
Stephen Cone’s Top10
Stephen Cone is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose films Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party and The Wise Kids are available on DVD and VOD. His latest, Princess Cyd, premiered at Maryland Film Festival, was an official selection of BAMcinemaFest and Frameline, and will be theatrically released by Wolfe Releasing. In November 2017, he will be the subject of a career retrospective at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. Stephen also teaches acting and filmmaking at Northwestern University and Acting Studio Chicago.
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1 (tie)
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John Cassavetes
Love Streams
I’m not the first person who felt he’d found a soul mate upon first encountering Cassavetes’s work, but it’s a testament to how immensely personal and humane his cinema is that it seems to be speaking directly to the soul of whoever is taking it in. I will carry this astounding body of work in my heart until the day it stops beating. My hero.
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2
Terence Davies
The Long Day Closes
The layering here of religious imagery, domesticity, sexuality, pop and classical music, mid-century cinema, and poetry into one expressive, experimental tapestry of adolescent struggle and joy moves me to no end. What a special filmmaker.
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3
Claude Lanzmann
Shoah
Quite possibly the key visual-historical document of the twentieth century, and a monumentally great movie to boot. Inexhaustible, simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, investigative and meditative, but always with two sturdy feet on this horrific and beautiful earth.
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4
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5
Jean Renoir
French Cancan
Renoir is in my holy trinity of filmmakers. How rare for an artist’s love of people and performance to be matched by his or her sense of craft, curiosity, experimentation, and adventure. French Cancan is my favorite of his, the most joyous, celebratory, wondrous thing.
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6
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7 (tie)
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Terrence Malick
The New World
Malick is the last of the American transcendentalists. We need him, we need him, we need him . . .
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8 (tie)
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Carl Th. Dreyer
Gertrud
Discovering Dreyer in my early twenties opened my eyes to what narrative could be.
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9
David Fincher
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
To these eyes, it’s become increasingly apparent that this is a major twenty-first-century masterpiece. No film that I can think of more achingly evokes the melancholy march of time.
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10 (tie)
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Chantal Akerman
News from Home
Impossible to choose a tenth.
Close-up was my introduction to cinematic humanism and secular grace.
A Christmas Tale is the ultimate cinematic feast, endlessly nourishing.
Something Wild is a pop masterpiece from a man who was, until recently, my favorite living filmmaker, Jonathan Demme. Rest in peace.
My Darling Clementine is my favorite John Ford—so beautiful it hurts.
News from Home justifies a personal cinema. The loneliest movie.