Twin Peaks makes the top five

Deciding on my list of the top five movies ever made is something I take far more seriously than is warranted. Nobody else cares, or should, but I have thought about it a lot over the years, and have become certain in my verdicts. 

They say your tastes are defined by a very specific age in your life, when you're a very young adult and figuring out what kind of person you are going to be. And they're right because my personal list of the top five favourite films hasn't changed in decades. It was always an easy list to decide upon and has been the same since the 1990s.

(The top 10 is much more flexible and has never been set in stone, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later come in and out, and Rocky Horror Picture Show and Die Hard have always been floating around in there, along with the best westerns. It's a fluid list.)

O Lucky Man! usually tops my top five, because it's always nice to have an absolute favourite film that is slightly unique, and I watched it again last year and it's still fucking awesome in what it says and sings; I have never got over the buzzing feeling of transcendence that I've got every time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey; Withnail and I has the best quotes of any movie ever; and the original Dawn of the Dead warped my mind right at the moment it needed to be warped.

The last spot was slightly flexible, but was always a western and usually a Clint. It was mainly The Searchers for the moment where the Duke's voice cracks at the end, but on any different day it could be the Outlaw Josey Wales for the words of iron speech; or Unforgiven for the final 20 minutes of wrath; or the Good, The Bad and the Ugly for its soaring magnificence.

But I've been thinking that list recently, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that while the westerns are all brilliant and still lingering in the more vague top 10, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is most definitely enshrined in that top five.

I saw it soon after it came out, and it's always spoken to me. It would be another five or six years before I actually got the chance to watch the TV show, and I was frequently lost by the dense plotting of the feature film. But it was such an intense experience it felt intoxicating, and I was greatly unimpressed by the critical indifference at the time (Kim Newman was the only writer I ever saw who captured what I felt about it).

I had that soundtrack on my walkman as I walked around town at night for years and years, and I got a real indication of a life in that darkness. I watched the film over and over, and can quote an embarrassing amount of it, and I finally saw it on a cinema screen for the first time last year.

It was the brilliance of that screening, and the full body chill that it gave me, that has now cemented it in my top five forever. A lot of the original show and The Return are staggeringly brilliant, and Fire Walk with Me is part of a vast tapestry of twisted genius, but it's also a genius work of cinema on its own.

I'm never gonna get vox popped by Letterbox, and that's fortunate because I'd be fucked if they did because they only want four films and I can't get it down that to just four. But those two hours in the town of Twin Peaks will always be one of them.