Seven Samurai
Rules of the Game
The General
Tokyo Story or substitute Late Spring
Persona
The 400 Blows
M
Lawrence of Arabia
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Nights of Cabiria
Jason you made my day
Top tens of all time are impossibly silly enterprises there simply are too many great films for even a top 1,000 to not leave essential films off. That said I will offer my own silly top fifty films because I can’t imagine excluding any of them.
Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith- 1919)
Greed (Erich Von Stroheim- 1924)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein- 1925)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer- 1928)
The Man With The Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov- 1929)
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo- 1934)
The Goddess (Yonggang Wu- 1934)
Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir- 1939)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks- 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles- 1941)
Cat People (Jacques Tourner- 1942)
At Land (Maya Deren- 1944)
Paisan (Roberto Rossellini- 1946)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu- 1949)
Sansho The Baliff (Kenji Mizoguchi- 1954)
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray- 1955)
Pyassa (Guru Dutt- 1957)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock- 1958)
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard- 1960)
The Cloud-Capped Sky (Ritwik Ghatak- 1960)
Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima- 1960)
Viridiana (Luis Bunuel- 1961)
The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad- 1963)
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti- 1963)
Muriel (Alain Resnais- 1963)
The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis- 1963)
Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha- 1964)
Barren Lives (Nelson Pierra Dos Santos- 1965)
Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard 1965)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo- 1966)
Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Passolini- 1967)
Out One: Noli Me Tengere (Jacques Rivette- 1971)
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky- 1972)
A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavettes- 1974)
Ceddo- (Ousmane Sembene 1977)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett- 1977)
In a Year of 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder- 1978)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg- 1983)
Vagabond (Agnes Varda- 1985)
The Horse Thief (Tian Zhaungzhaung 1986)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse- 1987)
Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata- 1988)
The Last of England (Derek Jarman- 1988)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang- 1991)
Destiny- (Youssef Chahine- 1997)
Flowers of Shanghai (Hou-Hsaio Hsein 1998)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami 1999)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul- 2004)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sisako- 2006)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke- 2006)
Pretty good list.
My top 10 Favorite Films of all time:
1. Brokeback Mountain
2. Network
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. The Searchers
5. City Lilghts
6. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
7. Hud
8. Touch of Evil
9. Amelie
10. Brief Encounter
wow how can you pick? It even depends on what mood im in.
Paths of Glory
Wooden Crosses
2001
Anatomy of a Murder
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward …
Beauty and the Beast-1946
the Crow
Frankenstein
Kwaidan
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
…..i think…
no wait what about to have and have not, or the Big Sleep?!! oh heck
The Rules of the Game- Renoir (1939)
The Swimmer- Perry (1968)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie- Cassavetes (1976)
The Brown Bunny- Gallo (2004)
Fists in the Pockets- Beilocchio (1965)
The Vanishing- Sluizer (1988)
Peeping Tom- Powell (1960)
Last Tango in Paris- Bertolucci (1972)
Hail Mary- Godard (1985)
The Passenger- Antonioni (1975)
Evil Dead II
Touch of Evil
Chimes at Midnight
Notorious
Love and Death
Bride of Frankenstein
Crimes and Misdemeanors
The Empire Strikes Back
The King of Comedy
Rabbit Fire / Rabbit Seasoning / Duck! Rabbit, Duck!
Impossible to do a top 10 list to little it is inevitable that I will leave something out, heres fifty of my favorite no order though and I still probably left a lot of stuff out. sorry for lack of Kurosawa.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Stolen Kisses
