
My Top 50 Films of All Time #40–31

40: Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Gilliam, 1979)
I adore Monty Python, but this is I think the only time Monty Python works really as a movie, rather than a loosely connected series of (admittedly very funny) sketches. The overarching story of Brian’s ability to stumble into a protest movement and then into becoming a messiah is a whip-smart satire of religion and the fervour it brings about in people by showing the same absurd people doing the same absurd things that characters always do in Monty Python sketches, but by instead contextualising that absurdity as actions driven by the desire to follow a religious figure’s every move, then to completely ignore the same figure when it suits them. It’s also absurdly funny.
Best Scene: “I have a vewy good fwiend in wome named biggus dickus”

39: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
If Martin Scorsese has made a career about observing the way people (mainly men) are seduced by violence and the way it destroys them, Raging Bull is his masterwork by creating and clearly showing how that violence destroys La Motta and everyone else around him. At the beginning of Raging Bull, La Motta is brutal, but Scorsese is correct to understand that the price he pays is not the dehumanisation of La Motta, but the lack of romanticism. La Motta is an awful man, but more than that he is pathetic, and to watch his pathetic and cruel personality overwhelm the beauty of the boxing scenes is the true tragedy at the heart at Raging Bull, one which Scorsese conveys here better than anywhere else.
Best Scene: Kind of a cheat, but the contrast in the opening between the beautiful slo mo shots in the ring and the scene of a much older La Motta is conveys the film’s theme so simply and starkly.

38: A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
A Matter of Life and Death is at once both deceptively intimate and deceptively grandiose. The plot ends up with the entirety of heaven being drawn into a grand trial to decide the future of one relationship. But A Matter of Life and Death finds its grace in the small moments, in a relationship so beautifully sketched out in the opening five minutes so that everything else can build the conflict between what will happen between them, and set up the intricacies of this movie’s portrayal of the afterlife. A Matter of Life and Death believes that a relationship this true is worth fighting the entirety of the heavens, and after watching it you feel like they’re right.
Best Scene: The aforementioned opening conversation over the radio between Peter and June is wonderful and heartbreaking in equal measures.

37: Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
When Fury Road opens, the world is burnt. The deserted outback which had defined the original trio of films has become a scalding desert, so bright that it looks as if the slightest touch would give you a third degree burn. This is the landscape which nearly every moment of this jaw-droppingly insane film, which turns cars into quick and brutal oasis's on a sea of flames. Fury Road is a movie worthy of the intensity and edge its landscape requires, a film made with more insanity and precision than any other action film of the past twenty years.
Best Scene: Honestly, pick any of the chase scenes, but I’ll probably give an edge to the first one just because the sand storm they drive into is awe inspiring.

36: Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
More than any other of his films, Spirited Away is a grand testament to the beauty of Miyazaki’s imagination. Whereas previous films of his tended to centre around a core cast of characters usually interacting in worlds surrounded by crowds or isolated in nature, Spirited Away’s central bathhouse is populated by a wide variety of creatures, each with a distinct and unique presence. Miyazaki beautifully uses this backdrop not as a fascinating side show but as a core part of the chaos and learning which Chichiro goes through, a sign of a master storyteller working at the top of his craft.
Best Scene: The hauntingly beautiful train ride with Chichiro and No Face.

35: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
Mulholland Dr. hinges on one moment. When the box is opened, the entire axis of the film shifts, and nearly every understanding of the strangeness of this film begins and ends with what you think that move is, what you think they move from and to. This, in a way, is how Mulholland Dr. at once becomes one of Lynch’s simplest and most beguiling films. The creepy executives, The man behind the diner, Club Silencio: things that might spiral out of the small town oddity of Twin Peaks are central to Mulholland Dr.’s central shift, but that shift, that question that Lynch is asking, is essentially unknowable, yet utterly compelling.
Best Scene: Though seriously Club Silencio fucked me up.

34: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
Who would ever have thought that a conflicted story on race relations in the USA would feel frustratingly relevant in modern times? Do The Right Thing remains a masterwork of tension, a film that makes you feel the heat on the hottest day of the year and that builds a cast of varied characters and their passions and frustrations, showing us how the heat brings those to the fore. And then it watches as that anger starts to boil into something that will break. Lee’s filmmaking prowess here is unparalleled, a strikingly brilliant film.
Best Scene: The final 15 minutes, when the tensions of the day blows up, are when the film really shows you what it’s doing.

33: Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)
At some point in the future, I worry we’ll forget that Michael Shannon may be the best actor working today at playing broken people, not just broken villains. His performance here is subtle yet powerful, quietly toiling and pushing forward whilst wearing the destruction of his ties to his family and community under his skin. Jeff Nichols’s film is able to build from a haunting yet simple premise: If Shannon is right, he must do what he is doing, if he is wrong, he is destroying his life for nothing, and this tension builds as its devastating consequences become clearer and clearer until Shannon explodes in one of the most heartbreakingly explosive scenes I’ve ever seen captured on film. Take Shelter came and went with little fan fare but it should have been recognised for being one of the most beautiful and painful films ever made.
Best Scenes: The pot luck dinner. Fuck me, that scene.

32: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, the best of Leone’s Man With No Name Trilogy, understands something about the climate of the westerns that so few others did: it was brutal, and it was chaotic, and the people who survived at the edge did so by being horrible and petty. But the landscape looms large over the small people fighting over money at the centre. The final fight is not just extraordinary because of the pacing and closeups, but the haunted graves which are irrelevant to the characters looking for nothing more than wealth. It doesn’t hurt that it’s made by maybe the greatest craftsman in cinema history.
Best Scene: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly could’ve been 173 minutes of Transformers 3 and the final duel in the graveyard and it would still have made this list.

31: There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
There Will Be Blood is able to be gigantic while barely focusing on more than one person. For the most part, the only other major characters are Paul Dano’s preacher, a strange brother, and Daniel Plainview’s son, who tends to quietly sit on the periphery of most scenes. Most films, never mind three hour films, would grow tedious with such a small cast, but There Will Be Blood has at its centre one of the most extraordinary performances and characters in film history. Daniel Day Lewis’ Daniel Plainview is a monstrous force, a vicious distillation of capitalism into one violent man, who slowly destroys and dismisses everything he cares about in order to become as rich as possible, and seems perfectly comfortable, even delighted with his tradeoff. Surrounding him is the harsh, sandy desert upon which Plainview has found his wealth, a compelling landscape upon which Anderson finds a terrifying beauty.
Best Scene: The explosion of the oil well is brilliant and bracing cinema.
