So many movies. Initial thoughts: I like "Mullholland Drive" a lot but I'm surprised so many others rank it so high. This is likely because David Lynch just died.
I love "Synecdoche New York" and I think low hundred is fair. I'm shocked that so many people agree with me.
I just saw "Sinners" last night. I liked it but #52 is clearly a recency effect. Will be a cult favorite.
"Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith"-- this is a troll, right? I don't even remember which one of the bad Star Wars movies this is, but I'm confident it sucked.
"The Substance" is super over rated. I understand what it's supposed to be about but the deal the actress makes in it is so obviously stupid from the beginning that I couldn't care about the rest of the consequences.
"Mean Girls" didn't make the original list? Absurd! It's one of the most important movies of the era. It explains the past decade so well. We may be at long last coming out of the mean girls era. Fetch is happening!
My idea is that the mid 1970s through approximately the mid 1990s was the "animal house" era and 2000 through at least 2020 was "mean girls" all the way. Everyone agrees with me about mean girls but insist on suggesting other candidates to replace animal house in my thesis. :)
As a teacher I live Mean Girls every day; not that my students are mean to me per se but I have to be cognizant of the social dynamics of the classroom in order to survive
Yes, THE SUBSTANCE was highly overrated. I liked the premise, but who likes characters who make obvious dumb mistakes, even if they are dumb actresses?
Yep. How does it benefit her that an entirely other actress is getting the parts? Just because the other actress comes out of her in a painful way? It's not like she became temporarily young. It was another woman.
It's precisely *because* it explains the past decade so well that it's not on the list. The people in charge of the NYT and many of our institutions *are* mean girls, and they don't like having their foibles skewered.
I thought Sith was the best of the prequels. Actually has some oomph to it.
Regarding Star Wars, I'd seen the first 2 prequels and found them so lacking that I didn't bother watching Revenge of the Sith. I saw an interview with Camile Paglia where she was gushing about the movie, so I finally got around to watching it.
It's definitely the best of the 3 prequels. The first half is OK (already an improvement over the first two), but the 2nd half is really good. I think it is telling that the closer we get to the original movie narratives, the better the prequels get.
The last half hour or so of Revenge of the Sith is tragic because we know exactly where the story must go. Definitely recommend Sith if you haven't yet seen it.
I'll bet an inspired artist could do a super-edit of the 3 prequels and make a pretty good 2.5 hour movie out of them.
The prequels have actually grown on me. The CGI-heavy cinematography gave a "softer" look which was offputting when they first came out, but I guess I've gotten used to it over the decades?
I thought the idea and plot outlines of the sequels were pretty good (with a few exceptions- it really pissed me off that Lucas made Anakin a child when he met Obi Wan. It was unnecessary and clearly contradict what Obi Wan said in the original film. People make fun of the political scenes and debates about trade treaties but that was the core of the story and potentially great. It just was incompetently executed in the extreme.
I recall seeing the first one with a friend shortly after moving to the bay area. We were so excited. The opening action sequence was amazing...then two hours of garbage. We left the theater and as our eyes tried to adapt to the daylight we were both slowly working out way out of cognitive dissonance. Wait...did that...suck? No! Couldn't be.
I've definitely scene all the prequels. I find it hard to believe that if I rewatched them I would gain a new appreciation. Isn't Sith the one where Anakin turns to the dark side? That was the whole end goal of the trilogy, a good but flawed character seduced by an evil genius and loses his soul setting up the events of the first three movies.
What amazing potential. How embarrassingly short of that potential it was. We wanted Iago and good acting and instead we got, well I'd like to make a comparison but after all this time isn't Anakin the gold standard for badly acted unearned tragedy?
The third set are so bad they're not even worth ripping a new asshole on. I once saw a video in which someone had spliced together every instance of Don Draper saying "what?". It was like half an hour of Don Draper what? That video is the only needed response to the third sequels.
Borat is a genuinely offensive film. And genuinely hilarious. It speaks a lot to the cultural tone of the 2000s that the critics who bemoaned the besmirching of Kazakhstan were seen as weenies.
I notice that attitudes have changed a lot of recent years. Partially this is Sacha Baron Cohen showing off his grating real personality more over time, but I think in large part the FSU countries were still hilariously obscure, provincial, poor and backwards in 2006. Not so true these days.
The general public has got more used to abrasive Israeli-style humor since 2006, but not so used to on-the-nose Israeli-style emoting (witness Gal Gadot’s unpopularity during the early days of coronavirus).
