Mike's Lists

Inglorious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino’s audacious approach to the war film refuses to follow any rules and ends up being thoroughly engrossing and original. 

Avatar - Despite its flaws, James Cameron’s sci-fi adventure creates a beautiful, richly detailed world that’s a joy to discover. Along with Tarantino, he reminds us what big-screen movies are all about. 

An Education - The year’s best coming-of-age story. Carey Mulligan’s performance is remarkably mature and Peter Sarsgaard is equally seductive. 

The Informant! - The forgotten comic drama of the year with Matt Damon’s best performance. One of those stories that would make no sense unless it were true. 

Up - Pixar continues to make the most imaginative, surprising and moving stories, CGI or live action. 

The Hurt Locker - Kathryn Bigelow’s emotionally cool look at a slice of the Iraq war is as understated as Tarantino’s war film is operatic. 

Star Trek - J.J. Abrams’ take on a familiar franchise is fast-paced and thoroughly entertaining. 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - The latest entry in the series is darker and more complicated and still engrossing.

Honorable Mentions: The Hangover; (500) Days of Summer; Adventureland; A Single Man; District 9; Anvil, the Story of Anvil; It Might Get Loud; 9; Up in the Air.

These are the movies that have stayed with me. I have watched each of them more than once—some several times—and found something new with each viewing. I hope to watch all of them again.

Gladiator (2000) – Ridley Scott and company reinvent the sword-and-sandal epic by pretending that they were making the first one. Russell Crowe leads a superb ensemble.

Shrek (2001) – Great characters, humor, and plotting. If CGI animation has gotten more detailed and complex, it hasn’t been put in service of a more enjoyable story.

The Road to Perdition (2002) – Gangster picture, character study, period piece, revenge story, and Tom Hanks and Paul Newman at the top of their game.

Munich (2005) – One of Steven Spielberg’s most involving and thought-provoking works. Terrific ensemble working with a difficult story.

Children of Men (2006) – Alfonso Cuaron twists the conventions of dystopian science-fiction into a vision of a grimly believable future, along with subtle and flashy effects

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) – Bollywood goes global in a Dickensian story of brotherly devotion and treachery, love and a nation transforming itself.

Inglorious Basterds (2009) – Quentin Tarantino reinvents the war movie (or recasts it as a spaghetti western), with humor, suspense and originality.

The Harry Potter Movies (2001-2009) – After Sorcerer’s Stone, the following five films have built on the previous works to rework British mythic history from King Arthur to Henry V.

Honorable Mentions: Wall-E, United 93, Training Day, Ocean’s 11, The Station Agent, The Swimming Pool, X-Men, Kill Bill, Michael Clayton.

Click Here to see Max's Favorite Films of the Decade

As usual, Max and I disagree on the overall quality of the year’s movies, and our lists could hardly be more different, but we arrive at the same conclusion.

I thought the year’s most popular picture, The Dark Knight, was too long and had too many endings. Of the more “serious” pictures, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was filled with phony Southern accents. Revolutionary Road is very good but somehow, I couldn’t become as involved with the characters as I needed to be. Clint Eastwood will probably get a Best Actor nomination for his work in Gran Torino but the whole film has problems. The Wrestler is mired in clichés at the end. That said, here are my eight top ten:

8) Iron Man – Everything I want to see in a big summer special effects movie: Good effects, solid story, excellent acting and humor.

7) Bank Job – Based-on-fact heist movie with smarts, humor, grand plot twists and a solid performance by Jason Statham. The year’s sleeper.

6) Burn After Reading – The Coen brothers at their best with the wicked story of half a dozen characters who are in way over their heads. Terrific ensemble led by George Clooney, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt.

5) Frost/Nixon – Frank Langella is going to get an Oscar nomination for his interpretation of Richard Nixon during his first public interrogation after Watergate.

4) Milk – Sean Penn is going to get an Oscar nomination for his interpretation of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official who was murdered in office. Excellent political biopic.

3) The Visitor – Richard Jenkins ought to get an Oscar nomination (and he ought to win) for his interpretation of a widower who finds himself after he meets two immigrants.

2) Wall-E – Admittedly the first half is better than the second, but Wall-E is the animated equivalent of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, a hard-working little guy who falls for a glamorous babe and wins her.

1) Slumdog Millionaire – Danny Boyle’s Dickensian epic about a kid who grows up in the slums of Mumbai and competes on the Indian “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” television show is the year’s best pure crowd-pleaser.

Unlike Max, I found 2007 to be a less than stellar year. Several of the films that made her top-ten list and the lists of most other critics and reviewers—Atonement, Into the Wild, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men—simply didn’t work for me. But I strongly recommend that you read her list of Underrated Films of 2007. Print a copy and stick it on the refrigerator for reference when the titles come out on DVD.

These are my seven top-ten theatrical releases:

7. Hairspray - Pound for pound, to use an apt metaphor, the adaptation of the Broadway adaptation of John Waters’ original is the most enjoyable movie I saw all year. I smiled a lot. Watching John Travolta and Christopher Walken dance together is worth the price of a ticket or a DVD all by itself.

6. Zodiac - O.K., after Fight Club, I’m now convinced that David Fincher is the real deal. Instead of focusing on the bloody details of the famous San Francisco murders, he’s interested in the way that people become obsessed and what that obsession does to them. He sticks closely to the facts and arrives at exactly the right ending.

5. Juno - The stars are perfectly aligned for young Ellen Page, writer Cody Diablo and director Jason Reitman in an intelligent, funny story of a pregnant teen, her family and an adoptive couple. What could have been an exercise in stereotypes is bracingly original all the way through.

4. Lars and the Real Girl - The premise—shy guy buys an anatomically correct sex doll and calls her his girlfriend—sounds creepy, but the filmmakers turn it into a genuinely sweet, slightly Woebegonian story with superb performances from Ryan Gosling and Emily Mortimer as his understanding sister-in-law.

3. Charlie Wilson’s War - Three stars—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman—at the top of their game ought to be enough to separate this comedy from the pool of contemporary war movies that nobody’s going to see. It’s bright, sharp, sexy and the office scene is a brilliant set-piece.

2. Lust, Caution - The intense sexual scenes have earned Ang Lee’s film an NC-17 rating, but at heart, it’s a carefully wrought spy tale in the John LeCarré mold. Stars Tony Leung and Tang Wei are letter perfect as lovers in occupied China during World War II.

1. Michael Clayton - A multi-million dollar product liability case drives one lawyer (Tom Wilkinson) insane and forces another (George Clooney) to question everything about his life. Complicated in all the right ways with brilliant dialog, legitimate surprises and great characters. Best film of the year.

Here are my seven top-ten DVDs:

7.  6. Payback: Straight Up (1999) Apocalypto - (2006) Two from Mel Gibson. If you can put aside the recent craziness surrounding Mr. Mel, you’ll find his pre-Columbian adventure, with subtitled Mayan dialog to be weirdly fascinating. The director’s cut of Brian Helgeland’s neo-noir that stars Gibson is radically different and much darker than the 1999 theatrical release. Of particular interest for fans of the Lee Marvin cult hit Point Blank which is based on the same Donald Westlake novel.

5.Seraphim Falls - (2006) Though it was eclipsed at the box office by 3:10 to Yuma, this post-Civil War Western is almost as much fun… O.K., it’s grim bloody fun but Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan are terrific in an extended chase across a landscape that ranges from snowy mountains to desert wilderness.

4. That Thing You Do - (1996) The director’s cut of Tom Hanks’ debut behind the camera adds some very nice bits that were cut from the theatrical release (including a wonderful little scene with Howie Long). The period details of the mid-‘60s are spot-on and it will take you weeks to get that catchy theme song out of your head.

3. The Lives of Others - (2006) Last year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar winner may not sound like a crowd-pleaser. It’s about East German secret police surveillance, but if you give it a try, you’ll find an involving story of political, artistic and sexual intrigue.

2. Blade Runner - (1982, 1992, 2007) The four-disc set contains four different versions of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi noir along with two discs of supplemental stuff. Is the film itself worth all the hoop-la? Absolutely. Take another look.

1.The Lookout - (2007) Scott Frank’s off-beat Midwestern mystery is equal parts caper flick and character study with a fine sense of place. Young Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels (who probably won’t get the Supporting Actor nomination he deserves) make unusual characters seem completely believable.

(*in no particular order)

National Lampoon’s Animal House – American cinema simply begins and ends right here.

Cool Hand Luke – The young Paul Newman’s best.

Meatballs – Has Bill Murray ever been wilder, crazier and funnier? No, not really.

Chinatown – “It’s just Chinatown , Jake.”

The Big Lebowski – On the third viewing, it makes sense and it’s still hilarious.

The Third Man – Maybe the best ending ever.

The Wizard of Oz – “Who put the Hot in Hottentot; whadda they got that we ain’t got?”

Amarcord – My favorite Fellini. My favorite Rota score.

North by Northwest – Perhaps Hitchcock’s most polished thriller.

Run, Lola, Run – Just when you think you understand how movies work, one comes along that destroys all of your assumptions.

Breaker Morant – A courtroom drama that exposes the moral complexities of modern war and what it does to the men who fight it.

Kieslowski’s Three Colors (Red, White, Blue) – My favorite European “art” movies. Time to watch them again.

The Blues Brothers – The last great anarchic comedy.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – One of the great pop epics.

The Wild Bunch – The movie that defines cinematic action.

Goldfinger – Best Bond. Best Connery.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – Perhaps the single most enjoyable movie ever.

Blade Runner – Ridley Scott’s vision of a weird future hasn’t faded.

The Road Warrior – No computer effects, just some of the best kick-butt driving scenes ever.

The Best Years of Our Lives – No movie has ever described the joys and difficulties of coming home from war any better.

Godfather I & II – About as good as it gets.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail – From the opening credits, maybe the funniest movie.

Monty Python and the Meaning of Life – Not as popular as Grail but just as funny and maybe more ambitious.

Shrek – Near perfect combination of technology, humor, characters and music.

Glory – The best Civil War film. Ever. I always cry at the end.

King of the Hill – The “lost” Steven Soderbergh film about growing up in St. Louis in the Great Depression.

Dirty Harry – Created the modern cop movie.

The Verdict – The middle-aged Paul Newman’s best.

One Froggy Evening – Chuck Jones’ great cartoon about the singing frog. At age 5, I realized its essential truth about the human condition.

Medium Cool – All the madness of the 1960s captured as fiction during the 1968 Democratic convention.

Dr. Strangelove – For those of us who grew up with the bomb, this comedy says it all.

Casablanca – “I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “There are no waters in Casablanca.” “I was misinformed.”

Die Hard – Big budget Hollywood escapism at its very best.

Bullitt – Great cars and Steve McQueen at his very coolest.

Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back – You know, they could’ve just stopped there.

The Great Escape – The next time I watch it, Steve McQueen will make it over the fence on that bike.

Charade – Great plot, great humor, great supporting cast. Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in the prime.

Night of the Hunter – More a black and white dream than a conventional movie.

Breaking Away – Family, friends and that strange summer after you graduate from high school.

Breaking Away
Pleasantville
American Graffitti
October Sky
Dick
The Wind and the Lion
Roxanne
Harvey
Barbershop

All Quiet On the Western Front (1930)

Gunga Din (1939)

The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)

Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Battleground (1949)

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Fires On the Plain (1959)

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Zulu (1964)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Cross of Iron (1976)

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

The Big Red One (1980)

Das Boot (1981)

Platoon (1986)

Hope and Glory (1987)
Glory (1989)

The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989)

When Trumpets Fade (1998)

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

1. Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2
2. Shrek
3. Amores Perros

4. The Station Agent
5. Road to Perdition
6. Million Dollar Baby

---

Ghost World
If...
October Sky
Say Anything
The Year My Voice Broke

Sean Connery
Harrison Ford
Julia Roberts
Julie Andrews
Tom Hanks
Elizabeth Taylor

Humphrey Bogart
Jimmy Stewart
Audrey Hepburn
John Wayne
Henry Fonda
Bette Davis

Steve McQueen
James Cagney
Peter Sellers
Burt Lancaster
Charlie Chaplin