1. Top 10 Films of John Waters (Artforum). A near-perfect list, iconoclastic and personal, but loaded with great, weird, wild, Watersian movies. The No. 9 curveball? Amid the art films, apocalypse comedy and Bieber concert film, a quiet, heartbreaking AIDS documentary.
2. Justin Davidson’s Top 10 Classical Performances (New York). So well written you’re guaranteed to feel like a jerk for missing any of the choices featured on it.
3. Thomas Copenhaver’s Top 10 Running Songs (3minus3.blogspot.com). A Minneapolis career trainer posted this list on his personal blog. I don’t like running, and I don’t even like all of these songs, but no one on earth could come up with better running songs. A ska remake of Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran”? And that’s just No. 7.
4. Rough Trade Shops’ Albums of the Year (roughtrade.com). Best kind of list: the albums I have heard are amazing, so I have to assume the albums on it that I’ve never heard are as well.
5. Comics Alliance 11 Best Comics (comicsalliance.com). Docked points for going with 11, not 10, but earned them back for ranking Daredevil above “Habibi.”
6. Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books (The New York Times). The only reason it’s not No. 1 is that Garner presented his picks unranked.
7. Keith Uhlich’s Top 10 Films (Time Out New York). Films you saw and liked (“The Tree of Life”), films you didn’t see and wish you had (“Margaret”) and films you never even considered seeing but now might (“Sucker Punch”).
8. Tyler Green’s Art Top 10 (Modern Art Notes). Smart, opinionated and ranging from L.A. to Fort Worth to MoMA.
9. The Unbest and A Year in Reading (unbest.tumblr.com and themillions.com). Two un-Top 10s that allow writers to wax rhapsodic about the single favorite album or book this year.
10. Mark Sikes’s Top 10 Films Hypothetically Starring Ryan Gosling (tribecafilm.com). Would Gosling have vastly improved “Hugo”? “Water for Elephants”? Sikes says yes.
