- Don’t Look Now (1973)
A despairing mystery. Married couple Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, grieving their drowned daughter, hope to heal during a work trip to gloomy off-season Venice. Spoiler alert: They don’t heal. The famous sex scene, ingeniously rendered as well as just plain hot, is a brief respite in an otherwise steady slide into fresh grief. A killer lurks. Things get supernatural. Time collapses, the color red proliferates. Sutherland searches for clarity and suffers the consequences.
- Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese’s glorious ode to NYC dread. Lonely cab driver Robert De Niro cruises the scuzzy streets. Deeply paranoid, but still capable of semi-normal interaction, he scores a date with beautiful political campaigner Cybill Shepherd. Would he really take her to a porn movie? Can he be that out of touch? My girlfriend Tara and I debated it. When she said she’d been on weirder dates, I felt a jealous twitch in my stomach. I asked for details I knew I probably didn’t want. Tara only shrugged. Even when De Niro goes full murderous psycho, shaving his head and loading his body with concealed weapons, I always identify with him. Loneliness is a demolition truck; it crushes your spirit. Although I’ve personally never wanted to kill anyone but myself.
- Wild at Heart (1990)
A blood-splattered, thrash metal romance. Young lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern hit the road in an ill-fated quest to find a better life. Dern’s control freak mom, played by Diane Ladd, her real-life mom, unleashes the forces of evil after them. Directed by David Lynch, the film has a grainy, vicious, graphically violent midnight-movie vibe, with awesomely incongruous Wizard of Oz references. The first time I saw it, I knew it would always be one of my favorite movies. Actually, this is just a ranked list of my favorite movies, recorded during my lowest point. But damned if they aren’t all about failure. Maybe I knew this year was coming. Or maybe all great movies are about failure. Tara always preferred Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), which I like, too. But Wild at Heart is funnier and more propulsive. Best scene: As their favorite thrash metal song blasts from the car radio, Cage and Dern violently dance on the side of the road. Soon, though, the thrash song gives way to the lush orchestral score, and the two tenderly embrace.
8A. Sidebar
For our third date, as a surprise, I took Tara to an outdoor orchestra concert. She frowned when we took our seats. My stomach tensed. Did she even like orchestra music? She didn’t talk much about herself, which at the time I stupidly mistook for modesty. All I really knew was that she earned a living by selling vintage unicorn figurines on Etsy. The music began. Tara was fidgety, annoyed by the breeze that kept tangling up her sleek black hair. Soon, though, she sank into a rapt stillness. At the end, when she turned to me and gripped my hand, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: not doomed. Her smile was like fluttery birds. “Thank you so much,” she said. “It was wonderful.” Then, in a whisper, “Just like you.” A month later, we moved in together.
- Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee’s mic drop masterpiece about race relations. On a broiling summer day in Brooklyn, characters of various races and racist levels bicker, bond, and philosophize. The primary setting is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, where Italian owner Danny Aiello and his sons work alongside a delivery man played by Lee. The thing people never mention about this movie is what a fucking blast it is. It’s the funniest, most freewheeling, least lecturing message movie ever. But peace can’t hold forever. In the end, anger gives way to rage, and sizzling heat to scorching flames.
- The Godfather (1972)
As a young man, I was a giddy, foolish dreamer. I planned to be a screenwriter. But after getting rejected by several film schools, while also receiving lukewarm responses to my scripts from multiple agents, I downgraded my dream to film scholar. That didn’t work out either. Life is a slimy, smelly, overflowing bucket of compromises. So here I am, just another chump blogging about The Godfather, which is both an obvious pick and impossible not to pick. The film depicts what might be the most chilling character arc ever: Michael Corleone, at the start a morally upright war hero with no involvement in his family’s crime business, by the end has become its amoral mastermind. Best scene: Henchman Sal Tessio, talking on the lawn with consigliere Tom Hagen, realizes that his double-cross against the Corleones has been discovered and that his life expectancy is about thirty seconds. Hot take: Legal companies are only slightly less evil than the mafia. The profit motive, a greedy python, gorges on money and human misery. Every corporate job I’ve ever had, including my current one, has felt like it was scarfing me down inch by inch.
