For me movies are about charisma. The scripts need energy and that “thing” that makes the words worth paying attention to. The actors also need to convey that energy and cool factor if I’m staying in the picture. It colors my top ten list. Some of these wouldn’t make it very far with most critics, but most critics don’t have much charisma. If they did, they would be actors.
- No Country For Old Men: The essential American movie. The Coen Brothers took arguably the best novel of the past 25 years brought it straight to the proper darkness it needed. Note: There is no soundtrack. The dialog is timed to perfection and more chilling than shark eyes. Javier Bardem plays a villain of mythic proportions without a missing a beat of dark humor, friendo.
- The Pope Of Greenwich Village: Find me a more charismatic performance than Mickey Rourke’s Charlie Moran and I’ll take it off my list. It makes me laugh, cry and shake my head in awe everytime, and I’ve watched it a lot. This movie is so good that even after Geraldine Page unpredictably steals it in the middle, you slip right back into Rourke’s casual cool genius.
- Hugo: This is why they make movies. A mundane world of a train station imagined through the innocent eyes of a lonely and abandoned child. Every scene is imagined with beauty and executed with compassion and respect.
- Ordinary People: First movie I ever saw in a theater, and to this date maybe the only one with a completely authentic ending. No family is perfect. Huge lesson for me. And it uses silence almost better than No Country For Old Men.
- Kill The Irishman: It’s based on a true story about some amateur Irish hoods who are really good at blowing up cars in 1978 Cleveland. The reasons they’re blowing up cars is because New York members of the Gambinos are driving them and they don’t take well to that in Cleveland. Nobody very famous or very pretty is in it. It’s gritty, explosive and nasty.
- Kings: An Irish film that nobody saw. It’s a dark and drunk story set around a group of alienated childhood friends who reunite for the funeral of one of their own. Great dialogue, much of it in Gaelic. Perfect lighting, palpable tension and a sense you actually went to the wake when it’s over.
- Seven Beauties: Giancarlo Giannini takes this film from minute one and makes it a masterpiece. Whether he’s talking up a young village girl or a Nazi prison guard he owns the screen and the emotional tide of this wide-ranging film.
- La Dolce Vita: It was made to show the beauty of life. Everytime I watch it, I think life is beautiful.
- American Gangster: Pretty ballsy move to make a 2:45 crime movie with more twists and turns than a canyon road. But it holds you. Denzel. Denzel. Denzel. Three reasons this was a great movie.
- The Lion In Winter: Like I said, I like scripts with energy. Find me a more wisecracking, snappy script and I’ll take this one off my list, too. When Hepburn says “I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How’s that for blasphemy? I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn… but the troops were dazzled,” …..it’s game over for me.