CALLING IT A DAY AGAIN: I've told you my favorite movies of 2005, 1995, 1985, 1975, 1965, 1955, 1945, and 1935. And now...

...and now we're done. I've done top 10 lists for several other years of the '20s, but I wasn't able to come up with 10 sufficiently worthy pictures from 1925. I've seen some really good ones (The Freshman! Seven Chances! The Phantom of the Opera!) and no doubt there are many more that I haven't seen. Maybe in another 10 years I'll have watched enough to give you a proper list.

For the record, my favorite film of 1925 is The Battleship Potemkin and my favorite film of 1915 is Les Vampires—or at least those installments of Les Vampires that came out in 1915. (It was a serial, and it stretched into the next year.)

I'll now put this old blog on ice til the next time I have a reason to use it. Probably in December, when I start posting these annual movie lists again.

posted by Jesse 9:02 AM

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THE MIDDLE THIRTIES: Over the last few weeks, I've written about my favorite films of 2005, 1995, 1985, 1975, 1965, 1955, and 1945. But wait, there's more!

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1935, it gave its Best Picture award to Mutiny on the Bounty. That's an excellent film, and it's close to the top of my list. But there's another movie that I think is better:

1. The Bride of Frankenstein

Directed by James Whale

Written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston

A young scientist named Frankenstein feels torn between a conventional marriage and a same-sex liason with his mentor, an old queen named Pretorius. The latter persuades the protagonist to reproduce with him through unnatural means. Upon succeeding, Pretorius proclaims himself "the bride of Frankenstein." Careless viewers assume he's referring to the couple's creation.

2. Mutiny on the Bounty

Directed by Frank Lloyd

Written by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, and Carey Wilson, from a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Revolution on the high seas.

3. Top Hat

Directed by Mark Sandrich

Written by Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, Ben Holmes, and Ralph Spence

"You mean to sit there and tell me that that girl slapped your face in front of all those people for nothing?" "Well, what would you have done? Sold tickets?"

4. Ruggles of Red Gap

Directed by Leo McCarey

Written by Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thompson, and Humphrey Pearson, from a novel by Harry Leon Wilson

The first great comedy western.

5. The 39 Steps

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Written by Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, from a novel by John Buchan

Hitchcock wouldn't perfect the lightly comic conspiracy movie til he made The Lady Vanishes, but I think it's fair to say that this is where he mastered it.

6. A Night at the Opera

Directed by Sam Wood

Written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind

The taming of the Marx Brothers begins here, but in this case the film is so funny that you barely notice. In later pictures, alas, that will change.

7. Toni

Directed by Jean Renoir

Written by Renoir and Carl Einstein, from a story by Andre Levert

Neorealism was a film movement born in Italy in the 1940s, yet somehow Renoir made a neorealist movie in France in the 1930s. Go figure.

8. Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo

Directed by Sadao Yamanaka

Written by Shintarô Mimura

"Why is that man groaning?" "He lost a game."

9. A Colour Box

Directed by Len Lye

This is one of Lye's crazed abstract avant-garde animations. It is also, technically, an advertisement for the British General Post Office.

10. Captain Blood

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Written by Casey Robinson, from a novel by Rafael Sabatini

Almost as insurrectionary as Mutiny on the Bounty, almost as kinky as The Bride of Frankenstein.

I'm not going to include a full honorable mentions list for this year, but I will give a shout-out to Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream—a picture for people who like high camp in their high art.

Of the films of 1935 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in La Bandera, The Scoundrel, Pie in the Sky, and Night Life of the Gods.

posted by Jesse 4:44 PM

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WHILE THE WAR ENDED: We've covered my favorite movies of 2005, 1995, 1985, 1975, 1965, and 1955. Next!

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1945, it gave its Best Picture award to Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. That is in no sense a bad movie, but it manages on the one hand to feel heavy-handed while on the other hand bowdlerizing its source material. I think it's one of Wilder's weaker efforts.

1. I Know Where I'm Going!

Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

A romantic comedy with something pagan simmering beneath it.

2. Ivan the Terrible, Part One

Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Stalin had an infamously ambivalent attitude toward this film and its sequel: He endorsed the first installment, then suppressed the second when he realized the parallels to his career weren't so flattering after all. Both pictures are deliberately, grandly overstylized, like an opera or a superhero comic.

