Favorite Movies of Great Directors

Orson Welles / Favourite Films
The Baker's Wife (1938) Marcel Pagnol, Battleship Potemkin (1925) Sergei Eisenstein, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) William Wyler, Bicycle Thieves (1948) Vittorio De Sica, City Lights (1931) Charles Chaplin, La Grande illusion (1937) Jean Renoir, Greed (1924) Erich von Stroheim, Intolerance (1916) D.W. Griffith, Nanook of the North (1922) Robert J. Flaherty, Ninotchka (1939) Ernst Lubitsch, Shoeshine (1946) Vittorio De Sica, Stagecoach (1939) John Ford.
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Edited by MortSahlFan - December 11 2024 at 19:37

Hitchcock - North By Northwest

Hi,

Edited by moshkito - November 25 2024 at 11:44

Hitchcock - Psycho
Zemeckis - Back to the Future Trilogy, Forrest Gump
Stanton - Wall-E
Lasseter - Toy Story 1 & 2
Waters - Pink Flamingos
Jackson - Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Spielberg - E.T.
Peele - Get Out
Louis C.K. - Pootie Tang
Reiner - This Is Spinal Tap, Misery
Brooks - Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles
Coen - The Big Lebowski
Oedekerk - Kung Pow! Enter The Fist
Sharman - The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Spheeris - Wayne's World
Allen - Most all of them
Guest - Best In Show, For Your Consideration, Waiting For Guffman, A Mighty Wind
Ashby - Harold and Maude
Burton - Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Demme - Stop Making Sense, Silence of the Lambs


Edited by Grumpyprogfan - November 25 2024 at 13:19

Top 10 Movies by Don Siegel, a director who makes my day and who's best-known for working with Clint Eastwood. 

moshkito wrote: But sadly, you can look at some of these lists and almost all of them have been on American TV for many years, which, for me, doesn't make them "great" ... just well known by the public!

^ Well that's much harder & obscure.   I'll have to re-watch Oliver Stone with Bill Maher.   And god knows what films Hitchcock liked, he probably wouldn't even say, knowing how pompous he could be.

^ I think he thought it was clear from the title.   That's language for ya.

MortSahlFan wrote: ... In the OP, I named Orson Welles' favorite movies. I didn't name movies he directed.

Edited by moshkito - January 13 2025 at 18:07

Willie & Phil (1980) by Paul Mazursky. One of his lesser-known films, yet for me one of his most personal. It has everything: humor, drama, freshness, wisdom, music by Claude Bolling, and even a cameo by Natalie Wood!

The Nest (1980) by Jaime de Armiñán. From a unique Spanish director whose films always had something special about them, a certain unnerving nerve they reached, an aura of mystery and a lot of magic, with the Spanish child actress of the 70s, who had already worked with Saura and Erice, Ana Torrent, who together with Hector Alterio created this special and disturbing atmosphere that permeates the entire film.

The Red Squirrel (1993) by Julio Medem. I'm still in Spain, and it's hard to choose among Medem's early works (before he inevitably lost his way) because Vacas was already excellent, but in The Red Squirrel he achieves a synthesis between the popular and the authorial that's difficult to achieve. You don't really know what's happening, nor do the protagonists, and you enjoy it as if you were at that campsite with them, needle after pine needle, mysteries are revealed, where everything is a game, and each character matters. Like a puzzle piece! Emma Suarez and Nancho Novo are splendid, in addition to being regular figures in that very inspired period of the director. There's something psychedelic and progressive, if you will, in its construction.

Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton's least representative film, is for me the one that comes closest to his true spirit, and not what is expected of him. Burton was someone strange ... but not because of the darkness of his films when they became somewhat predictable, but because of his own darkness in life, glimpsed in small details in his filmography. In Beetlejuice he questions and mocks the family, and in fact in the end he turns his back on it, and in his real life his relationship with his father was quite dysfunctional, later and with more years under his belt, the famous Big Fish, vindicated the relationship between a father and son, recovering family values, and he would do the same in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, in a less sentimental and sweetened way, however it was already a different Burton, trying not to make value judgments, in another less rebellious stage, as usually happens, although not to everyone. In Ed Wood, still in a period of transition, he opts for a hybrid of the two paths, more realistic if I may say so, where the protagonist creates his own group, his own dysfunctional family, with a very diverse group, but who love and support each other because they consciously choose each other.
That's one of the values I appreciate about the film, besides the hilarious performance of a still-in-its-best Johnny Depp, and the entire cast, really, understanding the absurd humor and the odyssey of joining the quixotic mission of this director to whom the film pays homage. Far from being "the worst in history," Burton didn't care what people said about him when he made this film. There was a lesson he himself seemed to forget: like Depp's character does with his second partner, he warns that he's peculiar, trying to correct the mistake he made with his first partner, without giving up on being one.It has that particular climate of freedom that was experienced in the 90s and that was related, indebted as it was, to the freedom of the 70s.