one day i'll wish upon a star...

A lot of people ask me what my "favorite movie of all time" is. I stare back at them blankly. It's just such a momentous question, and yet it's asked with such offhandedness. Well I'm not about to rank my favorite movies of all time, but I will give an alphabetical list of 15 movies that immediately come to mind:

- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick
- Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch
- A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick
- Diabolique (1955), Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Fargo (1996), Joel and Ethan Coen
- The Godfather: Part II (1974), Francis Ford Coppola
- The Graduate (1967), Mike Nichols
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Frank Capra
- Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Mike Figgis
- Natural Born Killers (1994), Oliver Stone
- Pyscho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock
- Raging Bull (1980), Martin Scorsese
- The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman
- Tokyo Story (1953), Yasujiro Ozu
- The Wizard of Oz (1939), Victor Fleming

All of these movies are superior films that deserve to be on anyone's top-10 list of all time. And it is no coincidence that Stanley Kubrick is the only director who appears twice. Although it was Hitchcock who first inspired me to take film seriously, it was Kubrick who dazzled me.