Your top 10 most visually impressive films you have seen.

Started by Stefen, November 08, 2010, 08:02:55 PM

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Stefen

Throwing out story (if you must), what are, in your opinion, the 10 most visually impressive films you have ever seen. Some movies suck, but look so good.

2001: A Space Odyssey
The Thin Red Line
Once Upon A Time In The West
Irreversible
Days of Heaven
Suspiria
In The Mood For Love
Brokeback Mountain
There Will Be Blood
The Last Emperor

These are my 10 and I'm sticking with them. I feel like a jerk for not including any B&W, but what can you do. I was THIS close to knocking off In The Mood For Love and placing Night of the Hunter in it's place, but didn't happen.

Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Fernando

boo-urns for not including barry lyndon...

I need to give it a thought to post mine.

Alexandro

this is hard because there is much to choose, I think the way to go is to remember how you felt when you first watched the movies and how that affected your perception.

I know 2001 was a complete knockout from the first time. Kundun was a film that enthralled me when I saw it for the first time on the big screen 12 years ago, I was hypnotized by it. Is not a great film, but just the visuals alone almost make it one.

I felt something quite similar with The Red Shoes, the difference being, that film is actually a GREAT film.

Definitely Days of Heaven and Ran. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a shock to me for many reasons and it still is.

To this day, I consider Shadows and Fog (a Woody Allen film photographed by Carlo di Palma) to be one of the most beautiful black & white films I've ever seen.

Sleepless

In the end I put more thought into this than anticipated, but I think I have a fairly decent list of films which have visually inspired me for whatever reason. There were numerous others I left off of course. So, in no particular order:

American Beauty
Spirited Away
Distant Voices, Still Lives
The Third Man
Weekend
Do The Right Thing
Eraserhead
The Straight Story
The Red Shoes
The Royal Tenenbaums
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

pete

impressive, so that goes beyond beautiful right?

Titus
aguirre, the wrath of god
Mind Game (everyone check it out!)
last life in the universe
magnolia
black orpheus
sunrise

my favorite films that utilized low-light:
all about lily chou chou
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
tristram shandy: a cock and bull story

I'm out of room, but I also really like The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, Sin City, Elephant (Though I hated the film), and The Assassination of Jesse James.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

Ostrich Riding Cowboy

Non-intuitive, non-ordered:

The Fountain
Citizen Kane
Barton Fink
The Prestige
Dazed and Confused
Blazing Saddles
Apocalypse Now
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Punch-Drunk Love
Children of Men


This entire list could probably be replaced by ten Buñuel films (if Un Chien Andalou weren't the only film of his I've seen).
DIDI: I missed you . . . and at the same time I was happy. Isn't that a strange thing?

Gold Trumpet

No top ten list for me, but I'll name a few films that stick with my visual memory. Watched parts of Avatar last night for first time and it's visually stupendous and boring at the same time, but these films have played with imagination:

The Double Life of Veronique
Solaris (Tarkovsky)
M
Mongol

Stefen

Yeah, these are just visually stunning films. The story may suck or it may rule. Story has no place in this thread.

I really liked the look of Sunshine by Danny Boyle. Story is hilariously bad at the end, but it's such a beautiful looking film.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

jerome

Playtime for its delightfully rich, large depth-of-field compositions
Trois Couleurs : Bleu for its use of color
Vertigo for its indelible images
...

Reel

Apocalypse Now
Body Double
Citizen Kane
George Washington
Koyaanisqatsi
No Country for Old Men
The Shining
Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Wings of Desire
Zodiac

Alexandro

yes, apocalypse now was huge for me also. even the first time I saw it, on fullscreen, on tv.

Reel

yeah watching it unedited on pbs when I was like twelve was huge for me.

The Perineum Falcon

This was pretty difficult:

Antichrist
The Fall
Werckmeister Harmonies
The Conformist
Ivan's Childhood
4
Sunrise
Black Narcissus
8 1/2
Red Beard

Sorry, have to add....
Honorable mentions:

Who Are You, Polly Magoo?
M
The Ascent
Metropolis

.....I really like b&w
We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.

ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ

Off the top of my head, these are my favorite movies for visuals (as well as being phenomenal movies in their own right):

In The Realm of the Senses
Holy Mountain
The Color of Pomegranates
THX 1138
Ivan The Terrible
Enter The Void
Eyes Wide Shut
Contempt
Titcut Follies
I Am Cuba
"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

pete

oh of course, the color of pomegranates!  all of his films are amazing.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton