As often as we sit in theaters listening to characters talk to each other, we can’t forget about the moments where we, the audience, are talked to. Narration is a tricky thing to do well, and we can’t get Morgan Freeman to lay down voice over tracks on EVERY movie. But when it does work, narration can really elevate a film in a number of ways. How many ways you ask? We think there’s at least ten… So here are our 10 favorite uses of narration on film of all time. 

That’s a weirdly difficult phrase to turn into a headline, btw…

There is of course the nostalgic retrospective voice over you get from Stand By Me or A Christmas Story, and the fourth wall breaking, direct address of Deadpool and High Fidelity.  Films like Wim Wenders fantastic Wings of Desire or Alphaville offer us inner access to characters we might not understand another way, while Paul Thomas Anderson and no relation Wes Anderson have a knack for pulling off a disconnected omniscient narrator. If you’ve got 20-something minutes to spare, we’ll cover all of these and like 100 other examples of what Clint likes to call “the good stuff.”

The Picks:
10 - Retrospective - The Virgin Suicides (1999) dir. Sofia Coppola
9 - Realtime - Fight Club (1999) dir. David Fincher
8 - Inner Access - La Noire de… (1966) dir. Ousmane Sembene
7 - Omniscient - The Big Lebowski (1998) dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
6 - Group - 20th Century Women (2016) dir. Mike Mills
5 - Unreliable - Last Year at Marienbad (1961) dir. Alain Resnais
4 - Sourced on Screen - Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
3 - Unsourced on Screen - Days of Heaven (1978) dir. Terrence Malick
2 - Film Noir - Sunset Boulevard (1950)
1 - Narration is the Whole Point - Blue (1993) dir. Derek Jarman

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