Will’s Top 100 Movies (100–91)

Every pretentious film nerd has at least thought about making some sort of list like this, but factors like time, “how could I ever stick to any number for all of movie history,” or simply “who cares,” have always stopped me from getting too far into a list myself. But hey, none of those silly reasons really hold weight now that we’re all stuck at home for the foreseeable future.

So why not? I finally made a damn list, and tried my best to be honest not just about what movies I think are the best, but what are the movies that I just dig the most? So yes, ‘Superman’ is on the list. So is ‘Superbad!’ These are my top 100 film picks — 100 movies I can 100% stand behind creatively that I’m always happy to pop in the ol’ blu ray player. For your convenience, I’ve included how/where you can stream applicable titles. Happy watching!

100. The Mask of Zorro (1998)

In the era of super-hero domination, I’m someone who wishes they still made period action movies without need for the supernatural or CGI overload. I know the guy’s made some trash (*cough* ‘Green Lantern’) but it seems to me we still don’t give director Martin Campbell enough credit when the guy saved the Bond franchise twice —1995’s ‘Goldeneye’ arrived six years after ‘Licence to Kill’ and introduced Pierce Brosnan as the first post-cold-war Bond, and once Brosnan’s run had devolved into invisible cars and ice castles the producer’s brought Campbell back to introduce Daniel Craig as the post-9/11 Bond in the character’s grittiest, most human adventure. Oh yeah, and in between those movies, Campbell took a character pretty much forgotten by the ’90s and made the sexiest most exciting pure old-school swashbuckler in decades.

Written by the guys who wrote ‘Aladdin’ and the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies (yeah, the first four of them) and the eventual Zorro sequel (okay, so these are dudes you wanna get to write your first movie and then drop them immediately after the premiere) ‘The Mask of Zorro’ reverses the typical Robin Hood/Batman class dynamic of a rich guy who’s nice enough to help you poor peasants, and has a young drunken bandit take up the crime-fighter mantel from the nobleman who’s moonlit as the masked hero in the past. Yeah, I know, the Welsh Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins are about as Mexican as a spicy Chic-Fil-A sandwich, and Antonio Banderas isn’t even from the right Latin country. But come on, they’re so damn good in the movie; maybe we can still just enjoy the flick and chalk all that nonsense up to a different era? Please?

Featuring one of composer James Horner’s most beautiful, sweeping scores, this ‘Zorro’ was made in a time when characters in a mainstream blockbuster were allowed to have hormones, and enact satisfying, bloody revenge on the kind of evil villains who really deserve it. But, like, for kids! Hell yeah. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

99. Ed Wood (1994)

Give me a run-of-the-mill sober biopic about a real and “very important” person and you’re likely to bore me to tears. However dig up some facts (and make a few up along the way) about a mostly-forgotten pop culture figure and turn it into a zany and charming dark comedy and now we’re cooking with gas. The infamously terrible director Ed Wood (‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’) is the subject of this wonderful showbiz satire written by the guys (Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander) who would go on to write other stranger-than-fiction tales such as ‘The People vs. Larry Flynt’ and last year’s ‘Dolemite Is My Name.’

And at a glance the real Ed Wood’s life was pretty bleak, but come now, who would want to watch that movie when you can tell the man’s story as a whimsical celebration of his creative spirit? Of course the movie pokes fun at Wood’s quirks and overall lack of talent, but it also goes deeper than the surface-level “can you believe this shit really happened?” game of James Franco’s recent comedy ‘The Disaster Artist’ (not that that’s not still a pretty funny movie and all) to become a righteous celebration of artistic passion. After all, if Ed Wood was actually able to make movies what’s to stop you from pursuing your dreams?

Alas the film flopped at the box office, and Tim Burton’s career pivoted towards the slicker, emptier fare he’d already proven himself capable of with his Batman movies. ‘Ed Wood’ features an Oscar-winning turn by Martin Landau (playing ‘Dracula’ star Bela Lugosi, who befriended and worked for wood at the end of his life), one of Johnny Depp’s (Wood himself) best performances as well as a number of memorable supporting characters, played by the likes of Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Patricia Arquette.

(‘Ed Wood’ isn’t currently streaming for free on any service, though you can and should rent it for a couple of bucks on any of them, and, if you’re in the mood, you can watch ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ on Prime Video).

98. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Yes, of course at least one James Bond movie would end up on this list of mine (spoilers— there’s three!), so here’s the Roger Moore entry, and it’s the one truly worthy film of his. Following the under-performing ‘The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974, producer Harry Saltzman dropped out of the series to handle his own debts, leaving only his original partner Albert R. Broccoli to continue the 007 series. Broccoli essentially did so by deciding to throw everything possible at the screen this time round. And damn if that didn’t make for a really good time, and just the sort of ridiculously heightened adventure audiences had come to expect from the franchise since Sean Connery faced off against Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob in ‘Goldfinger,’ the series’ breakout hit a decade earlier.

This movie opens with the spectacular ski jump off a cliff (a real stunt by professional insane person Rick Sylvester), then proceeds to give us the steel-toothed villain Jaws (the ’7"2 Richard Kiel in an iconic comic-yet-threatening performance), the Lotus Esprit car which turns into a submarine (Elon Musk owns one of these cars and has made clear a goal of his is to equip the vehicle to full 007 functionality) and a climactic shoot-out on a soundstage so big they had to build it for this movie. (It’s since been used for ‘Alien,’ ‘Harry Potter’ and many other blockbusters).

The Spy Who Loved Me’ has a dorky disco score written by EGOT-winner Marvin Hamlisch as well as his great theme song “Nobody Does It Better,” sung by Carly Simon, which Thom Yorke has called “the sexiest song ever written” (Radiohead has performed the tune live before). It’s not gonna be for everyone (especially those not used to the sexism of the ’60s and ’70s Bond films, which isn’t exactly as self aware as you’ll find in the likes of ‘Mad Men’ nowadays) but if you need a distraction in these trying times and you think a cheesy action spectacle from the summer of ‘Star Wars’ (but of course you’ve seen ‘Star Wars’ before) might fit the bill, what the heck are you waiting for? (Now streaming on Prime Video and Hulu.)

97. West Side Story (1961)

If not quite my favorite movie musical, ‘West Side Story’ is the musical in general that has the music I like best. The perfect marriage of Leonard Bernstein’s soaring melodies with Stephen Sondheim’s witty lyrics, this Best-Picture-Winning hit adapted from the broadway sensation makes full use of its gorgeous technicolor pallet to spectacular effect.

Yes, the brown-face on the actors playing the Puerto-Ricans has aged poorly, and even Rita Moreno, who is actually Puerto-Rican, was made to wear some, as it was thought (I’m guessing by white producers) her natural skin color wouldn’t appear dark enough to audiences. Sorry about that crap. You may know that Marni Nixon dubbed Natalie Wood’s vocals (Nixon also sang for Deborah Kerr in ‘The King and I’ and Audrey Hepburn in ‘My Fair Lady’) but maybe you didn’t know that Wood herself was actually a fine singer, and Nixon’s singing in the film is based on recordings of Wood, but able to belt out those high Broadway notes when necessary.

Brian De Palma once lamented that a helicopter shot of a city is the most boring way you can open a movie, since when you could start in immediately with an idea, why settle for the generic way a million other movies open? I tend to agree, but in the case of ‘West Side Story’ (I’m assuming one of the first movies to commence this way) fading from that thunderous colorful overture to a bare, quiet city before getting us down on the ground and finally introducing us to the rival dancing gangs is an iconic opener to beat. A timeless story with immortal music. (Now streaming on STARZ. Does anyone have STARZ?)

96. Road to Perdition (2002)

Adapted from the graphic novels by Max Allan Collins, director Sam Mendes’ (‘American Beauty,’ ‘1917’) best movie is also one of the best gangster movies since ‘GoodFellas’ 30 years ago. Tom Hanks (great, obviously) is mob enforcer Michael Sullivan who winds up on the run with his son from the goons of his boss (Paul Newman, terrific in his final live-action big-screen performance). Jude Law and Daniel Craig (his first movie with Mendes before two Bond movies a decade later) memorably round out the cast as creepy psychos, and cinematographer Conrad Hall (‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘American Beauty’) finds some of his most striking images in this blood-soaked Prohibition-era crime story. It’s also a heartfelt tale of a father and his son connecting amongst the direst of circumstances. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

95. Airplane! (1980)

Surely you didn’t seriously think I’d forget about this comedy classic? ‘Airplane!’ is a rare comedy that could actually get funnier each time — not because you’re more familiar with the characters, but because the more Zucker/Abrahams (these are the guys who would go on to make ‘The Naked Gun’ movies, among other rapid-fire comedies) stuff you watch, the more your eyes become trained to look for extra jokes going on in the background you’ve never noticed before.

