My Ten Most Rewatched Movies
(If I’ve listened to an album only once, that album is, essentially, a failure. The same isn’t true of movies. There are movies I love, including a few of my very favorites, that I’ve never—or at least rarely—felt the desire to watch again. But if repeatability isn’t an essential cinematic virtue, it is a cinematic virtue. Here, then, are the ten movies with the greatest measure of that virtue, arranged approximately in order of how many times I’ve watched them from beginning to end. I’ve restricted myself to movies I’ve watched regularly as an adult, leaving out those that I saw over and over again as a kid either because my family owned the VHS tape (The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Up the Creek) or because they were in heavy rotation when we began subscribing to cable (Grease 2). From the evidence, it would appear that I have a taste for action movies of the streamlined, no-nonsense, one-good-guy-and-a-bunch-of-bad-guys type, as well as high-concept comedies that sooner or later reveal the tender heart they’ve been concealing, with a few notable exceptions.)
Groundhog Day (directed by Harold Ramis, 1993)
Die Hard (directed by John McTiernan, 1988)
Office Space (directed by Mike Judge, 1999)
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (directed by John Hughes, 1987)
John Wick (directed by Chad Stahelski, 2014)
Taken (directed by Pierre Morel, 2008)
Running on Empty (directed by Sidney Lumet, 1988)
The Thing (directed by John Carpenter, 1982)
Ponette (directed by Jacques Doillon, 1996)
A History of Violence (directed by David Cronenberg, 2005)
— February 18, 2021