The Creature Features Movie Guide by John Stanley

And as it turns out, working for the mafia isn’t much different than any other job - you spend 30 years busting your hump to climb the ladder, only to end up face down on a bloody carpet in some tacky house in the burbs. Where Coppola went inside the walls of organised crime’s one percent, Scorsese’s gangsters are more blue collar. And for a movie about violent career criminals, it’s also strangely relatable. Certainly, the former is more easily rewatchable, owing to its breakneck pacing – its two and a half hours (and three decades) just whiz by. Based on the true life of mobster Henry Hill, Goodfellas was born in the shadow of The Godfather, but as the years go on, the question of which is more influential becomes mostly a matter of generation. ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ Ray Liotta’s opening line is the crime movie equivalent of ‘Once upon a time…’, and what follows is Martin Scorsese’s version of a fairy tale – the story of a starry-eyed Brooklyn kid who realises his boyhood dream and still comes out a schnook in the end. 🏆 The most deserving Oscar winners of all-time Written by Abbey Bender, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Bilge Ebiri, Ian Freer, Stephen Garrett, Tomris Laffly, Joshua Rothkopf, Anna Smith and Matthew Singer No matter where you are on the movie appreciation spectrum, we’re sure you’ll find something to love here. Because this is a list that covers a lot of ground: over 100 years, multiple countries, and just about every genre you can imagine, from monolithic blockbusters to treasured cult classics, ridiculous comedies to freaky horror, sweaty-palmed thrillers to eye-popping action flicks. And if you’re filling in the gaps of your movie knowledge – or heck, just starting to build it – this is a tremendous place to start.

If you’re enough of a cineaste to claim to have seen every movie here already, maybe think of it as a way to rethink your own personal rankings and challenge your own preconceived notions about what makes any movie one of the GOATS. Really, think of it more as a jumping off point. Well, perhaps it’s best not to think of this – or any list, for that matter – as any attempt at solidifying any sort of canon.

So then, why bother even attempting to rank the best movies ever made at all? Tastes in cinema vary wildly, of course, and one person’s Citizen Kane is another’s Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. But it’s what makes putting together a list of the greatest movies of all-time a particularly fraught assignment. Heck, who doesn’t? Trouble is, not everyone loves the same movies. In case you couldn’t tell, we love movies.

The Creature Features Movie Guide by John Stanley