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.
#50-41 you’ll start seeing some new trends. All time classics are really going to start dominating the list, as we’re in best of the best territory. Also, this is about as high as a movie made in the last 5 years can go. To become an all time classic, the emphasis becomes time: how do you hold up, how special is your film, etc. But either way, props to the 2 films who made it so high onto my list. And props to this list of 10 films, filled with all sorts of fears: some very real, and some supernaturally terrifying, but either way, you’re gonna get a little scared here.
While the market is saturated with stories about the high school experience, the junior high experience hasn’t been as well documented. Enter Bo Burnham and Elsie Fisher. Fisher is nothing short of incredible playing “Elsie”, your typical introverted 8th grader. Burnham shoots her experience like the roller coaster that it is. When the cute boy she likes talks to her, dubstep is going off in her head showing her elation. Pool parties? Jason Voorhees might as well be in that water. Scott Hamilton also delivers one of the great movie speeches as Elsie’s dad trying to find that balance of giving her space to grow but not make her feel alone. The movie finds that perfect emotional shift that kids going through all sorts of emotional and personal changes feel specifically at that time, in a way that might never be topped again.
My quintessential movie about the Vietnam War. Oliver Stone’s breakout film puts Charlie Sheen in the battle for his innocent soul. Does he follow the jaded but empathetic Willem Dafoe, or the hoo-rah! patriotism of Tom Berenger? Sheen makes that decision over the next two hours, as we see how the mile long stare of the Vietnam War Vets comes to be, with Stone showing the morally dubious and dehumanizing affects of these battles on everyone involved, and proves, as many have before and after him, that war is hell. Exciting, filmable hell.
The ultimate sports movie. Seeing Hollywood ignore him for all sorts of parts, Sylvester Stallone wrote this movie for himself, about a washed up boxer who unexpectedly ends up with a shot at the heavyweight title. Stallone creates the model for the underdog story: showing how down on his luck Rocky Balboa is, and how this one last shot is his chance to turn his life around against the imposing Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Burgess Meredith, Burt Young, and Talia Shire turn in spectacular supporting performances filling out Rocky’s life in blue collar Philadelphia. There’s a reason that Balboa statue still draws crowds today.
The greatest Ingmar Bergman movie in a career of amazing films. This one sees Max Von Sydow’s traveling knight in the middle ages encounter the devil on a quest, so he starts playing chess with him. What follows is a treatise on how to live a good life, the consequences of evil deeds, and the power of sacrifice and piety. Like all Bergman films, the characters are complicated and interesting, and the director crafts these haunting scenes: a cliffside view, a burning at the stake, a death march, etc. The symbolism and imagery are so deep that only a great talent like Bergman could have extracted the layers of storytelling he concocts.
Graduating from knighthood, Max Von Sydow leaves battle for the priesthood in William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece about a girl who becomes possessed by a demon. Linda Blair terrifies everyone playing an 11 year old girl who transforms into an unholy monster. The dialogue Friedkin makes Blair speak is still pretty evil today, scaring the bejesus out of everyone again and again. The movie culminates in the exorcism scene: a 15 minute showcase in how to escalate tension and completely grip the audience in a level of fear only the great horror films can pull off.
Bong Joon Ho had come close to making a great film countless times for me, showing a daring style of filmmaking with big tonal and plot shifts. Parasite was a perfect marriage of his style to a story that fits it. The movie starts with an uneasy story of a poor family slowly duping a rich family into hiring every family member. That hour of the film is tense and rich in symbolism alone. But then at the halfway point, the movie takes a big swing, and in that swing Bong takes his fascinating good film, and turns it into something special. He follows up that plot shift with one daring choice after another, pushing us to the inevitable climax created by the situation everyone is forced into. Every choice is bold but correct, and the movie drips excellence, moment by moment in Parasite’s beautiful Seoul House.
Prerequisite high school rite of passage. Matthew Broderick plays an army general put in charge of an African American battalion. Everyone is on their A game here. Broderick walks a fine line as the platoon leader but pulls it off, Denzel Washington won an Oscar playing Private Trip, Morgan Freeman exudes leadership as a Black ranking officer, and Andre Braugher plays maybe the most fascinating character of a shy timid educated African American learning what real life is like for his people. Edward Zwick gives us all sorts of issues the Massachusetts 54th had to go through to get paid fairly, to get near action, and simply to fight in battle. The battle scenes are very exciting, and give us heroic moments minute by minute to tell the story of the real life regiment, risking their lives for a country that never understood the depths of their heroism.
The pride of Disney’s early golden age. The movie tells the tale of a puppet brought to life, and teaches all sorts of great moral lessons for kids that would become seared into their brains forever. I find myself looking at my nose if I ever tell a lie. And I remain haunted to this day about living a life of excess, and how it can turn a kid into a jackass (the most frightening part of a surprisingly scary movie). But Pinocchio learns from these lessons with the help of his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and proves through bravery and selflessness why he deserves to be a real boy. It’s a scary, but exciting and rewarding adventure, with good lessons and wonderful songs (Wish Upon a Star won the Oscar that year, deservedly so) that kids will remember for decades now, and decades more to come.
The dawn of the blockbuster movie starts with who else, Steven Spielberg. The young director proves here that necessity is the mother of invention. His shark looked so phony and was such a pain to set up, Spielberg refused to use the latex creature until late in the film. What results is a master class in moviemaking: by NOT showing the shark and finding the two perfect notes for John Williams to score the movie too, Spielberg made the audience 1000% more terrified of “Bruce” before it reared its ugly latex head late in the film. In the acting department, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are excellent per usual, but it’s Robert Shaw’s Quint who steals the show as an older fisherman intent on getting this monster. This film worked so well that New England beachgoing dropped like 20% the following summer because of fear of shark attacks and makes me a little wary anytime I set foot in a lake or an ocean.
A rare sequel that improves upon the original, and by a lot! James Cameron takes his original concept of a time traveling cyborg assassin (AMAZING sci-fi premise), and convinced the studio to give him a bigger budget. That budget helped the talented director make one of the greatest set of action setpieces in any movie period with a motorcycle chase, a helicopter shootout, and a prison break among many others. Linda Hamilton ushered in a new brand of heroine: as badass and driven as any man. Arnold Schwarzenegger gives what might be his best performance as an updated version of his 1984 character, and Robert Patrick is chilling as a sleek, metallicy upgraded Terminator model. Cameron’s special effects remain revolutionary to this day, and his story about self aware computers and changing the future remains potent and powerful examples of great sci-fi storytelling. PS: While I’m putting the trailer here, it’s better if you don’t watch as it gives away a plot twist that makes the movie 20% better.
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
Glory has some uncomfortable racial politics that make it age not as well as the other films on this list.
The Newbie
Parasite and Eighth Grade are the highest rated of the recent films, and I see both on this list for a long while.
Growing in Esteem
I see Parasite aging like a fine Korean wine, as every rewatch I pick up on something else interesting and special about it.
Needs a Rewatch
I haven’t seen The Exorcist in a good while; might be good to see if it’s as scary as I remember it.
The Surprise
Eighth Grade at first glance looks like it doesn’t belong on this list. But I would ask you to watch it, and let me know if there’s a better movie that captures the junior high experience. The answer is there isn’t.
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.
