It’s my 45th birthday. So, why not make up a list of my 45 favorite movies?
You know, especially since I don’t normally rank things like this. Plus, I did a much shorter list once before for Gabbing Geek. That one hasn’t changed much.
That said, since I don’t generally rank things like this, just consider this ranking very loose. It’ll be more likely to be an accurate reflection on where I rank things the closer the list gets to #1. Near the top? Maybe not.
45 Avengers Infinity War/Endgame (2018-19)
I’m counting these two as a single movie because, well, Infinity War is a set-up and Endgame is a conclusion. The pair are both collectively and individually popcorn flicks that put a lot of characters into a blender, let them interact a bit, and fight a more complex bad guy than the MCU usually tosses out. Acting as a culmination of 10+ years of stories, it was everything I would have ever wanted from a big comic book movie.
For what it is worth, I think Infinity War is the better movie. Endgame had a big chunk of time in the middle where there didn’t seem to be much in the way of an actual obstacle for the heroes to overcome to save the day and drama kinda needs that.
44 Robocop (1987)
Once upon a time, this was the first R-rated movie I got to see. I was about 13, and I was really into what looked like a straight-up sci-fi action film.
Now over 30 years later, and I know it is still a great sci-fi action film but also a cutting social satire. That sort of stuff flew over my head as a young teen, but as a fortysomething man–do I could as middle-aged?–that’s a different story. And, quite frankly, the whole privatization of government services and corporate gentrification is probably more true now than it was back in 1987.
43 Airplane! (1980)
I can’t say that I have ever seen a 70s disaster movie. I have no reason for not seeing one. I just haven’t. I haven’t as of yet seen any of Bruce Lee’s movies either. There are only so many hours in the day.
But, if they’re anything like Airplane!, I probably don’t need to. With a cast of largely B-movie actors playing the goofy stuff straight, it’s one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Don’t like a joke? Wait five seconds and there’ll be another one. Sight gags, word play, slapstick, just plain weird stuff, and you have a movie that is better seen than described.
42 Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
How many sequels are honestly better than the original? Not many, but the second Terminator is not only easily better than the first film but also a high point for the franchise.
Then again, it would be hard to beat this one. Upping the ante with a more dangerous Terminator in the T-1000 and making the first movie’s villain one of its heroes, we get some good action and a very obvious Christ allegory in young John Connor who teaches a Terminator to sacrifice itself for the greater good. If there are more of these movies, it’s because this second one still has a lot of good will among fans in a lot of corners to keep hoping the next one will somehow be somewhere in the neighborhood of quality as this one.
41 Predator (1987)
Wait, I am ranking Predator above T2? Yeah, but not by much. See above about how this ranking is kinda loose until you get near the bottom. Besides, I honestly enjoy Predator more.
Look at how this one is set up. Aside from a couple of shots of a spaceship and some weird POVs, it looks a lot like a very generic action movie at the start as Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team of guns-for-hire go into the jungle, mow down all kinds of faceless minion types, and make lame one-liners along the way. And then a seven foot tall alien shows up and starts killing them while making it look easy. What does the alien want? Well, it’s only implied. Can it die? Well, it can bleed, and if it can bleed, they can kill it. Maybe. It’s just a really well-plotted action movie that keeps the audience in suspense as soon as the alien takes his first onscreen victim.
Besides, my dad liked to tell a story where he rented this from the video store and brought it home for himself and my mom to watch one night. She asked what it was about, and he didn’t really say. Then he enjoyed how, after a certain point, she had a death grip on his arm for the rest of the movie.
40 The Blues Brothers (1980)
There’s so much to enjoy about The Blues Brothers. Saturday Night Live occasionally tries to make a movie out of its reoccurring sketch characters, but those movies rarely work. The Blues Brothers is one of those exceptions.
