Daniel Radcliffe’s five favourite movies of all time
While Daniel Radcliffe is best known for playing the famous spectacled wizard in the Harry Potter film series, since then, he has tried his hand at several different movie genres. Back in 2012, Radcliffe noted his favourite films of all time during a feature with Rotten Tomatoes, and his selections are telling because this list came at a time when he was beginning to transition away from Potter.
Radcliffe’s undoubted favourite film of all time is Sidney Lumet’s acclaimed picture 12 Angry Men, a classic courtroom drama in which a jury tries to decide whether a teenager should be charged with murder. Radcliffe calls the film “a feat of writing”. He said (via Rotten Tomatoes), “It’s brilliant. You can’t look away. You’re gripped by the dynamics between the people, by what’s gonna happen.”
Evidently, Radcliffe admires the films of old, as his second pick is 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death. He claims that David Niven “could not be more charming in it if he tried,” adding, “He starts off, you know, as a World War II pilot about to crash his plane whilst quoting Andrew Marvell down the phone to the mayday operator, who he then falls in love with.”
Elsewhere, Radcliffe admires the works of Stanley Kubrick, particularly his 1964 anti-war film Dr. Strangelove, which satirises the nuclear fears of the Cold War. Radcliffe claims that the film taught him a lot about comedy. “The stuff that’s funniest is the stuff that scares us most — because all good comedy comes out of fear of death, fear of humiliation, fear of public awkwardness, fear of, you know, all those kinds of things,” he said. “To have truly, really dark comedy where at the end of the film everyone in the world dies, that was very funny to me.”
Flashing forward well into the future, Radcliffe selects 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine to join his list of classics. He said of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film, “I find it to be the sweetest, funniest… it’s a modern classic, I think. And I think Steve Carell is brilliant in it; heartbreaking. Also, the fact that it came out of nowhere — that I went to the cinema knowing nothing about it.”
Check out the list below.
Daniel Radcliffe’s favourite movies:
- 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
- A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
- Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
- Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006)
- Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963)
Radcliffe’s list is rounded off by Don Chaffey’s beloved 1963 stop-motion animation classic Jason and the Argonauts, which Radcliffe claims he uses as a “deal-breaker” in any potential romantic relationship. “That is the film that, within the first six months of a relationship of any girl that I’m with, I have to make her watch that film — and if she doesn’t react the way I’d like, then that’s kind of a deal-breaker,” he said. “If you don’t like Harryhausen’s stop-motion, then you are not going to be in my life.”
