The Best Films of Our Years Book

The Best Films of Our Years is an affectionate and witty traversal of the history of the movies year-by-year by an author whose style has been called "finely crafted" (America), "highly readable" (Choice), and "often irreverently amusing" (Opera News). In the 1970s, when he was lecturing on film, Father Owen Lee was able to speak with and learn from such movie people as Pauline Kael, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roberto Rossellini. In this book he provides thumbnail reviews of ten -- arguably the best ten -- movies of each year from 1935 (when he began his movie going) to the present. There is a preliminary section commenting on fifty important films that preceded 1935. And there is a closing section with longer chapters on "the ten best films of all our years", among them Grand Illusion, Rashomon, and Lawrence of Arabia. The book's title rings a change on William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).