My Favorite Movies

Just a joy and a revelation of a film. I'm sorry to all of you Denzel lovers out there, but Kevin Spacey deserved that Oscar. Sadly, so did Annette Benig & Chris Cooper. I love the use of color and space to guide your eye and tell the story in this film. And such a heartfelt, life-affirming ending. I love it.

The very definition of epic filmmaking. Charlton Heston has never, ever been better. The emotional intensity is damn-near operatic. But, at the heart of it all, it's a story about Christ. And the chariot race has to be seen to be believed. For you youngsters out there - that really is Charlton Heston riding on a real horse! No CGI! Now THAT is m----rf--king filmmaking!

a masterpiece - hypnotic and transcendent. Contrary to popular rumor, it actually has a very simple plot, but it strives to tell as much of the story as possible purely through imagery. Those who say they were bored by it don't realize that the movie is actually recreating the experience of dreams experienced in REM sleep. It's trying to reach behind your conscious brain to touch something more essential.... if you let it.

I am so angry I didn't get to see this beautiful film on a big screen. One of my all-time favorites.

Noir masterpiece. The look, the sound, the performances, the story. I think it's perfect. Crowe, Spacey, Pierce, and Cromwell all deserve awards FAR more than Kim Basinger.

Flawless. The best Batman film ever made. I love the truth about Ras Al Ghul. Can't wait for the sequel.

The best in the series. Reminds you of what can be accomplished with just models for f/x. This may well be Shatner's best performance of his career. Beyond the spectacle, this is probably the most rich, heartfelt, and layered screenplay in the entire Star Trek series. And by far the most literate - allusions to Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities abound. I was 9 years old when I saw this. I cried. And, even now, the ending monologue gives me goosebumps.

Still one of the scariest movies ever made. I didn't fully appreciate how overtly sexualized the entire design of Giger's monster made it even more viscerally horrifying. Also, check the quality of the sound design - it immediately puts you in the wrong mood. As a director, Ridley Scott is one of my idols.

Groundbreaking f/x, but, as with all great science fiction, it's the ideas that make it worth returning. Plus, Leslie Nielsen as a proto-Capt. Kirk!

The best action movie ever made. Flawless. Real characters, fantastic stunts, great story.

Filmmaking on a whole other level. Genius. Provocative. One of my all-time favorites.

To fully appreciate what an amazing achievement this film is, you need to watch it and pay attention to how often actual cuts occur within scenes. Once you realize that certain sequences have been done all in a single shot - sequences that involve people getting into and out of cars that drive, stop, reverse, crash, and stop,etc., or sequences that involve running through blocks of urban battlefields - and can grasp that every single thing captured during those long single takes had to be staged, rehearsed, timed, and then reset & repeated until it is executed flawlessly, and that some of those scenes incorporate CGI elements that must also blend seemlessly into the moving steadicam shots, AND, after all of that technical wizardry, that it's still a story rooted in the very basics of humanity, i.e. fertility and the survival of the species, as it plays out among simple individuals......

It's criminal that this film didn't even get nominated for Best Picture.

Not even a guilty pleasure. Just a straight forward vampire movie, executed to perfection. Stephen Geoffrey's really gives Roddy McDowell a run for his money in the Best Scenery Chewer department. Lots of fun.

one of my all-time favorites. Also one of the most misunderstood movies of all time. Here's a hint - it's a comedy, and it has far less to do with serial killers than it does with celebrity culture run amok. Scene stealers abound! Downey, Sizemore, Tommy Lee, even Rodney freakin' Dangerfield!

one of my all-time favorites. The defibrillator scene and subsequent blood test scene are pure gold. Carpenter at his best.

Just absolutely classic. Kevin McCarthy's descent into raving paranoia is such a wonderfully guilty pleasure.

My introduction to both Oliver Stone, the craziness of the Kennedy assassination, and, most importantly, the notion that, just because you see it on TV or in a movie and someone calls it "news" doesn't mean that it actually happened. Once again, the average critic of this film misses the point - the reason why Stone went through all the trouble of using the different mediums & film stocks with these conspiri-fied recreations of Deeley Plaza was to show you that, if HE could fake some footage that you can't distinguish from the real thing, why should you believe that the real thing is really the real thing at all? A masterpiece.

I"m really almost speechless about this movie. I really felt like I'd been transported to another world, and had lived there for such a long, engrossing period of time that it was only after leaving the theatre that I remembered "oh yeah, and that whole big thing happened in the beginning.... and that other thing happened, too". I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the first TRULY epic film I've seen placed in a modern setting in years. When I say it makes me think of "Lawrence of Arabia", that's not to make any qualitative judgments, but simply to say that I felt like I LIVED in Gotham City in the same way I felt like I lived in the desert with T.E. Lawrence. So that, in and of itself, is a monumental achievement. And it's achieved not just by the use of IMAX cameras in a richly textured city like Chicago. It's also the result of a script that covered a vast amount of territory, both chronologically and emotionally, while never ever making you stop to look at your watch to see where the time went. It's a totally engrossing STORY, expertly translated into film.

As much as an achievement as Heath Ledger's performance is as the Joker (which it is - he's tremendously good, and totally believable as Batman's equal), I think Christopher Nolan deserves a massive amount of credit for really taking film direction to a whole other level. No one has achieved such artistry in such a commercial film before, to my memory.

Because the experience was so complete and satisfying, I'm barely able separate out individual elements to highlight, like all of the performances, across the board, or the amazing action sequences, and then, finally, the morality play.

I don't know what else to say. I love this movie. The fact that it's a Batman movie is almost irrelevant.

Just a fun, totally surreal trip into the 9th Circle of Hell, otherwise known as Las Vegas. And they hit each of the other 8 circles en route. Don't believe me? Check out the Divine Comedy and see what I mean. But Dante was never this much fun. The cameos - Tim Blake Nelson as a nudist survivalist, John Cho as a man on fire who just wants a smoke, and Emmanuelle Chriqui as the hottest, bow-legged, wheelchair-bound stripper you've ever seen, just to name a few - are absolutely golden. And the visual style is just flawless: I love the way Hue loves to mix up deep & flat space as we follow John's decent into his own personal nightmare. That said, it's the old pro Buscemi and the hot new star Malco who bring it all home. Playing against type, Romany Malco is perfect as the aloof, tightly wound Virgil, who you KNOW is holding out on you and John but you can never quite figure out where he's coming from. The fact that we KNOW he's sitting on so much energy just makes his refusal to use it that much more compelling. And what can be said about Steve Buscemi that hasn't been said before? You feel his desperation, his inadequacy, his fear, his hunger - he's an everyman who uncovers all of our innate smallness in a way that makes us follow and enjoy instead of recoil and judge. Sarah Silverman is just the batshit crazy icing on the smiley-face cake. Definitely worth the trip.

Hitchcock's masterpiece. Hypnotic, and haunting, and beautiful. I saw this when I was 14, and I've had a crush on Kim Novak ever since.

When I was in film school, my instructor said that this movie bored him because, as a Yale grad from a rich eastern family, he had lived that life of affluent aimlessness like Jude Law's character, so it bored him. I said, as a Princeton grad from a working class family, I totally identified with my namesake Matt Damon's desire to cave in the skulls of rich spoiled fucks like Dickie Greenleaf and steal the lives they clearly took for granted.

Am I oversharing? :-)

It's a masterpiece. Amazing cast (especially Cate Blanchett) and a seemlessly integrated, heartbreaking score by Gabriel Yared.