Your Top 20 Films of All-Time (As of 2024) Movie • Page 12

Scorpio Rising was great, I watched when we where doing the year list polls

 

Scorpio Rising is only half an hour long. A very easy thing to experience.

 

Love how much Malick is there. Scorpio Rising being that high on someone's personal list is wild to me, but it takes all kinds.

 

Scorpio Rising is the most recent watch on my list. It really moved me in ways I didn't expect it to.

 

There is one more Malick to come.

 

I've always loved the story of Gene Kelly screening either that or another Anger film for friends at his house and being incensed when they didn't appreciate it.

 

another one I really need to see

 

I’ve got such huge blind spots that my top 20 in a year could be completely different films

 

That's the most exciting time of your movie fan journey, man. Everywhere you turn is a classic you get to see for the first time. Enjoy that shit.

 

I just saw there will be blood for the first time last year and it’s already undoubtedly my favorite movie ever

 

I watched Un Chien Andalou last night
This was a really good video on surrealist cinema

 

10. THE BIG LEBOWSKI
DIRECTED BY: JOEL AND ETHAN COEN

The Coen brothers always zig when we expect them to zag. After the critical acclaim of FARGO, they could have established themselves as the newest industry-approved dramatic directors. Instead, they decided to make a lark, a relentlessly silly story with clear influences from Ray Chandler and film noir. Dismissed at the time as a weak follow-up to the Very Important Movie (much like BURN AFTER READING after NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN or HAIL, CAESAR! after INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS), the film has grown to a level of fandom that threatens to crush the actual film with its recitation of quotes and dressing like the characters. Even with this Pickle Rick-like devotion to the film's peculiarities (Dudeism, White Russians, ironic Creedence Clearwater Revival fandom), what is still there is a deeply hilarious, while occasionally poignant story about the human desire to be left alone, hang out with the people close to you, and enjoy your hobbies.



"Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon, with nail polish." - Walter Sobchak

Unlike so many satires or send-ups, the film works on the conventional plot alone. A mystery of soiled rugs, kidnapped trophy wives, and nihilist thugs, we are witnesses to the absurdities that abound in their version of Los Angeles. A TV writer in an iron lung with an idiot son, a bizarre interpretive dance from Lebowski's landlord, a wildly garish mansion with empty hallways and a villains' study, and an attack ferret in a bathtub; we are exploring a world that exists on the edges of the society our hero knows, which is mostly a bowling alley and his own squalid apartment.

The film never tries to take a victory lap for a great gag because it is always on to the next one. We are laughing because we are as bewildered as he is; the commitment to the seriousness of the plot is never broken or subverted. Even in something as wacky as dedicating the ashes of a friend to the sea via coffee can, we don't need the wink or confirmation of lesser films. It is almost touching, in its own way.

 

What was all that shit about Vietnam?

 

"Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos" is for sure one of the greatest lines ever written.

 

9. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
DIRECTED BY: CARL DREYER

Sound came to the movies just as the silent era was reaching its artistic peak. METROPOLIS was a fascinating science-fiction film, SUNRISE showed how moving narrative on screen could be, and UN CHIEN ANDALOU and MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA pushed the boundaries of what should be filmed and how. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were continuing to amaze with their physical comedy, and we can always look at the what-if of the remaining pieces of GREED. With this film, though, we were given perhaps the greatest of the silence films, one where the lack of sound forces us to really read the eyes, the lines in the face, and the way the positions of people convey the amount of authority and power.

At the risk of opening another debate, Renee Falconetti's portrayal of the titular Joan of Arc is one of the best, if not the best, acting performances in the history of film. You truly get a sense of her pain, both physical (Dreyer made her kneel on stones, among other indignities) and the mental anguish of being so sure of her mission from God in the face of overwhelming skepticism and scorn. It is so strong and moving that you can almost start to believe Joan really was sent on a holy mission and why can't these captors, or really just a bunch of actors in town, believe her?



"Courage! Do not fall back; in a little the place will be yours. Watch! When the wind blows my banner against the bulwark, you shall take it." - Joan of Arc

Film is history. When we watch the movie in 2024, we are seeing what people in the late 1920's thought about an event in 1431. When the character Nana in VIVRE SA VIE goes to see the movie in the context of the film, we are getting a glimpse of what people in the Sixties thought about a movie from the 1920's depicting an event in 1431. In many ways it works like a primary source, unedited through time as a true and honest depiction (even if the films themselves are fictional). Dreyer would continue to work with religious themes for the rest of his career, although unfortunately Falconetti would fade into relevance, flee to Argentina after World War II, and starve to death. Like Bjork in DANCER IN THE DARK, the abuse she received derailed her career. While we can lament what would have been and we are thankful that working conditions are more ethical now, the film will always stand as one of the defining accomplishments of the silent era.

