Letterboxd asks you to name your four favorite films when you fill out your profile. Not five. Not ten like the Best Picture nominees at the Oscars. But four. In no particular order, here they are.
This one appears on most lists of the greatest films of all time: The Godfather. The haunting score… Brando, Pacino, Coppola. It all comes together to deliver a movie everyone has seen and no one can forget. I am the daughter of an immigrant mother and I too believe in America. When Bonasera pleads for justice on behalf of his daughter, I felt for him. It is the genius of the movie that we stand with Don Corleone when he orders that Bonasera’s daughter be avenged through violent means and that we also stand with the Corleone family in general when they go about the business of being mobsters.
Michael’s rise to becoming Don Corleone is fascinating to behold. Pacino plays Michael gently as one might strum a harpsichord. It is an incredibly nuanced performance without a false note. It all culminates in a bloody ending with Michael cleaning house while at a baptism for his godson, ironically renouncing the devil. Coppola brilliantly christens Michael as Don Corleone in the final scene. He has become the Godfather indeed, shutting the door on Kay and his previous life.
American Fiction is a recent film that has managed to make it to my top four films of all time. Jeffrey Wright is brilliant here as a writer — also my chosen profession — who publishes a book he doesn’t really like or believe in under a pseudonym. The book, of course, becomes a runway hit and he is forced to consider if playing to what he views as the lowest denominator is the way to a successful writing career.
The book in question portrays Black people in what he views as a stereotypical light and does nothing to "uplift" the race. When he finds himself on an awards committee about to crown his own detested book as the best of the year, it all becomes too much for him.
The script for the movie itself is a brilliant Oscar-winning adaptation by director Cord Jefferson of a book by the equally brilliant Percival Everett called Erasure. Issa Rae – the heroine of the best web series of all time – The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl – is great here as a writer who perhaps has played to the lowest common denominator but who has heavily “researched” her journey there rendering it academic and okay. Tracee Ellis Ross is in the film all too briefly as the sister of Jeffrey Wright’s character. A very funny Sterling K. Brown rounds out this highly dysfunctional but hilarious family unit.
A Star is Born is a film that will just about break your heart if you let it. It is one of my favorites because of the music, the acting and the modern honky tonk vibe. Only a few people know this, but I was raised on country music in addition to reggae and the sounds of the 70s. Country was very popular when my mother was a child in Jamaica so I grew up listening to it.
Bradley Cooper is brilliant here in my favorite role of his to date — Jackson Maine. He sings and plays guitar as if he had been singing and strumming the instrument his whole life. Lady Gaga takes to playing the part of a rockstar like a fish to water… unsurprisingly. Their chance meeting in a drag bar has all the charm of When Harry Met Sally. The main character's struggle with addiction against the backdrop of his lover's rising fame is the engine of this particular story.
As a audience member, I felt the highs Ally's career and the lows of Jackson's depression and eventual suicide in an up close and personal way that is a testament to the acting and the direction in the film. Cooper's directorial debut is sure-handed and deserving of every Oscar nod it got.
The Adjustment Bureau is an amazing adaptation in a long line of great Philip K. Dick adaptations. It's sci-fi meets romantic comedy. Fun fact: I worked as an extra on the film, and if you squint you can see me in the Brooklyn rave scene. Just kidding. I did work as an extra in that scene but, you cannot see me in the final product, squinting or not. The conceit of the film is that there are people who are responsible for keeping fate on its predetermined track, and if people should veer off that track these well-suited, hat wearing bureaucrats make adjustments to external events or even to the very minds of the people who are daring to tempt fate.
The chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt is contagious here, and we root for them to get together no matter what the "Chairman", i.e., God decrees. Anthony Mackie steals every scene he is in as Harry the meddling Cupid bent on getting Elise and David's characters together in the end. We root for these two to be a couple even if it means Elise won't become the prima ballerina she deserves to be...David's presidential ambitions notwithstanding.
The climax of the film, where Mackie's character helps the lovers evade the more senior members of the titular adjustment bureau, is a a master class in pacing and happy endings. We never get to meet the Chairman, but we get a message from him letting the couple know that they have forged a new fate which is possible with enough grit and determination. A very happy ending indeed.