Your 15 favorite movies of all time...

In My Humble Opinion
21

In no particular order beyond the first three or so:

  1. “Boogie Nights” - Easily the best movie of the '90s. Incredible performances, incredible writing, incredible, incredible, incredible. Kinetic, vibrant, true-to-life and powerful. The dialogue is remarkably accurate as far as rhythym and speech pattern. Paul Thomas Anderson is the next Martin Scorsese - only more truthful.

  2. “The Godfather” - IMO, the best movie ever made (there’s a difference between “best” and “favorite”). Made an important point about the American Dream without pounding us over the head with it. Oh yeah, and it’s got the best performance of the best actor in American history (Marlon Brando).

  3. “The Graduate” - Introduced the world to Dustin Hoffman, in a brilliant comedic performance. Great soundtrack, surprisingly haunting imagery (be honest … that shot of the two apes at the zoo disturbed you, didn’t it?). And most important (considering it’s a comedy), it’s just plain funny.

  4. “Dog Day Afternoon” - Al Pacino’s best performance. Intense, thoughtful, and smart. And, like most of the films on my list, makes a point without being overbearing or preachy. Also is one of the better films I’ve seen at establishing tone and setting.

  5. “Network” - Set the standard for satire. Just as relevant today as it was twenty-five years ago, if not more so. Faye Dunaway does not allow her character to be vulnerable a single moment, which, speaking as an actor, is a remarkable feat. If only Hollywood made satires like this nowadays.

  6. “The Player” - Oh, wait a minute! They do!

  7. “Shakespeare in Love” - A sentimental favorite of mine. I guess you’ve got to be a theater person to really and truly LOVE this movie - that’s been my impression anyway. Beautiful cinematogrophy, witty writing, and basically a good time had by all. And incidentally, no film I’ve seen has captured the love of art as well as this one has.

  8. “Casablanca” - Classy, simple, good old fashioned storytelling. Fine performances by all involved. Humphrey Bogart oozes scoundrel-esque nobility. Ingrid Bergman oozes angelic sexuality (strange term, I know, but I couldn’t think of another way to put it). Did they ever colorize this? I hope not.

  9. “Magnolia” - Can you guess who my favorite director is? When I first saw this film, it was the most phenomenal moviegoing experience of my life. Since then, after multiple viewings, I’ve begun to see its flaws, but I still love it. It’s a tapestry of raw humanity that never turns soapish or sentimental. And the ending is still the weirdest, most shocking thing I’ve seen on film.

  10. “The Shawshank Redemption” - I remember reading the Stephen King novella and trying to picture it as a movie - Frank Darabont fulfilled all my expectations and then some. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are both at their career best. And yeah, it can be sappy at times, but it still has a bit of a bite to it.

  11. “The Great Escape” - Oh wow. Another just mindblowingly good film. Who knew Charles Bronson had acting chops? To say nothing of Steve McQueen’s classic work (probably his best).

  12. “Die Hard” - Best action flick ever. Bar none. Bruce Willis muttering sarcastic bile through a cigarette clenched tightly in his teeth, machine gun clenched even tighter in his hand. Alan Rickman playing the least sympathetic villain you could find. And of course, that beautifully shot explosion at the end. There’s a reason this film’s been copied so many times.

  13. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” - No one plays the anti-hero quite like Jack Nicholson, and he proved it here once and for all. For that reason, I’ll never read the book or see the play again without picturing Jack. Strong supporting performances, especially Louise Fletcher as the creepy Nurse Ratched.

  14. “City of Lost Children” - Haven’t seen it? See it (or see “Dark City”, which completely ripped it off). French film. Bizarre. Lots of creepy-looking little kids and some beautiful cinematogrophy and art direction.

  15. “American Beauty” - I’ve noticed this movie gets a bad rap from some people, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the homophobic section of the population, or maybe it’s the moral ambiguity of Kevin Spacey’s character. Then again, morality is relative (but that’s an issue for another thread). Kevin Spacey gives what I am convinced will be the performance he is ultimately remembered for. Like “The Graduate”, has some surprisingly haunting imagery and kickass dialogue to boot. I’d kill to get to recite some of those lines.

22

Here are 15 I can watch repeatedly, off the top of my head. I won’t bother to explain my affection for the Classics, only the Flawed Classics.
*Island of Lost Souls *(1932)
Charles Laughton’s greatest over-the-top performance, plus the Panther Woman, Bela Lugosi and the Wolf-Man, and “What is the LAW?!?”

