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.
#60-51 gets us to the halfway point of my Subjective 100. The date ranges and genres are becoming more varied now. We’ve got 6 consecutive decades represented as well as horror, sci-fi, biopics, dramas, fantasies, and war movies all making their mark. The one thing they have in common is they all left a lasting, amazing impression upon me, and I hope they do for you as well!
This is the movie that made Matt Damon and Ben Affleck household names. Set in their hometown of Boston, Damon’s Will Hunting is a damaged genius, “sitting on a winning lottery ticket, too afraid to cash it in” as his best friend Affleck says in the movie. When Stellan Skarsgard’s professor discovers Will’s secret, Robin Williams and Minnie Driver enter Will’s life to try to help make him whole again, so he can use his gifts to their fullest potential. Damon and Affleck’s script is the biggest star here, capturing the humor and essence of the Boston ethos, as well as the layers of protection you have to get through to help out a tough guy.
Love has never been as heart breakingly beautiful as in this all too real tale. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play a pair of happily married octogenarians going through the motions of their last days. When Riva suffers a stroke, we see how the couple change their routines for the simple joy of living with one another, to the confusion and chagrin sometimes of their daughter Isabelle Huppert. Michael Haeneke’s camera is still, making the couple feel more like a real life moving painting of everyday aging and how love ages with it.
Milos Forman’s biopic stands apart from most other biopics about geniuses. Unfortunately most people have no idea what true genius looks like, and maybe we only experience it by watching someone else showcase it. Such is the brilliance of Forman’s tale, telling Mozart’s (Tom Hulce) story through the eyes of Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), a rival composer aware enough to know he could never be what Mozart so effortlessly was. As good as Hulce is playing Mozart like his era’s version of a pop star, Abraham steals the show as a man simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Mozart’s creative process.
One of the greatest courtroom dramas ever made. Tom Cruise plays a Navy lawyer brought in to defend two marines accused of murdering a subordinate. Aaron Sorkin’s script crackles with excitement, helping elevate the actors performances with amazing monologues and drama filled exchanges. A movie about people talking in a courtroom ripples with tension as new detail after new plot twist comes to light, culminating in one of the great movie monologues delivered by the amazing Jack Nicholson.
Greta Gerwig ascended to the director’s chair with this, her FIRST film. And what an amazeballs feature it is. Saoirse Ronan (Gerwig’s muse) plays the self-nicknamed Lady Bird, a high school senior trying to figure out what kind of person she wants to be before she goes to college. Ronan and Laurie Metcalf are amazing together, creating one of the most realistic mother-daughter relationships I’ve seen committed to film, capturing that razor’s edge emotional rollercoaster of dialogue teen girls and their moms live in, minute by harrowing minute.
When the My Fair Lady movie team decided Julie Andrews wasn’t a big enough name to star in the Broadway Play she was already amazing in, she settled for simply becoming the greatest nanny of all time. Helping Andrews out is a delightful Dick Van Dyke, an all timer of a musical score by the Sherman Brothers, at the time (and still pretty solid) amazing special effects like the animated sequence or the Steppy Time rooftop dance number, and a totally heartwarming morality lesson for kids everywhere to enjoy the simple things in life and take responsibility for yourself.
In a career of great movies and scripts, this is Cameron Crowe’s best, probably because it’s his most personal. Patrick Fugit plays Crowe’s stand in, a wide eyed writer following the band Clearwater around the US for the summer and growing up in the most entertaining way possible. Crowe assembles an amazing cast to perform his stupendous semi-autobiographical screenplay. Frances McDormand and Philip Seymour Hoffman slay the 3-4 scenes they’re in and have you glued to your seats when they show up. Billy Crudup is sensational as the face of Clearwater, obsessed with music and his own “golden god” ego. And then their’s Kate Hudson, who is so good as the “groupie” Penny Lane that Hollywood spent a decade trying to unlock the code Crowe cracked with her in his film. But the best part is how Crowe capture’s the essence of the American music experience, traveling city to city and dealing with fame, fortune, temptation, etc.
A movie that reinvigorated the slasher genre of horror movies. John Carpenter unsettles us almost immediately, as we experience a murder through the first person eyes of pure evil. Then he takes us to an asylum for the mentally insane, and couples it with his jarring piano score as we realize that Michael Myers, the Shape, possesses an unstoppable evil that is about to strike Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night. The movie set all sorts of rules and guidelines for how to make an effective slasher, and gripped me with fear and tension the minute Jamie Lee Curtis sees what happened to Judith Myers’s grave.
It can never be as simple as a heist movie with Christopher Nolan. In this movie, Leo DiCaprio isn’t stealing money: he’s stealing secrets inside people’s minds, using dreams to steal them. What follows is a mind bending experience where Nolan takes the “one last heist story” and folds a city on top of itself, has a fight scene that rotates 360 degrees, and has a shapeshifting Tom Hardy. Nolan and his actors help sell this amazing technical feast by throwing in a little bit of an emotional punch, especially the enigmatic Marion Cotillard playing a host of projections of herself. The genius of Nolan’s story is how well it is edited together, as the amazing director makes 3 timelines of dreamscapes understandable for the viewers so we can understand the stakes and time crunch characters are under.
David Fincher crafts this strange, compelling tale of an underground movement that captures the base warrior instincts of men. Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are charming and badass as the jaded founders, pissed off at how modern society has softened machismo and finding ways to stick it to the system. The movie also boasts an amazing plot twist, but Fight Club is so engaging and filled with ideas that the movie uses that twist to help tell its story, not just be the sole selling point of the film. I’m pretty sure Marie Kondo might have attended a Tyler Durden fight club at some point as well; they share some similar philosophies!
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
Most of these are rock solid choices. If I had to pick one, Inception might drop into the next section, but not off the list entirely.
The Newbie
The newest entry is Lady Bird, but that deserved to be on here the minute I saw it. There’s nothing super new; most of these have been lingering on my best of lists for a long time.
Growing in Esteem
The winner is Almost Famous, which gets better and better every time I rewatch it. There’s something special about Crowe’s script that makes that film as exciting as any movie out there.
Needs a Rewatch
It’s been years since I saw Amadeus. I should see if Milos Forman is a man of his time or a more timeless filmmaker that deserves this biopic’s high stature.
The Surprise
There aren’t a lot of great films about aging love, and Amour‘s story is totally engaging without being horribly despondent, a tough feat to pull off. The universality of that story is what makes it so special.
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.
