Quentin Tarantino’s classic, offbeat crime dramedy, Pulp Fiction, topped the Jerusalem Cinematheque’s audience poll as the greatest film of the past 50 years, which was held to mark the cinematheque’s 50th anniversary. The top 10 movies chosen will be shown throughout the month of August, starting August 5.
The series, titled “Your Top 10,” was voted on by over 500 people. Eleven films will be shown, due to a tie.
It’s fitting that Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, another classic by the iconoclastic and much-celebrated Tarantino, who now lives in Tel Aviv and is married to Israeli actress/singer Daniella Pick, made the top 10.
Inglourious Basterds, released in 2009, offers an alternative version of World War II in which a group of Jewish-American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, terrorizes the Nazi leadership. Mélanie Laurent stars as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a Jewish cinema owner in occupied Paris who devises her own plan for revenge, while Christoph Waltz gives an Oscar-winning performance as the terrifyingly polite Nazi officer Hans Landa.
For families looking for something lighter, Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride is a treat that parents and children can enjoy together. Released in 1987, the charming fairy-tale adventure stars Cary Elwes as Westley, who must rescue his beloved Buttercup, played by Robin Wright, from an arranged marriage.
Reiner balances swashbuckling adventure, romance, comedy, and affectionate parody, and the tale is bookended by the lovely framing device of having a grandfather (Peter Falk) read a story to his sick grandson (Fred Savage), who demands a book with no kissing. The grandfather doesn’t quite deliver, but the boy is happy anyway.
Two very different romances are also among the audience favorites. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is a lavish musical starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as an aspiring actress and a jazz musician who fall in love while struggling to establish themselves in Los Angeles.
With its vibrant colors, elaborate musical numbers, and references to classic Hollywood, the movie initially appears to be a celebration of romance, but Chazelle gradually complicates the story, asking whether love can survive when two people’s ambitions pull them in different directions.
Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes an even more unconventional approach to romance. Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey star as Clementine and Joel, former lovers who undergo a procedure designed to erase their memories of each other.
Written by Charlie Kaufman, the movie combines science fiction, comedy, and heartbreak as Joel relives the relationship while his memories are being destroyed.
Moviegoers in the mood for darker visions can choose from several intense dramas
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a lonely Vietnam veteran who drives a cab through nighttime New York and becomes increasingly obsessed with what he sees as the city’s moral decay.
Written by Paul Schrader and featuring a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann, the film draws viewers into Travis’s strange, lonely world, and during a time of frequent gun violence in the US and around the world, Taxi Driver feels more relevant than ever.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut transposes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War. Martin Sheen plays Capt. Willard, who is sent upriver to assassinate Col. Kurtz, a renegade officer played by Marlon Brando who has created his own brutal kingdom in the jungle.
Coppola’s three-hour final cut includes most of the French plantation sequence, which he cut out of the original film.
Christopher Nolan, whose latest film The Odyssey is this year’s big summer movie, has two films in the lineup. Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project and was later tormented by the consequences of his work.
Murphy won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, while the film also won Best Picture and Best Director, along with several other Oscars.
Nolan’s The Dark Knight is an especially dark superhero movie, with a bleakness that helped redefine the genre. Christian Bale returns as Batman, but the movie belongs largely to Heath Ledger, whose scarily unhinged portrayal of the Joker won him a posthumous Oscar.
Two other quirky films complete the top 10. Bong Joon Ho’s Korean thriller, Parasite, follows the members of an impoverished family who take jobs in the home of a wealthy couple, without revealing that they are related. Their ingenious scheme becomes darker as they get deeper. It was the first movie not in English to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, an exhausted laundromat owner whose tax audit is interrupted by the revelation that she must travel between alternate universes to save the world. Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis won Oscars for their performances in the movie, which also won Best Picture.
The full audience poll also includes such diverse movies as Past Lives, Fight Club, Perfect Days, Mulholland Drive, Inside Out, The Big Lebowski, Zero Motivation, Waltz with Bashir, Back to the Future, The Shining, Spirited Away, and Cinema Paradiso.
For the schedule, go to the Jerusalem Cinematheque website at jer-cin.org.il/en/lobby/your-top-10