My Favorite Movies

I often cite this as my favorite film(although I guess i don't have one definitive favorite) not because it is the one that may have effected me the most as wannbe filmmaker, or that it hits a personal note w/me, but really because I think more than many films I've seen Raging Bull was the first film to really challenge the way I looked not only at cinema but storytelling in general. It gives us a deeply flawed protagonist yet allows us to care about him and want him have success despite that.
It's a kind of storytelling that we truly are not seeing today, because it trusts the imental capacity of it's audience it does not offer superficial explanations to the characters behavior but it does imply heavily what his motivations are through observing the him as character, and therefore thrusting the question of futile his behavior is on the audience and question how shallow the victory he craves truly is. In that respect it could be viewed as cinema at its most fundemental level. This is why the people who dislike Scorsese are often the ones with very conservative ideas about films. More later..

The most twisted love story ever made, It might also be Hitch's most personal film. It's his greatest because it has an example of everything Hitch was known for, his technical brilliance, subtle use of sexuality, dark humor, questions of personal morality and guilt, it's all here.

The greatest western ever made.Maybe Wayne's best performance and John Ford is one of the greatest filmmakers america has ever produced, but don't take my word for it, Eastwood, Scorsese and Spielberg all give the film(and John Ford) their highest endorsment.

In my opinion the greatest silent film ever made and one of those films that never looses it's touch.It may not be Keaton's funniest film but it is his greatest in terms of filmmaking because it's not just a comedy but also what Orson Welles called the greatest movie about the civil war ever made.In fact it's one of the only comedies on an almost epic scale(in fact the film contains the single most expensive shot in all silent films). In Keaton's day he was always in Chaplin's shadow but today it's evident that his work easily on par if not superior to Chaplin.It would just be nice if flixster had a different poster this one is a little scary.

When Chinatown released it was called a neo-noir, but today I think fits alongside Out of The Past and Kiss me Deadly as one of the greatest noirs ever made. Back in the 50's and 40's noirs were low budget films that were able to tackle dark subject matter within the studio system.In the 1970's when studios began taking chances on independent films and filmmakers Chinatown did the same thing as the film-noirs form the golden age and was a huge success no matter how dark it was.