Thompson on Hollywood

Ranking Stanley Kubrick: Top Ten Directors, Top Twenty Flickchart Movies

My most recent online time-waster (along with Flickchart) is Formspring, which asks you questions and posts your answers on various social media. For example, when asked to name my top ten directors of all time, I came up with this list:

By Anne Thompson
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August 12, 2010 4:02 AM
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TIFF List: Essential 100 Films

The Toronto International Film Festival posts "The Essential 100," a list of must-see films that merges two lists (one determined by TIFF curators, another by TIFF stakeholders). There are many obvious choices, from The Godfather, Casablanca and Gone With The Wind to Chinatown, as well as such arcane entries as the controversial Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom from director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

By Anne Thompson
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July 13, 2010 6:48 AM
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Best Reviewed Movies of Decade: Pan's Labyrinth, Man on Wire

The best-reviewed movies of the decade on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are Pan's Labyrinth and Man on Wire, respectively.

By Anne Thompson
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January 2, 2010 8:26 AM
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John Waters' Ten Best List of 2009

When John Waters submitted his Guilty Pleasures list to Film Comment, he included movies like Woody Allen's Interiors and Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. So it's not entirely surprising that his 2009 Ten Best list, published in Art Forum, includes Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces. Waters knows what he likes. Here's his top five:1 Import Export (Ulrich Seidl) The most sorrowful movie of the year is also the best. The miserable lives of Ukrainian immigrants in Vienna make this agonizing but brilliantly directed opus the cinematic equivalent of slitting your wrists. A new genre? Depression porn? Hey, I got off.

By Anne Thompson
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December 27, 2009 8:01 AM
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Year End Wraps: Ten Best of 2009 and Decade

Without having seen Avatar, I've posted my ten best of the year and the decade.

By Anne Thompson
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December 10, 2009 11:40 AM
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Halloween Watch: Scorsese's Top 11 Scariest Movies

The Daily Beast asked Martin Scorsese to list his scariest movies. He came up with 11 and his scariest is my scariest, and always has been: Robert Wise's 1963 The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Nice to be validated.

By Anne Thompson
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October 29, 2009 7:13 AM
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Rotten Tomatoes Lists the Worst of the Worst

Rotten Tomatoes has collected their reviews and collated the worst-of-the-worst films of the 21st century. Whiteout---how many of Joel Silver's films are on this list, I wonder?---ranks at number 100. What's number one? Check out the lowest Tomatometers of the decade. All of the films on this year's list scored below an 8% Tomatometer score; the top 14 all have 0%. Twelve Oscar-winners starred in a "worst" film: Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro star in two. The comedy genre outpaces any other on the list, with 35. 2002 was the worst year of the decade, with 16 worst movies. Carmen Electra starred in more worst films, six, than any one else.

By Anne Thompson
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September 25, 2009 2:21 AM
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Lists: 50 Best Movies of All Time, Again

It's a list that keeps on giving: the 50 best movies of all time. With this global critics list at The One-Line Review, at least, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There's Citizen Kane at number one, and having shown the movie to my USC film criticism class, I get why the movie holds on to that top spot, decade after decade. The damn thing holds up. Pauline Kael said it was a comedy and she was right. It's entertaining, funny, unique, utterly timely and resonant today. Kids understand it perfectly. It doesn't age, even in black-and-white.

By Anne Thompson
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July 13, 2009 5:49 AM
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Top 25 Active Directors: Did EW Get it Right?

EW loves lists like this one, the top 25 active directors, designed to inspire healthy debate. Did they get it right? And what do they mean by active, exactly? "Most talented, in-demand directors behind the camera today?" They're trying to have it both ways--it's a power list measuring fame, heat, influence and at the same time, a qualitative measure of talent.