Welcome to MovieJawn’s first ever Sound & Vision Poll, where our writers share why they love their 10 favorite movies of all time!

by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

Whenever people learn I’m a literature Ph.D., they often feel compelled to ask me what my favorite book is. What they do not understand is that this is a paralyzing question for me. What metric does one use to determine their favorite book? Is it the one they have read so many times that the spine is cracked and the pages are falling out? The collection of poetry that astonished them with its excellence? The memoir that understood them in ways they didn’t think anyone could understand them? The novel that made them reevaluate their view of the world? What about the one that made them weep uncontrollably?

Curating a list like this one for film is almost impossible for all the reasons listed above, and the task is made even more difficult when the idea of best, which is a far more nebulous concept than favorite, is added to the equation. However, as I was mulling over the problem of “top ten films” for this series, I realized that there are films that keep returning to throughout the years, films that speak to my soul in one way or another. 

And please, for the love of David Bowie, stop asking people what their favorite book is.

Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Casablanca is a film that could have only happened at the perfect confluence of the right place, right time, right stars, right director, and right screenplay. It doesn’t have any right to be as good as it is. One of the few World War II films I can stand anymore, it focuses on a small, often neglected, corner of the conflict, but the world of Casablanca–and Rick’s–is full of all of these little stories of desperation and pain that play out around the doomed romance of the main storyline.

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s chemistry–and the accompanying off-screen animosity–is the stuff of film legend, but Claude Rains and Peter Lorre also put in memorable performances as the crooked government official and the black market dealer, respectively. The dialogue still feels fresh and razor-sharp–“I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray. You wore blue”–and the soundtrack is just as beautiful as the first time I heard it. What keeps me coming back, however, is the renewal of Rick’s hope. His cynicism stems from his pain: it hurts too much for him to hope at the beginning of the film. But as he heals his relationship with Ilsa, he begins to realize that hope is what will allow him to resist fascism, a message which gains more power for me with each passing year. As the oft-overlooked Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) says, “You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”

All About Eve (dir. Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1951)

All About Eve is my Citizen Kane. It received fourteen Oscar nominations and won six. To this day, it is still the only film to receive four nominations for women actors. It’s a commentary on the callous nature of show business and the calculation needed to survive. It’s about how success for women in the business often comes at the expense of other women. It’s about aging out of roles. It’s about how insecurity can tear apart a relationship. And it does all of that in two hours.

At the heart of the film is the relationship between two women: Margo Channing (Bette Davis)–a well-established Broadway diva–and Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter)–Channing’s ambitious young fan. The way that Eve slowly insinuates herself into Margo’s life without anyone realizing provides the tension, which is only cut by quick and punchy dialogue straight out of a screwball comedy. Every character has something to say, and everything they say reveals so much more than it conceals. When Margo wryly says over her dry martini, “I’ll admit that I’ve seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a salted peanut,” she is simultaneously pushing everyone away while begging them to stay. When Eve says that she will do anything for applause, she is simultaneously revealing her manipulations and her desire to replace human intimacy with parasocial relationships.

Bonus: there is a special appearance by Marilyn Monroe in one of her first film roles. While she is only in a couple of scenes, she manages to imbue what is supposed to be a one-note character with complexity with just a well-placed look.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise, 1951)

I’m a sucker for classic sci-fi films, even the ones with too much exposition. I just love the potential of these films to defamiliarize important ideas or conflicts, to reflect them to us through the lens of the what-if. One of the best is the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film that uses the metaphor of an alien visitor to expose the paranoia and self-destructiveness of the Cold War. However, its Twilight Zone-style messaging is still relevant for us today.

The film inverts the classic alien invasion trope by asking, what if the aliens are better than us? What if humans are a threat to the galaxy? These ideas are perhaps more common in science fiction now–although I would argue that they still are not that common–but that makes them no less relevant or powerful. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) attempting to see the world through Bobby’s and Helen’s eyes allows viewers to re-evaluate their world and to imagine the possibilities of a new one. While I don’t necessarily agree with the eventual solution of policing the galaxy with robots–even ones independent of any political interests–the ultimatum that Klaatu gives has echoed throughout science fiction from Octavia E. Butler’s “change or die” in Parable of the Sower to Captain Pike’s “kill each other or create something better together” in the pilot of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Plus, Gort is an incredible name for a robot.

