Top 7 - My Favourite Films of All Time (as of August 2019)
We are at that time of the year again, for my biennial tradition of running down my very favourite films as they stand right now. Strange as it sounds, there's something quite satisfying about doing this list every two years because it means that I get to track my taste in film over time. These last two years in particular are interesting because in that time, I've had my first two years at University, getting to study film more in depth than ever before. As a result, there's been a decent shake up. Six films from the list two years ago have left, three films I've seen for the first time in the last two years make their appearance and most of the holdover films have jostled around to new places. It is a bizarerely exciting time to be rehashing an old list so let's get straight into those honourable mentions, in no particular order of course.
A perfect little bundle of joy of a film. Paddington 2 is a testament to all that is wonderful about being British, about loving each other and about cinema. If you don't like this film then frankly, I have no desire to be associated with you.
Likely destined to rise up this list with time, Synecdoche, New York baffled me the first time I saw it, was just as perplexing when I rewatched it a week later and even now, it lingers inside me. A bizarre testament to the unspeakable power of cinema and the fear that keeps us human.
The first of many entries David Fincher will be making on the list, Seven is noir and detective fiction at its most miserable. It starts with the corpse of a man who has been forced to eat himself to death and only gets worse from there, carving a wound in my brain that may never heal.
At the complete other end of the spectrum to Seven is Before Sunrise. I could have put any film from the trilogy in this list (which finally gets a UK blu-ray release later this year) but Sunrise edges the others out just slightly, with its sublime examination of falling in love so deeply for such an agonisingly short time.
30 years after its release, there is still no greater action film than Die Hard. John McClaine is one of the great action heroes of cinema, Hans Gruber his equally iconic foil and the screenplay is exceptionally plotted. Plus, it is the best Christmas film ever and I will die on that hill.
Call it Stockholm Syndrome, call it bowing down to the poll in Sight and Sound, call it whatever: I truly believe that Vertigo is the jewel in the crown of a director who boasts many a shiny jewel already. Requires at least one rewatch to truly appreciate but OH BOY does it pay off.
Deeply funny, silly and British in all the ways I have loved since I was a young teenager, many have tried to ape Monty Python and the Holy Grail but no one can really capture the anarchic majesty of six blokes in silly costumes pretending to ride horses around Scotland.
There we go, seven absolute gems down, only my seven favourite to go. Buckle in, there's a couple of surprises ahead!
Look, I know what you're thinking but no, this isn't a joke. Obviously on a technical level, The Room is an utter shit show. It is awfully written, the actors do the script no favours and the cinematography and production design break new ground in incompetence. And yet, that is exactly why The Room makes this list. Everything that makes it a mess draws me to it time after time. Seven times in fact, more times than I have ever seen any other film. Any day, any time of day, drunk or sober: if someone asked me if I wanted to watch this film, I would say yes. Weirdly enough, part of the reason this film makes the list of favourites finally is because of what I have taken away from my film degree and the people I have had the pleasure of meeting while taking it: there can be an objective level of good that films can reach but at the end of the day, nothing matters more than how a film makes you feel. In the exact same way that Synecdoche makes me feel a deep existential angst or the films of David Lynch make me feel like I've gotten something out of a film I couldn't describe if I tried, I get an emotional experience out of The Room that can't be explained. Tommy Wiseau clearly put so much effort into making this film and at every moment where his artistic choice was the exact wrong one, I get a twisted delight in seeing it play out on screen. The Room is a hard recommendation because of how bad it is but I know for me, it has acted as a gateway drug to the world of trash cinema I now flourish in. It's worth supporting, believe me.
This is probably the biggest "upset" on the list (not that anyone's really upset about this but ya know, that's the expression). No, Fight Club is no longer my favourite film. I figure I'll go more into it in a blog post next week but for now, let's focus on why it remains such a brilliant film that defined my film tastes for so long. There is such a wickedly dry sense of humour that runs all the way through Fight Club that I fall back in love with every single time I see this film. It also has a style that now, can come across as weird edginess but when I first saw it, felt revolutionary. Looking back at Fight Club, part of the shame of it is how much Tyler Durden's dialogue has been hijacked by online alt-right groups, although that is equally kind of hysterical. Light spoilers I suppose but part of the point of Fight Club is that Tyler Durden is not a good guy. Sure, Brad Pitt lends him a mythological swagger but if you live your life by his philosophies, you are going to go down the wrong track very quickly. So yeah, parts of Fight Club can feel a little bit "We live in a society..." in our current world but it was one of the earliest films that got me into weird, boundary pushing cinema. Just try not to take any of the rules or commandments that literally.