3. Scarlet Street

Directed by Fritz Lang

Written by Dudley Nichols, from a play by Andre Mouezy-Eon and a novel by Georges De La Fouchardiere

"Who do you think you are? My guardian angel?" "Not me, honey. I lost those wings a long time ago."

4. Open City

Directed by Roberto Rossellini

Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini

A ground-eye view of the resistance in World War II.

5. Isle of the Dead

Directed by Mark Robson

Written by Josef Mischel and Ardel Wray

As is often the case with Val Lewton's horror pictures, this illustrates the Thomas Theorem: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

6. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

Directed by Robert Bresson

Written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau

Apparently, if you combine Cocteau with Bresson you get a Buñuel melodrama.

7. The Spiral Staircase

Directed by Robert Siodmak

Written by Mel Dinelli, from a novel by Ethel Lina White

Siodmak kept pumping out these atmospheric noir thrillers in the '40s, and an awful lot of them hold up really well.

8. The Picture of Dorian Gray

Directed by Albert Lewin

Written by Lewin, from a novel by Oscar Wilde

Wilde inspired so many bad movies—delicate, middlebrow piles of reverence whose creators never forgot they were adapting a canonized Great Author. It's a special pleasure when someone actually does justice to one of his tales.

9. Children of Paradise

Directed by Marcel Carne

Written by Jacques Prevert

"Novelty is as old as the hills."

10. Detour

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Written by Martin Goldsmith, from his novel

I like the theory that this whole delirious tale is one man's dubious alibi for crimes he really did commit, and that the film's inconsistencies and glitches are actually just the holes in his story.

Honorable mentions:

11. Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger)

12. The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise)

13. My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis)

14. Draftee Daffy (Bob Clampett)

15. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz)

16. Le Vampire (Jean Painleve)

17. Swing Shift Cinderella (Tex Avery)

18. Wonder Man (H. Bruce Humberstone)

19. The Screwy Truant (Tex Avery)

20. The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss)

Plus a shout-out to the concerto sequence in Hangover Square.

Of the films of 1945 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Enchanted Cottage.

posted by Jesse 9:19 AM

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A ONE AND THREE FIVES: I've posted my favorite films of 2005, 1995, 1985, 1975, and 1965. And now...

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1955, it gave its Best Picture award to Marty, a movie that's pleasant but hardly great. I prefer these:

1. One Froggy Evening

Directed by Chuck Jones

Written by Michael Maltese

This feels like folklore, doesn't it? The legend of the singing frog?

2. The Trouble with Harry

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Written by John Michael Hayes, from a novel by Jack Trevor Story

The most appealing portrait of rural life that I've ever seen onscreen, which surely says more about me than it says about the picture.

3. Smiles of a Summer Night

Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

The phrase "life-affirming Bergman comedy" may sound about as plausible as "Pauly Shore's four-hour Shakespearean drama." But that—the Bergman comedy, not the Shore epic—is exactly what this is.

4. The Night of the Hunter

Directed by Charles Laughton

Written by James Agee, from a novel by Davis Grubb

"Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?"

5. Kiss Me Deadly

Directed by Robert Aldrich

Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by Mickey Spillane

Cold War noir.

6. Diabolique

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Written by Clouzot, Jerome Geronimi, Frederic Grendel, and Rene Masson, from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

The Hitchcockian thriller that inspired Columbo and, less happily, a terrible remake with Sharon Stone.

7. East of Eden

Directed by Elia Kazan

Written by Paul Osborn, from a novel by John Steinbeck

"I'm not my brother's keeper."

8. Pather Panchali

Directed by Satyajit Ray

Written by Ray and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, from a novel by Bandyopadhyay

I saw this one in a film class when I was 18. N.B.: I think I was the only one who liked it.

9. Night and Fog

Directed by Alain Resnais

Written by Jean Cayrol

The standard against which I measure all other Holocaust films.

10. The Man from Laramie

Directed by Anthony Mann

Written by Philip Yordan and Frank Burt, from a story by Thomas T. Flynn

Lear in the old west.

