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.
#40-31 is filled with peaks. We get peak performances from actors. Peak films in movie genres. Peak screenplays that would define new eras of filmmaking. No matter which film you’re seeing here, it’s the pinnacle of some part of my film going experience.
Arguably the greatest example of media satire ever made. Peter Finch, after a news broadcast, goes off script, saying how he really feels about his upcoming “resignation” from the network. Because his unhinged rant boosted ratings, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall see an opportunity to give him more airtime to speak his truths, including threatening to kill himself on the air. What follows is a bleak, jaded Sidney Lumet masterpiece of the one law of television/movies/social media: ratings matter more than anything else. A chance to become famous or be seen will see anyone sacrifice any sense of morality or scruples they have for that sole purpose of keeping butts in seats. It’s unflinching, awful, but completely perceptively brilliant stuff as expected from Lumet, one of the great directors of all time.
James Cameron gets heaps of praise for how he pushed the storytelling, special effects, and world building with Terminator 2. He would never have had a chance to do so were it not for him pulling off this sequel to Ridley Scott’s incredible 1979 Alien (I try to pick only one movie from a franchise in this list, otherwise Alien would be on here high up). You don’t get Linda Hamilton’s ripped Sarah Connor without Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley creating the female action hero. Also Cameron does what all good sequels should do: take what makes the first special and expand upon it, not recreate it. As such, this film is an action extravaganza with all sorts of fun futuristic weaponry, an army battalion’s worth of interesting characters, and a relentless plot that culminates in a terrifying villain that will leave you on the edge of your seat the minute you land on LV-426.
Before he became the jaded 70’s master, Sydney Lumet directs this ode to one of the US’s great civic responsibilities: jury duty. We never see the trial: Lumet drops these 12 men into a room to deliberate on what they heard in the trial, with Henry Fonda being the 1 initial dissenting opinion. What follows is what every person hopes happens in that room: the jurors take the actual facts of the case and try to discern the correct decision regardless of their thoughts or feelings on who’s on trial. Reginald Rose’s screenplay brilliantly turns each juror into an archetype of a type of juror you might find: an emotional judgmental one, a purely analytical one, an antagonist, a bandwagoner, etc, as Lumet peels back the forces driving each of these people to their decision and whether those forces are based on the case or personal bias, and most importantly, the level of difficulty it takes to change a person’s mind.
One of Richard Linklater’s many masterpieces about the human condition and its relationship to time. The premise is so simple yet so powerful and hard to execute: the story of a boy’s life during his school years: age 6 to age 18, but shot over that 12 year period. The brilliance of Linklater is on full display here: this story is not about the big moments, but those little ones that define how you grow up: a teacher pushing your interest in a skill, forced haircuts by a parent, sibling rivalry, dealing with a divorced parent, etc. Linklater gives us these little glimpses into the life of normal, complex everyday people as we see them grow and change over the course of 12 years. By the end, you’ll remind yourself of your own personal little moments that helped you become who you are today, and be in awe how Linklater, his daughter Lorelai, Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, and Ethan Hawke managed to pull of this simple but amazing feat of filmmaking.
When you think of musicals, you’re probably thinking of elaborate song and dance numbers, where a story is going, then it stops, someone starts singing, then the story goes on again. Once is definitely a musical, but John Carney does the impossible: he finds a way to fit the concept into the real world: a street musician (Glen Hansard) befriends a sweet woman (Market Irglova) who likes his music, and the two start writing songs together. In addition to a wonderful set of songs, Carney finds these amazing moments to show the joys of creating art, like a shop owner turning down his radio to listen or an audiologist cancelling a gig because he knows he’s witnessing something special happening. You’ll find yourself not responding to texts and being late to visit your friends because of how magical Carney’s modern musical sweeps over you.
I doubt there will be a better encapsulation of the US high schooler experience. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera play your average friends, roasting/bonding with each other while underage drinking and fawning over their female classmates. At the end of the school year, in hopes to score with Emma Stone, Hill agrees to supply Stone’s party with booze, leading the pair on an event filled night to remember/forget. The movie perfectly captures that delusional hope/bravado wrapped in insecurity from upcoming life alerting experiences like college, where friendships get tested and pushed to their limits in gut bustingly hilarious and surprisingly emotional ways. And in the end of all that drunken chaos, all you’ll remember is McLovin (Christopher Mintz Plasse) getting robbed at gunpoint or Jonah being, um bled on in a different way, because what you’re really searching for those crazy nights are memories you can talk about with your buddies forever. On top of that, the movie just has some of the funniest moments of the funniest decade of cinema: McLovin, Yoda from Attack of the Clones, dick drawing, Steven Glansberg, and green beer, for your information that make me laugh the minute I think of them.
