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Tim Dirks' Most Controversial Films of All-Time
Favs/dislikes: 88:1. Films always have the ability to anger us, divide us, shock us, disgust us, and more. Usually, films that inspire controversy, outright boycotting, picketing, banning, censorship, or protest have graphic sex, violence, homosexuality, religious, political or race-related themes and content. They usually push the envelope regarding what can be filmed and displayed on the screen, and are considered taboo, "immoral" or "obscene" due to language, drug use, violence and sensuality/nudity or other incendiary elements. Inevitably, controversy helps to publicize these films and fuel the box-office receipts. -
Tim Dirks' The History of Sex in Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 71:0. The following listing of these influential, memorable and classic sex scenes and films (chronologically by year) takes into account all of the available surveys of this type of material, and attempts to provide an informed, detailed, unranked grouping of the most influential and groundbreaking films and scenes. It also considers other films with sex-related scenes, including portrayals of sex and/or nudity, and factors in a film's (or scene's) notoriety and infamy and the stars involved. Some of the most notorious (or infamous) films are quite mediocre, usually made as an excuse to display nudity or eroticism of a star performer. -
Slant Magazine's 100 Essential Films
Favs/dislikes: 39:0. While you will find many popular classics and critical favorites on our list of 100 Essential Films, our goal was to mix things up a bit. This list should not be construed as a definitive "greatest films" package, but as an alternative compiled by a group of kinky film-lovers wanting to give serious critical thought to neglected, forgotten and misunderstood gems. We aimed for the kind of list where post-Cahiers Orson Welles could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a pre-pastiche Brian De Palma; where it's understood that Hitchcock, Dreyer, Ford and Ozu created masterpieces besides film-school staples like Vertigo, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Searchers, and Tokyo Story; and where the postmodern irony of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life is allowed space next to its modern-day equivalent: Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (gasp!). Because space was tight, documentaries, shorts and animated films were not eligible. Additionally, we limited directors to no more than one spot on the list -
Paul Schrader's Canon Fodder
Favs/dislikes: 34:0. Former film critic, and current screenwriter and director Paul Schrader was challenged to create the movie equivalent of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. He began writing a book, but eventually stopped short with this long article. -
Nerve and IFC's The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 20:0. There’s a reason that any talk of sex in film comes back around to certain titles again and again. Getting two (or more) attractive actors to mash their faces together and huff and puff for the camera is relatively easy. Shooting a memorable sex scene is hard. We here at IFC News and Nerve.com sat through a lot of movie sex to make this list — oh, we suffered through it somehow. But even after all that ranking, weighing and debating, we’d be hard pressed to define exactly what it is that makes a sex scene great — in true Justice Potter Stewart fashion, we just know it when we see it, whether it shocks us, titillates us, turns us on, breaks our hearts or confounds our expectations. The oldest film on this list is from 1896; the newest is from last year. You’ll notice we decided to leave certain standards in the field off. And as always, these lists are a launching point for you to tell us what you think. -
Tim Dirks' Greatest Films
Favs/dislikes: 19:0. This selection of 100 Greatest Films in the last century of film-making covers, by conscious choice, a wide range of genres, decades, stars and directors. Emphasis in these selections is purposely directed toward earlier, more classic Hollywood/American films than more recent films, although some recent films (and British films) are included. (An Additional 100 Greatest Films, and Third 100 Greatest Films are also indexed here.) The Greatest Films selected do not include foreign films or non-English language films for purposes of specialization and focus. Negative judgment on foreign films or non-English language films is not intended or implied. Over a long period of time, the English-language films found here have repeatedly appeared on all-time best film lists and are often noted in the collective responses of film viewers and critics. Arguably, there has been reasonable consensus by most film historians, critics, movie-lovers, and reviewers that the selections chosen by this site are among cinema's most critically-acclaimed, significant "must-see" films (of predominantly Hollywood-American production). They are the films almost every educated person with a solid knowledge of film history and cinema would be expected to know and be literate about. -
Slant Magazine's Best of the Aughts
Favs/dislikes: 16:0. To tidily summarize a decade in world cinema is to attempt the impossible, yet if there's one overriding theme of Slant's Top 100 of the aughts, it's that despite a mainstream movie culture dedicated to increasingly expensive, techno-enabled infantilism, auteurist artistry and genre craftsmanship remain vital filmmaking avenues. -
The Dissolve's The 50 best films of the decade so far
Favs/dislikes: 16:0. The middle of a decade isn’t often a cause for reflection, but maybe it should be. We tend to break time down into whatever segments make sense, especially within art, fashion, and culture, where things move quickly and change significantly: The teen world of 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, for instance, is markedly different from the teen world of 1989’s Say Anything… Inspired by our friends at Pitchfork, The Dissolve polled its regular contributors and some friends of the site about the best films released since January 1, 2010. We compiled the results in an effort to help give shape to the decade in progress, as the cinematic landscape keeps evolving around us. When the math was done, we found the results surprising, with a No. 1 none of us predicted. (Though we probably should have.) -
Tim Dirks' Visual and Special Effects Milestones
