The Best Films Of Our Years

About the 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).

About the Author

Father Owen Lee is a Catholic priest and a professor emeritus of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he was one of the first academics to be granted the Outstanding Teacher Award. He has taught over forty university courses in North America and Europe, on classics, comparative literature, art, music,  and film. He holds four honorary doctorates, and is the author of sixteen books on various subjects – the quest myth, Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace’s Odes, Wagner’s Ring, and the great instrumental works of Western music. But he is perhaps best known for his appearances, through the past twenty-four years, as pianist, commentator, and quiz panelist on the intermissions of the live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His avocation is, of course, the movies.