Favorite Movies

This started off as a top-20 list but I kept wanting to add "just-one-more" so here's a list of some of my all-time favorite movies. The links, by the way, will take you to a corresponding link on one of my favorite movie-information sites, the Internet Movie Database.

Across the Universe - I LOVE this movie! Nominally a musical set against a backdrop of the 60's in general and the Viet Nam war in particular, this manages to be alternately uplifting, smile-inducing and thought-provoking. The all-Beatles score is brilliantly interpreted by the on-screen singers, the sets and the choreography are visually stunning and the plot-line is largely true to history...even in the details. I could write a whole review here but I'll just say that if you haven't seen this film, go see it now!
Adaptation - Nicholas Cage turns in one of his most brilliant performances in years playing Charlie Kaufman (the actual screenplay writer) and his fictional twin brother. There are so many brilliant levels of self-referentiality in this movie that I can't even begin to talk about how rich it is. Much as I enjoyed Chicago, this film deserved best picture of 2002 far more. I'm becoming a big Charlie Kaufman fan and you'll see other screenplays of his on this list.
Annie Hall - One of the all-time classic Woody Allen movies, I never tire of this. Woody Allen is one of my favorite writer/directors and you'll see a number of his other films on the list.
Artificial Intelligence: AI - A lot of people were critical of Stephen Spielberg's realization of this abandoned Stanely Kubrick story about a robot-boy who is programmed with something closely resembling emotions. For my money, it exhibits the best of both those great directors. A brilliantly conceived world where characters tug at your heartstrings, I found this visually stunning, brilliantly acted and brimming with quirky humor as well as being quite touching.
Bandits - A brilliantly funny contemporary parody of the old Bob Hope "on-the-road" movies, I'm also quite fond of the polyamorous overtones in this story.
A Beautiful Mind - As a graduate student at Princeton in the early 1980's, I remember being a bit spooked by the ghostly figure of John Nash prowling the basement of the Princeton University Computer Center late at night ("prowling" is a perhaps not an appropriate choice of words...he was usually ensconced in one of the small, windowless "break-out" rooms with an old-fashioned paper-tape calculator and reams of green-bar output. It wasn't until I saw this profoundly moving love story that I bothered to find anything out about the man. For my money, Russell Crowe deserved an Academy Award for this film way more than for the much trashier and over-rated Gladiator.
Being John Malkovitch - More inspired strangeness from the pen of Charlie Kaufman, this is the story of a frustrated puppeteer-turned -office-worker who discovers a door in his office which allows you to enter the brain of John Malkovitch for 15 minutes before ejecting you by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. If that thought makes you smile, go see this film! (FYI: be prepared for the only non-sexy role Cameron Diaz has ever played).
Being There - For my money, this is Peter Sellers most brilliant role. When the family-less gardener on a wealthy estate is discovered after the death of the owner, a series of accidents and mistakes soon has people believing he's a brilliant (if eccentric) thinker who becomes adviser to world leaders before disappearing mysteriously into...who-knows-where?
Bend It Like Beckham - I first saw this in London in early 2002 and I was thrilled to see it make it into distribution in the United States. This is the often hysterical, sometimes touching story of a young girl growing up in a traditional Indian family in London. While the family prepares for Jess's older sister's wedding, all Jess wants to do is play soccer...just like her idol David Beckham. It would be short-changing this film to call it My Big Fat Indian Wedding but it would not be an entirely inappropriate comparison.
Bicentennial Man - Robin Williams plays an android who has been programmed to experience human emotion. As he watches generation after generation of the humans he loves succumb to old age and die, he begins to question his "life" more and more. I found this story very touching with not a few deep insights into the nature of love and immortality.
Chicken Run - Actually, I think just about anything that Nick Parks and Aardman Studios do is absolutely brilliant (I even like the TV commercials they've done) but the epic scope of doing a remake of The Great Escape with all the main characters replaced with plasticene chickens in stop-motion animation is absolutely inspired in it's lunacy. Often frighteningly true to the original while being a wonderful story in it's own right.
The Cider House Rules - I've mentioned elsewhere on this site that John Irving is my favorite author. The Cider House Rules is not my favorite Irving novel (although it's up there) but this movie is the most sensitive of the many film-adaptations which have been made of his books...probably due in equal parts to Irving himself having written the screenplay and to the brilliant direction of Lasse Halstrom. Irving's book My Life in the Movies speaks at great length to the efforts that went into bringing this movie to the screen and, all I can say is that it was well worth the effort.
