Top Ten Rentals & Revival House Viewings, 2009

10. It Started with Eve (1941). My indefensible infatuation with Deanna Durbin, who started out incredibly cute and became incredibly beautiful, and who could sing like an angel but didn't have the pathos of Judy Garland, launched into the stratosphere after seeing this mid-career blossoming-into-adulthood romp. Why did she have to retire in favor of domesticity? I wish she had watched my #1 film before she made that decision.

9. Eyes without a Face (France, 1960). It's so restrained and polite, this film about a mad doctor who murders in order to save the disfigured daughter who hates him. Despite the carnival music, the cold destruction of life and thoughtful disposal of bodies, it's a film of still, composed, frightful images. That mask pops up in some of my nightmares.

8. The Fountainhead (1949). I completely reject this film's politics, which holds that it's OK for a guy to destroy something built from millions of dollars of public money if he's pissed that someone messed with his design, but King Vidor makes Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal into gods, and I'm pleased that author/screenwriter Ayn Rand created a screenplay that's the best-ever rebuttal to her own philosophy.

7. Scrooge (UK, 1951). Victorian England was a scary, dirty place for most people, and this film, unlike so many postcard-pretty adaptations of what is essentially a horror story, drives that home with gusto. Alastair Sim is the best Scrooge ever, and this is the best Christmas movie ever.

6. The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (Czechoslovakia, 1965). It made me think of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days: cold, realist pictures of struggling against a faceless, inhuman bureaucracy in order to find medical treatment. Zbynek Brynych's film documents a Kafkaesque Czechoslovakia that masquerades as a film about Nazis, but oppression, backstabbing, and inhumanity are universal.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Indirectly, Max Ophuls's practice run for his French film The Earrings of Madame de... helped me understand him, and that other masterpiece, better. It also allowed me to really appreciate Joan Fontaine's typical little-girl-grows-up performance when it's used in the right film.

4. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945). A simple, black and white film—deceptively simple, for Powell and Pressburger, the masters of operatic narratives, bring their flawless ear for dialog and eye for compositions to what's essentially a romantic comedy, not elevating it (because that assumes that romantic comedies are lesser beings) but showing us how it's done.

3. The Devils (1971). Ye gods, this is a disturbing, frightening, psychedelic nightmare of a movie. Ken Russell jumped way up on my "see more of this person's films" list (Tommy didn't really endear him to me).

2. Shame (Sweden, 1968). Bergman could say more in 90 minutes than most directors can manage in three-plus hours. Here, he's looking at war, loyalty, jealousy, hopelessness; Liv Ulmann and Max von Sydow are commitment and fear of commitment; Sven Nyquist makes that 1.66:1 frame scream with beauty and desolation; and how can I even start to explain how great this film is?

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (France, 1975). It's hard to describe it without sounding like the punch line of a joke about "art films," but Chantal Akerman's masterpiece about modern domesticity spends three breathless, enrapturing hours watching Delphine Seyrig keep house and entertain johns, making a forceful feminist statement by just showing, never telling. The Criterion Collection finally released it on DVD, but do yourself the favor of watching it on the biggest screen you can find.

Runners-up: The Children Are Watching Us (Italy, 1944); Grave of the Fireflies (Japan, 1988); Lucrece Borgia (France, 1935); Mamma Roma (Italy, 1962); Moonrise (1948); The Motorcycle Diaries (2004); Taipei Story (Taiwan, 1985); The Tall T (1957); Two Women (Italy, 1960).