Honorable mentions:

11. Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)

12. Ordet (Carl Dreyer)

13. Rififi (Jules Dassin)

14. Mama Don't Allow (Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson)

15. Cellbound (Tex Avery)

16. The Far Country (Anthony Mann)

17. Hare-Brush (Friz Freleng)

18. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz (Luis Buñuel)

19. Gumbasia (Art Clokey)

20. Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick)

Of the films of 1955 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phenix City Story and The Tall Men.

posted by Jesse 8:45 PM

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HEY, HEY, LBJ, HOW MANY FLICKS DID YOU SEE TODAY?: So far I've reeled off my favorite films of 2005, 1995, 1985, and 1975. Onward to the '60s.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1965, it gave its Best Picture award to The Sound of Music. It's hip to denigrate that movie, but I'm willing to defend it. I'm not going to put it on my list, though:

1. Repulsion

Directed by Roman Polanski

Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, and David Stone

The most claustrophobic and horrific of Polanki's claustrophobic horror movies.

2. The Saragossa Manuscript

Directed by Wojciech Has

Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, from a novel by Jan Potocki

A story within a story within a story within a...

3. The Battle of Algiers

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

Written by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas

In the '60s, would-be Guevaras watched this to teach themselves revolution; four decades later, the Pentagon screened it for tips on fighting terror. Whatever else they found in it, both groups got to see one hell of a movie—a film so utterly unflinching in its amorality that it feels more like a dispassionate documentary than a propaganda picture.

4. The Loved One

Directed by Tony Richardson

Written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood, from a novel by Evelyn Waugh

The Duck Soup of pet cemetery movies.

5. King Rat

Directed by Bryan Forbes

Written by Forbes, from a novel by James Clavell

"If you don't want to eat it, you can sit and watch. It's a free prison!"

6. It Happened Here

Written and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo

An alternate-history tale in which Britain falls under Nazi rule. A story about life under occupation, and the ease with which people in such a situation can become collaborators.

7. A Game with Stones

Written and directed by Jan Švankmajer

The stones of the title arrange themselves into simple shapes, into more intricate patterns, and eventually into human beings who swallow each other. If that doesn't sound good enough to belong on one of these lists, well, it isn't easy to describe the plot of a Dali painting either.

8. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Directed by Martin Ritt

Written by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, from a novel by John Le Carre

In Le Carre's bleak story, the intelligence agencies of the Cold War aren't entirely separate—more like competing forces within one vast corrupting system.

9. Mickey One

Directed by Arthur Penn

Written by Alan Surgal

The most surreal mob movie I've seen, and a prototype for the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s.

10. Simon of the Desert

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro

A meditating monk faces off with the devil. This being Buñuel, there's no reason to assume the devil will lose.

Honorable mentions:

11. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)

12. Looking for Mushrooms (Bruce Conner)

13. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich)

14. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)

15. Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah)

16. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet)

17. Time Piece (Jim Henson)

18. The Hand (Jiří Trnka)

19. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard)

20. Mirage (Edward Dmytryk)

Of the films of 1965 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Red Beard, Le Bonheur, A Fugitive from the Past, and The Shop on Main Street.

posted by Jesse 11:19 PM

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THE YEAR I ENTERED KINDERGARTEN: In my last few posts I've ran through my favorite movies of 2005, 1995, and 1985. You can probably anticipate what comes next.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1975, it gave its Best Picture award to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That only made it to #3 on my list, but there's no shame in that—any of my top seven here are better than my #1 picks for '85 and '05.

1. Nashville

Directed by Robert Altman

Written by Joan Tewkesbury

Some of my friends dismiss Nashville as a smug left-coaster giving a raspberry to flyover country. To them I point out that the least sympathetic characters in the whole vast cast are the rocker from L.A. and the reporter from the U.K. Altman's scorn is nothing if not universal.

2. Welfare

Directed by Fredric Wiseman

The great epic of American bureaucracy.

3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Directed by Milos Forman

Written by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, from a novel by Ken Kesey

Beneath this scathing attack on the nanny state you'll find an invisible fissure in the counterculture. Imagine some young hipster watching All in the Family one night in 1975 and then heading out for a late screening of this movie, never dreaming that Rob Reiner would turn out to have more in common with Nurse Ratched than with McMurphy.

4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

Written by Gilliam, Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin

Years of inept quotation by teenage geeks with bad English accents can't smother the comic genius of this movie.

5. Love and Death

Written and directed by Woody Allen

"Boris, you're a coward!" "Yes, but I'm a militant coward."

