by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

As much as publications want you to think their best-of lists are an objective affair, list making is a subjective art form. Aims aside, the goal should always be the same: to get eyeballs on the things you love. To spark discussions or, better yet, arguments. To serve as a guidepost in the overwhelmingly vast media landscape. My guideposts tend to be the ones that guided me along my path from cultureless child to pinky-in-the-air film snob to a more balanced and open-hearted movie watcher. 

10. High Fidelity (dir. Stephen Frears, 2000)

High Fidelity certainly isn’t a perfect movie (it’s too long and drags in the third act) but it’s as close to cinematic comfort food as it gets for me. It was the first DVD I owned, and I watched it religiously in those halcyon days as a budding music snob. John Cusack was born to play the crabby record store owner hung-up on his ex-girlfriend and the way this movie deftly handles adult relationships is still shockingly good. Come for a low-key workplace comedy, stay for a beautiful translation of Nick Hornby’s whole vibe. 

9. Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog, 1982)

It could have been any of the great Herzog films in this spot. From his masterpieces of New German Cinema (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Stroszek) to his incredible documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Encounters at the End of the World), it’s hard to pick one representative. What Fitzcarraldo has going for it though is the incredible making of documentary Burden of Dreams in which Les Blank captures Herzog’s wild man brilliance in real time. The movie itself if incredible and deeply Herzogian: a wannabe rubber baron with dreams of building an opera house in the Amazon embarks on a Quixotic mission up the river and into the jungle where, with the help of the natives, Fitzcarraldo dismantles and moves his steamship over a big muddy hill from one fork of the river to the other. Herzog being Herzog, he employed natives to physically move the ship over the mountain, and it’s as insane as it sounds. Herzog has spent his long career exploring the unseen places and the people who inhabit them, and Fitzcarraldo is Herzog at the upper limit of the lengths he will go to make sure a story gets told. 

8. Blindspotting (dir. Carlos López Estrada, 2018)

When cobbling together a Top 100 of the 2010’s list, Blindspotting ended up taking the top spot. It’s an unassuming movie about two lifelong friends (played by real life lifelong friends Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal) reevaluating their friendship as Diggs’ Collin tries to make it through his last three days of probation without getting roped into some nonsense behavior by Casael’s short-fused hooligan Miles. Set in the Bay Area against a backdrop of gentrification and police brutality, Blindspotting starts as a sort of buddy comedy and ends with modern America reflected back at itself through a dark mirror of its own making. The film culminates in one of the most heart-stopping and powerful sequences I’ve ever seen committed to celluloid. 

7. Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1987)

Like Herzog above, you could take your pick of Wim Wenders’ other masterpieces—Paris, Texas, Kings of the Road—and they could just as easily slot into this list. Well, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it really comes down to a Wings of Desire vs. Paris, Texas steel cage match where the winner is determined on what you gravitate toward in cinema. Paris, Texas is a novel, Wings of Desire is a poem, and while I typically gravitate toward the latter—and like any reasonable film nut, love Paris, Texas wholeheartedly—Wings of Desire comes as close to touching God as any film ever made. Wenders reflects on our humanity through the eyes of an angel (Bruno Ganz) monitoring human activity over wall-divided Berlin who falls in love with one of the cities inhabitants. Calling the film achingly beautiful feels like it doesn’t do the film justice. Wenders brought Cocteau’s Le Belle et la Bete cinematographer Henri Alekan out of retirement to give this film its ethereal black and white cinematography and that is one of the many god-tier moves Wenders made to craft this masterpiece. 

6. Before Sunrise (dir. Richard Linklater, 1995)

That Richard Linklater has made three movies that are straight up, a couple walking around different cities having conversations, feels insane if you look at like, popular cinema. Like put any of the movies in the Before trilogy up against the latest Avengers movie and the center of the Venn Diagram for people who like both of those movies is going to be very small. Still, I don’t know if anyone has made a better film that captures that intangible feeling of falling in love quite like Before Sunrise. We see baby boy Ethan Hawke and the permanently lovely French actress Julie Delpy fall in love in real time as they spend an evening traipsing across Vienna and the film succeeds because it is so audacious. It’s one of those movies where every time I rewatch it, I can’t take my eyes off the screen. It’s nothing but two regular people talking, and yet what they are saying speaks volumes. Before Sunrise is one of those rare movies that benefits from its two excellent sequels. In 2004’s Before Sunset, the couple reconnects and falls in love all over again despite having families of their own and in 2013’s Before Midnight we see the couple now married and their relationship seemingly on the rocks. Each time around peels back another layer of their relationship to show us something new and thrilling in Linklater’s (and Hawke and Delpy’s) ability to capture the complexities of everyday life. 

5. My Neighbor Totoro (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

Before we had kids, my wife and I spent a Summer burning through Miyazaki’s filmography. If you’ve seen those movies, you probably read that and thought, “That sounds like the best summer ever. To go back and watch all those incredible movies for the first time. What a joy.” Once all was said and done, I was convinced that My Neighbor Totoro overrated, dull, and a weird misstep in Miyazaki’s otherwise unimpeachable filmography. And then we had kids. And then we needed to entertain those kids. And then I ended up watching My Neighbor Totoro dozens of times and realizing that the lack of action is the point, and that the movie only works if you can slow down enough to live in its zen-like world of benevolent furry monsters, catbuses, and rural life. I have probably watched Totoro 50 times since my initial viewing, and it’s still a movie I practically beg my kids to watch. Like all kids their tastes shifted and evolved—don't even get me started on the crappy Netflix animated shows I’ve been forced to suffer through over the years—but you know what I do? Sometimes, if I’m feeling like I need to be centered, I’ll just put Totoro on in the background. It’s as close as a film has ever gotten to achieving a true sense of peace. 

4. No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

Picking just one Coen Brothers movie–just like picking one Herzog or Wenders or Miyazaki movie–is a borderline impossible task and honestly, it just comes down to where your personal preferences lie. Mine just so happen to line up with the one film the Academy went fully against character to recognize the Brothers’ greatness. Still, No Country For Old Men’s Oscar for Best Picture isn’t one of those cumulative effort things like Scorsese’s for The Departed, merely proof that the stodgy Academy couldn’t help but notice one of the best films of that decade when they saw it. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the Coens perfectly translated the author’s penchant for ultraviolence and captured the theme of a world gone mad faster than we could keep up with it. This is one of those movies where every time you put it on you just sit there gobsmacked, marveling at this masterclass in filmmaking.

3. The Big Red One (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1980)

There are a lot of WWII movies out there, but none of them really put the European Theater in as grand a scope as Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One. The film spans the allied invasion of Italy to D-Day to the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. I’ve seen a lot of WWII movies, and I don’t feel like any are as good, as gritty, or as overlooked as this one. The film was shot independently on a low-budget and though Lee Marvin in the lead is a good start, the supporting cast led by Revenge of the Nerds’ Robert Carradine and Star Wars’ Mark Hamill might not have inspired a lot of faith in moviegoers. And yet, the sequence where Mark Hammill confronts a Nazi soldier hiding inside one of the ovens at the Falkenau concentration camp is one of the most intense sequences I’ve ever seen committed to celluloid. Another reason this one tends to get overlooked is that despite the film’s epic scope, the only version available for years was a truncated sub-two-hour version. The 160-minute 2004 “Reconstruction” version is the one you need to seek out. 

2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Sometimes the only way to emotionally reckon with an existential threat is to lampoon it, and Stanley Kubrick’s lampooning of nuclear annihilation makes for the greatest black comedy of all time. Though Kubrick is best known as a visual stylist, Strangelove is a reminder that he was so much more. What makes Strangelove a masterpiece is its absolutely bonkers tone. You as the viewer are invested in the world not going KABOOM, and yet the people entrusted in making sure that doesn’t happen are all buffoons. Yet the dialogue is so heightened and hilarious, your frustration is replaced with a sort of, “well if the world is run by people like this we all kind of deserve to get blasted into oblivion.” Though it is very much of its time when the Cold War was still raging and people had to worry about mutually assured destruction on a daily basis, Strangelove still feels pretty timeless, especially on the “the world is being run by ignoramuses who can’t get their shit together” front. 

1. The 400 Blows (dir. Francois Truffaut

Watching The 400 Blows for the first time is one of those core memories that every movie buff has. I was 17, summer vacation, two-o'clock in the morning, and I was in the middle of watching every movie on IMDB’s Top 250. I threw Truffaut’s debut masterpiece on to “watch 30 minutes of it” and by the time the screen froze on Antoine Doinel on the beach I was feeling the same thing the deeply religious must feel when they find God. Not in the generic churchy way, but an individual emotional experience. The 400 Blows isn’t the flashiest movie from the French New Wave, but Truffaut delivers a film that so perfectly captures what it feels like to be young in a way that is more electric than any big budget explosion or million-dollar casting. And the most amazing thing is that Truffaut accomplishes this simply by getting out of the way and letting young, unknown Jean-Pierre Leaud simply be a kid. His Doinel is a delinquent, but not the worst delinquent. He’s wayward, but not that wayward. His homelife kind of sucks, but it’s not that terrible. Yet there is something about this chronicle of a misspent Parisian boyhood that hits me right in the Solar plexus every time I see it. It’s a feeling like, “I am watching my favorite film.” Every single time. For 20 years. And I don’t ever imagine that changing because The 400 Blows is as close to perfect as a film can get.