What’s not to like? It’s got great music, a lot of familiar faces in the cast (some of them more unknown than others at the time it was made), great comedy, and the second greatest car chase I’ve ever seen in a movie. Two blues musicians brothers go on mission from God to save their childhood home, an orphanage run by a sadistic nun. And because they are on a mission from God, well, the brothers see no harm in doing whatever they feel appropriate to get the money. That tends to make a lot of enemies, leading to that epic car chase as every law enforcement officer in the state of Illinois tries to bring down two unarmed men trying to just pay a tax bill on time.
Oh, what’s the greatest car chase ever? Keep reading.
39 Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Frank Capra is known for his Americana work. What so many people fail to understand is how much of that has a really dark side that occasionally surfaces to cause problems. There’s a reason George Bailey needs to see what life would be like if he were never born.
But is there anything darker than his adaptation of a popular stage play where a man learns pretty much his entire extended family is involved in murder? Sure, his sweet old lady aunts don’t look dangerous, and arguably they aren’t, but that doesn’t make them harmless when it comes to deciding if certain lonely old men might not be better off dead. Featuring a cavalcade of crazy characters testing the limits of one man’s sanity, you may never look at the idea of digging the Panama Canal the same way again.
38 Psycho (1960)
We all know about the shower scene. It’s the single most famous scene in the entire movie. It’s a well-earned shock, and even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably know the scene is something of a game-changer for the plot.
But man, is this entire movie put together well. Marion Crane’s story seems to be the main focus if you don’t know any better, and her general tension and paranoia really work well, so much so that missing just how off Norman Bates is wouldn’t be too shocking. She didn’t notice he was missing a few cards. Why would the audience? Sure, Tony Perkins in that dress at the end of the movie is a little silly, but this movie worked so well up until the moment Hitchcock decided he needed an info dump to explain why Norman was nuts.
37 Die Hard (1988)
Die Hard is, simply put, the epitome of the 80s action movie. It has everything in there. Ineffective superiors? Check. Over-the-top bad guy? Oh yeah. Feds and media that don’t help? Yup. But in addition to all that, there’s Bruce Willis as, basically, just a regular guy with only a handful of skills. Despite the movie’s title, he’s not an unstoppable killing machine. Sure, he probably should be dead many times over before the movie ends, but he does look a lot more beat-up than most 80s action heroes by the time the movie ends. The truly indestructible John McClane only shows up in sequels.
Besides, this is my favorite Christmas movie.
36 Animal House (1978)
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: there are a lot of jokes in this movie that haven’t aged well.
But what has aged well is still pretty funny. Basically every college comedy owes a debt to Animal House, the spiritual cinematic ancestor of pretty much all of them. Anchored by a hilarious John Belushi performance, the largely plotless movie follows a group of young men around as they have different problems related to being the low men on the campus totem poles. But when the going gets tough…the tough get going, just like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Why anyone would mess with these guys I have no idea. It’s clearly won’t end well for the BMOCs who keep trying.
35 Blazing Saddles (1974)
Again, some of the jokes may not have aged as well as they could have, but this is a movie that probably gets funnier as I get older. That doesn’t come with some sort of change in my sense of humor. It comes from just plain learning more about the sort of stuff Mel Brooks is referencing left and right throughout the movie.
I mean, I had heard Madeline Kahn did a pitch perfect impression of Marlene Dietrich for this movie, but I didn’t realize just how good it was until I finally saw a Marlene Dietrich movie. Yes, it’s as good as you’ve heard. And sure, I know Western tropes, but the more Westerns I saw, the more I noticed in Blazing Saddles. I had a similar reaction to Young Frankenstein after I finally saw all the original Universal Frankenstein movies. Brooks’ parodies are often made out of love, and this one had a script co-written by Richard Pryor. It’s got more edge as a result.
34 Flash Gordon (1980)
Look, this is just a fun, campy movie. The Queen soundtrack and Brian Blessed’s performance may be the two things people remember most. There isn’t much to this movie.
But I will add my ex-wife did not believe this was a real movie every time she found Ted on TV…
33 The Wolf-Man (1941)
I’ve always had a preference for werewolves. There are dozens of memorable and famous movies about vampires, especially Dracula. But how many werewolf movies can you name? And if you can name a few, how many werewolves themselves can you name?
