TOP 25 FAVORITE FILMS

I've carried the ability to re-enact this whole movie from memory since not long after disabusing myself of Santa. And it still holds up, as a classic and an epic.

The film is high brow in terms of production values, the story and the acting, but it's essentially a movie about a guy's amazing penis, and the film offers hilariously crude sex humor and pitch-perfect individual degrees of stupidity in the characters, and in the depiction of terrible quality in the porn films within the film.

Bulworth isn't just a jaded candidate making caustic jabs like an anarchist Jackie Mason. There's enormous significance in much of the dialogue, including Beatty spittin' rhymes, epitomizing political problems in the US that since their time have grown into much different, much uglier problems. Bulworth works like a scream of agitated comedic mania.

I have not laughed as loud and as extensively in a long long time as I have at John Malkovich, a poised and sophisticated veteran CIA analyst brimming with frustration and stress, thus a drinking problem, whose therapeutic endeavor to write a memoir is sabotaged by a bunch of complete idiots. His enraged reactions and bloodshot peeks through the cracks of his elegance are some of the funniest comic acting in the world.

Intoxicating in its technique, wearing its heart on its sleeve, Clockers is the best and most overlooked "hood film" of the '90s.

Straight out of the gate, first-time director George Clooney handles some of the most sophisticated and treacherous hair-pin shifts in tone and captures a career-making performance by the ever-lovable Rockwell.

The film is set in the urban '40s avenue of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity, giving calmly vivid life to every office, mansion and apartment. The wallpaper is something one just knows is nonexistent nowadays. The dishes, furnishings and nightstands are beautiful relics of coziness. The same goes for the clothing, just the plain suits that the men wear and the time when women were just beginning to wear pants. Dan Aykroyd's pipe-smoking and even his classical up-scale manor of speaking are reminiscent of every boss behind the desk in every old movie. Restaurants are full of smoke and volunteers-from-the-audience nightclub magic acts by men who dressed like Arabs or gypsies. It's a lovely work of production design.

Possibly the greatest remake of all time, multi-layered and entirely its own beast, The Departed is a vigorous and masculine film about two men trying to live social lives that are the fundamental antitheses of themselves. Their efforts loom to undo them. The unfolding of their stories concerns an ethical maze, in which good and evil don each other's camouflage. It's a densely cached, morbidly hilarious and powerfully dramatic magnum opus of its genre.

This is Tarantino's most complete movie yet. It is also his most epic, daring and incendiary. His storytelling gifts equal the ambition of the vision, which in scenes of unprecedented brutality refresh our senses to the unbelievable atrocity of slavery at the very same time it reminds us just how good Tarantino is at entertaining us. He manages to get the best and most colorful out of every actor. Performances, music score and any given exchange of dialogue are as awesome as they are unexpected, and the film features many of the filmmaker's most hilarious, most disturbing and most emotionally exciting moments.

What transfixes me throughout every scene of this sinewy, offbeat film is the extraordinarily pragmatic realism of the hurtles Sonny and Sal confront inside the bank. Not even twenty minutes into the film, we find we're already seeing things absolutely no other crime film has ever included that are astonishing in their dramatic persuasiveness. The climactic final ten minutes are ruthless in their steadily unraveling, almost unbearably intense tragedy. It's not only one of the most effective uses of sound to create drama I've ever seen, but everything concludes exactly as it would in reality.

Making me weep in aching sadness since the 3rd grade.

The Godfather soaks us up so dry it never has to hustle through. There is something in the deliberate journey of time as Don Corleone entrusts his reins of power that would have made an hour-and-forty-minute-long thriller unbecoming.

What Scorsese does that makes GoodFellas so universally adored is infect us with his exhilaration with the material. It has the breakneck propulsion of a storyteller who can't wait to see your reaction. Scorsese's camera embraces these guys, listens to their shoes clicking, beholds the tailoring of their clothes. And when they're plotting the fabled Lufthansa job, he has them whispering together in a tight three-shot that has their heads bent low and close with the rush of their own awesomeness. What a rush it is for them to steal.

