Nick's Top 100 Films
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Brazil (1985)
"It's like a stoned, slapstick 1984; a nightmare comedy in which the comedy is just an aspect of the nightmarishness." - Pauline Kael
Inside Out (2015)
"Docter and del Carmenâs creation is fantastical but utterly convincing. For all its abstractions, it still reflects the real complexity and fragility of the human mind, which is so easy damaged by trauma or neglect." - Matt Singer
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
"Remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's- really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood." - Owen Gleiberman
"'No Country for Old Men,'... is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop." - A.O. Scott
"Solaris helped initiate a genre that has become an art-house staple: the drama of grief and partial recovery. Watching this 166-minute work is like catching a fever, with night sweats and eventual cooling brow." - Phillip Lopate
"The most expensive animated feature ever made in Japan... and it's easily the most impressive, as well." - Richard Harrington
"One feels the presence of what we call life, all right, with its cyclical repetitions and its greater mysteries, but Yang also touches on something quite unusual here, an insight so refined and subtle that it should leave most modern filmmakers and fiction writers green with envy." - Kent Jones
The Muppet Movie (1979) (1979)
"With his Muppets, Henson found a balance between fuzzy post-hippie positivism and self-deprecating wit, and he added in the same quality that made many of the eraâs cultural phenomena so charming: simple problem-solving." - Noel Murray
"David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive." - Roger Ebert
"The film plays with the viewerâs perception of time and reality in ways that are unexpected, jarring and confusing. Several different interpretations have sprung up to explain the events of the film. All I know is that itâs a film that is well-acted, gorgeously shot, and demanding of your attention." - Dave Chen
"[Children of Men] immediately announced itself as the most best and bleakest sci-fi movie of the 21st Century. It has also proven to be the most prescient, anticipating a time when Britain has closed its borders, hateful isolationism has taken root, and xenophobia spores out of walled garden across the world." - David Ehrlich
"Perhaps the closest that a âmainstreamâ American film has come to the avant-garde moment. What makes Lynch so accessible compared to other artists working in the same sort of vein is that Lynchâs starting pointsâglamor of Hollywood, film noirâare so familiar and accessible to cinephiles." - Peter Labuza
Alien (1979)
"[S]cariest movie ever made. [E]very single detail, every button and lever, every bulkhead and airshaft, every monitor readout and analog ka-chunk of a door closing contrasts with the insatiable, perfectly predatory destructive force of the alien." - Matt Lynch
"The Thin Blue Line builds a sense of impending dread better than the clicking incline of a dilapidated roller coaster. It illustrates how comprehensively police can be blinded by the avenging desire of an enraged community. The contrast between personalities is pronounced. Even from prison (for a different crime), David Harris canât stop smiling. And Randall Dale Adams is incapable of a smileâhis eyes wide, still unable to believe this isnât a dream." - Paul Schneider
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
"The cinema's first modernist... was the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. As his most famous work, Battleship Potemkin, from 1925, shows, his analytical, quasi-scientific methods bore the mark of both aesthetic and political upheavals." - Richard Brody
"One of the defining features of âBreathlessâ is the degree to which its characters self-identity through the lens of the cinema, seeing in its images idealized reflections of themselves and modeling their attitudes and mannerisms to better cohere with that vision." - Calum Marsh
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
"[A] hell of a lot of truth in this. [A] hell of a lot of truth. [B]road cuts at the divide between living & simply being alive, but perhaps more than anything else a gently devastating look at how people change (or how they don't)." - David Ehlrich
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
"[I]t contains individual set piecesâthat opening encounter in the French farmhouse and a later scene in which the Basterds go undercover as German officers in the basement of a tavernâthat are near-perfect examples of taut, suspenseful moviemaking." - Dana Stevens
Carol (2015)
"In Todd Haynesâ unspeakably beautiful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's semi-autobiographical novel about a 1950s Manhattan shopgirl (Rooney Mara) who is thunderstruck by a mutual infatuation with a well-to-do housewife (Cate Blanchett), the film illustratesâamong other thingsâhow falling in love is an act of looking, while being in love is an act of seeing" - David Ehrlich
"Don't get me wrongâI'm glad people have continued to make movies for the past 90 years. Not really sure that they needed to, though. Formally speaking, Sunrise is a mic drop for the medium if there ever was one." - Mike D'Angelo
"Nothing in the climax of 'Zero Dark Thirty' settles for easy triumphalism. Everything about the film is potentially controversial, yet hardly any of it can be pigeonholed by way of ideology or politics." - Michael Phillips
Zodiac (2007)
"David Fincher's magnificently obsessive new film Zodiac is part police procedural, part monster movie, a funereal entertainment that is a testament to this cinematic savant's gifts." - Manohla Dargis
"Walkabout is cinema as poetry. Images rhyme with one another in a truly hypnotic fashion. Scenes are as vivid and intense as they are unreal and lyrical. Thereâs a phantasmagorical array of images, but also a rigorous, genius sense of structure." - Edgar Wright
Memories of Murder (2003)
"[W]hat distinguishes "Memories of Murder," setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity." - Manohla Dargis
"In their ruthlessness and monstrous grandeur, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are viewed as our symbolic ancestors: pure embodiments of the primal life force. They're of this earth but out of this world." - Owen Gleiberman
"8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many waysâthe freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions... But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself." - Martin Scorsese
"Yes, it's as entertaining as you have heard. Maybe more so. Raiders of the Lost Ark is, in fact, about as entertaining as a commercial movie can be." - Gene Siskel
"The perfect movie. Perfect structure, perfect characters. Every character in every movie made since Stagecoach is a version of a Stagecoach character." - Robert Ben Garant
Persona (1966)
"On one level, then, Persona could be seen as an allegory of acting...but on a deeper level, it more broadly suggests the possibilities and limitations of art in dealing with personal and worldly horrors." - Kenji Fujishima
"One of the most staggeringly comprehensive cinematic histories ever told." - Charlie Lyne
"Without a single riot scene or horrific effect, it tells a slow, gentle story of camaraderie and growth, with an ending that abruptly finds poetic justice in what has come before." - Janet Maslin
"Blazing Saddles is funny, yet in another way itâs quite serious â especially if you place the movie in context with the blaxploitation genre... These were outside-of-the-system films that, among other things, depicted African-American men as independent, powerful figures capable of undermining white authority. Why was Blazing Saddles â a major studio release â allowed to do the same thing? Perhaps because it was disguised as a comedy and a period piece.." - Josh Larsen
"The films central character, Ethan Edwards... is so detached from society that he is more associated with the Western landscape or what the film calls 'the turning of the earth'. He has been alone too long and has almost become inhuman. His search for a niece, kidnapped by Indians, is fired by rage and racism." - Mark Cousins
"Beau Travail is the most extreme example of [Denis'] talent, baffling and exhilarating. I don't know when I've seen a movie that is in so many ways foreign to what draws me to movies and still felt under a spell." - Charles Taylor
Dekalog I (1989)
(includes entire Decalogue)
"One of the great legacies of The Decalogue is that its vision of humanity is infinite: Behind every door, there are desires, secrets, and feelings worth exploring on film." - Scott Tobias
"One of the great legacies of The Decalogue is that its vision of humanity is infinite: Behind every door, there are desires, secrets, and feelings worth exploring on film." - Scott Tobias
Weekend (1967)
"[A] key film of the late sixties, a premonition of the political explosion of May â68 and its chaotic aftermath, a comedy of brilliant set pieces that cumulatively stage the collapse of Western civilization." - Gary Indiana
"Itâs all so bewildering and unsettling, it suggests these characters are pawns in some cosmic game whose details are incomprehensible to us mere mortals. We truly feel lost and trapped within the film." - Matt Singer
"The brutality in Silence leaves you shaken because it's meant to seem painful instead of playful, terrifying instead of titillating. Foster's Clarice Starling and Smith's Catherine Martin represent something unique in slasher movies: women who won't play victim." - Peter Travers
"The resulting scenes are among the most morally ambiguous ever filmed, because we the audience, the actors playing the siblings and Okuzaki himself are all aware that these old men are being lied to and guilt-tripped in order to lever the truth out of them. Yet Hara and Okazaki push further. Eventually the veteran attacks one of the old commanders who painfully reveals that the missing soldiers were in fact eaten in New Guinea." - Mark Cousins
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
"[I]t immediately drew me in and left me breathless. Guillermo del Toro has the ability to create magical worlds that are emotionally grounded, and he never shies away from the darkness that exists in both fantasy and reality." - Clea DuVall
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
"[Saving Private Ryan] accomplishes something I had been taught was most difficult -- making an action-filled anti-war film or, at least, one that doesn't in some way glorify or lie about combat." - Gene Siskel
Moonlight (2016)
"Moonlight is a movie about how someone comes to armor himself against vulnerabilities to the point in which he turns his chosen identity into a prison. But itâs a love story too, tender and dark, unfolding across decades, and offering hope that thereâs also time for its hero to figure out how to be open again." - Alison Willmore
Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
"An emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation." - Roger Ebert
City Lights (1931)
"Hereâs a movie about a man who never speaks, courting a woman who canât see, so their love is expressed in gestures of kindness, and restricted by sensory barriers. Thereâs a purity to it thatâs unlike any screen romance, and its poignance suffuses the entire film, even when it breaks off into tangentially related comic vignettes." - Scott Tobias
"It may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made. Even while you're convulsed with laughter you're still apprehensive, because the editing rhythms are very tricky, and the shock images loom up huge, right on top of you. The film belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster-movie tradition, yet it stands some of the old conventions on their head." - Pauline Kael
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
"What Herzog sees in the story, I think, is what he finds in many of his films: Men haunted by a vision of great achievement, who commit the sin of pride by daring to reach for it, and are crushed by an implacable universe." - Roger Ebert
"Spike Lee spends a good amount of time, early in the film, dousing a Brooklyn neighborhood with gasoline, as we hold our breath to see who will strike a match." - Alec Baldwin
Wild Strawberries (1957)
"Cinema is most often analogized with dreaming (see Hollywood as âdream factoryâ), but it is also a kind of remembering: it manufactures an immediate past, and thus makes us retrospectively and prospectively older. Bergmanâs Wild Strawberries starts with a dream and ends with a memory, aligning its beauty with the beauty of its seventy-seven-year-old star, the great Swedish actor and director Victor SjĂśstrĂśm." - James Schamus
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
"When it comes to âfairy-tale moviesââif such a genre exists as something other than a profit center for the Disney corporationâthere is Cocteauâs Beauty and the Beast and then there is everything else." - Geoffrey O'Brien
Le Samourai (1967)
"Alain Delon⨠gives his most memorable performance as an ice-cold assassin above such mundane⨠concerns as moral conscience. Though violent in its subject matter, Jean-Pierre⨠Melvilleâs film is also cool, meticulously lit, and classically framed. It⨠operates in a kind of dream state. Itâs the opposite of the fevered emotional style of⨠most gangster films." - William Friedkin
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