Every Best Picture Winner, Ranked: #30-11
Part 4 of 5
Now it starts getting really tough — we’re getting into the top tier of Best Picture winners. To quote Kendall Roy at his birthday party, “My thing was all bangers all the time.” I suppose now that I’d recommend you check out every single one of these movies just as great viewing experiences, not just as a historical checkbox, I should note that clicking the title of a movie takes you to see where you can stream it.
With that said … lights, camera, ACTION!
CATCH UP ON THE COUNTDOWN
Part 1: #94-71
Part 2: #70-51
Part 3: #50-31
30. The Hurt Locker (2009)
I’m willing to grade The Hurt Locker on a slight curve because I did have the pleasure of seeing it in theaters, long before it became the little indie that could — and was just a promising word-of-mouth sensation from the festival circuit. It’s lost a bit of luster on rewatch at home, a viewing experience which can just simply never hope to recreate the levels of spine-curdling tension I felt watching this film for the first time with no indication of who might live or die with each new bomb that needs to be defused. (And maybe I’m showing my own biases here, but I do love that Mark Boal’s screenplay unfolds with journalistic precision.) Even still, I come away with an immense respect for director Kathryn Bigelow’s craft — she’s got a remarkable sense for suspense and how these crucibles build and reveal characters. The film is a startling Rorschach blot of modern masculinity where the immediacy of death leads to poignant, powerful moments of reflection.
29. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
The first thing that jumps out in 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front is the sheer scale of the picture. Not just in terms of effects or in sets – just the enormous masses of real people gathered as soldiers to march through the town. That makes a big difference because humanity itself is the real special effect in a film about the dehumanizing (and demoralizing) effects of war. Lewis Millstone's adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel leans on searing imagery to convey this thesis, with some shots of astonishing imagination and edits of chilling impact still all these years later. It might not be the most naturally acted or skillfully plotted work, both of which are likely just a factor of how early in the sound era the film was made. Besides, the elements of the film that are firing on all cylinders more than compensate for any shortcomings.
28. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Talk about a master of his form firing across all cylinders. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is grand-scale epic filmmaking, but he’s not just bludgeoning the audience with the sheer size of his grand canvas. He’s judicious in deciding what’s needed to sell any given moment. Perhaps it’s an epic widescreen shot, or maybe it’s a small insert of a detail given outsized weight by Lean’s focus. The film has its fair share of scenes sold on the strength of montage, too, beyond just the famous match cut of the flame to the desert sun. And of course the whole enterprise lives or dies by how effectively Peter O’Toole sells the tragic stakes of the titular character, a man of no nation whose lack of alliances are responsible for both a heroic rise and disillusioning fall from grace. Lean’s unhurried direction gives the drama and action so much room to breathe, creating a relaxed yet pronounced momentum that culminates unconventionally but fittingly for the man it depicts.
27. Amadeus (1984)
Now THIS is how you make an anti-biopic. Amadeus has all the trappings of a stuffy period piece but has a wickedly subversive streak thanks to director Milos Forman. It's the story of the Great Man as interpreted through a jealous man, and that twisted perspective makes all the difference. Mozart himself is a sniveling fool as played by Tom Hulce in the eye of his rival, F. Murray Abraham's Antonio Salieri. (Hulce's ghastly, childish laugh alone makes the character unforgettable.) From Salieri's vantage point, we can see the work that makes prodigies so rapturous – as well as the petulant personalities that make them so repellant. This parable of creativity and genius is perverse and powerful up until its final moments as it praises the mediocrity of the masses.
26. Gone with the Wind (1939)
There is no trickier or thornier Best Picture winner to grapple with than Gone with the Wind, the great Civil War-era epic of the American South. The film’s sense of scale is so limitless, yet its vision of humanity is so limited. This adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel is big enough to hold multiple interpretations and viewpoints, so sorting out — and perhaps just sitting with — the unsettled contradictions of this star-crossed love story with a person and a place is part of the point. Whether Victor Fleming and the gaggle of professionals who brought the film to life were aware or not, I do find remarkable complexity in its portrayal of how within the idea of Southern antebellum nobility lies the seeds of its own demise. The doomed romance of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) proves a kind of inversion of the famous proverb: all is unfair in love and war. The two share mutually codependent delusions that leech off one another, with tragedy and history only strengthening their affinity. I do find the film sags under the weight of its grandiosity, particularly in the post-war back half that becomes more limited in purview. But if that’s the cost of getting those stunning, colorful vistas that resound with all the weight of a larger-than-life narrative, it’s a small price to pay.
