A definitive list of the Top 100 Films of All Time, as voted & ranked in Spring 2024 by contributors Alli, Boomer, Brandon, Britnee, Hanna, and James.

1. House (1977) – “The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.”

2. The Night of the Hunter (1955) – “A classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with its sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil stepparents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.”

3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) – “Blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.”

4. Videodrome (1983) – “‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’

I lie awake at night wondering what Brian O’Blivion would make of TikTok.”

5. Tampopo (1985) – “Hailed as the first ‘ramen western’ (a play on the term ‘spaghetti Western’), Tampopo takes that designation to its most extremely literal end, focusing on the title character’s ramen shop as the location of metaphorical quick-draws and high noon showdowns, as well incorporating a variety of loosely connected comedy sketches about food.”

6. 3 Women (1977) – “This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Altman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode this is a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often (see also: Images, That Cold Day in the Park); he’s damn good at it.”

7. Moonstruck (1987) – “On a short list of classics that I can rewatch at any time no questions asked, especially if I’m feeling low. Come to think of it, Mermaids & The Witches of Eastwick are also on that list, so maybe I just seek comfort in Cher’s curls.”

8. The Red Shoes (1948) – “The centerpiece nightmare ballet is maybe the most gorgeous cinema has ever been. If nothing else, it’s unquestionably the most gorgeous that the color red has ever looked onscreen, which is appropriate since it’s right there in the title.”

9. Peeping Tom (1960) – “It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous this must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing pornography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect, and the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, this was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.”

10. Sunset Boulevard (1950) – “Not sure why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is universally cited as the kickstart to the psychobiddy genre while this is fabulously campy/draggy in almost the exact same way (love them both). Anyways, it’s a masterpiece, but you already knew that.”

11. Grey Gardens (1975) – “Two fabulously volatile women having two separate, simultaneous conversations in loving, never-ending verbal combat. The kind of documentary that’s so iconic that there are multiple documentaries about it.”

12. Vertigo (1958) – “It was cool to see Unkie Hitch go full supernatural ghost story in this … for a while. The closest I can remember seeing him work in that mode before is Rebecca, but this feels even more detached from the confines of Reality, which is always a huge plus for me.”

13. Akira (1988) – “I assumed this was going to be a series of motorcycle chases, so the grotesque supernatural mindfuckery caught me off-guard in the best way. Staggering stuff.”

14. Polyester (1981) – “The Baltimore of Polyester is a wondrously delirious place, full of odd characters and strange circumstances. From the nuns at the unwed mothers’ home that Lu-Lu is sent to, who force the pregnant women in their care to participate in a hayride in the middle of a thunderstorm, to the older choir woman who commandeers a bus in order to chase down the delinquents who swatted her as they drove by (ending with her stopping their escape by biting a hole in their vehicle’s tire), every person is an exaggerated caricature of reality. Hyperbole is Waters’ currency, and Polyester is one of the most accessible of his films for a mainstream audience.”

15. Alien (1979) – “An exquisitely fucked up mutation of the Roger Corman creature feature. So many dirt-cheap horrors in its wake have aimed for its exact quietly eerie mood and inspired only frustrated boredom in the attempt. Here, every scare is a sharp knife to the brain no matter how familiar you are with what’s coming. I still can’t look directly at Giger’s goopy sex monster without shivering in pure disgust all these sequels & knockoffs later. Like the original Terminator, it’s got a reputation of having been surpassed by its louder, better-funded spawn, but I don’t believe that’s true for a second.”

16. Persona (1966) – “Ugly anxieties about fear of motherhood & questions of sexual desire bubble to the surface in such a horrific, unsettling way that you could consider the film a work of avant-garde horror if you view it in the right context. This was my first introduction to Bergman as a filmmaker and I’ve heard that entry point likened to jumping into the deep end. It’s a messy, languid picture that somehow pulls together a pointed & purposeful tone from the wreckage without ever affording the audience a clear picture of what exactly is transpiring.”

17. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – “Nothing tops this when it comes to existential dread and the anxieties & paranoias of urban living, as well as the socially imposed restrictions that treat women like baby machines with no agency.”

18. Spirited Away (2001) – “It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all.”

19. Heathers (1988) – “Hearing from the DVD commentary track that this was originally written as a 3-hour, final-word-on-high-school-movies epic for Kubrick to direct weirdly makes a lot of sense in retrospect, both in the eerie, alien tone and in how densely, wonderfully overwritten it is. As always, the best writing is editing.”

