Jennifer Lopez’s four favourite movies of all time
When Jennifer Lopez isn’t busy hanging out on a yacht or being paid £2million to sing some songs at extravagant weddings for the uber-rich, she occasionally does a spot of acting, although if you’re honest, you’d be hard-pressed to name any of the movies she’s made since 2019’s admittedly very good Hustlers.
The reason for that seems to be twofold: firstly that she has focused quite a bit on her singing, including vastly lucrative stints doing residencies at Las Vegas casinos, and also that the movies she has produced over the last five years or so all seem to be in conjunction with streaming sites like Netflix or Prime Video, resulting in features you come across at one in the morning while trying to find something to watch and think ‘I have no recollection of that being released whatsoever’.
Those include 2024’s wrestling drama Unstoppable, a sci-fi thriller called Atlas the same year, one called The Mother in 2023, as well as a comedy called Shotgun Wedding the year before that, and honestly, those films could have been about anything, stacking up like the parody clips at the end of 22 Jump Street.
However, while her hit movies might have tailed off in recent years, there was a time when she was one of the most in-demand, highly paid actors in the world, so she must have been doing something right. There were huge romantic comedies like Maid in Manhattan, spicy thrillers with George Clooney like 1998’s Out of Sight, a horror sci-fi in The Cell and more recently, there was even a Jason Statham punch-em-up in the ‘actually not that bad’ Parker.
But what movies does Lopez herself like to unwind to while presumably counting her money while lying on a bed of money? Well, she was asked by Letterboxd recently on the red carpet to name her four favourite films of all time, a task and question she undertook with all the engagement and attention that a horse might give the 10,000th fly to land on its nose that day.
She started off by naming West Side Story, the original from 1961, we assume, and not the Steven Spielberg remake that came 50 years later. The movie was adapted from a 1957 musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet and is about tensions between local gangs on New York’s Upper West Side, which is now somewhere you can pay $25 for a latte and wish you had the money to visit some museums. Starring Natalie Wood, it remains one of the most successful films of all time, winning ten out of 11 Oscar nominations.
Next she went with the Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams rain-soaked tear-jerker The Notebook, which to be frank a lot of women liked and a lot of men didn’t, which is fine, but was probably summed up best by a quote from The Guardian on release which said simply that “Dentistry in the Renaissance couldn’t have been more painful than watching this”.
Third on Lopez’s list was Robert De Niro’s directorial debut, A Bronx Tale from 1993, starring Chazz Palminteri, a superbly gritty mob movie about a young boy trying to choose between good and bad while coming of age. She, of course, is very proud of being from the Bronx, something you may have had a hint of thanks to her single ‘Jenny from the Block’, which featured the lyrics, “No matter where I go, I know where I came from (Southside Bronx, from the Bronx)” for the avoidance of doubt.
Last on the round-up came a slightly lesser-known film, 1992’s Prelude to a Kiss, which was a romantic fantasy with Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan, and is one of those strange body-swap movies, a bit like Freaky Friday, in which Ryan kisses an old man (OK) and switches souls with him for some reason.
Jennifer Lopez’s four favourite films:
- West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961)
- The Notebook (Nick Cassavetes, 2004)
- A Bronx Tale (Robert De Niro, 1993)
- Prelude to a Kiss (Norman René, 1992)
