The other day, my mom asked me if I would do a “Top 10 Things to Stream During the Shut-In” kind of list, to which I initially groaned. It’s a list seemingly everybody with any sort of online presence has been doing in recent weeks, and I frankly find it kind of a weird exercise. With the internet at one’s disposal, it’s not like one’s set of options is limited. If you know which streaming services to use, if you’re willing to pay a few bucks here and there for rentals and purchases, and especially if you’re willing to cast aside the shackles of capitalism and pirate some obscurities, you’ve got a very large swath of the history of moving images at your fingertips. And that, to me, seems like way too big and unwieldy a ‘category’ to cut down for the purposes of a Top 10 list.
But as I thought about it, it occurred to me that this perfectly describes any kind of personal all-time ranking: To survey the whole of film history and pick which films most represent you as a viewer. And maybe now, as we’re all cloistered in our homes with an unusual amount of time on our hands, is indeed the perfect time to make such a list.
So instead of making what is specifically a Coronavirus shut-in viewing list, I thought I’d polish off something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and update my Top 10 Films of All Time list – and tell you where to stream and access all of them from the safety of your (hopefully virus-free) home! The first time I did this list was in 2012, for the publication of my 2013 book Fade to Lack; the next was in 2017, for Episode 200 of The Weekly Stuff Podcast. I completely changed the 10 films between those two lists, and I like the 2017 version a lot better because of it. After all, in between the two, I earned two degrees in Film Studies and was on my way to going after a third. I’d learned, and changed, a lot.
It’s been almost three years since then, and I’m happy to say I’ve kept evolving and discovering, as all people should. There have been a few adjustments to that list I’ve been really itching to make recently, and I was also excited to play around a bit with the format. I have expanded the list to 12 films from 10 this time, because when I attempted to whittle it all down, I found myself with an utterly grueling, unbreakable 4-way tie for the last 2 spots. 12, after all, is just as arbitrary a number as 10 to limit things to – while still sounding nice and round and substantive (a “dozen favorite films,” if you will) – and if the purpose of this ranking is to set out a personal canon that says something about my cinematic values and taste, this feels like the most honest collection of films to accomplish the task, even if the size of the box is bigger than the usual 10. I have also decided not to rank these films by preference, because it is simply too wrenching to place films I love this much in a battle for supremacy with one another. And in any case, the purpose of this list is the overall canon it lays out, not a hierarchy between which films matter most to me. They all do, and in different ways.
So without further ado, my 12 Favorite Films of All Time are coming up after the jump, along with some thoughts on why each is here and some pointers on where you may find these fine films if you’d like to get to know me a little better, through the films that mean the most to me (hint: you’ll probably want a Criterion Channel subscription).