25. Nomadland (2020)
People seem to be settling into the idea that Nomadland's Best Picture win won't age particularly well, so allow me to present the counterargument. Chloé Zhao's intimate landscape quietly defies expectations for what it should be. It's not a screed against Amazon nor a takedown of capitalistic conditions that have pushed an elder generation of Americans out of financial stability and onto the road. That's not because it fails to do those things but rather because Zhao simply chooses not to foreground those. It's remarkable the way she manages to capture the sociological heft of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book of the same name in small details or casual dialogue. Nomadland paints a vivid psychological portrait of instability and restlessness – economic or personal – through the western wanderings of Frances McDormand's Fern and her camper van. The actress' preternatural ability to embody contradictory states of mind makes her journey feel as authentic and lived-in as the real nomads she stars alongside.
24. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
I was prepared to find Kramer vs. Kramer entirely outdated when I watched it in conjunction with the release of 2019’s Marriage Story, a film that even four decades later is still an exceedingly rare cinematic treatment of the common occurrence that is divorce. The film completely dispelled all my misguided expectations, wowing me with its sensitive and sophisticated portrayal of a couple separating. Robert Benton’s domestic drama never flattens divorce into some kind of parable or learning experience for Dustin Hoffman’s overworked ad man Ted Kramer as he needs to reconnect with his family. It’s a winding journey littered with many a detour to discover what it means to tend to one’s self as well as one’s child — a journey running at the same velocity but the opposite direction for his ex-wife, Meryl Streep’s mercurial Joanna. (It’s remarkable the movie has the foresight, even in the ‘70s, not to take the easy way out and simplistically cast her as the story’s villain. Kramer vs. Kramer possesses that rare wisdom to see people through all their messiness and into that oft-warped compass guiding us toward personal truth and relational stability.
23. The Sound of Music (1965)
Perhaps the high-water mark from the golden age of studio movie musicals, The Sound of Music manages to split the difference between stage and screen marvelously. Robert Wise, clearly the more capable directorial hand behind the original West Side Story, uses the soaring vistas of the Austrian countryside to compliment the heightened reality required for characters to burst into song. He's committed to capturing the numbers and characters first and foremost but isn't afraid to do interesting things with staging and pacing. The film is so sincere in its sentimentality that it's hard not to get swept up in the most moving moments — I was shocked at just how emotionally invested I ended up feeling throughout. Much of that has to do with the ethereal grace imbued into the musical by Julie Andrews, who surprises in every scene with the spark of her spontaneity. Her Maria never feels overly rehearsed, and that potent presence also leads to some killer comedic moments. (No wonder she ended up marrying The Pink Panther's director, Blake Edwards.)
22. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Kind of wild that Midnight Cowboy is the only true representation of New Hollywood's burst of cinematic sound and fury among the Best Picture winners (although given how frequently the Academy has turned their back to exciting and emerging trends across the decades, perhaps we should be grateful just for this). While I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd name this their favorite —much less the best — of the era, John Schlesinger's chronicle of flailing institutions and individuals captures something of a national mood at the turn of the decade. Midnight Cowboy crystallized New York City as a metaphor for the decaying of the American Dream, something only made possible by Mayor John Lindsay's ill-timed establishment of a city-wide production office. Within this urban sprawl, he charts the fall and rise and fall of two star-crossed strivers hustling for recognition: outsider sex worker Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and his grizzled would-be pimp and classic NYC type Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). The film hits that sweet spot of timeless and timely drama as it maintains classical resonance with its manly melodrama while capturing something entirely contemporary about the crumbling world around the two leading men.
21. Moonlight (2016)
Barry Jenkins' elliptical triptych of Black gay identity, Moonlight, is the most remarkable of syntheses. This trifurcated coming-of-age for Chiron, a sensitive Miami boy hardened by the hate around him, is deeply rooted in the specifics of its time and place. It centers the types of stories and characters relegated to the margins or reduced to a stereotype in the very movies with which it shares the honor of Best Picture. But the generous iconoclasm of Barry Jenkins means that the film cheats outwards, giving anyone who's felt love or longing they cannot express in word or spirit. By pulling from an eclectic set of artistic influences ranging from France's Claire Denis to Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien and applying it to the world he knows and depicts, Jenkins expands and explodes notions of what belongs in the canon. "I was an interloper," wrote James Baldwin when looking to see himself in the world's great works of art, "This was not my heritage.” How lucky is the world that Jenkins declared his cinematic heritage and crafted a film so achingly, beautifully human that cinema had no choice but to bend to his will.
