So..do you have ONE FAVORITE movie?

To answer your first question in a word: No.

Now, more words: impossible. I couldn't narrow down to ten favorite movies. Or twenty. Maybe fifty seventy-five, a hundred, if I were really pushed. And even then, I resist the concept of "favorites." I usually characterize it as something along the lines of those I revisit most often. Maybe that's hair-splitting. But even among, say a hundred, it would vary: some days, I'm in the mood for Sunset Blvd; on another, The Best Years Of Our Lives; on still another, it might be an Astaire-Rogers or a Hitchcock or Chinatown or Ballada o soldate. Or any one of dozens of others. 

To the second question (from which, by the stated conditions, I haven't disqualified myself), I'll put it this way: I recently participated in a thread on Film General posing the question of whether The Exorcist was the scariest movie ever made; I stated that there probably ain't no such animal. It's impossible to quantify. Same would apply to a "best movie ever made" proposal. 

If I'm being difficult, apologies, and pay me no mind.

Favourite



Best? No such thing, but I could live with

I do not understand. Why is the best movie ever made not allowed to be our favorite? I would have thought that there is a fighting chance that it would be. Please clarify.

La donna e mobile  

I have about 1500 movies in my collection. Only two I rate at 10.0

One of them was my favorite movie at 10 years old. The other became my favorite movie at age 19.

They have held those positions for over 60 years. I am the Greyfriars Bobby of cinephiles.

I must admit to having a brief infatuation with "The 400 Blows" when I was only a little older than the protagonist. I watched it the other night for the first time in many decades and would not rate it anywhere near as highly these days. But then I have turned my back on Nouvelle Vague generally since discovering classic French films of the preceding decades.

One way I am not so changeable is that movies I liked as a child, with very few exceptions, are still movies I like. I fell so hard for Holiday Inn at age ten that I would not leave the tv for Christmas dinner, lest I miss Fred Astaire’s firecracker dance. 60 years later it still seems one of his best films, with a very funny script 8n which he and Bing play characters that are consistant, and one of Fred’s best solos.


Those great Million Dollar Movies shown on TV gave me a lot of great first views of classics and most of them are still high on my list.

I could have written nearly every word of that post myself, marshamae , so similar to mine are the feelings and experiences you described. Although I may perceive weaknesses that escaped me as a kid, once I like a film, it tends to stay liked.

One particular holiday season in my youth, I was watching Holiday Inn the day after seeing White Christmas on another channel. My father walked through the room and asked, "Didn't you see this just yesterday?" I explained they were two different movies, and he said, "It's got Bing Crosby and he's singing White Christmas." That was all he needed, ordering, "Go outside and get some exercise."

Since we lived in Southern CA, it's not as cruel as it sounds to throw a kid out of a warm house into the dead of winter. 

Hedgehog In The Fog is an enchanting animated short film, made in 1975 by Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn. Never having used a computer, his work has nevertheless created films which are recognized as masterpieces of world animation.
The inspirational Hedgehog in the Fog was ranked No. 1 in a poll at the 2003 Laputa Animation Festival where 140 animators from around the world voted for it as the best animated film of all time.

The film concerns a small hedgehog (voiced by Maria Vinogradova) who every evening journeys out to see his friend the bear for an idyllic night of drinking tea and counting the stars. On this particular eventful evening, the hedgehog notices a horse up ahead surrounded by a strange fog and is concerned that the horse will perish should she become engulfed by the fog. Hedgehog ventures into the thick fog, intending to talk to the horse, only to lose his own bearings, he becomes trapped immersed in the pale and indistinct world…

Hedgehog in the Fog tells a deceptively simple story, one that can be enjoyed by all ages on many levels. Every detail within however feels as it could be a symbol for something far greater. With an unsettling melancholy and beguiling eeriness, the cuteness of the small protagonist and the overpowering magnitude of his surroundings shrouded in a nocturnal haze, creates at once a frightening, ethereal and beautifully sombre scene.

Above all, it's an intensely enigmatic piece. There is something profoundly Zen – the path of knowledge by rejecting knowledge, open to much interpretation, on the question of the films meaning, each time the answer could be different. Hedgehogs own philosophical reflection on his adventure sits among my favourite moments on film.   
A classic and much treasured film favourite, touching and timeless in appeal ...