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Watched on Saturday June 14, 2025.

Watched on Saturday June 14, 2025.

Watched on Friday June 13, 2025.

Watched on Friday June 13, 2025.

Watched on Thursday June 12, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday June 11, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday June 11, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday June 10, 2025.

"Since when does my father have a grave?"

As an act of recovered memory, this is an astonishing achievement that exists in a continuum with some of the other great modernist works of formalized trauma: Straub-Huiillet's stark use of nature as silent testament of those who have died on it; Heiny Srour's pointed illustrations of how women were slowly erased from the visible struggle of Arabs by their own men; the lucid dreaming PTSD of Pedro Costa's Fontainhas films; even, in the central location of a bombed-out, crumbling home that embodies the political and familial collapse of its occupants, the literature of William Faulkner.

Not only does Malas conjure the nightmare apparitions of French and British occupiers and the specter of Israel's ruin of Quneitra, but he also draws focus on the ways in which failed resistances breed an impotent rage too often turned on one's own family and community. Some of the film's tensest and most agonizing moments are those in which men have been humiliated to such an extent that they trash their own homes, shut away their own wives, beat their own children, which of course only adds yet another trauma ed down to the next generations in seeming perpetuity.

As much a distillation of the entire silent era as Sunrise, and maybe even more so, cramming into 75 perfectly elemental minutes German expressionism, French impressionism, even aspects of the earliest forms of documentary realism (the level of detail of coal dust coating the shimmering bodies of ship engine men is astonishing). The intertitles attain the high poetry of low pulp well before the golden age of noir, and each gesture or quick, abashed look between longing lowlifes says more than a line of text ever could. By the time a POV shot fogs and glistens in a mimicry of tears flooding a character's eyes you know you're seeing a high achievement in an artform that was already under rapid obsoleting in favor of a craze that would spend years crawling its way back to the level of care and skill that von Sternberg almost makes look intuitive and simple here.

Typically, Godard's most emotional détentes with his contentious relationship to cinema's and his own past are compressed into short format, but this feature-length allegory for both industry's crushing of cinematic vision and the possibility of that vision's rebirth thanks to the New Wave is among his tenderest gestures. Yet another plausible "return to zero" candidate in Godard's Giambattista Vico-esque spirals of personal history (and even the sly echoes of Alain Delon put in variations on his time as Tom Ripley in the two drowning scenes), Nouvelle Vague recapitulates the beauty and puckishness of his '80s work into a unified vision in time to move into the full essayastic form of his late period. The sonic maelstrom of King Lear is smoothed here into a still-complex but more melodious patchwork of ECM needle drops, countryside ambient sound, and literary quotations so immersive it's no wonder it became an ECM album unto itself, and the increasing stateliness of his visual form crests into some of his simplest, most evocative images. Sure, it's still abstruse, but this may well be Godard at his most contented, shortly before the post-Communist ruptures of the '90s reactivated his larger sense of cultural and political loss.

Paul Schrader has a story about one day not long after Taxi Driver hit theaters when a man showed up at his office demanding an audience with him, at which point he agitatedly accused the filmmaker of having somehow monitored him to get the material for Travis Bickle. As Schrader sat there, he became increasingly aware of the potential danger this man presented and had to calmly talk him down by explaining that the alienation and anger this man felt he alone experienced was a common enough condition for Schrader to have conceived of Bickle.

Close-Up might be said to be the benign version of this story, in which a man so identified with the work of a filmmaker that he found himself posing as said director not for personal gain but because he already felt a certain looseness separating his own sense of self from what was depicted on a screen. The most enduringly fascinating aspect of this film is how its ethical minefield of creative decisions and direct intrusion into legal proceedings could have produced one of cinema's all-time affirmations of humanity and art. Prefiguring his even more radical experiments in presenting the very idea of documentary as an endless droste effect of manipulations of reality for the sake of cinematization, Kiarostami casts all the real players of this drama as themselves and mounts a number of re-enactments and openly guided courtroom scenes to make Sabzian’s dream come true even as this calls into question his possible exploitation.

But Kiarostami's relentless interest in the people involved and how both the conman and the conned are united in a love of movies that can lead to an extraordinary act of forgiveness and leniency in a repressive system keeps Close-Up from sinking under the weight of its distortions. Indeed, the poetic echoes layered throughout (the taxi driver picking the flowers at the start prefiguring the extraordinary finale, that kicked can tracked at the expense of following a humiliating arrest until we see it later anyways as an anticlimax rather than a legal thriller) keep the focus on the film as its own object of careful construction. Yes, it's easy to be deceived in the moment at taking some bits at documentary face value, but Kiarostami never really lies about what he's up to. And through it all, he achieves something I think much closer in spirit to the "ecstatic truth" than almost anything Herzog has captured in his own elusive quest for it.

Watched on Sunday June 8, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 8, 2025.

The more Anderson's recent work is received as a kind of self-parody the more baffled I am by whatever movie others seem to have seen. Not as experimental as The French Dispatch nor as nakedly self-analytical as Asteroid City, this nonetheless fits within the decidedly more political angle his films have taken since The Grand Budapest Hotel. In some respects this could be seen as an update on The Darjeeling Limited's attempt to undermine its own orientalism, in this case foregrounding a character who profiteers off of postcolonial exploitation to such an extent that he has even made enemies of the nations who collaborate on bleeding the global south of resources and labor.

Korda's charismatic, Howard Hughes-esque self-delusion keeps things moving in the face of constant setbacks, but the subtle manner in which Anderson flips the script on his interest in strained parent-child relationships to drag the protagonist toward some kind of morality is a wonderful wrinkle in his usual interests. And lest the usual hand-waving away of "dollhouse aesthetics" be invoked, Bruno Delbonnel brings a new, dreamy quality to Anderson's images as intriguing as Yeoman shaking up his own standards with Wes in the Looney Tunes-isms of Asteroid City>

Watched on Saturday June 7, 2025.

Watched on Friday June 6, 2025.

Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday June 4, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday June 3, 2025.

Watched on Monday June 2, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

At this point I'm not even confident in calling anything the "final" Godard since I think this is the third thing to bear that title, but even more than Phony Wars this is a fitting farewell for the artist who did more than any other to make cinema capture the speed and convolutions of thought, to constantly reduce the distance between an idea and its realization in film form. Here, that quality underscores the agonizing last moments of the man's life: even by his abstruse standards, the thought processes here are discombobulated and scattered, with wordplay connections and poetic anti-aphorisms opening doors he can't quite walk through. Nonetheless, this is a gorgeous benediction, worthy of placement alongside Derek Jarman's Blue and the final, fingernail-etched works of Stan Brakhage as the last will and testament of an artistic drive so strong it powered through physical and mental collapse, only ceasing when a doctor finally noted a time of death.

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 29, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 28, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

The postwar Austrian yang to Stefan Zweig's late imperial yin, Vienna the erstwhile capital of a dubiously assembled and perpetually turbulent empire now ironically inverted into a jigsaw puzzle cut up among other powers who share no language nor speak the local tongue. And given Vienna's status as more or less a city-sized palace, what even is the reconstruction effort other than the reformation of a glorified Habsburg Disneyland? As the victorious allies settle into the new normal of Cold War politicking, profiteering abounds, and Cotten's Holly barely gets his bearings in town before he starts reeling in disgust from it. Reed's over-the-top direction came in and continues to come in for criticism, but why not approach this absurd post-imperial fairground with funhouse distortions to match?

The plot is an amusing masculine answer to Laura, with Harry Lime defined in absentia not as a fetish object but the repository of local and occupying scorn for the worst elements of postwar behavior, only to finally surface and define himself, somehow, as even worse than all that. The lead-up to Orson Welles's reveal is an absolute masterpiece, and the last traces of that wunderkind puckishness on his cherubic face only makes Lime's unrepentant greed and disregard for human life that much more abhorrent. No wonder Welles latched onto Lime more than any other character save Falstaff; his eventual reconfiguration of the character into Mr. Arkadin is merely a removal of what thin veneer of aloof detachment the rapacious man has in masking his all-consuming caprice.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Western propaganda won’t tell you that the Soviet Union had already made Rick and Morty by 1981.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

Clearly the model for her later feature Blood Tea and Red String, Cegavske's first movie is nonetheless a remarkable work in its own right and a fascinating tonal foil for the more fully developed later version. That movie is all eldritch folk, a dreamy, abstruse fable about the allure of destroying what one creates set to haunting pan flutes. Here, we feel things less from the creator's perspective than that of the doll freakishly animated into being, a rapid collage of blood and blades scored only by the bewildering rustle of plants shaken by the wind and the screech of blackbirds overhead. We see this creature's god imbuing it with existence, but it seems to be born into a godless world, abandoned at the moment of conception to a world that announces it will do everything it can to kill this new occupant.

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

Opening in a realm drenched in fog and populated by various creatures and figures from various eras who all exude a casual menace ranging from village elder corruption to bloody monsters. Mocky sets this in a realm outside of time. The world here could easily for medieval or early modern times if not for the presence of things like phones and medical technology like X-rays and monitors. Even so, those contemporary objects always point back to the primal along with everything else, reducing the technological world to tools that re-emphasize the ease of paranoid miscommunication or how humanity is reducible down to our all-too-vulnerable flesh and bones. In the cluttered set design, blocking, and even camera movements and framing, this often resembles something you'd expect to see out of Polish cinema of the time than , but the occasional moments of existential romance between the husband and wife protagonists remind you where you are.

Amusingly, as the fog clears and the nature of the supernatural forces at play clarify slightly, the real antagonist appears to be the accumulated weight of history which, as per James Joyce, is a nightmare from which the characters are trying to awake. Rotting stone buildings used as prisons and asylums continue to serve that function with hasty retrofitting, and the gathering zombified forces consist of meddlesome bureaucrats, plague priests, Vichy collabos, any group from 's past that has held boots on throats, or at least those at the middle management level. The ancien regime apparently can't be bothered to step back down into the muddy, bloody corporeal realm even for the allure of reasserting control.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

I wouldn't put it past Cruise to keep making these, but after the lopsided and overly expository Dead Reckoning, this bananas culmination of the franchise as a borderline Looney Tunes parody of itself is probably the best way to send it off with (ironically) dignity. The fun spy caper element of the franchise is nowhere to be found here, but McQuarrie compensates by dialing up the absurdity to some of the best-ever setpieces, including an elaborate, constantly worsening trek through a submarine that tops the third act of Titanic for sheer thalassophobic intensity. I love that after the last film just kept making exhausting warnings about The Entity and what all it might do, Tom Cruise issues yet another salvo against A.I. encroaching on human creativity by leaning into the idea that Ethan Hunt is so batshit insane that no algorithm could ever possibly predict his behavior.

Full review: www.slantmagazine.com/film/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-review-tom-cruise-christopher-mcquarrie/

A completely pointless exercise, literally everything other than the last two is 4/5 or above for me. Still need to see LA Takedown.

1. Miami Vice
2. Heat
3. Thief
4. Manhunter
5. The Insider
6. Public Enemies
7. Blackhat
8. Ferrari
9. The Last of the Mohicans
10. Ali

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The supreme master, one of a handful of filmmakers in the running for the best of all time. These rankings start to break down pretty much as soon as you get past the first seven (each an absolute masterpiece on every level, and all more or less interchangeable), and really you'd have to get all the way down into the 30s to find ones I think are less than excellent, and a chunk of those exist only as surviving fragments of longer films.

I've long maintained that David Lynch and Terrence Malick are the filmmakers who are most analogous to James Joyce, mining a similar aesthetic modernism to eschew narrative coherence for a pure fusion of the human mind and aesthetic form. If Ozu can be compared to any novelist, it's Henry James. His oblique framings and emphasis on inanimate objects as anchor points both for his editing patterns and his sketching of internal character is thoroughly Jamesian, as is his mastery of using numerous perspective points to shade in the depth of a central character and their story. In Ozu, as in James, the distinction between show and tell dissolves, in large part because we never seem to be being told or shown anything relevant until all of a sudden every extraneous detail snaps into focus and you see the outline that was there all along.