It’s a non-stop assault of silly (and occasionally kind of clever) humor I never tire of, and the movie that turned Mission: Impossible good guy Peter Graves into a pedophile pilot and permanently changed character actor Leslie Nielsen’s career into comedy. But while other Neilson films after forced him to make faces and act in ridiculous manners, the Zucker brothers wisely realized they could get a lot more mileage just by having this sober character actor deadpan his way through their absurd dialogue with a straight face. There are too many hilarious jokes in ‘Airplane!’ for me to pay tribute to, but one of my favorites is simply when one of the black “jive-speaking” guys lays down an extra long “shiiiiiiiiit” before a subtitle clarifies for us polite white folks that the meaning of that expression is “golly!” (Now streaming on Showtime.)

94. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

All of the Monty Python movies are pretty funny, (you know, if you’re into that sort of thing, and it’s clear some Americans very much aren’t) and if you’ve never seen their TV show ‘Flying Circus’ I recommend ‘And Now For Something Completely Different’ (basically them reshooting a lot of their most iconic skits and compiling them into a movie to introduce themselves to American audiences) as a primer. With a legacy of British (as well as international) comedy inspired by them, it can be hard to understand now just how ground-breaking and controversial these guys were when ‘Flying Circus’ first aired in (a post-Beatles, but still largely conservative) England in 1969. Fans will either tell you ‘The Holy Grail’ or ‘Life of Brian’ is the Python film. ‘Brian’ is also hilarious, but, clearly, I prefer ‘Grail.’

Much as I sometimes marvel that a trio of musical geniuses like Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison should all happen to meet each other as teenagers, I think us comedy fans should all count ourselves pretty damn lucky the likes of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Graham Chapman should all find each other and collaborate. (Was Terry Jones the Ringo of the Pythons? To be fair, I think both are talented.) When the Pythons ran out of money before filming their final battle sequence for ‘Holy Grail’ they decided to just have modern-day cops show up and arrest their medieval knight protagonists instead. That’s innovation for you.

My favorite moment might be when Michael Palin is reading the scripture’s instructions on how to use The Holy Hand Grenade and after being perfectly clear that we shouldn’t count to two, nor should we count to four before throwing it, he continues “three is the number thou shalt count to and the number thou shalt count to shall be three.” He pauses, and for a moment we think he’s finally finished. Then, “five is right out!” No one could push a joke like these clowns. (‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ is now streaming on Netflix, where you can also find ‘Life of Brian’ and all four seasons of ‘Flying Circus.’)

93. Superbad (2007)

The ‘American Graffiti’ or ‘Dazed and Confused’ of my generation of teenagers, ‘Superbad’ takes me back to a time when me and my 16-year-old buddies had to buy tickets to a PG-13 flick to try to sneak into an R-rated one. We got busted on our first stab at watching ‘Superbad,’ and wound up watching another flick that night.

People reading this from Northampton, MA, might recall the folks who worked at the local Cinemark in Hadley took their job with the utmost seriousness. It’s good to take pride in one’s work. Later when I worked at a movie theater I took great pleasure in catching adults trying to walk in with the cheaper child tickets and telling them they had to exchange them and pay the difference. Get your kicks in where you can.

So anyway, the next weekend we went back with a brilliant con. Our moms would buy us all tickets for ‘Superbad’ and then they would peel off to watch ‘The Nanny Diaries’ (Scarlett Johansson watches a kid I guess and romances Chris Evans — you know, back when you could find Black Widow and Captain America acting in such a movie. Variety raves that it “rarely rises up standard sitcom fare”). Anyway, the ever-astute theater staff caught our mothers in their devious act of bad parenting and made them watch our depraved teen comedy.

Apparently cartoon penises reenacting the Tiananmen Square Massacre wasn’t exactly their bag (nor, understandably, was the over-the-top sexism of the Jonah Hill character), so this was a movie, at least at home, for a time, I had to pretend to not like all that much. But I did. All that much. Here was a high school movie in which the actors actually looked and talked like they were in high school. In a pretty great year for film (‘No Country For Old Men,’ ‘There Will Be Blood,’ the list goes on and on) this was the “holy shit you’ve got to see this!” movie of the summer of ‘07, one of the few comedies I remember had everyone at school talking for months.

Going back for a minute to the film’s offensive nature, well, sure, it is… kind of. The characters (namely Hill’s Seth) say some pretty ridiculous shit, but he’s still a virgin who’s all talk, and compared to the likes of ‘American Pie,’ or the raunchy teen flicks of the ’80s, none of the actresses are asked to strip for the male audience. The comedy centered around body parts/functions is nearly all verbal (aside from those drawings I mentioned earlier, and a gag involving an unfortunate close-dance). Also, specifically ‘Pie’ in mind here, this group of guys doesn’t trick a girl into getting naked so they can live-stream a video of it to their friends, and, oh yeah, the whole internet! (Are most people really still okay with that movie?)

