Film critics write top-10 lists at the end of every year. Just about every single one of them does this without fail, despite the fact that every other film critic in the world also does it without fail—which means there are about 40,000 too many top-10 lists, with most of them saying the exact same thing. Even more confusingly, most of these lists continue to exist, year after year, despite the fact that people, in general, tend to find film critics to be pedantic assholes, and therefore rarely give even the smallest of shits about what they've decided to put on their little lists.

THAT SAID. 2013 was an excellent year for movies, and I had to write about that somehow. What I ended up doing was making a big pile of the most notable films of the year—they aren't ranked (because how do you directly compare Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell and Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim and not have your goddamn head explode) and there are not 10 of them (because that's a useless and arbitrary number of films). Instead, it's just a rundown of what I thought were this year's more remarkable movies—and hopefully, if nothing else, it'll serve as a reminder to see at least a few of them if you haven't. Here's the whole thing, and I look forward to hearing how wrong you think I am.