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.
#80-71 sees movies taking trips. That could be country hopping, job hopping, or time hopping. Either way, people are on the move, in the best way possible.
This wild cinematic car chase overload careens two movie franchises into each other. George Miller’s movie takes a Fast and Furious movie and inserts all the character development into action sequences, making the movie a two hour extravaganza of mayhem. Miller also takes the best pieces of his previous Mad Max films and creates the perfect world and story for his latest franchise installment. Like all great movies, I found myself gripping the chair, leaning forward, as I awaited the next actor flying from one car to the next as flames erupted from a guitar player atop a vehicle of destruction. What a lovely day indeed!
The 1950s and 1960s used the ever popular movie setting of WWII and crafted all sorts of stories around it, especially war action movies. Steve McQueen stars and leads this epic, about a German POW camp that houses the trickiest, slyest prisoners who’ve escaped German prisons before. Over the 3 hour runtime we learn about many of the Allied prisoners and their special evasion skills. But the movie’s treat is how it isn’t just about the heist: there’s all sorts of obstacles to face beyond simply leaving the prison, culminating in one of the great motorcycle sequences in movie history.
Great anime films have this way of taking something totally intangible and making it come alive onscreen. Makoto Shinkai’s masterpiece starts with something familiar in movie history: a body swap movie between two teenagers. But what he does with is one of those lovely examples of movie magic, turning the movie into something much deeper and interesting about how we can connect with one another. It’s funny, engrossing, exciting, and boasts the greatest animation I’ve seen in any movie, as the sheer beauty of it make my eyes well up multiple times.
Of course the legendary 1958-60 Hitchcock run was going to end up on this list. This international caper is the culmination of the decades of work Hitchcock invested in his craft, creating a perfect spy thriller. Cary Grant plays Hitchcock’s famous “wrong man:” a person dragged into a giant conflict he is not a part of but now has to piece together. Eva Marie Saint is excellent as the Hitchcock blonde, and James Mason is wonderfully creepy as Grant’s foil. This movie has double and triple crosses, interesting characters, and a now ubiquitous sequence where Cary Grant terrifyingly has to evade an airplane by running as fast as he can.
The movie of 1990s teenage girls dreams, James Cameron hits the perfect movie sweet spot. He tells the story of the doomed ocean liner through a star-crossed romance between the rich but broken Kate Winslet and perfect heartthrob from steerage, Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes the love story is cheesy, but the great actors sell the hell out of it. So when the “unsinkable” ship starts to ya know, sink, Cameron’s amazing special effects mean something, as we root for the love of the century to make it through the impossible. Plus, come on: only a great movie could single-handedly land a singer a Vegas Residency because of the song’s power to emotionally move everyone.
With the sound of “I Got You Babe” as the alarm clock to his personal hell, Bill Murray’s narcissistic weatherman wakes up everyday in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, unable to go anywhere else. In the hands of Harold Ramis, Murray’s journey tricks us into thinking we’re just watching a comedy for a long time. Until suddenly, the movie stops being funny, and gets downright emotional, as Ramis and Murray have sucked us into this plight of purpose for a broken man. So when Murray finds that purpose and zest for living, we’re as elated as he is, as he has discovered a great way to live a life fulfilled and happy!
The funniest movie of arguably the funniest decade of movies. Adam McKay and Will Ferrell are a force of laughs, as Ferrell’s vapid, self-absorbed doofus of a 1970s news anchor gets a hard dose of reality as Cristina Applegate ushers in the feminist era into Burgundy’s chauvinist brain. While the plot is basically pointless, what follows is maybe the funniest movie ever made, filled with all sorts of cultural gifs, quotes, or character names alone (Brick Tamland?!, Wes Mantooth?!, Veronica Corningstone?!?!, I chuckle everytime). Every minute has something memorable happen, making your face sore from laughing so much.
The institution of slavery casts a pall over humanity whose ripple effects exist to this day. Steve McQueen’s movie puts out, in all its horror and torture, how dehumanizing and terrifying slavery could be. Chiwetel Ejiofor is sensational playing Solomon Northrup, a previously free black man captured and dragged into slavery’s clutches. McQueen forces us to watch Northrup go from a real person into a commodity in real time, sucking the humanity and our emotional state away with it. The deserves to be shown in high school classes for years to come, so even at a young age people experience even a little taste how evil it was to think one person could own another.
Great movies usually have or two amazing sequences in them that dazzle the viewer so much that they ingrain themselves into your memory. The first hour of Wall-E is Pixar’s greatest sequence in their sterling history. On a waste ridden Earth in the future, Wall-E and his trusty sidekick cockroach go about their daily duties compacting trash, finding trinkets and repeating the next day. That is, until Eve, Wall-E’s love interest, shows up. The whole wordless story of Wall-E’s life and attempts at romance is so beautiful, funny, and gorgeous that it’s impossible not to get sucked in. Throw in a little cautionary environmental tale and planetary hopping, and you’ve got yourself a delight of an animated film that will appeal to the whole family.
There’s a reason Sydney Poitier is so revered in Hollywood. The Oscar winner broke so many barriers for people of color, simply by being a better actor than everyone he was in a movie with. Consider this film. Surrounded by a world, and partner (Rod Steiger) who want no part of him in their little police investigation, Poitier shows how to respond with both anger and dignity, proving these men wrong at every turn. Mr. Tibbs himself is so magnetic that it forces Steiger’s character to question on his decades of beliefs. That’s right. Sydney Poitier helped lessen a person’s prejudice during a police investigation! On top of the potent racial storytelling, Norman Jewison’s film is also an excellent police caper, mining all sorts of thrills and twists out of the investigation.
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
I laugh my ass off watching Anchorman, but something funnier might eventually come along to replace it, and unfortunately comedies have a tendency to age poorly.
The Newbie
There are many! In the Heat of the Night and The Great Escape were new watches from my movie history year, and were wonderful stories about racial politics and war/prison escapes.
Growing in Esteem
After rewatching Groundhog Day, it has simply aged like a fine wine Bill Murray would have stolen from the Punxsutawney Liquor store.
Needs a Rewatch
It’s been a long time since I saw Cary Grant chased by that crop duster heading North By Northwest. Could be time for a rebaselining of expectations.
The Surprise
Even after completing Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli collection, Your Name stands out as one of the greatest anime movies I’ve ever seen. I’ll find myself rewatching the trailer or listening to the soundtrack occasionally just to remind myself of the feelings I felt watching it.
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.
