Stephen Cone’s Top10

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.

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.

Quite possibly the key visual-historical document of the twentieth century, and a monumentally great movie to boot.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.

The Great American Movie.

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.

This movie is perfect.

Malick is the last of the American transcendentalists. We need him, we need him, we need him . . .

Discovering Dreyer in my early twenties opened my eyes to what narrative could be.

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.

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.