The Devil and Dan’l Webster (1940)
Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch is THE best Dam’ Yankee devil ever. And a great Bernard Herrmann score.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Things to Come (1937)
Again, endearing over-the-top perfs by Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, and pretty much everyone else in the cast. “Men are FLAHING again!”

International House (1932)
Burns and Allen, Peggy Hopkins Joyce (top sex symbol of 1932), a flock of great musical numbers including Cab Calloway’s band, AND W.C. Fields. “Is this Kansas City Missouri or Kansas City Kansas?”

The Bride of Frankenstein 9135)

Metropolis (1927)

All About Eve (1950)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952)

*Sunrise *(1928)
Absolutely gorgeous love story. And when Janet Gaynor finally lets her hair down…rowr.

The Navigator (1923)
Not as “perfect” a film as Keaton’s The General, but more typical of the man’s work. And possibly funnier, too.

Top Hat (1935)
Fred lulling Ginger to sleep with the sand-dancing…and every Berlin tune in it is a winner.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Epecially the part where Wilmer wakes up and Huston flicks the camera around to the portraits of Gutman…Cairo…O’Shaughnessy…and Spade. Four of the greatest grotesques in cinematic history. I’d love to frame those four shots, hang 'em up in the hall.

Tampopo (1986)
As a Food Movie, I rate this slightly higher than Babette’s Feast or Big Night. “let’s have some of your normal noodles!”

The Ladykillers (1958)
Great British comedy, my favorite of all the Ealings, with sterling perfs by Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, and Alec Guiness’s teeth.

23

Oh, well. I don’t really want to get anything done right now anyway. :slight_smile: No particular order.

[ul]
[li] The Conversation[/li][li] 'Round Midnight[/li][li] Silver Streak[/li][li] American Beauty[/li][li] Hopscotch[/li][li] Close Encounters of the Third Kind[/li][li] The Godfather[/li][li] Bull Durham[/li][li] 9 to 5[/li][li] The Maltese Falcon[/li][li] The China Syndrome[/li][li] 2001: A Space Odyssey[/li][li] Young Frankenstein[/li][li] Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan[/li][li] The Blues Brothers[/li][/ul]

24
  • Usual suspects
  • The matrix
  • Best laid plans (almost unheard of but very good final twists)
  • Twelve angry men (V. good, clever old movie)
  • Forrest gump
  • Gone in 60 seconds
  • Seven
  • Clue (only seen once but its brilliant)
  • The great escape
  • Terminator 2
  • The rock
  • Pulp fiction
  • The green mile
  • Rain man
  • The blues brothers
25
  1. Shawshank Redemption
  2. Fandango
  3. American Beauty
  4. Willie Wonka
  5. Schindler’s List
  6. Matrix
  7. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  8. Groundhog Day
  9. Goodfellas
  10. Animal House
  11. My Life as a Dog
  12. Swingers
  13. Rushmore
  14. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  15. Ordinary People
26

Blazing Saddles
Seven Samurai
Life is Beautiful
The Towering Inferno
The Manchurian Candidate
Dr. Strangelove
A Clockwork Orange
Shaft (The Original)
A Fish Called Wanda
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three
Airport
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
12 Angry Men

27

Boy, I needed Michael Ellis’s sig like I needed a poke in the eye with a hot marshmallow.

Under normal circumstances, I’d welcome you to the boards, but now I just need to go curl up with my blankie.

28
  1. Saving Private Ryan
  2. The Green Mile
  3. Fantasia
  4. Cinderella
  5. The Messanger
  6. The Patriot
  7. Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory
  8. Dirty Dancing
  9. The Mask Of Zoro
  10. Apollo 13
  11. Armageddon
  12. City Of Angels
  13. The Matrix
  14. It’s A Wonderful Life
  15. The Money Pit
29

I love this game :slight_smile:

In no particular order…

  1. Taxi Driver
  2. The Usual Suspects
  3. The Empire Strikes Back
  4. Dark City
  5. Grosse Pointe Blank
  6. Vertigo
  7. North by Northwest
  8. Rear Window
  9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  10. Airplane!
  11. Toy Story 2
  12. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
  13. Pulp Fiction
  14. Fight Club
  15. Terminator 2

There are so many more, but those are my top 15.

