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A fictionalization of a real-life 1972 bank robbery and hostage situation in Brooklyn that goes awry almost from the moment it begins. Masterful direction from Sidney Lumet and stellar acting performances from a young Al Pacino from back in the days before he became a ham and an ice-cold John Cazale, as well as a talented supporting cast of colorful characters, ensured this film's place in movie history. Not a picture with a big message, no deep meaning, not a lot of emotional punch, just a goddamn great yarn, incredibly well made. One of my favorites.
The classic that originated tropes that have permeated popular culture ever since, and which has been remade or ripped off countless times—and all for good reason.
You already know the story: an alien invasion of "pod people" creates duplicates of human beings and replaces them. But if you haven't seen the 1956 original, what you may not know is how great a movie it is. This extremely dated-looking 1950s film is utterly effective and highly original even today, and still holds up astoundingly well as one of the best sci-fi/horror movies out there. Today's audiences, accustomed to big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, may not be used to the more human-level drama and real storytelling here, but to me it will always be an impeccable, incredible classic and gripping view from start to finish.
My favorite Hitchcock movie. The birds in a small coastal California town begin inexplicably attacking the human populace, and it begins to look like a losing battle. Only Alfred Hitchcock could take such a thin premise and turn it into a suspense-filled horror masterpiece and major film classic.
Funny enough, tonight I filled in a bunch of reviews long-time favorites I'd never posted, and as soon as I was done, what does Tubi serve up, but the best gangster movie I've ever seen, "Goodfellas".
Honestly? I love this movie, but not like I love many of my other favorites. There is no denying it's one of the best films from one of our best directors, and contains an unimaginable heap of talent in its huge ensemble cast of dozens. It's a superb movie that deserves every bit of the wide praise it's received, and is the thrilling watch from beginning to end. I love this movie. But not like I love many of my other favorites.
But, it's ultimately just a story. It's not profound. It's about the rise and fall of a gangster. Even a crime film like "Dog Day Afternoon", another old favorite crime movie, somehow…
This movie about a young man's coming of age in a mafia-controlled Bronx neighborhood in the 60s, set against the backdrop of the growing civil rights movement, has always been a particular favorite of mine. De Niro's directorial debut, it's kind of a less-flashy little brother to GoodFellas, and for my money, a similarly good movie, although the story is smaller and more personal. It likewise stars De Niro, albeit here as a good-guy working-class dad, and has a cameo from Joe Pesci once again in scary mobster mode. Original author Chazz Palmintieri plays a star turn as a coolly intimidating local boss who De Niro wishes his son would stay away from.
I originally reluctantly had this under "Honorable Mentions" instead of "Favorites", because, ok, it's not "Network" or "Deliverance". It's not even "GoodFellas". But, damn, it's undeniably a big favorite of mine.
This is a placeholder, just put here because no way am I going to let a list of favorite movies go on any longer with Apocalypse Now being mentioned on it.
And incredible story and an incredible, intense film. Many, many people have written about it, much better than I could. Google it, if you need to.
One more favorite I realized I didn't have something posted for. I think some of these big favorites, I've seen so many times, I don't even watch them anymore, hence never thinking of writing them up. They're engraved so solidly in my mind I don't need to watch them anymomre.
Anyway. This is a placeholder. What are you going to say about the "Blue Velvet"? This is the one where it all came together for surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, with a deeply disturbing story, Hypperreal production values, like watching some kind of off-kilter wax museum come to life, and terrific performances from some usually B-grade actors, most especially reviving at-the-time has-been Dennis Hopper's career with his outright terrifying depiction of villain Frank Booth. And how we were supposed to watch Dean Stockwell's lighthearted performance in "Quantum Leap" after his bizarre, sleazy cameo in this?
Realizing now that a few of my absolute favorite movies aren't mentioned here, so just quickly filling in some blanks. "Deliverance" is a big one.
Come on, you've never heard of "Deliverance"? Google it. I shouldn't have to write a review for this one. One of the greats. Four old friends take a canoe trip down a remote Georgia river before it's dammed up and the route disappears completely, and things go horribly wrong. Great performances and one classic scene after another. This is a supposed adventure film that's actually a drama in disguise, but decades of subsequent out-and-out horror films featuring mutants and cannibals and psychotic slashers have still never yet managed to catch up with this film's occasionally—though not always—quiet, unnerving depictions of unfriendly locals.
If you haven't noticed, this site's "404" error pages, when you try to access a nonexistent page, say "You done took…
In adding my review of Fargo for no other reason than that I couldn't have a "favorite movies" section that didn't mention it, I discovered that I somehow left "A Serious Man", my favorite Coen Brothers film, off.
"A Serious Man" doesn't get mentioned much. Besides being my favorite Coen Brothers film, it's probably also their least accessible. I consider it more a work of art than a movie. The narrative is ambiguous, to say the least, and at times intentionally confusing, as the story unfolds of a professor in the late 1960s who is simply unable to understand why his life is falling apart: his wife leaves him for a man who empathizes with his pain of his losing her and offers him a hug; someone is sabotaging his career with anonymous slanderous letters to his employers; he is threatened by the father of a student who has…
I just discovered I have somehow never reviewed this major favorite of mine. A modern redefinition of the film noir and crime dramas, and probably, with "Pulp Fiction", responsible for the modern "neo-noir" tag.
It's hard to do this movie justice in writing.
A desperate, craven, and openly dishonest car salesman hatches a bizarre plot to have his wife kidnapped by unscrupulous characters, so he can force his wealthy but cruel father-in-law to pay a million dollars ransom, goes horribly awry and more and more blood is spilled.
This movie is filled with memorable acting performances. Frances McDormand plays a star turn as the charmingly dowdy cop pursuing the case, William H. Macy brings his full talents to realizing a groveling car salesman who is equally pathetic and despicable, Steve Buscemi does his usual modern-day Peter Lorre bit, and Peter Stormare—who I've noticed has a talent for a…
Holy cow. Up there with the best of"Black Mirror"-quality writing, but less like the Twilight Zone and more like finding a trove of lost Ray Bradbury stories... Small-town life above a mysterious underground research facility. Old folks gather in barns and play fiddle beneath strange technological ruins. Kids wander through the autumn woods and find derelict robots and mysterious artifacts. The stories are humanist and character-driven, not technology-driven, and as well-written as any sci-fi I've seen.
Originally aired in the '90s, this might be my favorite comedy series of all time, and close to my favorite TV show of any kind, ever. Garry Shandling is a funny guy,"It's Garry Shandling's Show"was cute and very entertaining, but I think he's generally regarded as a second-stringer of his era behind guys like Seinfeld, and doesn't get the credit he deserves for his excellent writing and work behind the scenes in a lot of things (for instance, ending Judd Apatow's"The 40 Year Old Virgin"with an absurd musical number was Shandling's idea.) The Larry Sanders Show is his crowning achievement, and to me one of television's crowning achievements, full stop. An amazing show-within-a-show focusing on the production of a talk show hosted by a fragile, selfish narcissist (Shandling playing completely against type), his craven and insecure cohost (played in another stellar turn by the doesn't-seem-like-an-actor-who-has-star-turns Jeffrey Tambor), their gregarious but mean-when-drunk veteran TV exec producer played with absolute comic genius by Rip Torn, and a host of other faces who are still around (Janeane Garofalo, Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham, Mary Lynn Rajskub) as the beleaguered writers and office staff supporting them, plus a bunch of celebrity cameos who are more than happy to play embarrassing versions of themselves (a la"Extras", another great tv-behind-the-scenes series.) I think this show ran for six seasons and was incredibly smart and funny the whole way through. An absolutely must-watch.
I always knew Hank Azaria was going to do something I was going to love. I waited and waited and it didn't happen, until"Brockmire". Absolutely a favorite show of mine, following the ups and downs of Azaria as a down-on-his-luck alcoholic baseball announcer. Everyone I've recommended it to has loved it too. Seriously, all you have to do is watch the first episode, and if you don't love it by the end of that first half hour, you can skip it. I actually had one friend call me before the first episode was even over to rave about how much he loved it. It's that good. Trigger warning: It does get a pretty dark in the second season, he hits some pretty low depths. Still, a bona fide gem and I will never understand why you never hear anybody mention right alongside the best shows of all time.
What can I say about Atlanta that hasn't been said? This show started good and only got better. An incredibly well-acted, often poetic, well-written depiction of life of an up-and-coming rapper and his crew. Lots of very realistic, three-dimensional character study, peppered with frequent surrealism and deadpan comedy, unusual takes on race issues not often seen in mainstream media, an absolute refusal to be bound by TV or genre conventions, and occasional usually-successful experimental episodes that depart partially or entirely from the main characters and plot of the series. In my mind, one of the consistently best TV series ever made. When a new season comes out, I actually save this one until I'm ready to sit and take it in.
