My 25 Favorite Movies

After an extended period of deep thought and serious consideration I am proud to unveil my list of the 25 best films I have ever seen.


1. EVIL DEAD II
Just about the most perfect movie I've ever seen. Sam Raimi's finest hour as a filmmaker unleashes all sorts of hell on his long-suffering muse Bruce "The Chin" Campbell with dollops of colorful cartoon gore and truly insane set pieces coming together with inventive visual effects and sound design to create a comic horror masterpiece unlike no other. "The Sequel to the Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror" is putting it very fucking mildly. My favorite movie.




2. THE THING
John Carpenter transforms the Howard Hawks B-classic of the McCarthy Era into a masterclass in tension and edge-of-your-seat terror by going back to the original John W. Campbell short story "Who Goes There" and brilliantly exploring the idea of an alien creature that can imitate any living organism and the paranoia that it can create among a tightly wound group isolated in the Antarctic. The genius effects work by Rob Bottin (with a little assistance from the late Stan Winston) bring our worst nightmares to bloody, slimy life. THE THING beats out HALLOWEEN as Carpenter's scariest film, but just barely.




3. 12 ANGRY MEN
First time director Sidney Lumet used his considerable television and stage experience to snag a dream cast for his adaptation of Reginald Rose's play about the jury for a murder trial debating the accused's innocence. Taking place almost entirely in the jury room and in real time we watch as the jurors' prejudices and notions about truth and justice break down as every bit of evidence and testimony is dissected and reevaluated. The result is the most riveting drama ever committed to the silver screen and it's played out by a masterful cast including Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Robert Webber, E.G. Marshall, and Henry Fonda as the juror whose doubt about the accused's guilt puts the plot in motion.




4. DUCK SOUP
A masterpiece of anarchic comedy that is also the Marx Brothers at their best. Filled with tons of classic comic set pieces and endlessly quotable, DUCK SOUP is a movie that never fails to make me laugh. Hell it even saved Woody Allen's life in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. Released a decade before the U.S. entered World War II, the movie remains one of the great cinematic political satires.




5. STAR TREK II-THE WRATH OF KHAN
The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise get back to basics after the ambitious and underrated STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE with a fast-paced swashbuckling space adventure that doesn't skimp on suspense, emotion, warm humor, and high drama. Most of the cast, in particular William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who gets a great death scene), have rarely been better. Every element that went into the making of this movie, from Nicholas Meyer's astute direction to James Horner's rousing score, is absolutely perfect.




6. REPO MAN
Alex Cox's sci-fi punk comedy is one of the most offbeat movies I've ever seen. Somehow the plot manages to make aliens, auto repossession, televangelism, and imaginary plates of shrimp gel into one mind-melting screwball plot. Fueled by fine-tuned performances from Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton among others, REPO MAN is like the movie Jonathan Demme was too scared to make.




7. DAWN OF THE DEAD
George Romero brings his zombie apocalypse out of the black-and-white night into the Technicolor dawn and delivers his best film to date, a wildly gruesome and darkly hilarious widescreen horror epic. Where do zombies go when they rise from the grave? To the nearest mall of course. Romero welds his caustic views on shallow consumerism and how we are willing to sacrifice our humanity for the illusion of security to his trademark flesh-eating dead antics. The Mount Olympus of zombie flicks.




8. RIO BRAVO
My all-time favorite western. John Wayne is at his best playing the sheriff of a frontier town fending off hired guns who have arrived to break an important prisoner out of his jail. Outnumbered and outgunned at least our man the Duke has some able support from Ricky Nelson, the lovable Walter Brennan, the lovely Angie Dickinson (who has a sweet and mature romance with Wayne's character John T. Chance), and in the film's best performance Dean Martin as a recovering alcoholic and Wayne's put-upon deputy. Smart, leisurely-paced, with lots of action and fine character work from a classic cast. A big influence on John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino.




