David Lowery names the 10 greatest movies of all time
Despite having made some of the audacious movies of the past decade or so, the American filmmaker David Lowery has yet to receive the appropriate level of critical or commercial acclaim. After helming a bounty of short films at the start of the new millennium, Lowery made the jump to feature moviemaking in 2013 with the Sundance winner Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and has been thriving ever since.
Soon after, Disney came calling, and Lowery would work on the much-underrated adaptation of 1977s Pete’s Dragon, releasing the film shortly before the 2017 indie drama A Ghost Story. Collaborating once more with actors Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, who worked with the director on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Lowery’s film was a mesmerising contemporary ghost story that spoke to an eerie untapped truth about modern life.
In 2021 he would take on his most ambitious feature film to date, adapting the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for modern audiences. Starring the likes of Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, and Barry Keoghan, The Green Knight was an epic fantasy flick that suffused the mysterious allure of the classic 14th-century tale with contemporary visuals and storytelling.
As one of the most promising names in modern cinema, it’s no surprise that Lowery was called up by the BFI to cast his votes regarding the ten greatest movies of all time.
Selecting his picks for Sight and Sound’s decennial issue, where the greatest films of all time are chosen by top filmmakers and critics, Lowery named a quality collection of movies from directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki. Like many, his first choice was the sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which has changed the way that genre movies are created and appreciated since 1968.
Elsewhere, Lowery also picks the Chantal Akerman feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which also happened to come out on top of the entire poll, claiming the number one spot ahead of such films as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Telling the somewhat monotonous tale of a lonely woman’s humdrum life, Akerman’s film is an experimental tour de force.
Lowery’s most recent selection is the George Miller flick Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015, a movie so insanely high-octane that it took audiences and critics entirely by surprise at the time of release. Starring Tom Hardy, Zoë Kravitz, Nicholas Hoult and Charlize Theron, the film is essentially one prolonged chase sequence that takes place on the deserted plains of post-apocalyptic Australia.
The rest of the filmmaker’s list included such classics as John Carpenter’s Halloween, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev; take a look at all of his picks for the ten greatest movies of all time below.
David Lowery’s 10 favourite movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1960)
- Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
- E.T. The Extra-terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
- Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
- Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
- Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
- The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2010)