Contact - I enjoyed this as a story but I especially appreciated that, perhaps more than any other sci-fi movie I've ever seen, this one gets most of the science right (or at least plausible). Given Carl Sagan's close involvement with this adaptation of his novel (and the continued involvement of his wife when he died during the filming), that's not terribly surprising. What is surprising is that a big-name director (Robert Zemeckis), appears to have actually taken a lot of the advice of his scientific advisors!
Cool Runnings - Unfortunately billed as the comic (true) tale of the Jamaican bobsled team in the 198? Olympics, I found this a profoundly moving testament to the willingness to follow your dream when the entire world is telling you it's absurd.
Cousins - An American remake of the French film Cousin, Cousine, this outing (staring Ted Danson and Isabella Rosellini) retains much of the comic farce of the original but manages to be a really touching love story at the same time
The Day the Earth Stood Still - What's not to like about a movie that can make the phrase "Klatuu barata niktu" famous? I also love the fact that, unlike just about every other alien movie of the 1950's, this time the aliens come to earth to save us (from ourselves).
Dead Again - Kenneth Branaugh is a bit over-the-top as an actor in this role but Emma Thompson and Derek Jacobi turn in their typically flawless performances. What Branaugh does bring to the party as director is a sense of forboding and suspense of which even Hitchcock would have been proud. I've seen this movie a number of times and know very well what's going to happen in advance and I still get a shiver up my spine at almost every single surprising revelation.
Fargo - Although I am not at all a fan of grisly murder movies, the Cohen brothers (and their usual cast of actors) are so brilliant with their blending of story-telling, character development and humor that I consistently come back to this movie remembering that it's great and then discovering that it's even better than I had remembered.
Finding Neverland - An approximately true story about the creation of Peter Pan, this movie is not without it's faults but there is a fairly long recreation of a private performance of Peter Pan near the end of the movie which is deeply touching (and seemed to have most of the audience in tears when I saw it in the theater).
Forbidden Planet - The Tempest done in outer space! This, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Day The Earth Stood Still comprise my nomination for the three genuinely high-quality sci-fi movies from the 1950's.
Frequency - There's a bit of a science-fiction theme in this movie about a son repairing his deceased father's short-wave radio when a rift in time opens up allowing him to communicate with his fireman-father in the past, a short-time before the father was killed in a warehouse fire. Much of the movie is predictable and even veers a bit towards sappy now and then and yet everything just plain works about it and I was on the edge of my seat through pretty much the whole thing.
The Graduate - Not Dustin Hoffman's first screen appearance (if I'm not mistaken, he's got a bit-part at a party in Audrey Hepburn's apartment in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's) but it's his first starring role and starring it is. There aren't a lot of actors who can burst so stunningly on the screen but Hoffman uses this movie to brilliantly capture not just the coming-of-age of Benjamin Braddock but a kind of coming of age of a generation.
The Incredible Shrinking Man - A pretty typical 1950's B-grade plot is elevated by a surprisingly sensitive treatment and, given the time in which it was made, this has brilliantly convincing special effects.
It's A Wonderful Life - Yes, it's corny and dated and kind of a cliché of the holiday season but after all these years, I still get inspired by Jimmy Stewart's "isn't it wonderful to be alive" run through the town at the end of the movie.
Kissing Jessica Stein - I had already seen this movie a couple of times when I went to buy it on DVD. I still remember the young woman at the check-out counter saying something like "Have you seen this? It's so much better than all those other 'I-think-I'll-try-being-a-lesbian' movies out there." Well, I can't say I was aware of that as a particularly crowded genre but this is a charming, funny, touching movie and quite Woody Allen-ish (if Woody were a 30-something bi-curious woman). The DVD is well worth owning...both the making-of documentary and the voice-over narrative are alternately funny and informative (occasionally even inspiring when you see the beg-borrow-and-steal techniques that went into getting this story on screen) and the several deleted-scenes add another level of understanding to the story.
K-Pax - Kevin Spacey is one of my favorite actors and he does not disappoint in this movie. I love stories which hint that things might be one way and they might be another way but which assume that the audience is smart enough to play with the thought without being told what to think. Spacey's character in this movie might be an escapee from Bellevue and he might be from another galaxy. Whichever he is, we haven't heard such simple wisdom from a character since Chauncey Gardener in Being There.
Legally Blonde - A silly bit of implausible fluff which is, nevertheless, executed so wonderfully by Reese Witherspoon that I couldn't help but enjoy this.
The Legend of Bagger Vance - Will Smith is brilliant as a mysterious caddy egging Matt Damon on to play an amazing game. Golf was never this exciting.
