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.
#90-81 are some of the best movie fantasies imaginable. Stuff that 8 year old you would grow giddy with excitement. Some of the Kanye West variety Beautiful Dark Twisted variety. And some straight nightmares. Either way, worlds and eyes will be opened to you that you can’t believe someone came up with. Also weird, but the run on 1995 films starts here: 3 are in this section of the list, what a great movie year huh?
This movie has to be mentioned when you’re listing the greatest plot twists in movie history. It left me with such a high I exclaimed “Holy SH*T!!!!!” loudly when everyone was asleep, waking up a family member or two. I think I even rewatched the movie immediately after it ended because I wanted to see the story through opened eyes. Even without the twist, Christopher McQuarrie’s script takes us down an eerie dark road with a group of low level con men who wind up in a heist plan together. Kevin Spacey is magnetic relaying the events leading to the heist while trapped in police custody, controlling every which way the conversations/monologues go. The name Keyser Soze will send chills down your spine, as it did mine.
Picture yourself in elementary school, the first time you read about dinosaurs. I remember being wowed by what I saw, but never thought I’d get to approximate what it must have been like to see them move. But that’s what Steven Spielberg was put on Earth to do. That look on Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s faces is exactly how the audience feels as they see a dinosaur leap from book to screen. Throw in a host of amazing movie moments, little (will you see a glass of water the same again?), and big (2 words: Tyrannosaurus. Rex.), and that elementary school kid inside of you will come alive again, seeing your dreams come alive.
Early David Fincher films dared to be brazenly cynical about the world. Movies so relentlessly bleak like Se7en have to offer something special; fortunately, like all David Fincher films, there’s something amazing keeping your attention at every turn. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are amazing as the detectives investigating one of the great movie serial killers: someone killing based on the seven deadly sins. And behind the scenes is Fincher, dazzling us with a fascinating story with great actors while he emotionally prepares us to enter an unkind, terrible world that takes us to the depths of human behavior.
Of the great high school comedies of the 80s and 90s, Amy Heckerling’s is like, totally the best. Taking Jane Austen’s Emma and transporting it to Beverly Hills, California, Heckerling shows just how timeless that great tale of love and wealth is. The movie walks that perfect line of lampooning the vapid nature of these privileged kids, while also making Cher, Dion, and Ty smarter than meets the eye. Plus, the movie gave the world the gift of Paul Rudd we know and love for decades to come.
Guillermo del Toro should have won his Oscar for this complicated wonder. The talented director somehow finds a way to blend a WWII war story with a child’s fantasy so the two work seamlessly in concert with one another. Like Tim Burton before him, del Toro has a way with frightening misunderstood creatures and imagery that leave the audience with all sorts of strange feelings. del Toro’s story builds to what I consider to be one of the more perfect endings in cinema history, that will leave you with a host of emotions equally contradictory and powerful.
The only documentary on my list earns that honor with a tale that rivals any great political thriller. Finding it unlawful that the government was spying on Americans without telling them, Edward Snowden invited journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras to Hong Kong, where the group planned to release all these secret documents stolen from the US Government. Though he disagrees, Snowden proves to be a captivating screen presence, and Poitras’s documentary ripples with tension as we learn how quickly the United States government, in all of its power, uncovers Snowden is the whistleblower and tries to keep him quiet.
Richard Kelly’s movie is proof that a great sci-fi idea goes much further than a CGI budget. Jake Gyllenhaal is mesmerizing as Darko, a brilliant teenager who survives plane debris on his house from an 8 foot metallic rabbit named Frank who tells him the world is going to end in about a month. Um, what? But Kelly’s story takes that totally insane hook and digs deep into the sci-fi mythology he wants to create by treating the philosophy seriously and intelligently. I also don’t think rabbits will ever look as menacing ever again.
How do you take someone as ubiquitous as Martin Luther King Jr. and make him human without alienating those who treat him like an icon? But that’s what Ava Duvernay does here. Her and David Oyelowo, make MLK a man by giving him the same fears and insecurities anyone has: family concerns, public persona vs privacy, The movie also takes the iconic events MLK participated in and shows what happens when the cameras turn off, cementing his hero/icon status while making the story more tangible for everyone.
Apologies to the Space Jam generation, but Robert Zemeckis’s tale is the shining beacon of how you combine real life and animation. The movie plays like a daffy, goofy 1940s film noir, with Roger Rabbit on the run, his wife Jessica the perfectly drawn femme fatale, and Bob Hoskins world weary detective reluctantly on the case. As imaginative and creative as Zemeckis’s story and animation are, it’s Hoskins commitment to the world he’s given that actors today probably used as a model for the CGI green screen acting.
Maybe the greatest romance in cinematic history. In addition to the ill-fated but star-crossed Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman romance, Michael Curtiz’s story is also a great war spy thriller, with a host of captivating complex characters double crossing each other for perfectly valid, honest smart reasons. This movie is so memorable at this point that 6 of its most famous quotes are on the AFI’s top 100 most famous quotes of all time, when most films can barely get to 1, including one of the great last lines in movie history.
Below I’ve included a little mini recognition section to honor some of the films above!
Will Probably Drop Out
The Usual Suspects has a legendary twist surrounded by a great movie, but maybe not a legendary one.
The Newbie
Citizenfour jumped all the documentaries out there and earns its spot on this list with its stellar real life tale.
Growing in Esteem
The first time I saw Pan’s Labyrinth I was blown away by its strangeness and daring, and continue to be so with each subsequent rewatch.
Needs a Rewatch
I haven’t seen Selma in a long time, and I want to see if my initial feelings have grown or faded as I watch it again.
The Surprise
Film critics worship Casablanca, so you might be surprised to see it this low on my list. I enjoy it very much, but when I watched it I was distracted by its obvious legendary status and couldn’t get as into the story as films higher on the list.
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.
