movie season starts even earlier this year

Ah well, no Red Sox baseball in October this year. I've assumed this for a long time, but we watch the season until the end, regardless of standings. I haven't suffered through 2010 as many Sox fans have. I just stayed in the moment and went along for the ride. I also missed many more games than I usually do, so at least I didn't do that in a championship season!

I see last year's "movie season starts early" post was in mid-October. Ouch.

So this is my annual post where I ask you what movies you saw over the past year that you highly recommend. As I mentioned here, we may concentrate this Movie Season on TV series, beginning with "Slings & Arrows," which many people have recommended to us and which we've never seen. "Death Comes to Town" is also on the list, at least for now.

Do you have another television series that you love and think we should see? We're not big sci-fi fans, although if something is really stellar, we won't avoid it because it's science fiction.

So far, after Slings & Arrows, the top "new" movies on my ZipList are: Broken Embraces (always have to catch up with Almodóvar), It's Complicated, Crazy Heart, The Trotsky (not out on DVD yet), The Ghost Writer, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Yes Men Fix The World, An Education and something called Micmacs.

Two older titles I've been looking for that Zip now has are Our Daily Bread, a documentary about industrial food production, and Denys Arcand's Days of Darkness.

Will Ferrell's recent movie, "The Other Guys," is supposed to be both really funny and slyly anti-capitalist, so it's on the list, too, although also not yet on DVD. I've heard Ben Affleck's "The Town" is terrific; another DVD to wait for.

After that, we're into older titles: It's Not Me I Swear!, Tulpan, Hunger, The Pool, and With A Friend Like Harry. The way Zip works - or doesn't work - you need a minimum number of titles on your list to get decent service. So we often end up paddding out the list with movies that we're only iffy on. If you folks have good suggestions, I can drop some of the older titles.

Any of these you love? Any you hated? What must-sees are missing from our list?