My 50 Favorite Movies of All Time

Hollywood’s Golden Age, arthouse classics from around the world, sci-fi and anime, and of course, ninjas.

I rarely watched movies growing up. Some of that was due to finances and some of that was due to the evangelical Christian milieu in which I grew up, which viewed Hollywood and “liberal” media with great skepticism. The cracks in that slowly began to appear in high school, when I borrowed VHS tapes of movies that my friends had recorded off cable TV, and fully burst open in college.

I took a film history course on a lark, only to have my eyes opened to the possibilities and treasures of world cinema. Meanwhile, the local VHS rental stores — RIP Audio-Visual and Hollywood Video — became godsends as I started seeking out weird and fringe titles. (Sure, Netflix et al. are more convenient, but nothing beat the experience of combing the racks of VHS titles and picking up something based solely on the cover art. But that’s a subject for another post.)

Interestingly, I didn’t start reviewing movies until several years into Opus’s existence. I suppose I had some misguided notion that reviewing movies required a higher degree of skill than reviewing albums. I’m not sure what changed my mind — perhaps it was my discovery of the delightful craziness that is Hong Kong action movies — but eventually, I began posting as many movie reviews as I did music reviews.

Cinema is vast, encompassing all manner of stories and methods of telling them. I love the classics — screwball comedies and Golden Age Hollywood — and arthouse classics, but as a nerd, I’m unsurprisingly drawn to sci-fi, fantasy, and anime. And of course, there’s my abiding love for martial arts and kung fu flicks. The following list encompasses all of those, and more, and each one of them contains a unique world that I’m glad to have experienced.

Enjoy reading Opus? Want to support my writing? Become a subscriber for just $5/month or $50/year.
Subscribe Today
Return to the Opus homepage