Dracula Presents: The Top 100 Movies of All Time (2015 List)

Yes! Duck Soup! One of my all time favorites.

Where does the name come from?

58. Ikiru

Year: 1952

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Writer(s): Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni

Starring: Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, and Minoru Chiaki

Distributor: Toho

Country of Origin: Japan

Language: Japanese

Running Time: 143 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Old age and dying are two aspects of the human experience which most directors need to tackle at some point. Most of them wait until late in their lives to get that degree of introspection but every once in a while you get a case like Ikiru, which Akira Kurosawa made when he was 42 and was more or less at the height of his career. The film is about an old man who has diligently worked all his life as a bureaucrat only to suddenly be diagnosed with a terminal cancer. The film is about what this dying man does knowing he doesn’t have long to live and knows he has to do something with his life. When he wasn’t making period films Kurosawa’s work always had a touch of Frank Capera in it, especially during the early post-war era. Ikiru is a good example of this in the way that it ultimately about a good person trying to do good in the face of an uncaring world. It feels like it’s about go down a fairly expected route, but then it suddenly pivots about 60% of the way through and flashes forward to after the protagonists death and sits in on his funeral as we hear people reminisce about how he manages to accomplish his big goal (the construction of a playground). It’s a really unconventional move but Kurosawa somehow manages to pull it off, leading to the film’s iconic image, the sight of the old man sitting on the park swing singing “Life is Brief” in the snow. It’s certainly not Kurosawa’s most funloving work, but it has an emotional power that transcends.

All I know about Amarcord is that red outfit the woman wears in the covers.

I actually dressed up as Harry Powell this year for Halloween.



Awesome film. Didn't expect to see it on your list.

56. Pulp Fiction

Year: 1994

Director: Quentin Tarentino

Writer(s): Quentin Tarentino and Roger Avary

Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Quentin Tarentino, and Christopher Walken

Studio: Miramax

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 154 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
It’s a truly rare and special thing when a young and ambitious filmmaker can throw down the gauntlet and release a film like Pulp Fiction that can be immediately recognized as something special by the critics, influence a generation of filmmakers, and even become a fairly sizable hit with the general public at the same time. Granted, like all Tarentino movies the film borrows liberally from a number of films and sources but also in Tarentino fashion the film manages to mold those elements into something that feel fresh and original. Interestingly, the main cinematic vein Tarentino draws on this time around is not lowbrow genre fare; it’s the French New Wave. Even though he’s working with much different source material his M.O. remains the same, he found a way to bring the Nouvelle Vague into the 90s and make it accessible to mainstream audiences without really compromising it or dumbing it down. The film is also a masterclass in screenwriting given the way it manages to intertwine three storylines (in non-chronological order no less) beautifully and in a way that almost never comes off as confusing to audiences that aren’t used to watching movies like this. Add to that the film’s incredibly witty dialogue (which references pop culture in ways that films rarely did before Tarentino came along) that’s delivered by a really smartly assembled cast. By the time Jules and Vincent are robbed in that restaurant and the whole movie goes full circle, the audience has this overwhelming feeling that nothing and everything just happened and it’s really satisfying.

55. Rosemary's Baby

Year: 1968

Director: Roman Polanski

Writer(s): Roman Polanski

Based on: The novel "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin

Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, and Angela Dorian

Studio: Paramount

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 136 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Roesmary’s Baby isn’t exactly a horror movie but it was instrumental in the development of that genre all the same. Before the late 60s horror movies were still primarily defined by the likes of Vincent Price and Boris Karloff and this movie played a big role in both maturing the genre and making it respectable. A psychological thriller at its core, the film brings a frightening situation into a contemporary and urban setting while also bringing a chilling ambiguity to the proceedings. Paranoia is probably the dominant running theme through all of Polanski’s work, and here he explores it to the fullest as Rosemary finds herself torn apart as to whether she’s truly the victim of a satanic conspiracy or simply imagining it because of her own fears of motherhood and her marital problems. The movie does a great job of playing things right down the center up until the last twenty minutes or so when we finally get the chilling reveal and a tantalizingly mysterious ending. The film made Mia Farrow a movie star and also won Ruth Gordon an Oscar, but Polanski was clearly the one who benefited the most from the film’s success. This was the perfect vehicle for the Polish/French director to bring his talents to Hollywood and it set up a long lasting career in English language cinema (even if it was interrupted by some unfortunate actions in his personal life), and for all his future accomplishments I don’t think he ever found a more perfect fusion of his European artistry and his American ambitions.

53. The Searchers

Year: 1956

Director: John Ford

Writer(s): Frank S. Nugent

Based on: The novel "The Searchers" by Alan Le May

Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, and Natalie Wood

Studio: Warner Brothers

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
John Ford is a filmmaker who is generally appreciated more for form than for content these days. His mastery of golden age Hollywood studio filmmaking is consistently admired but his content often lacked ambition. He was a stone cold professional working in a factory-like environment and compromises were inevitable. Every once in a while though he buckled down and made a film that was truly worthy of his talents and no movie did that quite as well as his 1956 masterpiece The Searchers. Though I’m sure many audiences went to the movie expecting just another John Wayne western like many others, what they got was something much grander, much darker, and much more mature than its contemporaries. Though it doesn’t openly criticize its genre the way the “revisionist” westerns would start to do in the next decade, the film does implicitly question some of the values of the genre that made both Wayne and Ford wealthy, specifically the genre’s hostility toward Native Americans. A modern movie would tackle racism by focusing in on the victims of oppression, but here the focus is more on the perpetrators of oppression. It’s a movie about the ways in which hate, and to a lesser extent obsession, twists one's own soul and clouds one’s judgement. The film boldly makes its protagonist a somewhat ambiguous anti-hero, a man who’s understandable desire to save his niece drives him to murderous extremes. It’s a beautifully rendered western any way you cut it, Ford really went above and beyond to make this his masterpiece, but it’s that extra level of ambiguity right up to the film’s iconic final shot that really makes the film stand out from the rest of the pack.

When it comes to Ford, I probably prefer The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and probably even The Grapes of Wrath, but The Searchers is right up there.

Nah, The Searchers is his best film.

Never seen any of em.

I made it known right from the beginning that I'd be treating certain trilogies like this.  I'm only doing it when it a trilogy feels like a cohesive work where the three films seem inseparable from the whole.  The Lord of the Rings movies were literally shot all at the same time and the three colors trilogy was conceived as a single work that was shot back to back.  Admittedly the "before" trilogy is probably a bit more of a stretch but those movies are still pretty intrinsicly linked works. I wasn't about to waste nine slots on the list separating them out just to be a top 100 purist, and trying to rank the individual installments separate from one another would have been madness.  For what it's worth I'm only going to be "cheating" on one more slot going forward.