I've liked every other Fellini film I've seen, and I adore
La Strada, but I didn't know what to make of
8 1/2. Sounds like that's a common first occurrence, so hopefully a second viewing will be as rewarding for me as it was for some of the others in here.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of the most idiosyncratic westerns I've seen. A buddy
cop cowboy flick with a legendary on-screen duo. It barely cracked my Westerns ballot earlier this year, so it didn't make my list here, but its odd mixture of comedy, romance, Burt Bacharach and playful banter always makes for a fun viewing . . . up until that iconic ending when our lovable outlaws encounter impossible odds and a still-undefeated freeze frame.
I'm not big on war films since they feature little to no replay value and most of them tend to blend together anyway, but when a skilled director like Spielberg tackles the genre, I'm almost always in awe of the scale and technical precision required to stage such enormous battle scenes.
Saving Private Ryan is a tremendous technical achievement. It has my respect, not my love.
The Apartment was high on my list. IMO, it's the best dramedy ever made. I'd say more but someone's telling me to "shut up and deal."
Here's a question I was thinking about looking at my list. How many of your 25 have you only seen once? I have 3. I love to rewatch movies but there is so much left out there to see that many times I skip a rewatch for something new. I really value that initial watch too. Maybe more than I should considering my memory. Thoughts?
I'm not sure how anyone could confidently cite a one-time watch as a top-25 favorite, especially when you consider how many films most of us have seen. For me, re-watchability is by far the most important criteria when determining favorites. There's been a ton of films I thought were great on a first watch and would've cited as potential favorites, only to re-watch them and discover that they'd already peaked with that initial viewing. (Most often that seems to happen with plot-heavy films that offer no surprises or hidden layers on re-watches.) Whereas a surprisingly high percentage of my biggest favorites are films that I didn't love on a first viewing, or felt underwhelmed by in some sense, only to find myself drawn back to them again and again, each new re-watch more enriching than the last.