A collection of Riz Ahmed’s favourite movies of all time
Not many people settle on their list of favourite films and then refuse to budge for the rest of their lives, but Riz Ahmed has at least displayed consistency when it comes to the movie that’s stayed at the top of the pile every time he’s asked to name them.
Obviously, every personally curated list of the features that hit hardest and worked their way deepest beneath the skin is subject to change, given that cinema throws up so many must-see releases on an annual basis. The Academy Award-nominated star’s own picks cover decades, span continents, and touch base with multiple genres.
Whether it’s populist entertainment like classic coming-of-age adventure The Goonies or James Cameron’s game-changing sci-fi blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgement Day, searing documentaries diving into the most iconic showdowns in sport or searing moments of socio-political importance like boxing story When We Were Kings and the incendiary The Square, there’s plenty of variety to be found.
However, based on how often he’s celebrated its merits as the greatest movie he’s ever seen, there’s a distinctly high chance that Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas will always be ranked number one for Ahmed, because he’s yet to waver on the seminal crime story as being the cream of the crop.
“If you haven’t seen Goodfellas, stop everything and do that now” was his advice for anyone unfortunate enough to have gone through life without seeing Scorsese’s inimitable masterpiece, with Ahmed describing it to Looper as “one of those films that whenever it’s on TV or whenever you catch it, you’re just like, ‘OK, we’ve got to watch it. Let’s just turn the phone off. We got to just get through this one.'”
He’s much more than a one-film man, though, with Ahmed at various points praising the “impossible to define” stylings of Michael Haneke’s gripping psychological thriller Hidden, the “taut, simmering intensity” of Francis Ford Coppola’s incredible sequel The Godfather Part II, and the way Matthieu Kassovitz’s provocative La Haine “bristles with authenticity and realism yet offers such a honed and composed vision.”
As one of its producers, Ahmed admits there’s an air of bias surrounding Flee being part of his all-timers collection, but it’s hard to argue with an animated documentary detailing a man’s escape from Afghanistan to Denmark as a child making the cut based on both its riveting artistic and technical merits, as well as the fact it made Academy Awards history as the first film to be nominated for ‘Best International Feature Film’, ‘Best Documentary Feature’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’ in the same year.
Riz Ahmed’s favourite movies of all time:
- La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995)
- The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
- The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
- Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
- Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
- When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1996)
- The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
- A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
- The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985)
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991)
- Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005)
