Oren Moverman, who appears as a visitor to the theater in Vanya on 42nd Street, is the cowriter and director of the 2010 Oscar-nominated The Messenger. He served as a screenwriter on I’m Not There, Married Life, and Jesus’ Son, among other movies. His new film, Rampart, cowritten with novelist James Ellroy, opened on February 10, 2012.
Like any top ten list in any discipline by anyone privileged enough to be asked to catalog his professional indulgences for public viewing, the following list is deeply meaningful and truly meaningless. The films listed below (in no particular order) seemed at one point or another to be more important to me than life, more consequential than anything happening outside the theater, more instructive than any parent. Years later, on second, third, and fourth viewings, these films read to me like romanticized lost and refound treasures, frozen in time flawlessly, inspiring, passionate, betraying renewed enthusiasm with every click of Play, while our own days and months in the “real” world, outside the frame, tick-tock away mercilessly. These films do not keep time, they are laughing at us; they go on, we don’t—how many more screenings do we have left?
Ten seems like an awkward number, stretching from the biblical fairy tale of the commandments to a sadly modern concept of indexing winners and losers. A brave man would reject the number ten; I am not that man, although I did list eleven. I can honestly say that the Criterion Collection contains many of my favorite films, many of the films that opened my eyes to the world at large and the possibilities of filmmaking. I offer only fragments of personal memories; to me, nothing academic is ever at the root of love of movies—it’s all sentiment and, now more than ever, sentimental . . .
Biography via Criterion.
