Heat director joins Letterboxd and shares his 14 favorite movies – and, predictably, he has great taste

Following in the footsteps of Mike Flanagan and Martin Scorsese, Heat and Miami Vice director Michael Mann is the latest filmmaker to make an account on film review social media site Letterboxd.

The director quickly made a list of his top flicks, titled “14 Favorite Films in no particular order (except Potemkin)“. As well as plenty of classics – like Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent epic Battleship Potemkin, in the list’s top spot – from legendary directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick, there are a few newer releases in there, too, made by filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos, Kathryn Bigelow, and Guillermo del Toro. 

The full list of titles that made the cut were Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010), Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010), Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964), Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934),  John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023), Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), and del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

Each title has a note from Mann singing its praises. Of Poor Things, he writes, “Wildly, expressionistically torqued. Kafka, if he was droll. Brilliant.” For Pan’s Labyrinth, meanwhile, the director says it’s “a real favorite of mine. Fairytales are not behavioristic, they’re very Freudian. They use symbols, particularly youth. Bruno Bettelheim did a lot of work on the nature of fairytales. As in a dream, fairytales have the power to invade our consciousness on many levels as we take it in. That’s the particular genius that Guillermo del Toro has.” 

Mann’s last movie was Ferrari, released in 2023, which starred Adam Driver as car manufacturing boss Enzo Ferrari. The film follows Ferrari over the pivotal summer of 1957 as he prepares his racing team for the Mille Miglia and grieves the loss of his son a year prior. 

Heat 2, which will act as both a prequel and a sequel to Mann’s 1995 crime movie, is also in the works, with Driver and Austin Butler rumored to be playing the roles taken on by Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer in the original.

While we wait for more news on Heat 2, check out our guide to the best upcoming movies on the way in 2024.