The Best Movie Ever Made....Period!!!

Quick Takes

The popular British publication Halliwell's has officially published its list of the 1,000 (!) best films ever made, culled from submissions from filmmakers and critics alike. Here are the top 50 titles (just click on any of them for a DVDFile review!).

1. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu)

2. La Regle du Jeu (Jean Renoir)

3. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)

4. The Godfather Trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola)

5. Shichinin no Samurai (Akira Kurusawa)

6. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

7. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)

8. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

9. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini)

11. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ( Stanley Kubrick)

12. Singin' in the Rain ( Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

13. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)

14. The Searchers (John Ford)

15. Det Sjunde Inseglet (Ingmar Bergman)

16. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick)

17. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder)

18. The Third Man (Carol Reed)

19. The Apu Trilogy (Satyajit Ray)

20. Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carne)

21. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel)

22. Andrey Rublyov (Andrei Tarkovsky)

23. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

24. Viridiana (Luis Bunuel)

25. Toy Story (John Lasseter)

26. Rashomon (Akira Kurusawa)

27. Smultronstallet (Ingmar Bergman)

28. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)

29. Sunrise : A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau)

30. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson)

31. 2001: A Space Odyssey ( Stanley Kubrick)

32. La Battaglia di Algeri (Gillo Pontecorvo)

33. Alexandr Nevskiy (Sergei Eisenstein)

34. Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel)

35. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

36. GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese)

37. Tristana (Luis Bunuel)

38. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)

39. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier)

40. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges)

41. Frankenstein (James Whale)

42. Bronenosets Potyomkin (Sergei Eisenstein)

43. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)

44. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)

45. Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard)

46. Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut)

47. A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard)

48. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)

49. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)

50. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog)

What do you think?

It's a pretty good list, although I think "Sunset Boulevard" is more boring than people are willing to admit. "Camp" is okay if it's also amusing.

"Wings of Desire" should have been mentioned earlier. It's also definitely one you need to try and see in a theatre at a midnight showing or something. Not on DVD.

Going back to the black and white era, a few others worth mentioning are "On The Waterfront," "White Heat," and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

Fargo

American Beauty

The Piano

Pulp Fiction

Dirty Filthy Love (you have to see this)

Hotel Rwanda

The Usual Suspects

The Grifters

Get Shorty

Clockwork Orange

Oh heck, one more, 'cause I rock (thanks!):

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Roger Ebert / March 19, 2000

In the waning days of World War II, American bombers drop napalm canisters on Japanese cities, creating fire storms. These bombs, longer than a tin can but about as big around, fall to earth trailing cloth tails that flutter behind them; they are almost a beautiful sight. After they hit, there is a moment's silence, and then they detonate, spraying their surroundings with flames. In a Japanese residential neighborhood, made of flimsy wood and paper houses, there is no way to fight the fires.

"Grave of the Fireflies" (1988) is an animated film telling the story of two children from the port city of Kobe, made homeless by the bombs. Seita is a young teenager, and his sister Setsuko is about 5. Their father is serving in the Japanese navy, and their mother is a bomb victim; Seita kneels beside her body, covered with burns, in an emergency hospital. Their home, neighbors, schools are all gone. For a time an aunt takes them in, but she's cruel about the need to feed them, and eventually Seita finds a hillside cave where they can live. He does what he can to find food, and to answer Setsuko's questions about their parents. The first shot of the film shows Seita dead in a subway station, and so we can guess Setsuko's fate; we are accompanied through flashbacks by the boy's spirit.

"Grave of the Fireflies" is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation. Since the earliest days, most animated films have been "cartoons" for children and families. Recent animated features such as "The Lion King," "Princess Mononoke" and "The Iron Giant" have touched on more serious themes, and the "Toy Story" movies and classics like "Bambi" have had moments that moved some audience members to tears. But these films exist within safe confines; they inspire tears, but not grief. "Grave of the Fireflies" is a powerful dramatic film that happens to be animated, and I know what the critic Ernest Rister means when he compares it to "Schindler's List" and says, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."

It tells a simple story of survival. The boy and his sister must find a place to stay, and food to eat. In wartime their relatives are not kind or generous, and after their aunt sells their mother's kimonos for rice, she keeps a lot of the rice for herself. Eventually, Seita realizes it is time to leave. He has some money and can buy food--but soon there is no food to buy. His sister grows weaker. Their story is told not as melodrama, but simply, directly, in the neorealist tradition. And there is time for silence in it. One of the film's greatest gifts is its patience; shots are held so we can think about them, characters are glimpsed in private moments, atmosphere and nature are given time to establish themselves.

Japanese poets use "pillow words" that are halfway between pauses and punctuation, and the great director Yasujiro Ozu uses "pillow shots"--a detail from nature, say, to separate two scenes. "Grave of the Fireflies" uses them, too. Its visuals create a kind of poetry. There are moments of quick action, as when the bombs rain down and terrified people fill the streets, but this film doesn't exploit action; it meditates on its consequences.

The film was directed by Isao Takahata, who is associated with the famous Ghibli Studio, source of the greatest Japanese animation. His colleague there is Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro"). His films are not usually this serious, but "Grave of the Fireflies" is in a category by itself. It's based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Nosaka Akiyuki--who was a boy at the time of the firebombs, whose sister did die of hunger and whose life has been shadowed by guilt.

The book is well-known in Japan, and might easily have inspired a live-action film. It isn't the typical material of animation. But for "Grave of the Fireflies," I think animation was the right choice. Live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action. Animation allows Takahata to concentrate on the essence of the story, and the lack of visual realism in his animated characters allows our imagination more play; freed from the literal fact of real actors, we can more easily merge the characters with our own associations.

Hollywood animation has been pursuing the ideal of "realistic animation" for decades, even though that's an oxymoron. People who are drawn do not look like people who are photographed. They're more stylized, more obviously symbolic, and (as Disney discovered in painstaking experiments) their movements can be exaggerated to communicate mood through body language. "Grave of the Fireflies" doesn't attempt even the realism of "The Lion King" or "Princess Mononoke," but paradoxically it is the most realistic animated film I've ever seen--in feeling.

The locations and backgrounds are drawn in a style owing something to the 18th century Japanese artist Hiroshige and his modern disciple Herge (the creator of Tin Tin). There is great beauty in them--not cartoon beauty, but evocative landscape drawing, put through the filter of animated style. The characters are typical of much modern Japanese animation, with their enormous eyes, childlike bodies and features of great plasticity (mouths are tiny when closed, but enormous when opened in a child's cry--we even see Setsuko's tonsils). This film proves, if it needs proving, that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality, but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences are about ideas, not experiences.

There are individual moments of great beauty. One involves a night when the children catch fireflies and use them to illuminate their cave. The next day, Seita finds his little sister carefully burying the dead insects--as she imagines her mother was buried. There is another sequence in which the girl prepares "dinner" for her brother by using mud to make "rice balls" and other imaginary delicacies. And note the timing and the use of silence in a sequence where they find a dead body on the beach, and then more bombers appear far away in the sky.

Rister singles out another shot: "There's a moment where the boy Seita traps an air bubble with a wash rag, submerges it, and then releases it into his sister Setsuko's delighted face--and that's when I knew I was watching something special."

There are ancient Japanese cultural currents flowing beneath the surface of "Grave of the Fireflies," and they're explained by critic Dennis H. Fukushima Jr., who finds the story's origins in the tradition of double-suicide plays. It is not that Seita and Setsuko commit suicide overtly, but that life wears away their will to live. He also draws a parallel between their sheltering cave and hillside tombs.

Fukushima cites an interview with the author, Akiyuki: "Having been the sole survivor, he felt guilty for the death of his sister. While scrounging for food, he had often fed himself first, and his sister second. Her undeniable cause of death was hunger, and it was a sad fact that would haunt Nosaka for years. It prompted him to write about the experience, in hopes of purging the demons tormenting him."

Because it is animated and from Japan, "Grave of the Fireflies" has been little seen. When anime fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seriously. Now that it's available on DVD with a choice of subtitles or English dubbing, maybe it will find the attention it deserves. Yes, it's a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.

thanks for the recommendation, but leave it to us to look up the review on imdb

you probably just killed this thread

On foreign films . . .

Folks have mentioned City of God. I agree. Folks have not mentioned Z or Battle of Algiers. Both are good and both are tragically relevant.

This is the summer of the Criterion Collection for me. My local movie store has a wall of the collection and every few days i check out a new one.

check criterioncollection.com for some in depth info on a lot of the movies listed here.

Dirty Pretty Things..small independent british film..

great film

Mentioning some movies not listed before...

Drama - Dangerous Liaisons

War - We Were Soldiers

Comedy - Weird Science, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Action - Hunt for Red October

Thriller - One Hour Photo

Cult - Wild at Heart, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Foreign - La Femme Nikita

Cheesy - Logan's Run

Hotel Rwanda

-Soup

Okay here's my 10 cents.

In no particular order.

Breaking Away

Slap shot

Cool Hand Luke

Biloxi? Blues

Rushmore

Election

Caddy Shack

Clifford

Brain Candy

A river runs trough something

Gattica

Endurance

I heart huckabees

Wet Hot American Summer

Platoon

Empire Strikes Back

American Beauty eh

Tiger Land

Apparently not.

imdb is a piss poor place to get reviews. Use

www.mrqe.com

instead and it will link you to virtually every online movie review for any movie you choose. This is the Movie Review Query Engine.

And you can great info on the Criterion Collection (I have like 45 of them now) at

www.criterionco.com

.

City of God

True Romance

Godfather I and II

Memento

The Greatest Movie of all time is non other than Mighty Ducks 2. Watching them come together under Coach Bombay and upset Iceland with Wolf the Dentist was out of control.

D.E.B.S.

Its jordana brewster and sara foster making out! If that doesn't qualify as the best movie ever... well then I don't want to be right.

Yet to be mentioned...How Green Was My Valley, Pirates of the Carribean, The Natural, What's Up Doc, Spaceballs, Duck Soup

Surfs up, Dude wrote:

Point Break. It combines three legends of unintentional comedy in their prime: Patrick Swazey, Keanu Reeves, and Gary Busey in his greatest role. The only movie that comes close to this in Unintentional comedy is Top Gun. Also the chance of seeing this movie being played on TBS or TNT at any given time is like 75%. "Utah! Give me two!"

Swazey's greatest role in terms of unintentional comedy was in the all time classic: "Roadhouse". Unbeatable for laughs. How they kept straight faces during production is beyond me.

People who like "The Natural" should read the book by Bernard Malamud. It's not long. It's a very different, much darker view of things than is in the film and has a much different resolution.

One very good baseball movie not mentioned is "Bang The Drum Slowly."

The best sports movie of all-time could be "Downhill Racer."

Amen on "Bang the Drum"