1. Early Summer
2. Late Spring
3. Tokyo Story
4. An Autumn Afternoon
5. I Was Born, But...
6. Floating Weeds
7. The Only Son
8. Tokyo Twilight
9. Woman of Tokyo
10. Late Autumn

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Speed Racer
2. The Matrix
3. Bound
4. The Matrix Resurrections
5. The Matrix Reloaded
6. The Matrix Revolutions
7. Jupiter Ascending
8. Cloud Atlas

Le cinéma du wife guy

need rewatch: Soldier, Shopping
haven't seen: The Sight

1. Resident Evil: Retribution
2. Pompeii
3. Monster Hunter
4. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
5. The Three Musketeers
6. Resident Evil: Afterlife
7. Event Horizon
8. Soldier
9. Resident Evil
10. Mortal Kombat

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

When you're here, you're La Familia

1. Fast Five
2. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
3. F9
4. Fast & Furious 6
5. Furious 7
6. 2 Fast 2 Furious
7. The Fast and the Furious
8. Fast & Furious
9. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
10. The Fate of the Furious

The pleasures of Éric Rohmer are evident even when first encountering his filmography, but only with time and increased exposure does his full genius come into view. Beneath those pretty but ostensibly simple surfaces are the vision of one of cinema's great totalizing artists, one every bit as cinephiliac and indebted to broader art history as his other Cahiers chums but who transmuted his love of Hitchcock and Hawks into a wholly unique aesthetic.

Mixing Impressionism, 18th-century theater, classic literature and cinema into gorgeously arranged dramedies, Rohmer fills these sunny canvases with moral dilemmas cooked up entirely in the neuroses of his pretentious pseud protagonists, whose endless pontification barely obscures how little they actually know. In his film cycles, he charts the way his characters resist and surrender to chance in a world they believe to be ruled by fate, while his outlier period productions perhaps bring his formal and thematic preoccupations into their sharpest clarity.

Setting aside what might be termed the "apprentice" work of his early shorts and even his first feature, Rohmer's hit-miss ratio is nearly unimpeachable, with even the weakest of his feature-length works containing such sublime visual order and underplayed irony as to be endlessly rewatchable. Give me a list ordered entirely different than mine and I'd instantly be able to see the logical of nearly any sequencing of the director who, to take from John Peel's description of The Fall, was always different, always the same.

1. The Green Ray
2. The Aviator's Wife
3. My Night at Maud's
4. A Tale of Autumn
5. Claire's Knee
6. A Tale of Winter
7. Boyfriends and Girlfriends
8. Perceval
9. Pauline at the Beach
10. The Lady and the Duke

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

All film lists are meaningless fun that should never be taken seriously, but trying to sort Akira Kurosawa is especially pointless given the man's off-the-charts batting average. A true master of form and function, he, like Scorsese or Ford, is a gateway cinephile figure who only reveals hidden depths the more you immerse yourself into film.

Quite frankly, even by the standards of lists being a frivolous means of ranking art, this is absolutely impossible. Any of the top four could reasonably be my pick for number 1, and only the bottom few (one of which is merely a TV doc) are anything less than marvels. So anyway, here's an all but entirely arbitrary exercise on one of the 10 or 15 best filmmakers of all time.

1. Seven Samurai
2. Red Beard
3. Ikiru
4. High and Low
5. Ran
6. Rashomon
7. The Bad Sleep Well
8. Kagemusha
9. Dreams
10. Throne of Blood

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Beau Travail
2. The Intruder
3. 35 Shots of Rum
4. U.S. Go Home
5. Friday Night
6. High Life
7. Trouble Every Day
8. Bastards
9. Nenette and Boni
10. Let the Sunshine In

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Didn't put too much thought in either the choices or ranking, tried to put in what came to mind first.