- Ordinary People (1980)
Tragedy aftershocks in a wealthy Chicago suburb. Grieving parents Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore try to move on after their older son drowns in a boating accident. Between this and Don’t Look Now, Sutherland really has the market cornered on drowned offspring. Their younger son, Timothy Hutton, who survived the accident, has one suicide attempt under his belt and is working on another. Brief grim flashbacks, like knife jabs, keep slashing into the calm present. Moore, deeply fond of the dead brother, behaves like such an aloof stepmom around Hutton that it’s easy to forget that she’s his birth mother. The film is the ultimate portrait of overshadowed siblings; Hutton’s brother eclipses him even in death. I can relate. Even now, with both of us middle-aged, I still feel the crushing contrast of my own older brother, who has a wife and kids and an obscenely lucrative consulting career. Best scene: Hutton and his menschy psychiatrist Judd Hirsch dig deep into the boating accident. The editing, here and elsewhere, is fucking killer. The scene hauntingly intercuts silent flashes of the two brothers clutching the overturned boat. It’s the scene I mention to people who think it’s just a glorified TV movie. Tara, incidentally, thought it was just a glorified TV movie. Realism stressed her out. She felt her hectic career selling unicorn figurines on Etsy, a career I’d loaned her money to expand, was reality enough.
- An Angel at My Table (1990)
A singular biopic. Janet Frame, a real-life New Zealand author, painfully shy, crowned with a bushel of red hair, bravely perseveres through a lonely, failure-filled, heart-wrenching life. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Frame spends years in institutions and at one point is scheduled for a lobotomy-like operation. Can writing save her life? Will she overcome her mental illness? Is she even ill? The tone alternates between enchanting dream and bleakest nightmare.
- Broadcast News (1987)
The best, darkest, most immersive romcom ever. News producer Holly Hunter, brilliant, beautiful, and socially inept, navigates life at a network station. She is romantically pursued by Albert Brooks, a sharp but neurotic newswriter, and William Hurt, a dim but charismatic anchor. Hidden in plain sight is a mystery involving broadcast ethics. The film, bittersweet from the start, veers increasingly bitter. Just as Hunter, our heroine, starts falling for Hurt, the ethical mystery is unraveled and the budding romance goes splat. But at least she has a great career to fall back on.
3A. Sidebar
Two months ago, Tara came home reeking of liquor. Her black hair, usually so sleek, was a ratty mess. “I’m out, my dude,” she said, then hurriedly packed up her stuff, as if the cops were on her trail. Maybe they were. She reached under the couch and yanked out a clear shopping bag filled with cheap plastic unicorns. Vintage my butt! When I asked about the money she owed me, she just snorted and kept packing. Her smirk was like creeping spiders. I blocked the door, to show her who she was fucking with, but she clocked me with her duffel bag and fled. Life tasted ripely dire: lush with agony. I fell back on nothing. My career was a dumb joke. I wept and chewed tobacco and whacked off to her memory. But I knew I had to move on; I just didn’t know how.
3B. Honorable Mentions
Before I forget: three runners-up. Carrie (1976), a sad, scary, vicious tale of high school cruelty. Vertigo (1958), a color-drenched, rapturously scored film about obsession, deceit, and murder. The Weather Man (2005), a darkly funny portrait of external success and internal despair.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
A blazing, gasping rush of action. But the first Indiana Jones film is so much more than just action. A long early scene, wherein Indy and his colleague Marcus explain the history of the ark to government agents, overflows with humor and personality and builds to an ominous biblical drawing. It might be the most vivid exposition scene ever. The film is so extra. Marian, the love interest, is as tough as Indy. There’s a smart, smarmy villain, and a creepy, bug-eyed one. The story sprawls. The dialogue crackles. Indiana Jones, for all his grit, comes up short as often as not. In the end, he gets the girl and some cash but zero glory. He lives to fail another day. The film, directed by Steven Spielberg, is the only one in this top ten that’s rated PG instead of R and, also, ironically, the one with the highest body count. Hot take: No one, absolutely no one, can direct action and suspense like Spielberg. His film Munich (2005), a political drama with thriller overtones, is as tense and exciting as any full-blown action film of the current century.
- Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
For years I felt like a fledgling screenwriter. Turns out I’m only a fan. Disappointment is like quicksand; the more you struggle against it, the stucker you get. Spoiler alert: I can’t move on. Instead, I’m gonna hunt Tara down and get my money back. The winds of justice are screeching your way, sister. After that, who the fuck knows. Maybe I’ll just drive north into forest country and disappear forever. My brother says I’m throwing my life away. Yeah, right. What life? I have no purpose, no value. This movie, though! Rosemary Woodhouse, young mother-to-be, suspects that her neighbors have sinister designs on her baby. The truth is much, much worse. Best scene: all of them. The film is a whole, vast, gruesomely spellbinding world to get lost in.