Ari Aster names the 10 greatest movies of all time
Much like the influential touch of filmmakers such as Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg in the 20th century, it’s difficult to consider what the modern horror genre would look like without the presence of American director Ari Aster. Helming Hereditary in 2018 and Midsommar in 2019, Aster has become known as one of the most exciting filmmakers of contemporary cinema.
Indeed, Aster’s 2018 movie has become the benchmark by which to judge all modern horror flicks, with the film’s cutting-edge scares being packaged alongside a classy drama that explores the dark roots of hereditary mental illness. Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and Gabriel Byrne, the film has already become known as one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
Aster’s first two feature films may have been firmly rooted in the horror genre, but his future in the industry doesn’t seem to be quite as rigid, with 2023 being the due date for his upcoming drama Beau Is Afraid. A peculiar-looking movie that chronicles the life of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, Joaquin Phoenix stars as the title character in this Oscar-bound flick.
The filmmaker has long discussed his passion for the broader world of cinema, citing directors such as Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman in his list of the ten greatest movies of all time in Sight and Sound’s recent decennial poll. “The ranking of art is a fool’s errand,” Aster starts, before contradicting his word and listing his thoughts on the greatest movies of all time, naming Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as his first pick.
Speaking about the 1958 classic, which topped the poll in 2012, Aster expressed: “Hitchcock’s most personal and perverse investigation into his own obsessions – with women (that is, with a specific type of woman – elegant and cold and always unknowable), with artifice, with control…It might be the most beautiful and disturbing movie ever made about the sickness inherent in ‘directing’”.
Aster speaks just as passionately about his other nine picks, calling Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ “a work of supreme, swirling inspiration” and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon “the funniest, the most stately, and at once the loveliest and most alienating of Kubrick’s films”. Further praise comes for Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, with the filmmaker calling the latter “profoundly funny and profoundly serious”.
Take a look at the full list of Ari Aster’s picks for the 10 greatest movies of all time below.
Ari Aster’s 10 favourite films:
- Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
- 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
- Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
- Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
- Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
- Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
- Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
- A Serious Man (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2009)
- Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
- Songs From the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