9. JAWS
As far as I'm concerned Steven Spielberg did his best work from 1975 to 1981, and he kicked off this golden age of his career with the ultimate man against monster flick. A shark too big and too hideous to exist outside of the Cretaceous Period starts making snacks out of the inhabitants of a small island community and only it's brave sheriff (Roy Scheider), a quirky marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss), and a crusty veteran fisherman (Robert Shaw) can destroy it. Alternately credited with and blamed for ushering in the modern age of blockbuster event filmmaking JAWS is a perfect example of popular cinema as finely-crafted high art with great acting, precision editing, and of course that iconic John Williams score.




10. THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Probably the Coen brothers' best film because it's one of those rare films that seems to improve with each viewing. Every character in the woozy labyrinth of a story could headline their own movie, but there have rarely been movie characters as unique and fully-realized as Jeff Bridges' Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski and John Goodman's Walter Sobchak. I can't find one fault with this flick. It really ties the room together. And it's funny as fucking hell!




11. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
John Carpenter's breakthrough flick is his personal love letter to Howard Hawks and his 1959 classic western RIO BRAVO and just happens to be a intense and hard-edged siege thriller that never pulls a punch. The faceless gangland hordes are almost as frightening as the greatest horrror movie monsters. Few directors would have the balls to kill a sweet little girl (in this case Kim Richards, Paris Hilton's aunt) in the first half-hour. Hell they couldn't even do that in the nutless 2005 remake. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 rules the world.




12. THE ROAD WARRIOR
What George Miller began with his original speed-metal revenge thriller MAD MAX reaches its zenith with his magnum opus THE ROAD WARRIOR, as hellbent for leather as any movie I've ever seen. Mel Gibson is a action movie immortal as the titular avenging angel pushing himself to the breaking point and finding his lost heart when he aids a small community hording a large supply of gasoline against psychopathic desert marauders. The action sequences, including some gold standard full-throttle car chases, are among the best of the best.




13. GOODFELLAS
Martin Scorsese's highly addictive crime epic gets my vote for the best Mob flick made yet with a bang-up cast headed by Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, and the great Joe Pesci. Most go for THE GODFATHER (also a classic), but Scorsese's inside look at the inner workings of a middle-class Mafia clan is something I can easily relate to. Loads of quotable dialogue and a ass-twomping soundtrack.




14. THE DIRTY DOZEN
The ultimate WWII flick and the ultimate tough guy epic. Lee Marvin leads a team of twelve hardened military prisoners behind enemy lines to kill Nazis and blow shit up good. A badass war classic with what has to be the greatest cast ever assembled featuring standouts by Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, and the godfather of indie cinema himself John Cassavetes. Guaranteed to put hair on your chest, even if you're a lady.




15. MONTY PYTHON & THE HOLY GRAIL
King Arthur and his quest for the fabled chalice of Christ gets a batshit insane British comic turn courtesy of those lovable lads from Blighty's greatest comedy troupe since the Goon Show. Never fails to make me laugh. Watch out for that damn killer rabbit. Ni!




16. APOCALYPSE NOW
Coppola's hallucinatory Vietnam War epic takes Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS into even darker territory to explore man's undying savagery. Martin Sheen has rarely been as good as he is here as the military assassin sent deep into the jungle to whack Marlon Brando. I'll never hear the Doors the same way ever again.




17. UNBREAKABLE
M. Night Shaymalan's best film is a dark and imaginative deconstruction of superhero comic book lore with top-notch acting from Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Improves just a little bit each time I watch it.




18. THE INCREDIBLES
Being a huge comic book geek obviously this would be my favorite animated flick. I can't help it. I love the characters, the animation, the design work, the vocal cast, and even the jazzy score by Michael Giacchino. I can't find a single flaw with this classic. THE INCREDIBLES will remain a favorite forever.