I've loved Hot Fuzz for about as long as I've loved cinema. I doubt I will ever not love it. I still remember that day when I watched it for the first time, thinking "Wow, this is what cinema can be". Even in my "wilderness years" when I was taking film very seriously and looked down on anything that wasn't utterly meticulous in its craft or was a bit too fun, Hot Fuzz still had a place in my heart. There has even been another strange layer to my love of this film recently, as my grandparents moved to the city where Hot Fuzz was filmed. I haven't rewatched the film since visiting the city but getting a chance to wander around and go "someone was shot there", "big shoot out there" or "Nicolas Angel got a cranberry juice there" was a real pleasure, the like of which I haven't had before. Getting into the actual meat of the film though, I don't know what there is to say that I haven't said countless times before. The humour is spot on, the parody elements always come from a place of love and the action manages to eclipse the very films it homages. That there is the mark of a truly great parody/homage film, when it surpasses the films it has been pointing to as action hallmarks. Edgar Wright has never made any film that is less than brilliant but Hot Fuzz for me is the apex of his directorial career. I can't wait to spend an entire year introducing confused Americans to this.
This shocked me a little too but not only is Fight Club no longer my favourite film, it isn't even my favourite David Fincher movie. I rewatched both The Social Network and Fight Club recently and comparing the two (frankly, kind of an impossible task), I now lean closer to The Social Network. Part of it is that it fits much closer to my views on cinema today than Fight Club, not least in how it approaches the truth. Clearly, this is a film based on the truth. Mark Zuckerberg is a real life villain today, Facebook is the inescapable cesspool you probably found this blog on and many other things too. But it isn't afraid to play around with the facts to make a story more compelling and I love that. If you see interviews with real life Zuckerberg, it is impossible to draw a connection between him and the snarky, eloquent version of Zuckerberg that Jesse Eisenberg plays but which would you rather spend two hours watching? This is before even touching on Fincher's meticulous direction and the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, second only to Requiem for a Dream's score for me. The whole film is a modern masterpiece but if you want it encapsulated in a small section of a film, look to the opening of this up to the first litigation scene. I cannot think of any more perfect sequence in cinema. Watching it is like watching a really great Rube Goldberg, where everything is in such elegant motion that you are in awe, grinning at the mastery that it takes to construct something like this. If Facebook has brought us much misery in our modern world, we can at least be happy that it also brought us The Social Network, one of the greatest films ever made.
I talked about Whiplash fairly recently when doing my list about the best films of the last five years so I'll try not to repeat myself but I apologise, because Whiplash is a film that I will take any chance to talk about. It is simply one of those films I can never recommend enough. Actually, writing about it now, I really want to rewatch it. Maybe I will once I'm done with this, we'll see. Damien Chazelle, the guy who directed Whiplash, has gone on to do some really great films since making this. La La Land charms the absolute pants off of me every time (and almost made this list) and I keep thinking I need to go back to First Man, a film I loved when I first saw it but whose gently musical approach to biopic (that isn't really a biopic) has stayed with me since. None of them though have come closer to perfection than Whiplash. One of the hardest things about making a film is making it compelling from start to finish, leaving not an ounce of fat for the audience to feel comfortable during but Whiplash does it. I get sweaty just thinking about it and writing about it more only ruins the magic so lets leave it at the fact that Whiplash is pure, tension filled genius.
Again, I've said so much about Eternal Sunshine over so many years of writing that it feels hard to know what new there is to say. So maybe we make like the characters and forget that we've done this before, try it again? Alright then. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most stunning film about romance I have ever seen, in which a man undergoes a process to remove his ex-girlfriend from his memory, before realising partway through that he has made a mistake. Like realising you're falling in love, you can't help but think everything Sunshine does is perfect. The way the film is structured, the performances that our two leads have never bettered, Jon Brion's achingly melancholic score. Not enough people have seen it but anyone I've met who has seen it or who I convinced to watch it fell just as much in love as I did. Except let's stop pretending we haven't done this before now because that is where the power of Eternal Sunshine lies. The star that was Fight Club has dimmed slightly in my eye but when I rewatched this film on Valentine's Day this year (I really am that lonely, one at a time please ladies), I found something incredible happening: my feelings for the film had not dulled, nor had they stayed the same. No, I had only fallen deeper in love than I ever had before. A truly great film is one that should grow and evolve with you and so far, Eternal Sunshine is the best example I have for that. Hell, I think that one day, it could end up at that top spot. For now though, I feel more than happy keeping it in the runner up space as a film that has stayed with me (in every sense of the word) throughout my life so far.
