90. Oldboy – Park Chan Wook
The midsection of Park’s
Vengeance Trilogy is embedded in our zeitgeist as a shockingly visceral cult
classic, and while the Korean New Wave has produced better films, none have
entered the cultural conscience quite like Oh Dae-Su’s relentless pursuit of
retribution. Choi Min-Sik’s earthquake of a performance is quixotic,
unsettlingly mad, and often overpowering, but far more nuanced than credited.
His incontrovertible malice is implored through shrieks of aggression but it’s
the wearied stares and grimaces in Oldboy’s
quieter moments which unravel an unequivocally nihilistic despair, of a man
who’s lost everything and whose only purpose is suffering. Wook intelligently conveys
the perverse thrill of highly stylised violence; his concurrent black humour
and that hallway fight single-take
particularly, but its final half-hour undermines its own mantra, with a
jaw-dropping reveal that stretches plausibility but never feels cheap, only
gut-wrenching. In the end, even if all you have is suffering to afflict,
suffering can still be afflicted. Oldboy is
a fascinating contradiction; slick, equable, and entertaining, but uncompromising,
subversive, and devastating.
89. When Harry Met Sally – Rob
Reiner
A good romantic-comedy is an
elaborate concoction, something delicately balanced between kitchen-sink
cynicism and idealistic fantasy. A good romantic-comedy understands that there
needs to be a darkness, an otherness ineffably centred on loneliness, for it’s
only in the bleakest recesses of this natural isolation where love can evolve.
Love is an arbitrary human construct, a concept derived from the necessity to
define an emotional attachment more profoundly absolute than lust. A good-romantic
comedy sells you that love is more than that. That love is neither quantifiable
nor qualitative nor physiological. A good romantic-comedy arouses you with the
belief that love is omnipotent and omniscient and almighty. When Harry Met Sally is a good
romantic-comedy. A very, very good-romantic comedy. In When Harry Met Sally, you believe that love is everything. It is
funny, and warm, and real; but above all else, it solidifies our most treasured
concept as something definitive, attainable and maybe, just maybe, inevitable.
88. 12 Angry Men – Sidney Lumet
12 Angry Men embodies that most elusive of things; a genuinely
perfect slice of cinema. What’s equally impressive is how well it stands up
even after Amy Schumer’s outstanding parody for her eponymous sketch show. Henry
Fonda’s solitary hero for justice, liberty, equality and other such American
jingoisms is triumphant, a potential landmine so easy to overwrite and
overplay, but Fonda’s personification is amazingly understated, a restrained
yet impassioned mouthpiece for integrity restricted by weariness yet exulted by
ardent defiance against the incompetence of self-possession. Fonda’s not alone,
with each of the twelve cleanly defined and developed. Each as soulful as they
are angry, as good as they are bad. It’s a claustrophobic, unsettling courtroom
thriller embedded with dislikeable characters and ethically questionable
decisions; far more complex and indeed provocative than its AFI revisionism
would have you believe. It’s taut, moving, distressing and endlessly watchable.
However, for all its underlying thematic complexity it triumphs most greatly as
a basic fable. Like Great Americans Novels such as Of Mice and Men and To Kill a
Mockingbird (more on that later), 12
Angry Men ultimately stands the test of time because of its simple, rigorously
fervent, completely true, moralism.
87. The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford – Andrew Dominik
Sure, its pensive imagery and languorous
pacing divided audiences to the extent of its being unfairly discarded as
purely a ‘critical darling,’ but its elongated title is its only aspect of
pretension. A Western with a brain and a heart, Dominik casts his objective eye
over the nefarious outlaw and the circumstances of his infamous murder. He
smartly precludes from judgement or indictment, and merely tells its story.
