My Top 50 Films

Sometimes when I'm bored I make lists. But always, without fail, the hardest of all is to make a list of my favorite movies. There's so many and I can barely limit myself. At the same time I feel like I haven't seen enough films to say any X amount stand above the rest. And then there's the issue that depending on how I'm feeling one film might stand out more than another. Sometimes I may leave off something that I love but just haven't seen in awhile to refresh my memory. It's pure subjectivity. I mean, what's the difference between slot 35 and 36 anyway?

But, I decided to have another go at it. So here, ranked, is my list of my Top 50 favorite films. There's stuff I had to cut (Pulp Fiction, Frenzy) but overall I'm happy with it. It's not an exhaustive sampling of my movie taste, there's plenty of genres and filmmakers I've left off. And very well if I do this list again in a year, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's drastically different. But at this very moment, these are the movies that feel right to me.

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

 2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God

(1972, dir. Werner Herzog)

 

3. Taxi Driver

(1976, dir. Martin Scorsese)

 

4. Eraserhead

(1977, dir. David Lynch)

 

 5. House

(1977, dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi)

  6. Two-Lane Blacktop

(1971, dir. Monte Hellman)

 

7. Vertigo

  (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

 

8. The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

 

9. Knife in the Water

(1962, dir. Roman Polanski)

 

10. The Thing

(1982, dir. John Carpenter)

   11. The Night of the Hunter

(1955, dir. Charles Laughton)

 

12. Psycho

(1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

   13. 3 Women

(1977, dir. Robert Altman)

  14. Boogie Nights

(1997, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

  15. Vampyr

(1932, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

 

   16. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

(2004, dir. Wes Anderson)

 

17. La Strada 

(1954, dir. Federico Fellini)

 

18. It's Such a Beautiful Day

(2012, dir. Don Hertzfeldt) 

 

19. American Movie 

(1999, dir. Chris Smith)

 

20. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

(1975, dir. Jim Sharman)

 

21. Deliverance

(1972, dir. John Boorman)

 

22. Sunset Blvd.

(1950, dir. Billy Wilder)

 

23. El Topo

(1970, dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky)

 

24. Head

(1968, dir. Bob Rafelson)

 

25. Female Trouble

(1974, dir. John Waters)

 

26. Stranger Than Paradise

(1984, dir. Jim Jarmusch)

 

27. King Kong

(1933, dir. Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Shoedsack)

 

28. Persona

(1966, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

 

29. Battleship Potemkin

(1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein)

 

30. Last Year at Marienbad

(1961, dir. Alain Resnais)

 

31. UHF

(1989, dir. Jay Levey)

 

32. North by Northwest

(1959, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

 

33. Citizen Kane

(1941, dir. Orson Welles)

 

34. Lord of the Flies

(1963, dir. Peter Brook)

 

35. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

(1965, dir. Russ Meyer)

 

36. Little Dieter Needs to Fly

(1997, dir. Werner Herzog)

 

37. The Searchers

(1956, dir. John Ford)

 

38. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

(1971, dir. Melvin Van Peebles)

 

39. Hunger

(2008, dir. Steve McQueen)

 

40. Raising Arizona

(1987, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)

 

41. Cool Hand Luke

(1967, dir. Stuart Rosenberg)

 

42. Breathless

(1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

 

43. Jaws

(1975, dir. Steven Spielberg)

 

44. Gimme Shelter

(1970, dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin)

 

45. Punch-Drunk Love

(2002, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

  46. A Woman Under the Influence

(1974, dir. John Cassavetes)

 

47. Badlands

(1973, dir. Terrence Malick)

 

48. Vampire's Kiss

(1989, dir. Robert Bierman)

 

49. The Big Lebowski

(1998, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)

 

50. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(1939, dir. Frank Capra)