Raiders of the Lost Ark

Why did it have to be snakes

Raiders came out the year I turned thirteen. And while I loved it at the time (owning both the soundtrack and the movie-on-record) I left it off the Top 10 list I compiled just five years later. I have no idea what I could have been thinking. You could consider it your favorite movie of all time and yet still somehow it is better than you remember. The combined forces of Lucas, Spielberg, Kasdan, Ford, and Williams at this precise moment in their careers spawned a work that feels at once the product of precision manufacturing and yet also as if they were making it up as they went along. Endlessly quotable, but with long stretches of wordless cinematic action. Epic and intimate. Thrilling and emotional. Like a 115-minute perfect rock song. I fear I am underselling the movie at this point. And I have gone too far without crediting Karen Allen, with her tiny frame, freckled face, and a smile that could crack the camera lens. Her hard-drinking Marion left a mark on a century of Hollywood’s portrayals of women with one sudden punch to the jaw. The film’s climax retains its capacity to haunt viewers' dreams, and to subvert their expectations—by having the hero who we have watched leap into danger, across chasms, and onto moving vehicles, defeat the villains by standing tied to a post with his eyes shut tight, laid humble before the literal wrath of God. —Chris Ereneta