Saturday 4 January 2014

The 2013 CAST Awards



For the 4th year running, good friend James McNally (also the founder and curator of the great short film screening series Shorts That Are Not Pants) has polled a disparate group of Toronto film writers/bloggers/cineastes for their 10 best films of the past year. The resulting final CAST (Cinema Appreciation Society of Toronto) awards provides not only a fine looking Top 10, but also allows you to walk through all the individual lists (including mine) to get a glimpse of a wide variety of taste and hopefully garner a few ideas for additional films to watch.

The full list with additional stats and individual member's votes can be found here. Below is the top 15:

  1. Her
  2. 12 Years a Slave
  3. Before Midnight
  4. Gravity
  5. Inside Llewyn Davis
  6. Mud
  7. Frances Ha
  8. The Wolf of Wall Street
  9. Upstream Color
  10. Dallas Buyers Club
  11. Blue is the Warmest Color
  12. The Broken Circle Breakdown
  13. Museum Hours
  14. Stoker
  15. Spring Breakers

Except for Blue is the Warmest Color (which I haven't yet seen) and Frances Ha (which simply never connected with me), I'm kinda in love with this list. My entire top 5 is represented within it and 10 of my top 20 make it. I don't know what that says about me and my taste, but it sure means a lot of great cinema was appreciated this year.


3 comments:

Alex Withrow said...

Wow, that is a damn solid list. That's one smart CAST there! Love that Upstream made the cut.

Dan said...

Once again, I'm jealous of the wisdom and talent of the Toronto film community. Very strong list!

Bob Turnbull said...

Hey Alex & Dan! Here I am, late as usual in responding...

Yeah, I was really happy with the outcome of the list - though I suppose that's because I found myself really enjoying most of the big critical hits this year.

We are lucky in Toronto though - not only because of the wealth of film variety available, but also due to the film writer/blogger community being very strong.