how do you define “favorite?”

Published by

joshua chamberlain

on

August 11, 2023

Every so often, I’ll stumble across a director’s list of favorite films. Some of these things are well-documented: Spielberg’s love of John Ford, Kubrick’s love of Fellini, and Tarantino’s love of just about every film ever made. Seeing such a list makes me pause to think about what films would be on my own list of favorites.

Of course, this opens a wormhole of questions: Are we talking movies that changed my life? Movies I played over and over again? Movies I still go back to? Movies that are like comfort food? Movies that changed how I think about the world?

The conversation spins into something almost monomaniacal, not dissimilar from John Cusack’s rant about how to assemble a list of top five records in the film High Fidelity (which despite referencing this film numerous times on this blog, probably wouldn’t crack my list of favorite films.)

The best answer I can come up with, now that I’m in my thirties and have a little perspective: movies that endure and are worth returning to, the same way some records are worth returning to.

With this in mind, here’s a list of favorite films, in no particular order…