I don’t care what Stephen King thinks of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his book. This movie is on the short list of the horrors of watching someone descending into madness. Jack Nicholson has never been more terrifying as the patriarch of a family, who house sits the Overlook Hotel, a giant property that gets snowed in over the winter while Jack can write his novel. But with nothing to do, Jack lets his mind drift as he walks the empty corridors, and that drifting leads to more and more sinister thoughts about his wife (Shelley Duvall) and his son (Danny Lloyd). Kubrick, genius that he is, weaves in supernatural and horror elements into a twisted package, locking us in with the Torrance family and making that noose tighter and tighter around are necks, until we are breathless with dread and anticipation that all work and no play has made Jack a dull boy, and turned him into something much, much worse.
I’m so glad Spike Lee was making movies by the time a Malcolm X biopic was in the works. No one was more equipped to tell the powerful reformers life story, from epic beginning to epic end. And Lee’s fight to tell the tale is evident in every frame of his epic movie. We get the warts and all, boy to man tale of a complicated, perpetually evolving man. Shoes that big could only have been acted by Denzel Washington, who Ethan Hawke once said should have won “10 Oscars” for that amazing performance. And directing him is the great Spike Lee, unafraid to plunge right into the heated, complicated components of Malcolm’s life that might scare lesser directors away. This love and dedication to Malcolm’s tale results in a biopic that should be a standard used by other filmmakers on how to tell a story of a full life.
Making a movie about Hollywood can be a tricky proposition. Stray to much into adoration and your movie becomes pandering, stray to into meta, experimental filmmaking and you risk losing the audience. This is all a roundabout way to say Sunset Boulevard is a perfect way to tell a Hollywood story. After a terrifying, pool based opening, we get a voice overed tale about William Holden’s novice writer going through the motions to stay afloat. After a flat tire, he stumbles on a beautiful but decaying old mansion, housing a former fixture of Hollywood royalty, Norma Desmond. What follows is a terrifying, tragic, complex tale about self-belief, delusion, fame, fortune: you know, staples of a Hollywood lifestyle. Holden is excellent, but Gloria Swanson (a silent movie star herself) gives one of the greatest performances in cinematic history as the endlessly fascinating Desmond, culminating in a final shot that will haunt you and make you cry at the same time.
When you mention the great filmmakers of the 2010s, most people will mention Greta Gerwig, Taika Waititi, Steve McQueen, Jordan Peele, Denis Villneuve. Ashgar Farhadi should be considered among this ultra talented group of directors, because all he does is tell amazing stories. Consider this film, a master class in how to pen a screenplay. Farhadi’s tale sets up this untenable, tense situation involving 2 families in modern Iran. When tensions boil over causing a tragedy, each family member becomes involved in a trial much bigger than a divorce court. Farhadi’s script constantly flips the power positions of the characters, with each new piece of information forcing the audience to reassess their feelings and understanding of each person involved. The story grows into this rich, complicated tale of life in modern Iran, and a brilliant tragedy about the fallout from a divorce. For all the love Kramer vs. Kramer gets, A Separation is the divorce story masterpiece written by one of cinema’s finest working filmmakers.
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
Oooff! A stupid hard choice because of the amazing films on this list. If I’m forced to pick one, Boyhood might drop into the next section, but it won’t drop very far.
The Newbie
The most recent one I saw for the first time was Malcolm X, but most of these have been somewhere high on my list for a while now.
Growing in Esteem
Every rewatch of Network, the movie gets better and better, and easier and easier to move up the list.
Needs a Rewatch
I don’t exactly crave the brilliant but emotionally draining storytelling A Separation provides, but it’s been too long to not experience the mastery of a perfect Asghar Farhadi screenplay.
The Surprise
Always the comedy right? But ask anyone between the ages of 18 and 40 what THE high school movie experience is, and the vast majority will probably say Superbad: I remember living for the night, and wanting to crash a party with girls I liked while hanging out with my buddies making memories before college might split us up. Also, the movie’s just funnier than any of the all time comedy classics out there.
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.
