Ryan Night’s Top 100 Movies: 10-1

Here it is, the top 10 of the 100 best movies of all-time according to me, the guy who runs this website. This was an arduous task, it ended up totaling about 13,000 words even though I only did a paragraph on each movie. Maybe I’ll turn this into an eBook and just throw it up on Amazon. Who knows. But I made it. We did it. Together. Not really together, I did everything. But you’re here. Welcome. I might also do this for games and bands. We’ll see.

For 100-91, click here.
For 90-81, click here.
For 80-71, click here.
For 70-61, click here.
For 60-51, click here.
For 50-41, click here.
For 40-31, click here.
For 30-21, click here.
For 20-11, click here.

10. Good Will Hunting
Kicking off the top 10 movies is Good Will Hunting, a killer movie about a guy with a heavy Boston accent named Will Hunting and his charming friend, Ben Affleck. Will is a super genius, but he’s lower class, so instead of getting an awesome Ivy League education, he works at Harvard as a janitor while rich kids spit in his face and talk down to him. After 20+ years of suffering terrible existence and building up a mass of defense mechanisms, attitude issues, jaded perceptions and unfulfilled dreams, things start going right for Will when a physics professor finds out he Will solved his unsolvable problem. This movie justifiably made Matt Damon famous, and Ben Affleck tagged along and starred in a bunch of Miramax properties in the 90s before briefly dating Jennifer Lopez. Good Will Hunting is an exceptional movie on every level, including a stellar performance by the late Robin Williams. This is a must-see movie.

9. Office Space
I’ve mentioned other movies on this list like Trainspotting, The Truman Show, Brazil, American Beauty, etc., which have rejecting the droll, repetitive, meaningless existence of corporate consumerist life as a central theme, but no movie more perfectly captures what a horrific hellscape modern corporate America is quite like Office Space. The repetition. The overall pointlessness of the entire endeavor. The cast of characters who aren’t actually doing anything productive, but whom you have to spend all your time with. The unfair, biased and incoherent political lens through which promotions are handled. Just the overall, dumbed-down gray blur which is that lifestyle, which everyone wants to escape, but no one seems to be able to even though it’s completely made up. Anyway, Peter Gibbons is sick of having 8 bosses and having to fill out TPS reports that make no difference, no one reads, but everyone somehow criticizes, so he guts a fish on his desk, bails and uses his newfound confidence to start dating Jennifer Aniston. Incredible movie.

8. 500 Days of Summer
I wanted to maintain a diversity on this top 10 movies list, so it’s not too skewed toward one genre. 500 Days of Summer is one of my favorite romance movies. It really captures what the feeling of a breakup is like. There’s a term you may or may not be familiar with called limerence, which is basically a kind of mania and obsession that’s easily confused with love. 500 Days of Summer, at its core, is about that emotion, and it delivers a master class in it. It’s a good movie for young people, probably, as a sort of bizarre cautionary tale (but they will probably experience the plot of this movie anyway), and for older people, it’s highly relatable. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are both incredible in this movie, and it’s a classic for a reason.

7. There Will Be Blood
The only PT Anderson movie besides Magnolia to make this list, and it’s in the top 10. There Will Be Blood is one of my favorite movies of all time. First of all, Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is mindblowing. He drinks your milkshake. He drinks my milkshake. He drinks everyone in Hollywood’s milkshake because good fucking luck ever living up to what this guy pulls out in this movie. This character has such a focus, a drive, an anger, and a mania that he’s hard to look away from. Paul Dano was tasked with acting opposite this performance and he does a great job, bless his heart. On the surface level, this is a movie with barely any dialog and a soundtrack made up of mostly long-held organ tritones about an oil man who buys a town to build an oil well and things don’t go as planned. On a deeper level, this is a gut-churning movie about a man with incredible drive who wants a family and can’t have it, so he redirects his love and passion toward amassing wealth and ends up, by one definition, unbelievably successful, and by another, more accurate definition, defeated and alone.

6. Empire of the Sun
Steven Spielberg made a lot of critically acclaimed, highly vaunted movies and I liked just a handful of them. Empire of the Sun, however, his least well-known movie, is one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. It stars a young Christian Bale, a British ex-patriot in Japan during World War 2, who is placed in a Japanese internment camp for whites (yep, they did it, too). The first half of the movie focuses on Bale’s situation after his parents flee the country but lose him in the crowd at a riot and are unable to go back. He returns to his home, but it’s empty; he tries to survive on his own, but he’s just a boy; and eventually his home is seized by the Japanese military. He stakes out on his own and runs into an American, played by John Malkovich, and they wind up in the camp together. Bale’s character latches onto Malkovich as a father figure, but in reality, Malkovich is just using Bale for sympathy points and extra food. What makes this movie incredible is the way it’s told through the eyes of a child. It focuses on the confusion, what war is like from a kid’s point of view. The kid doesn’t much notice the abnormalities of living in a camp and sort of instinctively adapts and thrives there; as other people are disgusted by rotted food with bugs in it, he sees it as normal and sort of a game; when he sees the kamikaze pilots take off, he doesn’t understand they’re flying away to die, he just thinks planes are cool. In the end, he grows up and the disillusionment and the trauma take him over, replacing that sense of wonder that was insulating him from what was going on around him. This is such a good movie, I really wish more people had seen it.

5. Lost in Translation
Another movie about Japan, but this one is totally different. Sort of a thinly veiled, fictionalized autobiography of Sophia Coppola’s marriage to Spike Jonze, this movie stars Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, each on their own separate obligatory trip to Japan. Johansson, a recently married, recent Brown graduate at the start of her life, and Murray, a successful, slightly over-the-hill actor toward the end of his career (some people have theorized his character was based on Tommy Lee Jones), meet up at a hotel bar and try to make the most of being stuck together alone in Japan. They discover they have a sort of chemistry that is palpable, and quite a shame given their age gap and both of their coupled-statuses. A strong case of right person, wrong time, as it were. A third main character is Japan itself, as experiencing the tranquil temples, culture shock, and chaotic nightlife of Tokyo is the canvas on which these two paint their adventure. I’m not sure this movie could ever be replicated. After it came out people tried, and failed, with movies like Garden State (which was fine, I’m not bashing Garden State), but there’s just something about the chemistry between those particular actors and that particular time period, in that particular city that produced something magical. I can still remember the feeling I had when I saw this movie. This real sort of sense of magic and wonder. And I wish the world could be like that. But it’s not.

4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Out of all the Charlie Kaufman films, this one’s my favorite, and I’m sure it’s everyone else’s favorite as well. Jim Carrey stars alongside Kate Winslet in a very original sci-fi romance that touches on the idea of soulmates and memory. First, much like 500 Days of Summer, it captures what a breakup feels like and does so in a very inventive way that could only have been delivered by the director, Michel Gondry. The sort of piece-meal montage of memories you go through during a breakup, amidst the somewhat random and chaotic cycles of grief, is put to film. The sci-fi conceit is intriguing: what if you could just completely edit a relationship out of your memory? That’s an interesting premise to think about even beyond the concept of relationship. What if you could edit out any trauma? Would you be healed? What if you rewrote your memories to be full of victories and successes instead of failures? Would you be more confident and become more successful after the fact? But what really makes this movie compelling, is the way they resist the procedure and then find each other again, which really brings a magical true love is real message to the movie. The movie itself ends on a bit of a cliffhanger where you sort of expect that they’ll make it the second time around; the original script is different, but possibly even more intriguing: the original script suggests that they’re done this multiple times and have found each other multiple times, and they replay the same 2 year relationship over and over again, suggesting that the lifespan of the relationship is just 2 years, but it’s such a precious and profound experience, they keep going on the ride again and again, like a ride at a theme park.

3. The Shawshank Redemption
Next up on the top 10 list is The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins. This film, based off of a book by Stephen King, is one of the best movies of all time. This happens to be my top 100 movies list, but The Shawshank Redemption for sure deserves to be on anybody’s top 100 movies list. It’s about a well-read banker named Andy Dufresne who’s wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. It follows Andy through his life-well-lived in prison, where he becomes a highly respected veteran inmate, all the way up through his eventual, masterful escape which it turned out he had been planning and slowly executing for years. There are several ups and downs throughout the plot, most notably when the corrupt Warden refuses to allow Andy’s appeal to go through even after he obtains new evidence proving his innocence. There are lots of iconic scenes in the film, and a great cast of supporting characters, especially Red played by Morgan Freeman. Ultimately, what makes this movie so satisfying is a man held down wrongfully beneath his station and his potential finally, in old age, obtains freedom through his own wit and ingenuity. Andy is a hero who seems superhuman, but also achievable.

2. Amelie
Amelie is a beautiful movie about a lonely, but cheery girl who sets out to selflessly do good in the world. She sees the world through a sense of wonder, and touches the lives of several characters in the film through her unique mix of insight and imagination. She helps two acquaintances fall in love; she helps a man reconnect with his childhood, and she even falls in love herself. This movie is so colorful and beautifully filmed, it’s guaranteed to touch your heart. I wish I had more to say about it; it’s a movie that has to be experienced.

1. Fight Club
Here we are. Capping off the top 10 list with my #1 favorite movie of all time, this movie is not only an incredibly well-made, dark David Fincher classic, it’s also so unbelievably apropos to modern society, especially as it relates to men. It rejects consumerism and identity through materialism; it presciently predicts this era of ‘lost men’ that has become so timely and epidemic now, well before it became recurring think piece on every pundit-filled media outlet; it’s an interesting and levelheaded view into human sadness and despair, which is so common today; it’s an interesting take on mental illness, not just the narrator’s schizophrenia, but on Marla’s BPD (a diagnosis I’m stealing from a site I found on google, but I quite like the slug for), the PTSD and grief in the support groups, and the mass psychosis of a society obsessed with their own narcissistic self-image and the accumulation of useless stuff that they can’t identify or fix any of the problems in their own lives. This movie, in many ways, is a metaphor for itself. Where Tyler Durden wanted to burn down the banks to set the stage for what came next, in many ways, the nihilistic philosophy laid out by this movie burned down the illusions of consumerism for young men and set the stage for a new perspective, which almost certainly is not making soap-bombs for a dictator in an abandoned house, but also, almost certainly, is not working 40+ hours a week making useless widgets so Lumburgh stock can go up a quarter of a point.

Whew, that’s it for the top 10 list and the whole top 100 list. It was quite a thing to write. I hope you get something out of it.

Here are links to the rest of the list:
For 100-91, click here.
For 90-81, click here.
For 80-71, click here.
For 70-61, click here.
For 60-51, click here.
For 50-41, click here.
For 40-31, click here.
For 30-21, click here.
For 20-11, click here.