Any top list ranking is subjective, and don’t let any other critic or movie watcher tell you differently. Movies are a personal experience, so know what you like, and rank using your criteria.
#100-91 are the just made its! Congratulations!! This list, like most of these mini groups, goes all over the place. No, literally. Mexico, China, Russia, the UK, LA, NY. ABC. Easy as 1-2-3! As easy as 1-2-3 is, liking these films may be even easier.
The first film on the list is a master class of editing and directing from Christopher Nolan, giving us a glimpse of how amazing his next decade is going to be. Shot backwards in small chunks, Nolan plants us firmly inside the head of Guy Pearce, a man suffering from memory loss in a way where he can’t remember anything that happens after about 6-7 minutes. Nolan weaves together a fascinating tale 6-7 minutes at a time from end to beginning, using that master of craft he possesses to keep us all guessing until the very end.
The lone true Western on my Top 100. I know what you’re thinking: this is really better than No Country For Old Men, High Noon, or anything John Wayne did?? Hell Yeah!!! Taylor Sheridan’s epic takes all the pieces those other films possess: shootouts, surly lawmen, big country shots, and adds in a heist movie, as well as some really fascinating moral quagmires surrounding what is exactly right vs. wrong.
You know who should make a movie about the 2008 financial crisis? The Talladega Nights guy! Obviously, no one thought this was a good idea…except Adam McKay, the director of Michael Lewis’s book adaptation. What results is something truly special: McKay takes his amazing ability to improvise and deliver the funny, and puts it in service of a real world situation involving financial jargon. McKay’s satire used humor to suck me in, hook me, and left me educated and pissed off about what the hell happened to those hurt by rampant banking greed and fraud.
We leave the housing crisis for medieval China. About 20 minutes in, Ang Lee’s seemingly run of the mill epic turns into a legend in its own right, as one of the great martial arts chases in movie history widened my eyes and mouth alike, knowing I was in for something really different. That scene was one of many where I found myself wondering “How did they do that????” and then not caring and edging closer to the TV. On top of this great ballet battle is a simple, powerful story about the classic hero’s choice: love vs. duty, told to us surrounded by breathtaking imagery befitting the grand spectacle Lee has built.
Musicals can get repetitive after watching a few in a row. But no matter how many times I see this one, it never get bored. This movie is a smile slapper: contorting your face into the happy look that never fades away, beginning to end. Part of that success is due to the songs, which bury into your brain and stay there, while you hum away, delighted. The story is also smart, taking place right around when movies started adding sound, and the repercussions it had on Hollywood stars, played wonderfully by Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor, who steals the show. If you’re looking for the glamorous ode to old Hollywood, I couldn’t recommend a better film to turn on and let the fun wash over you.
In my opinion, the sexiest coming of age movie ever made. Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal play hot shot young guns free of their girlfriends for the summer. They shoot their shot, and ask the elder Maribel Verdu to accompany them on a beach vacation. What follows for Luna and Bernal is all sorts of awakenings. Yes, the sexual awakenings are crazy seductive and hot. But because Alfonso Cuaron is directing, underneath he builds a complex emotional growth that slowly bubbles to the surface, allowing the boys a chance to mature emotionally too. Smart AND Sexy? How could I resist!
In his career of filmmaking, David Lynch pushes the directing and storytelling envelope maybe more than any other director. At times for me this makes his movies offputting or sometimes incomprehensible. Mulholland Drive is where Lynch finds the perfect sweet spot. The movie starts out a fascinating thriller, taking us through the seedy life of struggling actresses in LA. And then…Lynch does something that’s so daring and borderline insane that it nearly lost me. But after 10-15 minutes and maybe a paused wiki deep dive, the genius of what Lynch does grows and grows inside of you, and imprints on your brain. I put together my best Pepe Silvia board for theories about what happened, and did so eagerly because of how excellent a tale Lynch weaved together.
Religion and the human world. We’ve been debating for millennia now about the correct way to live, in particular when God gets brought into the picture. Taking the story of the titular famous Russian Artist, Andrei Tarkovsky turns this 3 hour epic into a thesis statement about the correct way to live. Throughout Andrei Rublev’s life, Tarkovsky paints these little moving pictures designed to test his main characters and the audience about their preconceived notions about religious contradictions, living a life of pleasure, how to serve God through art, etc. I don’t think Tarkovsky meant to answer any questions, but for me it certainly raised more ideas, all while telling a story of an amazing man and his life’s work.
If Netflix’s TV slate is any indication, serial killers remain a fascinating and terrifying part of society in equal measure. I’m certain that a large reason for that is this Jonathan Demme classic, and Anthony Hopkins all-timer villain performance as Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist who just so happens to enjoy eating people. Lambs sends Jodie Foster’s Clarice deep into the desolate pit of society’s worst, as she uses one serial killer to hunt another, who’s more twisted than Lecter is himself. This film will shock you and scare you more than a couple times, but that just means Demme, Hopkins, and Foster found something brilliant inside of a haunting package.
The first of several movies that will appear on this list from The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Using the onset of WWI as his inspiration, Hitchcock’s tale is about Joel McCrea’s correspondent heading to Europe to see a speech from a Dutch diplomat. The highlight of this movie are the set pieces. There are 3 of them, all quite brilliantly constructed as you’d expect. It’ll be hard to see umbrellas or windmills the same, and I maintain that Hitchcock could do better with plane suspense than any CGI effect could create. Hitchcock was always more than just his set pieces though, and his story about governmental chicanery with a little bit of lighthearted romcominess finds a perfect balance of tone and thrills that Hitchcock earned his Master moniker for.
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
If you ain’t first you’re last. Sorry Memento, you’re teetering as is.
The Newbie
I had never heard of Andrei Rublev until this last year. But after seeing it, I couldn’t ever forget it, and it will probably remain on this list for iterations. Foreign Correspondent is also a welcome entry, considering how well the effects and story hold up today.
Growing in Esteem
Adam McKay’s pivot to complex political satire in The Big Short has that movie as the rightful heir to Dr. Strangelove, one of the greatest satires ever made.
Needs a Rewatch
It’s been a minute since Mulholland Drive graced my screen. It’d be good to see the movie that blew me away at 23 remains as potent today as it did then.
The Surprise
Easily Hell or High Water for most. But that story is well thought out, and has more purpose and insight than many of the great westerns of the past. I proudly put it in such great company.
How the Subjective 100 was made…
My process to get 100 films was as follows: go through each top 10 list from every movie year on my website, and pull the best movies of that year that might qualify for my all time list (number of films per year varies, depending on the quality of the year). I took that set of films, and put them into their respective genres (sci-fi, drama, horror, etc). From there the films in each genre got ranked against each other. Then I worked backwards, taking the worst film from each of the genres and ranking them based on my personal judgment. Once the worst film from a genre was used, it was discarded, and the next highest film was then ranked against the current set. This process was repeated until I exhausted the entire film list, creating the list you’ll see forthcoming.