19. THE ABYSS
James Cameron's best and most underrated film. With all the praise he received for his romantic epic TITANIC I think the relationship between Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio contains some of his best character work in a film. This is a movie bursting at the seams with passion, spectable, and ambition. The director's cut is essential. A modern-day DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.




20. RESERVOIR DOGS
Quentin Tarantino's debut remains his best. A pressure cooker heist flick with brutal violence and mouth-watering tough guy dialogue. Like a twisted and bloody stage play, think TITUS ANDRONICUS in three-piece suits, RESERVOIR DOGS is a gruesome feast for fans of crime flicks and independent cinema.




21. GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
A strange companion piece to RESERVOIR DOGS, James Foley's brilliant adaptation of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic play loses not a sliver of it's blistering intensity in its jump to the big screen. A true actor's movie containing some of the best work of Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and a career best Jack Lemmon.




22. ALIENS
James Cameron returns with the sequel to ALIEN that tops the original in almost every way possible. The textbook definition of a cinematic rollercoaster ride: exciting, scary, emotional, funny, and 100 percent awesome! Sigourney Weaver is the warrior woman to beat them all.




23. DAZED & CONFUSED
Richard Linklater's sprawling ensemble comedy is the most honest portrait of high school life I have ever seen. There's no real plot, just a series of subplots intersecting like the various teenage characters that populate the thronging nightlife in a small Texas town. Smart, hilarious, and surprisingly heartfelt.




24. SHAUN OF THE DEAD
The creators of the brilliantly geeky Brit-com SPACED bring their act to the silver screen while indulging in their greatest horror movie fantasies. The result is a rare creation in this day and age: a true labor of love that comes along at the absolute right time and sets new standards. In this case director Edgar Wright and his longtime collaborator Simon Pegg raised the bar for hybrid horror-comedies. A classic of gutwrenching horror and sophisticated wit.




25. TREMORS
My favorite monster movie probably because it contains the best characters, the quirkiest dialogue, and some of the coolest-looking beasties seen in a long time. Taking a page from the original JAWS the makers of TREMORS keep their monsters hidden for most of the first half, then they let 'er rip in the second half. Suspenseful, witty, and a whole lot of fun.



That's my top 25. It took me some time to whittle down my all-time favorites into a list, one which I'm sure will be amended over time. But these films will always hold a special place in my heart.

CASINO ROYALE (2006)

I've never been too crazy about the James Bond movies because they always seem to slavishly adhere to a well-worn formula without never exploring the character of Bond and what drives him to do what he does. CASINO ROYALE finally allows us to glimpse into the dark soul of MI6's Agent 007 and in the process gives us the best Bond movie yet and the greatest screen incarnation of the iconic secret agent as played by Daniel Craig in what will become, as it did for every actor who has come before him, his signature role. CASINO ROYALE reboots the Bond series and updates it to post-9/11 modern times simultaneously. The result is a mature and gripping spy adventure that in its more quiter moments often invites comparison to the works of John Le Carre and Graham Greene with the same emphasis on interesting characters and their motivations. But that's not to say CASINO ROYALE skimps on the fireworks. There's plenty of great action sequences including two that might make your jaw drop: the opening action beat finds Bond chasing a scarred bombmaker on foot through Madagascar including an extended confrontation atop a high-steel construction site and makes wonderous use of the French free-running sport of Parkour; and a car chase where Bond's tricked-out spymobile does a few pretty frightening flips. The most suspenseful moments are the poker table duels between Bond and his blood-weeping adversary Le Chiffre (played by the great Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen with a subdued madness). Who would have ever thought Texas Hold 'Em could be so edge-of-the-seat thrilling? As 007's ice-cool boss M Dame Judi Dench is the only returning cast member from the previous Pierce Brosnan Bond flicks but she's given a real character to play this time around and her relationship with Craig's Bond carries genuine weight. Eve Green does some of her best acting to date as Vesper Lynd, the one woman capable of capturing Bond's elusive heart. Captain Kirk had Carol Marcus, Bond has Vesper. Jeffrey Wright and Giancarlo Gianni provide stand-out performances as two of Bond's unlikely colleagues. CASINO ROYALE is not only the best Bond movie yet but it's also one of the most ripping yarns cranked out by Hollywood in recent years. Let's hope they don't let the series to get out of hand....again.