20. Suspiria (1977) – “Hones in on atmosphere & tone rather than plot, and it’s well-served by that attention to detail. That’s not to say that the plot is irrelevant, but color and immersion are much more important here than they are in a lot of other films from the same period (or today). Contemporary critics took issue with the film’s plot structure, apparently failing to realize that it’s intentionally dreamlike, influenced by fairy tales and nightmares more than monomyth. Even the opening narration, which others consider to be out of place and somewhat silly, acts as a kind of horror-tinged “once upon a time.”’

21. Daisies (1966) – “Chytilová was years ahead of the curve on this absurdist comedy. Often cited as a cornerstone of the Czech New Wave and experimenting with visual trickery that still feels vivid & fresh five decades later (not to mention predicting a lot of flower child hippie fashion), it’s an incredibly important work for something so tangled in absurdism & frivolity.”

22. The Thing (1982) – “The strange, rose-colored lighting of emergency flares & the sparse, snow-covered Antarctica hellscape give the film an otherworldly look backed up, of course, by the foreign monstrosity of its titular alien beast. The creature design is over-the-top in its complexity, and I sincerely hope every single model made for the film is preserved in a museum somewhere and not broken into parts or discarded. Also up there with Carpenter’s best work is the film’s dark humor, not only in Kurt Russell’s drunkenly cavalier performance, but also in the absurdity of the film’s violence & grotesqueries.”

23. Blue Velvet (1986) – “A feverish erotic thriller set down the street from where The Cleavers live. It might only be because it’s the first one I saw, but I still think this was Lynch’s finest hour.”

24. All That Heaven Allows (1955) – “Works like a quickly-paced seduction montage set to a sweeping orchestral score, as if Rock Hard Hudson were sweeping the entire audience off our feet, not just the hot to trot widow he takes a fancy to. It’s tempting to attribute a lot of the entertainment value to its production design and its intense Technicolor dreaminess, but Sirk shows a masterful hand in matching that cinematic artifice to a concisely told, rapidly paced, delicately tragic seduction story. It’s a perfect object, the ideal version of what it sets out to achieve.”

25. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – “More of a dark fantasy along the lines of a more mature NeverEnding Story or Legend than a proper horror film, one that’s narrative of using imagination and compassion to fight fascism is even more important now than it was two decades ago.”

26. Possession (1981) – “With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, ‘Maybe all couples go through this’ it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.”

27. Heavenly Creatures (1994) – “Obviously personally obsessed with the material at hand, Jackson shoots the girls’ murderous attraction to each other with the same funhouse cinematic eye he afforded the over-the-top splatter comedies of his early career, except with a newfound pathos. Jackson’s camera work is as drunk on the characters’ violent chemistry as they are, adapting the same cartoonish aesthetic of his zombie comedies to a newfound, purposeful effect. I could never choose between Heavenly Creatures or Dead Alive as the best title in his catalog, then, as they’re equally, weirdly broad & childish considering the violence of their content. Heavenly Creatures is distinguished there in its immersion in the imagination of two real-life children whose dual fantasy ultimately resulted in a real-life body count. It’s both incredibly impressive and incredibly fucked up how well Jackson manages to put his audience in the headspace of these two extremely particular young women.”

28. The Virgin Suicides (1999) – “I will never fully be able to tell if the exquisite run of high school movies from 1998-2001 really was exceptionally great or if I’m just nostalgic for the era because I was entering high school around the time (along with taste-making pro critics who are now in the right age range to be able to repeat inane phrases like ‘1999: Best Movie Year Ever!!!’ loud & often enough that it sounds halfway legit). Either way, I love them, and this is one of the best.”

29. Princess Mononoke (1997) – “Maybe be the single most Metal animated feature I’ve ever seen. Its shapeshifting warthog demons, severed arms, decapitations, and eco warrior terrorism were not only unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a Miyazaki film before; they were also inexplicably invigorating in a way that only the best of cinema can be. Its PG-13 violence was shocking, but also darkly beautiful and added a whole other layer of complexity to a director I’ve been gradually less able to fully understand or pigeonhole with each passing feature. It’s an exciting feeling.”