Life Is Beautiful - When this movie first came out, I resisted seeing it for a while. Movies about being joyous while interred in a concentration camp sound a bit too far-fetched for me but Roberto Benigni's alternately hilarious and touching performance and direction produce the unimaginable: a feel-good movie about death in a concentration camp.
Love Actually - Yes, I'm a sucker for pretty much all of Hugh Grant's screwball romantic comedies but there's no denying that pretty much everything he's been in has been entertaining, heart-warming and deserving of a spot at the top of anybody's "best-date" movies. One of the special things for me about Love Actually is the almost ridiculous number of kind-of-but-not-entirely-inter-related sub-plots...not all of which get resolved by the end. Some might view that aspect of the film as a bit messy but it just adds an element of taking a quick peek at how love shows up in lots of different kinds of relationships. The opening montage of people greeting their loved ones at the arrival gates of Heathrow Airport could stand as a short-film on it's own.
The Magic Flute - Ingmar Bergman's delightful film of a concert performance of my favorite Mozart opera is as much about the delight of the audience as the joy of the show.
The Majestic - Grossly overlooked, pretty much a flop at the box office and perhaps Jim Carrey's finest performance
Man on the Moon - Another stunning performance from Jim Carrey in this amazing biography of Andy Kaufman. I never much cared for Kaufman but after seeing this film, I became fascinated with him.
The Mask - Funny that so many Jim Carrey features sort together on this alphabetized list. This early outing of his was the one that first had me notice him. It's not a profound statement but it's a wonderfully inspired lunatic take on "Be careful what you ask for…" For what it's worth, this is also Cameron Diaz's first film role.
Memento - This story of a man who has lost his ability to form short-term memories utilizes a series of flashbacks which go further and further into the past but always converge again at the here-and-now. However, as we pick up more and more detail, the "here-and-now" looks different every time we arrive here.
A Mighty Wind - What This is Spinal Tap did for (to?) progressive rock, A Mighty Wind does for folk music. One of the things that I most love about the team of Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, et al. is that they are smart enough (and good enough musicians) to know how to parody music lovingly. The songs in this movie are such loving parodies of the music that if you like 60's folk music, you'll actually enjoy these songs at the same time they are subtly pointing to the foibles of the originals. This is not vindictive parody, it is parody which has us laugh at ourselves. If there's a film by this team that's not on this list, it's probably just because I haven't seen it yet.
Monsoon Wedding - OK, I've never been to India so I don't know how authentic this is but the Indian director says that she wanted to make a relatively no-frills movie that captured the sense of growing up in New Delhi. If that makes this sound like a dry documentary, you couldn't be more off the mark. This is a warm, loving film which swings very successfully from laugh-yourself-silly to powerfully dealing with family tragedy. All the time, it is set against the stunning visual backdrops of India and the brilliant colors of an Indian wedding. The DVD of this movie features one of the more informative director's commentaries I've come across.
Mostly Martha - Aside from being a fairly contrived plot, it manages to avoid cliches and be a really warm story. Much of this takes place in a restaurant kitchen and I don't think food has ever looked more delicious on screen! Don't watch this when you're hungry!
Much Ado About Nothing - I like most of Kenneth Branaugh's work but the sheer beauty and joy that he captures in this filmed version of the Shakespeare play is truly stunning.
The Muse - Albert Brooks always manages to be funny by showing us the truth at a number of different levels. This story of a frustrated screenwriter who seems to have lost his ability to write is wonderful in it's analysis of what we think we need to do to get in touch with our personal Muse(s). A terrific device in this movie is the repeated use of cameo appearances by great writers, directors and other celebrities (all playing themselves...even when not identified by name) who show up in increasingly wacky scenarios.
My First Mister - More brilliance from Albert Brooks, this time as a rather bitter, very conservative middle-aged man who discovers life through the eyes of an equally disillusioned teenage girl. This could have fallen into so many clichés but it manages to side-step them all.
Notting Hill - Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in what may very well be the all-time perfect date-movie.
Psycho - Back in the days when directors scared you by not showing you things, Alfred Hitchcock made the definitive slasher-movie before that was a genre. Later directors thought it was scarier to show you all the slashing but Hitch knew better!
Radio Days - I don't know why this doesn't get mentioned more in surveys of Woody Allen movies. A sort of Upstairs, Downstairs based in 1940's Brooklyn, this is tender, funny, and loving on a dozen different levels. I've always liked this film and I like it more each time I see it.
Rear Window - The utlimate voyeur movie. Many have attempted to imitate this story line but, as usual, nobody's ever bested Hitchcock at it.
The Red Violin - How a movie about the 500-year history of a single violin, with dialog alternately in English, French, Italian, German and Mandarin ever got into mass circulation is beyond me but I'm really glad it did.
Shall We Dance - I don't speak a word of Japanese and I have relatively little interest in ballroom dancing but this story of an unfulfilled Japanese business man whose life is transformed through dance lessons is so captivating that, by the end, I forgot I was reading sub-titles and actually thought I was understanding Japanese. The 2004 remake with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez was much better than most Americanization-of-foreign-films and worth sitting through but the original is far more engaging.
The Shipping News - Another stunningly subtle performance from Kevin Spacey about a total loser of a man who discovers life when a series of misfortunes guide him back to his generational home in Nova Scotia.
Shrek - There have been some brilliant computer-animated films over the last several years (starting with Toy Story) but I don't think any of them quite so perfectly blends technical expertise with a balance of what-works-for-kids/what-works-for-adults as this story of a grumpy ogre who just wants some peace-and-quiet.
Singin' in the Rain - Although I've always thought that the final movie-in-a-movie segment of this film bogs things done, most of this musical is chock-full of wonderful dancing, delightful music and insanely good humor. Gene Kelley's performance of the title song has to be one of the top-10 or so classic moments in cinematic history.
Sixth Sense - I actually wasn't the least surprised by the "big surprise" ending but that didn't take anything at all away from this movie which still sends shivers up my spine just thinking about it. One of the scariest things about this movie may be that "child"-star Haley Joel Osment was able to deliver such a phenomenally sensitive and mature performance.
Something's Gotta Give - Two of our best actors (Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton) are wonderful in this wildly funny and wonderfully touching movie about an older couple learning how to grow young again through love.
Star Wars - I almost didn't list this here and no, I don't go to the conventions but the original film redefined the state of the art for special effects with an attention to detail that still impresses me nearly 30 years later.
State and Main - David Mamet has produced some really remarkable films but here's one that combines brilliantly witty dialog, great performances from some terrific actors and some out-and-out belly-laughs. I also appreciate the kind of subtlety which allows for a visual gag in the last scene of the movie which, even though it's been hinted at since very close to the beginning of the film, is not hammered home when it shows up at the end...you're just supposed to be smart enough to get it!
There's Something About Mary - Adolescent toilet humor elevated to an art form. There is SO much in this movie that I "shouldn't" laugh at but I'm always laughing too hard to remember that.
This is Spinal Tap - I don't think I've ever seen a movie by Rob Reiner that didn't strike me as absolutely wonderful but when he teams up with lunatics like Christoper Guest and Harry Shearer, this spoof of both self-aggrandizing rock-stars and bloated rock documentaries is bitingly funny.
To Kill A Mockingbird - Somehow or another, I managed to never see this movie until the spring of 2003 and I almost didn't watch it then (it was showing on a plane flight back from London). I was quickly and totally caught up in this alternately funny and moving depiction of life in a small Southern town in the 1930's where bigotry was a way of life. Although I'd read the book many years ago, I'd forgotten the many unusual (and often unpredictable) turns the lengthy courtroom scene involves. Totally riveting.
Tootsie - I have some acquaintances much older than I who say that Some Like It Hot is the best drag-movie ever made and I certainly think that's a terrific film but if I had to pick one great movie in this genre, it would have to be Tootsie. My favorite line is Dustin Hoffman saying to Jessica Lange near the end "I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with any other woman as a man."
Topsy- Turvy - I've rallied elsewhere on this site about movies which have no idea about what it really looks like to be a classical composer. Here's one that actually gets it right. I've never been much of a Gilbert and Sullivan fan but that doesn't matter. A stunning attention to period detail in general adds so much that even if you hated the story, you could enjoy being immersed in the shear reality of this world for two-and-a-half hours.
Under the Tuscan Sun - Diane Lane turns in a stunning performance as a depressed, recent divorcee who impulsively buys a dilapidated villa in Tuscany and transforms the ensuing upsets into the joyous life of which she's always dreamed.
Vanilla Sky - I found this to be an almost bizarrely rich story. At times disturbing, sometimes confusing and ultimately transformational, the convoluted timeline and deliberately ambiguous "Am I dreaming or am I awake" (dis)orientations make this a fascinating story to sit through.
Waiting for Guffman - More inspired lunacy from Christopher Guest in conjunction with much of the SCTV cast, this diabolically satircal look at regional theater is a joy to behold.
When Harry Met Sally - My second-place for best-date movie (after Notting Hill) goes to this story about the exceedingly likeable coupling of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Best line in the movie: "I'll have what she's having." (and if you don't know the scene from which that line comes, go see the movie!)