42. Shanghai Knights (2003)
I feel like a jerk making this the only Jackie Chan movie on this list. It's a far cry from his best stunt-work and fights which you can find in dozens of earlier films. When I tried to think about great Jackie Chan movies though, I found that I wasn't thinking of wholes so much as discreet scenes. Except for this one. It's a collection of an amazing variety of iconic pop-culture references, some clever choreography, hilarious dialog and a strong sense of visual humor.


41. One Week (1920)
This used to be below The Playhouse on my list of best Buster Keaton short films. I think this didn't move up the list so much as I've just worn out The Playhouse a little over the course of perhaps as many as a hundred viewings. This one is a little fresher in my minds-eye because I've only watched it a dozen times.


40. Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
Delicious looking. I love this one's portrayal the complexities of domestic life: food, marriage, family bonds, and change, giving each one a definitive and subtle cinematic rendering.


39. 2001 (1968)
The idea of an ambiguously sinister, all-seeing mind of synthetic logic has since seeped into the collective imagination but it's never been as pure and ruthless and sympathetic as here.


38. Time of the Gypsies (1988)
Emir Kusturica's tragicomic psychic-reluctant-gangster-gypsie epic.


37. The Prestige (2006)
I love the convoluted narrative structure (the interlocking diaries), ugly science-fictional 19th c. London, gratuitous array of doppelgängers, and dastardly-competitive magicians (both real and of the stage). I also find it to be Nolan's funniest film. The Edison-Tesla war is a great quasi-historical touch.




36. The Sun's Burial (1960)
The newest addition to the list, a movie I saw only a couple weeks before making this list. Few films can turn this subject into a consistently compelling story. It's about a collection of youths, a few tough ones driven by some restless, selfish energy, and the story is locked into the local concerns and intersections of its characters. If there's no violence to tie the camera down it just starts to drift away like one of the aimless followers in the gang. In this film Oshima seems to have reversed the central pair of his similar film of the same year, Cruel Story of Youth: the abusive thug and his self-destructive naif of a moll of that earlier film are here turned inside-out into an ambitious, merciless teen girl and her doleful, pretty boy-toy. I'm not sure how to make substance out of why this one works and that one doesn't. In all the ways that I found the disaffected youths of the first film's subjects, well, disaffecting... as perverse as it is to say the melancholy and nihilism in The Sun's Burial made me happy, that's the overall effect this film had on me. I think that even though the film takes a critical stance on its characters, and even though pretty much everything turns out badly, it remains humane to it's characters. The overexposed supernal-by-day/neon-by-night visual presentation of the film's grimy world plays well with its plaintive score.

Okay, back in a bit.