30. Crimes of Passion (1984) – “In some ways this is the prime example of Russell’s self-conflicting nature. It’s a visually stunning work that uses a Bava-esque attention to lighting to create an otherworldly playground of sexual fantasy & escapism, but it’s also just pure smut. It occasionally attempts to laud the virtues of sex work, but also uses the profession as a means to leer at naked bodies. It reads like an intentionally cruel vilification of marriage & monogamy that also has a lot to say about the hypocrisy of self-righteous religious piety, but it’s also just a long string of dirty one-liners like ‘Don’t think you’re getting back in these panties; there’s already one asshole in there.’ It’s thoroughly bewildering in its refusal to be engaged with as either high art or low trash, but instead insists that audiences simultaneously appreciate it as both. In other words, it’s pure Ken Russell.”

31. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) – “Tim Burton’s career started with his absolute best. It’s not surprising that this is his funniest work, given Pee-wee’s already fully formed manic brilliance elsewhere, but it’s occasionally surprising as his scariest. The ghost stories, clown surgery, and infinite hordes of macho brutes made this just as much of a Gateway Horror title for me as a kid as more obvious Burtons like Beetlejuice & Scissorhands. There’s even an Elvira cameo, if you know where to look for it.”

32. Psycho (1960) – “Peeping Tom might have endured as the cooler, prettier 1960 proto-slasher, but there’s obviously still plenty power in the similar push & pull between sleaze & elegance in its American equivalent. It’s also much easier to track Hitchcock’s direct influence on the genre than Powell’s, since Psycho improbably spun out into one of the most consistently entertaining slasher franchises around.”

33. RoboCop (1987) – “An often-misunderstood political satire, to the point where it was one of those strange ultraviolent 80s properties that, despite its exceedingly dark content, was cartoonish enough (perhaps by design) to appeal to small children. Bare breasts, bullet wounds, drug abuse, threatened sexual violence, and f-bombs aside, RoboCop boasted a titular cyborg protagonist seemingly designed specifically to make for a kickass action figure for little kids to drool over. Indeed, children did latch onto the futuristic law enforcer’s look (assuming they weren’t intellectually engaged by the film’s attack on the privatization of law enforcement), so much so that the movie inspired a surprisingly wide range of kid-friendly mutations. Almost immediately after its release, RoboCop launched an ostensibly still-alive comic book, a corny live-action TV series, two separate animated shows, a notorious Korean fried chicken ad, and a headline appearance at a WCW pro wrestling Pay-per-view, all with content designed to appeal to a younger crowd than its R-Rated source material.”

34. Citizen Kane (1941) – “Citizen Kane may not have been appreciated in its time, but it could not have been made anywhere but 1940s America. Capturing the spirit of that time with the tools of filmmaking future (pioneering deep focus, forgoing opening credits, fracturing traditional narrative, etc.), Welles constructed a stunning work that clearly stood as a cinematic crossroads between the past and what was to come. William Randolph Hearst was merely a cipher for the times in which he thrived, but he was an extremely well-chosen one.”

35. My Winnipeg (2007) – “Honestly shocking this doesn’t make at least one overt Winni-pegging joke. Maybe if it had been made just a few years later …”

36. Santa Sangre (1989) – “I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work is because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. A fine-art carnival sideshow.”

37. Blow Out (1981) – “Essential De Palma, arguably his masterwork. With its mix of intrigue, nail biting suspense, and dark humor, the film transcends genres and feels as fresh as it must have in 1981. Showcasing De Palma’s formidable skill behind the camera, this is also a great homage to the process of filmmaking from a modern master.”

38. The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989) – “This is a gorgeous, sumptuous piece of filmmaking, dancing lightly between areas of intense green and red saturation, austere white hideaways, and a grey-blue car park. Spending the entire runtime in so few locations could easily trend toward growing tired of the same places, but each place is so thoroughly baroque in its design that it’s an endless feast for the eye.”

39. Cruising (1980) – “Friedkin’s best on almost an objective level, in that it feels like the exact nexus of all his greatest hits: the step-by-step documentary approach to crime (and disgust with police response to it) in The French Connection and To Live & Die in LA; the queasy queer history timestamp of The Boys in the Band; the ecstatic pure-horror filmmaking of Bug & The Exorcist; the unflinching brutality of everything. It’s all here.”

