Your Top 20 Films of All-Time (As of 2024) Movie • Page 15

I met famed ap users cwhit and williek

 

1 (tie): CONTEMPT AND MASCULIN FEMININ
DIRECTED BY: JEAN-LUC GODARD

Jean-Luc Godard died recently, and it really emphasized just what a unique presence he had on the film landscape. When you watch somber European arthouse films releasing today, you can see the clear influences of Bergman and Antonioni. Bela Tarr very obviously owes a lot to Andrei Tarkovsky. The big-budget directors all want to be Steven Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson's deliberate and slowly paced filmography has shades of Stanley Kubrick. However, no one ever really captures what Godard was doing in his "cinematic period" from 1960-1968, and it might be impossible to ever recreate ever again. While all of the French New Wave directors were rebelling against the stuffy prestige films of the time, it was Godard who was most questioning what cinema can be, how you can change the defined rules of the medium, and how to play with audience expectations. When he wanted to, he could make a beautiful mainstream drama like CONTEMPT, and after he had proven to the world how great he was, he would begin to infuse his politics and move away from traditional narrative, starting with MASCULIN FEMININ.

Godard's cinematic period is almost parallel with Dylan's pre-motorcycle crash career, and the similarities illustrate the changing world of the Sixties. Godard and Dylan both proved themselves to be masters of the form in the early Sixties; Godard making ironic crime capers like some sort of proto-Wes Anderson while Dylan became the leader of the political folk movement, and then both men began to move against their own language, Godard becoming meaner and more openly polemical and Dylan embracing electric elements and moving beyond the protest movement. Throw in John Lennon and you have artistic growth that runs the gamut from the clean and optimistic early part of the decade and the chaos, violence, and conservative pushback of the later part of the decade. Talking about Godard's later films is contentious, as he often seemed to be trying to alienate the people who adored his earlier work, but those fifteen films over a nine period represent perhaps the greatest artistic output in the history of the artform.





Jerry Prokosch: Whenever I hear the word "culture," I bring out my checkbook.

Madeleine Zimmer: Give us a TV and a car, but deliver us from liberty.

They are both films about relationships, but everything else is radically different. CONTEMPT, made in color despite being the older film, is as mainstream as a Godard film was ever going to be. With an internationally famous model and a significant portion in English, it depicts the pain of falling out of love and the moments that betray trust. While the decisions can appear minor, and we know they are done for career purposes, those betrayals are irreversible, and you cannot even look at that person you used to share a bed with the same way again. Godard's personal history with women is problematic, to say the least, but more than almost any other director he really tried to explore the silent suffering of women of that time period, who were at once expected to become sophisticated modern women while also being expected to shut it down and become a dutiful housewife when the time required it. MASCULIN FEMININ is about young love and the ways so much jealousy and competitiveness will ruin the moment, only for us to realize what we were missing years later. It is about those people who were the first generation born after the war, able to access all the luxuries and benefits of modern society without the pain and trials of the first half of the twentieth century. Today we call them baby boomers and we think of their selfishness in less romantic terms, but they did not realize how much damage they were doing when their biggest concern was getting a date for Saturday. Famously, one of the intertitles claims that we are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, juxtaposing our idealism and desire for equality with our ultimate selfishness and materialism.

Both films end violently, as Godard films often do. Dead characters do not need messy resolutions, after all. This can be used as a criticism of Godard, but it is to illustrate how fleeting these moments and scenarios are. Godard ended up outliving virtually all of his peers, but he was constantly trying to reinvent himself in case he became the sort of stuffy museum piece that he diagnosed when he was a film critic to start his career. We will always be his students.

 

we’ve been in the same room, but you fled from me

see you at Sloppy Boys?

 

@Morrissey how often do you re watch these movies?

 

I don't generally rewatch movies unless I am on an airplane or maybe on vacation.

 

These write ups are newly written right? That’s impressive you can have new retrospection on something you maybe watched long ago.

I reserve movie time on the plane for movies I know aren’t my cup of tea. That format could ruin even the best movie. This is a hilarious idea.

 

Most of my top ten is unchanged from the last time we did one. I tried to omit films that I might have ranked highly at the time but couldn't remember well.

 

anyhow, great list and writeups. makes me want to watch some of these I haven’t seen.

 

I haven't seen or heard of at least 3/4ths of them

Flintstones erasure

 

Not even a Viva Rock Vegas mention smdh

yee I will be there throwing a surprise bachelor party for my bandmate lol

 

Tallied up everyone's lists with similar rules to the last time we did this. If a film appeared in first place on somebody's list, it got 150 points; second place got 149 points, and so on.

I had to take some liberties; if a list was posted "in no particular order," I counted in the order posted. I didn't include "honorable mentions" and only counted the first 20 films from each list. The full list of 364 films is here. Enjoy!

Top 50

1. No Country for Old Men
2. Jurassic Park
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4. The Thing
5. There Will Be Blood
6. Mulholland Drive
7. Mad Max: Fury Road
8. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
9. The Departed
10. The Big Lebowski

11. The Social Network
12. Scream
13. Everything Everywhere All at Once
14. Goodfellas
15. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
16. The Shining
17. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
18. Zodiac
19. Se7en
20. Inglourious Basterds

21. The Matrix
22. Boogie Nights
23. Blue Velvet
24. Halloween
25. Inside Llewyn Davis
26. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
27. Nope
28. 2001: A Space Odyssey
29. The Truman Show
30. Spirited Away

31. Punch-Drunk Love
32. American Movie
33. Do the Right Thing
34. The Godfather
35. MacGruber
36. The Silence of the Lambs
37. Arrival
38. The Godfather Part II
39. Before Sunset
40. Shaun of the Dead

41. Tommy Boy
42. Pulp Fiction
43. In Bruges
44. Blade Runner 2049
45. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
46. Drive
47. Dazed and Confused
48. Possession
49. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
50. It's a Wonderful Life

 

293/364

I'll take that tbh.

 

246/364

14 unseen from @cshadows2887 list

 

325/364

 

321/364

Some of the ones missing are big ones, though.

 

not even gonna try to count mine I’d be surprised if it’s even 200 but this will be a great resource for all my huge blind spots

 

But I think I’m gonna start the lord of the rings trilogy today

 

Enjoy, I struggled getting through them a little bit this year (just not totally my thing) but I really love Fellowship

 

I’m a giant fantasy nerd it’s my bread and butter when it comes to the video games I play so I’m pumped

 

yeah based on all of the rpgs you play I can't imagine you not loving it haha.

 

Horror classics hurt my score. Haven't seen

Texas chainsaw Massacre
Halloween
Nightmare on Elm Street

Not sure about The Exorcist

 

Damn, gotta see TCM and Halloween!