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

De Palma's version is also great - and has an even more fucked up ending.




And Bernard Herrmann's score is ALMOST as good as the one he wrote for Vertigo.

Psycho > Vertigo but it's close.

Psycho > Whatever you picked as #2

... yeah. I can accept that.

Admittedly, I owe it a re-watch, but I didn't go crazy for Rear Window when I first saw it. Still 3 1/2 stars, though.

29. Chinatown

Year: 1974

Director: Roman Polanski

Writer(s): Robert Towne

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Hillerman, Perry Lopez, Burt Young, and John Huston

Studio: Paramount

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 131 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
It is odd that in many ways Roman Polanski’s most famous movie doesn’t feel wildly Polanski-esque to me. That’s perhaps a silly thing to say given that Polanski has certainly made movies that are even more off-brand, but generally when I think about “early Polanski” there’s a certain amount of claustrophobia and madness involved, and there isn’t a whole lot of that going on in this film which is set in a sunny period Los Angeles. What does link the film to the rest of the director’s work is its incredible cynicism. The basic message of Chinatown is that the world is not fair, you can’t really fight the system, and sometimes you just have to throw your hands up and move on. That’s not the most pleasant message but there’s a certain truth to it and there’s a good chance that all the crazy events of Polanski’s life led him to the point where he was going to embrace such a message. This cynical world view is of course rooted in film noir and so is the rest of the film, which was one of the first attempts to make a neo-noir in full color and also make it work. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this cynical post-war outlook would be revived the same year that Nixon resigned over Watergate and revived paranoia for a whole new generation.

Chinatown has really grown on me.

28. Annie Hall

Year: 1977

Director: Woody Allen

Writer(s): Woody Allen

Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, and Colleen Dewhurst

Studio: United Artists

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
It’s easy to forget now, but Annie Hall was something of a transitional work for Woody Allen. The director’s pre-Annie Hall output was a lot more broadly comedic (they’ve been termed “the early funny ones” by those who were less fond of his career reinvention), while much of his later work would be increasingly realist and seek dryer laughs. Annie Hall presents something of a middle-ground; its characters are realistic and have believable motivations and yet Allen is also unafraid to constantly break the fourth wall in order to get a laugh. Future Woody Allen movies would never suddenly break into animation or include a gag where Allen is able to conjure Marshall McLuhan out from nowhere in order to one-up a blow-hard who’s babbling nonsense while in line at a theater. Similarly, the film’s close analysis of the ins and outs of modern relationships would not be found in one of his early farces like Take the Money and Run.



I hesitate to call the film a romantic comedy, simply because that phrase reminds modern audiences of a very specific formula that doesn’t really apply here, but it is a comedy about a romance and if that makes it a romantic comedy then it’s one of the best. This is the film where Allen finally really managed to turn his comedic persona into a real character and paired that character with the film’s title character, who is played perfectly by Diane Keaton. Of course both Allen’s character and (to a lesser extent) Keaton’s character are oddballs rather than super-attractive Hollywood archetypes and in many ways that made their attraction to each other all the more compelling. You really begin to feel that these people are made for one-another and that’s what makes their eventual separation so bittersweet. This must have seemed incredibly fresh back in 1977, and it still seems fresh today. This is the movie against which pretty much all of Woody Allen’s future films would be judged and is pretty clearly the definitive starting point for anyone trying to get into his work.

27. Z

Year: 1969

Director: Costa-Gavras

Writer(s): Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún

Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Yves Montand, Irene Papas, and Jacques Perrin

Studio: Reggane Films

Country of Origin: France

Language: French

Running Time: 127 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Though his career was harmed by inconsistency Costa-Gravas remains a remarkable, if somewhat under-appreciated, voice in cinema. A staunch leftist, Gravas sought out injustices to speak out against all over the world, but his most famous film is probably the one that hit closest to home. Z is set in an unnamed country and is in the French language, but there’s little doubt that the movie is about Gravas’ home country of Greece and depicts a fictionalized version of the events which led up to the military junta that was still ruling the country at the time of the film’s release. Much of the film functions as a political thriller where people are trying to get to the truth about an assassination that was seemingly carried out by the government and the uprising that came in its wake. The film came at a hyper-relevant moment and struck a chorde. In the late 60s people were rising up, trying to change things, going up against entrenched power structures and often feeling the wrath of the blowback. The film’s ensuing influence is manifest, its blend of exciting thriller elements with cynical politics and militant conviction would be copied a number of times through the years but the original has seldom been bettered.

26. The Apartment 

Year: 1960

Director: Billy Wilder

Writer(s): Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, and Jack Kruschen

Distributor: United Artists

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
The Apartment is something of a paradox. It’s a comedy, directed by a largely comedic director, staring a largely comedic actor, and featuring a rather comedic premise and yet it’s also an incredibly melancholic movie steeped in loneliness and pain. In fact Billy Wilder very specifically shot the film in black and white in order to remove all the color and mirth from the film’s Christmas décor and in widescreen in order to emphasize the distance and isolation of its characters. Personally I think it’s a little misleading to even call it a comedy and yet there’s a sort of hidden warmth and humanity at the film’s center, it makes you work for your catharsis but it does get there. The film was made at a time when Hollywood was slowly maturing, learning how to better make films for a more sophisticated and adult audience. This was definitely part of that trend and not just because it used comedy and euphemism to get sexual themes past the censors. Rather the film is a mature work because of its frankness and insight. It’s a movie about highly relatable characters who are the opposite of the conventional Hollywood heroes, these people lack confidence and are riddled with insecurities, but over the course of the film they work and struggle to become just a little bit better. It’s not the kind of dramatic character arc we’re used to out of Hollywood, but it’s certainly a meaningful change for these people and that’s what matters.

The Apartment is awesome, good choice