Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever! 

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)



Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

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Nick Schager's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1) DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)
2) THE SHINING (1980)



With all due respect to Stephen King, who famously disliked this adaptation of his novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is horror cinema nirvana, an unsettling vision of paternal and spousal madness crafted with the director’s trademark icy precision. Jack Nicholson’s performance is deservedly iconic, yet it’s the disquietingly unnatural atmosphere – generated by, among other things, those little twin ghouls, the nude grandma specter in the bathtub, Looney Tunes cartoons, and subtle allusions to Native American history – that truly turns this haunted hotel tale into a nerve-jangling classic.

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As faithful readers already know by now, the End Is Near for this blog...but before we all get Raptured up outta this bitch, your soon-to-be-less-employed-than-usual pals here at the Screengrab figured we’d settle the age-old question of ultimate movie quality once and for all with our own definitive and irrefutable rulings on the subject.

Last week, we determined the Top Ten Worst Atrocities in the History of Cinema...and now, after months of intensive research, legal wrangling, animal testing, sleepless nights and enough partisan debate to make the Coleman-Franken dispute seem like a mere coin-toss, we hereby present our individual and collective picks for THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

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It’s enough already! I blame myself for piling on, but surely we can find some intriguing blog entries out there on subjects other than the movie that rhymes with Blotchmen. For instance, Arbogast on Film is looking back at an apocalyptic fantasy from the olden days. “Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells speculates on rumors that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will feature…dinosaurs?

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OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)



Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!”  Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

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