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.

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