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.
#70-61 sees the stars and stripes really cementing their storytelling in my movie brain. Most of these stories have something to do with Americana, painting the Unites States in all its complicated grandeur, leaving me confused, horrified, excited, or sometimes all of the above.
The best epic in 1997 involved the 1970s-1980s porn industry. That’s thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction, and his casting agent. Mark Wahlberg. John C. Reilly. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Julianne Moore. Heather Graham. Burt Reynolds. Don Cheadle. Alfred Molina. And on and on. Anderson gets the most out of all these amazing actors inside of a giant story about the evolution of the porn industry and how all these people coped with the changing times. It’s fascinating, complicated, forever interesting, and funny as hell. I do wish I had Jessie’s Girl, just maybe not that night.
A movie that’s sadly become more and more prescient today. Edward Norton is horrifying, mesmerizing, and fascinating in equal measure as a boy who falls into the clutches of the neo-Nazi/white nationalist movement in the United States. Tony Kaye’s movie plunges you head first into a cycle of hate, seeing how generationally that virus can spread, manifest, and grow. It also shows that only through herculean efforts to understand and restrain oneself that that cycle can be broken, but more likely it’s bound to be manipulated by the powerful to end in tragedy. Norton’s performance keeps you engaged as you go deeper and deeper into the bad places of the soul, hoping that at some point light can be visible again, and soberingly realizing that for most, that’s not possible.
This movie is one of the reasons Marlon Brando is so revered in Hollywood. Playing a low level mob enforcer that flamed out as a boxer, Brando starts awakening from his life asleep at the wheel when he starts to question the motives of his superiors. Elia Kazan’s script becomes a story about the plight of the common man, beset on all sides by powerful forces, just trying to do the right thing. Brando’s has been boxer digs under the gruff exterior to find a damaged soul full of regret at what his life has become, and trying to make amends in the only way he can. The movie has a host of amazing performances and characters besides Brando too, including Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint in her first movie!
Most movies about war focus on the more cinematic battle sequences and, you know, men. Which is what makes this British propaganda film so refreshingly different. Set in a seemingly alternate matriarchy, where the women hold down the town as the men go to fight WWII, Greer Garson is the reddest rose in that universe. Not only does she financially provide for her family and help her son find love like most mothers might, she also prepares bunkers for family safety, adopts a larger extended family into her household, keeps the town together, holds an intense interrogation of a German paratrooper. I could go on and on. Yes William Wyler’s movie knows what its doing, but it’s doing it so well and so earnestly that you can’t help but be in awe of Mrs. Miniver’s ability to stand tall in the face of all obstacles.
Though not beloved at the time, this Alfred Hitchcock thriller might be the best script he ever worked on. Jimmy Stewart plays a man suffering from the titular disease, unmoored when tall heights come into play. Enter Kim Novak, an enigmatic woman that Stewart finds himself becoming obsessed with as he spends more and more time investigating. After the mid movie climax, Hitchcock’s story becomes as off-kilter as his protagonist, going hauntingly deep into the fallout of what happened. The tragedy of it hits you a little at first, but the more you ponder on it, the movie stays with you and won’t get out of your head, leaving you sad and a tad disoriented yourself, made possible by Hitchcock, proving he’s more than just a master of suspense.
In a solid resume of a career, this is Ron Howard’s gold star. The director takes the famous doomed space mission story where we all know the ending, and recreates the tension of those terrifying 7 days in space for Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) over the course of his 2+ hour film. The movie is a love letter to all those engineers in the sky and on the ground, who worked tirelessly to solve every problem to get those 3 men home, finding amazing ways to generate suspense staring at a line chart on a dashboard. In addition to the 3 amazing space actors, Howard gets a great ground acting game going too, including Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, and Kathleen Quinlan.
September 11, 2001 is one of the saddest days in American History. But in the darkness you’ll find the light shines brightest, and Paul Greengrass found one of the brightest lights from that dark, dark day. Using an unknown cast, Greengrass gives us an almost documentary/reenactment view of the airline events of that day on the ground and in the air. The movie’s straightforward storytelling showcases the selflessness of the United 93 passengers and their heroism. There’s no other response than tears to hear those poor souls calling their loved ones on a flight saying goodbye one last time to stop an act of terror from taking place.
The definitive movie about life in small town America. Peter Bogdanovich’s tale captures the day to day experiences of residents of those towns perfectly: the rigid stillness and traditions, the youthful desire to break out and explore, a life of many and no secrets at once, the power of religion vs biological urges, the decay of inevitable progress, etc. The cast is mostly excellent here too, especially Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, and Ellen Burstyn, who all create complex but recognizable characters you can’t help but root for or at least understand.
Great casts have dominated the films just above this one, but Martin Scorcese’s Oscar winner might have the best cast of the bunch: Vera Farmiga, and a bunch of dudes you may know like Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and many, many more. Plus with the gangster whisperer Scorcese at the helm, this cat and mouse cops and robbers thriller lets all these amazing performers cook, and puts them in a tale filled with twists, tension, and turmoil, relentlessly ratcheting everything higher and higher until the bubble finally bursts at the end.
Only Tom Hanks could make this movie work: a mentally slow individual tells a tale about his life and how he was a part of many important events of post WWII America. Hanks’s sincere qualities make this movie a feel good, nostalgic history lesson, an ode to the baby boomer generation and all the bullet points of their lives. Robert Zemeckis deep fakes Tom Hanks into all these famous American history moments, which somehow works like movie magic, also helped by a great pop soundtrack, a wonderful cast of characters like Gary Sinise, Robin Wright, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field, and expressions now firmly in the cultural lexicon. Will you think of boxes of chocolate or running the same again?
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
Forrest Gump has been dropping slowly, as the movie has some glaring flaws that make it hard to put amongst the best of all time.
The Newbie
3 very welcome newcomers here: Mrs. Miniver, On the Waterfront, and The Last Picture Show. All 3 bring something interesting about the lives of everyday people, but with all sorts of complexity and a cinematic quality that makes their stories pop.
Even though it’s tough, I should see if United 93‘s power was because I was still so close to the event when I saw it, or if time has softened its blow.
The Surprise
I think this is the first time there isn’t one! Most of these films should end up on top lists for most people.
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.
