This is not a definitive list of my favorite movies. Rather, these are movies I think are well worth seeing for any number of reasons. There are many movies I love that are not here, either because I assume everyone has seen them (Star Wars or Casablanca, for example) or just because if I didn't stop somewhere I'd be writing this for years. There are also not a lot of recent movies on the list as other people are much more up on current movies than I am.
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Title |
Director |
Notes |
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*anything |
Best of the silent comics. |
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*anything |
Even if it's not his best, it's still better than 97% of what's being made today. |
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Federico Fellini |
Marcello Mastroianni at his best, and a great movie about making movies. Plus it’s a full-on Fellini head-trip! |
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Robert Altman |
Love those 70's clothes. |
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Sergei Eisenstein |
One of the first true historical epics, with a score by Prokofiev. |
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Joseph L. Mankiewicz |
Ah, the bitchfest that is theater. |
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Bob Fosse |
The first R movie I ever saw. Who knew Roy Scheider could dance? |
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Stanley Donen/Gene Kelley |
Where do you go after making Singin’ in the Rain? Paris, of course. |
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Howard Hawks |
Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper write a dictionary. No, really! (Plus, the screenplay’s by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.) |
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Jean Luc Godard |
Dysfunctional French wannabe criminals, but they sure can dance… |
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Sergei Eisenstein |
The Odessa Steps sequence is just as important as everyone says. |
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Russ Meyer |
For a long time Roger Ebert wouldn't admit that he wrote this. Tag line: "This is not a sequel. There has never been a movie like it before!" |
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Michael Powell |
Nuns in the Himalayas face temptation. Much more amazing and beautiful than I just made it sound. |
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Roger Corman |
Shelly Winters as Ma Barker! Woo hoo! |
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Michaelangelo Antonioni |
Not to be confused with Blow Out, starring John Travolta and directed by that hack Brian De Palma. |
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Peter Yates |
McQueen, Mustang, San Francisco. 'Nuff said. |
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Otto Preminger |
Lawrence Olivier, Noel Coward, Kier Dullea. I screamed out loud at this one. |
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Alan Rudolph |
Rudolph is one of my favorite directors, and pulls wonderful performances out of everyone he works with. Also part one of the Keith Carradine festival hidden within this list. |
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Orson Welles |
There are two egregious moments in this otherwise nearly perfect movie. Can you spot them? (Click here for the answers.) |
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Lloyd Bacon |
Pre-code musical starring Jimmy Cagney with musical numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. I always liked Cagney better as a song and dance man than a gangster. |
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John Ford |
Important western, which is not an oxymoron! |
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King Vidor |
Why Rita Hayworth was a sex symbol. She later said the problem with her love life was that men “went to bed with Gilda, but they woke up with me.” |
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Bob Rafelson |
The Monkees movie. Also known as how to kill a career in one movie or less. But it's great and it has all sorts of cameos including Frank Zappa and Victor Mature. |
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Fred Zinneman |
How to Build Tension 101. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly |
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Howard Hawks |
The fastest talking movie ever. Rosalind Russell and
Cary Grant in the best version of the play |
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John Farrow |
OK, check out this cast and tell me you don't need to see it: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Raymond Burr and Jim Backus. |
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John Boorman |
My favorite coming of age in WWII movie. |
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John Cassavetes |
I think this is Cassavetes' best. Peter Falk is brilliant. |
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Mihail Kalatozov |
I can't do this justice. Check out Roger Ebert’s review. |
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James Lapine |
Judy Davis is playing my mother and/or my grandmother in the movie of my life. |
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Nicholas Ray |
The only movie on this list, so far as I can tell, to have inspired a song by the Smithereens. Humphrey Bogart is a depressed screenwriter and Gloria Grahame is the woman he loves. Sort of. |
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Nicholas Ray |
Yes, it's a Joan Crawford western, plus Sterling Hayden, Ernest Borgnine and Mercedes McCambridge. Check out this fan site. |
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Jean Vigo |
It's not that I didn't want this movie to end, it's that I wanted to move into it. |
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Federico Fellini |
God, what an opening…. |
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Jean Renoir |
More than just a theater in the U District. Classic WWI futility of war movie. |
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Howard Hawks |
Joan Collins and Edward G. Robinson. No, really…. |
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Otto Preminger |
I will always be in love with Gene Tierney. That's just the way it is. |
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David Lean |
No one does epics like Lean. |
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Henri-Georges Clouzot |
Stars the great Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot. Not to be confused with the vastly inferior Sharon Stone version. |
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Arthur Penn |
Revisionist, yet epic, western starring Dustin Hoffman |
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Bill Forsythe |
One of my all time favorite movies. Burt Lancaster is wonderful in a role that was specifically written for him. |
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Fritz Lang |
Probably Peter Lorre's greatest performance. Dark dark dark. |
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Jacques Tati |
Proof you don't need a lot of words in a screenplay. The movie I made in college was compared to Tati, though I had never seen any of his work at the time. Once I had seen Tati's work, I was incredibly flattered. (See also Tati's recently re-released and restored Playtime.) |
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Peter Jackson |
Before they trust you with a hobbit, you have to prove yourself by making the sickest, nastiest, most wrong puppet film ever. This movie also has the best Vietnam flashback scene in all of film. (No, I mean it.) |
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Jonathan Demme |
Jason Robards as Howard Hughes, and a great early Demme film. |
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Fritz Lang |
Dystopian, yet prophetic, visions. |
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John Ford |
