The abandoned-yet-opulent interior of the Boyd Theater in Center City Philadelphia, now sadly gutted
10. Heathers (1989)
This was a film which came to me in the closing six months of high school, a time when I was plunged in a deep well of depression and felt totally victimized by the world and all its dark events. It would be an exaggeration to say that Heathers “saved me,” but it was definitely there for me: few other films married the pulsating, cross-gender anger of one’s late teenage years with stiletto-sharp wit and a consummate sense of morality. Winona Ryder was never better as the savagely angry yet ultimately decent Veronica, while Christian Slater’s juvenile Jack Nicholson impression is just right for his role as the pseudo-intellectual, trenchcoated J.D. and Shannen Doherty’s turn as queen bee Heather Duke is a supremely bitchy lesson in “never trusting the quiet ones.” In the latter half of the film, there is a turn towards moralism and after-school special material — which is why it’s only number ten — but it’s offset by enough cock-eyed dream sequence horror and the real terror of the climax that it’s a wash. Even if you’re not in high school, it plays as a brilliantly transgressive black comedy. How very.
9. Barry Lyndon (1975)
Our first of three Kubrick films on this list, and because he’s also my favorite director I’ll permit myself this indulgence. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon was a minor work in that great novelist’s career, and played as the comedically picaresque (and likely false) boastings of an enfeebled Anglo-Irish rogue. Kubrick took this template, discarded the comic elements, and elevated what remained into a stunning social tragedy. Never at any point do you question if you’re not in the eighteenth century; you never see Ryan O’Neal as Ryan O’Neal or Marisa Beneson as Marisa Berenson, only Redmond Barry and Lady Lyndon, so fully are they sublimated into their roles. Routinely slurred as a nice-looking but emotionally inert waxwork, Barry Lyndon is anything but. It is the heartrending tale of a soulless man whose ceaseless drive for money and glory earns him nothing and in the end lands him right back where he started. As a history major, I appreciate this film as a meditation on the larger forces in history, the deep currents of a dark ocean on whose surface we blissfully bob. We are as powerless before these unseen forces as bewigged figures before us. We may strut and fret our hour upon the stage, but in three centuries, we will all be equal.
8. Metropolitan (1990)
There is a special class of films which you fall in love with at first sight. These are the films which within the first five minutes become lifelong favorites. They come around only rarely, like a flashing comet from the bowels of the cosmos, and for me Metropolitan was one of those films. Whit Stillman creates an entire world within the film, one which is cognizant of its own extinction (and may be functionally extinct anyway) yet soldiers onward — for what? The college-aged youths within it seem prematurely old and mature, bantering about Lionel Trilling and adhering to trivial rituals in a cultural landscape of Madonna and Michael Jackson, their world as lovingly chronicled — and as totally inscrutable — as any Jane Austen novel. This world contains an interplay of light and dark, of high comedy and heartbreaking tragedy, with the relationship between West Side quasi-socialist Tom and the beautiful, wounded Audrey at its core. A film full of future stars who never actually became future stars, and that’s a shame because they’re all immaculate. Watch the Christmastime scene in St. Thomas Church and try not to choke up, I dare you.
7. The Deer Hunter (1978)
Michael Cimino’s epic is colossal, impossibly detailed, dubiously tasteful, historically inaccurate, often maddening, and still totally compelling. To call this the “first real Vietnam film” is totally misleading; Cimino isn’t interested in Vietnam itself but the effect which any great, harrowing tragedy can have on a community. The forty-five-minute long wedding day sequence may appear like a perfect example of New Hollywood self-indulgence, but Cimono knows exactly what he’s doing: we are seeing the hardscrabble world of this Pennsylvania steel town in every last detail, all the petty dramas and neighborhood figures and room decorations and old country grandmas, everything. Indeed, if you told me this town wasn’t a stone’s throw from Pittsburgh but in the Soviet Union of 1968, I would’ve totally believed you. Every performance here is perfect, from Robert De Niro’s violently disillusioned Mike to Meryl Streep’s subtly shaded Linda to Christopher Walken’s Nick, a tortured husk of a man and the ultimate victim of war’s impossible choices. The attention to detail lavished upon the sturdy, unchanging world of Slavic Pennsylvania is equally present in the fiery, chaotic hellscape of Saigon just before the fall. We’re all a little bit disillusioned with America right now, and this film is the perfect bitter vodka shot for that mood.
