10 Greatest Movies of All Time

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The Godfather tells a story of organized crime in America during the 1940s and 1950s. Marlon Brando portrays the head of the powerful Corleone crime family. He does what he does to support his family which he deeply loves. His rivals attempt to kill him because he refuses to take part in the drug trade. His son Michael, a decorated war hero, loves his father so much that he kills the head of the crime family responsible for the assassination attempt and the corrupt police chief who is on the criminal's payroll. Michael becomes head of the family and realizes that the only way he can protect his family is to destroy his enemies.

In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has woven three separate stories into one very cool movie. The first story is about two hit men who work for a short-fused crime boss whose wife nearly dies from a drug overdose while in the company of one of them. The second story is about an over-the-hill prize fighter who reneges on his agreement to take a fall, much to the disappointment of the aforementioned crime boss. The third story, which opens and closes the movie, is about a guy and his girlfriend waxing philosophical before holding up a diner.

I don't know anyone who doesn't love Rocky, the story about a down on his luck Philadelphia fighter who gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to fight the heavy weight champion of the world for the title. The film, written by and starring Slyvester Stallone, was inspired by the true life story of Chuck Wepner who fought Muhammad Ali in the seventies. The film spawned a number of sequels - some good, some bad - and was recently capped by the surprisingly good ROCKY BALBOA.

Casino Royale is bloodier, grittier and darker than any of the previous Bond movies. Daniel Craig's Bond is a Pit Bull in a tuxedo. He'll rip your throat out if his master tells him to and he's not afraid to suffer a few bumps and bruises in the process. He's still suave and sophisticated and ever so clever - attributes he uses to dissuade and disarm his adversaries. Surprisingly, he has the capacity to love deeply and that's not an act at all. One more thing, he has a very high tolerance for pain and I guess that's expected of a "double-oh".

I refused to watch Goodfellas when it first came out because of my loyalty to the first two Godfather movies. But I'd heard so many good things about Goodfellas that I eventually decided to watch it. What an idiot I was. This movie is a nice contrast to the Godfather. It's a bit more contemporary and a little less dramatic than the Godfather. I read something once that real gangsters watch the Godfather to see how gangsters should act, but they watch Goodfellas to remind themselves of how they do act.

I think I watched this movie ten times in a period of three or four days. What's the word I'm looking for? Insatiable. I was insatiable. The Matrix is a story about a computer guy named Neo who discovers that the world he thinks is real exists only in his mind. The real world, he learns when he is forced to awaken, is a dark and dangerous place where what's left of humanity is in a desperate battle with the machines. Neo, it turns out, is the ONE - mankind's last hope against the machines. But first he must believe he is the ONE. Insatiable - wish I could say the same thing about the two sequels.

Spike Lee's energetic and clever bank-heist thriller touches on questions of race and class without taking away from the tension and fun of the cat-and-mouse games between a hostage negotiator (Denzel Washington), a bank robber (Clive Owen), and a high-powered fixer (Jodie Foster). Inside Man puts a spin on the Dog Day Afternoon scenario, with a group of sharp bank robbers who stay one step ahead of the police; it's a smart genre film that is not only rewarding on its own terms, but manages to subvert its pulpy trappings with wit and skill. (Adapted from Rotten Tomatoes synopsis).

I read the novel by Peter Benchley before I saw the movie and I was a little disappointed that director Steven Spielberg did not explore the tension created by the relationship between the shark expert portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie and the police chief's wife. If you're not familiar with the book, the police chief and his wife are displaced New Yorkers and she misses the intellectually stimulating social scene she had been a part of. The shark expert is brainy, good looking and culturally refined, qualities she finds missing in her life. That aside, this is a favorite of mine and to this day I am reluctant to swim in the ocean. Brilliant theme music by the way.

Star Wars tells the story of Luke Skywalker, a young man who lives on a dusty planet with his aunt and uncle. He'd rather join the Rebel Alliance and join the fight against the Evil Empire, but they need him on the farm. They buy a pair of androids unaware that they were recently jettisoned from an Alliance ship that had been invaded by Darth Vader of the Empire. Luke discovers a distress message from an Alliance ambassador, Princess Leia, hidden in one of the androids. He races back to the farm to find his aunt and uncle murdered - no doubt at the hands of the Empire. With nothing and no one left to return to Luke decides to join an old Jedi master and a mercenary on a mission to save the princess and the Rebel Alliance which the Empire has sworn to annihilate with it's new doomsday weapon, the Death Star - a mammoth space station capable of destroying entire planets and ending millions of lives in the process.

This movie is about R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a misbehaved con who shirks authority, who finds himself in an asylum after faking insanity to get out of work detail in prison. The vivacious troublemaker soon finds himself in a worse kind of prison--one presided over by the repressed, terrifyingly quiet Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), whose set of rules and regulations are meant to suppress patients' psychotic outbursts, and their spirits. It's not long before McMurphy is reaching out to his new inmates, trying desperately to bring life to an otherwise dead atmosphere. To Ratched, however, Nicholson's free spirit is as dangerous as a schizophrenic impulse. (Adapted from Rotten Tomatoes synopsis).