100 BEST MOVIES EVER MADE
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Note: The films that are marked with a yellow star |
The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Before that movie staple, Adventure Films for Boys of All Ages, degenerated
into cinematic roller-coaster rides, the genre boasted articulated plots,
real wit, stylish villainy and great players. This, the best of the
lot, has all that and a great star, Errol Flynn, at his apex.
The African Queen (1951)
A floating paean to cranky, middle-aged single people. The best of the
Hepburn/Tracy pictures, because Tracy isn't in it.
All About Eve (1950)
Power-crazed media figure comes to regret helping an ungrateful unknown
to become a star. A film so close to our own experience at Movieline
magazine, we have to go lie down now.
Annie Hall (1977)
Unlikely Galahad's unlikely love poem to the most unlikely of screen
queens.
This nasty, bleak little take on Hollywood's favorite tale--psycho lovers
on the lam from the law--gets better with every passing year. Two otherwise
inexplicable stars can justly point with pride to their work here.
The only film masterpiece ever created for three-year-olds.
In this film, when the idiot savant, who knows the world only through
the garden he tends and the television he watches, makes gentle pronouncements
that launch him to the heights of American power, the pseudo-aphorisms
are a lot more clever than "Life is like a box of chocolates." Intelligent
is as intelligent does.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Director William Wyler's tale of soldiers returning home to small-town
American after World War II may not ever have been the paragon of sensitive
realism it was once taken for, but it's still an accurate, meaningful
fantasy of the way we never were.
Blade Runner (1982, the Director's Cut)
An expensive, stylish, despairing vision of 21st-century L.A. in which
Daryl Hannah and Sean Young, both perfectly cast, play androids. The
most borrowed/stolen-from film of the last 20 years.
Those who think Antonioni's English-language film about a '60s London
fashion photographer is dated should watch it again and try to name
even one important item missing from this defining encyclopedia of what
happened to us when we started looking at ourselves as cool objects.
David Lynch's fabulously, authentically neo-Freudian fairy tale about
the seriously dark and weird things going on in a small American town
and/or in the mind of an over-curious young man who lives there. A masterpiece
that slipped miraculously through the screens Hollywood keeps in place
to prevent such original eruptions.
A precariously thin veneer of charm helps put over this frankly amoral
tale of venal users who deserve--and, surprise, wind up with--each other.
Hit theme tune goes a long way to disguise the bitterness of this pill.
A precariously thin veneer of charm helps put over this frankly amoral
tale of venal users who deserve--and, surprise, don't wind up with--each
other. Flashy musical numbers go a long way to disguise the bitterness
of this pill.
Casablanca (1942)
A time capsule of World War II-era glamour, nobility and romance. The
only movie that could rival the average Shakespeare play for number
of lasting phrases contributed to everyday speech.
Chinatown (1974)
The best thing Jack Nicholson will ever do. The best thing Faye Dunaway
will ever do. The best thing Roman Polanski will ever do. The best thing
Robert Towne will ever do. Etc.
Citizen Kane (1941)
A boy and his sled are separated. Problems ensue.
City Lights (1931)
Even if--like us--you can generally do without Charlie Chaplin, this
one's a keeper.
Are we just being paranoid, or has everything this movie predicted about
the invasion of personal privacy come to pass? In any case, the thinking
man's Sliver.
This tale of a self-made American millionaire industrialist who sells
his factory and sails off to Europe with his flighty, pretentious wife
is even more remarkable than it seemed upon first release, because Hollywood
would never write as much virtue and benevolence into the character
of a businessman now.
There's a lot more going on in this film than the question of whether
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were or were not doing it during
the filming of the sex scene. Basically a kinky and intellectual ghost
story, outre director Nicolas Roeg's tale of things unseen becomes,
thanks to his lucid, subversive eye, an Investigation of the Unseen.
Double Indemnity (1944)
So oft-imitated it should be old hat by now, but no--mix together the
ruthlessness of the script, the director, and the film's femme fatale
star, and what you get is a poisonous cocktail that still has real kick
to it.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (1964)
A classic black comedy about the Cold War. Stanley Kubrick's icy gallows
humor is hyperbolic but dead-on accurate about the various species of
crazed extremists who handled the Bomb back when it looked like we might
be lobbing it momentarily.
Quite an odd film to come from Hollywood, where physical beauty is the
town religion. David Lynch's true story of John Merrick, a legendarily
ugly man with an exquisitely gentle soul despite all the misfortune
and cruelty makes you cry all the tears Merrick's kind doctor doesn't.
The best of the Star Wars trilogy. All the fun-filled archetypes are
in top form, and a perfect balance is achieved between special effects
and story, humor and emotion, and giddy action and dim-bulb philosophy.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
By now, backlash has set in, claiming this movie's no The Wizard
of Oz. They're wrong.
Power-crazed media figure comes to regret helping an ungrateful unknown
to become a star. A film so close to our own experience at Movieline
magazine, we have to go lie down now.
Bob Rafelson tops our list of filmmakers with only one movie in 'em,
but that one movie is a corker. Some people cannot buy Jack Nicholson
as a piano virtuoso, but we have trouble getting past the early scenes
depicting Jack as an oil rigger. From then on, smooth sailing.
Power-crazed media figure comes to regret helping an ungrateful unknown
to become a star. A film so close to our own experience at Movieline
magazine, we have to go lie down now.
One of the two best anti-war films ever made, starring a young Mel Gibson,
whose outrageous good looks seduce you right into the heart of the battle.
A gloriously gilded Easter egg of a movie. Despite the sugary trimmings,
it's bracingly tart to the taste.
The Godfather (1972) and
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
The very best of the gangster-glamorizing genre, if you give a damn
about such things, and you really shouldn't.
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Long, Southern soaper closer to Jackie Collins than Shakespeare. Two
big stars at their best. Still works, always will.
This nasty, bleak little take on Hollywood's favorite tale--psycho lovers
on the lam from the law--has something that's missing from Bonnie
and Clyde, Thieves Like Us, True Romance and all the
others: irrepressible, irresistible Peggy Cummins, the gal we'd most
like to be gunned down by.
Very funny, winning young guys run, hop, jump, flirt, wisecrack and
make music. Our favorite Marx Brothers movie.
Two towering talents the movies completely misused--Claire Bloom and
Julie Harris--provide the warm heart beating at the center of this cold-blooded
haunted house thriller, which lets your imagination do all the work.
His Girl Friday (1940)
A classic of pre-shrill feminism. The one-liner chemistry between newspaper
people Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell would probably result in mutual
sexual harassment charges in real life today.
A refreshingly off-putting Humphrey Bogart plays the self-involved,
tormented writer with rage to spare, and the winningly sexy/creepy Gloria
Grahame plays the woman who loves him to little avail. A remarkably
grim and true portrait of a writer, a category of humans Hollywood so
loathes and fears and needs that movies seldom present them realistically.
John Ford's pointed political mood piece is a demanding partner, but
still retains the power to haunt you afterwards.
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw makes for an alluring yet
distant film, easily the movies' most ghostly ghost story. Great script,
acting, and direction, but one lone teardrop steals the show.
Intolerance (1916)
Difficult, daunting, dated, and--OK, yes--challenging to sit through,
yet D.W. Griffith's complex, four-part film lives up to its reputation
as the first great epic produced in Hollywood.
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
The only Frank Capra flick to make our list, and, sure, we'll admit
we're sick of it by now, too. So try doing what we did--just knock off
watching it for a few years. When you come back to it, it's even better
than you first thought.
King Kong (1933)
A magical-looking movie that accomplishes the astounding feat of making
a horny male (i.e. Kong) who lusts after a blonde bimbo half his age
seem sympathetic, tragic and downright endearing. Added plus: peerless
native headgear.
The Lady Eve (1941)
The only film that could possibly make you want to become a cardsharp--anything,
actually, that would put you in the fast company of smart, sexy, utterly
corrupt Barbara Stanwyck, who is at her glorious, comic best.
Almost didn't make our cut, since, after all, this is the movie that
unleashed on an unsuspecting world everyone from Randy Quaid, Cloris
Leachman and Timothy Bottoms to Cybill Shepherd, Peter Bogdanovich and
Larry McMurtry. Truth is, this film could have survived Penelope Ann
Miller, too, and still been great.
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
The incomparable director Max Ophuls brings the art of film as close
as it can get to the art of music in this story of a woman who is destroyed
by her obsessive love for a glamorous pianist who trifles with her and
later doesn't even remember her. What would seem pathetic and alien
if envisioned by another director is tragic and personal here.
A movie that still has the power to send you running into the arms of
Bill W. The script, direction, acting, score, cinematography, and that
freaky bat, are all aces.
Wit, charm and ideal performances keep this soaper afloat--and make
it superior to any of its remakes. The movies' greatest unheralded female
star, Irene Dunne, thought it was her best movie, and she was right.
A cool, precise primer in the political, familial, romantic and personal
paranoia that has plagued the American psyche since this film was released.
Angela Lansbury is not really a good-hearted mystery-writing sleuth,
she's an evil bitch who feeds her own son to the wolves. Laurence Harvey
isn't really an English dish with great cheekbones, he's a tortured
wimp. Asians aren't our valued trading partners in the great new global
economy, they're--well, you get the point.
Contemporary urban saga of mixed doubles and missed opportunities still
strikes a nerve. The smooth, elegant production can't hope to gloss
over all the heartfelt heartache in the writing, playing and direction.
Sad spellbinder about how the West was settled by the losers who'd failed
to score back East. Winners here are Warren Beatty and Julie Christie,
cast as star-crossed lovers--neither one has ever been better.
