Academy member Rebecca Hall is known for her acting work in films like The Town, The Prestige and Christine. Hall made her directorial debut with Passing, which is now available on Netflix. Below she shares five of her favorite films and what they mean to her.
It contains both the absurd and the romantic and makes sense of the old adage that cinema is the stuff of “dreams.”
Probably the most impossibly beautiful film about a group of possibly ugly people.
I couldn’t believe that a film could do what The Red Shoes did. For me it’s a horror film. It gave me nightmares as a child that I’ll never forget but also remains a reminder that the only limit to filmmaking is your own imagination.
One of the films I saw as a child that made me fall in love with cinema. At once transportive and haunting. Jimmy Stewart is brilliant and boldly unlikable. As a depiction of masculinity in crisis I found myself every bit as obsessed with him as he is with Kim Novak’s character.
A perfectly written and constructed film. There is not a single piece of casting that doesn’t sing. When I was 11 years old I watched it nearly every night for a year. I loved this erudite, hot mess of a group of grown-ups, and wanted to be a part of it—for better or worse.