Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)



Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)



As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)



Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)



It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Leonard Pierce