Kaylee Dugan's Favorite Movies Of All Time

Hello /Film friends! I don't know what made you click on this article but I'm simultaneously glad you did and I'm also terrified you'll find a way to bully me online. This might sound ridiculous, but even though I've been writing about movies (and food, art, music and all other sorts of cultural joys) for almost a decade, I still have to imagine the internet as a black void where no one can actually read my content. What can I say, I'm fun to have at parties.

Even though the internet is listicles all the way down, writing them is hard, especially when the topic is something as personal as your 15 favorite movies. While I love every title on this list, there are so many more I could discuss at length, and frankly, this list is shifting around in my brain all of the time. But, sometimes you have to buckle down and make a decision.

With that being said, most of my blurbs call out the people who introduced me to these movies or the people I watched these movies with for the first time. All of my friends and loved ones are very cool and smart. 95 to 99% of my best thoughts are essentially ripped from the brains of the people I love, which is why I felt a need to shout them out here. What I'm really saying is, /Film should actually hire my mom to write about movies. I'm just a conduit for her good taste.

I am a documentary fiend and while I will watch all of the very sad movies about heart-wrenching murders and real crises, my favorite docs are essentially useless puff pieces about niche worlds. "The September Issue" is very much one of those films. If you read "The Devil Wears Prada" at a young age, this documentary will scratch a very specific itch in your brain. If you've ever had a job in an unconventional workplace that required way too much of your time and heart, this movie will take you right back, which could be a good thing or a bad thing. For me, this documentary kind of reminds me of a life I lived once and while I'm not in a hurry to go back, it's nice to visit. It also reminds me of my best friend Marissa who is the only person in my life who will have in depth conversations about fashion with me. We dress very differently, but we somehow have all of the same opinions. It's magic. Also I love the Anna Wintour gossip. She's a weirdo and I want to know everything.

And we're back to puff piece documentaries! If you like underdog competitions and consider yourself to be a snob or snob adjacent, "Somm" needs to get on your watch list because it will honestly teach you some cool stuff about the wine world. But at its very core, it's also basically a sports movie. You root for people to pass their fancy wine test, and if you're mean like me, you also root for people to fail their fancy wine test. It's specific and nerdy and so much fun. Also, everyone in this doc is a character. No one is boring. Every person in this movie would corner you at a party so they could talk down to you about wine and it rules. Those are (sadly) my kind of people.

This movie is a puzzle and I love every minute of it. I feel like you'll probably hear (read?) me say this over and over again in this list, but it's dripping in atmosphere. This is the perfect off-kilter thriller that is filled with weird moments that almost, kind of, verge on horror but pull back just before things get too grim. Also, I have a soft spot for movies that are really just about rich people problems, and this movie is a rich person problem shrouded in paranoia and dipped in acid. Everything about it is sinister. Now that I think about it, it's kind of like "Succession" but weirder and meaner. As a side note, I watched this movie in the basement of my high school friend Eli's house and now he's out in the world being a successful doctor. I hope you're having fun out there, man!

Unfortunately for me and my brain I was shown this movie at a very young age and then I read the book as an impressionable teen, so the moody Rochester is forever my lit/cinema crush. It's a curse! Anyway, "Jane Eyre" is the perfect gothic romance featuring Orson Welles as your sad boyfriend who loves to neg you and Joan Fontaine as an absolute babe with perfect hair and a tenacious spirit. The mystery at the heart of this unconventional love story is wonderfully unhinged and the fact that it's in black and white only makes it feel more goth and bleak and British. I used to watch this movie all the time with my grandmother, who is from England, and it definitely made me think that every house in England was a decrepit castle, which isn't not true.

Okay, so I was truly obsessed with "Kiki's Delivery Service" as a child but I had no idea who Hayao Miyazaki was or that he made any other movies. Cut to me being like 10 or 11 years old and watching "Spirited Away" for the first time, which owned so hard and made me obsessed, but again, I was too young to drive myself to Blockbuster and rent my own movies, so that filmography continued to go unexplored until I was in high school and a friend lent me her DVD copy of "Howl's Moving Castle." There are a lot of Miyazaki movies I love, but this one takes the cake. It perfectly juggles the more adult aspects of the characters while still giving into these wild childish scenes of pure joy. It's a real romp of a love story and the world building is top notch, both intimate and sprawling. I love a man who knows how to put an ensemble together.

I mean, I'm a Maryland girl so I believe there's a state bylaw that makes me legally obligated to love this movie, but I'd like to think I would love it even if I wasn't born with Old Bay blood or whatever. My younger, and much cooler, cousin Rachel convinced me to watch this movie with her when we were kids and we did 100% think it was real and we did think the Blair Witch would be coming for us. Besides eliciting real fear because we were real dumb, you cannot deny the pure unadulterated menace that ekes out of this movie. Even if you can't deal with the shaky cam style or the constant screaming (there is a lot of screaming but frankly wouldn't we all be screaming if we thought a witch was going to kill us?), from a business perspective, this movie was able to do so much with so little and that alone is impressive. Did it launch a thousand copycat found footage films? Sure. Do I love all of those movies too? Yes.

I'd like to start this off with the weird and perhaps surprising caveat that I've only seen half of the first season of "Hannibal" and it was fun but it's not "The Silence of the Lambs." And I don't care how many tumblr gif sets you make of Mads Mikkelsen, I'm not going to change my mind. Anyway, Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster own so hard in this movie, I could watch them act the hell off of each other for hours. Truly, the rest of the plot could go away and this movie would still rule, but its conventional thriller sensibilities combined with those one-off moments that feel legitimately transgressive, boggle my mind. This is another movie my mom introduced me to when I was a teenager, and I'll never forget my little brother asking to watch it with us and my mom aquiescing, just to send him out of the room when that scene in the prison happens. I grew up in a cool family.