It's definitely tough

Yeah I guess I'm just underscoring it's hindsightedness

This year isn't over yet, but so far I'd only recommend about 5 or 6

Yeah I guess I was just stating an obvious point, but with a bit of derision because of my aforementioned distate for retrospective lists.

Here's a few others from that year nobody is mentioning:

PS According to the top of my list I saw 86 movies that year and the worst one was Batman & Robin.

Interestingly, 1997 was the first year I started archiving top 20 lists for movies, so I actually DO have a snapshot of my favorites at that time:

Hindsight lists are less interesting to me personally. Everyone can have the right answer 20 years later. I'm much more interested in what was happening at the time.

Actually Crash was released in most commercial territories worldwide in 1996, but US/UK got it in '97 so it technically counts for this list. Waiting For Guffman had zero territories open in '96. It's fully in the '97 camp.

The '96 date comes from a bow at the Boston Film Festival in Fall '96, but it opened to the public in '97

Waiting For Guffman was released in the US on January 31, 1997

Considering several of those above are on the list I made at the time, I agree with you. This is some hindsight list making here. Not one single person had Starship Troopers and Face/Off in the top 5 films of 1997 at the time. Not one.

PS This is clearly a list that was written in hindsight. No one in the world had a ranking like this at the time, I promise you.

Major pieces missing from this list:

Exactly.

This is gonna be an American Crime Story season and you know it.

Yeah but "dime a dozen" is different from "awful". I'm just saying there are enough individual moments in the movie that I think save it from awful status. It just doesn't feel like the right movie to bestow that harsh of a term on.

Missing from the TIFF slate so far:

I'm with you. He's definitely hit and miss, although I'd say Crimson Peak falls more in to the miss category for me.

I'll never understand why people think Seven Psychopaths is awful. There's too much Sam Rockwell goodness in there to be considered a terrible movie.