So does ‘Superbad’ hold up? Over a decade later, totally! It’s a blast, and in true Judd Apatow fashion it’s wickedly raunchy and just sweet enough so we actually end up liking the characters. Perhaps for the better, lest the movie become too saccharine for the subject matter, Apatow simply produced the film, leaving the directorial duties to Greg Mottola (who would go on to make the very funny Simon Pegg sci-fi comedy ‘Paul’ as well as the excellent and more personal coming-of-age comedy ‘Adventureland.’) Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, loosely based on their own teen years, or at least the movie they wanted to watch at that time. (Now streaming on Showtime.)

92. The Dark Knight (2008)

Maybe Christopher Nolan’s dialogue can air a bit towards the obvious, but come on, how many great action movies can boast a perfect screenplay as well? And if you’ve ever been a fan of any super hero flick, ask yourself, honestly, do you know how many times you’ve seen ‘The Dark Knight?’ One of my film regrets of movies released in my lifetime is not seeing this one in IMAX (though I did catch Nolan’s last three that way — totally awesome dude!).

At 152 minutes, ‘The Dark Knight’ is pretty damn long, but damn if it ever feels like it, cause this movie moves. Spectacular practical action in the era of CGI chaos… something about Heath Ledger… something about Hans Zimmer (and don’t forget James Newton Howard composed the non-Zimmery stuff for the first two movies)… come on, you already know this movies rules! (And it’s on Netflix right now!)

91. Angel Face (1953)

Back in the twisted days of Hollywood’s studio system, aviation genius/billionaire creep Howard Hughes became obsessed with actress Jean Simmons (who would later act in ‘Guys and Dolls’ and ‘Spartacus’) after seeing her in a few of her British films (she had appeared in some great ones, including Powell & Pressburger’s ‘Black Narcissuses’ and David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’). Back when you could do such a thing, Hughes bought Simmons’ contract, forcing her to move to America and make movies for him. It didn’t take long for Simmons to become aware Hughes’ interest in her wasn’t purely professional, and so she sued him for control of her own career.

By the early 1950's Hughes was already a hypochondriac recluse (kind of like me and you right now!) and so when people wanted something from him they’d sue him, Hughes (presumably too busy peeing in jars in his mansion) wouldn’t show up to court and they’d get their money. But for Simmons, Hughes (the sketchy bastard he was) showed up to court on their day and the judge, acknowledging Hughes had frequently crossed the line with Simmons, compromised the verdict so that Simmons would make three more pictures (under a strict time limit) with the notorious producer before ending her contract. Did I mention the ’50s was kind of a fucked up time?

Few remember the first two of those movies — ‘Affair with a Stranger’ and ‘She Couldn’t Say No’ (yikes, that title!). Then with just a month left of their agreement, Hughes picked a screenplay off a shelf called ‘Murder Story.’ It was a trashy, cliché-ridden crime picture, but Otto Preminger (‘Laura,’ ‘Anatomy of a Murder’) agreed to direct it in three weeks for an out-of-pocket bonus from Hughes, and even punched up the screenplay himself, coming up with a better title in the process. They hired tough-guy movie star Robert Mitchum to play the lead, a run-of-the-mill chump who falls for the wrong girl (Simmons) and before shooting began Hughes had been fussing so much trying to make Simmons’ hair perfect that one day she completely shaved her head just to piss him off (she wears a wig in the film).

So that’s a taste of the behind the scenes drama surrounding this movie that clearly fascinates me, but without that ‘Angel Face’ would still be a small gem of a noir cult classic. Simmons is terrific in it, Robert Mitchum is being Robert Mitchum (which is, still, you know, pretty cool) and composer Dimitri Tiomkin (‘High Noon,’ ‘The Searchers’) leaves us with a particularly haunting melody to suite our femme fatale. There’s one scene in particular — Simmons’ character meets with the nice girl (Mona Freedman) Mithchum’s character is involved with, and it doesn’t go the way you’d expect — that feels incredibly sharp and ahead of it’s time. Oh yeah, and you’re not gonna forget the ending of this flick — a big shock then a lovely bit of black humor delivered without a showy wink — anytime soon. (Sadly ‘Angel Face’ isn’t streaming anywhere yet, but if this sounds like the kind of movie you’d be into, go ahead and seek out the DVD and I doubt you’ll be disappointed.)