Favs/dislikes: 16:0. From even its earliest days, films have used visual magic ("smoke and mirrors") to produce illusions and trick effects that have startled audiences. In fact, the phenomenon of persistence of vision (it was first described to some degree in 1824 by British physician Peter Mark Roget) is the reason why the human eye sees individual frames of a movie as smooth, flowing action when projected. The earliest effects were produced within the camera (in-camera effects), such as simple jump-cuts or superimpositions, or were created by using miniatures, back projection, or matte paintings. Optical effects came slightly later, using film, light, shadow, lenses and/or chemical processes to produce the film effects. Film titles, fades, dissolves, wipes, blow ups, skip frames, bluescreen, compositing, double exposures, and zooms/pans are examples of various optical effects. Cel animation, scale modeling, claymation, digital compositing, animatronics, use of prosthetic makeup, morphing, and modern computer-generated or computer graphics imagery (CGI) are just some of the more modern techniques that are widely used for creating incredible special or visual effects. -
Slant Magazine's The 100 Best Films of the 1990s
Favs/dislikes: 14:0. The further one sifts through the decade's offerings, the more surprising its highlights seem. This is, after all, the decade during which Terrence Malick broke his two-decade-long sabbatical from filmmaking, a fugue only Stanley Kubrick came close to rivaling, both creating masterworks well worth the wait. The decade when all sorts of Eastern cinema broke through, from sensual Hong Kong mixtapes to cerebral Iranian puzzle boxes. The decade where Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, and others who made their names during the American New Wave of the '70s all broadened their horizons and confirmed their artistry, even with next-generation filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, David Fincher, Todd Haynes, and Quentin Tarantino all nipping at their heels. The decade where a commercial tie-in to a hit TV show could also be perhaps the strangest, most confounding wide-release film of its era (which should've surprised no one, given David Lynch's involvement). The decade that saw a talking pig (Babe) competing against another one (Mel Gibson) for the Best Picture Oscar. The '90s were all that and still found room for Aleksandr Sokurov holding a landscape shot for 40 minutes, James Cameron breaking the $100-million-budget ceiling, Chantal Akerman people-watching, and at least two anarchic, if not downright Marxist, sequels to hit children's movies. Dated? This decade is daft punk. -
The Dissolve's The Best Films of 2013
Favs/dislikes: 9:0. Finding consensus among nine writers can be a struggle, but when a year is as strong as 2013, the abundance of riches makes it especially hard to figure out which great films to line up behind—and which great films are relegated to “any other year” status. For The Dissolve’s inaugural year-end best-of list, only one film appeared on all Top 15 ballots: Spike Jonze’s Her, a forward-thinking science-fiction/romance that takes place in the near future, but captured the tenor of the times like no other film this year. From there, the list opens up to a full spectrum of cinematic visions, from the IMAX spectacle of Gravity to the piercing intimacy of films like Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12, or The Past, Asghar Farhadi’s worthy follow-up to A Separation. And the 20 films below are just the beginning: Many others connected with one—or a few—of us, but couldn’t quite wrangle up the votes. -
Roger Ebert's Best Films of the Decade (2000s)
Favs/dislikes: 7:0. All of these films are on this list for the same reason: The direct emotional impact they made on me. They have many other qualities, of course. But these evoked the emotion of Elevation, which I wrote about a year or so ago. Elevation is, scientists say, an actual emotion, not a woo-woo theory. I believe that, because some films over the years have evoked from me a physical as well as an intellectual or emotional response. -
Twilight Time
Favs/dislikes: 7:1. Twilight Time is a company specializing in releasing limited edition classic films on DVD and Blu-ray. -
Buzzfeed's Which Classic Movies Have You Seen?
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. From Charlie Chaplin to Bette Davis, from Orson Welles to Akira Kurosawa, from Walt Disney to Quentin Tarantino, how many of these 200 classic films from the past 100 years have you seen? -
All Time Box Office (Top 200)
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. -
Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. -
Slant Magazine's The 25 Best Films of 2013
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. -
Tim Dirks' Best Film Editing Sequences
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. Many of the most memorable film-editing sequences are highlighted in this multi-part tribute to one of the least understood of the cinema's technical arts. -
The Dissolve's The Best Films of 2014
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. After Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was released in mid-July, there was an immediate sense in the Dissolve office that the rest of the year was a race for second place. Watching a child grow up over a 12-year period is enormously powerful on its own, but through the prism of this one life, Linklater makes so many profound observations about love, family, politics, religion, the South, and the changes that happen at home and in the culture at large. Though we reached a solid consensus over Her in our inaugural poll, that was nothing compared to Boyhood, which topped five of our seven individual ballots, and placed second on a sixth. From there, the best of 2014 branched out into a diverse assortment of auteur favorites, unconventional historical biopics, form-challenging documentaries, and mainstream hits that proved that even a risk-averse Hollywood could still put out smart, innovative, broadly appealing entertainments. The only unifying theme is that 2014 came in like a lion and out like a lamb: Of the films below, only Selma and Inherent Vice were harvested from the late-year awards crop. Otherwise, there are no hidden patterns, just confirmation that great films came in all sizes and from all corners this year. -
Stylus Magazine’s Top Films of the Millennium (2007)
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. It's not the end of the decade yet, but it’s been an amazing one so far, and narrowing eight years of cinema down to twelve films (one per writer on the Stylus film staff) has been a chore. Enjoy our recommendations, and check out individual writer lists after the article.