The 1. 00 Greatest Movies, Feature . And in your thousands, you did. Here are the results of Empire's 1. Greatest Movies poll. But that's not all. We also polled your favourite filmmakers for their lists, too.
Taxi Driver upset people, and for good reason: Four decades later, its vision of murderous rage as cathartic release is still disturbing. One person bothered by the. These movies were added to the IAFD in the last 14 days. Gay titles are shown in blue, web scenes in yellow, compilations in dark grey.
To read greatest movies picks from the men and women who actually make those movies, buy the July issue of Empire, on sale from Thursday. Or cut out the middle- man and subscribe now. Stand By Me (1. 98. Rob Reiner's adaptation of Steven King's novella The Body is a stirring, touching adventure film which knows the real world is exciting and scary enough just as it is. It's also a coming- of- age movie which celebrates the intensity of childhood friendship, while gently mourning the transience of such bonds. Which is why, unlike its central character, it'll never get old. Read Empire's review of Stand By Me.
Raging Bull (1. 98. Scorsese and De Niro have together made movies better than their boxing biopic, but it's hard to argue that any of those movies feature a more jaw- dropping performance than De Niro's here as self- destructive pugilist Jake La Motta. It also features some of cinema's best- shot fights; hard to believe that before Scorsese, no director thought to put the camera inside the ring.. Read Empire's review of Raging Bull. Read Empire's review of Am. Titanic (1. 99. 7)James Cameron doesn't do things by halves, does he?
20 Best Bollywood movies from 1990 to 1999. The 1990’s decade produced some the most memorable Hindi films. It is hard to pick only a handful out of hundreds of.
His movie about the 1. But it turned out to be one of the most successful films ever made (in terms of both box office and Awards), and made him King Of The World. You couldn't make it up, could you? Read Empire's review of Titanic. Good Will Hunting (1. Remember when young actor buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay?
Might seem odd now, but Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's heartfelt story of a friendship between a troubled maths genius (Damon) and his unconventional counsellor (Robin Williams, who also won an Oscar) deserved the accolade. What happened to those guys, anyway?.
Read Empire's review of Good Will Hunting. Arrival (2. 01. 6)Denis Villeneuve's empathic, perception- bending alien visitation drama is a delicately crafted modern rework of The Day The Earth Stood Still — except the extra- terrestrials are truly otherworldly and there's the sky- high obstacle that is the language barrier. With its message that open- minded communication enables us to realise the things we have in common with those who appear vastly different, it feels like genuinely compulsive viewing for this troubled day and age. Read Empire's review of Arrival. Mp4 Movies For Ipod Bang (2017). Lost In Translation (2. Sofia Coppola's second film is the ultimate jet lag movie, locating its central almost- romance between listless college grad Scarlett Johansson and life- worn actor Bill Murray amid the woozy, daydreamy bewilderment of being in a very foreign country and a very different time zone.
And it's exactly right that we still don't know what he whispered to her at the end. Read Empire's review of Lost In Translation.
The Princess Bride (1. Rob Reiner and writer William Goldman's affectionate pastiche of romantic fairy- tale stories.
It doesn't just include one of cinema's greatest swordfights, or one of its most entertaining battle of wits, but it also has a doozy of a sickbed- storytelling framing device, during which narrator Peter Falk suffers interruptions from his grandson (Fred Savage), even pausing and rewinding the action. Read Empire's review of The Princess Bride. The Terminator (1.
It features time travel and a cyborg, with car chases and shoot- outs, but in James Cameron's first proper movie (ie not featuring flying piranhas) it's all packed around the blood- covered endoskeleton of a relentless- killer horror pic. After all, what is Schwarzenegger's Uzi- 9mm- toting Terminator, if not an upgraded version of Halloween's Michael Myers? Read Empire's review of The Terminator. The Prestige (2. 00. Christopher Nolan's last 'little' movie concerned warring stage magicians (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) in late 1.
London, but was less a period thriller than a stealth sci- fi. In some ways, it can also be seen as a metaphor for his film- making philosophy: keep the magic practical, don't give away how you do your tricks, and stay well away from 'real' magic (ie CGI).. Read Empire's review of The Prestige. No Country For Old Men (2.
The Coen brothers’ Cormac Mc. Carthy adaptation is a tension- ratcheting, 1. Texas- set chase movie, which also thoughtfully considers the question: how can good people ever possibly deal with a world going to shit? It also revealed that Javier Bardem makes an awesome villain; ever since he played No Country’s cold- blooded assassin Anton Chigurh, Hollywood can’t stop making him the bad guy. Read Empire's review of No Country For Old Men. Shaun Of The Dead (2. Before its release, you might have been forgiven for thinking it would be Spaced: The Movie.
But Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s first feature is genuinely stand- alone, a savvy blend of proper- funny comedy and seriously gruesome undead- horror which, funnily enough, played a big part in the zombie- movie resurgence we’re still enjoying now. Read Empire's review of Shaun Of The Dead. The Exorcist (1. 97.
William Friedkin’s ’7. But the reason it chills so deeply is the way it sustains and builds its disquieting atmosphere so craftily and consistently throughout. Read Empire's review of The Exorcist.
Predator (1. 98. 7)A pumped- up men- on- a- mission movie with an ingenious science- fiction tweak. When you’ve got the world’s baddest asses on the march (Arnold Schwarzenegger! Jesse Ventura! Carl Weathers! Shane Black!?!), it’d be rude not to have them stalked by an intergalactic hunter with space- dreads and a shoulder- mounted laser cannon. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1. You voted. There may only be 1. Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, but it’s hard to imagine two better actors to play a bickering father and son, off on a globetrotting, Nazi- bashing, mythical mystery tour.
After all, you’ve got Spielberg/Lucas’ own version of James Bond. Of course, its greatest strength is in Natalie Portman, delivering a luminous, career- creating performance as vengeful 1.
Mathilda, whose relationship with the monosyllabic killer is truly affecting, and nimbly stays just on the right side of acceptable. Read Empire's review of L. Rocky (1. 97. 6)John G.
Avildsen’s boxing drama is the ne plus ultra of underdog sports movies. It not only proves that winning isn’t the most important thing (you gotta go the distance), but also enabled Sylvester Stallone to craft a character so convincing and emotionally absorbing, he’s still appearing in movies almost 4. Read Empire's review of Rocky.
True Romance (1. 99. Tony Scott’s handling of Quentin Tarantino’s script came off like the cinematic equivalent of cocaine- flavoured bubble- gum: a bright, flavoursome confection that had an intoxicatingly violent kick. It also drew some tremendous big names to its supporting cast. Jackson, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Dennis Hopper.
Read Empire's review of True Romance. Some Like It Hot (1. It says a lot about the magnitude of Billy Wilder’s talent that he took a reportedly awful shooting experience with a pill- addled Marilyn Monroe and turned it into a movie that features what is arguably her best performance, not to mention one of his own finest features. This cross- dressing caper also has what must be the greatest last line in history: “Well, nobody’s perfect”. The Social Network (2. Or, I’m Gonna Git You Zuckerberg.
Portrayed as an . But it is great drama, expertly wrought by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who exploits the story’s central paradox (a guy who doesn’t get people makes a fortune getting people together online) to supremely juicy effect. Read Empire's review of The Social Network. Spirited Away (2.
Hayao Miyazaki’s most successful film (also the highest- grossing anime until Your Name came along last year) is truly a moving work of art, in both senses.
Taxi Driver remains one of the best (and most troubling) of Palme winners. Palme Thursday is A. A. Dowd’s monthly examination of a winner of the Palme D’Or, determining how well the film has held up and whether it deserved the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. Taxi Driver (1. 97. Over the last month, and frequently on Twitter, cinephiles have been engaged in a heated debate about the new film from Martin Scorsese, the uproarious financial- sector opus The Wolf Of Wall Street.
The point of contention is whether Wolf, with its endless and exhausting parade of debauchery, is glorifying its filthy- rich, swindling protagonists or condemning them. Setting aside how exciting it is to see a 7. Hasn’t Marty been accused of condoning immorality for most of his career, for having a little too much fun with the brutes and sickos he so often takes as his subjects? The controversy surrounding Scorsese’s approach to reprehensible men can be traced all the way back to at least 1. Taxi Driver upset people, and for good reason: Four decades later, its vision of murderous rage as cathartic release is still disturbing. One person bothered by the film’s climactic reckoning was the famous playwright Tennessee Williams, who served as head of the Cannes jury in ’7. Either way, festivalgoers seemed to share his sentiments, heckling Taxi Driver at its premiere.
The booing continued when Williams announced, despite his reservations, that the jury had selected the movie for the Palme D’Or. Maybe Williams, like Scorsese himself, was powerless to deny a certain attraction to Travis Bickle, the crazed nocturnal avenger of the film’s title. If Mean Streets was Marty’s breakthrough, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turned him into a Hollywood player, Taxi Driver was the movie that announced his true arrival—his induction into the hall of New American Masters. Today, its reputation as a classic is basically secure: After scoring four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Taxi Driver has spent the last 4. Last year, it clocked in at No.
Sight & Sound poll of the greatest movies ever made. And in 2. 00. 9, Film Comment contributors voted it the single greatest Palme D’Or winner ever—a vindication, given how it was first greeted at Cannes. Simply put, this is one of those films that people find difficult to separate from its fan base. After all, one of its most famous devotees was a would- be political assassin: John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1. Jodie Foster—the actress who played the teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver—and claims to have devised his plot as an attempt to impress her, perhaps hoping to become a Bickle- like media celebrity.