This is a movie that has lived on in my heart, and vividly the corners of my mind, ever since I first saw it—so much so that I had a little bit of trepidation about watching it again. Would it live up to my recollections? The answer: yes, absolutely. This is one of those movies I'm not sure I'd ever recommend to anyone else, but it plucks my strings just right... made with zero budget and very little by way of plot, in terms of story this entire movie is nothing but a group of hikers losing their grip on reality. And the ending is straight-up terrible, no way around it. But the journey there, just the walk in the woods slowly going incomprehensibly wrong, not even for any reason that's ever given, I find just gripping and disturbing. Worth noting, I usually multitask when I'm watching movies, and even on this second viewing this one sucked me in and distracted me from my laptop. Possibly the most disturbing horror movie set mostly in daytime. It's really a movie about losing control, to me a much scarier thing than any monster. This is one of those movies that, while nobody will ever call it a masterpiece—make no mistake, it's a low-budget indie flick from start to finish—but I find (and a lot of reviewers seem to agree with me) something about it is very affecting; it sticks in your mind. It's a quietly-building grotesquerie. I bet Lars von Trier likes it, or would. And I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's review of von Trier's"Antichrist", which essentially says,"I can't say I liked it; but I can't stop thinking about it."This one is the low-budget indie version of that. (EDIT: Googling around, I found this page of extremely polarized comments on Reddit that sum it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/xq7okl/yellowbrickroad/ )
I love this movie so much, am so close to it, I don't know what to say. It's like trying to write a summary of a beloved life-long friend.
This movie about the intersection of power, economics, and media, explored through a tale about the mental breakdown of a news anchor and the paradox of his resulting rise in ratings. It predicted, in 1976, so many things that we didn't see in reality until much later: the forces of economic globalization, the rise of "reality television", the commercial subversion of TV news (still, it may be hard to remember now, valued as a source of objective information at the time) from a reporting concern into a driver of profits and propaganda outlet—and takes them all to a ridiculous extreme, plus, casts a woman in the role of a cutthroat executive, something my…
The Trio Organ Sonatas not among Bach's more popular works. He wrote them as homework practice for his son, Willhelm Friedemann Bach, sometime in the late 1720s. This recording was released on the ultra-cheap Naxos label, famous for releasing not particularly noteworthy classical recordings on cassette for like $3. All my classically trained friends, back when I still hung out with disreputable classical musicians, looked down their noses at it.
This is one of my favorite albums, full stop. Like it or don't. I'm not going to try to defend it. I've heard other recordings of the Trio Organ Sonatas; there is none that I like as much. Something about this one is like magic: independent melody lines—played one with each hand and one with the organist's feet on the pedals—pulse and snake, laugh and skip and dance around each other as if they have a life of their own.…
Probably one of my top three favorite albums of all time. Mike Oldfield, stylistically and melodically my favorite guitarist of all time, has had decades-long success in Europe but never became widely known in America. He's best known here for his debut, "Tubular Bells", a truly strange and wonderful 45-minute instrumental recorded, incredibly, when he was 19 years old, and well-known for later being used as the creepy theme music to "The Exorcist", although it was not written as a soundtrack.
I do love the "Tubular Bells", but to me, "Hergest Ridge" is his quiet masterpiece. A very unusual instrumental tapestry of droning textures and odd but beautiful melodies, on which he played something like 18 rock and orchestral instruments himself, including numerous layers of quiet and highly processed electric guitars, and, just, one of those things that's hard to explain in words. It was written when he lived in…
Ah, my beloved "Red Queen To Gryphon Three". A singular all-instrumental album, reminiscent of the proggiest of prog rock, if only it had been invented in a parallel world where the popular music of the 1970s wasn't dominated by electric instruments. Formed by classically trained students of England's Royal College of Music, Gryphon was originally an erudite folk act playing renaissance music, and moved into prog rock without losing the flavor. Acoustic and orchestral instruments abound... there's still enough touches of electric guitar, organ and synthesizer to qualify it as rock, but it's just wonderfully full of acoustic guitar, english horn, recorder, etc., all played with formally-trained expertise. If, like Gene, you don't like prog rock, you will hate it, but fans of the folkier side of prog (Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield's quieter moments, Steeleye Span) you should love it. I adore it.
Wait, ok. A little virtue-signalling never hurt anyone, so I'll point out: From everything I've read and seen, director Lars von Trier seems to me like kind of a disturbed or unbalanced individual, very likely a misogynist, misanthrope, almost definitely a narcissist, and probably personally an all-around malignant asshole. And also, I think, easily the most talented filmmaker of the last few decades. Not since Herzog or Tarkovsky have I seen someone who just struck me as so adept in the language of filmmaking, such a natural talent.
Breaking The Waves is a straight drama. Set on a remote Scottish island, where an American there working on an oil right has fallen in love with a local, who is a member of the island's ultra-religious church. They marry, when he is injured in an explosion on the rig, and their relationship takes…
I consider this film about a young boy who forms a friendship with centuries-old vampire who looks like a 12-year-old girl to be maybe one of the top 10 horror movies ever. This is one of those films like The Exorcist, The Omen, or The Shining where a talented director took on supernatural material, and made, not just a great horror movie, but a great movie, along the way telling a brand new story about familiar monsters without relying on cliche. (It may also be that three of the four movies mentioned were based on acclaimed novels.)
