- Here at IGN FilmForce, we like to argue; not
about who tracked mud through the kitchen, or which of the editors used all of
the toilet paper in the men's room. We like to argue about movies… which is
better than which and why. Unfortunately, after the umpteenth shouting match,
the higher-ups decided it would be a whole lot cooler to put all of this
arguing to some kind of positive use. Therefore, we came up with an exhaustive
plan: we will rate the Top 25 movies for 13 genres in 13 weeks. We have already
done Animation
and Drama,
and we will roll out a new genre each Friday until we have covered the most
important categories of movies.
25. The Conversation
Francis Ford Coppola's follow-up to The Godfather (in fact an interim
film between the two crime sagas) is a paranoid masterpiece on par with his
best work, and stands up today as a remarkable depiction of one man's
professional life destroyed by his inescapable personal convictions. Gene
Hackman gives one of the movies' great performances as Harry Caul, a sad-sack
surveillance expert who finds himself ensconced in a potential assassination
plot while trying to recover from his role in the deaths of three people years
before. Like Antonioni's similar Blowup, the film takes typically
concrete material - that is, recorded sound - and reduces it to a fluid,
maddeningly interpretive landscape; as Harry attempts to decipher the footage
and divine motives, intentions, and most importantly, outcomes, he only finds
himself further from the truth. Coppola, meanwhile, transforms the language of
cinema yet again, and offers a vision of the media age that remains unshaken
even to this day.-
24. Basic Instinct
Paul Verhoeven's sexed-up 1992 hit, Basic Instinct, starring Michael Douglas
and Sharon Stone, is one of the freakiest thrillers ever made. Douglas stars
Nick Curran, a police detective investigating a series of vicious sex murders
who becomes involved (very involved) with the prime suspect, uninhibited, manipulative
novelist Catherine Trammell. Keep your legs... err... fingers crossed that the
forthcoming sequel will be a worthy successor to the original.
23. The 39 Steps
A forerunner to North by Northwest, 1935's The 39 Steps was
Alfred Hitchcock's first "wrong man" film, and is arguably the best
of Hitchcock's British film work. 39 Steps, like later Hitchcock movies
such as Saboteur and The Man Who Knew Too Much, follows an
average, innocent man (Robert Donat) who's framed and has to clear his name.
The title refers to the film's "MacGuffin" -- "the 39
steps" is a phrase Donat's character must determine the meaning of in the
search to prove his innocence.
22. The Conformist
Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 tale of a Fascist sympathizer who becomes complicit in
a plot to assassinate his old professor is an unlikely but unforgettable film,
one fraught with personal and political tensions that erupt in images so
beautiful that the message is conveyed even if the words don't always make
sense. Bertolucci, a student of the works of director Pier Paolo Pasolini,
creates a deeply personal film about one man's desperate desire to conform,
projected against the backdrop of Italian Fascism; Jean-Louis Trintignant plays
Marcello, who survives being molested as a child only to succumb to the impact
of that experience as an adult when asked to seek out his old teacher, now a
political dissident. Like, says, Chinatown, the film is full of
political double-crossing, and occasional detours into personal problems that
don't always add up, but Bertolucci is firmly in control of this captivating
thriller; never has 'fitting in' felt quite so cloying as depicted here. -TG
21. Charade
The masterstroke of director Stanley Donen's career, Charade is a nearly
perfect thriller. Rivaling Hitchcock's best, Charade has enough
intrigue, suspense and red herrings to keep just about any viewer riveted from
beginning to end. At 59, Cary Grant is still pretty damn suave. The fetching 34
year-old Hepburn has an excellent chemistry with the dashing aristocrat, and
the two play humor and romance with equal aptitude. As much as Charade
seems to be having fun with the audience, it's also having some fun with itself
along the way, a layered and perfect thriller in all senses. -JO
20. Rashomon
There have been dozens of movies made telling stories from multiple
perspectives, but Rashomon was the first, and likely the best: adopting
the adage that there are always three versions of the truth - your version, my
version, and what actually happened - director Akira Kurosawa explores the
particulars of a crime through the eyes of several different characters -
including the deceased victim - and offers a case study in storytelling that
has seldom been matched in the 60 years since it was first made. There is a
famous story about Kurosawa's assistants, who challenged the director to
explain the film after reading its screenplay; his response to them was
"if you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it, because
it was written with the intention of being incomprehensible." Seldom has a
movie that made so little sense felt as satisfying. -TG
19. Strangers on a Train
This 1951 Alfred Hitchcock classic tells the story of a "murder
exchange" between two men who meet on a train and decide to
"trade" murders... The problem is, only one of them actually carries
through on the deal. Stars Farley Granger and Robert Walker turn in excellent
performances, the script (co-written by Raymond Chandler) is tightly written,
and the scenes are superbly directed, from the smartly choreographed opening
sequence to the famously unfaked and truly dangerous runaway merry-go-round
scene.
18.
Fight Club The first rule of Fight Club is that it kicks ass.
Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's amazing and unique novel, Fight Club follows
the intertwining lives of two men as they turn the world on its ear. Eschewing
society's rules in favor of chaos, the two men (Brad Pitt and Edward Norton)
begin a national network of "fight clubs" where men go to beat each
other senseless in hopes of finding salvation and respite from their boring
lives. Not only an indictment of consumer culture, but a wickedly dark and
sinister film with constant thrills, Fight Club stands as a modern
classic. –
17.
Notorious
Alfred Hitchcock's ninth American film, Notorious combines a great spy
story with a romance. Featuring a stellar cast -- Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant
and Claude Rains -- and some groundbreaking camerawork for 1946 (including a
swooping crane shot down to an extreme close-up of a key in Bergman's hand), Notorious's
plot revolves around a very realistic and timely "MacGuffin" (a term
Hitchcock coined for whatever all the characters are after): uranium. -BZ
16. The Third Man
The Third Man is classic noir mystery at its finest. From prolific director
Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, the film stars Joseph Cotten as pulp novel
author Holly Martins who travels to Vienna after WWII to work with his friend,
Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles). But when Lime is killed in a mysterious
car accident, Martins begins to look into the events surrounding his friend's
death. Welles appearance, an top-shelf musical score and a number of plot
surprises are all highlights of this classic picture.
15. Blue Velvet
Prior to Blue Velvet, David Lynch made three ambitious and equally
eccentric films - Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Dune -
but with the 1986 mystery, his legacy was permanently assured: this bizarre
exploration of suburbia's seedy underbelly became the template for almost every
Lynch project which followed. Kyle Machlachlan, who later became the director's
squeaky-clean protagonist on Twin Peaks, plays Jeffrey, a nosy kid who
discovers a severed ear in an abandoned lot and soon succumbs to a strange,
frightening world of masochism and violence. Dennis Hopper, returning to
sobriety after decades of drug use, offers a chilling performance as Frank
Booth, while Isabella Rossellini lays bare her soul - and her body - as a
kidnapped man's wife, who finds herself unexpectedly excited by this dangerous,
depraved underworld. Lynch would go on to make other memorable mysteries, but
this is the only one that ever quite served his own and his audience's purposes
so satisfactorily.
14. Touch of Evil
Signaling a return to the studio system after countless feuds, Touch of Evil
is a comeback of sorts for Orson Welles, and one of his finest films. Featuring
one of the most impressive opening shots in cinema history, Touch of Evil
proved yet again that Welles was a visionary filmmaker; one who could balance
the technical with the creative to achieve greatness. Featuring a young
Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, the cast is terrific, but as usual, Welles
steals the show with his portrayal of Hank Quinlan, a corpulent, no-hold barred
local cop working the scene in the seedy town of Los Robles, Mexico. Moody and
almost too dark for its time, Touch of Evil stands as one of the great
thrillers of all-time.
