80. A Clockwork Orange – Stanley
Kubrick
I may (greatly) prefer the novel’s
ending, but there’s no doubt that the film’s bleakly euphoric conclusion befits
the gleeful, exuberant malignance which populates one of Kubrick’s most
intensely divisive classics. Whereas Burgess’s text suggested Alex’s mania was
based in his adolescence, Kubrick ignores the perverse Bildungsroman subtext in favour of unleashing the id as something intemperate and rampant. McDowell’s
Alex is primitive, his sense of modern propriety and decency castrated, but he
is just as culpable as his brutally misunderstanding society who try to beat
out his bastard. Kubrick takes aim at everyone; Alex, the continuing and
antiquated objectivism of mental health treatment, and the viewer’s proclivity
for voyeurism; we are, in spite of the inhospitably vile imagery, beguiled. Its
final power is in twisting our perception of chronic violence into one of near
ambivalence, a thought as horrifying and interesting as Kubrick’s opus itself.
79. A Matter of Life and Death –
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
The genius of Powell and
Pressburger’s work is their ability to seamlessly synthesise cinema’s lightness
and darkness; the quaintly uplifting Canterbury
Tale is deftly populated with some brooding anti-war sentiment, while the
intensely psychosexual Black Narcissus avoids
utter tragedy through the heartening morality of its heroine. Their finest film is yet to come on this list, but this ardent theme of ambiguity is
emphatically portrayed in A Matter of
Life and Death. Peter should have died in a plane crash during World War
Two, but his body is missed in the English Channel fog by an angel, so he goes
on living and falls in love with June. The angel returns to plea for his return
to heaven as it’s what is proper, but Peter fights for an appeal for a second
chance at life. A courtroom drama of the highest stakes on the highest
metaphysical plane, as its semi-pun title infers. Niven is charming, Novak
divine, and the entire film is simmering over with wit, imagination and
sophistication. However, the possibility that Peter’s visions are disseminated by PTSD
and war guilt is subtly embedded into A
Matter’s fibre, a real gut punch when it inescapably dawns on you just as everything
seems too benign. Not only is it a triumphant romance-fantasy, but a truly
harrowing examination of how war portrays life as arbitrary and precipitous to
the point of complete futility and maybe insanity.
78. Annie Hall – Woody Allen
It’s widely known that Annie Hall was a rewrite away from being
a disaster, such was the mess of Allen’s initial ‘final’ draft. It was
dramatically refocussed, the Love and
Death sketchy, kaleidoscopic style aborted for a more streamlined love
story; that’s not to say Annie Hall’s narrative
structure is basic, it’s still chronologically jumbled as Allen jumps from his
protagonist’s fondest memories of his relationship with the eponymous Annie to
moments of self-loathing and neurotic introspection. It’s not an indictment of
the modern relationship, nor is it a celebration. It’s a direct, nuanced
exploration of lust, love, loneliness and intimacy that’s almost never been
bettered. That’s not to say it isn’t funny – it’s packed full of excellent
one-liners ('that’s okay, we can walk to the sidewalk from here') and colourful
sight gags – but there’s just so much more to it than pretty much any other
rom-com. Naturally, the film is centralised by Diane Keaton’s Annie herself. As
intelligent and effervescent as she is insecure and occasionally vain, she is
the epicentre, as rounded and wonderful and flawed a person as you’ll encounter
in real life. I once read an essay arguing her to be the best character in film
history. There are times when I find it difficult to disagree.
77. Sunset Boulevard – Billy
Wilder
There is a splendid irony in
Hollywood’s exalted hero making the best anti-Hollywood film of all-time,
especially one as transparently savage as Sunset
Boulevard. Because, truly, this is about as un-subtle as they come. Wilder
sublimates a domestic drama with a tsunami of Noir motifs; the drenchly moody
cinematography; the wisecracking, retrospective voiceover; and then Gloria
Swanson as Norma Desmond herself, not so much femme fatale as Queen Fatale.
Because, like all Noirs, there is a mystery here, the mystery of meaning. It
cannot be overstated how significant her performance is, a send-up of
Hollywood’s innate, problematic artifice. Of all the girls from small-town
America who dreamed of becoming a star, Norma succeeded, and is still
monstrously unhappy and polluted by delusion. The acting is towering, the
script tightly wound and searing, the score atmospherically nailed to the mast.
The concept of celebrity is the biggest lie in pop-culture, and never has it been
as profoundly expressed as it is here. It is a film about the perils of egoism
and subsequent madness, pontificating that the greatest ego and madness of all
is in fact Hollywood’s.
76. Citizen Kane – Orson Welles
Here it is, the film regarded The
Greatest Ever Made by America’s cinema intelligentsia for decade. Hyperbole
eternally surrounds Citizen Kane,
whether in its institutionalised position in cinematic lore, or in the
reactionary opposition to such claims. Trying to come to terms with some objective
analysis of its actual quality is like trying to find a piece of hay in a
needle stack. Painful. Very painful. But, it is very good. Magnificent even,
despite it not being quite my favourite film. Historically, its importance and
influence is colossal, especially in its structure, following the life of one
man from childhood to death with all his glories and demons in two separate
chronological timelines. Welles is oustanding as newspaper magnate Charles
Kane, a man whose concurrent economic growth and ethical degradation
personified the emergent corporatism of America, while his script is equally
strong. Removing it from the context of its colossal legacy, Citizen Kane is exceptionally well-made
and edited, even by today’s standards, and boasts one of the most perfect
endings in the unveiling of Rosebud.
75. Synecdoche New York – Charlie
Kaufman
Pretentious, self-indulgent,
affected. These are all words frequently used to describe Kaufman’s directorial
debut – after previously penning films for (mostly) Spike Jonze classics such
as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation – and they’re all
justifiable. Kaufman openly confesses that his work is indulgent and
solipsistic, but that shouldn’t take anything away from the film itself. The
conceit alone is appallingly ambitious; a disillusioned theatre director
attempts an autobiographical play whose dedication to naturalism sees him
attempt to construct a to-scale New York and for him to play himself in
realtime. It’s metacinema on a whole other plane dealing with love, isolation,
death, politics, exuberance and every conceivable important issue in a sad,
funny, articulate manner. Its final monologue is true, and hurtful, and
inspiring, and simply important. Like Ulysses
and Infinite Jest and Waiting for Godot, Synecdoche New York is the peak of postmodernism; frustrating and
often impermeable, it’s more than worth the investment when it hits you with
something hard and unexpected which no other field of Art could achieve.
74. Mad Max: Fury Road – George
Miller
The most recent film on this
list, Fury Road is a strange medley
of genres. Dystopian Science-Fiction and brutal action film fair enough, but
feminist, egalitarian and environmentalist polemic? Feel-good story of one man’s
redemption? It’s packed full of surprises; the first, and possibly most significant,
is that the protagonist isn’t the title character at all, but Charlize Theron’s
enigmatic Furiosa. Her mission, to reach a green place that no longer exists to
save the innocence of girls which no longer thrives, is impossible. There are
jagged barbs aimed squarely at our own patriarchal arrogance, where our
physical earth collapses and our global society becomes more unequal and
vindictive, and there is so much layered humanity in here, politics aside, that
it’s easily to forget how incomprehensibly exhilarating Fury Road actually is. From the lightning hurricane storm to the
canyon finale, this is relentlessly fraught, tense and riveting. It is the only
occasion I can think of where the expression ‘breath-taking’ is genuinely apt,
and the visuals are apocalyptically lush to boot. In my opinion not so much a
feminist film as a humanitarian one, but even when all its plentiful critiques are stripped bare and it’s thematically naked, it’s simply one of the most vigorously
exciting action movies ever made.
73. Zodiac – David Fincher
Seemingly lost among the catalogue
of serial killer flicks which populated the noughties, it’s possible that Zodiac is one of the most
under-appreciated films of recent years. Following three men, their stories
naturally intertwined, it follows their collective fanatical need to discover
the (real life) identity of San Francisco’s Zodiac killer. Fincher, who’s
rarely been as comfortable or confident as he is here, plays on our preoccupation
with the macabre. Murder is, as Freud’s Death Wish theory illustrates, endlessly
fascinating to us, as it is the forcing of nothingness, a purposeful removal of
all existence, a concept so abstract that we determinedly fixate on it because
our rational minds refuse to understand. This is a grippingly elusive,
impeccably paced mystery, with performances from three effortlessly likable
everymen who fruitlessly sacrifice their everyday lives to chase the most
crimson of red herrings. This is also opportune to use the old cliché; the city
of San Francisco is the real protagonist, its foggy, hazy disposition and
architectural verticality purveying a subliminal sense of constant unease. Suspenseful
and obsessive, Zodiac is impeccably
crafted entertainment – as refined as it is fun – a truly perfect thriller.
72. The Exorcist – William Friedkin
Its special effects may have aged
– though not as poorly as you might think – but the ideas in Friedkin’s
landmark picture are as distressing as ever. No matter how desensitised we invariably
may become, a young girl masturbating with a crucifix while calling cackling maniacally
that she’s fucking Christ; will never lose its clout. That’s the lasting effect
of The Exorcist, it’s entrenched in
repugnant imagery which impishly preys on our societal taboos in ways we don’t
expect; while female masturbation is obviously no longer stigmatised, the precepts
of highly sexualised pre-teens and Christian figureheads remain as traumatic as
it was in the conservative 70s. Max von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn are superb, but
Linda Blair never seems to receive the praise she warrants, her wholly convincing
panic matched by the hideous malevolence of her possessed state. The film
itself is also more complex than credited, concerning itself with religious
doubt, sacrifice, faith, and the imperative power of fear and confusion in
subtle but effective ways, like the demon mocking Father Damian’s dead mother.
After all, the devil’s in the details, and the minutiae contribute to the sensation
of something morally essential about The
Exorcist, even when detached from a Christian framework. A mesmeric,
secular good versus evil parable, that even now chills to the bone.
71. Schindler’s List – Steven Spielberg
Think about the films you’ve seen
recently that you feel have mattered, really mattered. 12 Years a Slave maybe? Let’s take 12 Years a Slave; it certainly isn’t flawless when taken empirically,
many characters are underdeveloped and the ending feels discordant with the
film before it, but its emotional impact is seismic. I’ve, and I’m sure many of
you, have rarely experienced anything. It was visceral, open, honest inhumanity,
and it was shattering. Schindler’s List is
similarly flawed and similarly wrought. Spielberg’s signature sentimentality,
omnipresent in his filmography, flirts with offensiveness at times in List, most notoriously captured colouring
the girl’s red dress, but he skirts just on the correct side so that the
overall effect is unfalteringly devastating. Whether it’s Fiennes sniping concentration
camp workers with a calculated apathy, or when the camp showers release water
rather than the anticipated gas, the tension is overbearing and the steep indifference
hollowing. While this and 12 Years a
Slave are just as important as films, this is a much better Film. There’s enough
humour, – admissibly limited – warmth and sense of an overall arc here to
constitute a viewing which, though never enjoyable, engages you directly with
its character so that the full desolation of modern history’s darkest moment
feels utterly physical. If 12 Years a
Slave is documentarian in its naturalism, then Schindler’s List is conversational in its intimacy between narrative
and observer.
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