
My Top 50 Films of All Time #50–41

50: Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
Die Hard is a testament to how good action movies can be when you don’t force feed the audience with information. The villains are smart and capable and their plan is withheld from the audience until near the end of the film. The heroes are tough, but broken, and not valorised for their masculinity: their main weaknesses and failures come from their need to show strength and authority. And the decision to essentially have a two hour bottle episode at the top of a tower is tense and engaging, allowing Die Hard to work as a series of events anchored by two great performances circling around each other until, inevitably, lots of things blow up.
Best Scene: Everything with Alan Rickman, but I always get a kick out of his first call to the FBI announcing which terrorist groups he wants released from prison: “I read about them in Time Magazine”.

49: Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
Rear Window is not the darkest Hitchcock film, but it may be the most cynical. In Psycho, or in Vertigo, the darkness which Hitchcock has found is based around a single person, who usually by trauma or abuse or any number of specific circumstances has fallen into humanity’s darker impulses. In Rear Window, the only thing that could push a person engaging in that same darkness is boredom. Rear Window contains that fascinating tension at which Hitchcock excels, but at the service of enticing you into wanting to find a dark conspiracy involving the man living across the way, and then it asks why you are sitting there, so much more hopeful that Jeff (James Stewart) discovers that there was a murder that had been committed then that someone was never killed.
Best Scene: The final, tense, scene with Grace Kelly trying to find evidence in the man’s apartment.

48: Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
“I personally figured I was seeing something that someone would never see again in the world. That it was once in a lifetime.” A policeman is called to find that a man is waltzing between The Twin Towers on a rope, and though his job is to get the man to step back onto the roof, his only feeling is pure awe. This was the beauty of Phillipe Petit’s act, and Man on Wire communicates that beauty so that despite the fascinating complications and contradictions of Petit as a person, it all washes away when you see him perform his greatest feat. Philippe Petit is egotistical. His actions led him to alienate his close friends who helped him achieve this dream. His plan to sneak into The Twin Towers with a bunch of walking wire was immensely reckless. And none of it matters. None of it can take away from the pure awe you get from seeing the photos, from listening to people describe him walking across that wire. Marsh’s ability to convey the deep, magical nature of Petit’s achievement is extraordinary, turning a crazy yet beautiful act into one of the best documentaries ever made.
Best Scene: The final walk is magnificent to behold despite, or maybe because, it is only hinted at through still images and the awe inspired recountings of the people involved.

47: In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
In the Mood for Love is a romance without romance, two people who exist in a much more common intertwined lives than most film romances: two people who may be right for each other, who find some semblance of happiness with each other but who are unable to make the final step to actually being together. Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematography is at his elegiac and starkly colourful best here, creating gorgeous image after gorgeous image, and it’s anchored by two extraordinary performances in Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. In The Mood for Love is a portrayal of two people nearly finding all the love in the world, and finding it all lost to a whisper.
Best Scene: The Whisper.

46: Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
David Lynch makes dark comedies, dramas, and horrors all mixed into one film infused with his own strange tone, and there’s nothing else like it. And even more than some of his other work, there really is nothing quite like Blue Velvet. To describe it as a dive into the dark underbelly of suburbia understates how much the darkness and chaos in Blue Velvet is so much more unsettling and strange than you see in any other film. Lynch’s twisted vision of the way people can control and abuse others is articulated most clearly in the Dennis Hopper’s magnetically monstrous Frank, a live-wire villain who you feel can explode at any second, leaving Blue Velvet constantly on edge. But Blue Velvet is also somehow able to be really funny, the kind of laughter that somehow makes you feel more terrified about what’s happening in front of you.
Best Scene: Our introduction to Frank is absolutely terrifying.

45: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
I always felt Wes Anderson’s films were movies that, with their distinct and colourful style, were built to be my kind of thing, but I also felt that so much of his work was ornate and constructed to a fault, that they kept me at an arm’s length emotionally. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the wonderful exception: Anderson’s style becomes more ornate, but he builds it around a story of charming people rather than pure misanthropes, which has at its core a fantastic performance by Ralph Fiennes. This is one of my favourite movies to rewatch, there are so many wonderful jokes and riffs, each frame is intricately designed, and the story is at once multi layered yet never confusing.
Best Scene: I feel like The Grand Budapest Hotel is more a series of amazing story beats than any overarching scenes but I love the opening sequences as we are introduced to the world of The Grand Budapest and the character that is M. Gustave.

44: The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
The Princess Bride has everything. It has great dialogue, it has a raft of amazing performances, it has a wonderful central romance and a group of iconic supporting characters, it has perfectly slimy villains, and it has the most important thing any film can have: a six fingered Christopher Guest. It’s a perfect blockbuster.
Best Scene: So many great scenes, from the Iocane powder, to the weird Fire Swamp, to “to the death”, but the best has to be the sword fight. More fight scenes need people discussing fighting technique while they fight.

43: The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
The Big Lebowski is a film about contrasts, and about how much the conflict that comes from those contrasts only really matters if you decide to take them seriously rather than to just laugh at them. It features a relaxed stoner who is best friends with a PTSD ridden maniac who both end up in a noir plot but don’t seem to put much effort into being noir detectives. It’s got a large elaborate plot yet the most important scenes are just the aforementioned maniac and stoner chilling at the bowling lanes. And its got a series of intense scenes in which our heroes are under constant threat of death, but then tells you that the villains were just as haphazard and pathetic as the heroes. Many filmmakers could find that frustrating but the Coen Brothers? They just think it’s pretty funny. And they’re not wrong.
Best Scene: Pretty much any scene with The Dude, Donny, and Walter is a classic, but I gotta go for the scene which combines them interacting with the introduction of one of the great five minute characters in cinema, “Nobody Fucks with the” Jesus Quintana.

42: Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
With the world having built an entire apparatus around putting nuclear weapons into the hands of a few individuals, then deciding to elect the most insane individuals to those positions of power, Dr. Strangelove is a film that is scarily relevant. If the way to make comedy is to watch mostly insane, incompetent people bounce off each other, making satire is all about giving those people power. And so Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece takes that idea to its logical conclusion: there are insane people in power, and that power gives you the ability to destroy humanity on a whim. Kubrick’s craft is immaculate, Peter Sellers is incredible, and the world’s probably fucked. At least we got Dr Strangelove while we were here.
Best Scene: It HAS to be Dr Strangelove’s final monologue. Nearly every mad insane view on nuclear war that Kubrick is satirising comes full circle to bring home how insane the brinkmanship of Mutually Assured Destruction really is.

41: Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film is a rare beast: a deeply deeply uncomfortable meditation, yet an invigorating and compelling one. Tarkovsky builds these beautiful yet haunting sequences with so little in front of him. Stalker builds a world around what’s on the screen, where the framing of shots is based even more on what is off-screen than what is on-screen, because it all hints at a world that feels is a constantly shifting and changing threat. Questions of meaning and the nature of humanity are asked by the three men at the centre of this film, but they are articulated most clearly by the world they walk through, a brutal and unintelligible land haunted by the impossibility of certainty in life. Stalker is a fascinating, captivating film.
Best Scene: The two and half minute cart ride into The Zone is one of the most audacious sequences on film.