13. Dial M For Murder
Originally shot in 3-D but rarely projected that way (I was lucky enough to see
a 3-D print once. Very cool, but doesn't make much difference outside of the
scissor scene), Dial M For Murder is Hitchcock in the zone. As great a
thriller as Dial M is, it's even more amazing when you realize that
number three on our list, Rear Window, was released the same year. One
of Hitchock's favorite blondes (and mine too), Grace Kelly, is the star of both
films. The shifty-eyed Ray Milland gives an excellent performance as well,
backpedaling and backstabbing his way through this terrific thriller.
Hitchcock's work takes up more than a third of our thriller list, and argument
could easily be made for slots.
12. Double Indemnity
Proof positive that women are the downfall of man, Double Indemnity is
also further proof of Billy Wilder's status as one of the most versatile and
talented directors in Hollywood's brief history. If you only know Fred
MacMurray as the lovable ole' dad on My Three Sons, you'll look at him
differently after seeing his performance as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity.
Barbara Stanwyk is stunningly beautiful as black widow Phyllis Dietrichson.
Edward G. Robinson delivers a classic line with every breath. Much like most of
Wilder's dramatic work that would follow, Indemnity is dark and cynical,
with a black sense of humor that is as troubling as it is eternally inviting.-
11. Memento
Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano stand out this inventive, backwards 2001 thriller
from writer-director Christoper Nolan. Telling the story of a man (Pearce) who
suffers from short-term memory loss, Memento plays like a puzzle,
showing how the events we see in the beginning came to be. The plot unfolds in
ten-minute sequences, shown in reverse chronological order, a device that
actually makes the film an even more intriguing thriller than it would have
been had it been presented in a forward-flowing timeline. –
10.
The Sixth Sense
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's breakthrough movie was released in 1999, when
spoiler-happy movie websites were dishing every detail they could find about
upcoming flicks. But somehow, some way The Sixth Sense made its way to the big
screen unspoiled and blew audiences away with a surprise twist ending that no
one saw coming. The film, starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, was an
unexpected blockbuster that benefited from positive word of mouth that spread
like wildfire... but the ending largely remained unspoiled.
9.
Vertigo
Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo is at its essence about obsession, as much
for the director himself as his artistic designs. In the film, James Stewart
plays Scotty, a detective who becomes obsessed with a woman named Madeleine
(Kim Novak) who dies, and then mysteriously reappears in a subtly different,
slightly less polished form. He begins to remake this 'new' version, renamed
Judy, in the image of his object of desire, but finds that it only pulls him
further from the sad essence of their relationship - namely, that each of them
has fallen for a part of the other they cannot have. Hitchcock's efforts here
to render Scotty's vertigo, much less his obsession with Madeleine, reach new
heights of technical expertise - even for the endlessly inventive filmmaker -
but the lasting effect is one that the audience cannot shake: one man
sacrifices a real woman for the dream of another, and one filmmaker lays bare
his soul for the sake of his art. A masterpiece in any terms.
8.
Seven
While movies about serial killers are frequent and usually awful, Seven
brought intelligence and genuine thrills to the sagging genre, during a
considerable drought. Oozing mood and bleeding intrigue, the movie slowly
unwraps a gory tale of a killer punishing his victims by enacting murders based
on the seven deadly sins (thus the title). With gritty performances by Brad
Pitt and Morgan Freeman, and a star turn from relative unknown (at the time)
Gwyneth Paltrow, David Fincher's film ensures that audiences will squirm from
the first frame to the final grisly revelation
7.
Night of the Hunter
Endlessly imitated but still in many ways an obscure classic, Robert Mitchum is
truly terrifying in this masterpiece by actor-turned-director Charles Laughton.
This was the one and only feature he directed, amazingly enough. Why try to top
perfection, I suppose. Mitchum's frightening presence is most associated with
his over-the-top portrayal of Max Cady in the 1962 Cape Fear, but it was
his subtly terrifying, ruthless Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter that
stands as his greatest acting achievement. Sporting his classic
"Love" and "Hate" tattoos across the fingers on his right
and left hand, Powell is a deeply evil character driven to murderous excess in
pursuit of fortune. He has no compassion, be it mother, the elderly, or the
innocent children desperately running from his wrath
6. Manchurian Candidate (1962)
John Frankenheimer's 1962 adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate
combines drama, suspense, science-fiction and political satire in such an
effective way it's hard to put it in any one category. As a thriller, Manchurian
Candidate succeeds superbly, featuring an incredibly creepy plot involving
brainwashed, unknowing assassins. Feelings of paranoia and foreboding reign
throughout the flick, culminating in a very intense, climactic ending. -
5.
Silence of the Lambs
Anthony Hopkins' pronunciation of the name "Clarice" in indelibly
imprinted in my brain for the rest of time. As the maniacal Hannibal "The
Cannibal" Lector, Hopkins took full ownership of the role originally
portrayed by Brian Cox in Manhunter. Jodie Foster also fully affirmed
her status as Hollywood's smartest leading lady. Her performance was so solid
that the FBI still uses the film as a poster-child for their promotion.
Thrilling, scary and just exceptionally solid filmmaking in the hands of
Jonathan Demme, Silence was a runway success both commercially and
critically, taking home golden naked guys for Picture, Director, Actor, Actress
and Screenplay.-
4. Psycho
Consistently listed among the best thrillers ever made, Psycho, the 1960 Alfred
Hitchcock film starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, has changed the way
anyone who's ever seen it feels about being the in shower. Believe it or not,
when Psycho first came out, audiences weren't completely into it. For
Hitchcock, who had previously crafted films like North by Northwest, Vertigo
and Rear Window, the film was a significant departure from his established
formula. Many fans of the filmmaker were disappointed to get something all
together different than they were expecting. Maybe we'll feel that way about
the Star Wars prequels in a few years? Nah.
3. Rear Window
Of Alfred Hitchcock's many paeans to voyeurism, Rear Window is not only
his most famous, but his best: when a famous photographer is laid up in his
apartment after an accident, he spends his days and nights watching his
neighbors until he believes he witnesses a murder. Jimmy Stewart, the reliable
hero of many of Hitchcock's movies, plays Jeff, the wounded voyeur, while Grace
Kelly plays his marriage-minded accomplice. Meanwhile, Hitchcock's fluidity
with the camera has seldom been as expressive, and simultaneously as simple;
shooting exclusively from Jeff's point of view, the images themselves prove
condemning to the audience because they wisely avoid offering any other
perspective, and offer a remarkable juxtaposition between the moral conclusions
drawn from his observations and the character's unwillingness to engage
anything but from a safe and satisfactorily detached distance. Far surpassing
the facile and fleeting scares of modern thrillers, Rear Window offers
an exercise in suspense that proves as unforgettable - and frightening - today
as it did in 1954. -
2. Chinatown
Featuring a strong, Academy Award-winning screenplay by Robert Towne, Roman
Polanski's Chinatown follows private detective J.J. Gittes (Jack
Nicholson) as he investigates a murder and stumbles onto a conspiracy involving
the future of Los Angeles. A neo-noir thriller that simultaneously pays homage
to and redefines the film noir genre, Chinatown tells a complex story
brilliantly and showcases one of Nicholson's greatest performances. -
1. North By Northwest
It's only fitting that Alfred Hitchcock would top this list, since his sense of
story and knack for suspense made him the greatest mystery/thriller director of
all-time. North By Northwest is a masterpiece of intrigue, and features
some of the most copied sequences in film. Starring the incomparable Cary Grant
as Roger Thornhill, a man mistaken to be a spy. The twists and turns that
result from Thornhill's flight from relentless pursuit provide a blueprint by
which all thrillers can be judged.
THIS POSTER WOULD ADD, “DAY OF THE
JACKYLL” directed by Fred ZINNERMAN, a Frederic Forsythe Novel, ODESSA
FILE, a Forsythe novel that is better than the film. Really good!
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