Ten Favourite Films

I've been doing some useful procrastination and have been thinking again about best/favourite films. Last time I made a list of my top ten was about two years ago, and I've seen and re-seen a lot of movies since then. It's rather arbitrary to choose my ten favourites, and the list changes frequently depending on what is fresh in my mind and what mood I'm in. The top three have been the same for a long time, but their relative position changes frequently.

Here is the list, with some comments:

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

Absolutely the funniest film ever made, and gets funnier and richer every time I see it. It is probably the most Shakespearean of all films, in that it deals with the green world and relationships, and has sparklingly poetic yet vernacular dialogue. Hawks later said (in the interview with Bogdanovich, I think) that it was a mistake to make all of the characters crazy, but the genius of the film is that it never lets up on the sustained madness.

2. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

I've always loved the rather cheerfully cynical darkness at the heart of this movie, the best ever made about Hollywood. Wilder gets everything right here; no line of dialogue is out of place and it is directed with a carefully light touch that his other movies don't quite attain (other than Ace in the Hole and, sometimes, Some Like It Hot and One Two Three).

3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

This is the opposite of the previous two, probably the most relentlessly serious movie ever made. Looking in detail at the musical score for my 'Stage and Screen' class showed me the intricacy of what Herrmann and Hitchcock were up to. It's a high modernist work in the tradition of Webern or Eliot, a kind of art I usually don't respond to, but somehow Hitchcock has managed to make it extremely emotional at the same time as being intellectually richer than nearly anything else in the history of art. I think it's the music and the colour palate that most contribute to its unique texture.

4. Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)

Truffaut is my most recent obsession, and this is my favourite of his films. This is the second-best movie about movies. Truffaut is a master craftsman and this film critically engages with the idea of craftsmanship.

5. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Anderson needed to be on this list, and at the moment this is the film I'm most responsive to. I don't understand how anyone could think he is emotionally frigid, as this one leaves me a trembling wreck!

6. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Some other Hitchcock films could have been in this spot (Psycho, The Birds, North By Northwest) but at the moment it's the comical side of his personality that wins out. This is his most amusing film, and it helps that Michael Redgrave plays a musicologist.

7. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Like Vertigo another high-modernist vision with a compelling score and expert cinematography. Anderson manages to sustain an edge-of-the-seat interest for a very long time. It's a film that demands undivided attention and gets it.

8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

This is probably as far from the previous film as one can get, a textbook example of the postmodern, but Tarantino does postmodern better than anyone else, and this is his most successful attempt. The long scenes ebb and flow in quite an extraordinary way that has something in common with Monteverdi. I'm not quite sure what, but my response to this is similar to my response to Poppea: Tarantino seems to use the camera to heighten his dialogue much as Monteverdi uses his music to heighten Busenello's poetry.

9. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1980)

This must have the best acting you could ever see on screen; every character is perfectly cast and Bergman, unlike most modern directors, shoots them in such a way that you can see the performances develop throughout a scene. It never feels like it was assembled from different shots, so invisible is the cutting, yet he uses the affordances of editing to make it breathe like a good musical performance. It goes without saying that the five-hour television version is the one to see.

10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)

Of all the recent films I've seen, this one has made the strongest impression. It's the kind of movie that sneaks up on you. After I saw it the first time I wasn't quite sure what to think, but I noticed that I kept thinking about it. Seeing it a second time proved that it's a brilliant masterpiece.

I'm not sure what all of these come together to say. Any ideas?