Pitt puts in a career-best performance, James’s anti-hero notoriety analogous to
the actor’s own public persona, while Casey Affleck – one of our generation’s most
under-appreciated actors – betrays a character so slimily malevolent with a
strange emulsion of compassion. With a documentarian voiceover establishing its
‘true story’ credentials, coinciding with the naturalistic performances from its
impeccable cast, Assassination would
appear almost journalistic if it weren’t for its lyrical cinematography. Each
shot looks perfectly stressed and placed, stilted in dreamlike browns and
yellows, while its effectively minimalistic score accentuates its exhausted,
gorgeous melancholy. So transfixed by the powerhouse performances and beautiful
framing, you ignore the profundity of James and Ford’s power dynamic, and the
film’s ending catches you completely unawares with how goddamn powerful it is. Assassination is truly poetry in motion,
except that poem might be a drug-addled, downcast Auden work.
86. The Long Good Friday – John
Mackenzie
What’s immediate from the opening
of The Long Good Friday, a sprinting
credits sequence adorned with Francis Monkman’s iconic saxophone driven score, is its propulsive pacing, and it doesn’t
let up for 130 minutes. It’s exhausting watching the underground of mod London collapse
into tacit warfare with a unexpected immediacy and urgency. What’s so
impressive is how sophisticated it all is, as Mackenzie follows Bob Hoskins’ destruction
as closely as those of his lieutenants and footsoldiers. It’s an incredibly
layered film, with exquisite detail applied to the most secondary character and
most seemingly capricious plot point. It’s a remarkable technical as well as
artistic achievement, a masterpiece of screenplay execution, that such an
ambitious project is pulled off without an obvious hitch. Helen Mirren is
incredible, and incredibly attractive, as Hoskins’s not-so-empty-headed trophy
wife, but this is inescapably Hoskins’s film. Simmering with vindictive fury,
his Ozymandias of a mob boss is simultaneously terrifying, charismatic and
somehow sympathetic, his physical and psychological degradation staggering to
behold as his crime kingdom is systematically and emphatically dismantled in
front of his eyes. A monolithic depiction of a crumbling empire, The Long Good Friday is without a shadow
of a doubt the greatest British gangster film of all-time.
85. Kind Hearts and Coronets –
Robert Hamer
Paraphrasing a Tennyson couplet, ‘Kind
hearts are more than coronets/And simple faith than Norman blood,’ this Ealing
gem does that most British of things; the mutual celebration and lampooning of
traditional British values. The plot is essentially rudimentary – the suave
working class Louis, played by Dennis
Price, murders the eight highborn relations standing between him and the venerable
position of Duke of Chalfont – but there’s so much more here than that premise
belies. In framing Britain’s landed aristocracy and all their amicable naivety with
Louis’s blue-collar realism, underscores the significance of his conquest. It
makes the case both for and against a regimented class system with alarming clarity
and wit. But concentrating on its social commentary threatens to discount just
how hilarious and clever it is. The dialogue is naturally crackling, the
slapstick hits the mark every time, and nonstop subversions of its own concept
is amazing. And then of course you have Alec Guiness playing the entire D’Ascoyne
family which spans both sexes and three generations, with utter aplomb. One of the
strongest cases to be made that Guiness is Britain’s finest ever actor, is
right here. Twistedly dark, bleakly funny, and ever so ruddy, bloody, Britishly
smart, Kind Hearts and Coronets is deservedly
lauded as the crown jewel in the diamond crown of Ealing studies. Although I
doubt there’ll be another film anytime soon about a methodical serial killer to
receive a U rating.
84. Lilya-4-Ever – Lukas Moodysson
Lilya-4-Ever is a journey into the deepest, darkest recesses of
human deplorability. After her mother abandons her to move to the US, the
innocent, benevolent Lilya is corrupted by the remorseless inhumanity of the
Soviet Union’s human trafficking operation. Lilya is untainted purity, in one
of the filthiest orifices in recorded history. Saying any more would ruin its
effect, as for all its austerity, it remains a film that is a necessary
experience. Mooydsson, following on from his bittersweet dramedy Together, is unflinching in his
presentation of Lilya’s unspeakable transformation, from her scrawling hopeful
graffiti in her grimy apartment to the film’s traumatic ending. As dark as it
is, it’s Moodysson’s eye for the evanescent hopefulness of the human spirit
with endures, the idea that deeply heartfelt notion that even at our worst we
can persist with the dream of approaching happiness and peace. This is
difficult, stressful viewing, but absolutely essential and important, the
sickening awakening to what we’re capable of. Think Heart of Darkness with less trippy existentialism, more charcoal black
reality.
83. M – Fritz Lang
In the pantheon of great
contributors to the evolution of film, alongside the likes of Griffith and
Melies, someone rarely mentioned for some inexplicable reason is Fritz Lang.
The German director made the first great Science Fiction film in Metropolis and also, quite arguably, the
first great thriller in 1931’s M.
Peter Lorre, who later became a Hollywood darling in his comic relief roles in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon due to his distinctive bug-eyes and otherworldly
voice, stars as the sinister child-killer who forces the entirety of interwar
Berlin on red alert, who is discovered and branded with a bright red ‘M’ to
evince his status as a murderer during his chase. Following the accidental
prescience of Metropolis’s fascistic
dystopia, M portrays a community
enraptured in paranoia and terror, as enabled by the predatory newspapers and
barely held in check by the self-absorbed local politicians. It’s one of the
films where each frame is carefully aligned and portends individual
significance, an elaborate, masterful artwork which still holds up today. Its
final half hour meditates on capital punishment, justice and the nature of evil
in such a sophisticated manner it’s no wonder, if slightly ironic, that
Goebbels fell in love with Lang’s work (until he actually understood Metropolis).
82. Raising Arizona – The Coen
Brothers
The first of a… fair few Coen
brothers films to make the list, Raising
Arizona was their first masterpiece, an indestructibly light tale of
silliness and family. It’s manic, peculiar and endlessly loveable, and institutes
that Coenesque tone of ethereal fairytale-like mythos in an alternate universe
to our own. It firmly established the brothers’ skill with creating memorable
minor characters; that amazing gas-station vendor for instance, as well as
their idiosyncratic camerawork and editing (that amazing zoom-in to Mrs Arizona’s
scream). It’s one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen, honestly laugh a
minute, but it’s the size of its heart which makes it customary regular viewing.
It’s about the most adorable, lovely couple desperate to share their love with
a child, and a couple stupid enough to steal one once they realise that their
love is too immense to share just between the two of them. It’s about the
strength of family, the durability of familial and romantic love, and the joys
of parenthood. That ending, where Hi dreams that he and Ed achieve the family
they always desired, is possibly the most touching I’ve seen, even ending on a
killer gag, and I shed tears everywhere.
81. The Social Network – David Fincher
Trust David Fincher to turn a
juicy if unexceptional rise-to-fortune story about a software company into one
of the most compelling dramas of the last decade. He does this, ably aided by
Aaron Sorkin’s magnificent screenplay, through a dynamic non-chronological narrative
structure, razor-sharp dialogue, and flawless presentation. Jesse Eisenberg plays
the dickhead genius Zuckerberg to frightening perfection, with Arnie Hammer and
Andrew Garfield also giving solid accounts for themselves, but this is really
Fincher’s opus. The montage of debauchery in the Harvard fraternity house, the
Henley Regatta boatrace to Trent Reznor’s update ‘In The Hall of the Mountain
King’, the Scorsese-lite club scene with Timberlake’s sleazy consultant; these
are all some of the finest sequences filmed in years. There are precepts of the
debilitation of friendship, the corrupting monopoly of corporatism, the rise to
prominence of software engineers as the new emperors of entrepreneurship, but
above all else The Social Network exists
as an enormously entertaining, fiercely intelligent document of one of the most
bizarre situations of modern times. Conclusive proof that Fincher is our
generation’s Kubrick, the talent whose perfectionism is only matched by his eye
for a knockout story.