30

I tell people that if they want to get to know me that they only need to know my three favorite movies of all time. What they care to make out of them is their problem.

  1. Satyricon
  2. Wild Bunch
  3. Army of Darkness

The rest fall into that amorphous category of films identifiable mainly for my wife walking in and saying, “Oh, my God, you’re watching that AGAIN?”

  1. True Grit
  2. Night of the Hunter
  3. Yojimbo
  4. High Sierra
  5. Bladerunner
  6. In the Heat of the Night
  7. The Producers
  8. Cool Hand Luke
  9. Zulu
  10. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  11. El Mariachi
  12. The Seven Year Itch
31

Not necessarily in this order, but close.
[list]

  1. The Maltese Falcon - I could watch this a hundred times. Humphrey Bogart is perfect, Sydney Greenstreet is perfect, Peter Lorre is perfect. As good as the book.
  2. The Seven Samurai - Kurosawa and Mifune in their all time best. The peasants, who seem to be the victims, are really in control.
  3. Annie Hall - when Woody Allen was funny. And profound instead of pretentious. And don’t we all need the eggs?
  4. Young Frankenstein - “Put ze candle - beck!” Terri Garr - rowr. Everybody connected with this film deserves praise, especially Kenneth Mars and double especially Madeline Kahn.
  5. Any Marx Brothers movie - probably Duck Soup.
  6. Cabaret - divine decadence.
  7. Godspell - the first Christian movie that didn’t treat Jesus as a boring stick-in-the-mud with a fake British accent.
  8. Airplane - Do you have to ask why?
  9. On Golden Pond, because it makes me think of my grandmother.
  10. Psycho - You never see the knife going in. You think you do, but you don’t have to.
  11. Pinnochio - the best animated movie, ever.
  12. Fantasia - it is still years ahead of its time. And the sequel is darn good, too, although not all-time material.
  13. Nosferatu - 1929, with Max Shreck - genuinely frightening, especially at one in the morning, which is when I saw it for the first time.
  14. Freaks - the most unsettling movie of all time, because it is not just actors. Those people are real, and you come to realize that you, the audience, are the freaks because it never occurred to you that they were people with real feelings.
  15. Frankenstein - for the acting.

Thanks to all for sharing your ideas.

Regards,
Shodan

32

In no particular order:

  1. It Happened One Night
  2. Lawrence of Arabia
  3. LA Confidential
  4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  5. Goodfellas
  6. The Godfather
  7. Sleuth
  8. A Fish Called Wanda
  9. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
  10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  11. Braveheart
  12. Mr. Roberts
  13. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  14. Schindler’s List
  15. The Great Escape

Honorable Mentions:
The Professional
Field of Dreams
Dirty Harry
The Thin Man series
A Clockwork Orange

33

I thought long and hard and could not come up with a good favorite film list, even after scanning the laughable top 50 (even by decade) at imdb.com. But since I have some expertise in Japanese cinema, I’ll just list my favorite Japanese films, in no particular order.

Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa 1950. An absolutely perfect film, it put Japanese cinema on the world stage.

Tokyo Monogatari - Yasujiro Ozu 1953. This film exemplifies the Japanese concept of “ishin denshin” which means “understanding without words.”

Hanabi - Beat Takeshi 1997. A gritty film about two suicidal cops. The wheelchair-bound cop acts out his suicidal rage in watercolors, the other cop uses a gun.

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The bad sleep well) Akira Kurosawa 1960. A cynical modern tale of politics, corruption, and revenge. Complex and chilling, this film made me mad at the world for a month!

Kagemusha - Akira Kurosawa 1980. Nobody ever made a bigger samurai battle on film.

Miyamoto Musashi (a/k/a Samurai 1, 2, 3) Hiroshi Inagaki 1954,5,6. Not brilliant filmmaking like Kurosawa or Ozu, but a compelling legend of Japan’s greatest swordsman, with compelling acting.

Hadaka no shima - Kaneto Shindo 1962. A film of the hard life of a farming family isolated on a barely livable island. This film has no dialogue whatsoever, just location sound.

Topaz (Tokyo Decadence) - Ryu Murakami 1992. The story of a Tokyo hooker and the events that drive her insane. A very eccentric film by one of Japan’s greatest postmodernist writers.