20. Terms of Endearment (1983)
I would direct anyone who thinks that the television miniseries is the most natural format for adapting a novel to James L. Brooks' Terms of Endearment. In just over two hours, the filmmaker satisfyingly and succinctly captures several decades in the embittered relationship of a dramatic mother and daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger) by making each scene count. The dialogue is crisp, and the acting resounds with a deeply felt knowledge of all that's been said and lived away from the camera. (Shame about some of the schmaltzy underscoring between scenes that gives it the patina of a sitcom.) I'm glad I rewatched this recently to better appreciate the maturity of the parent-child dynamic, one fraught with bile and undermined by geographic separation ... yet united in a shared struggle they cannot understand until it's almost too late. Brooks really is one of our greats at telling stories that contain both the comedy and drama of living in reality. That sense of naturalism matters for the third-act tragic pivot, which makes for a tearjerker that actually had me weeping with its potent blend of sweetness and sadness.
19. Titanic (1997)
Sheesh, talk about a movie that was extremely underserved by my first experience on a grainy DVR from HBO Signature in the mid-2000s. Everything about Titanic possesses a stature as grandiose, majestic, and tragic as the ill-fated titular vessel. James Cameron remains the only person operating at such elevated levels of sincerity and insanity to pull off such a supersized epic. The cross-class, star-crossed romance of Rose and Jack (a swoon-worthy Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) reaches the firmament because Cameron believes he can reach the stars with their improbable love. The stakes have to feel as big and corny as they do for the film to make such a flawless pivot from love story to disaster film in its back half. Unlike the ship, Titanic sails rather than sinks on the outsized imagination of its creator — no wonder the blue jewel is not the only heart that can’t go on.
18. The French Connection (1971)
All the grit and grime of '70s New York comes to vivid, lurid life in William Friedkin's The French Connection. Though this zippy thriller is famed for its immersive daredevil chase sequence as a car tries to keep pace with an elevated subway train, that's just the cherry on top of an entirely engrossing police procedural. Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman have more on their minds than simply NYPD detectives trying to bust up a French heroin ring. It's never as simplistic as the thin line of morality separating cops and criminals so much as it's an examination of whether there's any line Gene Hackman's "Popeye" Doyle won't cross in the dogged pursuit of his target. Does a discussion of whether the ends justify the means when there is no end in sight ... only meanness? Like the boundary-pushing era it helped officially usher in at the top level of the Academy Awards, The French Connection is not afraid to let us linger in the unsettling reality of the country's moral and physical decay.
17. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
I was a bit underwhelmed as a high schooler watching The Silence of the Lambs for the first time expecting a horror movie; Anthony Hopkins' psychopathic cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter is more chilling than outright terrifying. When I rewatched expecting a pure cat-and-mouse thriller, I got completely swept up in the film's methodically unraveling tension between Lecter and Jodie Foster's FBI Agent Clarice Starling. Jonathan Demme crafts a masterfully controlled burn, letting the psychological warfare between the two leads simmer suspensefully until the film reaches its combustion point. Ted Tally's script does a remarkable job ensuring that the effect of Clarice's gender in traditionally male spaces plays a role in every moment, yet it never needs to be discussed openly. It can be felt, in large part thanks to the economy of cinematographer Tak Fujimoto's sparsely illustrative compositions. The Silence of the Lambs is about as tight and taut as they come.
16. Chicago (2002)
It's a bit ironic that Chicago is my favorite movie musical to win Best Picture. Rob Marshall's take on the satirical show all but spits in the face of theatrical performance with its rapid-fire cutting that disrupts the continuous flow of movements and dance. That's not the only thing lost, either, in the transition from stage to silver screen: virtually any of the humor in the satire of fame and infamy gets completely drained out. Still, what's gained from the movie's imaginative use of frames within frames more than makes up for anything that might be lost. Marshall maximizes the use of expressionistic fantasy enabled in cinema to open up the inner theatricality of all the characters clawing for recognition in a Prohibition-era town with memories as short as the headlines. It might not make sense to expand every musical this way, but Chicago justifies the brassy changes both textually and stylistically. It's sinfully satisfying and scintillating.
