July 18, 2025

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I estimate that my list of ten best movies of all time is not only eccentric, it also includes probably about thirty films. With another fifty that probably should be on it. But the concept of "ten best" is pretty silly, anyway. We've had movies for a century, and in that time a lot of writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, and, sure, some directors, too, have been trying their best to create powerful entertainment for civilians who plunk down their money and invest their time and come away contented, or happy, or thrilled, or overwhelmed, or so deeply moved that their lives are changed forever.

My list isn't designed to impress anybody. I don't give a rat's petoot about the opinions of critics or movie professionals or even French auteurs.

Films that are definitely not on my list start with Citizen Kane and Philadelphia Story, and continue through Casablanca and Pulp Fiction. There are directors who, by their egos and triviality, disqualify themselves for any list of admirable films, in my opinion. Quentin Tarantino and Orson Welles are at the top of that list. I personally believe that the only reason they are called geniuses is because they told other people that they were. They haven't provided any reason for me to believe them, and plenty of reasons for me to doubt.

Now that we've settled the fact that I'm an ignorant philistine, let's get on with the list of real great movies.

I can't rank them -- number one, number ten -- all I can say is that they're on my list.

I just finished watching You've Got Mail for the umpteenth time and it still works on me. I start crying when Meg Ryan remembers twirling in her bookshop with her mother, as she closes the grate and locks the store for the last time. I keep being teary with the brilliant way Nora Ephron writes Tom Hanks's courtship of the woman he put out of business. "152 scars from his nose job." And Meg Ryan looking up into his eyes and saying, "I wanted it to be you."

Here's another one. Emma Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. It's not Jane Austen's greatest novel (that would be Pride and Prejudice), but Emma Thompson wrote a script that is better than the novel. Austen was still trying to figure out the whole storytelling thing, and she didn't yet understand the climax of her own story. It comes when Hugh Grant tells Emma Thompson that his engagement with the Serpent was canceled. It was his brother that she married, and Hugh Grant is there because.... Emma Thompson understands and she is finally liberated from all her promises that had held her silent. The scene where she weeps uncontrollably is one of the most brilliantly written and acted climax scenes in all of cinema.

Two romantic movies -- and why not? The coming together of female and male to form an unbreakable bond of love is at the heart of human evolution and the survival of cultures and civilizations. What else should be at the heart of a great movie?

I'll tell you what. In Patton, George C. Scott plays the role of a lifetime. A warrior who is vain but can produce good results when they are most needed. He becomes the man that a nation hopes for when they are in greatest need. We want someone to save us.

Another civilization-saving role is Winston Churchill, played by the incomparable Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour. It helps that the simple beauty of Lily James served as our viewpoint character for several key scenes. But it's Gary Oldman in a perfect screenplay. "I blub a lot," he says in a subway car. So do I.

I loathe horror films. But for some inexplicable reason I went to see Poltergeist in a movie theater. In spite of the cheat scene where a ghosthunter's face dissolves in a mirror, the movie as a whole became far more than a series of scares. Death is right up there with romantic love on the list of topics for great storytelling art. "They're he-ere." "Walk toward the light, my children."

Loneliness is the true hell of human life, since we are inescapably social animals. That's why Tom Hanks's virtually one-man movie, Cast Away, touches us so deeply. It's also a romance, with Helen Hunt as the dream of love that helps Hanks stay alive on his deserted island. And when she says, "You're the love of my love" even as she walks away because she has promises to keep, my heart always breaks along with his. I think: What if my magnificent wife had said no to my absurd proposal of marriage?

Humans always long for, worship, dream of gods. Spawned in the midst of the Great Depression, Superman was a god for the American people when we really needed saving and had nobody but second rate politicians to pull it off. (Sorry, FDR. You weren't the savior of anything.) After a sad little TV series in the 1950s, there were movies -- which couldn't decide whether they were wry comedies or hagiographic dramas. None of them was a great movie or even, in my opinion, a good movie.

Until Man of Steel, which is, in my view, the only good Superman movie. The most recent effort, the mess that stars David Corenswet, who is not to be blamed for the incoherence of the story, has only one real contribution: Rachel Brosnahan as the best Lois Lane. (Amy Adams was excellent in that role in Man of Steel. Just saying.) I can rewatch Man of Steel over and over. The others repel my interest and my sympathy.

What about science fiction? I'm a sci-fi writer, and surely I should have a real sci-fi movie in my list. There are some fine contenders -- The Martian, for instance, and Jeff Bridges's perfect performance in the well-written Starman. I adore Serenity, the feature-film fulfilment of the TV series Firefly. But the ineffable Arrival nudges those worthy contenders out of the list, with the most brilliantly realized aliens in all of sci-fi cinema, not to mention Amy Adams at her very best.

Arguably, an asteroid-hitting-Earth scenario is science fiction. In that case, I have another sci-fi film on my ten-best list: Deep Impact. No matter at what point I join the movie already in progress on TV, I watch the rest of the movie to the end. Téa Leoni is so utterly believable, and when she joins Maximilian Schell on the beach to meet the tsunami, it makes me feel like all the pains of fatherhood might be worth something. Meanwhile, every plotline is handled beautiful -- Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski, Robert Duvall and the whole spaceship crew.... I was going to list more, but in the whole cast, there are no clinkers. They all catch fire. It's a perfect movie.

I have to mention to films that are disqualified because they are split into parts. The six-part BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, the movie that introduced us to Colin Firth, is a miniseries. Of course it had a far better chance of delivering Jane Austen's finest novel to the screen -- there was time. And the two-part Dune with Timothee Chalamet avoided the offensively omphaloskeptic version by David Lynch (and the other, merely clumsy miniseries) is the only worthy adaptation of that huge and vital science fiction novel. They can't be on my list, but they have to be mentioned here.

I've enjoyed many superhero movies, and admired a few. Ryan Reynolds's Deadpool is a favorite, and Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy earns a rewatch whenever I run into it. I also found Chris Pratt's and Dallas Bryce Howard's Jurassic World movies compulsively rewatchable. But not enough to force their way onto my list.

Hacksaw Ridge is director Mel Gibson's finest movie -- and Andrew Garfield's finest performance so far. It would be a brilliant movie even if it were fictional; knowing that it's a remarkably faithful-to-the-facts war movie makes it almost more emotionally intense than I can bear. There is no better war movie, period.

He's Just Not That Into You is based on a book with no single story -- but the screenwriters shaped it into a great movie about human love and commitment. The Justin Long and Ginnifer Goodwin love story would have been enough. But it is trumped, for me, by the Jennifer Anniston and Ben Affleck romance. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Connelly also earn honors for the broken marriage story, in which both of them still earn our sympathy. I love this movie about love and hope.

Forrest Gump is Robert Zemeckis's magnum opus, a retelling of recent American history through the experiences of the most phenomenally lucky marginally retarded man. If you notice a trend of movies starring Tom Hanks, that's not a coincidence. Just as you can't lose money on a thriller starring Tom Cruise, you couldn't fail if you had a good script and Tom Hanks in a romantic story.

Love Actually doesn't have Tom Hanks, but it seems to have everyone else. Writer-Director Richard Curtis's magnum opus is one of my favorite Christmas movies, and also one of my favorite movies for any time of year. I know there are people who hate it. I can't do anything about that. I love every storyline, every minute, every actor in it. So sue me.

It's a Wonderful Life cannot be left off of any list of the greatest movies. Jimmy Stewart was Tom Hanks in an earlier era. This dark Christmas movie failed so badly at the box office that the studio let the copyright lapse -- which meant TV stations could broadcast it for free at Christmas time. This happened after my childhood was over, so I didn't grow up on it. But I can practically quote every line as I watch it, I've seen it so often as an adult. So have you.

The Lion in Winter was my favorite movie for so long that I can still quote half the lines. Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn in what is arguably their finest performances, with Anthony Hopkins unforgettable as Richard Lionheart.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a great love story, with a father and son both wrestling with loves they can't get over. The scene at graduation is heartbreakingly beautiful. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Bobo (a child actor who could actually act), and the ethereal Lio Tipton; this is the only movie in which I find Julianne Moore almost watchable. That's how good this movie is.

All of Me is a Steve Martin/Lily Tomlin fantasy comedy that works because of Steve Martin's incomparable ability to play both a man and a woman who are each in partial control of the man's body.

And then there's the tragically hopeful romance in The Accountant, one of my favorite movies of all time. Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick play good people who cannot make a go of it ... but want to. And J.K. Simmons as the Treasury cop whose life has been shaped by the accountant -- it's a perfect movie about good people doing good in sometimes terrible ways.

Movie musicals are far more complicated than other films. To start with, the score and lyrics need to be brilliant. Then the movie has to be well cast, well acted, well directed. So Camelot and Man of La Mancha, great musicals, are driven off the best-movies list by miserable casting of good actors who can't sing, or good singers who can't act. La La Land was a touching movie, but the songs, though lovely, were not up to the standard set by stage musicals. I so wish that any of Stephen Sondheim's musicals had been adequately filmed. The closest was the Neil Patrick Harris concert performance of Company.

While some musicals have been hugely successful financially, they aren't even in the running for my list. Only one musical forces its way into my top ten: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Howard Keel, Jane Powell, Russ Tamblyn, and the best assemblage of dancers in any musical film. If the list weren't already crowded, I might have found room for Oliver!

About Time is my favorite time travel love story. A man who has inherited his father's power to go back in time and fix things finds out that some things can't be fixed. It seems to be a romance, but ends up, very satisfyingly, as a story of a son's love for his father.

How could any top ten list not include Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment? It's ostensibly a comedy, but in fact it's one of the greatest romantic movies ever.

There's an honor roll of close also-rans in every category:

An Affair to Remember, African Queen, An American in Paris. Moonstruck, Ghost, Pretty Woman. Table 19, Sleepless in Seattle. Gone with the Wind, The Princess Bride. While You Were Sleeping, Say Anything. His Girl Friday, Adam's Rib, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Random Harvest, It Happened One Night, Barefoot in the Park. How to Steal a Million, Charade. Working Girl, About Last Night. Harold and Maude, Sabrina (the Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond version). One Fine Day, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A Fish Called Wanda.

Rocky (I), First Blood (Rambo I). Die Hard, The Sixth Sense. Riddick, Equalizer (Denzel Washington), Baby Driver. All three of the Planet of the Apes movies with Andy Serkis as Caesar. Venom. The Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-man.

The Replacements. Trouble with the Curve. Moneyball. Draft Day. A League of Their Own. The Bad News Bears. (But I loathed Million Dollar Baby. The pro-euthanasia ending was intolerable. Screw the Oscars.)

Gone with the Wind. My Fair Lady. Howard's End. Remains of the Day. Slumdog Millionaire might have made the list, except the book was so powerful that I'm not sure that what I loved about the movie was, in fact, the movie.

Bad Words is Jason Bateman's comedy about an adult who uses a loophole in the rules to compete in a kids' spelling bee. I loved the movie, raunchy as it sometimes is.

The Shop Around the Corner was remade as You've Got Mail -- it's almost as good. Because it's about time travel, Somewhere in Time might be sci-fi, but it's pure romance and unforgettably beautiful. Christopher Reeve's best movie.

50 First Dates. Yes, some of the acting is awful, but when Drew Barrymore wakes up on the boat, my heart always breaks with her discovery that she is the mother of a little girl who adores her. Even if she also has to discover that Adam Sandler is her husband.

Let's just remind ourselves of how poor I am at counting to ten.

You've Got Mail
Sense and Sensibility
Patton
Darkest Hour
Poltergeist
Cast Away
Man of Steel
Arrival
Deep Impact
Hacksaw Ridge
He's Just Not That Into You
Forrest Gump
Love Actually
It's a Wonderful Life
The Lion in Winter
Crazy, Stupid, Love
All of Me
The Accountant
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
About Time
The Apartment

Whaddya know. Only twenty-one films on my Top Ten Movies list. That's much better than I expected. (If I expanded it to be a Top Twenty-one Movies list, I'd include a lot more of the almost-made-its, bringing it to more than sixty movies. So let's admire the self-control involved in my choosing twenty-one films for my top ten, and leave it at that.)