It was originally recommended that I watch this with the original swedish soundtrack and English subtitles, and not use the terrible English audio overdubbing job, and though I don't like subtitled movies in this case it proved to be good advice.
Two years later the novel was remade for American audience and…
I can't say this obscure 1964 Vincent Price is a truly great movie but it will always have a very special place in my heart. Unlike some of my most esteemed favorites, I wouldn't say it's can't-miss, but at one point Price himself said this was his favorite of all his movies, and George Romero openly cited it as the direct inspiration for founding father of the zombie genre "Night Of The Living Dead" (bet you didn't know there was a "founding grandfather" movie of that genre. "The Last Man On Earth" made it alllllll possible.)
This was based loosely on the 1954 novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. That's the same "I Am Legend" that "The Omega Man" (with Charlton Heston) and Will Smith's much later action movie were based on.
(This is worth a side note here: Richard Matheson's is a name anyone with more than…
I adore this movie. Well done, old-school humanist, character-driven sci fi. There's like three characters in the whole movie, a lot of talk and very little action, qualities some other quiet "thrillers" I'm particularly fond of (such as The Vast Of Night and The Invitation) share, when they're well-made enough to carry it along on that.
In this, a programmer wins a chance to spend a few days with the reclusive head of his company in his isolated retreat, where it turns out he has built an artificial (and, in some lovely FX work, visually clearly robotic, except for the face) woman. The programmer has been called there to interact with her and determine whether he feels she is genuinely conscious and intelligent. That short synopsis doesn't really do it justice, but to say more would be to rob anyone reading of the experience…
A huge favorite of mine. Nathan Fielder is a "business expert" who comes up with hilarious, incredibly ludicrous, far-fetched ideas to save struggling businesses in this unscripted, quasi-"reality" show.
Just one example off the top of my head: a struggling appliance store is being run out of business by a nearby major chain store. When the chain store advertises that they'll match any advertised price, Fielder advises the appliance store owner to start advertising a certain TV for $1. Then, he'll send people over to buy out that TV from the chain store for $1, and when they're out of stock, his client can raise the price again and resell them in his own store for full price, a 100% profit.
In the kind of complication the show specialized in, somebody noticed that if he advertised the TV for $1, someone might come in and try to buy it for…
Jay Baruchel, Eric Andre, and the ridiculously likable Britt Lower in a magical-realist take on dating. If you've ever gone to a party and discovered your recent ex is there with her new boyfriend, and, he's literally Adolph Hitler, and, everyone at the party likes him more than you... then you should be able to relate to this.
It had all the monsters and magic of dating made literal, and, played them with a completely straight face. It was three seasons of deadpan humor, mixed with surreal, sci-fi, and fantasy elements. And I enjoyed it immensely.
What can I say about "Touching The Void"? I'm a sucker for a good survival story, and "Touching The Void" is one of the best of them. It's a true story, the film interspersing dramatizations of real events with interviews with the actual survivors, which is a tactic I ordinarily don't like very much but here is applied to such an incredible true tale that I have no problem with it.
Two mountaineers are climbing in the remote Andes, thirteen miles over rough glacial moraine from their remote base camp, when a storm sets in. Tethered together by a rope, one slips, and dangles over a sheer cliff, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The other climber, unable to gain secure enough footing to pull him back up, is instead slowly being pulled down towards the edge by the weight. Knowing that if he goes over they will…
I will always love this movie. Most people hate it. Almost no plot: Annoying yuppie couple get accidentally left behind out on the open ocean while on a scuba diving excursion, float in shark-infested waters for a few days. And that's it. That's all that happens. In my opinion, expertly made—it's about mood, not story, and the cinematography and amazing soundtrack, a compilation of indigenous folk music from cultures around the world, carry it for me. Most people probably think it's boring. I will always re-watch it.
If you're reading this list and haven't seen "The Descent", just go see it. A classic in my book. A bunch of women on a caving expedition when things get scary. Not a classic horror story, but a classic horror film and, I think, a rewarding movie-viewing experience. Very well-made by a director who understood that horror movies should be movies first and horror second. It does eventually lean a little more towards action/adventure/survival than towards plot/storytelling, which is often not my preference, but this is well-done enough to rise above my usual complaints about the category. (UPDATE: I have heard from some friends that they don't like this movie. I don't understand that.)
Melissa George stars in a pretty original, intense and well-done fantasy/speculative fiction thriller that tackles some familiar themes with enough original twists, turns, and surprises to be consistently entertaining despite some occasional obvious logical flaws, and, to leave the viewer with things to think about.
I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.
It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much…
Humanity's survivors speed around a frozen globe in a train, get lost in class warfare and survival issues. Distinctive, quality, underrated, memorable sci-fi. An instant classic in my book.
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