Charade (dir. Stanley Donen, 1963)

Enter Charade (1963), the most Hitchcockian film that Hitchcock didn’t make. Charade combines the stylish charm of Audrey Hepburn and the exasperated debonair of Cary Grant into something that is equal parts comedy and thriller–and equally good at both. The set-up is one we have seen dozens of times before: a young trophy wife discovers that her murdered husband hid something valuable, and his criminal friends want it back. But the true genius of Charade is in the contrast between Reggie’s mundane life–her job, her living situation, her coping mechanisms, her desire for Peter (Grant)–and this dangerous situation she finds herself in, highlighting the absurdity of both when placed next to each other. 

In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, Reggie is cornered in a phone booth by Tex (James Coburn), who intimidates her by lighting matches and dropping them into her lap while she struggles to extinguish them. Afterward, when Peter asks if she is all right, she calmly responds, “I think I am having a nervous breakdown.” It is a perfectly relatable and hilarious response that does nothing to deflate the tension of the moment.

And the Givenchy. The Givenchy!

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982/2007)

I couldn’t make a list like this without a Ridley Scott film. I love Blade Runner so much that I wrote almost an entire chapter of my dissertation about it and its 2017 sequel. The film single-handedly defined the cyberpunk genre, effortlessly synthesizing Philip K. Dick’s original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with neo-noir, neon, Asian motifs, and trash chic.

What does it mean to be human? How does one define empathy? Can one be human while subjugating others? These questions have fascinated me since I first saw this film as a teenager, so much so that I will be writing a monthly column for MovieJawn on posthumans in film starting later this week. But beyond the epistemological questions of the film are the breathtaking visuals of a technologically advanced Los Angeles crumbling under its own bleak corporate bloat. While Harrison Ford’s performance as the hardboiled Blade Runner Deckard is iconic–as is Sean Young’s femme fatale Rachael–for me, it will always be Rutger Hauer as the rebel replicant Batty who steals the film. His final line, improvised by Hauer, will eventually be tattooed somewhere on my body: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”

Note: the film that belongs in this spot is The Final Cut which Scott made to bring the film back to his original vision. While the original 1982 theatrical or the 1992 "director’s" cuts are the versions that most people were familiar with before 2007, this version is far, far superior.

Labyrinth (dir. Jim Henson, 1986)

In my junior year of undergrad, I was re-watching Labyrinth in the common area of my dorm when one of my friends–who just had rotator cuff surgery and was high out of her mind on painkillers–plopped down on the couch next to me, dramatically pointed at David Bowie, and asked, “Is that God?” This is the only reaction you can have to David Bowie as Jareth, the goblin king.

Like many Americans, my childhood was full of The Muppets, but I always preferred Jim Henson’s darker stylings like The Dark Crystal (1982) and The Storyteller (1988-89), the strange fantasy worlds that exist just in the corner of your eye that have their own rules. It’s the weirdness, the uncanniness, the hint of worldbuilding without exposition that appeals to me. Things aren’t as they seem, and it is impossible for us to fully see them. It’s The Wizard of Oz. It’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s The Sandman.

Labyrinth will always be my favorite of these types of films due not only to the memorable performances of both Bowie–The Man Who Sold the World is one of my most played albums–and Jennifer Connelly. Here is the meeting of two opponents: a goblin king and a sixteen-year-old girl playing a game of cat-and-mouse for a child’s life within a bizarre labyrinth populated by whimsical puppets. It’s the most unorthodox and yet completely appropriate extended metaphor for adolescence. 

And don’t get me started on “Magic Dance.”