 

There's a close up in Joan of Arc just after she is given her death sentence (I think...?) and we see Maria Falconetti's side of her face twitch and seemingly spasm involuntarily. It's either one of the best pieces of acting and deliberate body control I've ever seen, or the power of losing yourself entirely in a performance.

 

8. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
DIRECTED BY: STANLEY KUBRICK

Where are we going and where did we come from? What purpose do we serve and do we have free will? These questions are unanswerable, but whether it is the surety of evangelical religion or the hand-waving of committed atheism, we cannot help but look for patterns and signs throughout the world and in our daily life. To take on the questions in art is to invite mockery and charges of pretentiousness; however, in Kubrick's best film, we are invited to witness the evolution of man as a grand social experiment, with the pursuit of answers creating more questions and the final reveal just creating more anxiety and confusion.

Whether it was the random chance of evolution or the divine will of a Creator, we all look at the things that surround us and find incomplete answers. Why are we so wise and able to have complete dominion over all of the plants and animals? Why is our planet so hospitable to life when the planets and moons that we have been able to visit or witness so barren and lifeless? Why do we just happen to be close enough to the Sun and support life but not too close to burn up or too far to freeze? Are we even thinking about these questions correctly, or are there things so far beyond our understanding as to render the pursuit of knowledge a waste of time? A dog or a cactus does not ponder why, and if it really is random, we are going to drive ourselves crazy looking for answers.



HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

What the film does so artfully is frame this pursuit of knowledge inside of a fairly traditional narrative of exploration, not unlike Zheng He or Columbus. Our characters are not really sure what the monoliths mean, and certainly are unaware of their subconscious effects, but they drive us forward from our simian origins to our enlightened pilots and architects of space travel. It even fits in a brief explanation of the flaws of relying on AI (something we need to look at more closely today) before flinging us into its most bizarre experience, where Bowman gets to experience his life in fast forward before evolving (or devolving?) into the Star Child. Is he sent back to help us? Is he there to judge us? It is answered based on your own interpretation of our value of the species and our accomplishments thus far. If we can make a movie like this, we are worth saving.

 

7. LATE SPRING
DIRECTED BY: YASUJIRO OZU

What do we owe each other? Is it our life to live, like the Godard film, or are we constrained by the obligations of family and society? At a certain point you are going to look back on your life and ask what you were doing it all for, and what your purpose was. We call exist in the context of what came before, and we are necessarily going to have to let people down or move on from the expectations of us if we are going to grow. However, the postwar period has increasingly seen an arrested development for many, not wanting to leave those safer and sunnier times for the cold, dreary realities of work and making your own family and enduring loss. At the same time, how selfish are we for wanting these people to remain connected to us, never being able to fully grow and experience the totality of life for themselves?

TOKYO STORY is usually considered the pinnacle of Ozu's career, and while it is a great film, there is such a profound feeling of regret and loss here. Daughter Noriko has not married well after most of her peers, taking on the matriarchal role after her mother's death. She is beautiful and kind, so it is not out of a lack of suitors, but she is happy to remain by her father's side because of the tight family culture of Japan and her true devotion to keeping her father happy and healthy. How do you cut someone loose for their own good when they don't want to go? As humans live longer, at what point are we a burden to our families and their own lives?



Shôichi Hattori : Young people have changed so much since our day. Take that bride last night. She comes from a good family, yet she plowed into the food and even drank sake. Gobbling up sashimi with that big painted mouth. I was shocked.
Shukichi Somiya : Of course she ate. Food was scarce for so long.
Shôichi Hattori : At my wedding, I was too filled with gratitude to eat a single rice ball.

Adding to the film's look at the changing roles of family in Japan is the heavy censorship the film faced. While the United States occupied Japan, they imposed strict rules on Japanese films in order to conform them more towards Western values. It is never more obvious than when two characters ride by a strikingly out-of-place Coca-Cola sign. In some ways, though, the censors helped to inadvertently more thoughtful film as Ozu tried to contextualize what was so important to Japanese people and Japanese families versus what they knew they were going to lose and how they would change society. While TOKYO STORY dealt with the ramifications of city life and urban work, here we see the last throes of that old tradition, which you might find at a tourist shop or a small village but is increasingly going instinct. It is film as history.

