The “disturbing, beautiful, strange, and challenging” movie Michael Sheen called the greatest of all time
Michael Sheen might be most renowned for his fantasy roles in Twilight and Good Omens, but given his prolific, decades-long career on the stage, it’s safe to say he’s deadly serious about his career.
Though he has multiple big productions and awards to his name, such as Golden Globes, Emmys and Baftas, to name just a few, he’s made it clear he’s not in the game for money, after announcing himself to be a “not-for-profit” actor back in 2022.
It’s clear from the credits to his name, his massive talent on screen and his dedication to improving the arts and the general world around him that Sheen is serious about what he does, and a look at his favourite film only reinforces this. In an interview with Time Out, Sheen discussed his top ten favourites, and it reads like a bingo card for Letterboxd cinephiles.
There’s Federico Fellini’s legendary 8½, the avant-garde meta-fictional comedy about a filmmaker who heads to a spa to get over a creative slump that’s a must-watch for any budding filmmaker. As Sheen remarked, “He self-mythologised his dreamworld into a personal wonderland on screen”.
This comes after Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now, which “turned my head upside down and inside out. I discover something new each time I watch it”, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, about which he said, “No one has inspired me in relation to what is possible in art more than him”. Also up there are Stalker by Tarkovsky, Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese and In the Name of the Father featuring Daniel Day-Lewis.
So he’s ticked off all the greats, but, of course, there has to be something weird and cool, and that’s House by Nobuhiko Obayashi, a fantastical fever dream of 1970s Japanese horror that Sheen loves to watch with his daughter, telling Time Out, “I love it and so does my daughter. It’s wildly inventive, funny, scary and genuinely disturbing at times. Utter brilliance”.
However, according to the Frost/Nixon actor, one of the greatest films of all time and his longest-standing favourite, is Powell and Pressburger’s iconic A Matter of Life and Death. Known as Stairway to Heaven in the US, it tells the tale of a British airman who survives a plane crash that he apparently wasn’t meant to, eventually being summoned to the afterlife.
Sheen called it “romantic, disturbing, beautiful, strange and challenging”, and believes it has “one of the most extraordinary opening scenes of all time”, which is why it’s been his favourite since he was a teenager. Set between a brilliant technicolour England and a monochrome ‘heaven’, A Matter of Life and Death is beloved for its layered philosophical themes just as much as its incredible visual techniques created by Powell and Pressburger, which included a huge escalator with a 12-horsepower engine.
It ticks all the boxes of romance, action and dreaminess that children and adults alike can get on board with, and it remains among the top 100 of BFI Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time.