DEATH SENTENCE (2007)

Based on a novel by DEATH WISH creator Brian Garfield, DEATH SENTENCE travels through some of the same territory but cuts it's own different path thanks to the wintry direction of James Wan (SAW) and a compelling lead performance from Kevin Bacon. The story even occasionally deviates from the standard revenge story by addressing the physical and psychological burden of taking the law into your own hands. Bacon plays a successful corporate executive whose rising hockey star son gets killed by a gang in the midst of a gas station stick-up and finds that the legal system is reluctant to do anything serious about it. In giving the killer a taste of his own medicine Bacon incurs the wrath of the killer's even more vicious gang leader brother and his band of bloodthirsty marauders. After a series of tragic events Bacon decides to take his campaign of Old Testament vengeance to the next level. To quote Keanu Reeves in THE MATRIX, "Guns. Lots of guns." Plus a ton of bloodshed and brutality that only the director of the wince-inducing original SAW could deliver in high gruesome style (Wan's SAW cohort Leigh Whannell plays one of the gang members). DEATH SENTENCE is a tightly-paced hardcore violent thriller of the old school in the tradition of VIGILANTE and THE EXECUTIONER, and Kevin Bacon's credible transformation from a peaceful family man to a roaring rampage of revenge would make Charles Bronson proud. The unrated DVD brings home the gory goods. Highly recommended.

SORCERER (1977)

William Friedkin took all the studio goodwill and directorial clout he amassed with THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST and pretty much flushed them down the toilet with this big-budget remake of the classic 1955 French thriller THE WAGES OF FEAR. Filmed mainly during a politically turbulent period in the Dominican Republic (with additional scenes filmed in New Jersey, Jerusalem, and Spain), SORCERER tells the sordid tale of four men from different walks of life who have come to a small village in South America to hide from the forces of their respective pasts. An American oil company has a stranglehold on the region, enslaving its populace and tainting the pristine jungles with billowing clouds of smoke from its refinery, the only real source of employment for hundreds of miles. One day the refinery catches fire and the company wants to use highly unstable nitroglycerin to extinguish the blaze but needs four men brave enough to embark on a suicide mission to transport the nitro by trucks across 200 miles of treacherous and unpredictable jungle terrain.

The men chosen for the job are Scanlon (Roy Scheider), a low level Jersey crook on the run from the mob; Manzon (Bruno Cremer), a French investment banker running from ruinous scandal; Kassem (Amidou), an Arab terrorist partly responsible for a devastating bombing in Jerusalem; and the mysterious hitman Nilo (Francisco Rabal), cooling his heels in the village after a violent assignment. Whatever differences these men may have, whatever dark secrets they may harbor, the thing that will ultimately bond them is seeing their dangerous mission to the end. This quartet of unlikely antiheroes must drive their rusted-out trucks over rickety rope bridges, through raging rivers, and across some of the most brutal landscape known to man. If they succeed the rewards will be great; if they fail dental records will be needed to identify their bodies, and that's only if their teeth are even left.