1. Seven Samurai
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part I
3. The Red Shoes
4. Notorious
5. PlayTime
6. Monsieur Verdoux
7. Only Angels Have Wings
8. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
9. The Green Ray
10. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

updated 2/23/21

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2. Gone Girl
3. Zodiac
4. The Social Network
5. Alien³
6. Fight Club
7. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
8. The Game
9. Se7en
10. Panic Room

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Work in progress as I work through some lingering screeners and what gets put on Festival Scope, as well as what hits theatrical that I missed at the fest.

1. Vitalina Varela
2. Uncut Gems
3. A Hidden Life
4. Parasite
5. I Was at Home, But . . .
6. Martin Eden
7. Ema
8. Bacurau
9. Pain and Glory
10. Marriage Story

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Including all films I've seen that either have or will receive US theatrical distribution in 2018.

1. 24 Frames
2. First Reformed
3. Milla
4. Madeline's Madeline
5. PROTOTYPE
6. Zama
7. Let the Sunshine In
8. The Day After
9. Paddington 2
10. Annihilation

...plus 43 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. PROTOTYPE
2. First Reformed
3. Zama
4. The Day After
5. Call Me by Your Name
6. Lady Bird
7. The Florida Project
8. Faces Places
9. Mudbound
10. Manhunt

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Long Day Closes
2. Distant Voices, Still Lives
3. A Quiet ion
4. The Deep Blue Sea
5. The House of Mirth
6. The Terence Davies Trilogy
7. Sunset Song
8. Of Time and the City
9. The Neon Bible

A list of any film I've seen that played at TIFF. Will also include films I've seen since the festival that were in the lineup.

1. A Quiet ion
2. Toni Erdmann
3. Paterson
4. The Ornithologist
5. Elle
6. Personal Shopper
7. Sieranevada
8. The Death of Louis XIV
9. Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids
10. Nocturama

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

List in progress

1. Right Now, Wrong Then
2. Taxi
3. Office
4. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
5. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
6. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
7. In the Shadow of Women
8. The Assassin
9. Cemetery of Splendor
10. Chevalier

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Omits TV movies and films that are not directly credited to To. Also does not include The Royal Scoundrel, which I've yet to be able to track down a copy of. Write-ups for these picks can be found in this article: www.film.com/movies/ranked-johnnie-to-films-from-worst-to-best

1. Romancing in Thin Air
2. Sparrow
3. Running on Karma
4. Throw Down
5. Election
6. Drug War
7. Breaking News
8. Exiled
9. Fat Choi Spirit
10. PTU

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Goodbye to Language
2. Listen Up Philip
3. Stray Dogs
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. Closed Curtain
6. The Immigrant
7. Actress
8. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
9. Inherent Vice
10. Under the Skin

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

List in progress. Still have most of Ford's films to see, plus I need to rewatch some I already have.

1. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
2. How Green Was My Valley
3. Wagon Master
4. My Darling Clementine
5. Young Mr. Lincoln
6. The Searchers
7. The Sun Shines Bright
8. Steamboat Round the Bend
9. Donovan's Reef
10. Fort Apache

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 3:10 to Yuma
• 8½
• 12 Angry Men
• The 39 Steps
• À propos de Nice
• Ace in the Hole
• All That Heaven Allows
• Amarcord
• Anatomy of a Murder
• Army of Shadows

...plus 170 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Devil, Probably
2. Histoire(s) du cinéma
3. An Autumn Afternoon
4. The Time to Live and the Time to Die
5. Ugetsu
6. All That Jazz
7. Extreme Prejudice
8. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
9. The Story of Marie and Julien
10. The Addiction

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Based on New York theatrical, non-festival release.

1. Leviathan
2. Museum Hours
3. At Berkeley
4. The World's End
5. Drug War
6. Bastards
7. To the Wonder
8. Inside Llewyn Davis
9. Like Someone in Love
10. Spring Breakers

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

   The ungainly mixture of Spielberg's epic-scale wonder and Kubrick's even-fussier, cynical intellectualism makes for what may be the greatest American film of the aughts. Spielberg transcends his themes of innocence to get at the heart of humanity itself, and what he finds is not so pretty. I love this film, including its horribly misunderstood and lazily dismissed ending, one of the most profoundly dark ever filmed.