If you're someone who knows me from my film course, you'll have known this was coming because I do a very poor job of shutting up about David Lynch and his cinematic magnum opus, Mulholland Drive. Like so many other films on this list, I can only explain part of the affect this film has on me, which maybe says something about how wanky my tastes are but I also put The Room on this list so who's the real wanker, huh? Last time I did this list, I had seen Mulholland Drive very recently and only the once, yet still kind of knew it had to have a place on the list. Without wishing to give anything away to the uninitiated, it is the kind of film whose first viewing is deeply special and surprising in ways that I still don't really understand. Later in that week (a week where I also melted my brain watching Dune, Inland Empire and the last two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return), I returned to the film ready to understand it at last. Knowledge wise, I remained empty handed but emotionally, my cup overfloweth. In total now, I've seen Mulholland Drive five times, studied it for Uni and subsequently written an essay where I tried to get to grips with it. I couldn't even begin to adequately break down the ways I love it. Like Sunset Boulevard, it's a testament to a Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did. Like Eraserhead, it requires mental acrobatics that perhaps no one is capable of. Like Fight Club, it grapples with identity in impressively gonzo ways. Yet despite doing many things like other films, it comes together to create a cultural artefact that is totally unique, scenes like the audition or the "This is the Girl" scene or the sequence in "Club Silencio" being eye wateringly beautiful. I could wax lyrical about Mulholland Drive all afternoon, write paragraph on paragraph about how much it floors me, what an important piece of cinema it is, but there's no point. You simply have to see it. Maybe it won't be for you and that's okay, I know people who didn't dig it and I don't hate their guts for it, no matter what they may believe. As long as you try and engage with Mulholland, the outcome barely matters and you'll be left with hours of interesting conversation and argument(God knows there's much in this film to discuss). Whatever you think of Mulholland Drive though, it is, right now, my favourite film of all time. Maybe not forever, maybe not even next week, but right now, it is where my heart lies. This is the film. And with that, I bid you goodbye and Silencio...
Paddington 2 (new entry)
A perfect little bundle of joy of a film. Paddington 2 is a testament to all that is wonderful about being British, about loving each other and about cinema. If you don't like this film then frankly, I have no desire to be associated with you.
Synecdoche, New York (new entry)
Likely destined to rise up this list with time, Synecdoche, New York baffled me the first time I saw it, was just as perplexing when I rewatched it a week later and even now, it lingers inside me. A bizarre testament to the unspeakable power of cinema and the fear that keeps us human.
Se7en (previously #7)
The first of many entries David Fincher will be making on the list, Seven is noir and detective fiction at its most miserable. It starts with the corpse of a man who has been forced to eat himself to death and only gets worse from there, carving a wound in my brain that may never heal.
Before Sunrise (new entry)
At the complete other end of the spectrum to Seven is Before Sunrise. I could have put any film from the trilogy in this list (which finally gets a UK blu-ray release later this year) but Sunrise edges the others out just slightly, with its sublime examination of falling in love so deeply for such an agonisingly short time.
Die Hard (same position as 2017)
30 years after its release, there is still no greater action film than Die Hard. John McClaine is one of the great action heroes of cinema, Hans Gruber his equally iconic foil and the screenplay is exceptionally plotted. Plus, it is the best Christmas film ever and I will die on that hill.
Vertigo (new entry)
Call it Stockholm Syndrome, call it bowing down to the poll in Sight and Sound, call it whatever: I truly believe that Vertigo is the jewel in the crown of a director who boasts many a shiny jewel already. Requires at least one rewatch to truly appreciate but OH BOY does it pay off.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (new entry)
Deeply funny, silly and British in all the ways I have loved since I was a young teenager, many have tried to ape Monty Python and the Holy Grail but no one can really capture the anarchic majesty of six blokes in silly costumes pretending to ride horses around Scotland.
There we go, seven absolute gems down, only my seven favourite to go. Buckle in, there's a couple of surprises ahead!