40. Female Trouble (1974) – “Affords Divine a stage to perform her most gloriously fucked up stunts on celluloid, then directly comments on our fascination with those wicked deeds and with crime as entertainment in general. More importantly, though, it allows her to perform the full spectrum of American femininity as, to borrow the title of a Lifetime movie, Wife-Mother-Murderer in the post-hippie grime of the mid-1970s. Dawn Davenport is multiple generations & evolutions of the misbehaving woman, a perfect template for Divine to perform a full floor show of varying proto-punk looks & sneering femme attitudes. She may have starred in a few better movies, but few performances ever served her better as a top bill entertainer & the center of attention.”

41. The VVitch (2015) – “A haunting, beautifully shot, impossibly well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan, it has many virtues outside the simple question of whether or not it was a scary movie. But yes, The Witch succeeds there as well. At times it can be downright terrifying.”

42. Hard Boiled (1992) – “John Woo, while he has made his share of flops, is one of action cinema’s greats, and this is his masterpiece. It’s a perfect blend of style and tension. He manages to keep the stakes just as high as the amount of fun. The sequences of explosions and stunts are beautifully choreographed, displaying the influence of kung fu movies that Honk Kong is historically known for. The characters, while classic tropes, are compelling, with even small side characters being afforded a life of their own. It manages to follow the blueprints laid down by the movies before it, while also exploring new territories.”

43. The Shining (1980) – “Potent, chilling cinematic mythmaking with the same level of widespread impact on the artform as The Wizard of Oz, even if its direct echoes are much less substantial: Room 237, Ready Player One, Doctor Sleep, moon-landing conspiracy videos, etc.  Weirdly enough, both films were Christmas viewing rituals in my house growing up too.”

44. Paprika (2006) – “A personal favorite even though I’m embarrassingly unversed in anime. Would love to live in a world where all animation took full advantage of the dream-logic freedom of the artform like this; so much of the medium feels limited by weak imaginations in comparison.”

45. Fargo (1996) – “A dark, mean movie about little people with meaningless lives doing harm to one another over petty, trivial things. A movie in which being able to commit cold blooded murder doesn’t mean you can’t also be sniveling or pathetic. But Fargo is also about gentleness, comfort, and quiet dignity.”

46. Poor Things (2023) – “Lanthimos movies always feel like they’re poking at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods. That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as perversely fun as it is here, though, to the point where it feels like he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.”

47. The Seventh Seal (1957) – “The film is now remembered mostly for its historical significance and that iconic image of Death, parodied in movies like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Last Action Hero, rather than its substance. That’s a shame because The Seventh Seal is thematically rich and a masterpiece of cinematography. A jester’s performance interrupted by a procession of the plague stricken. An innocent woman burned at the stake. The Dance of Death. The stark black & white images Bergman presents are haunting, evocative, and foreboding, staying with you long after the final credits.”

48. Serial Mom (1994) – “You can get Kathleen Turner and America’s Darling (D.A.) Sam Waterston into a movie wherein a man gets stabbed in the back with a fire poker and his liver has to be removed from said implement comically, but not a film in which a chicken is crushed to death by fucking. John Waters couldn’t make Female Trouble or Pink Flamingos in 1994, and maybe that’s a good thing; it gave him the opportunity to tackle a similar concept in two different ways, and although the size of an audience isn’t the sole factor in determining success, it can’t be said that Serial Mom didn’t reach a larger audience. What (if anything) it lost along the way is worth the sacrifice to create a John Waters movie you can (almost) watch with your mom.”

49. Jackie Brown (1997) – “An ideal specimen of 90s Tarantino, if not only because he actually got to platform one of his genre idols instead of just paying homage to them.  It’s easy to get frustrated by how little work Pam Grier has gotten as a lead over the years despite being a goddamn Star, so you gotta cherish the victories where you can find them.”

50. Eyes Without a Face (1960) – “The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.”

51. Don’t Look Now (1973) – “A delectable head-scratcher. For a movie with such clear themes & purposeful imagery, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what it was getting at with its conclusion, which is definitely part of the charm. Reminded me of many great works of its era, but most of all Fulci’s The Psychic. Would gladly watch it a few more times to continue to puzzle at it, which I suppose is the highest praise you can lay on any film.”

