CineFix Top 100

“Warriors… come out and play-ayyyyy…” The Warriors dropped in 1979 during an age of New York City that was about to change. Walter Hill’s film about a gang being hunted across the city as they try to make it home is a portrait of the politics of gang society. Clint, Cal and Alex talk about 70s fight scene choreography, expert camera blocking and just how many guys it takes to be wearing vests with...

“So far, so good. So far, so good…” On one hand, La Haine is a grab bag of every filmmaking trick that was cool in the 90s. On the other hand, it’s a scathing look at systemic violence that’s as relevant as ever even 30 year later. The story of three guys outside of Paris grappling with the aftermath of a riot in which police officers put one of their friends in a coma, La Haine is a tough but ess...

“Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” Hot Fuzz, the second chapter in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s ‘Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy,’ takes the piss out of buddy cop movies in the most loving way possible. The story of a cop who’s too good for his own good transferring to a small town in the country and uncovering a gruesomely violent plot, lampoons its action influences w...

“You cannot change your fate. However, you can rise to meet it, if you so choose.” Hayao Miyazaki dropped one of his several masterpieces in 1997 with Princess Mononoke. Depicting the battle between Iron Town and ancient Gods of the forest, the film is a gorgeously animated adventure that paints it’s themes vividly front and center. Clint, Cal and Alex talk about where it fits in Miyazaki’s body o...

“I like to watch.” From director Hal Ashby, Being There is wildly intelligent movie about an incredibly unintelligent man. Peter Sellers stars with Shirley MacLaine in a story about a simple-minded gardener and the power brokers who seem to think he’s a genius. Clint, Cal and Alex talk about the power of projecting only what we want to see, how films can become eternally relevant and who has the b...

“I’ve never seen that. I’ve never seen anybody drive their garbage down to the street and bang the hell out of it with a stick.” Joe Dante’s first collaboration with Tom Hanks started as a send-up of Rear Window before it morphed into a genre-bending, dark comedy in The ‘Burbs. Coming after Joe Dante’s Academy Award winning Innerspace and Tom Hank’s first Best Actor nomination for Big, The ‘Burbs...

Bring your hot takes somewhere else, Rear Window is S-Tier Hitchcock. Made and released between other Grace Kelly classics Dial M for Murder, and To Catch a Thief, Rear Window’s strength lies in Hitchcock’s ability to make us willing accomplices in Jimmy Stewart’s spying on his neighbors by leaning so hard on his POV and ratcheting up the tension of being stuck in one place. Clint, Cal and Alex di...

Our community season continues with one of the funniest movies of all time and our first newly minted Top 100, Monty Python and The Holy Grail. A gleeful skewering of the filmmaking process by first time filmmakers, The Holy Grail crams in a musical number, an animated god, and a record scratch of an ending that breaks the fourth wall in the same way Blazing Saddles did. Clint, Cal and Alex discus...

Season 2 continues with a bit of a milestone Disney film as both the first movie to be developed after Walt’s death and the first to be released on VHS, Disney’s Robin Hood. How much has nostalgia played into its placement on the list? Clint, Cal, and Alex are here to break it all down, digging into the incredible pedigree behind the film, including Don Bluth who went on to create such classics as...

We head to a galaxy far far away to discuss a little space opera that changed the way we make movies, talk about movies, and build franchises out of those movies. George Lucas’s Star Wars stormed onto the scene in 1977 and was relentlessly retconned as they moved to franchise the biggest original IP of all time. Star Wars is inescapable now, but Clint, Cal and Alex try to dissect the movie it was...

Our community season continues with the movie that added infamous and plethora to our vocabulary, the Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short classic, Three Amigos. Directed by John Landis, whose filmography up to this point is littered with hits, Amigos succeeds by continually making its leads the butt of the joke. Clint, Cal and Alex discuss the difficulty of analyzing comedies, whether or no...

Season 2’s community theme kicks off with the patriarch of modern action cinema, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. An epic story of samurai helping a small village community defend itself against raiders, Seven Samurai puts its characters front and center, and is a masterclass on how to earn a three hour runtime. Clint, Cal and Alex break down its place in film history as a foundational text on acti...