However, in this well-constructed little gem, the filmmakers knew that werewolves were a thing, but they didn’t really have any sort of lore to go with them. As a result, this movie made it all up. Wolf’s-bane, full moons, silver bullets, all that came from this movie. And unlike most Universal movie monsters, Larry Talbot (always played by Lon Chaney Jr) is a truly sympathetic victim. Chaney’s sad eyes really hammer home how he’s almost as much a victim as the people his Wolf-Man savagely murders off-camera. Vampires often seem to enjoy their status. Wolf-men like Larry don’t. It makes them a lot more tragic as a result, and I dig that.
32 Casablanca (1942)
Hold the phone. Why is one of the greatest classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age way up here? Well, simply put, as great as Casablanca is, I really enjoy other movies a whole lot more. The fact it got on my list at all should tell you a lot. You don’t see Gone with the Wind on here at all.
But Casablanca made Humphrey Bogart one of the most unlikely romantic leads in movie history. This movie is loaded with so many famous lines, most of which I learned from Looney Tunes. It’s about a man learning to care after his heart was broken. That he does so at the expense of his own happiness makes the sacrifice all the greater. There’s a reason Casablanca is an all-time classic.
31 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Humphrey Bogart is one of three actors whom I always see as the coolest guy in the room in any scene. Another such actor is Steve McQueen, one of the seven hired guns for this great Western. A small town in Mexico without any real money to call its own wants to send the bandits who keep robbing them away for good. That means bringing in some American gunslingers willing to work cheap. And that further means bringing in seven really iconic tough guys to take care of business.
Somehow despite the cast of seven men, the movie makes time to give each one a storyarc, and while not all of them will live to see the end of the movie, they each get some screen time. My dad told me six of the seven went on to be fairly famous and have good careers, and having a movie like this on your resume certainly helps. Akira Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai is also worth a look, and Kurasawa greatly appreciated what was done with his work here. On the other hand, the 2016 remake doesn’t really hold much of a candle to this one.
Oh, the third actor I always think is the coolest guy in the room in any scene is Sidney Poitier.
29 The Dark Knight (2008)
Batman is my favorite fictional character. This is the best live-action Batman story I have ever seen, with the best live action Batman and Joker. True, I’d rank both Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill above Christian Bale and Heath Ledger respectively, but at least in Ledger’s case, that’s a close call. I mean, Ledger made that great impression on a movie where he has something like less than twenty minutes of screentime. That’s impressive by itself.
Now, granted, I should maybe have this lower if Batman is my favorite character and this is my favorite Batman movie, but there are just movies I like more than this one, including one superhero flick still to come.
30 The French Connection (1971)
I’ll say it here: The French Connection has the greatest car chase I’ve ever seen in a movie. The fact that the car is chasing an elevated train doesn’t really have any effect on all that. The fact the car chase occurs on a crowded New York City street and the filmmakers neglected to get the city’s permission before filming on the other hand does.
But that car chase is almost something of an anomaly in this movie. Most of it is about a cat-and-mouse game between a wealthy French drug dealer and a pair of NYC narcotics cops looking to bust him. Both the Frenchman and Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle are rather formidable opponents, with the class element tossed in for good measure. Based on a true story, the movie has a somewhat ambiguous ending showing even if the drugs were caught, hardly any of the people responsible actually paid for the crime.
28 The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
I couldn’t pick just one, so I’m going to do like I did with the Avengers and make it one listing. Besides, will we ever again see something like this trilogy? Easily Peter Jackson’s masterpiece, he filmed all three concurrently and ended up with something huge that honors the spirit of the books they were based on.
Epics of this size don’t come along every day. Jackson knew how to tell the huge and the personal simultaneously in these movies, using characters over more fantastic and mystical than human and still finding the humanity in them. A lesser filmmaker probably couldn’t pull off movies like these without making them look like parodies of themselves. I know I left Fellowship of the Ring thinking I already wanted to see more, The Two Towers awed by the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and Return of the King wondering why that movie had so many endings…OK, the three aren’t perfect, but they’re still pretty damn impressive.
