TOP 150 MOVIES

Featuring director Christopher Nolan at his visual and ideological best, The Dark Knight Rises successfully caps an end to Nolan’s groundbreaking Batman series with a tale of good vs. evil set in a world plunged into darkness.

Set eight years after The Dark Knight, the film opens on a Gotham City that has rid itself of its crime element and of the vigilante Batman, with a physically and spiritually wounded Bruce Wayne secluded in his mansion. When mysterious terrorist leader Bane (Tom Hardy) puts into action a plan to destroy Gotham City, Batman rises from the shadows to fight this new scourge.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 44 minutes, there is a lot to consume in The Dark Knight Rises, but the quality of its content is of such high value that every minute is worth digesting, with Nolan proving himself a filmmaker able to merge ideas with spectacle.

Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s true life tale of survival against impossible odds, coupled with director Roman Polanski’s (Chinatown) experiences as a youth in the Polish city of Krakow (his mother died in Auschwitz), The Pianist excels as both stirring wartime drama and technical achievement.

Pawel Edelman’s photography and Allan Starski’s art direction transports the viewer to an unimaginable event in human history, while Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning turn as Szpilman provides the human face amongst the monstrosities. Brody’s physical transformation and quiet determination give the film its emotional centre.

Polanski keeps the focus tightly on Szpilman’s day-to-day struggle to stay alive, avoiding easy sentiment and letting the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto and the ruined city speak for themselves. The result is a film that feels both personal and historically precise.

Young love, bitter life lessons, and the glory of the hustle reigns supreme in Licorice Pizza, a coming-of-age somewhat romantic comedy in which Paul Thomas Anderson takes us on a surreal trip through 1970s Los Angeles with a masterwork display of filmmaking.

Cooper Hoffman stars as Gary, a 15-year-old child actor and helpless romantic who has a gift-of-the-gab and an entrepreneurial spirit. When he meets photographer’s assistant Alana (Alana Haim) he falls head over heels in love.  The problem is she’s 25 and does not reciprocate the same feelings.

Anderson has his coming-of-age love story play out during a 1970s in which the kids were often out late, and the adults found themselves lost in the fog of the post-60s haze. Licorice Pizza feels very much like a time capsule not only in the look, sound, and feel of the ‘70s California aesthetic, but also in the way people consumed culture and communicated.

A true-crime saga both epic and intimate, Killers of the Flower Moon is a reminder of how the sins of history should never disappear in the sands of time.

Killers of the Flower Moon stars Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart, a Native American from the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, who is thrust into the throes of a murder conspiracy after her tribe becomes one of the richest people in the world when oil was found on Osage land in the early 1900s. Into this time of prosperity and greed arrives WWI veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) who agrees to work for his uncle Will Hale (Robert De Niro) a successful cattle baron. When Ernest and Mollie fall in love, Hale manipulates his dim-witted nephew into marrying her with the intention of securing her oil head-rights, a plan that involves murdering Mollie’s family.

What follows is an immersive delve into a tragic period of American history that director Martin Scorsese (The Irishman) brings to life with daring artistry and unflinching testimony.

A film that is as awe inspiring in its imagery as it is touching in its themes, Close Encounters of the Third Kind saw Steven Spielberg find that perfect balance between spectacle and emotion.

Richard Dreyfuss stars in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a regular family man whose life is changed after an encounter with a UFO. What follows is an amazing journey into self-discovery as Spielberg channels personal family struggles into a sci-fi drama featuring great performances from Dreyfuss and the Oscar nominated Melinda Dillon.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind also features one of John Williams’ most memorable compositions in the “five tone motif” shared between the alien visitors and the humans.

James Cameron’s sequel to his groundbreaking Terminator is a slicker, more grandiose beast, building upon the story of its predecessor and laying the groundwork for a sci-fi mythology where a war between man and machine takes place.

Arnold Schwarzenegger reunites with Cameron to once again play a time travelling cyborg killer, only this time the mission had changed from killing future resistance leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) to protecting him from an advanced synthetic assassin, the unsuspecting T-1000 (Robert Patrick.)

To say the stakes are high in this story is an understatement, with the fate of mankind resting in the balance. Cameron’s excellent direction makes those stakes feel palpable, conjuring brilliant performances from his cast and coupling them with state-of-the-art filmmaking technology that forever did away with the line between the real life and the digital life.   

Roman Polanski’s neo-noir mystery Chinatown remains one of his best films, with many thanks to Robert Towne’s screenplay fool of rich, complex characters and well-paced suspense.

The film stars Jack Nicholson as private eye Jake Gittes. Hired by the seductive Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) to investigate her husbands alleged adultery, Gittes is instead drawn into darker territory where deceit, corruption, and even murder take place.

Nicholson is excellent in one of his signature performances, possessing an old school charm that can give way to a wild rebellion at any time. Great too is Dunaway who portrays her extremely complex character with a cool elegance. Yet the real star here is Polanski, who with Chinatown has made a film of stylish cool that cloaks a sinister darkness.

A raw, gritty tale of loneliness and despair set against the seedy streets of New York City, Taxi Driver continues to live up to its reputation as an extremely influential piece of cinema.

Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who takes a job as a New York taxi driver. As his attempts to become a part of society backfire, Travis becomes even more isolated as he decides to take out the "scum of the earth" that fill the city once and for all, his befriending a child prostitute (Jodie Foster) taking him over the edge.

De Niro is perfectly cast as Travis, creating from the ground up a frightening study of quiet intensity and murderous rage, the demons inside his head never letting go. Director Martin Scorsese uses the camera to illustrate Travis' point of view, giving insight into the madness that has gripped him as he slowly turns into an angel of death.

Has there ever been a more powerful opening 20 min in film history? By the time Steven Spielberg unleashed hell on earth in his brutal depiction of the D-Day Invasion, Saving Private Ryan had audiences gripped in a tale of bravery amidst the brutality of war. 

Set in 1944 in Normandy, France, Saving Private Ryan stars Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller, the leader of a group of U.S. Army Rangers tasked to retrieve paratrooper James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) whose brothers have been killed in combat.

With America’s favourite movie star Tom Hanks leading a terrific ensemble that also stars Ed Burns, Barry Pepper and Tom Sizemore, Saving Private Ryan blends incredible action filmmaking alongside moving dramatic moments in Spielberg’s moving tribute to the “greatest generation.”

The second entry in The Lord of the Rings trilogy takes reign as the best.

With the pleasantries of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring out of the way, director Peter Jackson throws us into the thick of a battle between good and evil, that culminates in a masterfully choreographed and captured battle sequence. The film keeps multiple storylines moving without losing focus, and the siege at Helm’s Deep remains one of the trilogy’s strongest set pieces.

The introduction of one of the best VFX creations to grace the screen in the form of decrepit, two-faced Gollum (played brilliantly by Andy Serkis) ups the stakes in an adventure where the fate of the world lies in the balance. Serkis’s performance gives the character a real presence, and Jackson uses him to deepen the moral weight of the story as Frodo (Elijah Woods) and Sam (Sean Astin) continue their journey.