“If you’re so hungry, why don’t you just go eat S#!T!!!” We’re hanging out in the snow at Park City for the 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival this week and got a chance to see 2014 festival alum The Babadook on the big screen and wouldn’t you know it, it happens to be on the CineFix Top 100! A terrifying entry into the psychological horror genre, writer director Jennifer Kent gives us the...

Clint, Cal and Alex continue their neverending journey to watch 100 of the greatest movies of all time while Dan's sentient algorithm continues to throw curve balls. This time there is a theme: community! And yes, all the quotes and music in the trailer are clues to the movies that will be featured this season. Be sure to check back on January 28th when our first episode of season 2 drops with Aki...

“Oh, I hope you felt appropriately guilty afterwards.” In this CineFix Not 100, Alex and Calabro are talking about Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 follow-up to Pulp Fiction. In the 25+ years since Tarantino adapted the Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch, Jackie Brown has managed to age like Pam Grier herself, which is to say, incredibly. Cal and Alex wax on about how this is Quentin’s most tra...

“Just try not to say anything too loud or crass.” Welcome to another NOT Top 100 in between seasons! This week, Clint’s not around so Cal and Alex are digging into one of their favorites that didn’t quite make the cut. This week they explore In Bruges and discuss its status as a Bro-core movie, its choice to focus on the words of its playwright script instead of the visuals of the romantic city it...

“It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” Raiders of the Lost Ark is an unimpeachably great movie that gave us the second iconic Harrison Ford role of the era with Indiana Jones. It’s hard to imagine a world without our most famous archeologist, or to understate the franchise’s influence on the adventure genre, but at the time there was a weird amount of pressure to succeed. Steven Spielberg...

“Your Mother ***** ***** in hell!” The Exorcist had audiences' heads spinning in 1973 and hasn’t really stopped since. William Friedkin had just won an Oscar for The French Connection and William Peter Blatty’s novel was a best seller, but the filmmakers still had a long way to go to make a classic. Clint, Alex and Cal are chock full of pea soup and ready to dive into the incredible makeup effects...

"Your move, creep." The year… vaguely near future. The setting… Old Detroit. The hero… a robotic cop resurrected by corporate greed fighting to regain some of his humanity. RoboCop, in a word, is awesome. The Paul Verhoeven masterpiece has everything you’d want from the 80s; goopy squibs, stop motion animated robots and a literal shootout in a cocaine factory. Clint, Cal and Alex dig into the incr...

"They had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Carol Reed’s The Third Man is a gorgeously photographed bit of post-war film noir that gave us one of the greatest grins in the history of cinema. It also gave us a ton of zither! Clint, Cal and Alex dive into the classic detective yarn that’s not really about a detective at all. They discuss the dutch angles...

"I hate space." For anyone that got to see Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity in the theater, it’s a breathless, palm-sweating, white-knuckled experience that is hard to describe. Essentially Castaway in space, Sandra Bullock is by herself for most of a tight 90 minute adrenaline rush just trying to survive. This episode of CineFix Top 100, Clint, Cal and Alex celebrate this harrowing film’s 10th Anniversar...

“Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.” David Cronenberg has made some incredible movies that are also incredibly gross. This episode of the CineFix Top 100 dives into one of his best, The Fly. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis star in the story of inventor Seth Brundle and his attempt to master teleportation only to end up becoming a fly for his trouble! Clint and Cal spend another week waiting for Alex to rejo...

“I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin here!” The late 60s marked the beginning of a new era in Hollywood and Midnight Cowboy was right in the middle of it. The 1969 film from John Schesinger follows a swaggering small town Texas stud trying to make it as a hustler in Manhattan and the unlikely relationship he discovers with a con-man. Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman turn in amazing performances, but the most...

“I’ll be back.”   There are few who do sequels like James Cameron. In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day blew the socks off everybody on its way to becoming, what we here at CineFix are happy to proclaim, the most perfect action movie of all time. Groundbreaking visual effects mixed with ingenious in-camera tricks and one of the greatest cinema face turns from Arnold Schwarzenegger, T2 is one helluv...

“Phil!? Phil Connors?!?!” In 1993, the late great Harold Ramis teamed with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell to do the same thing over and over and over again. In the 30 years since, Groundhog Day has become a genre all unto itself. Blending elements of time travel, magical realism, spirituality and good old fashioned romantic comedy, it doesn’t feel right to call it a cult classic but that’s not fa...