6. Dog Day Afternoon

Directed by Sidney Lumet

Written by Frank Pierson

Best bank-robbery movie ever.

7. Night Moves

Directed by Arthur Penn

Written by Alan Sharp

"Do you ask these questions because you want to know the answer or is it just something you think a detective should do?"

8. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Directed by Peter Weir

Written by Cliff Green, from a novel by Joan Lindsay

To understand the mass media's fixation on disappearing white girls, start here.

9. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

Directed by Thom Andersen

The prehistory of the movies.

10. Jaws

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, from Benchley's novel

There's a handful of Spielberg movies that I like, but if all his pictures were to disappear tomorrow this is the only one I'd miss.

Honorable mentions:

11. Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

12. Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer)

13. Organism (Hilary Harris)

14. The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)

15. Shivers (David Cronenberg)

16. Posse (Kirk Douglas)

17. Monsieur Pointu (André Leduc, Bernard Longpré)

18. Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)

19. The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman)

20. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)

How good a year for movies was 1975? That top 10 list features the best Wiseman film I've seen, the best Forman film I've seen, the best Gilliam (as director, at least), the best Lumet, the best Penn, the best Weir, the best Spielberg. And while I don't think that's Woody Allen's best movie, I do think it's his funniest.

(Regular readers may be feeling a bit of déjà vu, because Monty Python and the Holy Grail appeared in my 1974 list too. Sorry: I was misinformed about when it had its premiere. If you want to beef the '74 list back up to 20 movies, now that Holy Grail has been taken away from it, you can add Ali: Fear Eat the Soul to the honorable mentions.)

Of the films of 1975 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Dersu Uzala.

posted by Jesse 10:41 AM

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BOXING DAY MOVIEPALOOZA: So far, I've listed my favorite movies of 2005 and 1995. Now it's time to enter the Reagan era.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1985, it gave its Best Picture award to Out of Africa, which is basically a coffee-table book masquerading as a story. These are all far better:

1. Ran

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide

The story of King Lear predates the Bard, so it shouldn't seem that odd that the best film the play inspired doesn't include a single line of Shakespeare.

2. Brazil

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown

Monty Python's 1984.

3. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol

When I watched this in my teens, I thought it was pretty funny. Thirty years later I saw it again, and I realized it was a goddamn masterpiece.

4. Mix Up ou Meli-melo

Directed by Françoise Romand

A gloriously bizarre documentary—bizarre in content, bizarre in form—about what happened when two English families brought the wrong babies home from the hospital.

5. Vagabond

Written and directed by Agnès Varda

Not a simple celebration of a free spirit, and not a disdainful condemnation of a marginal life either.

6. After Hours

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Joseph Minion

Other critics can weigh this picture's place in Scorsese's filmography. I'll just point out that it's the best movie Cheech and Chong were ever involved with.

7. Louie Bluie

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

This is a charming documentary about the bluesman, artist, and porn aficionado Howard Armstrong. It is also utterly fake: The comfortable living room that it seems to have been filmed in is actually a movie set, some of the people reminiscing with Armstrong barely know him, and the director had to persuade his subjects to play the early string-band songs he loved rather than the more complex music they preferred. I go back and forth on whether all that artifice is a flaw or just another hidden dimension to the story.

8. Static

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Romanek and Keith Gordon

Before he was shooting videos for Bowie, Beck, and Johnny Cash, Romanek made this terrific indie flick about a man who believes he's built a machine that lets you peek into heaven.

9. Mishima

Directed by Paul Schrader

Written by Paul and Leonard Schrader

The literary lion as leader of a fascist death cult.

10. Return to Oz

Directed by Walter Murch

Written by Murch and Gill Dennis

This didn't find an audience at first, probably because most people's expectation when hearing the phrase "sequel to The Wizard of Oz" is not "freaky, scary movie that strongly implies that Dorothy is insane." Fortunately, the picture eventually attracted the underground following it deserves.

Honorable mentions:

11. Fool for Love (Robert Altman)

12. Come and See (Elem Klimov)

13. Prizzi's Honor (John Huston)

14. Fluke (Emily Breer)

15. Chain Letters (Mark Rappaport)

16. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen)

17. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)

18. DreamChild (Gavin Millar)

19. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)

20. Grim (Takashi Ito)

Of the films of 1985 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Taipei Story and Crimewave.

posted by Jesse 9:14 AM

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