7. The Room (new entry)
Look, I know what you're thinking but no, this isn't a joke. Obviously on a technical level, The Room is an utter shit show. It is awfully written, the actors do the script no favours and the cinematography and production design break new ground in incompetence. And yet, that is exactly why The Room makes this list. Everything that makes it a mess draws me to it time after time. Seven times in fact, more times than I have ever seen any other film. Any day, any time of day, drunk or sober: if someone asked me if I wanted to watch this film, I would say yes. Weirdly enough, part of the reason this film makes the list of favourites finally is because of what I have taken away from my film degree and the people I have had the pleasure of meeting while taking it: there can be an objective level of good that films can reach but at the end of the day, nothing matters more than how a film makes you feel. In the exact same way that Synecdoche makes me feel a deep existential angst or the films of David Lynch make me feel like I've gotten something out of a film I couldn't describe if I tried, I get an emotional experience out of The Room that can't be explained. Tommy Wiseau clearly put so much effort into making this film and at every moment where his artistic choice was the exact wrong one, I get a twisted delight in seeing it play out on screen. The Room is a hard recommendation because of how bad it is but I know for me, it has acted as a gateway drug to the world of trash cinema I now flourish in. It's worth supporting, believe me.
6. Fight Club (previously #1)
This is probably the biggest "upset" on the list (not that anyone's really upset about this but ya know, that's the expression). No, Fight Club is no longer my favourite film. I figure I'll go more into it in a blog post next week but for now, let's focus on why it remains such a brilliant film that defined my film tastes for so long. There is such a wickedly dry sense of humour that runs all the way through Fight Club that I fall back in love with every single time I see this film. It also has a style that now, can come across as weird edginess but when I first saw it, felt revolutionary. Looking back at Fight Club, part of the shame of it is how much Tyler Durden's dialogue has been hijacked by online alt-right groups, although that is equally kind of hysterical. Light spoilers I suppose but part of the point of Fight Club is that Tyler Durden is not a good guy. Sure, Brad Pitt lends him a mythological swagger but if you live your life by his philosophies, you are going to go down the wrong track very quickly. So yeah, parts of Fight Club can feel a little bit "We live in a society..." in our current world but it was one of the earliest films that got me into weird, boundary pushing cinema. Just try not to take any of the rules or commandments that literally.
5. Hot Fuzz (previously #4)
I've loved Hot Fuzz for about as long as I've loved cinema. I doubt I will ever not love it. I still remember that day when I watched it for the first time, thinking "Wow, this is what cinema can be". Even in my "wilderness years" when I was taking film very seriously and looked down on anything that wasn't utterly meticulous in its craft or was a bit too fun, Hot Fuzz still had a place in my heart. There has even been another strange layer to my love of this film recently, as my grandparents moved to the city where Hot Fuzz was filmed. I haven't rewatched the film since visiting the city but getting a chance to wander around and go "someone was shot there", "big shoot out there" or "Nicolas Angel got a cranberry juice there" was a real pleasure, the like of which I haven't had before. Getting into the actual meat of the film though, I don't know what there is to say that I haven't said countless times before. The humour is spot on, the parody elements always come from a place of love and the action manages to eclipse the very films it homages. That there is the mark of a truly great parody/homage film, when it surpasses the films it has been pointing to as action hallmarks. Edgar Wright has never made any film that is less than brilliant but Hot Fuzz for me is the apex of his directorial career. I can't wait to spend an entire year introducing confused Americans to this.
4. The Social Network (previously an honourable mention)
This shocked me a little too but not only is Fight Club no longer my favourite film, it isn't even my favourite David Fincher movie. I rewatched both The Social Network and Fight Club recently and comparing the two (frankly, kind of an impossible task), I now lean closer to The Social Network. Part of it is that it fits much closer to my views on cinema today than Fight Club, not least in how it approaches the truth. Clearly, this is a film based on the truth. Mark Zuckerberg is a real life villain today, Facebook is the inescapable cesspool you probably found this blog on and many other things too. But it isn't afraid to play around with the facts to make a story more compelling and I love that. If you see interviews with real life Zuckerberg, it is impossible to draw a connection between him and the snarky, eloquent version of Zuckerberg that Jesse Eisenberg plays but which would you rather spend two hours watching? This is before even touching on Fincher's meticulous direction and the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, second only to Requiem for a Dream's score for me. The whole film is a modern masterpiece but if you want it encapsulated in a small section of a film, look to the opening of this up to the first litigation scene. I cannot think of any more perfect sequence in cinema. Watching it is like watching a really great Rube Goldberg, where everything is in such elegant motion that you are in awe, grinning at the mastery that it takes to construct something like this. If Facebook has brought us much misery in our modern world, we can at least be happy that it also brought us The Social Network, one of the greatest films ever made.
