My Favorite Films
Submitted by Maniac Mansion on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 05:16
Tags:
- Say Anything (Crowe, 1989)
- Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
- Planes Trains and Automobiles (Hughes, 1988)
- Clerks (Smith, 1994)
- Fargo (Coen, 1996)
- Rosemary's Baby (Polanski, 1968)
- Pi (Aronofsky, 1998)
- Almost Famous (Crowe, 2000)
- Ed Wood (Burton, 1994)
- Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 2001)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Foreman, 1975)
- Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964)
- Rocky (Avildson, 1976)
- Magnolia (P. Anderson, 1998)
- Persona (Bergman, 1967)
- Fight Club (Fincher, 1999)
- High Fidelity (Frears, 2000)
- Evil Dead II (Raimi, 1987)
- JFK (Stone, 1991)
- Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985)
- Manhattan (Allen, 1979)
- The Royal Tenenbaums (W. Anderson, 2002)
- Napoleon Dynamite (Hess, 2004)
- Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
- Black Christmas (Clark, 1974)
- Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)
- Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
- Lost in Translation (S. Coppola, 2003)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
- Memento (Nolan, 2000)
- The Goonies (Donner, 1985)
- The Crow (Proyas, 1994)
- Superbad (Mottola, 2007)
- Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
- The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)
- Scream (Craven, 1996)
- The Shining (Kubrick, 1980)
- Nashville (Altman, 1975)
- Love Actually (Curtis, 2003)
- Igby Goes Down (Steers, 2002)
- The Beyond (Fulci, 1981)
- Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
- Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978)
- Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante, 1990)
- Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
- The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1986)
- The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)
- Pee Wee's Big Adventure (Burton, 1985)
- Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
- Tommy Boy (Segal, 1995)
- Grey Gardens (Maysles, 1975)
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron, 1991)
- Stand by Me (Reiner, 1986)
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (G. Hill, 1969)
- Fletch (Ritchie, 1985)
- The Warriors (W. Hill, 1979)
- Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier, 2000)
- Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
- The Cable Guy (Stiller, 1993)
- Better Off Dead (Holland, 1985)
- Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994)
- Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
- American Beauty (Mendes, 1999)
- Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994)
- Big (Marshall, 1988)
- Juno (Reitman, 2007)
- Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
- Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988)
- Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)
- Alien (Scott, 1979)
- Twister (DeBont, 1997)
- Maniac! (Lustig, 1980)
- Ghost World (Zwigoff, 2001)
- Stranger than Paradise (Jarmusch, 1984)
- Election (Payne, 1999)
- Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
- You Can Count On Me (Lonergan, 2000)
- My Cousin Vinny (Lynn, 1992)
- Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
- The Emperor's New Groove (Dindal, 2000)
- The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
- Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
- Gone With the Wind (Fleming, 1939)
- The Princess Bride (Reiner, 1987)
- Solaris (Soderbergh, 2002)
- Amelie (Jeunet, 2001)
- Wet Hot American Summer (Wain, 2001)
- All That Jazz (Fosse, 1979)
- The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999)
- Dummy (Pritkin, 2002)
- Troll 2 (Fragasso, 1990)
- Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004)
- The Sandlot (Evans, 1993)
- Amores Perros (Innaritu, 2000)
- The Frighteners (Jackson, 1996)
- Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001)
- Primal Fear (Hoblit, 1996)
- Falling Down (Schumacher, 1993)
Author Comments:
These are my Top 100 favorite films. I do not claim them to be the "greatest" films of all time, just films I love for one reason or another. A great deal of factors went into selecting which films made the cut: overall quality, entertainment value, times watched, emotional impact, and personal attachment. The results are a bit schizophrenic jumping from Oscar Winners to Box Office Flops to Uknown Indies to Cult Classics. I'm just weird like that.
I realize there are only a total of 9 films on the list made before 1970. I mean no disrespect to classic films, nor am I totally ignorant to them. I just tend to prefer modern films.
Any list with Clerks. and Pulp Fiction in the top 10 has my approval.
The fact that the rest of the list is generally kick-ass is just a bonus. :)
I've never seen Magnolia but I would be interested in watching it. I heard it's one of Tom Cruise's best performances. What are your thoughts?
Magnolia is an ensemble film and the performances are uniformly awesome (my personal distaste for Julianne Moore aside). It's also 3 hours of very emotional material (I don't watch it too often because it leaves me drained!) So, if you are in the mood for a long, serious, dramatic film, Magnolia is simply one of the best, and I highly recommend it. And yes, I would have to say that it is probably Tom Cruise's most powerful performance. However, my favorite performance from Cruise as a lead is in The Color of Money.