I knew you'd love Near Dark. I enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as some of her others. My Kat Bigelow rankings:

1. Strange Days - A - I kind of forgot about this when making my list, probably cause I've only seen it once. Really powerful experience though.
2. Hurt Locker - A
3. Zero Dark Thirty - A
4. Point Break - A-
5. Near Dark - B
6. K19 - C+

White Man's Burden is a great, great film. I think it needed to be said.

Second match in the last batch. And I think one of the Weir films is going to be Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Have you seen Tell Them Willie Boy is Here? If you like Jeremiah Johnson you probably will enjoy this too.

I have seen Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, and it is indeed a very fine film.

Another Redford film I love, one which only just failed to place on my list, is Downhill Racer.

Apparently, Sly is an extra in that.

25. Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - This is an unsung masterpiece by Martin Scorsese, a film yearning to be discovered anew and regarded more highly. In many respects, I regard this as the director's farewell to the menacing, nocturnal NYC in which he forged his legacy with films such as Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and, of course, Taxi Driver. In a wise move, he casts the energetic and inventive Nicolas Cage as the protagonist, a morbid and unstable paramedic on the precipice of self-destruction, haunted by the lives he could not save and exhausted in general by long nights always on the move. From his voice to his physicality, Cage here exudes a blend of desperation, frustration, and trauma of the soul. As grim as the film's plot points and visuals often are, it is ultimately a story of slow and hard, but also honest redemption.



24. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) - In a gesture of enormous respect, Steven Spielberg completed the ambitious project he and Stanley Kubrick were developing and debating before Kubrick died in 1999, and the result is a visionary science-fiction masterpiece which truly and perfectly blends the best of their distinct philosophies and sensibilities. Set over the course of thousands of years, the film ponders, through the plight of a robot child created to imprint upon and love a parent without question, how our responsibility toward technology changes as technology becomes more advanced and indeed more human. One indelible sequence is set at a "flesh fair," a spectacle blending pro wrestling and the Holocaust in which abandoned and captured robots are destroyed for the sadistic pleasure of roaring human crowds.

Nice inclusion of Walkabout.

The Cincinnati Kid is pretty bad. A non-involving plot, wooden acting and dialogues, suspense-free card-playing scenes.

Near Dark and Witness have some atmospheric scenes played to techno soundtrack (norm of movies in 1980's) but that's about it.

The last two are uninspiring.

The phrase 'based off' is quite irritating.

23. Vanilla Sky (2001) - I am tempted to say this is the most undervalued film ever or at least within the last 20 years. Upon its theatrical release, it received a vicious lambasting from critics. Fair play to them, but my response to the film is as distant from theirs as Pluto is from the Sun. Writer/director Cameron Crowe merges the clever science-fiction conceit of the Spanish art-house hit Open Your Eyes with his established specialties, including a melancholy and nostalgic portrayal of romance and a perfectly curated suite of diverse popular music, and the result is a mind-bending entertainment which also serves as a meditation on responsibility, contrition, and the male ego. Delivering one of his strongest performances in the lead role, there is a strong sense the film represents for Tom Cruise a chance to complicate, explore, and subvert his own image as he plays a powerful and wealthy dandy (the type of man whose nightmares begin with the discovery of a grey hair) whose beaming life is turned upside down by tragedy and disfigurement.



22. Barry Lyndon (1975) - Beloved and notorious perfectionist Stanley Kubrick's best film is without a doubt among the most beautiful ever made. It is also fascinating and moving, at least for viewers with both patience and an interest in the era portrayed. Set in the second half of the 18th century, the film depicts the rise through society and subsequent fall from grace of the Irish title character, including his time fighting in the Seven Years' War and his romance with a noble and wealthy widow. It is a haunting and sweeping film concerned with courtship, custom, finance, and the negative side of ambition, and the magnificence of the visual experience should not, cannot, be understated. Detail oriented and driven to the point of using lenses developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to film scenes by candlelight or with natural light instead of with electric rigs out of step with the period, the director and his team of ace technicians create a film resembling court paintings come to spectacular, vivid life.



