William Tyler’s Top10

This absurdist version of an Orwellian dystopia is one of my desert-island films, and it’s also Gilliam’s masterwork. In our current emotional wasteland, I often find myself wondering which dystopia are we living in. While we are closer to Children of Men and Idiocracy, there is something about the meek human spirit in Brazil, and the way it attempts to outwit the machine, that makes me think this film is the pinnacle of dystopian achievement.

I’m not sure if I agree with Kubrick that this is the scariest film ever made. But it’s a perfect miniature horror story that doesn’t need any cortisol shocks or gore to plunge you into spiritual dissonance and fear, which other all-timers, like The Exorcist, do a lot more loudly.

This legendary, Oscar-winning documentary meditation on the Vietnam War is still so damning and searing in its indictment. Like the best documentaries, it lets its own subjects and their testimony guide the righteous anger of the narrative. As Daniel Ellsberg opines in one interview, “We weren’t on the wrong side, we were the wrong side.”

Altman is the greatest because he could work with any canvas, and you absolutely know that actors loved working with him. Some of his films have traditional ensembles, like Nashville or Gosford Park, but in this masterpiece there’s just one man: Philip Baker Hall. Even considering the talent involved, it’s still somewhat surprising that a one-man drama about Richard Nixon would be so riveting.

When push comes to shove, I still have to declare this my all-time favorite movie. This timelessly hilarious vision of the afterlife is simply perfect. Brooks is a grump and a humanist, and I’d like to think that when we die we’ll experience something like what we see in this film.

If ever a film was meant to be seen on the biggest screen, it’s this late-period Kurosawa masterpiece. But it’s grand and haunting at any size. If someone asked me for the best film shot in color, this would be my first response almost without hesitation.

Like Kubrick, Antonioni is one of those directors whose visual acumen is so complete that it is almost impossible to imagine cinema without him. I love his color work, but this is probably my overall favorite; it’s a totally poetic fever dream.

Two sides of a master film essayist at work here—the perfect and astonishing La Jetée, arguably the most epic short film ever made, and the more languid and playful Sans Soliel. One is still-life science fiction, the other is a gloriously colorful and surreal documentary.

Since Tarkovsky is rightly revered for his epics, it’s always worth reminding people that his debut, while smaller in scale, is maybe his most moving and devastating work. It’s a World War II film that manages to be as childlike as its protagonist but still surreal and devastating in its examination of war’s pitiless horror.

Here’s one that will eternally polarize, but as a left-wing-history nerd, I worship this film. Plus, it’s about an ill-fated foot solider of manifest destiny from Nashville. Many things probably factored into this film failing upon its release: the way-too-smart script by Rudy Wurlitzer, the on-the-nose Reagan-era satire, the numerous and distracting anachronistic sight gags. But I think time has been kind to this overlooked masterpiece.