Aaaaaaaaarrrrrghhhh difficult choice!
This year I managed to slightly shorten my movies watchlist, and I liked so many of them (some for better, others for the trash) that I would be in need of more than a top three rank!
I’ll try to restrain myself!

Phantom of the Paradise (1974):

or the involuntary queer agenda

“WIINNSLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.”
William Finley is epic. He is a giant here.
He manages to be the most wet, self-absorbed, most pathetic, saddest creature of all.

This movie was an incredible find after watching it with friends, and instantly became my top movie of the year.
Brian de Palma created a campy and glam masterpiece crowded by exaggerated characters that feel taken out from a pulp comic book. There’s drama. There’s lipstick made with glitter (hazardous microplastics. Help). There’s innovative shootings, photograpy. Jessica Harper!!!!!!! Catchy tunes! Art unfairly stolen without the artist consent! The artist gets!!!! MAD!!!!! Blood, murders (?), funky scenography and tunes! Again!
It’s impossible not to get absorbed by this deliciously whimsical and rock n’ roll tale.

Easy Rider (1969):

Big downer and I mean it in every most terribly beautiful way.

I watched it around december because I needed inspiration for a comic I’m trying to make for my college thesis and since my work touches the road trip genre I thought to give the movie a try! Majorly due to the “old folks” around my family who saw/lived the films that came out around the 60s/70s that always brought up Easy Rider when talking about films that sculpted a specific slice of generation; it was often cited as an unmissable film of the “on the road” genre to watch, so I took courage and saw it (in vhs!! The audio was wonderfully crispy probably to age or far too many rewatches :’))
What’s there to say. It’s terrible ( in the sense of magnificent and sublime) how this film can so brutally and bluntly portray the envy, The Envy that is felt by those who live chained to the approval of a hypercapitalist society and their mindwashed peers, towards the freedom of the outcasts, the same ones they have been taught to deeply despise since childhood.
Because
Because today the danger is the girl and woman that speak their minds, tomorrow two guys dressed and with hair styled in a certain way. They become so inappropriate and repulsive that they must be moved away. Thinking about it, they should be killed instead. Cleansed away. But the problem was the unneeded chatter. The problem were the long air and wrinkled attire. Because the stranger is danger. The change brings out freaks that stains the purity of our respectable society.

I’m still not over this movie. Maybe I’m seeing too much? Maybe the way this 2026 begun makes me look back too much for my sanity to this movie?
I’m not well. I’m not. Per niente davvero.

Please watch Easy Rider.

Paul (2011):

Another movie I saw for inspo for my comic!
And.
Madonna mia santissima.
What a beautiful discovery. I’ve never heard of Paul before one of my friends brought it up few months ago.
After watching it, instantly it went in the heartfelt category of movies (of my own creation) where: nerdy and unwanted groups of people unexpectedly save the world just because they care about things in a sincere and anarchic way. Being nerd (or neurodivergent) is part of the fullfilment of the hero journey. The other film I’ve put in the group is Ready Player One, but that is a story for another time.
It’s a cheerful movie. Deeply desecrating. Contains zaza and jokes on aliens’ balls. 10/10 Now I remember that I want to see it again. It has a significant amount of quotes and jokes referring to various science fiction series and films.

HONORABLE TERRY GILLIAM MENTIONS BECAUSE I CAN’T RESIST (I watched both this summer and I’ve been destroyed in a moltitude of tiny particles)

Brazil (1985):

I needed a few weeks to recover from watching this. I was fortunate to see Mr Gilliam live at the Cinema sotto le stelle, an event that takes place in Bologna during the summer, where a huge screen is built in the city’s main square and for a month the films are shown freely in their original languages. Sometimes it’s the directors who present their films, and with Mr Gilliam was exactly the case. He talked about how he had used the prestige brought to him by his previous film to make this one, being that, if the studios had ever discovered the real aim of the film, they would never have allowed him to produce it in the first place.

What we have here? We have breathtaking sets and miniatures sets. Incredible makeups and costumes. Terribly bureaucratic dystopia. BOB HOSKINS???? BUTCHY KIM GREIST????
Several cuts to the film exists, including one with a “happy ending” explicitly wanted by the then head of Universal. Here’s an article that speak about the Brazil’s cuts whole crazy mess. (X)

Time Bandits (1981):

I found Times Bandits a bit dispersive. There are often bursts of action at the same time that a main character makes a witty joke that is important for the lore. You want to understand what was said. You get distracted, the moment you catch the joke the characters are already somewhere else saying others things while doing incredible stunts and explosions happen, and this occur MULTIPLE TIMES DURING THE MOVIE. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood when I saw it, I should see it a second time.

I have an intense need to put Terry Gilliam into a specific group of directors that are able to pour a staining and oozing campy cuntyness in the style of their sets. I’d lock him in a little room along with Guillermo del Toro and Jim Henson. Who knows what they could have created together…
Maybe Wes Anderson too, but!!! He’s already a different kind of cuntyness.
Gilliam’s imaginary worlds like his dystopian ones are complete worlds for me. They have a specific worldbuilding that you could learn to understand as by osmosis just by seeing the sophistication with which a mass of rocks was designed: its exaggeratedly fake colors, like the lighting of a fairytale world would lighten a rock; an immaginary rock, that’s very real in your eye; its porous surface that perfectly cuts through the devastated scenery that seem to exists only and only to better points out those same rocks. Then a massive sandalled foot of a giant emerging from the depths of the sea crushes the rocks and casually walks away. The giant has an entire boat on his head.

Time Bandits is a must watch. One time in a life at least.