Joe Dante’s 10 favourite films of all time
Amongst Joe Dante‘s most notable films is Gremlins, the hit 1984 movie that often enters the age old debate surrounding alternative Christmas movies. The film focuses on a young man who is gifted a strange creature as a pet, which he affectionately names Gizmo. However, things turn sour when Gizmo begins to spawn several mischievous and destructive creatures who set about causing chaos on Christmas eve.
The film is certainly Dante’s biggest hit, although his other movies include Piranha, Small Soldiers and Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Dante looks to be a big fan of classic cinema, according to his list of favourite films (as per Combustible Celluloid), so let’s take a closer look at his inspirations now.
First up for Dante is one of the most widely-celebrated films of all time, Orson Welles’ 1941 picture Citizen Kane. The film told of the life and times of Charles Foster Kane, a fictional media baron who was based on several real-life tycoons, including William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Remarkably, the film, often considered the greatest of all time, was Welles’ first feature movie.
Another classic that Dante admires, although vastly different from Citizen Kane in the way it approaches narrative, is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, which was released in 1963. The surrealist and highly-experimental film tells of an Italian film director whose creativity comes into question when he struggles to direct a science fiction epic.
Yet Western cinema is not the only love of Dante, for he also admires the best films from the East too, including Akira Kurosawa’s excellent 1950 picture Rashomon. The film tells of the conflicted reports of several people who claim to have witnessed the murder of a samurai and gave rise to an epistemological problem called ‘The Rashomon Effect’.
It does appear that Western cinema is the most beloved of Dante, though, particularly the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and we find his epic Once Upon a Time in the West from 1969 amongst Dante’s favourites. The film saw Henry Fonda cast against type as the villain, with Charles Bronson portraying his enemy. It remains a true classic of the western genre.
There is room for a boxing classic, too, with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull also making an appearance. The 1980 film saw Robert De Niro portray the turbulent and talented boxer Jake LaMotta whose obsessive and violent behaviour caused the estrangement of his wife and family. It was adapted from LaMotta’s 1970 memoir of the same name by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin.
Check out the complete list of Joe Dante’s favourite films below.
Joe Dante’s 10 favourite films of all time:
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
- 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
- Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, 1945)
- The Dead (Stan Brakhage, 1960)
- Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969)