Just don’t ask me about that Hobbit trilogy.
27 Raising Arizona (1987)
I have a weakness for a certain type of comedy that most filmmakers can’t pull off. That would be the one where the movie is basically a live action cartoon. Those require a certain sense of style and talent.
Fortunately the Coen Brothers can do just that. This was the first movie of theirs I had ever seen, and it’s still my favorite of theirs. Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter just react in some sort of super-stylized manner, there’s an Apocalypse Rider from Hell tossing hand grenades at rabbits just because, and everything seems too surreal from start to finish. There may be two entries above this one list the best car chases I’ve ever seen, but for best chase scenes period, look at Cage’s attempts to dodge the law, trigger-happy clerks, and a pack of dogs while mostly on foot. Add some yodeling music and you have comedy gold.
26 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The best Westerns tend to be about taming the wild frontier. Most of the time, that’s subtext. For The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that’s text.
How else can we consider a movie like this one? Lawyer Jimmy Stewart comes out west, and by the end of the movie, he is literally bringing law and order to the frontier as the territory votes for statehood and eventually sends Stewart off to the Senate. Sure, he looks pathetic when he defiantly tells tough guy criminal Lee Marvin how he’s going to use legal means to bring the guy robbing him down at the beginning of the movie, but it doesn’t look that way in the end. Likewise, rancher John Wayne is there as the rough-and-tumble type who tamed the West the way John Wayne characters usually do, only he gives it all up to give Stewart the reputation (and the girl!) to actually bring in that law and order. Wayne couldn’t do what Stewart could, and Wayne knew it. I usually prefer Eastwood’s Westerns to Wayne’s, but this one here is a notable exception.
25 Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Maybe about a decade ago, I ran this movie for a class and many of my male students were totally smitten with Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker. I advised them to maybe not look up what Dunaway looks like today since, you know, she’s a lot older and has a reputation for having had a lot of plastic surgery, and these were a bunch of 18 year olds who probably were just going off her youthful appearance. But did they listen to me? Nope. This might have been the same group who kept referring to Warren Beatty as “Bullworth” now that I think about it.
But has there ever been a group of outlaws that seem like so much fun to hang out with as Bonnie, Clyde, and their gang? Sure, they rob banks, but they usually only shoot in self-defense and don’t rob customers. If the law would just let them be…well, maybe they wouldn’t have been riddled with bullets at the end of the movie. Then again, the real Bonnie and Clyde probably weren’t so pleasant.
24 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
I was shocked to learn a couple years ago that The Bridge on the River Kwai is based somewhat on true events. The Japanese really did force prisoners to build bridges and railroads for them through the Burmese jungles. So, I was a little shocked to learn there was some truth behind this movie, but somehow not overly surprised.
If anything, this epic war story shows just how insane war is. A British Colonel POW won’t do a damn thing to help his captor…until the Japanese man capitulates a little on upholding the Geneva Convention. From there, the Colonel will not only help his captors build a bridge, he’ll see to it’s finished on time, on schedule, and even in better shape than what the Japanese had originally planned, all to prove his own nation’s superiority. Meanwhile, the only American to get decent screen time in the movie escapes only to be voluntold he has to lead an expedition back to destroy the very bridge he nearly died escaping from in the first place. Does all this actually lead to anything other than death and destruction? Just one thing according to one of the movie’s few survivors: “Madness!”
23 The Seventh Seal (1957)
Igmar Bergman’s work has a certain reputation for being very serious and dreary, and what could be more serious than a movie where a Medieval knight plays Death in a game of chess for the right to survive the plague? And then I was assigned to watch the movie while in college and discovered something I was not expecting: this movie can actually be quite funny.