One of the great closing lines in all of film. One of Jack Lemmon's first films. |
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John Ford |
Henry Fonda in what many people consider to be John Ford's best western, if not best movie overall. |
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Richard Benjamin |
Peter O'Toole kicks ass. |
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Robert Altman |
Probably the definitive Altman film, if there is such a thing. Part of the Keith Carradine festival. |
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Charles Laughton |
Twisted Mitchum. Amazing impressionistic visuals. And it’s all I can think of every time I’m standing on the banks of the Missouri. |
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Howard Hawks |
Male bonding par excellence. Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth. |
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Seijun Suzuki |
Watch me shoot three guys with one bullet! 60's Japanese pulp movie by the master of the genre. Any film by this guy will give you a good ride, but this one is my favorite. |
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Jacques Tourner |
Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. My favorite noir. |
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Michael Powell |
Major creep-out movie. Don’t watch this alone, or alone with a film director. |
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John Boorman |
Would you want to meet a pissed off Lee Marvin in a dark alley? I didn't think so. Not to be confused with Grosse Pointe Blank, but that’s also well worth seeing. |
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Sidney Franklin |
Almost fell out of my seat laughing at this one. Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery in a pre-code film of Noël Coward’s play. |
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Akira Kursawa |
The one that got him noticed in the West, along with Toshiro Mifune. |
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Michael Hoffman (Produced by Rick Stevenson) |
Scottish caper film in which minor highway robbers become folk heroes. Great soundtrack by Big Country. |
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Jules Dassin |
French noir heist flick directed by blacklisted American ex-pat. |
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Harold Lloyd |
Second only to Buster Keaton of the great silentvcomedians. And while watching Lloyd climb around the outside of avskyscraper, remember he was missing three fingers on one hand. |
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Fritz Lang |
Edward G. Robinson as a bank teller succumbing to temptation, and more. |
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Alfred Hitchcock |
Hitchcock directs a script by Thornton Wilder leading to twisted Americana at its best. My favorite Hitchcock movie, and Hitch’s favorite, too. |
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George Stevens |
A friend of mine wrote in a paper on this movie that "Jack Palance is so evil he warps time and space." It's true. |
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Hal Hartley |
Watch for the dance number inspired by Godard’s Band of Outsiders. |
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Stanley Donen/Gene Kelley |
Probably the best movie musical ever. |
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Otto Preminger |
Jackie Gleason on acid, Groucho Marx as a gangster called God, and the closing credits are all sung by Harry Nilsson. All this and Carol Channing to boot! Must be seen to be believed, though it's very hard to find a copy. |
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Preston Sturges |
The power of movies, plus Veronica Lake pretending to be a boy. Like that'd work. By the way, the movie within a movie in this movie is the source of the title of the movie O Brother Where Art Thou. |
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George Stevens |
30's escapism with Astaire and Rogers. See also Top Hat. |
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Juzo Itami |
Does for ramen what Monty Python did for cheese. And you gotta love the Japanese John Wayne. |
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Robert Fuest |
Vincent Price chews scenery all over the place as he kills the doctors who failed to save his wife in methods inspired by the biblical plagues of Egypt. Need I say more? |
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Vittorio De Sica |
Proof that drama can come in small packages. |
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David Lean |
No one does epics like Lean. Did I say that already? |
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Francis Ford Coppola |
Gene Hackman's best performance, and one of Coppola's best films as well. And on top of that it was edited by the great Walter Murch. |
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Norman Panama |
Danny Kaye and his midget friends save the day from evil Basil Rathbone. What's not to like? |
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Robert Siodmak |
Burt Lancaster may be the cleanest pirate ever, despite doing all his own gymnastics and stunts. |
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John Huston |
This is the right way to end a career. The man was attached to an oxygen tank the whole time he was directing, for god's sake. |
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Dick Powell |
My favorite submarine movie, though The Hunt for Red October is pretty good too. Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens as the captains trying to outthink each other. |
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Raoul Walsh (uncredited) |
Just some classic Bogart. |
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William Friedkin |
Popeye Doyle will hunt you down if you don't see this movie. |
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Frank Tashlin |
Jayne Mansfield! Va Va Voom! Plus Little Richard and a director who learned everything he knew from making Tom & Jerry cartoons. Watch for the ghost of Julie London. |
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? |
Where it all started in 1903, more or less. Not to be confused with the 70's movie starring Sean Connery and Leslie Ann Warren, but that one is fun as well. |
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Akira Kursawa |
The source from which George Lucas, um, borrowed inspiration for many elements of Star Wars. |
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Orson Welles |
Witness the cult of Rita Hayworth. See also Gilda |
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Michael Powell |
How British can you be? |
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Anthony Harvey |
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, not to mention a young Anthony Hopkins and a young Timothy Dalton. |
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Orson Welles |
Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, and even better in some ways. |
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John Huston |
This is the right way to start a career. The 1931 pre-production code version is also worth checking out. |
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John Huston |
Huston originally intended to make this movie with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, but they went and died on him. Twenty years later, enter Sean Connery and Michael Caine. |
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Alan Rudolph |
Paris in the 20s as imagined by an Altman protégé who lives on Bainbridge Island outside of Seattle. Part of the Keith Carradine Film Festival |
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George Cukor |
Hepburn, Grant, Stewart. Need I say more? |
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Jean Renoir |
Classic examination of the class struggle, and a fun murder mystery to boot. |
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