Jesus, how do you pick from such great and wonderful films made over history? However, I have to confess my personal tastes tend toward hybrid movies. Still, do I choose from
Ace in the Hole
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Thomas Edward Seymour's moving indie Everything Movies Alone
John Sayles' mystery/drama Lone Star
Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs
Peter Medak directing Marat/Sade
: (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade) But I think it really comes down to John Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood
I seem to be very bad at this "One Favorite" thing.
(1938)? My mother's favorite movie, shown to me at a very young age: 
(1969)? - which was high on my to-see list, but that I couldn't track down until three years ago. Practically every line of dialogue is a punchline.
(1940). Which is still and hopefully will be one of the funniest scripts delivered by two master actors. This is the movie that infused all of my adult comedy writing. 
, of course, was the highlight of the Summer of 1980. I already hero-worshiped Harrison Ford and Han Solo—what five-year-old didn’t, when Star Wars hit the screens in 1977? When Raiders was released, I saw it eight and a half times (that half-time was when my father stayed for the next show so we could watch the beginning again) in ten weeks. I lived and breathed Indiana Jones, dressed like him for Halloween, and experienced the first “uh oh” shudder of innocence lost when Temple of Doom followed it in 1984. Still, it’s a movie I cannot and will not turn off, when it pops up on television, commercials and all. It was the first Laserdisk I ever bought. So where the hell is our Blu-Ray? 
was a staple in our house, in the years before cable. We’d gather as a family to watch it whenever it came on television, cut up, panned and scanned, didn’t matter. The first time I saw it letterboxed, many years later, on Laserdisk, I was happy to report that I finally understood why those four villagers were so afraid of Calvera and his six men, and why the Magnificent Never-On-Screen-All-At-The-Same-Time were hired for defense. I knew at a young age that I was watching something special. Not just a western, which I loved. Sure, it took me many, many years to appreciate Brad Dexter (or even pick him out of a line-up), but it turned me on as a kid to 
and the rest of Kurosawa’s oeuvre (I may have been the only second grader to have ever seen this landmark film, as a matter of fact!). 
was my turning point, from film fan to film addict, first catching it at the Pittsburgh Playhouse during their repertory summer season, the year between my junior and senior year of high school. I lived in that cruddy theater, with its two carbon-stick projectors linked by an alarm to alert the projectionist. I had met up with my buddy John Bulevich to catch either 
or 
—regardless of memory-loss, I do know that whichever one it was had ended its run the day before. And Miller’s Crossing came as an unexpected delight. And while I had liked the Coen Brothers movies in the past (Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, so far), Miller’s Crossing came as a breakthrough because I understood it. I saw the Dashiell Hammet and Howard Hawks and John Huston influences. It was as if film history had revealed itself to me, through snappy dialogue and rich characters and, for the first time, I noticed direction. As well as editing, thanks to the wonderful tommy-gun scene with Albert Finney defending his life from would-be hit men. I knew I always wanted to write. With this movie alone, I understood that my life would be involved with movies, without question.