Stephen King Releases His Top 10 All-Time Movies List, And There Is A Shocker

Author Stephen King released his top 10 movies list on Monday, including one choice that might scare up your curiosity.

The prolific novelist noted that he excluded four films based on his own stories, “Misery,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile” and “Stand by Me.” That suggests his 10 picks are actually part of a top 14.

King’s tastes ran classic. He chose many movies that might feel at home in other all-time rankings: “Casablanca,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Jaws,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “Double Indemnity,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

A comedy time-loop hit, “Groundhog Day,” also made the cut, along with the 1973 gangster movie that helped stoke director Martin Scorsese’s greatness, “Mean Streets.” King also included “The Getaway” from iconic action director Sam Peckinpah.

“Sorcerer,” director William Friedkin’s 1977 box-office bomb about desperate dudes transporting nitroglycerine in Latin America, rounded out the list. (King actually wrote it down first, but the titles were in no particular order.)

“Sorcerer?” you might ask. Same here.

“Sorcerer” later built a positive critical following among audiences. It got a huge thumbs-up from the King-snubbed director Quentin Tarantino, who called it a “masterpiece,” and from “The Godfather Part II” director Francis Ford Coppola, who said it was a “forgotten classic.”

That sure sounds better than Rex Reed’s mixed review back in the day: “I don’t know if there’s an audience for this kind of grueling, depressing experience, but Sorcerer might bring back the kind of moviegoer who used to cheer Humphrey Bogart. It’s tough and unyielding as a pair of brass knuckles.”

A movie based on King’s “The Long Walk” comes out on Friday. We’ll see if makes the author’s “excluding” part of the list in the years to come.