1960sMidnight Cowboy (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture, and the X was self-inflicted by a nervous studio head who consulted a psychiatrist. Three million dollars, forty-five back,…
1980sHeaven's Gate (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cimino shot two hundred and twenty hours of film for forty-four million dollars, took three and a half million at the box office, and ended the era that…
1950sCarol (2015) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two women fall in love in 1952 and the film says almost none of it out loud. Todd Haynes shot it on Super 16 for under twelve million dollars…
2000sDistrict 9 (2009) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A first-time director shot an alien occupation film in a real Soweto township for thirty million dollars, cast his friend who had never acted, and got a Best…
1980sCaddyshack (1980) rates 8.5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The plot was abandoned during production and the film assembled itself out of whatever four comedians did in front of the camera. It should not work. It made sixty…
1970sBlazing Saddles (1974) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mel Brooks made an anti-racist film by putting the ugliest language available in the mouths of idiots and letting the sheriff outthink them. Made for two point six…
1980sAmerican Psycho (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mary Harron read a novel everybody called unfilmable and found the comedy in it. Made for seven million dollars, mostly in Toronto, and it is far funnier and…
1950sGrease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-nine and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…
2000sThe Time Machine (2002) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. H. G. Wells's great-grandson directed it, collapsed from exhaustion, and Gore Verbinski shot the last eighteen days. The first act is genuinely good and the film throws…
1990sThelma & Louise (1991) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Callie Khouri wrote it in six months as her first screenplay and took the Academy Award for it. Two women leave for a fishing weekend and never…
1960sThe Time Machine (1960) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. George Pal made it for under a million dollars, won an Academy Award for a time-lapse effect built out of stop motion and melting wax, and kept…
2010sParasite (2019) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A house built on a vertical axis, a family climbing it, and a genre change at the midpoint that almost no film survives. The first non-English winner of Best…
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