Empire have revealed their Greatest 100 Movies of the Century
Has your favourite made the list?
Our friends over at Empire have been kept very busy gathering together their top films of the century. With everything from Toy Story 3 to Dunkirk and Star Wars: The Force Awakens to Wonder Woman, there will almost certainly be a film that you know and love.
Avengers: Infinity War made the Top 10 in Empire's list, ranked at Number 7. And we caught up with Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland, at the time of the film's release, when they talked about their awkward first meeting!
However, it was Mad Max: Fury Road which was voted the greatest movie of the century by Empire magazine critics and readers in their poll of the 100 Greatest Movies of the Century.
On taking the top spot the film's director George Miller told Empire, "It’s a lovely pat on the back… How do you measure the worth of a film? The best I can come up with is to ask, ‘How long does it follow you out of the cinema?’ Some films you’ve forgotten by the time you get to the car park. Others seem to follow you around for the rest of your life."
George went on to explain, "Whenever it fell down, it didn’t stop me thinking about it. You couldn’t kill it with a stick," talking about the fact that it took almost 20 years to get made!
See Empire's Top 10 movies of the century:
10. Lost In Translation (2003)
It was Scarlett Johansson who was the revelation here, her 13 film felt like her real arrival. The set-up – mismatched couple stuck together in an unfamiliar city – could have lent itself to a more conventional fish-out-of-water romantic comedy, but Sofia Coppola's deadpan anti-romance instead leans into the emotional dislocation of its two central characters adrift in an alien (to them) Tokyo.
9. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece is part fantasy, part historical war movie. Caught in the middle of it all is young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), by day tending to her pregnant mother and avoiding her brutal stepfather, Sergi López's Captain Vidal, by night she is taking on three otherworldly tasks in order to gain immortality and return to the fairy kingdom.
8. Get Out (2017)
Daniel Kaluuya became an international star for his turn as Chris, the photographer who leaves the city to meet his white girlfriend's parents – and discovers there's more than meets the eye. Eerie and supremely entertaining, with an all-time-classic scene as Chris descends into the 'Sunken Place', Get Out has everything that makes a horror movie great.
7. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
The culmination of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing together every corner from the cosmic Guardians Of The Galaxy to the Earth-bound Captain America, should have been a triumph – and it is, but it's also an epic tragedy that's daring enough to let its villain win and wipe out 50% of all known life.
6. The Social Network (2010)
The Social Network is a spectacular, none-more-contemporary tale, with all the oldest storytelling tenets: friendship, revolution, greed, and betrayal.
Jesse Eisenberg is pitch-perfect as the jittery, ice-cold Mark Zuckerberg, setting up the site as a way to score women (in every sense), talking down to everyone he meets at breakneck speed, and swindling Andrew Garfield's Eduardo Saverin out of his share of the business.
5. Moonlight (2016)
While utterly cinematic, Moonlight is the closest moviemaking gets to poetry – it's such a powerfully concentrated, impressionistic piece of work that every moment in it contains multitudes. The story of Little (aka Chiron, aka Black), a young black gay man growing up in Florida, is told in three distinct chapters – his youth, adolescence and young adulthood – that are vastly different from each other, each segment revealing the small but seismic moments that reverberate through his life and transform him completely in the years we don't see him.
4. Inception (2010)
How do you follow up a gamechanger like The Dark Knight? You use your box office clout to make a gigantic, original, narratively-complex blockbuster the way only Christopher Nolan can. A summer movie set in the swirling subconscious, Inception is a film about the power of ideas that has plenty of its own – positing a sleeping mind as the scene for an anti-heist, picturing man-made dreamscapes that look like James Bond movie sets, and setting up a dizzying conceit of dreams within dreams within dreams with each operating at different speeds.
3. The Dark Knight (2008)
After delivering the ultimate Bruce Wayne movie with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan put his dark knight to the test – clashing with Heath Ledger's shuffling anarchist Joker. Everything about The Dark Knight feels grand and mythic – not just its imagery (the Joker setting piles of cash ablaze, the Two-Face reveal, the gleaming Gotham cityscape), but its sweeping narrative arcs that turn heroes into villains, lovers into martyrs, and gangsters into monsters.
2. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
There has never been a cinematic fantasy saga like The Lord Of The Rings – and its opening chapter remains its crowning achievement. When Peter Jackson – the Kiwi filmmaker with a history of lo-fi splatter gore movies – disappeared for years to shoot his Tolkien adaptation, nobody knew what to expect. When The Fellowship Of The Ring finally arrived, it was better than anyone could have hoped for – a stunningly cinematic, appropriately mythic re-telling of the first book, with heart, humour, and a promise of much more to come.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
30 years passed between the arrival of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road. That's three decades in which the fourth instalment of Max Rockatansky's story seemingly swirled and brewed and bubbled away in the mind of filmmaker George Miller, a dusty, oily fever dream taking on a deranged life of its own before spewing forth, fully formed, onto the screen.
You can see the rest of Empire's The Greatest 100 Movies of the Century on their website empireonline.com and in this month’s issue of Empire, on sale on Thursday 23rd January.
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