2. Empire of the Sun

   Spielberg's best pure-childhood film, even if it's about a child who has to grow up far too quickly. Dotted with occasional surrealism, directed with ion, and acted with aplomb from everyone, most especially a young Christian Bale in one of the three or four best child performances ever. Along with A.I., Spielberg's most unfairly overlooked masterpiece.

3. Jaws

   The only American film I can think of that's better-written is The Apartment. Jaws is simply a perfect film, and just because it doesn't "mean" anything doesn't detract one bit from its immaculate construction. The best Howard Hawks film Hawks never made.

4. Munich

   Those who accused Schindler's List of being too two-dimensional (what movie have these people watched?) got yet another reminder of Spielberg's nuance when it comes to Jewish suffering with Munich. ing judgment on no one (or maybe everyone), the film seriously grapples with the Israel/Palestine conflict and its unsolvable grievances. Also doubles as one of the best, most mature reflections on America's own position as a country wounded by terrorism and responding with terrorism of its own.

5. Schindler's List

   Every time I watch this I try very seriously to see what the detractors are saying, but I just can't see it. Spielberg gives us complex Jews, he gives us complex Nazis (that includes Goeth), and he does not toy with the audience, not even in the infamous shower scene. I always seem to forget this film's greatness until I see it once more and am again reminded of its mastery.

6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

   Star Wars may have set my imagination alight as a child, but now I more frequently return to this beautiful, and somewhat haunting, rumination on the possibility of life beyond this world. Spielberg says he wouldn't let the film end the way it did today, which makes it all the more vital a look into his early mindset.

7. Raiders of the Lost Ark

   Best adventure movie ever, the end, no competition.

8. Catch Me If You Can

   It's hard sometimes to that this is really a drama and not a comedy. Who knew Spielberg could be so funny? Not anyone who's watched 1941 or The Terminal, that's for sure. It's also Spielberg's best late-period reflection on childhood, lost innocence and yearning for parental bonds, one that perfectly balances the more serious, even horrifying truths of Empire of the Sun with the more light, endearing touches of, say, E.T.

9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
10. War of the Worlds

    Yeah, that ending is as terrible as you , but the rest of it is amazing. Filled with the most surreal Spielberg shots outside parts of Empire of the Sun, War of the Worlds also deals most directly with the experience of 9/11. The Terminal and Munich attempt to grapple with the attack's wake, but this is all about that assault and the bewilderment, fear and bravery it inspired. And it did it all with a damn sight more taste and elegance than the movies that directly dramatized the attacks.

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Note: some of the listed dates may not correspond to their actual years of release.

• One Week
• The Phantom Carriage
• Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
• Safety Last!
• Sherlock Jr.
• The Gold Rush
• Faust
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• Man with a Movie Camera

...plus 83 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

List is alphabetical. One film per director

1. Ace in the Hole
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
3. Alien
4. L'Argent
5. Army of Shadows
6. L'Atalante
7. Baby Face
8. Barry Lyndon
9. Bigger Than Life
10. Blazing Saddles

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Bigger Than Life
2. Bitter Victory
3. Johnny Guitar
4. In a Lonely Place
5. The Lusty Men
6. On Dangerous Ground
7. Rebel Without a Cause
8. Party Girl
9. They Live by Night
10. The Savage Innocents

List in progress. Will be finalized at end of year.

1. Romancing in Thin Air
2. This Is Not a Film
3. Cosmopolis
4. It's Such a Beautiful Day
5. The Color Wheel
6. Moonrise Kingdom
7. Holy Motors
8. The Turin Horse
9. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
10. Bernie

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. No Country for Old Men
2. Zodiac
3. Youth Without Youth
4. The Darjeeling Limited
5. Secret Sunshine
6. Eastern Promises
7. Go Go Tales
8. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
9. Mad Detective
10. Silent Light

1. Prince of Darkness
2. In the Mouth of Madness
3. The Thing
4. Assault on Precinct 13
5. They Live
6. Halloween
7. Escape from New York
8. Big Trouble in Little China
9. Christine
10. Escape from L.A.

