the rules of the game - The Screengrab

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

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.

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Four)

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever! (Part One)

1. Double feature: THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

2. THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...(1953)

The balance of visual beauty, depth of sophistication in terms of character psychology, high wit, and unsentimental yet warm humanity that Jean Renoir achieved in his greatest works would earn him the title of World's Greatest Filmmaker if it could be laid on anyone's shoulders without smirking. Max Ophuls' love tragedy is one of the few movies that can be mentioned in the same breath as Renoir's without embarrassing it. By an odd concidence, all these movies are, in varying degrees, about the death of the aristocratic class; all manage to satirize these people without cheap condescension or programmatic rage, and all manage to partake of the seductiveness of opulence without ever slipping into the Merchant-Ivory vice of seeming to have been made by snobs for tourists. We may never get another movie that looks on such people and their way of life with such clear eyes again; it's hard just to believe that these films were made in the same century that saw the birth of reality TV.