21. Kes (1970) - There is a grating cliché I often hear in reviews: if you are not moved by such and such scene in such and such film, you must have a heart of stone or no pulse. I almost always shy away from using it myself, but, honestly, if you are not moved by this British drama, damn it, you must have a heart of stone! A naturalistic coming-of-age story with a social conscious and a cast of largely first-time and therefore highly authentic actors, the film is set in a grim town in Northern England and focuses on a small, put-upon child tormented at home and in school who briefly finds a peaceful reprieve from his harsh existence when he secretly develops an interest in falconry. Sad eyed, salt-of-the-earth lead David Bradley delivers one of the most soulful child performances ever, and the film's downbeat ending leaves a permanent bruise, but also has the power to intensify the viewer's capacity for empathy in a profound way.

There are three more Cage films (The Rock, Vampire's Kiss, The Weather Man) which were on my initial, rather considerably longer list, but were cut.

I bow to Sir Nicolas.

Just missed out on my list too.

I am moving into the top 20 now:



20. The Deer Hunter (1978) - There is no shortage of films involving the Vietnam War, a conflict which lasted from 1954 to 1975, whether they focus on actual combat, the plight of soldiers returning home to a divided and furious nation reluctant to celebrate them as heroes, or other facets of a brutal and complicated campaign which still disturbs and divides people to this day. Among them, my personal favorite is The Deer Hunter, a personal three-hour epic which introduces a group of friends from a steel town in rural Pennsylvania, depicts their day-to-day life, and then follows them to Southeast Asia, where they are forever changed by the carnage they experience and the close calls with death they endure. This is an exemplary picture in every respect, from the lived-in authenticity and intensity of the performances to the deliberate pace which gives the audience time to understand the central characters, where they come from, and how they interact with one another before and after experiencing combat. And it is hard to conceive of a sequence more suspenseful than the iconic one here in which beaten, bruised, and exhausted American prisoners of war are forced to play a game of Russian roulette.



19. Blade Runner (1982) - The road to "completion" has proven long for this tortured science-fiction film, but from an anxious shoot and even more storied periods of post-production and post-post-production ultimately emerged a visionary genre masterpiece, a film for which everyone involved in front of and behind the camera will be remembered. Blade Runner is set apart by one of the most astonishing and detailed visions of the future ever captured on film and numerous tantalizing questions regarding identity, morality, and technology which continue to inspire debate to this day. "Tears...in rain."

both enormously overrated films.

18. The Portrait of a Lady (1996) - One of the greatest literary adaptations ever. Henry James' story focuses on one Isabel Archer, a beautiful American girl living abroad in Europe who inherits a fortune, giving her the rare chance to lead an adventurous and free life, but she falls into a misguided relationship with and later weds a gentleman confidence artist whose true nature, including a barbed and covetous disposition, turns her life into a nightmare and prison, forcing her to weigh her personal desire to escape him against established propriety and constrictive gender roles. As crafted by Jane Campion, a director from New Zealand for whom I have enormous respect (four of her pictures are on this list), this is a lushly staged, sensual, and smart rendering of the distinguished James text and features a phenomenal ensemble cast who breathe rich cinematic life into the various fascinating and flawed characters. The cast includes an Oscar nominated Barbara Hershey as a craftily calculating woman who helps lead the heroine astray and the often underutilized Martin Donovan, a moral and sympathetic presence as the consumptive cousin who secures Isabel her financial clout only to watch from a dismayed distance as her life trends downward and his illness worsens.

I kinda wanna see The Portrait of a Lady now.

And I want to see it less.

Vanilla Sky is great.

17. Breathless (1960) - Films do not come much cooler, freer, and sexier than the directorial debut of Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the most beloved release of the French New Wave. The film tells the rapid-fire story of a youthful criminal, a student of the attitude and style of Humphrey Bogart, who steals a car, shoots a policeman, and splits for Paris to reunite with an American lover, who may or may not betray him to the lawmen in hot pursuit. There is a sense here of an energetic film subverting, revising, and changing the rules of cinema in general as it goes.



16. Interview with the Vampire (1994) - Neil Jordan, another of my favorite directors and one who is represented many times on my list, perfectly adapts the influential novel by Anne Rice, the story of a suicidal Louisiana plantation owner who is transformed by an ancient vampire and tries, and often fails, to cope with the violence required of him to survive in his new nocturnal and supernatural state. Jordan's big-budget adaptation loses not one iota of the text's Gothic grandiosity nor its playful homoerotic overtones. For a person such as myself who is a fan of vampires, period horror, over-the-top Gothic style, and both stars (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt), this film is pure, unadulterated, blood coated pleasure and, same as its central characters, never gets old. It is a shame Cruise and Jordan never reunited for a second Rice adaptation. I try to forget the godawful Queen of the Damned exists.