2007 was the year I really got into movies as an artform, which was handy as it was a famously great year for cinema. Looking back, though, it was the year before that offered more masterworks for some of the best artists working today. This top 15 is not permanent, as there are still a number of films I feel I need to see to make a conclusive list. Even so, the ones here are some of my most treasured of the last decade. Also one of the best years for genre cinema ever.

• Miami Vice
• Inland Empire
• Syndromes and a Century
• The Prestige
• Exiled
• When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
• The Black Dahlia
• Pan's Labyrinth
• Black Book
• Letters from Iwo Jima

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Charlie Chaplin made 11 feature films. All of them are great. So good are they, in fact, that even to consider this ranking as a relative best-to-worst would give the wrong impression of even the "weakest" of Chaplin's movies.

• Monsieur Verdoux
• The Gold Rush
• City Lights
• A King in New York
• Limelight
• The Great Dictator
• A Countess from Hong Kong
• A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
• Modern Times
• The Kid

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

One of America's most stylish, provocative, occasionally unbearable filmmakers, from best to worst.

1. Carlito's Way

   The height of De Palma's Romanticism, the mature follow-up to Scarface's deliberately inflated bravado and offense. Forget Godfather III; THIS is the film where Pacino wants out but keeps getting sucked back in.

2. Hi, Mom!

   De Palma has always been transgressive, but in of pure shock, he never topped this early masterpiece. The Be Black, Baby segment alone is among the most daring things ever made by an American filmmaker, and the surrounding material takes a rusty blade to the Vietnam era. The first great De Palma movie, and still one he rarely even approaches.

3. Blow Out

   Not the first film to show off De Palma's Romanticism after his early, anarchic years, but the best indication of his full talents. Also a key display of how De Palma can shamelessly rip off others (Blow-Up, The Conversation) and still create something wholly his. The split diopter lens has never been better used, and the finale brings irony down upon it in an agonized wail. Only one or two of his films have better endings.

4. Body Double

   A Hi, Mom! for the '80s. De Palma mercilessly skewers everything, especially Hollywood's move into borderline pornography, and no other BDP film so expertly moves through its hall of mirrors (no mean feat for a director with so many head-trip stylistic exercises). De Palma's most audacious film.

5. Phantom of the Paradise

   Forget Rocky Horror Picture Show. This has better tunes, more filmmaking chops, and the best Psycho parody of them all (sorry, High Anxiety). I don't think I ever get through a single scene without laughing.

6. The Black Dahlia

   De Palma's most misunderstood film, a fever dream of Hollywood that is, in its own elegant way, as transgressive as Body Double's own mind-f••k. Its ending is similarly deconstructive, only more emotionally draining and haunting than Body Double's farce.

7. Femme Fatale

   Not as far-reaching a genre deconstruction as The Black Dahlia, Femme Fatale is nevertheless one of De Palma's most tantalizing, morally thoughtful films. Bifurcated into two equally false storylines, the movie digs into the sexual politics of noir's most infamous character type and then offers her, and others, a second chance at life. De Palma has his cake and eats it too, reveling in the seediness of noir and then finding a path to grace in it.

8. Mission to Mars

   Deceptively childish, Mission to Mars sports some hauntingly lyrical imagery and a faith in the secular unknown rarely seen in American film (only Close Encounters, 2001 and come to mind). The "Dance the Night Away" scene alone reveals how infectiously enthusiastic De Palma might have been if he left aside his penchant for irony.

9. Dressed to Kill

   Utterly ridiculous, yet compulsively watchable. One of De Palma's finest pure-thrill movies.

10. Obsession

    As with Blow Out, Obsession shows De Palma stealing wholesale yet making something original. The circling shot at the end is the first real glimpse of a giddy De Palma, and it's a euphoric thing.

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.