What are your top ten favorite movies?
The above shows top 5 films chosen in an Amazon staff poll and aggregates them.
I am writing this to give me space in my habitual daily blog writing
However, I do think there is a truth that naming favourites are just a way of refusing to change the ways you see things, for a film that does not challenge any habitual thinking, feeling and acting does not set about to be ‘liked’ or favoured but to challenge. That explains my top spot.
I have linked them to a blog on the title below where I have a blog on them:
- Maybe a film that challenges us to do what films need us to do to see them at all -see, hear, fell, imagine touch – has to be top, so let’s say Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.
- A toss up between Fox and His Friends or Fear Eats the Soul by Rainder Werner Fassbinder. Both demonstrate what it means and feels like to be marginalised in ways new to film.
- Then one that opens up the difference of meaning between being and feeling alone: Andrew Haig’s All of Us Strangers.
- Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest was probably the bravest film ever in using every filmic device to tell truth about the banality of evil.
- John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy for excellence in making mortality beautiful.
- A 1964 film that was the first to take working class queer life as its subject based on Gillian Freeman’s novel, and named after it, The Leather Boys.
- A modern breakthrough film of growing up black and queer: Moonlight mentioned in a blog on a Caleb Azumah novel which shows its relevance to ‘straight’ experience for black children.
- A film that enables us to see so much more than ‘fact’ in the processes, conclusions and deliverables of science and is innovative: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
- For technical excellence in genre-bending: Saltburn, It dares to unpack masculinity to find if sexuality is expression or weapon in men.
- The ideal film-maker’s film. What does it mean to shoot one. The misunderstood Alex Garland’s Civil War
That’s it for today.
With love
Steven xxxxx
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