Nick's Flick Picks: 100 Personal Favorites

One of the first features I wrote for this site was my list of "Top 50 Films," supplied as a way of stating loyalties, admitting biases, and letting readers know how well my tastes matched or opposed your own. That list has since been heavily revised into my Top 100 Films page, which aims to list the "best" films I feel I have seen. Obviously "best" is a ludicrous and misleading word to apply to works of art, even when using no one's criteria but your own. I do think the movies on that roster are exceptional, roughly in the order I have arranged them, but the list has always been intended as a conversation starter more than anything.

Here, now, is a different kind of conversation, a loopier sidebar, a weirder wormhole into my likes and dislikes—since, even within the Top 100's obvious mix of aesthetic admiration and personal prejudice, it's always been hard to interject movies that, for whatever eccentric reason, I love out of all proportion to their aesthetic merits...which, as it happens, are sometimes sublimely high and sometimes appallingly low. Where do you fit those films by your favorite directors that aren't their most polished but still feel immediate, and indispensable, sometimes more so than their masterpieces? How about the flicks that made you laugh and rail and cry, as much out of circumstance or association or outright manipulation as out of artistic discipline and dexterity? The movies you quote from incessantly, or that you find yourself thinking about, embarrassingly, in the very midst of intense or intimate real-life experiences? The movies you've seen 20 times, when you still haven't seen Rio Bravo or Ugetsu even once? The arrival of these titles into my filmgoing life still shapes my habits of viewing, writing, thinking about, and feeling the movies just as much as "better" or more "classic" films do.

My approach to what follows, then, has been to compile a ranked list of favorites that purposely excludes all titles on my most recent Top 100 list. I love many of those films just as much as I do these, but the point is to share with my readers something new about my tastes, contexts, and personal pets. Plus, in the spirit of a looser and less hidebound list, whenever a pair of films have locked themselves into close reciprocal memory, I've allowed them to share a slot, just like A-side/B-side pop singles used to do. I hope you'll enjoy what follows, and that you might recognize some of your own treasures, and that either way you'll let me know!

---

Permalink       100 Favorites       Homepage       Blog       E-Mail