7. Inherent Vice
Because: It's an ode to the poetry of cinema, to the idea that great art doesn't make you THINK, it makes you FEEL. One of Paul Thomas Andersons most polarising films, Inherent Vice split the vote on whether it was a masterwork or a mess. Im firmly in the former camp. The things commonly suggested as problems within the film its convoluted plot, its lackadaisical tone, its refusal to provide any concrete resolutions are actually what make it a classic. Inherent Vice adheres to the idea of cinematic poetry, a free-flowing film that goes where it goes and does what it does without feeling the need to provide answers, content with just luxuriating in a time and place and its textures and its people. The films dense narrative, itself derived from the even denser one in Thomas Pynchons source novel of the same name, is noir opacity passed off as confused stoner logic, a brilliant subversion that places Inherent Vice alongside Robert Altmans Long Goodbye in the canon of great Californian surf-noir. Modern movie audiences are obsessed with finding the answers to films, to solving them. Inherent Vice does away with all that because it understands that most of the great questions in life are unanswerable, that the beauty is not in the answer, but in the trip to find it. The best films are not concerned with what they are about, but rather how they are about it, and Inherent Vice is testament to that. Imbued with the slow-drip death of the 60s (which filtered out into 70s anxiety), the film is a rumination on the effect a certain time had on a certain place and how it affected a certain psyche. Its a decade-long detective story with no answers to the ethereal questions it asks.