To be fair, it’s not a comedy. But the knight’s squire is a wisecracker of the highest order, bringing some humorous balance to what would seem to be a very dark film. There’s also what looks like a lot of dark humor. Death, for example, cheats. He blatantly cheats. The knight reveals to a hooded figure he takes for a monk his plan to win the game only for Death to pull the cowl back and reveal who the knight just gave his strategy away to. And for all that most of the characters die in the end, there’s the hope for new life from the young family who managed to survive, the father being someone who just has visions and sees both the danger for and the carefree departure of the recently deceased. Seeing the new life present shows that, even in a violent and evil time and place, there’s always hope for a new generation to keep things going and maybe make them better. And sometimes, death maybe isn’t so bad.
22 Empire Strikes Back (1980)
OK, ask me to rank the Star Wars movies by themselves, and I will rank Empire Strikes Back as the best bar none. Ask me to rank all my favorite movies, and a different part of this saga goes near the top of the list for personal reasons. It should make sense when you get to the bottom of this post.
But man, Empire showed just how great this series could be. Putting the directorial duties into the hands of a man who actually wanted to explore character dynamics and actually give the actors direction really made a difference. Darth Vader went from a large guy with a glowing sword to the scariest man in the galaxy. You don’t fight Darth Vader. You fight him and entire room he’s standing in. Add in Han and Leia getting closer, Luke taking lessons from a puppet, and even Chewbacca showing some genuine emotions here and there, and you’ve got a classic.
21 The Shining (1980)
Stephen King hates this adaptation of his work. He has good reason for it given how much the novel meant to him and his own life, but I suspect he’s the only one who really feels that way.
Stanley Kubrick always specialized in the strange and off-putting, and giving him a horror movie only makes sense as something that would fit his line of work. He didn’t make movies to allow characters to connect to his audience. A perfectionist who almost literally drove Shelly Duvall insane to get the right reactions, it may not be much of a stretch to see Jack Nicholson as a crazy guy, but that hotel isn’t helping. I mean, usually the blood gets off on the second floor…
20 Pulp Fiction (1994)
There are two movies that made me a cinephile. Pulp Fiction is one of them. I love the way Tarantino’s work just drips with this raw energy and excitement even when there isn’t much happening. Pulp Fiction just struck me as really, really cool when I saw it as a midnight screening for its original release.
Pretty much all of Tarantino’s signature style solidified here after an excellent debut with Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction is, by turns, funny, suspenseful, and often just interesting characters hanging out and talking to each other.
Besides, Sam Jackson will never be as intimidating as he is here reciting a made-up Bible verse.
19 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg both like to evoke a certain era in a lot of their work. Lucas’s filmography shows more of this than Spielberg’s, but it’s there, and it shows up a lot when the two finally collaborated on this, the first of the Indiana Jones series of films.
Really, did any movie open with a better introduction to who a character is and what he can do than the opening scene in this movie? You more or less learn everything you need to know about Indiana Jones and without a lot of info dump exposition. Why tell when you can show? From there, it’s one exciting action scene after another, and that’s not even getting into a short man who can be really intimidating just by hanging up a coat.
18 The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There are a handful of movie killers and monsters associated with only a single actor. Even if other actors play the role, that one noteworthy performer will be remembered above all other. And as much as I liked Mads Mikkelsen’s take on the TV version Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins got there first.
Of course, Hopkins only has about twenty minutes of screen time in this one, and he makes the most of it. His Hannibal just seems off in ways that none of the other psychos in the movie do. Heck, his way of staring into your soul certainly doesn’t help.
But just that one performance doesn’t make a great movie. Fortunately, the rest of the movie, often working off how sexist the society around Clarice Starling treats her, is excellent. This should be more Clarice’s story than Lecter’s, and in many ways it is. But it is really hard to remember that whenever Hopkins shows up to eat the scenery and maybe some of the other characters.
And yes, I am aware that Brian Cox actually played Hannibal Lecter first. I just haven’t seen that one.
17 Superman (1978)
I may be a Batman fan more than a Superman fan, but it’s hard to deny this movie’s overall charm. It’s the first real big budget superhero movie, and it would be hard to find an actor that embodied a superhero better than Christopher Reeve did. He says he’s for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and he says it so earnestly that, well, you just can’t help but believe him.
