digidoh

I must've fell asleep; I thought it was Good Burger.

Josh-da-man

2001 A Space Odyssey
Alien
Blade Runner
Blue Velvet
Boogie Nights
Goodfellas
Halloween
Jaws
Pulp Fiction
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rosemary's Baby
This is Spinal Tap

Michael T Hudson

Raiders

Paul_SD

Yeah, for me it's the complete opposite. I find it a marvel of pacing. The four hours fly by (for me). I finally got around to seeing Heaven's Gate recently, and despite some impressively shot sequences, that film was unbearably belabored and long winded. And that's 20 minutes shorter than GWTW.

Love 12 Angry Men. One of the films I bought on Laserdisc before I even had a player. Reevaluating it after twenty years (and after having had the opportunity to sit on a real jury in murder trial) some of the dramatic crescendos ring a bit false for me now. Still a great movie/character study with a high re-watchability factor, but it shines just a little less bright for me now than it once did.

I have a LOT of problems with NxNW- most of which generally fall into the contrived nature that's inherent in nearly all of Hitchcocks work. The suspense generally depends on a lot of people doing a lot of foolish things to keep the balls in the air. This is especially, and frustratingly true when it comes to the villains- who despite being violently ruthless to all the "red shirt" supporting characters, can't seem to dispatch the hero in as simple and efficient a manner as possible (and as they would in a film that didn't treat the characters like action figures being manipulated by the plot). Good looking film with some , logistically at least, impressive set pieces. I just wish I didn't have to turn my brain off for so much of his stuff.

The General: I'd forgotten about this one. Talk about movies that run like a precision Switch watch. Yeah, this one is as close to perfect as you can expect to get.

Casablanca is up there too- though I've always had a hard time buying Elsa's reciprocated love for Rick. I can imagine her playing him out of a sense of self sacrifice for her husband, but not out of passion. To the film's credit, it ably supports vastly different interpretations of some of the characters motivations though.

GoldenJCJ

Thanks to this thread I decided to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again last night. Yep, I can still confirm its perfection!

OldBoy

I think I have to put Avengers: Infinity War in this. Not even Endgame, which I love, but think has flaws. It just has everything. Except the ending, but I feel in many ways it is completely perfect and works on every level.

Norm de Plume

This is an excellent selection. I like a sentence in Ebert's review. He said the film was constructed like a fine Swiss watch.

TomOpus

The Shawshank Redemption

EddieMoney

Taxi Driver or The Empire Strikes Back

rbrown498

Bonnie and Clyde

The Graduate

rennervision

A lot of the obvious ones have been taken, but I think these are worthy of a mention...

Goldfinger - (basically the 1964 template of nearly every Bond movie that followed it)
Superman: The Movie (still think it's the best superhero movie of all time)
The Terminator
The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2
Robocop
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Die Hard
Oh what the heck, Evil Dead II as well.

IBJoel

I think I might be more interested in debating what makes a perfect movie than which ones are. I think one hallmark of a perfect work is that the work has to stand on its own, thus exempting many sequels (or at least sequential narratives) from fulfilling that criteria.

Decker

1967 was a good year. But both movies lost the Oscar to In The Heat of the Night.

johnnysd

Interesting because for it's genre ESB is close to a "perfect" movie in my opinion.

If I were going to define a "perfect" movie it would be one where there is nothing you dislike about the film, and that any alteration or deletion would make the movie worse.

atrium

Took me until page 5 to get it, but there it is.



There are a lot of films in the topic that would qualify as 'perfect' to me (Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive, also Aguirre the Wrath of God). But what those movies don't have is the universal appeal that TGTBATU has. By universal appeal I mean that it is both extremely highly regarded artistically, and immensely popular (#13 on IMDB). It's the perfect blend of popularity and artistic merit too. But by universal appeal, I also mean that it's a movie that can be watched at any time, in any mood. Where with movies like Apocalypse Now or Aguirre I want to be in a certain mood to watch them, with The Good it's a movie that can be appreciated deeply or can be appreciated on a surface level. Can be apprecited when you're in a downer mood or when you're feeling euphoric. It's a rare movie that's befitting of any mood, and of any person. I don't really know of many people who dislike this film.

It reminds me of Raiders, in a way. Both just fun, adrenaline rush type films. I prefer this one personally, but Raiders could just as easily be called Perfect for the same reasons.

Hazel Motes

kefrank

I like the 4 rules these guys have for what makes a "perfect movie":
1. A Perfect Movie creates the world it exists in.
2. It wholly sustains that world.
3. Regardless of changes in society, it retains its meaning and entertainment value.
4. A Perfect Movie is never placed in any preferential or numerical order. Each film is perfect by its own scale.

By those rules, here are a handful of movies that I would argue are perfect:
Alien
Back to the Future
The Godfather
Once
Office Space

A couple of those may be unconventional picks, but when I think about films that fully create and sustain their own world, with transcendent meaning and entertainment value, each of those spring to mind for me immediately. Maybe if I get more motivated, I'll write a more detailed justification for each one at some point.

DJariya

Bluelitespecial

Two of my favorites that come to mind.

IBJoel

I think those are strong contenders, even if I don't care for the bottom 3 (I used to love Office Space. Now I live it). One I've heard mentioned a few times outside of this thread is Robocop.

IBJoel

While I think Empire is far and away the best Star Wars film, I feel like it cannot exist without the cultural context of the first film. Although I'd say it definitely fares better than many other sequels, because of the opening crawl giving you set-up. So while on a technical level I think it's perfect, narratively/emotionally it is not.

mwbmis

The first movie to come to mind is one that has been mentioned over and over in this thread....Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I don't remember if I have ever told this story on this board, but I like the story so whatever. About 15-20 years ago, our old school theatre in town became the budget theatre (before it sadly closed for good). Towards the end of it's days it would run a different "classic" movie ever few weeks on it's old time big screen. One of these movies was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a buddy and I went to see it. Now, I saw this film for the first time on the big screen with my grandfather when I was 8 years old. When we went to the revival screening, my buddy and I sat a row in front of a kid around 8 and his dad.

As the movie went along, it became clear that this kid was seeing it for the first time. When we got to the wham bam face melting conclusion, the kid verbally exclaimed, "Holy Cow!". That made me very happy.

kefrank

The thing that pushes Office Space into "perfect" territory, in my view, is the way that it so deftly captures the "soul-sucking work environment" world, juxtaposing the corporate career setting and the just-making-ends-meet restaurant setting. And 20 years later, I've come to appreciate that it does so in a timeless way that doesn't rely heavily on things that could have so easily become antiquated. Take Michael's "PC Load Letter" frustration with the printer - hardly anyone in 2020 is getting a "PC Load Letter" message on a printer, but nearly everyone has experienced malfunctioning technology with esoteric error messages and can relate to and laugh at that moment. Office Space walks that line so perfectly all the way through. The themes, the characters, and the humor are enduringly entertaining and relatable decades later, which is pretty rare for a comedy and particularly remarkable for a movie that primarily focuses on workers at a software company.

devilshalo

There is no 'perfect' film. It's hard for everything to be spot on and i'm including technical aspects of a film. Lighting, editing, sound, framing, continuity. Perfect IMO means "flawless."

dhmac

I call "The Empire Strikes Back" the perfect sequel. It's a sequel that expands and deepens everything great about the original movie while not resorting to being an imitation of that film.