My Top 100 Films (81-100)

[The following is the final entry in my top 100 films list. Check out picks 1-20, 21-40, 41-60 and 61-80.]

81. Sherlock Jr. (1924/USA/Buster Keaton)

Keaton was no stranger to self-reflexivity (recall the censoring hand over the lens in One Week), but this literal cinematic dream is the first great film about film. Every Keaton film has its "How did he do that?" moment, but Sherlock Jr. has one a sequence. Keaton's perfect blocking in the scene where he interacts with the screen, the trick of him diving through a man's "torso," his wild motorcycle ride: I still jump when the last section of that bridge collapses as he drives smoothly on. As a technical achievement, it's rarely been surpassed. As a laugh-getter, it never has.

82. Singin' in the Rain (1952/USA/Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen)

The greatest of all musicals, Singin' in the Rain takes a wry but loving look at the early days of talkies and how the musical showed what the format could really do. Where to even start with the film's pleasures. There's the Technicolor-saturated imagery, its own little joke about/endorsement of technological movie fads and their possibilites for cheap kitsch and high art). The hysterical gags of hammy dialogue and Jean Hagen's helium-drenched squeak, like a chain-smoking four-year old. And of course, there's the dancing, from Gene Kelly's giddy twirl in the rain to Donald O'Connor's fearless "Make 'Em Laugh." When someone says they hate musicals, kindly tell them about this movie. And then avoid them forever.

83. Small Soldiers (1998/USA/Joe Dante)

Joe Dante rose to prominence as a protégé of Steven Spielberg's, and damned if he hasn't consistently bitten the hand the feeds ever since. The timing of Small Soldiers is almost too perfect, its deliberate hodgepodge of military film references a satirical parallel to the shamefully overeager contradictions in Spielberg's own 1998 war movie. In fact, Phil Hartman, playing a suburban dad who loves every new technological doo-dad for his home theater and says things like "World War II is my favorite war," might as well be a Spielberg stand-in. But beneath the hilarious sight of military-chip-powered toys doing battle in a neighborhood are complicated insights into a socially ingrained thirst for war (the toy store that sells no violent toys teeters on bankruptcy), the growing cultural influence of the military-industrial complex (defense contractors making toys isn't far off from making recruitment video games), even the racist predestination of the genre, and its real-life corollary (ethnic native populations exist to be killed by arrogant white soldiers).

84. Stalker (1979/Russia/Andrei Tarkovsky) (TOP 10)

Tarkovsky's spiritual journey into a realm that is both an escape from the prison of the USSR and its own cage is, even by the director's standards, slow and hypnotic. The Zone represents the best and worst of us, the basest impulses and the most fervent faith. What lies at the heart of this area? God? Aliens? A lethal dose of radiation? The latter is only the explanation with evidence to back it up, but as the Stalker leads his doubtful trekkers deeper into this lush are surrounded by so much slop and Communist decay, the questions raised grow ever more complex, as nihilistic as they are affirming. Stalker sets up the expectation of something earth-shattering, but it's only after you've watched it and gone away for a while that you realize the whole slog of has been life-changing. That's true not only of the characters who venture into the Zone but, judging from some of the responses to the film (including my own), the audience.

85. Stop Making Sense (1984/USA/Jonathan Demme)

Stop Making Sense is a concert film of unorthodox structure, not only in Demme's aesthetic focus—avoiding crowd shots or back-stage patter, perfectly timing his edits and movements even as he doesn't get in the way—but in the band's own performance. The manner in which Talking Heads do not simply come on stage but coalesce gradually adds an element of surprise, and odd poignancy, to the concert. Then there's the actual performances, which brim with the post-punk group's weird, spiky energy and funky playfulness. As David Byrne jitters about, soft-shoes in an oversized suit and even runs laps around the stage, the band's art trappings peel back to reveal a fundamental desire (and ability) to please a crowd.

86. Stroszek (1977/Germany/Werner Herzog)

Herzog's journey to America is a travelogue fraught with disillusionment and dashed hopes. The collection of German freaks who seek greener pastures in the U.S. and find only economic downturn and malaise so unbearable that the woman among them stoops to blowing truck drivers just for a ride anywhere but here. Bruno S.' cryptic, deranged rantings are so slipshod yet passionately delivered they must have come out of the actor's ill brain, yet for such an unpleasant creature he is intensely pitiable. The climax, with its roadside attraction set on surreal autopilot as a gunshot echoes in the distance, offers the weirdest, funniest, yet saddest takedown of the American Dream put to film, and the only one where a dancing chicken has a prominent role.

87. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927/USA/F.W. Murnau) (TOP 10)

A swirling melodrama of love, betrayal and reconciliation, Sunrise is elevated into the pantheon by Murnau's poetic camera. In the countryside, his camera drifts along the moors in the moonlight (what I wouldn't have given for a Murnau-directed adaptation of Wuthering Heights). In the vast city set, Murnau pulls back and manages to frame the same shots with wildly conflicting moods at different moments in the film. As if foreseeing the coming death of the silents, Murnau uses the movie as a staging for every cinematic technique invented to that point, as well as some tricks of the director's own. Yet for all the dizzying skill, enduringly impressive and dense, no other film feels so elemental, in story and craft.

88. Sweet Smell of Success (1957/USA/Alexander Mackendrick)

What can you say about this film is doesn't already say with more florid, pulpy eloquence? Clifford Odets' script has dialogue to die for, blissfully unconcerned with how "real" people talk and focused only on accentuating the noir setting to the max. Tony Curtis twists his good looks into a rat-like sneer, all ambition but no guts, while Burt Lancaster, buttoned up by the suit and thick glasses of a newspaperman, has never been rawer or more imposing. That Lancaster's Hunsecker enjoys so much power as nought a gossip columnist is but one of the film's many cosmic, abysmally black jokes.

89. Sweetie (1989/Australia/Jane Campion)

Jane Campion's feature debut uses odd lens choices, fragmentary and non-facial close-ups, and vivid color contrasts to probe into her characters deep social and psychological hang-ups. The story of two warring sisters, one neurotic and withdrawn, the other open but stunted, smacks of the Shem/Shaun sibling war of Finnegans Wake, complete with a rampan Elektra complex. But Campion's daring, idiosyncratic aesthetic marks her most flagrant attempt to capture a feminist look. At the very least she lacerates the male gaze with unsparing irony. The final, twisted hallucination is too uncomfortable in its various implications to look at directly.

90. Taxi Driver (1976/USA/Martin Scorsese) (TOP 10)

Scorsese's best film occupies such a huge place in pop culture that it can be easy to overlook not only how insidious a portrait of alienation and loneliness it is, but also how subtle and human it can be as it erects the ultimate anti-protagonist. That shot that drifts away from Travis as he is rejected by his idealized love, a move that communicates both Travis' psychological break from the world and, more simply, Scorsese himself bowing away in embarrassment and respect, is the single greatest, most profound, most insightfully subjective shot in Scorsese's oeuvre. Elsewhere, Scorsese and De Niro (in his wiriest, most tightly coiled performance), look upon their Dostoevskian psychopath with such sympathy that people still mistake Travis for a hero.

91. Tokyo Drifter (1966/Japan/Seijun Suzuki)

Suzuki's subsequent Branded to Kill might, despite its monochromatic color, might be even weirder, but the sheer awesome gaudiness of this neon-soaked jazz-noir grabs me more. To watch this film is to see a director in giddy, open war with his studio, using all the impositions they placed on him to get a straightforward movie in order to get ever weirder. The plot is utter senselessness: in one memorable scene, Suzuki evades over how the hero gets away from his pursuer, only for, minutes later, the bad guy to show up bleeding from a stump for a hand and ready for another round. In terms of elegant, inventive tastelessness, Suzuki's Dadaist compositions reign supreme.

92. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948/USA/John Huston)

John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a Western in appearance but a pitch-black noir in spirit. Huston's gift for stripped-down and blunt, yet nuanced and patiently observed, direction makes his view of this doomed hunt for gold brutish but insightful. Huston's own father shines as the old man who tries to extricate himself from the all-corrupting influence of greed but cannot; the fact that he even tries makes him the de facto moral center. But this is Bogart's show, and he plumbs depths of evil and avarice rare even for him. He's such a repulsive, unredeemable character that his fate is both welcomed and, by virtue of its almost Coenesque anticlimactic placement, all the more shocking.

93. The Tree of Life (2011/USA/Terrence Malick) (TOP 10)

Malick's passion project came to fruition in the form of an extended montage, a floating camera drifting through the history of the universe, past, present and future. Malick perfects his style, making a film made solely of glances and textures, of emotions without filters that I felt as the characters felt them. Brad Pitt has never been better than as a father unprepared to handle just how much he loves his children, which can make him as much a monster as an unloving parent. The religious imagery is bombastic, yet as Malick traces a semi-autobiographical '50s family to the birth of the universe and the death of the Earth, I think less of any Judeo-Christian teaching than Carl Sagan's line, "The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

94. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992/USA, France/David Lynch)

The first act pushes Lynch's surreal deadpan humor its limit, practically daring you to stop watching. If you can make it through, however, the movie then opens up to both his most horrific exploration of the dark heart of the suburbs, and the most humanely observed. His pity and compassion for Laura Palmer make her plight harder to bear, and the twisted irony of her "angel" coming to usher her into death is as genuinely comforting as it is terrible. Not only does the film manage to offer a spiritual closure to the show's narrative cliffhanger, not only does it encapsulate the series as a whole, it also distills all the conflicting, weird elements of Lynch's canon to the barest, if strangest, essence.

95. Vertigo (1958/USA/Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitch uses all his visual trickery to dive into Stewart's Scottie, reflecting the character's obsessive misogyny even as he imperceptibly critiques it. Stewart's innate ability to engender audience sympathy makes his loss and betrayal devastating, but as he tries to mold a new lover into the image of the old one, then goes mad when he learns of a larger ruse, his doting becomes sinister and abhorrent. To even try to unpack the intricacies of Hitchcock's critical ironies in a blurb is impossible. Nothing short of a full monograph can even broach its complexity.

96. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007/USA/Jake Kasdan)

Walk Hard takes Spinal Tap's unsparing insight into the darkly funny perils of real musicians and marries it to a parody of rampant musician biopics so right-on the movie has, like Spinal Tap, only ever gotten funnier the more I learn about the things it mocks. Damn near every single line is quotable, and the cast delivers the dialogue perfectly. To this day I cannot see Raymond J. Barry in anything without thinking "The wrong kid died." And like Spinal Tap, Walk Hard excels on the strength of songs as solidly crafted as they are ridiculous.

97. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000/Hungary, Italy, Germany, France/Béla Tarr)

Tarr uses only 39 shots in a 2.5-hour film, each take constantly realigning, even overhauling, its immaculate blocking. This approach also allows the implacable tension of the circus tent attraction obsessing everyone to build and build until it threatens to collapse society. But for us art-loving shut-ins who see creativity as a means for building the world, Tarr unsympathetically uses the giant whale carcass to symbolize art, and the different ways people respond to it are all, on some level, destructive. Tarr may be Tarkovsky's heir, but he's also the Russian's spiritual polar opposite.

98. White Heat (1949/USA/Raoul Walsh)

Walsh's meaty direction combines with Jimmy Cagney's playing to the rafters for a gangster noir so vicious it feels more like a lost Pre-Code feature than a contemporary genre picture. Cagney's Cody is a sadist both mollified and egged on by his mother, and his mood swings of agony and rage make him predictable only that he is always unpredictable. No one died like Jimmy Cagney, and his righteous screams from the top of a burning refinery is his finest demise.

99. Yi Yi (2000/Taiwan/Edward Yang)

Edward Yang's final feature is an elegantly paced, three-hour film about the travails of a family that seems to capture all life in its frame. Generational gaps, coming of age, fading innocence, rekindled passions, and more play upon the family, and even the larger and social context of Taiwan. Part of the film's greatness owes to Yang's refusal to take a side in the old vs. new debate: he sees the advantages of both, but also how each relies on the other. Only together can they figure out something as complex, frightening, yet rewarding as life.

100. Zodiac (2007/USA/David Fincher)

Fincher's last film before moving into his current obsession with the digital age, Zodiac is, appropriately, a decidedly analog tale about piecing together a mystery without modern tools. The clean, dark digital photography gives uncomfortable clarity to the Zodiac's work even as it obscures anything that can lead to his capture. And time wears on, infuriatingly slow compared to how the world now wears on. In The Social Network, the long-completed Transamerica Pyramid symbolizes instant change in the technological era. In Zodiac, its time-lapsed construction shows the trail growing cold, until, like the Egyptian pyramids, the building becomes a tomb for San Francisco's murdered.

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Honorable Mentions: These are the films I left off my final list either because I needed to revisit them or because I simply ran out of room. I won't list any films by directors already mentioned for the sake of brevity. That does, though, mean I will have to avoid mentioning Carl Dreyers Ordet, a film I desperately needed to see a second time, and did right in the middle of this week. Had I rewatched it earlier, it most certainly would have had a spot on this list. In time, and with a few more viewings, it may well occupy a spot in my top 10. Here are the 25 that just missed the cut.

Beauty and the Beast (1946/France/ Jean Cocteau), Black Book (2006/Netherlands/Paul Verhoeven), Cat People (1942/USA/Jacques Tourneur), Exiled (2006/Hong Kong/Johnnie To), The Heart of the World (2000/Canada/Guy Maddin), The House is Black (1963, Iran, Forugh Farrokhzad), The Housemaid (1960/South Korea/Kim Ki-young), It's a Wonderful Life (1946/USA/Frank Capra), Killer of Sheep (1979/USA/Charles Burnett), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949/UK/Robert Hamer), The Last Bolshevik (1992/France/Chris Marker), The Man With a Movie Camera (1929/Soviet Union/Dziga Vertov), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943/USA/Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid), Moolaadé (2004/Senegal, France, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Morocco, Tunisia/Ousmane Sembène), The Music Room (1958/India/Satyajit Ray), Out of Sight (1998/USA/Steven Soderbergh), The Phantom Carriage (1921/Sweden/Victor Sjöström), The Prestige (2006/USA, UK/Christopher Nolan), Safety Last! (1923/USA/Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor), The Searchers (1956/USA/John Ford), Shaun of the Dead (2004/UK, France, USA/Edgar Wright), A Trip to the Moon (1902/France/Georges Méliès), True Romance (1993/USA/Tony Scott), Two Lovers (2008/USA/James Gray), The Wizard of Oz (1939/USA/Victor Fleming, various uncredited)

My Top 100 Films (61-80)

[The following is the latest entry in my Top 100 films. Click the links to see picks 1-20, 21-40 and 41-60.]

61. Once Upon a Time in the West (1969/Italy, USA/Sergio Leone)

Leone's homage/revisionist take on the Western reaches its pinnacle in this perfectly directed, almost Brechtian deconstruction. From the long, unbearably tense beginning (hands down the best film opening ever) to Henry Fonda's everyman image being perverted to suggest that violence and sadism is a cornerstone of the "average American." Leone helped create a Western icon in Eastwood's Man With No Name, but here he tears the whole damn place to the ground. Even so, he does it with such lush formalism it's nearly impossible to see him battering at the foundations until it all collapses.

62. Only Angels Have Wings (1939/USA/Howard Hawks)

Hawks' most spiritually pure film, of men being men and women not losing an inch to them. Cary Grant's deliberately aloof performance only makes him more irresistible, and the muted grief these pilots cannot express when they lose one of their own turns the heavy fogged airstrip where tehy operate into a grounded ghost ship, haunted by the freshly dead and soon-to-die. Hawks' direction has never been the kind one would call poetic (and that's a compliment), but the ethereal, haunting mood he casts in this film comes damn close. The three Hawks films in this list are all perfect. Bringing Up Baby is the perfect screwball comedy. Rio Bravo is the perfect Western. Only Angels Have Wings is the perfect...well, it cannot easily be fit into genre. For that reason, it may be the greatest among these equals.

63. Paris, Texas (1984/Germany, France, UK, USA/Wim Wenders)

One of the most piercing, on-point views of America came from a foreign director with multinational backing. Sounds about right. Harry Dean Stanton's quintessential performance as a prodigal son trying to repair the life he does not remember doubles as an abstract elegy for America, for the faded Old West where this is set, and for the American Dream that hollowed out Travis and his family. Intimate, poignant moments between people are as bewildering and unsettling as they are necessary and hopeful. All we have is each other, and sometimes not even that.

64. Park Row (1952/USA/Samuel Fuller)

I have a hate-hate relationship with journalism, but this unabashedly sentimental, if pulpy and caricatured, view of newspapermen is so infectious it makes me pine for its return to prominence. Packed with Fuller's cigar-plug dialogue, brutish action and unrepentant idealism, Park Row so thoroughly believes in journalism's fundamental role in American society that it ties the profession to the importation of our greatest symbol, the Statue of Liberty. Hey, no one could ever accuse Sam Fuller of playing it small. Contains that immortal line, "The day you learn to read, you're fired."

65. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid [preview version] (1973/USA/Sam Peckinpah)

Ignore the butchered theatrical cut (and the misleading 2005 special edition) in favor of the 1988 cut that tried its damnedest to get as much of Peckinpah's original vision back on the screen. Watching this cut, though, it's hard to imagine a more beautiful, if severe, epitaph for the West. The opening credits alone, with the stop-start fades in and out of color and the juxtaposition of an old Garrett's double cross with Billy's gang shooting the heads off chickens in the past, is worthy of canonization. But the rest of the movie is no less striking, finding no heroism in Billy's iconic fast-living, but also no comfort in Pat's cowardly long life. Peckinpah's infatuation and disgust with violence finds its greatest outlet here, searching desperately for something to love in the Old West and finding nothing. Slim Pickens' quiet, dignified, but deeply sad reaction to his fatal wounding haunts me forever and always.

66. A Perfect World (1993/USA/Clint Eastwood)

My rare connection to Clint Eastwood's work makes the ones I do love all the more special, and this portrait of doomed innocence in the run-up to Kennedy's assassination is one of his most unforced, affecting films. The politics tacitly expressed in Eastwood's films are conservative, but above all weary, dissatisfied with a world that seems to please nobody. Like other conservatives, Eastwood wants to go back to the past, but instead of reveling in it, he wishes to correct something in the hopes of setting the present on a better path. The so-called perfect world he gives to escaped convict Butch and the boy hostage he unwittingly sets free from his own prison is devastating for its fragility and ephemerality. Eastwood's own Texas Ranger serves as a revision of the trigger-happy characters he started to play around the time this film is set, a cop who wants a peaceable solution to the situation and can only look on in disgust when that hope, too, is revealed as just that.

67. Persona (1966/Sweden/Ingmar Bergman)

I want to revisit my early piece on this film, but I keep putting it off because I don't want to have another go until I feel I've truly understood the movie. I may be delaying a second post until my death. Bergman's reflexive drama is as playful as it is despairing, its use of metacinematic structure and style to  peel back the existential mystery of an actress gone mute. Is the movie a parable for man's inability to deal with tragedy, or art's? The straightest answer I could give is "Yes." But it's also Bergman's most focused insight into the horror of human existence and the vacuums of communication between people. The slow entwining of Bibi Andersson's and Liv Ulmann's beings ironically connote a breakdown in illusion as the film becomes ever more illusory. The last shot, revealing camera filming the actresses, should be a liberating reminder of the falsity of the image. Instead, it suggests that all life is false.

68. Phantoms of Nabua (2009/Thailand, Germany, UK/Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

I will not be able to state definitively my favorite Apichatpong Weerasethakul feature until I know he has made his last, for he continues to develop and enrich his themes and aesthetic with each new one. So I will instead select this 2009 short, inexplicably left off the Uncle Boonmee DVD despite being part of the same project that culminated in that masterful feature. At 10 minuts, Phantoms wastes no time, but it also doesn't particularly put forward a narrative. Instead, it presents a striking composition, a fluorescent light, a flaming soccer ball and a flickering film projector showing a film of lightning strikes all blazing in starless night. Eventually, the soccer ball hits the screen and burns it to cinders, reminiscent of the climax of Inglourious Basterds and Nick Ray's experimental short The Janitor. As the projector continues to shine light into the smoke, are we meant to see it as a breakdown of film's power, or of art being projected into the real world to become one with it? This alternately mournful and blissfully hopeful conundrum, when taken in tandem with Uncle Boonmee, marks the greatest, most evocative elegy yet made for the format of film.

69. Pinocchio (1940/USA/Ben Sharpsteen et. al)

Admittedly, the film is more a collection of vignettes than a unified narrative, but when animation looks this good, I'm happy to go anywhere it takes me. The more random the better. The rich variety of colors and stunning depth of field display a technical ambition no smaller than that of Fantasia. Pinocchio himself is, forgive me, a bit wooden, but this fantastical movie makes a frightfully adult case for how unforgiving this world is, especially to someone different. As Pinocchio heads from Geppetto's cozy, cluttered workshop to a cage, an exploitative freakshow, a morally and physically corrupting island of temptations and, finally, the belly of a whale, one gets the sense that he wants to be a real boy not to feel like he belongs to the world but so it will finally stop doing everything in its cosmic power to kill him.

70. Platform (2000/China/Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia's alternately wistful and critical view of China's modern history, both its Communist 20th century and shamelessly capitalistic new era, is best captured in this period piece about a troupe traveling around China at the end of the '70s and beyond to sing of Mao's accomplishments. But those who sing of Mao's trains have never actually seen one, and most still feel tied to an almost feudal existence never wholly overcome in the vast, geographically and even lingually segmented country. The decade slowly morphs the Peasant Culture Group of Fenyang into the commercialized All-Stars Rock 'n' Breakdance Electronic Band, but as with the Communist "upheaval," this capitalistic dawn changes little about the day-to-day existence of China's population, and indeed its only true innovation is to find new ways to keep people separate and lonely.

71. Playtime (1967/France/Jacques Tati) (TOP 10)

How can a comedy on this scale be so minutely controlled? Tati's long shots emphasize the alienation and dehumanization of modern life in such a way that he can also celebrate the struggle of the human spirit against the cage it built for itself. The precision of his setpieces—the see-through apartment complex, the rows of file cabinets revealed to be sealed-off cubicles—are as funny as they are evocative, and the extended climax in a brand-new restaurant slowly dismantled by its patrons is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly said, “the most formidable mise-en-scène in the history of cinema.” But if Tati's desire to back away from modernist influence seems conservative, it should be noted that his release of his iconic Hulot into a much larger world of characters is a downright socialistic narrative decision.

72. Ran (1985/Japan/Akira Kurosawa)

Taken with Welles' treatment of Falstaff, Kurosawa's stupefying adaptation of King Lear is the best Shakespeare put to celluloid. Tatsuya Nakadai captures all of Lear's folly and crumbling arrogance as Hidetora, and his descent into madness is accentuated by chilling Noh stylings. Everything else is no less bombastic, be it Hidetora's caustic, wormy Fool or the gargantuan battle sequence of a castle being torn to ribbons, a sequence shot with more disgust than Kurosawa ever put into his camera. And this is the man who ended the supposedly heroic struggle of Seven Samurai with the boldest warrior literally ass-up dead in the mud. Not Kurosawa's last great film, but perhaps his last awe-inspiring one.

73. Red Desert (1964/Italy/Michelangelo Antonioni)

I'm still torn on Antonioni's modernist ennui, but strangely I feel it works far better in this color-streaked industrial fog than in L'Avventura's bleaker monochrome. Monica Vitti shines as a woman unable to adapt to the industrial environment of the film, with its unnatural shapes and colors, to the point that she can barely function. Yet underneath Vitti's disconnect and sexual tension with Richard Harris' understanding, equally alienated Corrado, the film makes an open case for the beauty of this man-made world, where not only the vividly colored objects have aesthetic appeal but even the cold gray steel that makes up the industrial realm's circulatory and respiratory systems. Antonioni may craft characters who see no future in altered, modern landscapes, but he does, keeping the movie from sinking into navel-gazing wistfulness.

74. The Red Shoes (1948/UK/Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) (TOP 10)

"Why do you want to dance?" "Why do you want to live?" "Because I must." "Well I don't know exactly why, but I must." "That is my answer, too." And with that early exchange, I knew I'd found a film I'd cherish forever. The Archers' use of color is equalled by none, and this phantasmagoric, vividly subjective ballet film captures the overwhelming ecstasy and agony of artistic inspiration and drive like no other movie. The ballet sequences offer perhaps the first great step forward for film art after the end of the silent era, updating silent techniques into something even more magical as the music entwines flawlessly with the movements. The grim climax suggests the doomed fate awaiting all those who can do nothing but art, but that this will never dissuade anyone so inclined is part of their reason their art towers above all others.

75. Repulsion (1965/UK/Roman Polanski)

Polanski's psychological apartment nightmare is my favorite horror film by far, and the only one that truly terrifies me instead of just momentarily freaking me out. Given Polanski's infamous actions, there's a dark irony that, more than nearly any other male filmmaker, he understands women. I'll take his multifaceted, psychosexual portrait of Catherine Deneuve's stiff Carol over generations of thinly sketched knife-bait any day. Polanski's mastery with a camera is also evident even at this early juncture, the time-marking shots of decaying food and the silent nighttime hallucinations as perfectly composed as they are spontaneous and arresting. I don't watch this too often, but only because I like to sleep now and then.

76. Rio Bravo (1959/USA/Howard Hawks)

Perched on the cusp of the '60s and a subsequent downturn in American cinema and uptick in art cinema, this perfectly plotted, perfectly acted, perfectly shot Western seems a last hurrah for classic Hollywood. Made as a conservative response to High Noon, Hawks' film nevertheless always struck me as liberal, as John Wayne's hero tries to go it alone but is absorbed into a larger, mutually supportive community when it comes time to defend the small town. But regardless of what the film is "saying," Rio Bravo is so immaculately crafted that it can please anyone. Not a single moment is out of place, and that includes the songs.

77. The Rules of the Game (1939/France/Jean Renoir)

The "game" in the title could refer to aristocratic codes both followed and transgressed in Renoir's greatest feature, or maybe even life in general. But considering how much, and how quickly, its overlapping dialogue, deep-focus cinematography and fluid, playful camera movements trickled down into the language of cinema, the game for which Renoir sets down the rules may be filmmaking itself. I saw contempt in Renoir's view of the dying, oblivious aristocracy when I first saw the film, but now I see the slap he so desperately wants to give these people is a concerned corrective, not a furious assault. The spectre of coming upheaval hangs over this movie, and as repulsive and self-absorbed as these characters are, it's hard not to feel sorry for what they're about to experience.

78. Safe (1995/USA/Todd Haynes)

Haynes' domestic horror film is terrifying for its ambiguity. Like Nick Ray's Bigger Than Life, the "monster" is the American way of life. But where Ray regrettably tied James Mason's madness to a drug, Haynes leaves Julianne Moore's problems unnervingly unexplained. As the film tracks her attempts to diagnose and cure her reaction against her upper-middle-class environment, it conjures images of AIDS scares, cults and a world we'e made so antiseptic it now ironically infects us. And as that bleached, isolated life is exemplified by Moore's Carol, the victim is her own antagonist. I don't think it's any kind of coincidence, also, that Moore's character shares a name with the protagonist/villain of Repulsion.

79. Sansho the Bailiff (1954/Japan/Kenji Mizoguchi)

I have been thunderstruck by Mizoguchi for some time (seek out, please, his neglected and commercially unavailable Straits of Love and Hate), but Sansho the Bailiff eclipses all else I've seen by him. Mizoguchi's period piece shows a world where a governor's kindness gets him exiled, his wife sold into prostitution and his children made slaves. The film is unbearable, showing the corruption of the son, the maiming of the mother and, most hauntingly, the self-sacrifice of the sister, who as ever brings up the director's autobiographical guilt over the exploitation of his own sibling. There's also a scathing indictment of bureaucracy, the rampant sadism of the titular character made worse by the fact that he's the equivalent of an office manager, drunk on his modicum of power and sycophantic to his superiors. I only saw the film for the first time last week, but I was left so devastated, and so enamored with its indescribably perfect mise-en-scène, that I could not leave it off the list.


80. Seven Samurai (1954/Japan/Akira Kurosawa) (TOP 10)

The film that made me a cinephile. I'd seen and loved great movies before this, but afterward, I was never the same. Kurosawa crafts the shortest 3.5-hour film in history, an adroitly paced action epic that somehow manages to take wide, message-heavy digressions without losing an ounce of steam. This was also, along with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, the film that made me notice how lens choices affected the image, Kurosawa's long lenses crushing the depth of field, turning each composition into a huge painting. It also emphasizes the bridging of connections between the samurai with each other and with the peasants they agree to defend, the gradual flattening of the image emphasizing their physical and spiritual proximity. The director cares so much for his characters that he does not revel in the savagery that consumes most of them, and indeed even shows their corpses embarrassingly placed to ward off any notions of heroic bloodshed. "We lost," as the sage samurai leader says as he overlooks what most would call a victory, and the final shot dwells not only the rescued living but the departed dead.

My Top 100 FIlms (1-20)

I've done my best to resist the rush to list-making spurred by the critical census-taking of the Sight & Sound poll, that decennial feature that shows off the dearest loves of critics and filmmakers the world over before being averaged out to remind everyone that Citizen Kane is still the best movie ever. I've seen so many top 10 lists pop up over the last few weeks that I started to feel as if I were the only blogger actually happy to not have to agonize over something so meaningless and yet so crucial as a list of 10 movies among the thousands a cinephile has seen that somehow stand out among the rest. I can't even keep a year-end list limited to that many entries; to sum up all of cinema into so few choices is an infuriating prospect. Besides, at 22, the idea of me setting down my favorite movies is laughable. There's so much I haven't seen, so much I haven't re-seen, that I wouldn't dare claim to have any grasp on what I truly love yet.

Then, I thought about the fun of doing such a list not as a declaration of taste but as a time capsule, a snapshot of my mindset at this stage of my life to be revisited later after my picks have undoubtedly changed. I admit that gives these selections a self-satisfying, esoteric bent, but that's true of all lists. Still, I love lists, and I love to spread my affection for my favorite movies. I tried to stick to that old one-film-per-director rule to maximize the variety, though I quickly violated that with a few filmmakers. (Howard Hawks even appears three times in my top 100, but then one could make a credible top 10 of all time with nothing but Hawks films, so I'm convinced this constitutes restraint on my part.) My tastes do skew a bit more recent, a reflection both of my lateness in coming to film and my passion for a type of reflexive, (post-)modern cinema that will become apparent as I explain my choices. I have presented these in alphabetical order, having had such a hard time narrowing the list down to 100 as it is without worrying about placement. I will, though, mark the films I would likely include in a top 10 I would submit to Sight & Sound if I were asked today. Or perhaps I should say were I asked right this second, as my picks at any given moment could be different. So, for the time being, here are the first 20 of my 100 favorite films of all time:

1. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967/France/Jean-Luc Godard) (TOP 10)

I could just as easily have selected Godard's most recent feature, Film Socialisme, for advancing the ideas presented here into the digital age of communication, but 2 or 3 Things is the more inviting and rapturous of the two. Seeking a new, socialistic aesthetic for the cinema, Godard films everything, his digressions to gaze at trees, construction sites, and the void of a cup of coffee making a Terrence Malick film look as tight as a Val Lewton production. But in this essayistic breakdown of the director's early pet theme of prostitution as symbol of capitalism is a gorgeous, meditative, and uncharacteristically hopeful culmination of his work to that point and a forecast of coming ambition.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968/USA/Stanley Kubrick)

Kubrick's most cryptic and impenetrable yet, by virtue of its head trip stylings, most accessible film. Kubrick coolly reflects the division of historical epochs by technological states by defining humanity by its tools, be it a bone that lets our forebears clobber rival apes to a program that performs our own functions so well it recognizes humans as obsolete systems and begins phasing them out. Yet beneath Kubrick's icy remove and wry cynicism is his most hopeful conclusion: perhaps the tools that facilitated our evolution into homo sapiens can trigger the next step and a new universe of possibilities. An atheist rapture.

3. Ace in the Hole (1951/USA/Billy Wilder)

Not Wilder's cleverest, best-shot nor best-acted film, but the most cohesive in its savagery and the most prescient in its worldview. In an age where screenwriters, most of them former journalists, celebrated the newspaper profession, Wilder saw the problem with trusting ordinary, underpaid and overambitious people. Kirk Douglas has never been more vile, ginning up a media circus at the expense of a man's life. The film slowly takes on the properties of the collapsed mine shaft trapping the victim of Tatum's fame baiting, grower ever darker, tighter and airless until it suffocates you.

4. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001/USA/Steven Spielberg) (TOP 10)

I'll just say it: the ending is brilliant and by far the most disturbing thing Steven Spielberg ever filmed. If you think it's sentimental and light, you're not paying attention. The rest of the film is about as grim, methodically demolishing any argument for the unique quality that makes humans human. Little David displays love and, no less critically, hate, and his Pinocchio-inspired journey perverts and despairs of a toy's futile quest to become a real boy. Unbearably, the film suggests that David fails not because of any shortcoming of his own but because humanity is no real gift in the first place. Is this the same man who made E.T.?

5. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974/Germany/Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Take Harold and Maude, strip out the quirkiness and compound the unexpected emotional impact and you've only just begun to process Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fassbinder's tortured romance between an elderly widow and a strapping Arabic immigrant elicits the harsh reality of lingering hatred and prejudice in a country still atoning for the extremity of its racism. More importantly, he does not lose the actual relationship to the allegory, shaping a textured portrait of a couple's internal and external pressures all the more devastating for its tangibility. The slow tightening of the frame subtly visualizes how Ali and Emmi see each other, culminating in a slightly ironic reconciliation that engenders hope and uncertainty in equal measure.

6. L'Argent (1983/France/Robert Bresson)

Bresson was like a transcendant George Carlin, getting ever harder and more vicious with age. Bresson's final film, L'Argent, is an outright horror movie, where the monster is capitalism. Even when his previous films ended on despairing notes, there was a sense of release to them, the fate of the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar in its own way as freeing as the conclusion of A Man Escaped. No such luck here: money is all-powerful and all-present, corrupting minds until the mere want for money, not even the objects it buys, becomes man's spiritual motivation. U.S. currency bears the motto "In God We Trust," but L'Argent suggests that this is redundant, for money is our God. As only he can, Bresson makes this point a great deal more elegantly and profoundly than every liberal college freshman who says the same thing.

7. Army of Shadows (1969/France/Jean-Pierre Melville)

Melville's war film concerns the French resistance against the Nazis, yet in some ways it is a more scathing indictment of French militarism than all the movies made about Algeria. Refusing to glorify the push back against Vichy, Melville instead shows realistic war, with deflated heroism and muted sadism rendered oddly unmoving by the frame's metallic blue tones. Seen here, guerrilla war looks as nasty and soul-rotting to its practitioners as it does to those on the receiving end of it. Dismissed by hip post-'68ers as DeGaullist fluff, Army of Shadows might really have gotten under their skin for suggesting the inevitable pitfalls of a radical left uprising in any era.

8. L'Atalante (1934/France/Jean Vigo)

Like Murnau's Sunrise, Jean Vigo's one and only feature-length picture L'Atalante is narratively simplistic yet impossible to describe. Located in the space between dialectics (male/female, land/water, etc.), L'Atalante eschews classification for a poetic revelry in images that at once look back to the silent era and find new innovations in the play of sight and sound. Less openly political than Vigo's short Zéro de Conduite, this feature nevertheless displays its own socio-sexual-political underpinnings throughout, never more so than when Michel Simon, that French Dionysus, is on the screen. A masterpiece, though I'd be damned if I could explain it at this time.

9. Baby Face (1933/USA/Alfred E. Green)

Barbara Stanwyck sets hearts and other body parts on fire in this audacious Pre-Code romp about a woman literally sleeping her way to the top. Stanwyck's sexual immediacy has never been so overpowering: she's so seductive here that the thought of being used by her practically seems like something for which a guy should thank her. No one is safe: she even blazes through a young John Wayne without breaking a sweat. The restored version adds even more raunch, pushing the envelope so much that even in the days of the Hays' office's impotence something had to be done to put a lid on this movie. But one glace at Stanwyck's come-hither look and it's clear that nothing short of blast shielding could protect a "hypothetical reasonable person," as the Supreme Court once described the test-case for obscenity.

10. Bigger Than Life (1956/USA/Nicholas Ray)

That I managed to restrict myself to but one Ray film is a miracle, but there was no doubt which of his films I would choose. Bigger Than Life marks the pinnacle of Ray's studio work, his CinemaScope widescreen capturing the boundaries of suburban bourgeois life with more sinister edge than has been filmed since. James Mason's magnificently unhinged performance as a dad whose druggie hallucinations give him the self-image of a deity. American patriarchy and middle-class aspiration are torn asunder in Ray's color-streaked frame, with the play of shadow and light making an Expressionist play of Mason's uncontrollable delusions of grandeur and superiority. The most savage vision of 1950s America put to celluloid.

11. Blade Runner [final cut] (1982/USA/Ridley Scott)

Scott's futuristic vision of Los Angeles, more Asian than American, is either false given the subsequent rise of Hispanic cultural influence or, given the shifting economic power of China and Japan, so prescient the world merely hasn't caught up to it. But in Scott's tactile future is the past, the use of flying cars and androids a staging for a brilliant throwback noir that mines the built-to-serve directives of Replicants for existential angst and the polluted, acid-rain haze of L.A. for its shadows and despair. the question of Deckard's own humanity, despite Scott's own urged reading, is pointedly irrelevant. What, after all, is the difference between a machine who must perform its task and a man compelled to do the same?

12. Blazing Saddles (1974/USA/Mel Brooks)

One of two masterpieces Mel Brooks released in the same year, Blazing Saddles edges out over Young Frankenstein for the audacity of its comedy (co-written by Richard Pryor) and the slyness of its genre travesty. As with all of Brooks' parodies, Saddles overflows with affection for tropes, but there's a critical edge here not found in Frankenstein or Spaceballs. The undiluted savagery of its racial humor, unsparing of the hateful nature of those rubes lionized as pioneers in other Westerns, still has bite, and it's not for nothing that the he-man brawl between flamboyantly dressed cowpokes breaks through the studio wall and into a lavishly gay musical setpiece. But through it all, Brooks' gift for rapid-fire shtick has rarely served him better, and Blazing Saddles never sacrifices funny for clever.

13. Brazil [director's cut] (1985/UK/Terry Gilliam)

Gilliam's expressive sci-fi satire replaces fascists and Communists of dystopias past for a new, more powerful enemy: bureaucracy. In a world where one needs a form in triplicate just to use the bathroom, Jonathan Pryce's Lowry has soaring dreams of freedom that gradually crumble as his ability to distinguish reality from fantasy fades.Propelled by Gilliam's magnificent setpieces and scabrous humor, Brazil moves into ever darker waters until even the darkest comedy produces unease, fear, and, in the end, sadness and horror.

14. Bringing Out the Dead (1999/USA/Martin Scorsese)

As much as I cheated on the one-film-per-director rule with Hawks, I'm amazed I didn't violate it even more so with Scorsese. I whittled the final inclusions down to two. Why leave out such masterpieces as The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ for the sake of this little-seen fin de siècle work by the master? Because it is perhaps the most stylistic film in the oeuvre of American's most stylish filmmaker. Taxi Driver played at 45rpm, Bringing Out the Dead is an explosion of Scorsese's visuals and themes, a wracked paramedic making an inverse Travis Bickle in his self-implosion to save people, not destroy them. Set in a Hell's Kitchen as infused with Catholic guilt as it is drugs, Bringing Out the Dead sends Nic Cage on nightmarish nightly runs that streak color and sound into garish, gorgeous circles of hell. Naturally, Scorsese's love of film abounds, especially in the silent-film-like effects of Frank plucking New York's trapped souls from the pavement.

15. Bringing Up Baby (1938/USA/Howard Hawks)

The pinnacle of Hawks' screwball comedy, with Hepburn and Grant turning in flawless performances and sexual dynamics turned on their heads. Practically every line is an innuendo, and the deadpan visual delivery of Hawks' workman direction only makes everything funnier. Hepburn, after some comic coaching by Grant, remains calm and playful as Grant goes to pieces under her desire. It's a pitch-perfect comedy, with Grant's leap into the air when he loses composure and screams "I just went GAY all of a sudden!" making for one of the best line deliveries of all time. I can't watch this movie without gasping for air

16. Carlito's Way (1993/USA/Brian De Palma)

Hi, Mom! is perhaps more representative of De Palma's audacious charm, but this capital-R Romantic take on a hood trying to go clean is the most elegant and pained entry in the gangster genre. De Palma and Pacino move away from the satirical excess of Scarface, each providing some of his subtlest work. Presented as a dying man's flashback, Carlito's Way is not about if but when, and the process that leads Pacino's futile effort for reform offers De Palma the chance to use all his directorial flourish with formalist precision. Gangster movies are often thrilling, even chilling, but rarely have they been this devastating.

17. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974/France/Jacques Rivette)

I left My Night at Maud's off this list because, having seen only that film in Rohmer's canon, I was sure I'd one day see something that would top it. Why, then, include Celine and Julie Go Boating, if the same situation applies? Well, I can't think of many other films that so immediately arrested me, so completely consumed my attention from the start as this metacinematic feminist tale. Watching Celine and Julie Go Boating offers the pleasurable feel of seeing it as it is constructed, the narrative molding and rewriting itself as if visualizing the drafting process. Proustian in structure, Celine achieves a delicate, deeply intellectual playfulness all its own.

18. Chimes at Midnight (1965/France, Spain, Switzerland/Orson Welles)

Welles' decision to cast himself as Falstaff is one of the most humble instances of a director giving himself the lead. It's an act of remarkable self-criticism, inviting such scrutiny it's easy to miss the rest of the film. Well, at least until you glance around Welles' padded body and see the gorgeous construction of the frame, which has a cohesiveness one could not reasonably expect of a movie pieced together over years. The Battle of Shrewsbury remains the greatest battle sequence ever filmed, its smoky, cacophonous din terrifying, darkly funny, but not remotely celebratory. Many have ripped it off, no one has copied it.

19. Chungking Express (1994/Hong Kong/Wong Kar-wai)

Oh, which Wong to choose? The suffocating, unrequited romance of In the Mood for Love? The relationship-from-hell of Happy Together? The downright Joycean 2046? I'll go with Chungking Express, a cast-off interim movie that has in its spontaneous energy flecks of all the others. Filled with broken hearts and anxiety over Hong Kong's impending turnover, Chungking Express is nevertheless the most joyous of Wong's features, reveling in the hope of newfound love more than it wallows in despair for the end of old ones. Faye Wong wipes the floor with other Manic Pixie Dream Girls, her effervescent energy making the act of covertly cleaning her crush's apartment one of jubilation and rebirth. Hope is a rare commodity in Wong's films, which makes it all the more blissful here.

20. A City of Sadness (1989/Taiwan/Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Geometrically precise in its camera movement, structured as variations on repeated framings, Hou's film is nevertheless stunning in its emotional impact. Hou uses medium, long, and even longer shots to get an overview of handover of authority of Taiwan from Japan to another power, China. But the film's critical distance and political content is defined, then redefined, along the personal lines of the family at the heart of the story. Hou holds his shots for so long that, when he returns to that same location and same axis later, the different placement along that same axis is immediately recognizable and portentous of social and narrative change. To date, this is the only Hou film I've seen, but if he made one better, then he belongs in the pantheon of great directors.