52. Paris is Burning (1990) – “As a culture, its subject has everything necessary for a great film: sights (in the homemade fashion), sounds (in the music & dancing that accompanies the runway voguing), and narrative (in its long history as told through the eyes of old-timers who had occupied the scene decades before the film’s camera crew arrived in 1987). Part of what makes it so arresting is its combination of both surface pleasures & much deeper, more meaningful aspects. Sure, it’s stuffed with lush, beautiful fashion and the absurd hieroglyphics-inspired dance moves of voguing, but there’s a lot of real heartbreak at the center of the culture’s need for escape.”

53. Mulholland Drive (2001) – “Lynch is often accused of being stubbornly opaque, but here he gets vulnerable by letting the audience in on what truly, personally frightens him: studio notes, homeless people, and chatting with strangers at the airport.”

54. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) – “When my parents returned home from watching this in the theater they reported ‘We just saw the worst movie we’ve ever seen in our lives. You’re gonna love it.’ Little did they know that I’d build an entire personality out of loving it for the better part of a decade. Maybe a little embarrassing in retrospect, but the twee era was at least a step up from my previous mall punk & nu-metal phases.”

55. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) – “I was not at all prepared to be this emotionally wrecked by a simple tale of a noble donkey’s adventures in our miserable world. Worked really well for me as a Baby’s First Bresson, in that it tore my heart out of my chest, stomped on it, and beat it with rocks & sticks. Ouch.”

56. Midsommar (2019) – “A cathartic breakup drama disguised as a gruesome daytime horror. Ari Aster’s traumatic nightmare-comedy about a toxic romance that’s far outstayed its welcome is distinguished by its morbid sense of humor, its detailed costume & production design, its preference for atmospheric dread over traditional jump scares, and its continuation of occultist, Wicker Man-style folk horror into a new generation of genre nerdom.”

57. Basic Instinct (1992) – “The ideal specimen of the first-wave erotic thriller, from the casting of Michael Douglas as an explosively angry asshole to the onscreen sex resembling fight choreography instead of anything genuinely erotic. I’m always a sucker for movies where the protagonist continually does something they know is going to kill them because it also makes them horny, and this one has a lot of cheeky fun with that tension.”

58. Parasite (2019) – “Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is a twisty, crowd-pleasing thriller about class resentment, with a particular focus on how Capitalism forces its lowliest casualties to fight over the crumbs that fall from on high. It’s a genuine phenomenon that such a savage commentary on class politics has become so universally popular, earning sold-out screenings & ecstatic critical praise for months on end as its distribution exponentially spreads. When was the last time such a wide audience embraced a movie that features *gasp* subtitles, much less such a tonally explosive expression of economic anger?”

59. La Belle et la Bête (1946) – “I cannot deny the visual splendor & fairy tale magic of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête; it’s every bit of a masterpiece as it has been hyped to be, just a gorgeous sensory immersion that defines the highest possible achievements of its medium. What I didn’t know to expect, however, what its reputation as the defining Beauty and the Beast adaptation had not prepared me for, was that it would be so deliriously horny. La Belle et la Bête is more than just a masterpiece; it’s a Kink Masterpiece, which is a much rarer breed.”

60. Metropolis (1927) – “A century later this movie’s still on the cutting edge: understanding that labor is Hell and that giant gears + steam = cinema.”

61. Starship Troopers (1997) – “It’s always fun to take the cultural temperature of a mainstream movie in its time by returning to Ebert’s review.  This is an amusing case in the same vein as Josie & The Pussycats: he totally gets it, referring to it as ‘sly satire’, but he still doesn’t like it.”

62. True Stories (1986) – “A fearless peeling back of Byrne’s public persona (as unobtrusive as it is) to lay bare the core of this being called ‘David Byrne.’ It’s truly a celebration of the specialness of the mundane, and even the specialness of something as ugly as suburban tract housing. Who can say it’s not beautiful? There ought to be a law.”

63. Some Like It Hot (1959) – “No movie’s perfect, except this one.”

64. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) – “Almodóvar has said that women make the best characters, and he absolutely delivers that here. We have deranged women, compassionate women, cruel women, calculating women, funny women, tired women, angry women, all revolving around one barely-present man who doesn’t deserve their attention.”

65. Birth (2004) – “The bathtub scene rightfully raises a lot of eyebrows but I gotta give it to the dining-room spanking as the #1 wildest thing that happens in this movie. Still Glazer’s best, give or take that one Jamiroquai video.”

66. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – “I know the greater cultural understanding of this film is as a communal ritual, but I never really experienced it that way. Watching my VHS copy on loop as a kid was a solitary hobby, but it taught me everything I love about art, from B-movies to glam rock to drag.”

67. Wild at Heart (1990) – “Halfway between David Lynch’s version of Cry-Baby and John Waters guest directing an episode of Twin Peaks; a movie adaptation of their historic handshake at the Bob’s Big Boy. Perversion, repulsion, perfection”

68. Body Double (1984) – “What if Vertigo wasn’t about vertigo, but was instead about claustrophobia? It feels like this is the catalyzing question that went through Brian De Palma’s mind when he first came up with the idea for this risqué homage to one of the Master of Suspense’s greatest works (there’s also a little bit of Rear Window thrown in there just for good measure). It’s a product of its time, a sleazy De Palma take on a Hitchcock classic, and as such it’s an oddity that I can’t recommend more highly.”

69. Amelie (2001) – “There’s a very peculiar, detailed, dark-magic energy to its fairy tale rhythms that’s enduringly endearing, trafficking in a hyper-specific, hermetic world that still feels unique & intimate no matter how often it has been echoed in its twee-tinged decedents.”

70. Muriel’s Wedding (1994) – “The tension between 90s-era John Waters humor & pitch-black Todd Solondz despair makes me howl like a madman every time I watch this. Just outrageous, gorgeous, soul-crushing bliss every time.”

71. Brief Encounter (1945) – “A kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder. When the would-be couple develops their first inside joke it’s like they’re loading a gun. Thrillingly romantic.”

72. All About My Mother (1999) – “A deliciously complex feat of writing & empathy that exemplifies the very best of what I love about the few Almodóvar movies I’ve seen so far: the unforced humor, the unembarrassed melodrama, the gorgeous artifice, and the soul-deep genuine interest in the lives of women.”

73. Diabolique (1955) – “It’s probably for the best that Clouzot beat Hitchcock to the punch adapting the novel, since he got away with indulging images & themes Hitchcock would have been pressured to tiptoe around, and yet it feels so much like Hitchcock’s best works that it’s simultaneously a shame. I guess adapting Boileau-Narcejac’s The Living and the Dead into Vertigo instead was a decent enough consolation prize, though, all things considered.”

74. M (1931) – “It’s the kind of classic film urtext that has been dissected, contextualized, and decoded nearly to death in nine decades since its release. That also makes it the kind of urtext that has so much discourse that most people are intimidated by the sheer amount of scholarship surrounding it or think that it’ll be outside of their grasp to understand, or they think it falls into the category of impenetrable artsy-fartsy stuff that culture snobs are always going on about. None of that is true. This movie is extremely accessible, not to mention scary, beautiful, and bewitching.”

75. Knife+Heart (2018) – “A neon saturated fever dream, and yet it holds together in a way that is truly astonishing and thoughtful, considering that multiple people get stabbed to death by a knife hidden inside of a makeshift phallus.”

76. Boogie Nights (1997) – “Even more so than Goodfellas, this has cinema’s clearest distinction between its story’s Fuck Around era (the 1970s) and his Find Out era (the 1980s), down to the minute.”

77. Rear Window (1954) – “The sets have a proto-Wes Anderson dollhouse quality to them. The lavishness of the costume design tops even Douglas Sirk productions like All That Heaven Allows. Not a single hair feels out of place and each mechanical piece of the plot moves along like clockwork, even though the film’s star, Stewart, is supposed to convey a pathetic, disheveled state with his broken leg & unwashed body. With all of the film’s intricate visual design, complex plotting, and trick photography innovation at the inevitable climax, it’s easy to see this only as a gorgeous middle ground between a populist thriller & a high brow art film. The truth is, though, that the movie also slyly functions as a morose comedy.”

78. Adaptation (2002) – “Charlie Kaufman is the screenwriter equivalent of that old school hip-hop style of only rapping about how great you are at rapping, so that you’re always talking about doing something instead of actually doing the thing.  His saving grace is that he mercilessly makes fun of himself for it.”

79. Jurassic Park (1993) – “The kind of VHS era classic you can replay start-to-end in your head just by closing your eyes. With Jaws, Spielberg used major-studio Hollywood money to explode the template of the Roger Corman creature feature into a rudimentary prototype of the modern blockbuster. By the time he got here two decades later, he had perfected the artform.”

80. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – “One of the most consistent pleasures here is watching Jodie Foster & Anthony Hopkins try to out over-act each other. Foster’s thick Southern accent & Hopkins’s *tsk tsk* brand of mannered scenery chewing have always been a neck & neck race for most heightened/ridiculous for me, but this most recent rewatch has presented a third competitor in this struggle: Howard Shore. The composer’s string arrangements actively attempt to match the soaring stage play line deliveries from Foster & Hopkins, who similarly seem to be playing for the back row. The rabid horror fan in me wishes that the score would ease up and leave a sparser atmosphere for the genre film sleaze to fully seep into, but the more I think about it, the more Shore’s music feels symbiotic with the lofty Greek tragedy tones of Demme’s performers.”

81. Clueless (1995) – “I think it says a lot that it’s only onscreen for a few scenes and yet the Cher Horowitz plaid is just as instantly recognizable as Spiderman’s suit.”

82. Opera (1987) – “Widely considered to be the last great Dario Argento film, this is a sharp movie with a fast pace and some great new ideas from the aging director. Argento was invited to La Scala after Phenomena and asked to produce and mount a stage opera; he was happy to do so, but the project never went anywhere due to artistic differences. Instead, he channeled that idea into his 1987 film, which concerns a production of Verdi’s Macbeth staged by a transparent avatar of himself, with heavy influences from the plot structure and recurring images of The Phantom of the Opera. It’s an imperfect film, but that hardly differentiates it from Argento’s other works, even some of his unequivocal classics.”

83. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) – “I can’t sell this one any better than the original poster that warned of 5 things you should know before buying a ticket:

1. If you’re long-standing fans of Miss Davis and Miss Crawford, we warn you this quite unlike anything they’ve ever done.
2. You are urged to see it from the beginning.
3. Be prepared for the macabre and the terrifying.
4. We ask your pledge to keep the shocking climax a secret.
5. When the tension begins to build, try to remember it’s just a movie.”

84. Labyrinth (1986) – “Bowie has had a pretty interesting acting career, starring in films such as The Hunger and Absolute Beginners, but Labyrinth is without a doubt the film he is best known for. The Goblin King has been the source of so many sexual awakenings due to his mysterious aura and dashing appearance (not to mention that giant codpiece), but more importantly, the music that he created for the film is extraordinary. Definitely my favorite film soundtrack of all-time. Each song has a lot of heart, a lot of fun, and a whole lot of Bowie.”

85. In the Mood for Love (2000) – “A high-fashion Sirkian melodrama of the highest order. Love how the central couple’s role play is way kinkier & more intimate than what their spouses are likely up to. Also impressed by how current it feels, forgiving a horrendous choppy slo-mo frame rate choice that roots it right square in the early aughts.”

86. Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – “Even without the Delphine Seyrig connection this would make an exquisitely eerie double feature with Daughters of Darkness. For fun, I’m going to pretend they’re set at the same creepy hotel. Baby’s first headcanon <3”

87. Dogtooth (2009) – “Most helpful as a guiding roadmap to Lanthimos’s disorienting oeuvre. It’s a concise distillation of what the filmmaker has been delivering in each feature since: viciously traumatic hangout comedies.”

88. All About Eve (1950) – “Fabulously bitchy, hilariously vicious; a terminal diagnosis of movie star brain rot.”

89. Theorem (1968) – “Devoted Pasolini scholars and Criterion Channel subscribers would likely be appalled to see his film Teorema contextualized as a Saltburn prototype, but I’m compelled to do so anyway, since the hyperbolic, nerdy gatekeeping around Fennell’s totally cromulent sophomore feature needs to be combated with fire.  Teorema is a much smarter, harsher, politically sharper social-climber thriller than Saltburn by practically every metric, so it might initially seem like an insult to present it in this comparative context, but since all it would really take is one TikTok video recommending it to Saltburn fans (Salties? Burnies? Tublickers?) for the film to find a younger, curious audience, I’m willing to risk the faux pas.”

90. mother! (2017) – “I’m of the firm opinion that subtlety is highly overvalued in modern criticism, so I’m tickled that this film is fully committed to its crash course on the entirety of the Bible and (intended or not) Aronofsky’s self-flagellation over the Artist-Muse power dynamics of his own romantic partnerships, a pitch black act of self-analysis that paints the Artist type as much more of a monster than the divine role of the Biblical analogy.”

