I’d like to do something new for you folks. We are already halfway through the year and I’ve amazingly seen 257 movies thus far. That’s a lot of movies! And a lot of movie reviews, (that is to say when I actually get them done). I know that some of you do read every single review and I love you for that. But not everyone can see 257 movies in half a year. Hell, my friend Josh who loves movies just as much as I do has only seen about half of that this year. I know that for the rest of you, you probably see much less than even that. What to do if you are the movie lover that only sees a handful of movies a month? I recommend so much that it is hard to know what for you is really worth picking up first and what it is that can wait.

A couple nights ago I came up with a brilliant idea. Why didn’t I think of this before? Why not just pick out my top five favorite movies from each month to share with you? Not necessarily the best movies that I watched each month, but my favorites, the ones that really hit me in the gut and made me say, “Wow, that’s a great movie.” The ones that I hope will make you say the same thing. If I’m going to ramble on and on about how great a movie is, it is probably going to be one of these movies.

For quite a few of the months it was really hard whittling it down to just five movies. I wanted to extend those lists. But I’ll try to keep it to the formula. These are my five favorite movies from each of the six months we’ve gotten through so far this year, in no particular order: