Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever! 

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)



Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)



Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)



5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)



The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)



8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)





9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)



Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)



10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)



Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)



Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)



12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)



What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs