Welcome to MovieJawn’s first ever Sound & Vision Poll, where our writers share why they love their 10 favorite movies of all time!

by Kirk Stevens, Contributor

When I walk my dog, I often silently do this memory exercise where I run through lists of movies in my head, according to whatever category I come up with. “Movies Coming Out This Year That I Want To See” or “Movies I Own But Have Never Seen” or “Movies I Saw In Theaters When I Lived in New York City.” These are never written down or recorded. I do it because it’s fun for me. Then I get home and hang up the leash, and all my work is erased. I love making lists, but I don’t care for ranking things, especially movies.

I am turned off by the competition, but I am lit up by the conversation. Yet I read the Sight & Sound polls, I revisit the AFI Top 100 lists, and I get sucked into the Oscar race every year. I can have fun with a movie draft podcast, but I have no interest in questions like, “Who would win - Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees?” or “What’s the best Star Wars movie?”. I love films but I find myself both seduced and nauseated by film culture. I love to read lists of people’s favorite films because I want to hear why they love a title, especially when they go to bat for something less celebrated. In making these comprehensive lists, where literally every film ever made is on the table, I struggle with simultaneously wanting to honor and blow up the canon. I wrestle with all of this. In my struggle to find a way to write this piece, I decided to share some of my memories to get into the who/what/where/when/why of my picks. The best approach I could find in making this unranked list is asking myself this question - what movies shifted something in me?

All That Jazz (dir. Bob Fosse, 1979)

It’s 2010 and I find a used copy of All That Jazz at Record Theatre (RIP) in Buffalo, New York. I make my way through Cabaret and I’m underwhelmed (but in 10 years I’ll come around). I see Lenny and I love it. I put on All That Jazz one afternoon, racing the clock to finish it before I have to leave for work at Regal Eastview Mall. The film is alive. It’s meta. It’s a self-absorbed, thinly veiled fantasia/autobiography with Roy Scheider starring as Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon–a brilliant, complicated, predatory, womanzing, and most importantly, dying director. Dancers twirl in a quick cutting, expertly edited opening set to George Benson’s On Broadway. Roy Scheider looks in a mirror and says “Showtime” (which is the extent of what my dad remembers about the movie). Ann Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi dance down the stairs to Peter Allen’s Everything Old is New Again. There’s something called Airotica. Scheider and Ben Vereen duet for the grand finale, singing “Bye Bye Life. Bye Bye Happiness. Hello loneliness. I think I’m gonna die.” It ends with a cold shot of Scheider being zipped up in a body bag. I drive to work and tell my manager Ben (RIP) about what I’ve just watched. He recalls seeing  All That Jazz but can’t quite remember the details. I hope he got a grand finale when he went.

Chasing Amy (dir. Kevin Smith, 1997)

Kevin Smith is the first director I’ve sought out. It’s around 2002. I’ve seen Clerks and Mallrats and I am wrapping my head around the fact that Jay and Silent Bob are in multiple movies but they’re not quite sequels to one another. My friend Steve’s dad says “Chasing Amy is really bad,” meaning it’s inappropriate, and he’s right. He lets me borrow his DVD. It’s crass, crude, full of slurs, and middle school me finds it hilarious. Then the movie walks a tightrope of a final act and even at 13, I feel the weight of the onscreen relationships destroyed. The movie is celebrated because the logline of “Straight man falls in love with lesbian” is progressive for 1997. It takes me years to realize that that’s not what the movie is about, and it never was. If you view it through the lens of queer representation, of course it’s a mess. Chasing Amy is about insecurity and the ramifications of putting yourself and other people in a box. It is made by and told from the perspective of a white, straight, cis man, and viewed countless times by this one. I grow into my 20’s and learn none of the lessons the movie imparts on Ben Affleck.  While Chasing Amy may be tough for many to sit through today, and I understand where it fails, I still admire its tenacity to unpack its baggage.

Days of Heaven (dir. Terrence Malick, 1978)

It’s 2009 and my internet deep dives lead me to discover Terrence Malick, a famously reclusive director with large gaps in his resume, known for striking visuals and voice over. I blindly buy used copies of Badlands and Days of Heaven at FYE. I watch Badlands one summer night and I need someone to feel what I’m feeling. So that same night, I go over to my friend Miles’ house and we watch Days of Heaven, and this impromptu double feature alters my understanding of what a movie can be. Days of Heaven is the greatest. The train. The farmhouse. The romance. The kid sister. The locusts. The fire. The Morricone score. It’s a poem. I let it wash over me. I become Malick obsessed and scour IMDB message boards for leaks about something called The Tree of Life. A year and a half later, I rip off Malick’s tropes in my senior student film. 

Good Will Hunting (dir. Gus Van Sant, 1997)

It’s the late 90’s and my dad has a guy at work at the hotel who bootlegs VHS tapes. They look terrible. It takes me a few years to finally watch Good Will Hunting after my friend Henry convinces me that I will love it. After Robin Williams sits on a bench with Matt Damon and monologues about all the beauty and hardships that make up his lived experience, capping it with “I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book,” I look at Henry and he says “Told ya.” Within a year, I sample this audio on my own band’s track (because if you didn’t sample a movie in the early 2000’s, were you even in a band?). I was and still am in awe of how triumphant Robin WIlliams’ performance is. His Oscar is deserved and he was my way into the movie as a teenager. When I watch the movie now, my heart aches for how damaged Will Hunting is. He pushes his therapist and girlfriend away, but they never give up on them. And when he finally lets them in just a tiny bit, it makes me cry. Good Will Hunting never gets old to me. Neither does quoting Professor Gerald Lambeau’s lines in Stellan Skarsgard’s Swedish accent with my friend Sean. We’re weird.

The Great Mouse Detective (dir. John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Michener, & Burny Mattinson, 1986)

My cousin Felicia lives up the street. It’s the early 90’s. We go through cycles of watching the same kids movies in clamshell cases over and over again. The Great Mouse Detective is immediately my favorite. I’m not sure if it’s the rare mystery plot for a children’s film or the cunning Basil of Baker Street or Professor Ratigan (the World’s Greatest Ra- err, I mean Mouse) or Toby the dog or Fidget the peg legged bat, but this one does it for me. It still does. Maybe I am just nostalgic for those wonderful few years where my cousin and I were close friends and neighbors. Maybe it’s Dr. David Q. Dawson, drunk, dressed as a pirate, and doing a kickline on a bar stage while the lady mouse sings. 

The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955)

The filmmaking in The Night of the Hunter is so ahead of its time that it feels like it exists outside of time altogether. It’s a fairy tale. It is the first black and white movie I appreciate as an adult. It’s 2008 and I’m sitting in my living room with Andy, watching the DVD I borrowed from my friend, Roy. The opening titles begin with a booming, menacing score by Walter Schumann (with input by Charles Laughton) that then fades into a chorus of children singing “Dream, little one, dream.” What is this? This doesn’t feel like other old movies. Robert Mitchum plays the devil in the form of the huckster Reverend Harry Powell, killing and conning his way through the countryside, crooning Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. The images are out of a child’s nightmare. Shelley Winters, still and deceased in a car at the bottom of the river. Reverend Powell in the distance, riding on horseback, while the children watch from the barn. Pearl and John, drifting along the water in a rowboat, passing a spider web, while Pearl sings “Once there was a pretty fly.” The ending feels too neatly wrapped up for me, but that reaction lessens with each viewing. I love the movie immediately. Andy shrugs it off (but he comes around a few years later). The day I graduate college, I go to Barnes & Noble and buy the Criterion edition of The Night of the Hunter. And that’s how I became a huckster preacher. 

The Puffy Chair (dirs. Jay & Mark Duplass, 2010)

I’m on my futon with a laptop on my chest, watching The Puffy Chair. It’s 2010 and I’m tearing up within the first few minutes of the movie. The handheld camera is moving in and out of focus. Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton are talking in obnoxious voices - the shared, ridiculous kind that only you and your partner do with each other. When Duplass mishears Aselton say “I brought my own nightsack” as “I brought my own nutsack” and they both break into genuine laughter, the camera lets it play. It’s joyful. I’ve been doing improv for years and I am taken with this style. It's not riffing to capture as many usable jokes as possible, it’s after something relatable and real. You could argue that it plays more like an Acting 101 exercise, but I’m under the spell of this so-called “mumblecore,” so much so that I’m crying on this futon and nothing much has happened yet. It’s all too appropriate that my Acting 101 teacher from last semester, Jerry Finnegan (RIP), shows up in the middle of the movie as the sketchy owner of a furniture upholstery business. I become personally responsible for spreading the word around the University at Buffalo’s theater department that JERRY IS IN A MOVIE. Anyway, The Puffy Chair is the fire that I needed to start making my own short films throughout my last year of college. The spirit of picking up a camera and getting your friends together to create something is on full display here. I want to do this in 2010. I still want to do this.

Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne, 2004)

This is the funniest movie of the year? This isn’t funny! It’s boring! That’s my reaction at 17 years old, watching the movie with Sean. We don’t finish it. A couple years later, it’s on in my dorm room. I’m not really watching it, but my roommates' reactions convince me there’s something there. So I try again. I like it. With each subsequent viewing, I like it more. Is this what forming a palette is like? Is this what drinking wine is? Because I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot! I think Sideways is perfect now. This isn’t the most conventional “perfect movie” choice but to me - beat for beat, line for line, cringe for cringe, the screenplay doesn’t miss. It’s so funny. Miles and Jack are the most mediocre schlubs, lying and failing their way through a vacation. All four of the principal characters are so human. Their mistakes are on full display and they’re doing their best to start over or keep going. I was initially confused by Thomas Haden Church’s Oscar nomination. I thought, “Is this guy actually a good actor?” But the more I watch the movie, the more I see how spot on he is. It’s all in his facial expressions and his commitment to his wrongheaded ideas. His reactions to Paul Giamatti’s whining and preference to hang back and make safer choices are priceless. Every few years, I revisit Sideways and worry that some of the magic will wear off. That hasn’t happened yet.

Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

It’s my 21st birthday weekend and Andy, Steve, Miles, and I have taken a road trip to New York and New Jersey. I’ve been obsessively watching the trailer for Synecdoche, New York for months and a couple friends have seen the movie on a road trip of their own recently. Before we go to our screening at the AMC Empire 25, Andy calls Steve’s mom and asks her if it’s okay for Steve to see an R-rated movie (Steve is the oldest one in the group). We see the movie and I am moved but perplexed. I think I love it, but how can Samantha Morton’s house be perpetually on fire? Why do the characters' genders change? How does time work in this movie? I have seen Charlie Kaufman’s other work and I understand that his films exist in their own reality, but Synecdoche, New York was after something more intangible, more existential. The micros and macros of life. The horrors of aging. This is the first movie for me that dumped out a bunch of puzzle pieces and said, “Have at it.” It didn’t take long to realize there’s nothing to solve. But I love to sink my teeth into its choices. I’ve carried this one with me. I want to play Jon Brion’s Little Person at my wedding someday. I haven’t rewatched this film since Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away. His work means so much to me. When I finally watch Synecdoche, New York again it will hit harder.

The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973)

“Corn rigs and barley rigs and corn rigs are bonnie. I’ll not forget that happy night among the rigs with Annie.” 

These words are sung as Sgt. Howie heads towards the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison, in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. The song by Paul Giovanni opens the film and sets the unique, eerie tone for the festivities to come. It’s 2011 and Andy and I are attempting to do “30 Days of Horror” in the month of October. It’s the first fall after graduating college, and we’re in this strange “What do I do now?” place. So what we’re doing is trying to watch 30 horror movies in 30 days, and Miles is here too. By the time a bunch of eccentric locals break into the pub song “The Landlord’s Daughter,” we’re all beaming. The Island residents are preparing for May Day by performing sacred rituals and playing menacing head games on Sgt. Howie. It’s all so goofy but entirely unsettling. This is my introduction to folk horror. And it’s a secret musical! In the final sequence, the film’s title is earned. We reach our truly disturbing conclusion, even though we’ve seen it coming. The old gods have won. They always win.

In 2012, Robin Hardy releases a spiritual sequel to The Wicker Man. The Wicker Tree is disappointing, boring, and lacking all the magic that made my friends and I fall in love with its predecessor. Andy, Miles, and I watch it together. We are let down, and all slightly closer to figuring out our next moves. New jobs, new schools, and new cities await. At some point, the movies on this list, along with countless others, stop being subjective works of art, and become old friends.