The Fifth Element (dir. Luc Besson, 1997)

Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element combines the whimsy of Henson with the cyberpunk anti-capitalism of Scott with a topping of romance. While I originally fell in love with this film for Milla Jovovich’s Leeloo, the most adorable human weapon of all time, I constantly find new details in this film every time I watch it. The world that Besson creates is so frenetic and lived-in, from the cigarette vending machine in Dallas’ (Bruce Willis) apartment to the shrink-wrapped single-use beds. It’s campy; it’s fun, yet it is completely in control of its setting.

The thematic elements age well too. Weapons tsar Zorg (Gary Oldman) wants to destroy the world to monetize it, something that eerily sounds like a certain billionaire who recently acquired Twitter. Leeloo’s doubt when she asks Dallas “What’s the use of saving life when you see what you do with it?” is one of the best encapsulations of my depression. But Dallas’ response, to tell her that love is worth saving, means more to me now than it did when I first watched it.

Lilo and Stitch (dir. Chris Sanders and Dean De Blois, 2002)

When Lilo and Stitch first came out in June of 2002, I was eleven and my sister had just turned six, two ages that do not have a lot in common. This film gave us a language to communicate in, even though neither of us had ever experienced any of the loss that Lilo (Daveigh Chase) and Nani (Tia Carrere) have. But I am the eldest child born into a conservative religious family that expected me to help raise my siblings like Nani. My sister is the youngest child who felt out of place and rebellious like Lilo. So it is no wonder that we still to this day will quote the film to each other, our favorites being “You like me better as a sister than a rabbit, right?” and “My friends need to be punished.”

As an adult, I watch this film not just for nostalgia but also because, if you haven’t guessed already, I love chosen family narratives. While Disney certainly has made their share of chosen family films over the years, this one comes at it from a completely new POV. These characters are not Disney damsels in distress or wunderkind. They are flawed and dysfunctional. Life has not been kind to any of them. It’s only through each other that they all learn that they are worthy of love: “This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little and broken, but still good.” As a queer person who has had to distance myself from my family for my own emotional and physical safety, this line wraps itself around me like a warm blanket because I too have had to find my own little broken family in my wife and my close friends. 

Only Lovers Left Alive (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Every film lover has a film that they have seen dozens of times by being its most exuberant proselytizer. I don’t think I can count the number of people I have introduced to Only Lovers Left Alive, all while insisting on watching it with them. It combines everything I love: vampires, nineteenth-century Romanticism, dystopian gothic fiction, and a dreamlike soundtrack. 

It’s a remix of the genre. Instead of lurking in Transylvanian ruins, vampire Adam (Tom Hiddleston) hides away in the ruins of Detroit, torn between his desire to connect with someone through his music and his disillusionment with “the zombies” (humans). The film luxuriates in the visceral beauty of its characters, played perfectly by Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, and Anton Yelchin, who is literally and figuratively haunting abandoned cityscapes.

It also poses new questions about what it means to be a vampire. How would time passing seem to someone who lives forever and who can think and act faster than a human can? What does love mean over centuries? How do climate change and mass migration affect vampires?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Celine Sciamma, 2019)

Have you ever watched a film and just knew that it would live in your mind forever, that you would be drawn back to it again and again like a moth to a flame? I was a little concerned about including Portrait of a Lady on Fire due to recency bias, but when I rewatched it for the fourth time this week, I just couldn’t leave it off the list. Not only because the last shot makes me weep every time I see it, but because of the way the film manages to encapsulate every feeling I have ever had as a queer woman in a world made for straight people. 

I live in the US in the 21st century, not an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, and yet, I have felt all the longing, all the futility, all the rage, all the guilt, and all the pain of Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). This film somehow manages the impossible task of creating a desperate romance while not romanticizing or demonizing the time period. There is no patriarchal figure to be the villain here–men are almost totally superfluous in this film–still, both characters intimately understand the restrictions of their world. And yet, there are small acts of resistance that come in the form of taking control of one’s reproductive choices, forming communities of women, acting on one’s desires, in loving someone else.

It has come to my attention that young queer women on TikTok have begun asking each other “Are you a fan of Vivaldi’s Summer?” as this generation’s “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” As a lifelong fan of Vivaldi and the Four Seasons, I am thrilled that this film has managed to queer one of my favorite classical pieces.