But there’s no denying that Travis Bickle, so ferociously embodied by Robert De Niro, has become something of a pop- culture icon—an outlaw anti- hero, immortalized on dorm- room posters and through the transformation of his psychotic bedroom soliloquies (“You talkin’ to me?”) into oft- quoted catchphrases. If the legacy of Taxi Driver is the lionization of a murderous bigot, then maybe Williams was right to be reluctant about handing it an award. The million- dollar question, to which there may not be a satisfactory answer, is whether the movie is accidentally fascist or just widely misunderstood. Is Bickle’s nihilism so persuasively conveyed that it ends up sounding like a kind of gospel, not the ravings of a lunatic? Transmitting universal loathing through a car windshield, his thousand- yard- stare locked on the inhabitants of the “cesspool” he traverses, De Niro’s insomniac cabbie is the spawn of no less than three collaborating minds. For Scorsese, he’s one of the first in a long line of magnetic monsters—of bad men with bad habits, of sinners reborn but not through redemption.
A former film critic who wrote expertly on noir, Schrader modeled Bickle at least partially on the hard- bitten rogues of the genre he loved. But by his own admission, he also poured a lot of himself into the budding vigilante, exorcising personal demons through a hallucinatory revenge fantasy. Schrader, an angry urbanite himself, set his original script in Los Angeles; though the locale was switched to New York, resulting in what may be the quintessential NYC movie, there’s still a sense that Taxi Driver could be about sleepless nights in any city that never sleeps. For those who live in the shadow of glass and steel, surrounded everyday by strangers, the film may strike a raw nerve.
Empathizing with Bickle’s specific prejudices isn’t necessary to relate to his general unease and fury. It helps—or hurts, depending on how you come at it—that this amateur assassin is played by De Niro, young and mesmerizing in his Method conviction. He’s charismatic in the part, because he has to be; in order to believe that a “normal” person like Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) would give this clearly unbalanced stalker the time of day, we have to understand what she might initially see in him. Before going full- on crazypants, De Niro makes Bickle an almost guileless curiosity—a man who speaks his mind, without shame or hesitation, and whose cluelessness about social norms has a certain alien charm. There’s something weirdly funny about the scene in which Bickle takes Betsy on a date to the porno theater.
He’s not being a creep or a pervert, at least not intentionally; he just genuinely believes this is what it means to “take a girl to the movies.” You almost feel sorry for the guy, at least until his obsessive behavior intensifies. Taxi Driver is rarely as much fun as Goodfellas or Mean Streets or The Wolf Of Wall Street is. There are no iconic classic- rock montages, no Rolling Stones boogies. The ugly characters tend to be really ugly, not hilariously so. But the film is also alive with the sights and sounds of a lost city.
Post- “Giuliani cleanup,” there’s a time- capsule fascination to Scorsese’s vision of a grimy, chaotic New York, perversely exciting in its bustle and danger. Movies On Blu Ray Dvd Undercover Grandpa (2017) more. Furthermore, the director packs the margins of the movie with flavorful supporting players: Bickle’s trash- talking colleagues (including a scene- stealing Peter Boyle); Albert Brooks, doing a dry run to the witty neurotic he’d play in his own films; and the rotten romantic coupling of Foster (then 1. Harvey Keitel’s vile pimp.
The scene in which the latter two share a slow dance is perhaps the movie’s ickiest and most tender moment, rolled into one. By painting Bickle as a kind of urban samurai, devoted to cleansing himself of imperfection and intent on committing the gun- nut equivalent of Seppuku, Schrader flirts with bestowing a genre- movie coolness on the character. So too does the great composer Bernard Herrmann, whose melancholy score—his final work, before dying in his sleep in December 1.
Bickle’s alienation. However they’ve been misread, there’s nothing “cool” about the scenes in De Niro’s tiny, sweltering apartment, where he vamps as a desperado. Scorsese deflates the character’s delusions of grandeur by including a take of De Niro (intentionally?) flubbing his internal monologue, so that he has to start it all over again.
Shrewdly, this stylistic hiccup suggests that Bickle’s righteous indignation is a performance—a deluded macho display, more of a pep talk to himself than a coherent statement of philosophy. It’s next to impossible to watch the following clip, which features the movie’s most famous line, and not ponder how somehow could find the character’s routine cool and not just sad. Much has been made about Taxi Driver as a political film, and there’s little doubt that Bickle is intended as an embodiment of American disillusionment—the angry voice of an angry nation, post- Vietnam and Watergate. But Bickle’s fury is not constructive, it’s misdirected: “I don’t know much about politics,” he tells Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris), the presidential candidate he’ll later plot to assassinate.