Iain Stott

Stotty's One-Line Reviews

My top 50 has been drawn up and rehashed and redrawn and tinkered with and scrapped and restarted numerous times over the last couple of months. Films have come and gone and come again. Masterpieces have appeared and disappeared and reappeared. And the conclusion - that this task is, perhaps, impossible. Today’s favourites are tomorrow’s almost favourites. A slight change of mood, a touch of flu, a bad day at work, a nice sunny day – and one’s cinematic tastes can’t help but be effected. And so it is that the following 129 films have, at some point over the last ten or twelve weeks, been included amongst my 50 favourite films. So in effect my 50 favourite films include 129 titles. I’m sure that if I had attempted to come up with a list of 129 favourites, then I would have ended up with a list of 200 or more titles. And so, vaguely non-sequitously, if it is true that you can never stand in the same river twice, then it is also true that you can never watch the same film more than once, or, for that matter, ever make a definitive list of anything.
With that in mind, I present my 50 favourite films – all 129 of them:

…and on a(n even) more trivial note, two of the films on my list contain performers who went to my school: Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and Nathan Walsh, who was actually in my class, in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988).

6 comments:

mister muleboy said...

I can't really respect a man who excludes Kelly's Heroes.



Well, I guess I can. The list moves me.

Starting with I present my 50 favourite films – all 129 of them

21 July 2009 at 07:14
Surbhi Goel said...

pretty awesome!

6 October 2009 at 21:29
Matthew Dickinson said...

cool list I guess.

i tried to write your name like 12,000 times and kept getting it wrong

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.movies.kubrick/browse_frm/thread/566fd1362d836fde#

but it's late at night and i didn't sleep last night :/

check out my reviews under tha name "stalepie" on Netflix! search for it.
"Eyes wide shut" used to be my favorite movie, but now it's "Alien from L.A.," I think. :D

i dunno, i kind of wish i had watched more of FIRE & ICE, and I wish to watch HEAVY TRAFFIC again soon, and "Seconds" by John Frankenheimer! -- that's a goodie! ooh ooh ooh and i love Zelig and Dumbo and Thief of Bagdad 1924.

And my favorite cartoon is STILL "revolutionary girl utena" ^_^!!!

9 December 2009 at 00:03
Matthew Dickinson said...

oh whoops, I meant to post this under that 50 Greatest Movies list thing, 'course..

9 December 2009 at 00:05
psyspectre said...

great list, many of your favorites are in my favorites. Including the extremely now overshadowed like THE LAST LAUGH (Murnau) and THE ONLY SON (Ozu)

1 January 2010 at 18:58
Peter said...

Iain, I've lost your email address. I was wondering if you have a copy of FILM COMMENT magazine? In the Jan/Feb issue there is a critics poll of the best films of the decade.

11 February 2010 at 03:17

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