Rutgers dropout Larry Charles (Borat's director) cut his teeth being third-in-command on Seinfeld, although he and Larry David eventually had a falling out. LC molded the Kramer character as Jerry and George were expies of Jerry and Larry
SBC is reading his audience--back in the 2000s he was cool because he was doing the edgy comedy that appealed to young men in those days, then he had to pivot to making fun of rural people because they hadn't seen HBO yet and he had to claim he was unmasking racism, then he tried to go woke. and predictably became a lot less funny and had zero credibility as probably the most famous politically incorrect comedian in existence.
Hey, I'll always have that time I showed a guy from India Da Fresh Ali G Show while we were both drunk and we laughed almost continuously for 2 hours.
Two unlisted movies worth your time, Steve: Prairie Home Companion and The Founder. The former is a quirky Robert Altman meditation on mortality, music, and humor that ranks among his best; while the latter is a tightly paced and eminently well crafted rise of a tycoon biopic about Ray Kroc starring Michael Keaton
Yeah it's thoughtful but light fare that doesn't bog itself down with tedious plot. Only now realizing the funny twist that in the movie the show is shut down by heartless FINANCIAL CAPITAL while in real life Kiellor was unpersoned by shrill humorless shitlibs outraged that he committed lese majeste against a woman at NPR
The last set of movies was so bad that some post genX fans have retrofitted the idea that the original sequels didn't suck. I looked it up and it was 2005 and I find that hard to believe. I had those categorized as 1990s movies.
THE PRESTIGE is one of Nolan's few films where the puzzles he likes so much is embedded in a story that works on its own.
Too often Nolan's work (MEMENTO, INCEPTION, INTERSTELLAR) becomes more puzzle than story. The emotional heart of the film - which is always the characters' story - gets lost or is muddied. THE PRESTIGE is one of Nolan's only films where the puzzle, while quite good on its own terms, doesn't matter as much because the story itself is so inherently interesting that you can forget about the puzzle for a while. You can come back to it later or figure it out on a second viewing. Or, as Michael Caine's closing narration teases, maybe we in the audience don't want to work it out.
With a film like INCEPTION, the puzzle is so prevalent that it blunts the emotional impact of DiCaprio's story. You can't ignore it, not even for a moment. It's puzzle first, story second.
The event driving the narrative is that DiCaprio's wife, played by Marion Cotillard, became so obsessed in her belief that the world she lived in was not real that she killed herself and tried to force her husband to do the same - or so DiCaprio's character believes. Her death happens before the beginning of the film, but it propels everything we see in the story. It haunts DiCaprio. He knows he is responsible for it. She has become a specter in his mind - and a danger to others who share his dreams.
So when the film eventually gets around to showing her death, it should be a powerful scene. DiCaprio certainly plays it that way. But the puzzle has already neutered the scene's emotional impact for the audience. It doesn't hit the way it should. We're too dizzy following the puzzle's twists and turns.
THE PRESTIGE works for me because its puzzle never overwhelms the story at its heart.
Never thought of it that way. You are probably correct. I also remember some character asserting in "Interstellar" that the most powerful force in the universe is love. That's so stupid in the context of a movie with a black hole in it that I'm pretty sure I imagined it.
I like all of Nolan's movies. Even when one doesn't work for me, I usually still find it interesting. I never leave the theater thinking, "well, that was a piece of crap."
But I watch a movie for the story, not to solve a puzzle. So when Nolan's films become more wrapped up in their puzzles than the story, my interest flags.
I don't recall the line in INTERSTELLAR that you mention, but that does sound trite. THE PRESTIGE, on the other hand, has many lines I can never forget.
"Obsession is a young man's game."
"The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special."
"The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything."
"You're familiar with the phrase "man's reach exceeds his grasp"? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his nerve."
"Are you watching closely?"
Just a brilliant movie that not only survives repeated viewings, but improves with them.
Big Lebowski was made in 1998, so I have no favorite movie to contribute to this list. I did like the new Top Gun though, I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't woke. I did like the new Napoleon too, despite making him an awkward sperg. I like the outfits, historical setting, and battle scenes.
I would say that top ten or twenty lists are entertaining, top fifty lists are stretching it a bit, and top one hundred lists are too much. But top five hundred lists are like reading the phone book.
That for the most part, the divide between commercially successful films vs art house films tend to between the public and the experts. The experts wouldn't be caught dead nominating the LOTR trilogy even on a bad day for anything other than special affects, makeup etc. Certainly not for actual acting performances.
It will be interesting how many of these films make the cut when the poll is taken again at midcentury, 2050.
"Not as good as the 1933 black & white version with Katharine Hepburn"
VERY telling. That Hepburn played the tomboy Jo. In other words, as she was starting out in her film career, the word on the street was that she wasn't perceived as a girly feminine actress. This would change in later years in order for her to make the Alist.
"because Saoirse Ronan is too much of a girly girl to play tomboy Jo"
Hepburn did make a fine Jo.
"e.g., she can’t throw a baseball through a glass window."
So basically Ronan is signalling not so subtly to the audience that she's straight. Allyson was 100% straight.
In 1952 film Pat and Mike, Hepburn also plays golf on open course. And she shot very very well (no surprise, as Kate played golf since high school and was a golf champ).
I saw "Casino Royale" and "Master and Commander." "Casino Royale" was a confusing, politically correct mess. M as a woman. Bull shit. You may as well make Moneypenny a transgender. "Master and Commander" was a stew of about five Patrick O'Brian novels. It was very good but not great. Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin were excellent as was Max Pirkis as Midshipman Lord William Blakeney.
I had better quit reading and start watching movies, I am behind by the hundreds.
Makes me feel out of touch, but maybe everybody does, at least I hope so.
So many movies. Initial thoughts: I like "Mullholland Drive" a lot but I'm surprised so many others rank it so high. This is likely because David Lynch just died.
I love "Synecdoche New York" and I think low hundred is fair. I'm shocked that so many people agree with me.
I just saw "Sinners" last night. I liked it but #52 is clearly a recency effect. Will be a cult favorite.
"Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith"-- this is a troll, right? I don't even remember which one of the bad Star Wars movies this is, but I'm confident it sucked.
"The Substance" is super over rated. I understand what it's supposed to be about but the deal the actress makes in it is so obviously stupid from the beginning that I couldn't care about the rest of the consequences.
"Mean Girls" didn't make the original list? Absurd! It's one of the most important movies of the era. It explains the past decade so well. We may be at long last coming out of the mean girls era. Fetch is happening!
Right. "Mean Girls" would seem like a clear cut candidate for a top comedy of the century.
My idea is that the mid 1970s through approximately the mid 1990s was the "animal house" era and 2000 through at least 2020 was "mean girls" all the way. Everyone agrees with me about mean girls but insist on suggesting other candidates to replace animal house in my thesis. :)
As a teacher I live Mean Girls every day; not that my students are mean to me per se but I have to be cognizant of the social dynamics of the classroom in order to survive
Indeed. I've avoided any contact with young people for precisely this reason.
I liked how in the movie even one of the teachers sheepishly raised his hand to the question about being bullied by the queen bee.
Too true to life. Give it 20 years to be recognized.
Yes, THE SUBSTANCE was highly overrated. I liked the premise, but who likes characters who make obvious dumb mistakes, even if they are dumb actresses?
Yep. How does it benefit her that an entirely other actress is getting the parts? Just because the other actress comes out of her in a painful way? It's not like she became temporarily young. It was another woman.
Yeah, but that ending tho...
Gross, but not scary.
Hilarious, I'd say.
Too much. I prefer my horror movies to have atmospherics more than gore.
I don't remember it.
It's precisely *because* it explains the past decade so well that it's not on the list. The people in charge of the NYT and many of our institutions *are* mean girls, and they don't like having their foibles skewered.
I thought Sith was the best of the prequels. Actually has some oomph to it.
I'm unsure they are sophisticated enough to understand that. More likely they remember themselves as victims of mean girls from high school.
It's a good point! Perhaps both!
Regarding Star Wars, I'd seen the first 2 prequels and found them so lacking that I didn't bother watching Revenge of the Sith. I saw an interview with Camile Paglia where she was gushing about the movie, so I finally got around to watching it.
It's definitely the best of the 3 prequels. The first half is OK (already an improvement over the first two), but the 2nd half is really good. I think it is telling that the closer we get to the original movie narratives, the better the prequels get.
The last half hour or so of Revenge of the Sith is tragic because we know exactly where the story must go. Definitely recommend Sith if you haven't yet seen it.
I'll bet an inspired artist could do a super-edit of the 3 prequels and make a pretty good 2.5 hour movie out of them.
The prequels have actually grown on me. The CGI-heavy cinematography gave a "softer" look which was offputting when they first came out, but I guess I've gotten used to it over the decades?
Rogue One may be the best of them all.
I haven't seen any of the other Star Wars movies or TV shows - maybe I will check out Rogue One, thanks for the suggestion/observation.
I thought the idea and plot outlines of the sequels were pretty good (with a few exceptions- it really pissed me off that Lucas made Anakin a child when he met Obi Wan. It was unnecessary and clearly contradict what Obi Wan said in the original film. People make fun of the political scenes and debates about trade treaties but that was the core of the story and potentially great. It just was incompetently executed in the extreme.
I recall seeing the first one with a friend shortly after moving to the bay area. We were so excited. The opening action sequence was amazing...then two hours of garbage. We left the theater and as our eyes tried to adapt to the daylight we were both slowly working out way out of cognitive dissonance. Wait...did that...suck? No! Couldn't be.
I've definitely scene all the prequels. I find it hard to believe that if I rewatched them I would gain a new appreciation. Isn't Sith the one where Anakin turns to the dark side? That was the whole end goal of the trilogy, a good but flawed character seduced by an evil genius and loses his soul setting up the events of the first three movies.
What amazing potential. How embarrassingly short of that potential it was. We wanted Iago and good acting and instead we got, well I'd like to make a comparison but after all this time isn't Anakin the gold standard for badly acted unearned tragedy?
The third set are so bad they're not even worth ripping a new asshole on. I once saw a video in which someone had spliced together every instance of Don Draper saying "what?". It was like half an hour of Don Draper what? That video is the only needed response to the third sequels.
Borat is a genuinely offensive film. And genuinely hilarious. It speaks a lot to the cultural tone of the 2000s that the critics who bemoaned the besmirching of Kazakhstan were seen as weenies.
I notice that attitudes have changed a lot of recent years. Partially this is Sacha Baron Cohen showing off his grating real personality more over time, but I think in large part the FSU countries were still hilariously obscure, provincial, poor and backwards in 2006. Not so true these days.
The general public has got more used to abrasive Israeli-style humor since 2006, but not so used to on-the-nose Israeli-style emoting (witness Gal Gadot’s unpopularity during the early days of coronavirus).
SB Cohen is a mix of Larry David and Don Rickles.
Rutgers dropout Larry Charles (Borat's director) cut his teeth being third-in-command on Seinfeld, although he and Larry David eventually had a falling out. LC molded the Kramer character as Jerry and George were expies of Jerry and Larry
SBC is reading his audience--back in the 2000s he was cool because he was doing the edgy comedy that appealed to young men in those days, then he had to pivot to making fun of rural people because they hadn't seen HBO yet and he had to claim he was unmasking racism, then he tried to go woke. and predictably became a lot less funny and had zero credibility as probably the most famous politically incorrect comedian in existence.
Hey, I'll always have that time I showed a guy from India Da Fresh Ali G Show while we were both drunk and we laughed almost continuously for 2 hours.
Two unlisted movies worth your time, Steve: Prairie Home Companion and The Founder. The former is a quirky Robert Altman meditation on mortality, music, and humor that ranks among his best; while the latter is a tightly paced and eminently well crafted rise of a tycoon biopic about Ray Kroc starring Michael Keaton
Agree on “Prairie Home Companion”! Plus it’s one of the few movies that genuinely seems to express what it’s like to be an old man.
Yeah it's thoughtful but light fare that doesn't bog itself down with tedious plot. Only now realizing the funny twist that in the movie the show is shut down by heartless FINANCIAL CAPITAL while in real life Kiellor was unpersoned by shrill humorless shitlibs outraged that he committed lese majeste against a woman at NPR
Revenge of the Sith?! The education crisis is way worse than I thought!
The last set of movies was so bad that some post genX fans have retrofitted the idea that the original sequels didn't suck. I looked it up and it was 2005 and I find that hard to believe. I had those categorized as 1990s movies.
"Top Gun: Maverick. Perhaps the great Hollywood movie post-covid and post-George Floyd."
The Air Force knew that only Maverick could drop a MOPS down the chute at Fordo, and kudos to Cruise for stepping up.
Great comment. Not to quibble but, Maverick was a Naval Aviator (US Navy fighter pilot)
Moonlight drops from #6 to #18 on the reader list. I don’t think it would have made the reader top 50 had the NYT not included it on their list first.
I'm glad to see THE PRESTIGE made the top 100. It's Nolan's best film.
I really liked prestige. The one of his thinkers that most made me think.
THE PRESTIGE is one of Nolan's few films where the puzzles he likes so much is embedded in a story that works on its own.
Too often Nolan's work (MEMENTO, INCEPTION, INTERSTELLAR) becomes more puzzle than story. The emotional heart of the film - which is always the characters' story - gets lost or is muddied. THE PRESTIGE is one of Nolan's only films where the puzzle, while quite good on its own terms, doesn't matter as much because the story itself is so inherently interesting that you can forget about the puzzle for a while. You can come back to it later or figure it out on a second viewing. Or, as Michael Caine's closing narration teases, maybe we in the audience don't want to work it out.
With a film like INCEPTION, the puzzle is so prevalent that it blunts the emotional impact of DiCaprio's story. You can't ignore it, not even for a moment. It's puzzle first, story second.
The event driving the narrative is that DiCaprio's wife, played by Marion Cotillard, became so obsessed in her belief that the world she lived in was not real that she killed herself and tried to force her husband to do the same - or so DiCaprio's character believes. Her death happens before the beginning of the film, but it propels everything we see in the story. It haunts DiCaprio. He knows he is responsible for it. She has become a specter in his mind - and a danger to others who share his dreams.
So when the film eventually gets around to showing her death, it should be a powerful scene. DiCaprio certainly plays it that way. But the puzzle has already neutered the scene's emotional impact for the audience. It doesn't hit the way it should. We're too dizzy following the puzzle's twists and turns.
THE PRESTIGE works for me because its puzzle never overwhelms the story at its heart.
Never thought of it that way. You are probably correct. I also remember some character asserting in "Interstellar" that the most powerful force in the universe is love. That's so stupid in the context of a movie with a black hole in it that I'm pretty sure I imagined it.
I like all of Nolan's movies. Even when one doesn't work for me, I usually still find it interesting. I never leave the theater thinking, "well, that was a piece of crap."
But I watch a movie for the story, not to solve a puzzle. So when Nolan's films become more wrapped up in their puzzles than the story, my interest flags.
I don't recall the line in INTERSTELLAR that you mention, but that does sound trite. THE PRESTIGE, on the other hand, has many lines I can never forget.
"Obsession is a young man's game."
"The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special."
"The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything."
"You're familiar with the phrase "man's reach exceeds his grasp"? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his nerve."
"Are you watching closely?"
Just a brilliant movie that not only survives repeated viewings, but improves with them.
My favorite line was Michael Caine something like "I know how he does it. He uses a twin."
Big Lebowski was made in 1998, so I have no favorite movie to contribute to this list. I did like the new Top Gun though, I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't woke. I did like the new Napoleon too, despite making him an awkward sperg. I like the outfits, historical setting, and battle scenes.
I wanted to like the new Napoleon but I failed.
LOT of crappy movies on that list
“Ponyo” was probably my favorite animated movie of the last 25 years.
I would say that top ten or twenty lists are entertaining, top fifty lists are stretching it a bit, and top one hundred lists are too much. But top five hundred lists are like reading the phone book.
"What do you think?"
That for the most part, the divide between commercially successful films vs art house films tend to between the public and the experts. The experts wouldn't be caught dead nominating the LOTR trilogy even on a bad day for anything other than special affects, makeup etc. Certainly not for actual acting performances.
It will be interesting how many of these films make the cut when the poll is taken again at midcentury, 2050.
"Not as good as the 1933 black & white version with Katharine Hepburn"
VERY telling. That Hepburn played the tomboy Jo. In other words, as she was starting out in her film career, the word on the street was that she wasn't perceived as a girly feminine actress. This would change in later years in order for her to make the Alist.
"because Saoirse Ronan is too much of a girly girl to play tomboy Jo"
Hepburn did make a fine Jo.
"e.g., she can’t throw a baseball through a glass window."
Hepburn was a pretty good golfer.
Hepburn's Jo throws baseballs twice (and very well), June Allyson throws one baseball, and Soarsie Ronan, a girl's girl, throwns none.
So basically Ronan is signalling not so subtly to the audience that she's straight. Allyson was 100% straight.
In 1952 film Pat and Mike, Hepburn also plays golf on open course. And she shot very very well (no surprise, as Kate played golf since high school and was a golf champ).
I saw "Casino Royale" and "Master and Commander." "Casino Royale" was a confusing, politically correct mess. M as a woman. Bull shit. You may as well make Moneypenny a transgender. "Master and Commander" was a stew of about five Patrick O'Brian novels. It was very good but not great. Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin were excellent as was Max Pirkis as Midshipman Lord William Blakeney.
Did Ridley Scott's Hannibal make the list? I enjoy that film. It is delightfully absurd.
No, it made neither list