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

by Travis Gonzalez, Contributor

No movie exists outside the time it was made. A period piece produced in the 80s is going to reflect the ideals and values of the people watching it in theaters. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. As the (now) patron saint of AMC Theatres, Nicole Kidman, has repeated ad nauseam, movies have the capacity to connect with us on an emotional level and reflect back our world from a new and exciting point of view.  t

Going to the movies is not just a transformative experience, it can be one of affirmation.

When putting together this list of what I felt were the greatest movies of all time, I kept going back to this dialogue between history and manufactured reality that films offer us. It’s a key ingredient that many classic movies have. When we think about what a good movie is, it’s not just the cinematography, or the writing, or the actors that make it stand out. Rather, iconic movies create a time capsule of the unique dreams, fears, and views of their time while also transcending those boundaries, offering a new layer of connection for the next generation.

The Wizard of Oz ( dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)

The Wizard of Oz is the chicken soup of any top movie list: it’s a classic, feel-good musical about the grass not always being greener. Produced at the height of the Great Depression, audiences needed this story, and it helped movies cement their value as a mass mode of escapism. The Victor Fleming film was also among the first to take full advantage of Technicolor as a narrative device and create an immersive fantasy world. Dorothy walked so Jake Sully could fly on a banshee. 

But what makes this 83-year-old movie legendary has been the staying power of its iconography. Ruby slippers, catchphrases (“Be gone, before someone drops a house on you!”), and traveling companions have been homaged, repackaged, and reimagined for every generation.

When I think of great American cultural exports, The Wizard of Oz is up there with apple pie. 

Rebel Without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955)

Directed by Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause is notable for having been released a month after James Dean’s fatal car crash. In many ways, the tragedy around the actor’s death and the way he lived his life mirror the themes of the film. The movie follows the story of Jim Stark, a young troublemaker who moves to Los Angeles for a fresh start, only to find himself embroiled in more violence and drama.

The film being produced and set in the 1950’s only amplifies this tension. Youth culture will always push against their parents' desire for conformity, and this was even more apparent in mid-century America. But that has never been a bygone issue, which is what makes Rebel Without a Cause relevant for whichever generation is currently having a finger wagged at them.   

Like several other movies on this list, this movie stands the test of time because of its star’s performance and persona. Dean deftly balances the line between teenage rebellion and emotional distress, making Jim Stark’s pain feel all the more real. And of course, this movie cements the trope of the “teen” idol. If Dean were around today, the image of him in his white t-shirt and red jacket would have launched a thousand TikTok trends.

The Misfits (dir. John Huston, 1961)

If Rebel Without a Cause covers the “decay” of American Youth, The Misfits focuses its attention on the decline of American idealism. Another star vehicle featuring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, the film follows divorcée Roslyn Taber (Monroe) as she has a tryst with Gay Langland, a cowboy a past his prime (Gable). In another case of art imitating life, playwright Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay, as his marriage with Monroe further fell apart. 

This movie represents an America in transition, as the characters clash with having to choose between the freedom to do what they want and the inevitable pressure to settle down. Monroe, for her part, uses this film to shatter past expectations and assumptions about her depth as an actor.

Director John Huston frames this collapse in stark black and white, with the imposing background of the American West calling to mind the open frontiers of Ansel Adams photography, now reigned in for good. 

Giant (dir. George Stevens, 1951)

Movies often have a defined period of time where the narrative takes place. It’s one piece of the protagonist’s life. But what makes Giant so unique is that it attempts to condense the entire rise and fall of a rich Texan family into three hours.

What I love about this epic is that it’s the story of the individual people who live on the land, find love, fall out of it, and ultimately want to be remembered. It’s intimate, despite its scale. And watching Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean move fluidly between different periods of their characters’ lives feels like a master class in acting.

Paired with the sprawling, and often boundless imagery of an undeveloped Texas, director George Stevens makes this “powerful” family small against the unstoppable passage of time. 

Ugetsu monogatari (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

Following the end of World War II and the Allied Power’s occupation of Japan, films depicting the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – and really any film examining the war – were heavily censored. To get around this challenge, Japanese directors turned to ghost stories and period pieces to help process the trauma of the war. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari, does just that. It follows the story of a sixteenth-century farmer who leaves his family behind to make ends meet, only to end up being seduced by a spirit and forgetting them. The film hinges around the idea of memory, loss, and destruction, and one can’t help but create a bridge between the 1500s and the 1940s. Widely considered to be a masterpiece, the film, alongside classics like Rashomon, also helped introduce Japanese cinema to a global audience.    

Ugetsu is a prime example of how movies have become a key way for artists and audiences to process major cultural trauma, and is a direct connection to films like Godzilla and The Ring.

8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini, 1963)

Movies about movies get a bad rep these days, but Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ , named for the sequence of movies he had made up to that point, is less about the making of a film and more about a peek into the mind of a creative person struggling to create. Part autobiography, part fantasy, the movie often slips into surrealist imagery as the main character, Guido Anselmi (Marcelo Matroianni), must  finish writing his new science fiction film while faced with mounting pressure to to outdo his past work. It was meta before meta was popular, and few directors who want to tell the story of telling a story have come close to capturing Fellini’s balance of whimsy and comedic urgency.

Rome, Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1944)

If you studied a film in college, you have probably seen this movie. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City follows characters dealing with the fallout of a Nazi-occupied Rome, and their subsequent attempts to escape. Rosselini’s film, produced without the resources of the famous Italian film studio, Cinnecità, which had been damaged by the war, is widely considered the film that birthed Italian Neorealism. Shot in the cramped apartments and stairwells of real Roman buildings, and leveraging a cast of non-professional actors, Rome, Open City offered an alternative to high-adventure blockbusters, one that used intimate, people-focused stories to reflect larger societal issues.

Mamma Roma (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)

Neorealism tends to suck up a lot of the attention around Italian cinema (I have a Neorealist film on this list). But what was happening in the post-war/reconstruction period? Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma explores that through the perspective of a mother (Anna Magnani) and son trying to build a respectable life in Rome, only to find the odds stacked against them. 

Pasolini’s filmography often explores disillusionment during the somewhat stalled rebirth of Italy in the 60s. This film in particular combines a near documentary-style depiction of this family’s struggle with a visceral connection to religious iconography and suffering. In fact, it’s this tendency to profane sacred images in his work and critique institutions like the Catholic church that allegedly led to his assassination in 1975.

The Circle (dir. Jafar Panahi, 2000)

This film is the most contemporary on the list and likely the most obscure, but perhaps best reflects how movies can be tools for social critique. Directed by Jafar Panahi, The Circle is a collection of stories following the daily life and struggles of women living in Iran. Using a unique storytelling style, the camera seemingly shifts from one story to the next, as if following these women in real life. Not only does this movie share a style with the Neorealist classics, it’s also one that defied strict censorship to be produced. The Circle, while winning a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was banned in Iran. And in 2010, the government banned Panahi from directing any more movies for 20 years.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand, 1937)

As with many of the films on this list, Disney’s first foray into full-length animated feature challenged the way stories can be told on the big screen. Another Depression-era classic, the simplicity of Snow White’s story allows its artistry to shine, and in this movie you can see the kernels of what would become Disney Animation’s signature style for the next sixty years, from the anthropomorphized animals to the quirks that make their villains so fun to watch at any age.