Sunday Top Ten - Moments from Casablanca

It's not hard to see why to this day Casablanca remains one of the most unanimously adored movies of all time. Humphrey Bogart is unforgettably appealing as the acerbic antihero whose hard-boiled shell conceals a heart full of compassion and nobility. Ingrid Bergman, radiantly beautiful as always, plays wonderfully off of him with great tenderness and emotional nuance. The script is one of the finest ever written, striking a perfect balance between romance, melodrama, and humour, filled with more quotable dialogue than any film ever produced. Producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz constructed a distinctive and exotic atmosphere with elegant photography and production design. All in all, it's close to being THE perfect screen romance. After the cut are ten moments that always come to mind when I think about this movie.

Sunday Top Ten - Best Picture winners

Oscar season has been well underway for weeks at this point, and yet I confess and apologize that I've been rather lax on Oscar conversation in this space. Life has been hectic as of late. But while we still have a number of weeks to go before December reveals the really big hopefuls, I figured now is as good a time as any to dust of the corner of my brain that promotes awards discussion by dedicating an installment of Sunday Top Ten to the best of the Best – Best Pictures, that is.

This sort of list is different for everyone, but I'll bet one common theme is how difficult it is for everyone to narrow their list down to ten. Easy as it is to complain about Oscar's taste, they've picked a lot of damn good movies over the last 80-some-odd years. In my humble opinion, the cream of the crop are:

Sunday Top Ten - Movie endings

It's hard to separate a movie from its ending. All films intend to end on their strongest note. Necessarily, all the great films have great endings. I could easily replicate my top ten movies of all time and make a strong case for them being my top ten endings of all time, but for the sake of variety, I limited myself to only one of those on this list. Besides, there are plenty of films out there for which the endings speak such perfection that they stand out above the endings of films I actually like more.

It should go without saying, some spoilers and all that ensue: