Danielle Ryan's Favorite Movies Of All Time

My dad helped shape a lot of my early movie tastes, and one movie we constantly watched together was The Blues Brothers. The John Landis-helmed musical comedy was based on a Saturday Night Live skit made famous by stars Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Aykroyd and Belushi play Elwood and "Joliet" Jake Blues, the titular Blues brothers. Jake is released from a three-year prison stint only to discover that the Catholic orphanage where he and Elwood were raised is in danger of being shut down. They decide to get their band back together for a massive charity concert to raise money for the orphanage. Along the way they share big musical numbers with such greats as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and Chaka Khan.

I have family in and around Chicago, and watching The Blues Brothers became a familial rite of passage for all of us. The music is outstanding, the comedy is gut-busting, and my hero Carrie Fisher stars as Jake's jilted fiancée who tries to kill him after he left her at the altar. I will never forget what it felt like as an eight-year-old obsessed with Princess Leia to see her fire a rocket launcher. It was glorious.

I know Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about a musician from East Berlin who undergoes a botched sex change, is problematic. The movie, based on the off-Broadway musical of the same name, stars writer/director John Cameron Mitchell as the titular Hedwig. There are layers and layers of discourse about transgender characters in film to be had here, but I can't deny the impact the movie had on my life.

I was a young, confused queer kid whose only understanding of breaking gender norms came from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.Hedwig's story, about feeling trapped in a body you didn't quite want, resonated deeply with me. The film's overall message, that you don't need another person to be complete, was also a huge help in surviving my teenage angst. Within the context of its time, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a groundbreaking step forward. It will always hold a special place in my heart, and the soundtrack still positively slaps.

I'm a big Kill Bill fan, so when I discovered that the Female Prisoner Scorpion films served as inspiration for director Quentin Tarantino, I had to seek them out. The first one I was able to find was the third entry, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable. (The title is also sometimes translated as Female Convict Scorpion, for what it's worth.) Beast Stable continues the story of Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) after she escapes from prison and is on the run. The Female Prisoner Scorpion films are Japanese exploitation and are a take on women's prison films, so they're full of graphic content. Matsushima's story is a rape-revenge narrative at its heart, so prepare for some seriously traumatic scenes.

The Female Prisoner Scorpion movies are all pretty bleak, but Beast Stable gives Matsushima her first real friend in the form of a sex worker who takes her in. Matsushima is played to perfection by Kaji, who also sings the haunting themes for the films. She doesn't speak much, but when she does, it's worth paying attention. The cinematography and direction are out of this world. There's a lot of experimental shots with bright colors and unusual lighting that are reminiscent of both Expressionist and Giallo cinema. This is a beautiful bloody ballet of a movie that deserves a place in film history.

I've always had a soft spot for DIY-filmmakers. From Robert Rodriguez to Kevin Smith, these scrappy creatives made me feel like I could make my own movies. None had quite the impact as Sam Raimi, however, and his 1981 debut feature The Evil Dead is everything I love about truly independent filmmaking.

Bruce Campbell stars as Ash Williams, who would go on to be a chainsaw-wielding, one-liner dropping action-horror hero. Here, he's just a scared college-age kid who accidentally summons the forces of hell while on a trip with his friends in the woods. Campbell's physical comedy in Evil Dead II almost edged it out over the original, but there's something special about the homemade grunginess here. Sure, you can see the seams in the costumes, but it doesn't matter because The Evil Dead is still really freaking scary. It's played straight-faced, without any of the horror-comedy elements of later entries, and it still gives me the creeps. Hail to the king, baby.

What can I say about Mad Max: Fury Road that hasn't already been said? George Miller's 2015 post-apocalyptic odyssey is one of the few films I will call "perfect." I love all of the Mad Max films (yes, even Tina with the big hair in Beyond Thunderdome), but Fury Road is a feat of filmmaking. Charlize Theron's character, Imperator Furiosa, is the kind of badass action heroine I longed for growing up. I mean, c'mon, this movie features man chained to a moving vehicle, playing a guitar that shoots fire. How could it not be perfect?

Writer-director Robert Eggers made a movie that feels like it condenses everything I learned in American Lit and Film 101 into a singular vision of madness. The Lighthouse mixes mythology with the mundane, telling the story of Prometheus through two lighthouse keepers trapped on an island together. In the script, the two men are named "Young" (Robert Pattinson) and "Old" (Willem Dafoe), in part because it is a story of changing identities. It also follows in the Promethean vein, in which the young Prometheus stole light from the elder sea god, Proteus. Similarly, Young wishes to work in the lamp of the lighthouse, but Old keeps him away from the light.

Eggers and his co-writer, his brother Max, based all of the dialogue on scores of diaries and journals of lighthouse keepers, called "wickies." There's an authenticity to the dialogue, even when they're yelling about one another's farts or cooking skills. He also shot the film on old lenses, and did all of the special visual effects in-camera. Watching The Lighthouse with the director's commentary on is this cinephile's dream.

Ridley Scott's 1982 film about a group of renegade androids on the run and the Blade Runner who hunts them was the movie that made me fall in love with movies. I was 12 the first time I saw it, and I remember asking my dad why there were "black bars" on the screen (for letterboxing). It felt like my first "grown-up" movie, and I immediately fell in love with its science fiction setting, beautiful cinematography, and compelling characters. I already had a serious fondness for android stories thanks to Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so this was the logical next step.Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford as Deckard, a Blade Runner who hunts down rogue replicants (a fancy word for androids) for a living. It's only when he meets the mysterious replicant Rachel (Sean Young) that he begins to question his work. Loosely based on the Phillip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner is a thought-provoking dive into our ideas about sentience. Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah steal every scene as two of the renegade replicants who escaped and are looking for their creator. There are multiple available cuts of Blade Runner, but I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it before start with The Director's Cut. Trust me, no one needs to hear Ford's voiceover from the theatrical version.

I love movies, so it makes sense that a movie about movies and the people who love them would be my #1. Perverse provocateur John Waters wrote and directed this ode to cinema's misfits, about an independent movie crew that become a cult. Cecil B. Demented stars Stephen Dorff as the titular Cecil, a renegade indepedent movie director who convinces his crew to kidnap movie star Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) to star in his movie. They start acting as "cinema terrorists," attacking a screening of a Patch Addams sequel, holding a Baltimore film convention party hostage, and eventually crashing the set of Forrest Gump 2. By the time their rampage is over, people are dead and families are broken, but cinematic history has been made.

Cecil B. Demented is Waters at his filthy, subversive best. Like all of his films, Cecil B. Demented loves the very people it's skewering. Waters has a clear fondness for misfits, and each of the many unusual Sprocketholes (the name Cecil gives to the crew) are depicted with love. As a teenager, I really identified with Cecil, because he spoke to my own punk, non-conformist ideals. As an adult, I realized that Waters is poking fun at himself with Cecil, and that it's possible to take movies too seriously. Cecil B. Demented is crass, funny, and sometimes sweet, but most of all, it's a perfect tribute to all of the weirdos out there who love movies more than anything.