Coming across as a love letter to an American icon, this Superman may be living in late 70s America, but he sure doesn’t seem to notice. And along with Reeve are the likes of Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, and Marlon Brando all making for a downright wonderful movie.
That said, I do love me some superheroes, but this one sure wouldn’t work today. These days, we’d be demanding to know why it took so long to get the guy into his costume. Then again, maybe it would be nice if other superhero movies learned to take their time setting things up…
16 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The counterculture movement often looked at how authority figures of all kinds work to repress people’s desire for freedom. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest took that in a unique direction by making the authority figure a nurse in a mental hospital who rarely raised her voice. And then it tossed human firecracker McMurphy into the mix, seeing who would win in a contest of wills.
Who does win? Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Jack Nicholson is an obvious McMurphy, but Louise Fletcher earned her Oscar as well as the often preternaturally calm Nurse Ratched. She may be the creepiest nurse in film history, particularly considering just how much power she seems to hold over everyone in the building, and not just the patients. She’s the sort of villain you just love to hate even as she’s trying to be what she sees as utterly reasonable.
By the by, I read the novel once. I’d recommend it. It’s a trippy work told entirely from the point of view of the Chief, a man who thinks hidden machines called the Combine run the world. It’s always interesting how the Chief always refers to McMurphy’s red hair and how Ratched is often referred to as an old woman considering who played those characters in the movie and what they look like.
15 The Dirty Dozen (1967)
So, I didn’t like The Expendibles when I saw it. It found it rather so-so, relying too much on nostalgic feelings for old 80s action movies and their stars and less on saying anything all that interesting. For that, I would have to look to the 1967 equivalent, The Dirty Dozen.
OK, so, maybe only about half or so of the dozen get anything in the way of a distinct personality, but beyond the concept, there’s a group of guys, condemned prisoners, selected for a suicide mission behind enemy lines in World War II. Featuring some of Hollywood’s best tough guy character actors from the day, the movie actually makes a group of convicted felons mostly sympathetic (Maggot, of course, isn’t and isn’t supposed to be). And unlike The Expendibles, these guys actually can die, and most of them do. But because we spent so much time getting to know most of them, each death feels a little sharper…again, except for Maggot. That one was a victory.
As an added bonus, also unlike The Expendibles, this isn’t a movie with a lot of black-and-white morality. There are definite shades of gray on display here.
14 The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The first Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff is a great little horror film, barely over an hour long, that shows why man should not play God.
The sequel takes all that, tosses in some over the top, campy new characters, and dials it up to eleven with an extra order of potential blasphemy, all while adding a new iconic monster to Universal’s stable. The Bride only really appears in this movie, but when she isn’t darting her head around or hissing, she sure does strike a memorable appearance just standing there stiffly. And that’s not even getting into whatever crazy crap Dr. Pretoreus is up to at any given moment.
13 The War of the Worlds (1953)
My favorite movie when I was about 14 was The War of the Worlds. I watched it again and again and again. It’s still holds up well. There’s some genuine suspense when the aliens show up until just around the time they start shooting. The movie keeps things on a global scale, showing Martians attacking every corner of the globe…well, except the communist countries. I don’t seem to recall any peep about the Soviets fighting back.
Why still rank this movie here over 30 years later? Well, short answer, it may be one of the best of the various 50s sci-fi movies, showing all the tropes and plot points that made such things work, when movie characters just automatically trusted scientists and the government to get things right in the end. Except, of course, it doesn’t much matter if they do. The Martians doomed themselves.
For what it’s worth, the Spielberg version with Tom Cruise works pretty well too, but I like it more for its direction than its acting. Once the shooting starts, nowhere is safe for more than a minute as something will always come along to show how doomed the human race might actually be. Plus, Gene Barry and Anne Robinson from the ’53 version appear briefly as Tom Cruise’s ex-wife’s parents.
12 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
There’s a line from a review I read for this movie that always stuck with me. It said that Eternal Sunshine demonstrates exactly why heartbreak hurts so much. Our memories of the good times are tainted by the bad times to come, and our memories of the bad times are so bad because there used to be good times. And that’s always struck me as basically true.
