Anya Stanley's Favorite Movies Of All Time

Hello /Film readers. I'm Anya Stanley, and I like movies — the darker, the better. In the past five years, I've fooled an outlet or two into paying me to talk movies, and /Film is the latest mark to take my film opinions seriously. When the invite came down to round up my top 15 movies, I was a little daunted. I've actively avoided this for said five years, because I knew my list would refuse to pick a lane, and would defy any attempts to corral and rank them in any way that makes sense. How do you weigh "Mouse Hunt," which has a rodent taking a dump on Christopher Walken's forehead, against Paul Thomas Anderson's ruthless take on an Upton Sinclair epic? I'll tell you how.

You write up each favorite as it comes to you, take a deep breath, and number each entry in the exact sequential order you wrote it. F*** it, we'll do it live.

Before the hate mail comes rolling in because my top 15 doesn't match the AFI Top 100's, let it be known that these are my personal favorite movies ever made, the ones I've watched so many times I can discern them from another room, from hearing just two seconds of the score. I'm not saying "The Honeymoon Killers" is better than "Annie Hall" — actually, yeah, I'll commit to that one. The list is not definitive but for the uninitiated, there exist some fine additions to your watchlist.

When I'm asked who my favorite actor is, I wouldn't get nearly as many confused faces when I say Lili Taylor if people would just watch "I Shot Andy Warhol." It makes sense on some level — Mary Harron's depiction of both radical feminist Valerie Solanas and pop artist Andy Warhol is anything but marketable. Warhol, in this film, isn't especially venomous, and Solanas — visionary as she is — isn't prodigious enough for the art world she rubbed up against. Harron penetrates the sensationalist aspects of the story (that make up the title) to make a feature-length study of its main players, and Lili Taylor as well as Jared Harris as Warhol are more than up to the task. I keep coming back to this movie for Taylor and for Harron's magnificent showcase of a time and culture that had its warts as well as its beauty marks.

"The Honeymoon Killers" was Leonard Kastle's only foray into feature film directing, so the tale takes on even more of a lightning-in-a-bottle insistence than it did previously. Based loosely on the story of the Lonely-Hearts Killers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the movie's power lies in its stripped-down presentation of its unempathetic subjects gliding through innocent lives like sharks through water. Production was so threadbare (made on less than $200K) that its stars, Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco (themselves fledgling stage actors), did their own hair and makeup. Shot in a documentary-like black and white, nothing is glorified in "The Honeymoon Killers" — not its killers, not the deaths, not even the victims whose vulnerability is just as exploitable to Kastle as to the con artists. It's mean and it's plain, and most of the time, that's all I need for a story that I can connect with.

Note: For those with iron stomachs, Fatih Akin's 2019 German horror drama "The Golden Glove" brings a similar stark sensibility to serial killer Fritz Honka.

I argued with no less than four friends about which David Lynch movie is my personal favorite, such is the enigmatic nature of Lynch's works — can't make heads or tails of them at times, but boy is it transfixing. Ultimately, I went with the movie in his filmography that has since become considered one of the early "midnight movies," and because any movie list of mine feels naked without something of his. Set in a world that defies explanation, with characters set adrift in their own misery, framed like a series of cough syrup-induced hallucinations, "Eraserhead" is the most formally presented nightmare I've ever watched.

Most of the analyses and praises written of Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" make much of Daniel Day Lewis' powerhouse performance as the insatiable oilman Daniel Plainview, the immaculately shadowed cinematography of Robert Elswit (probably the same reason why I'm so transfixed by the stark visuals of Dan Gilroy's "Nightcrawler," an honorable mention behind this list), or Johnny Greenwood's ominous orchestral score that sits at unsettling odds with the period setting. But the reason "Blood" sits on my list is because of its final monologue, in which Lewis unleashes one of the finest trash-talking thrashings ever committed to film. First telling poor, pathetic Eli Sunday that his land is worthless, then revealing that Eli was usurped by his own brother, and then dancing a verbal jig about his nemesis before taking his God complex to the highest (lowest) level. You'll never devastate someone as soundly as Plainview does here:

Stop crying, you sniveling ass. Stop your nonsense. You're just the afterbirth, Eli...that slithered out on your mother's filth. They should have put you in a glass jar on the mantelpiece. Where were you when Paul was suckling at his mother's teat? Where were you? Who was nursing you, poor Eli? One of Bandy's sows? That land has been had. Nothing you can do about it. It's gone. It's had. You lose....

Written and directed by Lau Kar-leung, "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" begins with a gorgeously staged opening battle sequence between general Yueng Yip, his seven sons, and an army of men under general Pun Mei. One by one, the general and his bloodline are wiped out in a treacherous, bloody ambush that takes all but two of Yeung's sons. The sixth son returns home a shell of himself, too traumatized and unstable to take the lead and avenge the family. The fifth son takes shelter in a remote monastery and eventually convinces the monk leadership to allow him to train as a monk, soon developing the eight diagram pole fighting technique. When the chance comes for revenge, will he break his nonviolent, noninterventionist Buddhist vows? The whole bloody affair stars Gordon Liu in yet another collaboration with Lau; the dynamic duo had previously made martial arts movie magic with "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin" and "Executioners of Shaolin," among others. Do you dig the scene in Tarantino's "Kill Bill" where Uma Thurman's yellow-clad Bride single-handedly fends off the Crazy 88s? Then this movie's got something special for you: a nine-minute finale at a set piece featuring seven stacked coffins, skin avulsion, ripped-out teeth and, in the spirit of Joe Bob Briggs' Drive-In Totals, "Piggyback Fu."

In my Letterboxd review, I call this "A masterpiece of grim slapstick from the minds of unstable men," and I meant it. Ostensibly a family movie but truly a turf battle to the death betwixt man and mouse, "Mouse Hunt" doesn't seem like an outlier in Gore Verbinski's career — this is the man who made both "A Cure for Wellness," "The Ring" remake, and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, after all. But alongside a firing-on-all-cylinders Adam Rifkin, who would go on to write "Small Soldiers" a year later and raunchy comedy "Detroit Rock City" a year after that, Verbinski crafts a timeless comedy with a host of memorable characters and a cheeky streak of adult humor mixed in with the classic Hollywood slapstick.

I was gifted "The Night Child" (AKA "Together Forever," AKA "The Cursed Medallion") from the Amazon Prime algorithm gods, who saw me puttering around their giallo section for a few months and recommended this feverish gem. There's a lot going on (too much, I'm sure some contemporary critics argued) in this Italian horror picture, but within it is demonic possession, a dead mom, an absent dad, an obsession with a painting, a bewitching score by Stelvio Cipriani, and a hauntingly poetic ending. If you're wondering whether the movie is pretty, you should know that director Massimo Dallamano fiddled around with a camera lens or two as cinematographer (under the name Jack Dalmas) for two Sergio Leone works — whether in life or death, every player on Dallamano's stage is photographed intimately, finding art in the nooks and crannies around death and darkness. When I realized that I had watched "The Night Child" at least 10 times and that it wouldn't stick around the streaming service forever, I panic-bought a cheap DVD release of the film for the cost of a cup of coffee. I have never, before or since, seen such a bleached-out, truncated transfer of a movie, which is a shame because this movie should have had a few boutique restoration releases by now.

I hope you're listening, Arrow Video.