91. After Hours (1985) – “A Dick Miller cameo? A recurring human-sculpture horror gag? A city full of weirdo artists who hang out at late-night cafes? A director who got his start under Corman? I’m convinced this is all just an elaborate homage to Bucket of Blood.

Either way, it’s one of the best crafted comedies I’ve ever seen; manic perfection.”

92. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) – “A fairy tale about a machine who loves unconditionally but receives nothing in return because he is considered a Thing, not a Person. Its many allusions to Pinocchio rely heavily on that tale’s horrors of body dysmorphia & crises of self, not its potential for storybook cuteness. Filtering that formula through a Blade Runner-inspired future of ‘real’ people playing god with artificial minds & bodies opens the film up to a brutal adventure into philosophical dread & emotional torture. Spielberg is not at all afraid to twist the emotional screws here—stabbing, melting, dismantling, and psychologically torturing his robo-cast at every cruel twist in the story—a far cry from the ‘gee willikers!’ sci-fi throwbacks of his 1980s work. He walks back those impulses somewhat in the epilogue, but the film has already dug too much of a wickedly cold groove at that point for the emotional damage to be undone.”

93. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) – “After trying to subvert & mutate the Old Hollywood musical in Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy questions whether maybe the artform was already perfectly sublime as is?”

94. What Happened Was … (1994) – “Absolutely loved this. There’s a certain flavor of sinister absurdism and withering dialogue you can only find in stage plays, and this builds to both in such a gradual, low-key way that you hardly notice your skin’s been on fire the entire time. The camera also makes great use of its one-apartment location in a way you rarely see outside of Friedkin’s stage play adaptations.”

95. Altered States (1980) – “It’s hilarious to read that Ken Russell wasn’t the first choice for director and effectively banned the screenwriter from the set. The ecstatic video art psychedelia of the final product is purely Russell’s own thing, a thunderous testament to his all-powerful stubbornness. If Paddy Chayefsky were as popular an author as Stephen King, it would have The Shining level notoriety as a triumph of auteurist bullying.”

96. Gaslight (1944) – “Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!’ (and then Charles Boyer proceeded to scare the shit out of me for the rest of the runtime).”

97. Raw (2016) – “I was beaten to the punch by Catherine Bray of Variety in the comparisons that were most evident to me, as she called Raw ‘Suspiria meets Ginger Snaps,’ which was my thought exactly while sitting in the theater. The school setting lends itself to the former allusion, as does the stunningly saturated color palette and the viscerality of the gore (which is less present than one would expect from either the marketing or the oft-cited fainting of several audience members at the Toronto premier), while the coming-of-age narrative as explored by two sisters with a complex relationship makes the latter reference apparent. Make no mistake, however: even for the strongest stomachs amongst us, there will be something in this film that turns that organ inside out.”

98. Halloween (1978) – “Carpenter’s score for the film and the visual design for serial killer Michael Myers are undeniably iconic, but the overall effect of the barebones horny-teens-hunted-by-a-masked-killer slasher is never as interesting to me as the stranger, more outrageous mutations of the formula that followed (The Final Destination, Slumber Party Massacre II, Sleepaway Camp, The House on Sorority Row, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, etc.). I’m appreciative of Halloween’s influence on the horror genre, but skeptical of most after-the-fact academic assessments of the film that explain Michael Myers to be the embodiment of pure, senseless Evil as if that were that were a mythology it fully defined. Beyond lip service to philosophical ponderings on the nature of Evil provided by crazed psychologist Dr. Loomis, what’s mostly onscreen in the original Halloween is hot teens being punished for behaving badly (like a decades-late update to the 1950s “road to ruin” pictures where sex = death). The philosophy behind its supposed explorations of Fate & Evil have become part of its lore in the decades since its release.”

99. The Exterminating Angel (1962) – “Pushes its Party Out of Bounds conflict to unmatched extremes that are somehow just as amusing as they are terrifying.”

100. The Doom Generation (1995) – “One of those bittersweet blessings where I wish this was around in my life when I was a dipshit, John Waters-obsessed teen but seeing it for the first time with a rowdy crowd of queer weirdos made every airheaded line reading hit way harder than it would have alone on VHS. One of the best movies out there about how boring, rotten, and beautifully cheap life in America can be; divine Gen-X junk food.”

-The Swampflix Crew