Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: An Introduction

We will begin unveiling this year’s Muriels Hall of Fame inductees tomorrow, announcing them a day at a time (as is our wont) until we’ve finished. However, before that begins, I thought it best to warn you that this year’s class is rather, well, larger than last year’s. There’s a reason for that. Although we’ve never set an exact number of films to honor annually, generally I’ve tried to make ten the goal. And it looked like we’d have roughly that many again this year when I first began tabulating the results.

However, when I took a look at this year’s top vote-getters, I noticed that not a single one of them was in a language other than English. Seeing as how the goal of the Muriels HOF (and the Muriels proper, for that matter) has been to cast a wide net, this simply wouldn’t do. So I looked at the next highest vote-getters in the bunch and noticed a number of foreign-language films there.

This left me with a decision. I could either:

a. Stick with the eight top vote-getters, English or no, just for the sake of having a more manageable number,
b. Find some arbitrary way to only select the foreign-language films from the next-highest group of vote getters, or
c. Take all of the next-highest group, even though it would cause the number of inductees to balloon.

I wasn’t about to choose option (a), and while I wrestled with the possibility of option (b), I felt that if we were truly going to be about choosing the best films from around the world, we shouldn’t make a distinction between Anglophone cinema and foreign-language cinema just in order to meet some diversity quota. Therefore, I decided to pick option (c).

Because of this, the 2015 crop of inductees numbers a whopping seventeen (including the already-chosen Dr. Strangelove, which got in by winning the 50th Anniversary Award in February). And while that sounds like a lot, I hope you’ll agree that the larger group created a good mix of films- not just foreign films from numerous countries, but also a number of genres and great filmmakers we haven’t honored previously, as well as a number of interesting milestones for the group.

Anyway, hope you enjoy this year’s nominees, which as always will be presented alongside essays written by our Hall of Fame voters. Enjoy!