The Truman Show will definitely be on my list. I'm interested in Walkabout. Sounds like something I'd like.

15. Rebecca (1940) - Earlier in presenting my list, I cited Frenzy, my second favorite film by perhaps the most recognizable director to ever live, Alfred Hitchcock. This is my favorite. A magical and masterful blend of mystery, romance, and suspense, the film turns on a debutante who rapidly falls in love with a dashing and wealthy widower. After they wed, she moves into his isolated manor, a place haunted by the outsize memory of his first wife, the title lady. The heroine must unravel the mystery of Rebecca and also outmaneuver perhaps the most sinister character in the Master of Suspense's entire oeuvre, an ice cold and severe maid obsessed (perhaps in love) with the late Rebecca, an ambiguous antagonist played with stonily implacable menace by the inimitable Judith Anderson. I imagine even Norman Bates would steer clear of her.



14. The Battle of Algiers (1966) - The line between fiction and reality is rarely more thin than it is in this propulsive, fact derived drama of social division and urban warfare set in French controlled Algeria in the 1950s as the Algerians fight, at times fight dirty, for independence. Shot and cut in a documentary style, the film is authentic to the bone, and many of its tensions and themes, including the question of if and/or when to use torture to extract information and otherwise intimidate an enemy, still ring true in various contexts around the globe in the 21st century. This could pair well with another film on my list, Z, for an electrifying and exhausting double feature of political cinema.



13. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) - "What we and what we seem is but a dream. A dream within a dream." The scariest mystery may be the mystery without a solution. The second feature film by Peter Weir, and his first major critical and financial hit, is set in Australia on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900. A group of schoolgirls from a prestigious school go for a picnic in a mountainous area in Central Victoria, and a few among them vanish. There is no evidence of a violent crime nor a trace of where they went. It is as if an old and secret part of the universe briefly opened and enveloped them, and the ineradicable question of their fate haunts the people left behind. Utilizing various distinctive tools, including dramatic photography focused on the absurdity of prim performances of Western European civilization in an ancient and unforgiving landscape and an original score featuring haunting panpipes, Weir perfectly toys with the audience's simultaneous dreadful fear of and longing to see into the unknown.

12. Atonement (2007) - One of the most moving tragic love stories ever told on film is also among the more complex as fact and fiction, deceit and truth, blend to tell the story of an ambitious and intelligent servant's son, the rich beauty he loves, and her sister, who tells a brutal lie which wrongly sends him to prison on the eve of the Second World War and then to France as a soldier. In the best film of a still fresh, but destined to be legendary career, astute director Joe Wright brings a high level of formal confidence and elegance to the film on a technical level, including an astounding minutes-long shot revealing bit by bit the spectacular chaos of a seaside military evacuation, while also maintaining a firm grip on both the heartache of the characters and an unusual, provocative gambit in story and structure pondering whether fiction can be a satisfying vehicle through which to atone for regrets and sins of the past.



11. An American Werewolf in London (1981) - There are several horror films on my list, and I would describe myself a lifelong fan of the genre. This gem from the early '80s is my favorite horror film and also, as it were, one of my favorite comedies. When fear and humor can be blended well, and they are blended perfectly here, the results can be dynamic and inspired beyond measure. From an atmospheric opening sequence on a desolate and misty moor onward to a werewolf transformation which still stands as the most convincing and grotesque ever conceived and shot, An American Werewolf in London is a bold feat of imagination and technical craft. One of the most enjoyable popcorn entertainments I know of, its grisly storyline is laced with a just-right amount of absurdity and whimsy, including visits to the protagonist from a dead friend, more decomposed and sarcastic each time, and a playful roster of nostalgic and/or uptempo songs with a lunar theme, including multiple versions of "Blue Moon." (Trivia: they also tried for Cat Stevens' hit "Moonshadow," but were denied by the singer/songwriter.)

Where's Anna Karenina?, recently watched this for the first time and was great

I adore Anna Karenina (it was my second favorite film of last year), but it did not end up on my list.