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If I Had a Sight & Sound Film Ballot: Matthew Connolly’s Top 10 Films of All Time

Creating this fantasy Sight & Sound ballot felt as much like excavation as photography.

If I Had a Sight & Sound Film Ballot: Matthew Connolly's Top 10 Films of All Time
Photo: Touchstone Pictures
Editor’s Note: In light of Sight & Sound’s film poll, which, every decade, queries critics and directors the world over before arriving at a communal Top 10 list, we polled our own writers, who didn’t partake in the project, but have bold, discerning, and provocative lists to share.

Among the many critics who simultaneously partake in, and rise skeptical eyebrows toward, “best of” polls, the notion of the “list as snapshot” becomes a helpful negotiating metaphor. Viewing any top 10 ballot as a historically contingent event—as opposed an authoritative act of canon formation—allows critics to both enthusiastically make the case for our favorite films, while acknowledging that any act of “objectively” ranking works of art quickly bumps up against the limits of one’s own knowledge, biases, and experience.

It’s a useful image, but perhaps an incomplete one. If a photograph captures a given instant, it cannot account for all the previous moments that collectively created what was placed before the lens. Whittling down this list, for me, became as much about contending with my relationship to different periods in my life as it did with clarifying my feelings on the films themselves—as if the two could ever be wholly disentangled. Should I go with more classical Hollywood titles, whose early presence in my life profoundly shaped both my cinephilic tastes and childhood memories? Is it better to take a gamble on those movies that I’ve had less time to sit with, but whose initial seismic impact most likely ensures their permanent place in my head and heart?

Creating this fantasy Sight & Sound ballot, then, felt as much like excavation as photography, sifting through the layers of past experience, arranging the found artifacts in an attempt to convey my range of cinematic passions up to this point. It’s been an inevitably frustrating, completely rewarding task—and, if it means you add a couple of these titles to your Netflix queue as a result, all the better.


Breathless

Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

Jean-Luc Godard’s screw-the-rulebook masterpiece remains one of the great, joyful paeans to the endless flexibility and playfulness of the cinematic medium. Several viewing later, I remain floored by its devil-may-care freshness, its nimble shifts in tone and pace, the simultaneity of its cooler-than-cool chic and almost guileless enthusiasm. Godard would go on to make works that perhaps eclipse Breathless in their formal density and political knottiness. It’s all the more reason to savor Godard’s initial shot across the bow—both a perfect time capsule for a moment in film history and a portal that plugs us right back into the initial, heady thrill of that moment.



The Chelsea Girls

The Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, 1966)

With its imposing running time and double-screen projection format, Andy Warhol’s jaw-dropper probably remains one of the great under-seen films in American cinematic history. And that’s a shame, because it remains an audacious and overwhelming experience. Like so many of Warhol’s films, it offers a laser-like study in the narcissism, creativity, and cruelty of those underground demigods known as the “superstars.” The transcendence of The Chelsea Girls lies in the semi-accidental poetry of its juxtapositions, no more so than Eric Emerson’s stunning, drug-fueled, neon-soaked self-deconstruction on screen right as a crowd of silent partygoers gaze placidly on screen left. It’s a haunting encapsulation of Warhol’s aesthetic—icy cool and singularly devastating.


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In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

Few films grasp the frenzied, throbbing heart of erotic obsession as completely as this one. Humphrey Bogart has never been as heartbreaking—or as frightening—as he is here, playing a broken-down screenwriter whose unspecific rage can never be satiated. The love of a good woman (the divine Gloria Grahame) calms his heart temporarily, but she comes with her own demons and dark suspicions. The depth of In a Lonely Place’s darkness sneaks up on you slowly and surrounds you completely. I cannot think of another sequence that stops my heart as completely as Bogart and Grahame’s final encounter, offering perhaps Hollywood’s most fearless gaze into the abyss of love strangled by fear.


My Darling Clementine

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

Anyone who thinks of the western genre as the provenance of male posturing and violent wish fulfillment need only watch John Ford’s masterwork, which offers some of the most delicate and deeply moving meditations on the vicissitudes of romance, camaraderie, and community in the Hollywood canon. Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature’s “Doc” Holliday make for one of cinema’s great, doomed friendships, with a shoot-out climax that evokes the swirling ambivalence and regret of great film noir. And is there a more poignant image of courtship than Fonda and Cathy Downs walking arm in arm toward the town dance, the strains of “Shall We Gather at the River” offering a tentative ray of hope within the wind-swept desolation of the west?


Nashville

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

The densest, nerviest, and most furiously alive of Robert Altman’s state-of-the-union panoramas, Nashville never fails to exhilarate in the scope of its ambition and the depth of its observation. It’s a film of a thousand moments: the look on Lily Tomlin’s face as she listens to Keith Carradine’s lady-killer croon “I’m Easy” across a crowded bar; the crestfallen striptease of Gwen Welles’s deluded waitress; the deeply ambivalent final performance by Barbara Harris’s starry-eyed aspiring singer. Altman weaves them together in a way that honors their lived-in spontaneity while forming a larger national portrait that’s all the more biting for its clear-eyed empathy.


The Royal Tennenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Few critical truisms puzzle me more than the idea that Wes Anderson is some kind of irony-encased, twee-for-the-sake-of-twee stylist. I mean, I get it, in the sense that his idiosyncratic aesthetic has become one of the most predominant in 21st-century American cinema. For anyone who believes that his surfaces are ends in and of themselves, rather than offering rich and multifaceted visual counterpoints to his emotionally crippled protagonists, I humbly ask them to give Anderson’s 2001 masterpiece another watch. The Royal Tenenbaums remains the quintessence of Anderson’s brilliance: rich with detail, zig-zaggy wit, and whiplash tonal shifts where simple turn of phrase opens out onto worlds of singular hurt and regret. It’s only grown deeper with age, and it never fails to make me weep.


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Safe

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Maybe it’s an AIDS allegory. Maybe it’s a science-fiction-tinged environmental parable. Maybe it’s an unsettled—and unsettling—meditation on selfhood in the postmodern era. Like its disintegrating protagonist, Todd Haynes’s Safe has become a Rosetta Stone within which viewers can see more or less whatever it wants. That the film also defies any simplistic allegorical reading speaks to the meticulous formal control evident in every perfectly composed, antiseptic frame. Perhaps Haynes’s greatest trick, then, becomes investing us so completely in the plight of Carol White (the astounding Julianne Moore), even as her crumbling identity remains a disturbing, fuzzy question mark. Her film-ending descent into physical seclusion and self-help bromides is the stuff that nightmares are made of.


Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

Frame for frame, no other film packs so much in this much pleasure. Billy Wilder’s spinning-top farce situates itself at the apex of two great Tinseltown traditions: the lovingly designed structure and polish of classical Hollywood cinema, and the boundary-pushing chutzpah that would mark some of the studios’ most audacious works for the next 20 years. It’s a combination that Wilder takes utter delight in, with scene after beautifully constructed scene humming with barely controlled erotic anarchy. And then there’s that trio of flawless comic performances (with Jack Lemmon’s sexually confused bass player taking the cake). There isn’t a film I’d rather watch at any given moment than Some Like It Hot.


Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Oh, that Lubitsch touch. So sly, so urbane! What often goes unsaid is how utterly empathetic it also is—so accepting of foibles and the unruly passions that roil the human heart. There’s no better showcase for Ernst Lubitsch’s profoundly humane brand of comedy than this dazzling comedy of manners. The double- and triple-crosses that mark the relationship between a thief (Herbert Marshall), his partner in crime and love (Miriam Hopkins), and the perfume manufacturer he’s conning (Kay Francis) are as sleek, sexy, and sophisticated as anything Hollywood has ever produced. But it’s the moments of wistfulness—the acknowledgment that the world is flawed and messy, and all the more wonderful for it—that make this gem sparkle all the more.


Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

There are many great films, but few that make you think you’re witnessing some next step in the evolution of the medium. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner felt like one of those movies when I first saw it, and I haven’t been able to shake the notion since. A work of beguiling modesty and eccentricity, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives contains mysteries that I’ll be happy to puzzle over for years to come. I don’t want to confine Apichatpong’s achievement to the realm of exoticism. Uncle Boonmee exudes a craft, patience, and unassuming formal beauty that can only come from a truly gifted director. Still, its respect for the unknown and ability to hint at worlds of experience just beyond the frame gives its artistry a magic that’s best experienced, rather than explained. And what an experience it is.

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Matthew Connolly

Matt Connolly is an assistant professor of film studies in the Department of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His criticism has also appeared in Reverse Shot and Film Comment.

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