6. Nashville (1975)
Continuing the trend of sprawling three-hour epics from the seventies which are unusually relevant in our current national climate comes Robert Altman’s teeming depiction of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A crowd of eccentrics, hustlers, celebrities, and politicos descend upon Nashville for a campaign rally for a third-party populist candidate with nebulously-defined politics, and all hell breaks loose. Often labeled a comedy, in my opinion this is nothing of the sort: it’s rather a chain of small, heartbreaking tragedies which together form a grand tapestry of fear and loathing in the cracked-up anxietydome of bicentennial America. We’ve got twenty-four main characters here, and there’s not not a bad performance in the bunch; from Lily Tomlin’s sexually frustrated white gospel singer to Keith Carradine’s cynical hippie lothario of a folk singer to Ronee Blakely’s emotionally fragile Loretta Lynn-take off Barbara Jean, each person is fully realized with distinct rich and varied stories, despite the crowded, antic nature of the film. Ringing with original songs which both mock and pay tribute to the world of country music, Nashville remains a sui generis work of American cinema. It don’t worry me, indeed.
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
What can I truly add to the discourse that hasn’t already been said? One of cinema’s supreme achievements, a perfect marriage of special effects wizardry to an introspectively humane kind of storytelling which has only truly been rivaled by Andrei Tarkovsky’s quasi-answer film Solaris (1972). This film is like a lightning bolt, coming out of the blue and rearranging what’s possible in your head right as it happens. I first saw it when I was eleven and never really got over it — especially the “star gate” sequence, a mind-opening psychedelic voyage which pierces right through one’s soul and resonates on a level deeper than reason. Somehow, the fifty-five years of parodies and references, of Also sprach Zarathustra cues and “open the pod bay doors, HAL” have not dulled the film’s freshness and expansive, generous view of humankind (and computerkind, while we’re at it).
4. Network (1976)
The only satire which ages in reverse. Despite its Ford administration vintage, Sidney Lumet’s savage Network predicted everything from Fox News and reality TV to the warping of romance by technology and Wells Fargo BLM marketing. The whole film thunders with the askew Old Testament language of Paddy Chayefsky’s mighty script, spoken by a murderer’s row of all-time great performers like Peter Finch (in his final — and most iconic — role as news anchor turned schizophrenic prophet Howard Beale), William Holden, Faye Dunaway (deliciously soulless as rapacious TV producer Diane Christensen), and Robert Duvall. Yet the greatest of all the performances — and monologues — in the film belongs to Ned Beatty. Temporarily abandoning his Dixie sheriff persona, Beatty transforms into Arthur Jensen, the bellowing, jowly avatar of the Eastern business establishment, raining hell down on poor, insane Howard Beale about how the world really works. Everything he says was true enough in the seventies, but now? It’s so accurate it’s truly frightening. Our world is even more dominated by media images than ever before, and there are millions of Howard Beales lying around just waiting to be exploited by millions of Diane Christenesens — and even more terrifyingly, Howard and Diane are often the same person and don’t even know it.
3. Ghost World (2001)
To explain what makes Ghost World great is near-impossible for me, but I’ll try: it is simultaneously a deeply bleak portrayal of the parallels between late-adolescent malaise and middle-aged nebbish malaise, a love letter to pre-war Delta blues, a war cry against the homogeneity of twenty-first century life, a searing portrayal of the ways we deceive and hurt one another, a vehicle for Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi, a glimpse of Scarlett Johansson on the brink of fame, a love letter to the late Brad Renfro, a smart-alecky dark comedy, a contemporary tragedy, and a glimpse into the dying embers of Fukuyama’s end of history. This is one of those films which contains the entire world within its suite of fundamentally unlikeable characters; it hates them and loves them and redeems them. The graphic novel is amazing too, but think of this film as a companion piece to it rather than a straightforward adaptation.
2. The Wicker Man (1973)
My personal white whale. A film which totally defies all attempts at classification; its designation as a horror movie is only because there’s no other roughly comparable label for it. It’s simultaneously the genesis of the entire folk horror genre (there’s no Midsommar without The Wicker Man), a musical, a detective story, a Hitchcockian thriller, a twee camp comedy, and a deeply serious investigation of the clash between two rigid, diametrically opposed systems of belief. You can analyze and overanalyze this film to death and also enjoy it simply as a particularly effective thriller-horror flick. No amount of “not the bees” memes derived from the execrable 2006 Nicolas Cage remake can dull the bizarrely sunny terror of the original.
1. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
This is the movie which first made me fall in love with cinema. My fifth grade teacher showed this to us in class (he also read to us from To Kill a Mockingbird, Flannery O’Connor, and Jorge Luis Borges and showed us an ESPN documentary about the connection between the Colombian men’s soccer team and Pablo Escobar — he was nothing if not trusting in the maturity of his young charges) and it rearranged my brain in ways which still reverberate today. I suddenly understood — even at that young age — what movies can do, that in the span of ninety minutes you can tell an entire fucked-up story about nuclear annihilation and also have it be one of the funniest, more quotable movies ever made. There’s nothing to add or subtract from this and there is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said before. The first link in the chain of strange events and experiences which led me to be the person I am today, and no amount of whining from bored APUSH students or pretentious poli-sci majors can rob it of its transgressive power.
Shocked that there's not a single Francis Ford Copolla film in your top 10.