 

6. SPOOKIES
DIRECTED BY: BRENDAN FAULKNER & THOMAS DORAN WITH FUNDING FROM THE MAFIA

 

Finally, some good fucking food

 

6. CITIZEN KANE
DIRECTED BY: ORSON WELLES

As the history of film grows, the delicate balance between honoring history and being able to enjoy those films grows. Yes, INTOLERANCE is an incredible film and a major historical landmark, but who really wants to sit down and watch it for any reason but the academic? The way films are experienced has changed so much over time; not just the obvious, like color and sound, but everything from styles of acting to pacing to camera cuts per second. Most modern audiences will groan through a film from 1933, and an audience from 1933 would never have known what to do with something like AVENGERS: ENDGAME.

Welles' first film has a reputation as The Best Movie Ever, and it can be a terrible burden to be considered the best of anything. How can there even be such a thing? For anyone who has experienced the films that came before it, the style and the techniques pop out right away. Characters in the foreground and background, the noir elements, the tale of an entire life in flashbacks; it feels so modern despite the trans-Atlantic accents and the 1:33 aspect ratio.



James W. Gettys: You're the greatest fool I've ever known, Kane. If it was anybody else, I'd say what's going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you're going to need more than one lesson. And you're going to get more than one lesson.

The story of Charles Foster Kane is as timeless as Jay Gatsby and Holden Caulfield. He simultaneously seems to have it all but can never be fully satisfied. Following the tenets of Great Man Theory, Kane keeps pushing for more while neglecting to appreciate what he had accomplished or who he accomplished it with. While it can be sort of condescending to see the newest version of "how hard the rich have it", it is important that it was Kane himself that squandered the pleasures of life for his own pursuits and need to right the perceived wrongs in society. We know so much more about mental health and particularly the way childhood trauma carries with us these days, but in Kane's time you were just expected to keep it to yourself and get back to work. Like Kane said, he could have been a great man.

 

5. THE TREE OF LIFE
DIRECTED BY: TERRENCE MALICK

It is so easy to become jaded as you sit through more and more films seemingly made in a lab to garner particular responses. The jump scare horror film with a creepy doll or child, the superhero movie, the comedy that seems to be transgressive before enforcing conservative ideology, the indie drama about someone down on their luck finding themselves. The cycle continues, and on the rare occasion that someone dares to draw outside of those lines, charges of pretentiousness or elitism are sure to follow. How dare you color outside of the lines? You have Brad Pitt and Sean Penn on your poster; we want our coming-of-age story nice and neat. For some, the film was finally an opportunity to cast Malick outside, who had gradually been growing to this moment since DAYS OF HEAVEN veered so heavily from his more conventional BADLANDS. This is a film that asks the viewer to critically examine the moral choices of a dinosaur, who finds another wounded dinosaur, prepares to eat them, and is moved or otherwise persuaded to show mercy on the creature, only for the stark reminder that this entire system is going to be extinct long before any of us have any chance to interact with it.

It is about that time where your innocence is lost, when you stop believing everything your parents say, when you seek to gain approval from your peers by any means necessary, and when you reckon with your own ability to hurt and destroy others. It is understanding why you cannot keep looking at that pretty person in the next row and why you seem to desire things you never thought of. At the end of that tunnel is grace and empathy, as we grow from our selfishness and pursuit of pleasure in service of living for others. Even then, until the end of our lives, we must deal with the inner conflict of our id and our superego, called nature versus grace in the film.



Jack: Where were You? You let a boy die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good? When You aren't.

Malick's free-flowing camera works here better than ever, as the way the view never lingers and is always exploring outside of the "intended" frame in the same way a child looks around the world with such curiosity and wonder. We all go through those moments early on, when we see ills of the world like violence, homelessness, and substance abuse and are forced to reckon with the more idyllic world that our parents had carefully presented for us. While Malick ends the film with a vision of Heaven, we have to parse that optimism with our own ability to imagine a better world while coping with the realities of the current one.

