Gene Hackman | T.Z. Barry

With 2025 winding down, it is time for my annual list of the best movies at least a decade old that I watched this past year. Once again, the list is somewhat random and arbitrary, based on the movies I happened to choose to watch (or re-watch) over the course of the past year. The films are sorted into five tiers and listed alphabetically within each tier. (In case you missed it, I made a separate list for the best horror movies I watched in 2025.)

Tier 1: Cinematic Masterpieces

The Conversation (1974) directed by Francis Ford Coppola
I saw this movie years ago when I first started studying screenwriting and decided to watch all the greatest films from history. I remember being blown away by The Conversation at the time, but over the years I had forgotten the plot details, so I had been planning to re-watch it. The recent passing of Gene Hackman propelled me to do so—and I feel the same way as the first time around—that it is an absolute cinematic masterpiece. As the title implies, The Conversation is built entirely around a conversation that Hackman’s character (a surveillance technician) records. A gripping noir plot follows, with twists and turns, but equally fascinating is the psychological study of Hackman’s character, Harry Caul—a lonely man who devotes his life to perfecting his craft of audio surveillance and wiretapping—but as a result, he feels great guilt for the repercussions of what his clients do with his tapes, and he lives in constant paranoia of who might be listening to him.

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1. Jeremiah Johnson [1972] – Directed by Sydney Pollack

I would say they don’t make movies like this anymore, except they did—at least once with The Revenant in 2015, which was clearly influenced by Jeremiah Johnson. This is a powerful film, so different from most of the CGI-reliant movies made today. You can tell the cast and crew were actually there on location in the remote wilderness of Utah filming this movie—and simply seeing that natural landscape on the big screen was captivating. It makes you realize just how extraordinary the pioneers who ventured out West were, considering the lengths it took to survive mother nature. The film also portrays the tragic violence that took place between humans—the pioneers and the Native Americans. Sometimes I feel the desire to become like Jeremiah Johnson and move out to the remote mountains, build my own cabin, and live a quiet life alone in nature to read and write—but only sometimes.

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