Made decades before my time, I could've never been part of the movie's zeitgeist, but the cinematic technique and the wry, cynical tone have always acutely spoken to me.

Heist is the brand of caper film that came before special effects supplanted sharpness, structure and dialogue. This movie is comprised of natural ingredients, not manufactured goods. Some critics disliked the particulars I loved most, professing that some climactic gunplay could've profited from more stylized treatment, which would've been amazingly unwise.

One of the most unremittingly nonstop action films ever made, with an expert succession of climactic sequences. It's a roller-coaster ride---at one point very literally---a visual extravaganza, a technical coup and masses of exuberant pleasure. Spielberg and Lucas didn't equate building on Raiders by simply making everything bigger and louder. The energy of storytelling imagination is put forth double-time.

I've even met horror fanatics that detest Irreversible on grounds of not being able to withstand the brutality of only two scenes. Or shots, frankly. The camera watches unflinchingly as a person is degraded and terrorized for numerous lengthy, remorseless minutes in a ceaseless stationary shot that never cuts away, and as a guy has his face literally pulverized with a fire extinguisher, in a hand-held shot that feels as if to partake in the pounding. That the movie has a profound meaning is to its tribute but makes it no more endurable. But it's an unforgettable experience.

William Friedkin has found a soulmate in writer Tracey Letts, and because of the typically shocking director's piercing and drum-tight handling of Letts' intriguingly hideous characters, I have a newfound respect for Matthew McConaughey. I don't know one fan of his Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez pairings who I would imagine is even aware that most of his scenes are even legal to release in theaters. His along with other surprising star turns, deliberately paced scenes of tension and sadistic cat-and-mouse play, and a mix of moral indifference and physical grossness that renders even the murkiest noir pallid leave you sitting dumbfounded at a rare and original brand of thrill ride.

JUST. PERFECT.

To watch this movie is to get sucked into a country's consciousness trapped in the command of fear, spellbound by the entertainment of it all at once. We view Mickey and Mallory with the same separated allure as we do the local news freak shows, reviling their wickedness but bathing them in unbroken interest, even unspoken awe. And they'd see us the same way.

Hitchcock consciously shot Psycho not with his high-priced feature regulars but with his TV crew. Lengthy segments hold no dialogue. In its gut sensation, Psycho fits better alongside shoestring noir like Detour than with Hitchcock's own chic Technicolor thrillers like Rear Window or Vertigo. In this way and in its starring use of Janet Leigh, Psycho is as much a companion piece with Touch of Evil as it is Hitchcock's arguably most socially pivotal film.

I was in the seventh grade when I impulsively borrowed a VHS tape from an older classmate. I knew nothing about it. It simply looked interesting. I went home and watched it. I had no idea how to react. I felt numb. I felt truly horrified and became obsessed by the feelings this movie gave me. I owe a great deal of credit to this film for opening a door for me to pursue more, better, powerful films.

This indelibly quotable audience fave is a compulsively watchable and electrifying exercise and a halcyon cult-smash stand-out by Ritchie. For those who grieve for the old Ealing comedies or the farces of McCarey and Wilder, and don't disapprove of a spot of gunplay, blood spatter and dismemberment, or an immensity of profanity generously strewn throughout, this is a refreshing and stirring experience. May the post-modern gangster standard keep on coming, as long as they keep as imaginative, as hilarious and as absorbing as the hyperlink tapestry of Snatch.

This political crime drama, the cream of Soderbergh's diverse crop, is compelling expressly as it doesn't moralize with a unitary ideology. It is so subdued that at one moment, Michael Douglas's final speech, one wants one more declaration, reaching the bottom line, but, we having been shown the vast uncertainty of the drug wars, the movie lets us accommodate that thought for ourselves.

This one has it all.