Irezumi (The Spirit of the Tattoo) - Yoichi Takabayashi 1982. A perverse S&M tale of a tattoo artist who does his greatest tattoos on the backs of women while having sex. As he grows old and reaches the peak of his artistic powers, he becomes impotent and seeks an apprentice to fill his role.

Darn, I can only come up with 9 off the top of my head. There are probably greater Japanese films, I know there are, they’re on my list of films I want to see, but it will take a lifetime to search them all down. But all these films are truly great, and well worth going out of your way to see them.

34

Hmmm, well, in no particular order, with directors:

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)
Robocop (Paul Verhoeven)
Robocop 2 (Irvin Kirshner)
The Winslow Boy (David Mamet)
American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kirshner)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)
Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean)
Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley)
Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone)
Scarface (Brian De Palma)
The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola)
The Fifth Element (Luc Besson)

35

Chas E, good info on Japanese movies there. Thanks.
aoty, I like the fact that you were the only poster so far (before me) to mention Taxi Driver and North by Northwest, both of which are gems.

I tend to rate these in terms of their sheer emotional power, then by their entertainment value. Here goes:

1 - In the Heat of the Night - as powerful a movie as has ever been made.
2 - Saving Private Ryan - ditto.
3 - In Cold Blood - ditto again.
4 - Braveheart - final ditto.
5 - Casablanca - powerful and funny at the same time.
6 - Psycho - Hitchcock at his most frightening.
7 - The Godfather part 2 - perfection.
8 - American Beauty - ditto to Casablanca.
9 - Taxi Driver - disturbing.
10 - The Unforgiven (maybe without the “The”? I don’t remember.) - The American West at its most violent and awful.
11 - North by Northwest - Hitchcock at his most entertaining.
12 - To Catch a Thief - Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and Hitchcock. Sheesh!
13 - Jackie Brown - perfect street dialogue. Only movie I’ve ever seen that can make this claim.
14 - The Great Escape - like the other guy said, Bronson and McQueen, not to mention James Garner and a whole host of other name male actors who did a truly great job.
15 - Goldfinger - Pussy Galore! the best of the James Bond movies.

Cheating section:
Honorable mentions to What’s Up Doc?, Saturday Night Fever, Ran, Excalibur (which hasn’t aged well, but is still fun), Some Like It Hot, The Odd Couple, Plaza Hotel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, To Have or Have Not, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, For a Fistful of Dollars, Shaft (the original), La Cage Aux Folles (the original), and Cat Ballou.

I’m sure more will come to me in about five minutes, like somebody else said.

36

in alphabetic order

1-All That Money Can Buy (aka “The Devil and Daniel Webster”)
2-Angels With Dirty Faces
3-The Bride of Frankenstein
4-Foreign Correspondent
5-The 400 Blows
6-Harvey
7-He Walked By Night
8-His Girl Friday
9-Ikiru
10-It’s a Gift
11-The Lavender Hill Mob
12-La Ronde
13-Sons of the Desert
14-Sullivan’s Travels
15-They Made Me a Criminal

37

Welcome to the boards, Michael Ellis!:slight_smile:

Your new sig is much better, IMHO.

38

Ok, I’ll chime in:
*Raising Arizona
Annie Hall
The Hunt for Red October
Memento
Kid’s in the Hall Brain Candy
Fargo
Rear Window
Nation Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Bull Durham
12 Angry Men
The Godfather(the Complete Epic)
Fight Club
Full Metal Jacket
The Maltese Falcon
The Shawshank Redemption

39

I can’t even begin to rank these, so in no particular order here are the movies I can watch over and over (and even though I own them on video or DVD, must watch if they come on TV). I am cheating on the first two, since to me they are a prt of the same thing:

  1. Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back
  2. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  3. Tombstone (my very favorite Val Kilmer role, BTW)
  4. Sense and Sensibility
  5. Better Off Dead
  6. Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
  7. Young Frankenstein
  8. The Princess Bride
  9. The Abyss (director’s cut)
  10. A Time to Kill
  11. Monty Python’s The Holy Grail
  12. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  13. Footloose
  14. Gladiator
  15. Grease

Return of the Jedi doesn’t make my list because of the Ewoks. I just can’t like 'em.

40

Election
Goodfellas
The Godfather
House of Games
Marty
Groundhog Day
The Exorcist
American Graffiti
The Adventures of Prescilla,Queen of the Desert
Dirty Harry
American Beauty
LA Confidential
You Can Count On Me
Unforgiven
Annie Hall