As for the movie itself, since most of it takes place in a man’s mind, it is appropriately trippy. There some really creative stuff going on there showing how memory can work in a dream state and how it might look if our memories were erased one by one, especially when we might decide we don’t want that to happen anymore. Add in a not-really-happy ending, and you have this glorious movie and its look into what bad relationships might look like.
11 Unforgiven (1992)
The Western often depicts the gunslinger as the unapologetic good guy who solves problems with his sharpshooting or his fists. But that’s not how it works in real life, and Unforgiven reflects that.
This is a film where violence begets violence begets even more violence. Sure, the central conflict may initially be over getting back at two cowpokes for cutting up a young prostitute’s face, but no one ever asks her what she wants. There’s just a lot of baying for blood before Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny, having just fallen off the wagon, decides to show people what really scary violence looks like. It isn’t just or fair or pretty. It’s just violent. As Munny says just before he goes back to the bottle, “We all have it comin’, kid.”
10 Army of Darkness (1992)
Wait, did I say Flash Gordon was just fun? And did I say I loved Raising Arizona because it was like a live action cartoon? Well, Army of Darkness is both of those things, and it’s a thing of beauty as a result.
Also, if I put something like this in my Top Ten, you gotta figure I’m not just some movie snob who only picks old classics or whatever stuff I saw as a kid in the 80s. I saw this one as young adult in the 90s!
9 The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Now here’s a roller coaster of a movie. Watch it for the first time and just try to figure out what’s going on. There are so many people saying ominous things, you’d be excused for thinking there are more people in on the subversive communist plot than you originally thought.
But man, what a ride this one is. Can a young man overcome his brainwashing to keep from doing, well, more awful things than he’s already done? And has there ever been a more evil mother in film history than Angela Lansbury in this movie?
8 Goodfellas (1990)
Yeah, I prefer Goodfellas to The Godfather. Maybe that comes from the fact I had a lot of high school classmates with Italian heritage wanting to live the mafia lifestyle and always referencing The Godfather. Goodfellas was probably in the mix, too, but some of the mob guys in Goodfellas aren’t Italian mobsters. Or it might just be that while The Godfather is easily a cinematic masterpiece on par with the absolute best that film can create, it does somewhat romanticize mob life. Goodfellas does that too in places, but it also isn’t afraid to show just how much these guys are violent assholes. Violence is “just business” for The Godfather. It’s something of a default setting in Goodfellas that just seems uglier.
Basically, Goodfellas tells a somewhat similar story to The Godfather about the corrupting influence of the mob, but the difference is Goodfellas‘ Henry Hill wanted this life from the beginning and as soon as it got too tough, he cut a deal and hates himself. His final monologue doesn’t exactly make him out to be a sympathetic character with his obvious disdain for the everyday people in the audience, and it shouldn’t. There’s a sense of class to the Corleones while the various wiseguys in Goodfellas still seem like thugs and crooks no matter how well off they are. Plus, I love Scorsese’s work and the energy he brings to the table for his better films. Even his lesser work has that energy.
That said, a number of my students over the past few years like to say how much they love The Wolf of Wall Street. I like to tell them the director just remade one of his earlier, better movies when he made that one. Sometimes they look up Goodfellas, and to date the only ones who disagree with me are the ones who think Jordan Belfort’s lifestyle made him too awesome for words. So, really, it’s like my old high school classmates who thought the mob was cool after they saw The Godfather.
7 A Clockwork Orange (1971)
What does the title of this movie mean? The answer is in the book it’s based on, and Stanley Kubrick famously didn’t adapt the novel’s last chapter. I’m actually fine with that having read the last chapter, but it does change the overall tone of the story.
Then again, Kubrick might not have read the novel at all and just made the movie.
As it is, the film version is outright impossible to classify by genre, but the central performance from Malcolm McDowell as a teenage psyhopath with a taste for fine music and a gift for weird words is compelling in its own right, neatly divided into three different acts that end with the lad “cured all right”. Haunting and weird, a combination I don’t see pulled off well often enough.