 

Gonna paste my Donnie Darko review here because I wanted to revisit it to confirm whether it was truly my number one next to Eyes Wide Shut, and in all honesty, they feel like 1a and 1b representing different times and tastes in my life (Donnie Darko being my teens and Eyes Wide Shut being my 20s). Long story short, yes, it remains one of my favorite films of all-time, if not my absolute favorite. Part of that is definitely nostalgia, but i do feel the film has aged tremendously well and truly earns that spot for me.

"Donnie Darko - 10/10
This is The One. You get worried when you see a film you love lumped in with other formative angsty teen boy movies, but this just feels like so much more than that, from a technical standpoint and otherwise. The older you get, the more you realize the time travel/time loop stuff is secondary to the idea of extraordinary things happening in a very ordinary, conservative suburban area in the late-80s. The atmosphere, the music (both score and soundtrack), the casting/performances, and the uniquely complex and stylish writing/directing from a VERY young Richard Kelly...it just all comes together in one of the most memorable directorial debuts of all-time. When people talk about enjoying Lynch films because of the way they make you feel as oppose dto actually understanding them structurally, I can't help but think that Donnie Darko works in a way other complex logic vs. feeling films haven't for me in the past.

This film is a series of open-ended questions about free will and destiny, dressed up as the science of time travel, centered around all of the complicated emotions that come with growing into an adult. It's nostalgic, tragic ("How does it feel to have a wacko for a son?" "It feels wonderful."), funny (the Smurfs scene is an all-timer), deeply unsettling, and over 20 years later, it bends genres in a way I haven't quite seen repeated.

Gyllenhaal calling Swayze "the fucking anti-Christ" is quite possibly my favorite moment in film of all-time. Also, they threw Richard Kelly in Diretor Jail because he wouldn't stop making movies with portals in them and we need to free my man."

 

And I didn't even mention the needle-drops! "Mad World" gets all the love, but the rotating shots while "Head Over Heels" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" play are two of the greatest of all time. Movie is just on another level.

 

4. THE GODFATHER PART II
DIRECTED BY: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

The debate between the first and the second film comes down to a simple difference in expectations: do you prefer the cleaner, more coherent, and complete first film, a story about a man who cannot escape his fate, or do you prefer the messier, less focused, and more ambiguous second film, which is about the downfall? The two films make up the great American tale of the differences between our expectations and reality, but what takes the second film to greater heights is how it dispels with the potential for rationalization for violence in the first film and the myth-making of Don Corleone and his son, Michael.

Compare the climax of both films, which is Michael exacting violence against his enemies. In the first film, his victims are the four mob bosses who conspired to kill him and his family, the brother-in-law who betrayed them, and the longtime lieutenant who was planning to strike first. Other than poor Khartoum, the Corleone Family has been portrayed as reactive to violence pursued against them for the high crime of not wanting to help facilitate the sale of heroin. We do not really know much of their history, so in many ways the audience can morally justify Michael's fall from grace. When Connie is screaming and blaming Michael for her husband's death, we know that Carlo helped kill Sonny and in the Old Testament sense it was justified revenge. Compare this to the much smaller, more pathetic stakes in the bloodbath of the second film. Hyman Roth did betray Michael, but he is sick and is getting put into police custody, leading to one of the top Corleone men being killed in the process. Frank Pentangeli is convinced to kill himself because of his attempt to ensnare Michael, but at this point he had already submitted and would likely face charges himself. Of course, ultimately, the descent into darkness is to kill Fredo, who was a mostly hapless co-conspirator in an attempt against Michael but is no real threat to anyone, even hugging Michael across the waist like a child. It is the greatest of offenses, like Cain to Abel.



Michael Corleone: If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.

Even though virtually every gangster film ends with the downfall of the protagonists, it is very easy to find people and groups glamorizing them. Tony Montana loses the three people he cares about one by one until he is blasted into a pool of his own blood, and Henry Hill has to send his two father figures to jail while his childhood friend is dead and he has to live anonymously. Tony Soprano has failed in his repeated attempts to groom his successor, is facing his greatest legal challenge yet, and just barely survived the latest spat with New York, if he isn't shot to death in that last scene like all evidence suggests. When Michael asks his mother if it is possible to lose your family, she does not understand the question, but he gets his answer in the end: his children are hostages in a custody dispute, his wife is cast out, his brothers and parents are dead, and his sister has submitted to his rule. Even Tom Hagen, the one man who had Michael's ear, is forced to bend the knee in front of hired hands after being humiliated. Michael might live a long time, but he is sitting there on that bench, alone, with nothing to show for it.