Long regarded as a prime example of the folly of directorial indulgence, SORCERER gained a respectable cult following and was able to finally put its troubled reputation to bed in the more than three decades since it debuted in theaters in the wake of STAR WARS mania and promptly vanished after grossing a meager portion of its $22 million budget. It's one of William Friedkin's best films. Back in the day the man knew how to milk all the white-knuckle tension and palm-perspiring suspense he could out of a scene. Anybody who has witnessed the intense car chases in THE FRENCH CONNECTION and the underrated TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. and the sustained exorcism of Regan MacNeil in THE EXORCIST can attest to that. In SORCERER Friedkin delivers more than his fair share of scenes guaranteed to keep your eyes glued to the screen. The story kicks off with a masterful extended opening sequence that establishes the back stories of our four main protagonists. These moments are integral to our understanding of the characters' motivations for wanting to escape their pasts and maybe even get a second chance in life. Of course their reasons for transporting the nitro to the oil fire aren't exactly noble. They need the money to flee the hellhole village they've exiled themselves to. That's something I think we can all relate to. Plus one of the most interesting aspects of the film is Friedkin, working from Walon Green's morality minefield of a script, manages to have us sympathizing with people who have committed selfish and immoral acts. In the great tradition of film noir, our "heroes" are dark and complex men driven not by the need to do the right thing but by the desire to survive at all costs.

There are two action scenes in SORCERER that truly make the movie a classic thriller. The first is where the trucks are forced to cross an ancient rope bridge half-buried in river fastly surging thanks to a punishing storm. Not since the "coin toss" scene in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN has a scene actually made me hold my breath and keep my eyes wide open. I won't spoil the outcome of the scene for you if you've never seen the movie, but all I will say is that I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

The second key scene is when the quartet encounters a rather large tree that has fallen directly on their only road. In a long sequence accomplished without music, the men get pissed, attempt to chop a new path in the jungle, and then realize that the only way they're getting on with their mission is if they remove the tree. This is where Kassem's explosives skills are put to good use. For nearly ten minutes we watch as he builds an improvised device out of rocks, rope, and sticks designed to lower some of the unstable nitro onto the tree thereby blowing it up completely. It's both exciting and eerily compelling.

The shadow of death hangs over the main characters in SORCERER but Friedkin's expertly-assembled cast is up to the challenge. Roy Scheider gets a rare lead performance and he plays it to the hilt as the unofficial leader of the mission. There are a lot of things about his character we have to figure out for ourselves, yet Scheider preserves the mystery without making his professional tough guy into a psychological case study. The rest of the cast is a who's who of international talent that's refreshing for a big action flick such as this. Bruno Cremer is seriously good as the only one of our criminal antiheroes who's never gotten his hands dirty. The only blood on his hands belongs to the business partner he inadvertently drove to suicide with his lousy dealings. Yet Cremer's Manzon never feels out of place in the group. He's even allowed some moments of pathos as he pines for the wife he left behind in France. Amidou is intriguing as the potentially volatile terrorist Kassem. International film legend Francisco Rabal brings extra shadings of moral complexity to his assassin Nilo.

The film is driven by a propulsive score by Tangerine Dream and boasts impressive production design by John Box, crack editing by longtime Friedkin collaborator Bud Smith, beautifully grimy and oppressive cinematography by Dick Bush and John Stephens, and a diamond-hard screenplay by THE WILD BUNCH scribe Walon Green. Most importantly, SORCERER is William Friedkin's baby. The director's reverential respect for the original Henri Georges Clouzot-directed WAGES OF FEAR is ever present here but Friedkin never slavishes follows the original shot for shot. Instead he adds his own interesting contributions to the narrative, most prominently the telling social commentary about how industry has raped once beautiful countries and the memorable opening scenes that lay out the main character's back stories in often graphic detail. The result is a truly awe-inspiring piece of high-tension action cinema that still manages to hold you in its spell after all these years.

SORCERER is one tough motherfucker of a flick. Take a chance and see this classic.

BASKET CASE (1982)

Frank Henenlotter made his directorial debut with this ultra-cheap bizarre horror comedy from the days of the grindhouse's last gasp. Shot on location on the streets of New York City BASKET CASE's strange tale of two seperated Siamese twin brothers, one a small and deformed creature named Belial, plays out amidst the time capsule-worthy tableaux of a pre-Giuiliani New York. The movie's never particularly scary, especially once we see Belial in all his crude glory. But the oddball sense of humor displayed by the filmmakers and a game cast comprised mostly of 42nd Street denizens handpicked by Henenlotter makes this movie a true original in the annals of 1980's horror. The special effects often betray their low-budget origins but are pretty fun to watch (the woman with a face full of scapels and other Belial kills), but the coup de grace is the sequence where Belial goes nuts and tears up his flophouse room like a coked-up rock star. What makes this scene truly unique is the fact that it was accomplished with old-fashioned stop-motion animation. Don't expect the flair and imagination of Harryhausen though. The scene looks like less convincing than the clay-animated exploits of Gumby and the California Raisins, but it all adds to the overall maddening fun of BASKET CASE. Catch this one if you're feeling adventurous.

SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)

Like Indiana Jones this year, Superman's return to the big screen had been nearly two decades in the making. And like the new Indy flick SUPERMAN RETURNS had all the ingredients of a surefire success, and yet it still proved to be a disappointment. With all the development that went into this movie over a period of more than a decade you would think the filmmakers would have concocted a decent storyline that didn't reek of a hollow retread of the original Richard Donner standard-setting epic. Plus with all the time they had you would figure they would find the right cast- Donner and his great casting director Lynn Stalmaster scoured the earth for the right Superman and Lois Lane and made the absolute perfect choices in Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. And even with a terrific director like Bryan Singer at the helm with two years and a budget pushing $200 million to make it the movie still fell into those fatal traps. Unknown actor Brandon Routh was chosen to step into Reeve's bright red boots as the comics' single most iconic superhero. There's a reason why the dude's still an unknown...he's not worthy of inheriting the mantle of Superman. Maybe I'm being a little harsh but I think you will agree that's the triple truth Ruth. It doesn't help that Singer and his X2 writers Dan Harris and Micheal Dougherty give Routh very little to do other than fly around, lift really heavy objects, and look mopey most of the time. Plus Routh's an even lousier Clark Kent. That should have been an easier part to play because Routh had a bit more to do. But whereas Reeve channeled the spirit of Cary Grant to infuse his portrayal of Superman's alter ego, Routh merely plays Kent as an unconvincing geek. Faring no better is Kate Bosworth, a rather fine actress, as Lois Lane. Bosworth does what she can with the role but ultimately she has none of the romantic soul and cynical wit Margot Kidder brought to the character. At least Kevin Spacey does worlds more as Lex Luthor than Gene Hackman could ever dream, mixing in his usual dark humor with a frightening malevolence that perfectly suits the villain. Shame that the filmmakers couldn't think of a better plot than simply rehashing the plot of SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE sans the origin story. It's a pretty thin story that is painfully stretched and padded out to fill an unneccessarily long two-and-a-half hour running time. The whole subplot with Lois' son doesn't hold water either. It makes no sense especially since Singer and his collaborators wanted to honor the continuity set by the Donner original and the first Richard Lester sequel. My hope for the next Superman flick is that whoever gets to make it (and my money's not on Singer at this point) drops the pretentions and slavish devotion to past Superman films and strikes out on their own without sacrifing any respect for the character's past cinematic incarnations. It's possible as long as they don't take any cues from Singer's creepy stalking of Donner's original.

RAMBO III (1988)

Probably the most kicked around of the Rambo series, RAMBO III still manages to be a decent flick with lots of cool action scenes and a hearty gung-ho attitude. Sure it dated fast once the Russians took a hint and pulled out of Afghanistan, and it doesn't help that the Russkie villains are even more one-dimensional and bombastic than the ones in the first sequel. Plus Rambo was in danger of becoming just another oily-muscled action hero instead of the haunted loner he started out as. But it tooks balls to make the Arab characters sympathetic and heroic instead of villainous as was becoming the style in the 1980's. RAMBO III may be a quaint relic of a geo-politically different time, but it still has moments.