6 Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Every time I see Sunset Boulevard, I love it a little bit more. Billy Wilder isn’t represented on this list anywhere else, but he was one of the most talented screenwriter/directors to work out of Hollywood and one of my personal favorites. His comedies are funny, and his noirs are suspenseful.
And Sunset Boulevard is actually both of those genres. Coming across as a pitch black satire of the Hollywood system, memorable villain Norma Desmond doesn’t understand that she isn’t a big star anymore, but she will control the lives of everyone she comes in contact with. This is a murder mystery where we know who dies because he’s the narrator. We’re just seeing how he got there, and the killer’s identity isn’t exactly a surprise.
Additionally, for a director known more for his wordplay and scripts than his visual flares, the opening scene ending in William Holden floating face down in a pool dead has for good reason entered our collected consciousness. I’ve seen it parodied more than once, from such TV series as Archer and American Dad. Even if you’ve never seen Sunset Boulevard, you’d probably be surprised how much of it you’ve seen or heard before.
5 Taxi Driver (1976)
In my mind, Taxi Driver perfectly shows the slow deterioration of one lonely soul with some severe issues. Travis Bickle is no hero. He’s dangerous, racist, judgmental, and the only reason anyone may think he is be a hero at the end of the movie is no one at any point during the movie tries to get to know the guy. That he isn’t much interested in getting to know other people doesn’t help much as he continually sees the worst that 1970s New York has to offer.
The violent end of this movie is still, to me, one of the most realistic gun battles I’ve ever seen. Nothing is romanticized. It’s just brutal, violent, raw, and frightening.
4 Star Wars (1977)
I know I said above that Empire Strikes Back is my favorite Star Wars movie, so why is the original listed so close to the top on my all-time list?
Simple: it’s the first movie I remember seeing. My dad took just me to see it when I was pretty small, and I loved the hell out of it. Combine this with Pulp Fiction, and you have the two movies that made me a film buff. Nuff said.
3 Network (1976)
The tag line I used to hear all the time about Network is that it is more true today than it was when it was made. You know what? That’s about right. This movie predicted news-as-entertainment and the rise of reality television decades before those became as recognizable as they are now.
Plus, how often is a movie known primarily for who wrote it instead of who acted in it or directed it? And yet, the name most associated with it is writer Paddy Chayefsky. Granted, the script is brilliant, and I always love brilliantly-scripted movies, so there’s good cause for both Chayefsky’s name being attached to it and for my general fandom.
2 Chinatown (1974)
Speaking of brilliantly scripted movies, here’s Chinatown, that rare movie that really rewards a second viewing. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes is a private eye asked to look into what sounds like a standard divorce case. Instead, he’s sucked into a murder, a frame job or two, and massive corruption in the water department for Depression-era Los Angeles.
I think what I love best about this one is how the story is told. Once onscreen, the camera never really loses sight of Gittes, meaning the first time viewer only knows as much as he does. Additionally, it doesn’t treat the audience as stupid by overexplaining everything that happens. Plus, Gittes is a clever man with style to burn. True, director Roman Polanski’s later real life events maybe make this one a little harder to watch, but so far I’ve been personally successful at doing like grad school taught me and separating the art from the artist…at least for this movie. Some other directors like Woody Allen make that a lot more difficult.
1 Rashomon (1950)
Every year, students of mine learn I’m a film buff and ask me what my favorite movie is. And every year, not a single one of them has heard of Rashomon. I’m rather fine with that. It means I get to educate them on the subject when they ask.
What can I say about the murder mystery that is never solved? Director Akira Kurosawa never intended to solve a murder–indeed, a number of cast members asked him and he refused to say who the killer was during filming. The point is to say whether or not human beings are ultimately capable of anything other than self-serving actions. The murder and its various witnesses seem to all say one way, but maybe that isn’t always true.
I will add Kurasawa manages to direct each of the four stories of what happened in a different style, and that takes some real talent that I have always appreciated.
So, there’s my 45. Will there be a new list at this time next year with a Top 46? Um, I hope not. This took a while.
0 Comments