My Top 10 Films
Any honest top 10 is never finished. The taste might stay the same, but the particulars will change.
A good top 10 can also be more like a statement of purpose. Certain archetypes might be represented. Certain directors. But your identity as a film goer should shine through in all the variations.
I’ve thought of this new top 10 as something like: my most interesting top 10. This list is, in some respects, not all that different than what came before it. But in another sense, it is something entirely new. I wanted to find 10 films that capture me as a cinephile, that reflect my personal journey as a fan, and that still mean something special to me today.
A top 10 that felt uniquely mine, which might not always have been true of the prior iterations.
Obligatory honorable mentions: The Lord of the Rings; Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb; Zodiac
10. WAR OF THE WORLDS (Spielberg, 2005)
Our greatest living director weds Holocaust imagery with post-9/11 trauma and throws in the most technically impressive spectacle of his career for good measure. For all the talk of Spielberg and parents and children, this might be the most affecting relationship he’s put on screen. A favorite Cruise turn too.
I quibble with the ending, but no good top 10 is complete without a knowingly imperfect entry.
9. CRIMSON PEAK (del Toro, 2015)
Guillermo del Toro is a genius and you can’t help but feeling that he put exactly the film he wanted to on screen in CRIMSON PEAK. Every frame oozes with gothic audacity.
But this wouldn’t be the film it is without Edith, one of the great del Toro heroines, and Jessica Chastain’s Lucille — del Toro is a feminist of the highest order and here he gives us both another great protagonist and a villain who is her equal in every way.
8. SHUTTER ISLAND (Scorsese, 2010)
Martin Scorsese understands madness. That was as true in 2010 as it was in 1976, when he gave us TAXI DRIVER. But in SHUTTER ISLAND, the condition is most emphatically rendered.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Teddy” is the director’s most fully realized antihero. Teddy’s dreams and memories, scattered throughout in the film’s most visually arresting images, are the key to unlocking SHUTTER ISLAND’S emotional core. Michelle Williams also delivers, in an oft-wordless role, a woman whose madness matches her man’s.
But what I love most about SHUTTER ISLAND is the joy in its making. The movie rewards, rather than punishes, rewatches because no detail was left to chance. Scorsese plays it straight, if you know what game he’s playing.
7. MANHUNTER (Mann, 1986)
What is most remarkable is that Michale Mann so completely created his own visual aesthetic on MANHUNTER he never felt the need top it. For the rest of his career, he would wrestle his visual ambitions in service of, perhaps, better stories and better characters.
But just once, he gave our eyes everything they could ever need — or handle.
6. BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD (Lumet, 2007)
I’m a sucker for a good swan song, and nobody had a better one than Sidney Lumet.
Nearing death, America’s most unobtrusively gifted director delivered a movie of such gripping tension, burning anger, and bottomless sorrow — and yet one told with such vibrancy and skill—that even Tarantino might feel like a cheap knockoff afterward. Hawke, Hoffman, Finney and Tomei were never better.
5. BOYHOOD (Linklater, 2014)
Beneath quiet, humble tales of everyday life and experience, as lived and experienced, Richard Linklater is our most formally ambitious filmmaker.
I also won’t pretend to be totally rational about a film that, in many ways, parallels my own life. Let it suffice to say it is as close as many of us will come to watching our childhood on screen.
But as the final line reminds us, Linklater isn’t just running an experiment. Nothing less than time, existence and the nature of the human experience are on his mind. Something so profound, for a story so ordinary, is truly a wonder.
4. INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch, 2006)
A woman in trouble.
Who is she?
A haunted movie.
A murder.
He’s a killer.
She dies in the television static’s glow.
3. ARMY OF SHADOWS (Melville, 1969)
This is more of a story about me than about Melville’s French Resistance masterpiece and its slow, strange road to wide release. I saw it in theater in college, not really knowing what it was or that I was about to see my first film of my favorite director’s favorite director (I don’t know for certain that Mann or David Fincher would claim Melville as theirs, but they could and should.)
But I can sum up my feelings about “L’Armée des ombres” succinctly: When the final postscript flashed across the screen — mere words in such a carefully composed film—my heart dropped into my stomach.
I’ll never forget the feeling.
2. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (Lean, 1962)
A twin of sorts to ARMY OF SHADOWS: I saw Lean’s magnum opus for the first time in the perfect conditions, 70mm on a ginormous screen.
Unforgettable. Magical, really. The desert is like an alien planet, a world of fantasy and magic and myth. Lean and O’Toole understood this.
1. THE TREE OF LIFE
I’ve already said everything I could hope to say about cinema’s most transcendent contribution to the human experience. Like a prayer.
