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Wed 14 January 2026 17:45, UK
It’s impossible to say which movie deserves to be called the greatest of all time, because it’s such an open-ended question. It can also be equally difficult for anyone to name one movie as the single greatest film they’ve ever seen, but Matt Damon has no such qualms.
Whenever someone gets asked for their favourite feature, there are usually two outcomes: a title either rolls off the tongue instantly, or you suddenly forget everything you’ve ever seen and stand there in a daze, wondering why you can’t remember so much as one.
Since he’s spent most of his adult life in the public eye, though, Damon has listed a few. He’s even got a favourite Ben Affleck movie after praising his best friend’s “wonderful performance” in The Way Back, a picture he “strongly advise people go check out,” so he clearly isn’t one for playing favourites.
He’s been obsessed with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin’s antics in Midnight Run for as long as he can remember, formed a core memory when he and Affleck caught Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction on the silver screen for the first time, and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove left an indelible impression.
The Academy Award-winning screenwriter went so far as to label Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as “perfect,” which would have been heartily endorsed and approved by his Adjustment Bureau and Oppenheimer co-star and long-time friend, Emily Blunt, but that isn’t his pick for the cream of the cinematic crop.
How do we know there’s a solitary picture he’d call his one and only favourite movie of all time? Because he told Cindy Pearlman for her book, which was quite literally titled You Gotta See This: More Than 100 of Hollywood’s Best Reveal and Discuss Their Favourite Films, so it would be misleading if he was lying.
“I watch The Godfather Part II at least once a year,” Damon explained. “Oh god, I like everything about it. The acting is so good that I set there and wonder if I could ever do anything that great. You look at Pacino and Brando and think, ‘I’ve seen this film a hundred times’, but it’s fresh every single time.”
Weirdly, despite claiming that he rewatches it annually and his cumulative viewings have exceeded three figures, you’d think Damon would have noticed by now that Marlon Brando isn’t in it. He was supposed to be, but his ongoing disputes with the studio saw him back out of a planned one-day shoot for a flashback sequence, forcing Francis Ford Coppola into a last-minute rewrite.
Either he’s absorbed the first two seminal Godfather flicks into a timeless whole, or Robert De Niro was so convincing as the younger Vito Corleone that he thought he was watching Brando reincarnated. Either way, The Godfather II was, is, and will no doubt remain the actor’s all-time favourite.
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