3. Whiplash (same position as 2017)
I talked about Whiplash fairly recently when doing my list about the best films of the last five years so I'll try not to repeat myself but I apologise, because Whiplash is a film that I will take any chance to talk about. It is simply one of those films I can never recommend enough. Actually, writing about it now, I really want to rewatch it. Maybe I will once I'm done with this, we'll see. Damien Chazelle, the guy who directed Whiplash, has gone on to do some really great films since making this. La La Land charms the absolute pants off of me every time (and almost made this list) and I keep thinking I need to go back to First Man, a film I loved when I first saw it but whose gently musical approach to biopic (that isn't really a biopic) has stayed with me since. None of them though have come closer to perfection than Whiplash. One of the hardest things about making a film is making it compelling from start to finish, leaving not an ounce of fat for the audience to feel comfortable during but Whiplash does it. I get sweaty just thinking about it and writing about it more only ruins the magic so lets leave it at the fact that Whiplash is pure, tension filled genius.
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (same position as 2017)
Again, I've said so much about Eternal Sunshine over so many years of writing that it feels hard to know what new there is to say. So maybe we make like the characters and forget that we've done this before, try it again? Alright then. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most stunning film about romance I have ever seen, in which a man undergoes a process to remove his ex-girlfriend from his memory, before realising partway through that he has made a mistake. Like realising you're falling in love, you can't help but think everything Sunshine does is perfect. The way the film is structured, the performances that our two leads have never bettered, Jon Brion's achingly melancholic score. Not enough people have seen it but anyone I've met who has seen it or who I convinced to watch it fell just as much in love as I did. Except let's stop pretending we haven't done this before now because that is where the power of Eternal Sunshine lies. The star that was Fight Club has dimmed slightly in my eye but when I rewatched this film on Valentine's Day this year (I really am that lonely, one at a time please ladies), I found something incredible happening: my feelings for the film had not dulled, nor had they stayed the same. No, I had only fallen deeper in love than I ever had before. A truly great film is one that should grow and evolve with you and so far, Eternal Sunshine is the best example I have for that. Hell, I think that one day, it could end up at that top spot. For now though, I feel more than happy keeping it in the runner up space as a film that has stayed with me (in every sense of the word) throughout my life so far.
1. Mulholland Drive (previously an honourable mention)
If you're someone who knows me from my film course, you'll have known this was coming because I do a very poor job of shutting up about David Lynch and his cinematic magnum opus, Mulholland Drive. Like so many other films on this list, I can only explain part of the affect this film has on me, which maybe says something about how wanky my tastes are but I also put The Room on this list so who's the real wanker, huh? Last time I did this list, I had seen Mulholland Drive very recently and only the once, yet still kind of knew it had to have a place on the list. Without wishing to give anything away to the uninitiated, it is the kind of film whose first viewing is deeply special and surprising in ways that I still don't really understand. Later in that week (a week where I also melted my brain watching Dune, Inland Empire and the last two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return), I returned to the film ready to understand it at last. Knowledge wise, I remained empty handed but emotionally, my cup overfloweth. In total now, I've seen Mulholland Drive five times, studied it for Uni and subsequently written an essay where I tried to get to grips with it. I couldn't even begin to adequately break down the ways I love it. Like Sunset Boulevard, it's a testament to a Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did. Like Eraserhead, it requires mental acrobatics that perhaps no one is capable of. Like Fight Club, it grapples with identity in impressively gonzo ways. Yet despite doing many things like other films, it comes together to create a cultural artefact that is totally unique, scenes like the audition or the "This is the Girl" scene or the sequence in "Club Silencio" being eye wateringly beautiful. I could wax lyrical about Mulholland Drive all afternoon, write paragraph on paragraph about how much it floors me, what an important piece of cinema it is, but there's no point. You simply have to see it. Maybe it won't be for you and that's okay, I know people who didn't dig it and I don't hate their guts for it, no matter what they may believe. As long as you try and engage with Mulholland, the outcome barely matters and you'll be left with hours of interesting conversation and argument(God knows there's much in this film to discuss). Whatever you think of Mulholland Drive though, it is, right now, my favourite film of all time. Maybe not forever, maybe not even next week, but right now, it is where my heart lies. This is the film. And with that, I bid you goodbye and Silencio...
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