15. Spotlight (2015)
People like to dog Spotlight for its modesty and lack of flair, but guess what? It's the perfect match of form and content. Tom McCarthy directs this story of the Boston Globe team breaking open decades of sexual abuse within the Catholic church with the kind of procedural matter-of-factness befitting their dogged, detail-oriented labor. If it's the cinematic equivalent of dim fluorescent lighting, that's not a knock but a strength for the film. Spotlight spurns flashy emotional outbursts or canned catharsis as it uses individual reporters to highlight the institutional rot that enabled clergy to act with impunity. The film follows the facts ... and it leads to a gut-punch of a movie that does justice to the subjects and story alike.
14. Schindler’s List (1993)
How do you possibly capture the enormity of the Holocaust's tragedy? With Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's epic of the Shoah, he shifts focus masterfully between the grand scale of the destruction and the individual units of humanity that make up the millions who perished. Janusz Kaminski's camera must show the vastness of the Krakow ghetto evacuation, yet it's equally important that the scene culminates with a collection of tiny details from their confiscated possessions to drive home the inhumanity of trying to eradicate anyone. The two modes must work together to produce the film's cumulative impact, a staggering recognition of the value of human life. Opportunistic Nazi party member Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) realizes this financially as he looks to reap the profits from employing cheap Jewish labor in his factory, but he also comes to understand it spiritually as he observes the horror of the concentration camps. Some of the film's slightly meandering scripting holds it back from reaching the concentrated terror of other Holocaust films like Son of Saul, but the amount of ground the film must cover is substantial in order to strike its final chord of braided hopefulness and hopelessness in the face of genocide.
13. The Apartment (1960)
The Apartment takes us to joyous places as well as darker ones, oftentimes within the same scene at the drop of a pin. Billy Wilder understood something about the complexities and irrationalities of the human condition like few others in the medium’s history. I guess you’d call it a forerunner of the contemporary “dramedy,” a film that toggles seamlessly between droll observational wit and poignant human emotion. And six decades later, the satire of Wilder (and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond) still stings and resonates with its barbs at corporate America. This improbable love triangle between Jack Lemmon's pencil-pushing insurance man Bud, Shirley MacLaine's elevator operator Fran, and Fred MacMurray's personnel director Jeff Sheldrake — each of their superiors — captures how characters can both trick and treasure each other, not to mention themselves, both consciously and unknowingly. It’s funny when it needs to be, tragic when it has to be and truthful to the ways we live and love throughout.
12. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Its predecessor takes the cake on world-building, character development, and overall satisfaction. But it's in The Godfather: Part II where Francis Ford Coppola really gets into the meat of his exploration of patriotism and patriarchy. The seeds of Vito's rise and Michael's fall expose the dark underbelly of the American Dream: those who are shut out of achieving the promise of prosperity will simply seek to pursue those same ends through extralegal means. Coppola's dissolves between scenes are absolutely devastating here as he wipes away the porous boundary between past and present. Whether by fate or our own volition, we can never escape the legacy of our parents. What a blessing, what a curse.
11. American Beauty (1999)
I think people might be afraid of just how well American Beauty bottles up the essence of the '90s. It's both a fitting summation and the perfect topper for a decade of American decadence and decay, a strange unicorn of a period between the Cold War and 9/11 where the country could afford to look inward rather than to threats from outside. Of course, certain elements of this have not aged well – even beyond the obvious “ick” factor of Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham and his preying on underaged objects of his lust. But Alan Ball's script is remarkably tight and a deep, probing exploration of desire and discontent in suburbia. All the characters are remarkably layered and brought to vivid life by the top-notch cast; Annette Bening as put-out housewife Carolyn is the MVP with her absolutely staggering performance. There's self-indulgence in the way American Beauty presents its insights about the state of social, economic, and domestic turmoil brewing just underneath a thin smile, sure. But then again, that's how the time was – so can we really fault Sam Mendes for holding up a mirror? If you aren't scared by your reflection, there's a lot to reflect upon in this masterfully constructed, remarkably entertaining, and surprisingly moving drama.
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You can now deduce the top 10 — come learn the order tomorrow!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall