil, people. Nicole Kidman gives her career-best as Grace, a woman on the run from... something... who stumbles into a town that has to be imagined by... everybody. It's a tough nut to crack, but once you are inside the Dogville world, there is no way you can't stay out the end. And what an end it has.

07 Touching the Void - The infamous pseudo-documentary about the climb up the face of Siula Grande, which has never sense been climbed. Let's just say disaster strikes on the very summit of the mountain and what follows is 90 minutes of the most painful cinema you will ever watch. You wince as they go over every rock. And the "Brown Girl in the Ring" montage is about the freakiest thing that I saw this year. Don't watch it late at night.

08 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Who would have thought the best art film of the year would have been Harry Potter? Cuarón, for the first time in the series, injects life, not only into Potter but to everyone in the film which gives the wizarding world a touch of madness and more than enough danger. Emma Watson all of the sudden appears as one of that generations best young actresses. The Potter series is better for Cuarón's involvment. And bravo to David Thewlis. Sure, they could have done a LITTLE better explaining the whole stag/animagus thing concerning Harry's dad, but I'll take what we got any day.

09 Maria Full of Grace - A harrowing story about a beautiful young girl who gets mixed up in Columbia's drug trade and becomes a mule by swallowing 62 coke pellets down her throat. Wonderfly told, but the standout thing here is the introduction of Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria. What a find.

10 Garden State - I hated the first 30 minutes of Garden State, because I didn't really quite understand what exactly it was trying to say... but I did indeed clue into it by the end. Garden State is well acted and well told. It's a little too typical of the common late 20 something "maudlin" attitude but it is surprisingly told without much melodrama and really trusts its characters. Some scenes (like the wallpaper scene especially) seem put in to make a visual point, strip all that away though and it turns into an excellent but small little film.

My next 10 (so you can see what JUST missed out)

11 The Incredibles
12 The Clearing
13 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
14 Before Sunset
15 Fahrenheit 9/11
16 Shrek 2
17 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy
18 Valentin
19 The Dreamers
20 Baadassss!

Coming soon... the Worst list.

You have some good choices there, andaroo. Kill Bill, Collateral, Shaun of the Dead, and Anchorman would all be in my top 10/20 as well for the year. I did see Eternal Sunshine, and I didn't like it as much as the rest of you. I don't know why. Maybe I just didn't get it.

lol Zingy I felt the same about ESOTSM. I liked it but didn't really saw it's "greatness". I definately watch it again. It happens often that I miss something the first time I watch a movie.

But your avatar is an Eternal Sunshine picture?!?!

I think I'll change it again.

So far, Eternal Sunshine is at the top of my list as well.

The Worst

10 Young Adam - Sometimes films end up on my worst of the year list because of the amount of human effort it takes to reach the end of the piece. And this is one of those films. Although it's mostly about Ewan McGregor having lots of raunchy sex with Tilda Swinton. Bleh.

09 I, Robot - I could forgive the wacko adaptation of Issamov's novel if there was actually a great story that Proyas wanted to tell, but instead it had me questioning the movie's logic the entire time. If you want to be a dumb action movie, be a dumb action movie, if you want to... and The Matrix Revolutions and Reloaded learned this the hard way... want to be more complex and have meaning beyond that you have to step up to the plate and script a well laid out story and stick to it. I felt I, Robot was an absolute failure as a piece of sci-fi and its CGI antics (especially the freeway chase) did nothing for me accept to say that Will Smith spent a lot of time in front of the green-screen.

08 Catwoman - I actually saw this in the theater. I was hoping it would top the worst-of list, but it not even THAT campy. It's just bad. It's not funny. It's not bad-funny. It isn't anything.

07 Secret Window - Should just call this movie Write Club. Depp gives a decent performance but the whole thing is destroyed by the last 20 minutes of the film which are completely and utterly embarassing. Crunch!

06 Godsend - Good performance by Stamos, but just too manipulative and too exploitive of children and the horror genre for my tastes. Also the way the story plays out doesn't really make sense to me, they didn't earn its stripes. Cameron Bright in his first reincarnation movie this year! woot!

05 Slasher - This was an IFC documentary filmed by John Landis (American Werewolf in London, Thriller, etc.) and it is a complete and absolute mess. It says nothing, and the subject of the documentary is not interesting and not explored to the depths he could have been.

04 Garfield - It should be kept on store shelves next to packages of Wonder Bread. This movie is so white-bread and *safe* that it bled any ounce of humor out by the end of the credits. Odie should have been CG. It just didn't work.

03 The Day After Tomorrow - I've written a ton about this film, but the thing that bothers me the most is that after New York is "destroyed" the film loses any sense of momentum and plot and just becomes a random sequence of scenes depicting nothing important. The big solution to their whole mess was to sit around, burn books and relax until the cavalry came? What? One of the worst scripts of the year. It has a tenth of the charm of Independence Day and Stargate and yes, Godzilla is a much better movie. Best marketing campaign of the year though!

02 Envy - There is one great scene in Envy, and that's where Ben Stiller tells his boss off. That's it. The rest is Jack Black doing his patented naive act and Stiller pulling off the uptight sidekick. Then on top of it, this is a movie about poo. Great.

01 Along Came Polly - I really don't have it out for Ben Stiller, really. I like him, I think he has a lot of charm. Heck, I even love Zoolander. And Aniston... she is great in almost all her roles. But Polly is a comedy and as a comedy it completely and utterly fails. None of the jokes work. NONE. It is just a complete waste of space. It's ... RAAAUUUGGGGG... so frustrating. There is no chemistry here. And Rudolpho the Ferret? You know they are desperate when, in order to try and make your movie funny, you resort to banging a blind ferret against garbage cans to elicit a laugh. Don't go there.

out of the movies i've seen in your top 20 list, cept for harry potter, i enjoy the list quite a bit ...

disagree on some of the worst movies but overall, pretty good.

Eternal Sunshine will most definitely be in my top 10, as will Maria Full of Grace.

What happened to your super strong praise for Fahrenheit 9/11, by the way?

I still think it has some pretty effecting scenes, but after, I read a bit, and while it would still score in the B+ to B range, I can't fully support something that is a documentary with VAST holes in some of the material presented, even if it is to take down a President that disgusts me.

So it's slightly content based. I dunno. I re-evaluated everything on this list and the hour that I did this I wasn't in the pro camp.

Of those I've seen on your 'worst of' list...

I again agree strongly with your inclusion of Along Came Polly. What an utterly laughless, joyless experience.

The Day After Tomorrow was also pretty lame ("Who's that?" "It's my father!"), but I'd say as of now it's just outside my worst 10.

Young Adam was a little difficult, but I appreciated it for its atmosphere and oddly intriguing central character. But yes, lots of raunchy sex.

I, Robot was just silly. Fun, though.

Booo. You put I, Robot on the worst. cant have that