3. 400 Blows
4. The Squid and the Whale
5. Lacombe, Lucien
6. Pulp Fiction
7. Fargo
8. Rushmore
9. Jules and Jim
10. Synecdoche, New York
11. Being John Malkovich
12. Lost in Translation
13. I’m Not There
14. The Life Aquatic
15. Breathless
16. Casablanca
17. The Graduate
18. Harold and Maude
19. 8 ½
20. Fires on the plane
21. The Burmese Harp
22. The Bad sleep Well
23. Annie Hall
24. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
25. Dazed and Confused
26. Big Lebowski
27. Murmur of the Heart
28. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
29. Brazil
30. The Darjeeling Limited
31. My Night at Maude’s
32. Claire’s Knee
33. GoodFellas
34. No Country for Old Men
35. Barton Fink
36. Au Revoir Les Enfants
37. There Will Be Blood
38. Bottle Rocket
39. Pan’s Labyrinth
40. The Shining
41. The Assassination of Jesse James
42. Band of Outsiders
43. The Fire Within
44. Coffee and Cigarettes
45. Dead Man
46. Down by Law
47. If….
48. Wild Strawberries
49. Diving Bell and the Butterfly
50. Don’t Look Back
This is as good a thread as any to make a first post in….as others have mentioned lists such as these are silly, yes. But they do spur good discussion as well as provide a quick snapshot of one’s taste (personality?). At any rate-I can’t be objective as the original post asks. Lists such as these are always a subjective exercise. Since moods, taste and one’s mindset is always evolving-so do lists such as these. Oh yes-if lists such as these are sometimes maddeningly impossible to construct, then certainly it isn’t possible to assign any sort of arbitrary rank to them either.
So for today my absolute favorite films are(twenty-in alpha order):
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
Claire’s Knee (Eric Rohmer)
Come and See (Elem Klimov)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins)
I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov)
In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Mullholland Drive (David Lynch)
Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Possession (Andrzej Zulawski)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Red Psalm (Miklos Jancsó)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)
The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
The Devils (Ken Russell)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice)
Interesting Aaron that you would chose Possession, because i also love that movie and think it is underrated, nice job!
Andrei Rublev
Citizen Kane
Apocalypse Now
2001 a space odyssey
Days Of Heaven
Satyricon
Solaris
The Third Man
Metropolis
Eyes Wide Shut
List may change tomorrow lol
this is in no special order….
city of god
clockwork orange
seduced and abandoned
Basketball Diaries
Brazil
Breathless
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The Edukators
Good bye, Lenin!
Happiness
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s top 100:
Le Tunnel sous la Manche (Melies)
Les Vampires (Feuillade)
Tih Minh (Feuillade)
Foolish Wives (Stroheim)
Greed (Stroheim)
Die Nibelungen (Lang)
Sunrise (Murnau)
The Docks of New York (Sternberg)
Spione (Lang)
Arsenal (Dovzhenko)
Lonesome (Fejos)
City Lights (Chaplin)
M (Lang)
La Nuit du Carrefour (Renoir)
Ivan (Dovzhenko)
I Was Born, but.. (Ozu)
Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Milestone)
Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor)
Make way for Tomorrow (McCarey)
La Regle du Jeu (Renoir)
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
Christmas in July (Sturges)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
Day of Wrath (Dreyer)
Heaven Can Wait (Lubitsch)
The Seventh Victim (Robson)
Ivan the Terrible 1+2 (Eisenstein)
The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu)
Stars in my Crown (Tourneur)
The Steel Helmet (Fuller)
The Big Sky (Hawks)
Othello (Welles)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks)
The Naked Spur (Mann)
The Sun Shines Bright (Ford)
Johnny Guitar (N.Ray)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
The Saga of Anatahan (Sternberg)
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
Track of the Cat (Wellman)
Ordet (Dreyer)
Guys and Dolls (Mankiewicz)
The Killing (Kubrick)
A Man Escaped (Bresson)
India (Rossellini)
Breathless (Godard)
Hiroshima mon Amour (Resnais)
Rio Bravo (Hawks)
The Tiger of Eschnapur/The Indian Tomb (Lang)
Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak)
Shadows (Cassavetes)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
A Wife Confesses (Masumura)
Eclipse (Antonioni)
The House is Black (Farrokhzad)
Gertrud (Dreyer)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Black Girl (Sembene)
Playtime (Tati)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy)
L’Amour Fou (Rivette)
Out 1 (Rivette)
La Région Centrale (Snow)
Avanti (Wilder)
Out 1:Spectre (Rivette)
F for Fake (Welles)
Parade (Tati)
Celine and Julie go Boating (Rivette)
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
Providence (Resnais)
Doomed Love (Oliveira)
Perceval le Gallois (Rohmer)
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Orderly or Disorderly (Kiarostami)
Too Early, Too Late (Straub, Huillet)
Love Streams (Cassavetes)
Manuel on the Island of Wonders (Ruiz)
Mix-Up (Romand)
Mélo (Resnais)
Where is the Friend’s House? (Kiarostami)
Yeelen (Cissé)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies)
A Tale of the Wind (Ivens)
The Asthenic Syndrome (Muratova)
Close-up (Kiarostami)
Nouvelle Vague (Godard)
Actress (Kwan)
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
The Puppetmaster (Hou)
Satantango (Tarr)
Dead Man (Jarmusch)
When it Rains (Burnett)
Inquiétude (Oliveira)
The Wind will Carry Us (Kiarostami)
Platform (Jia Zhangke)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg)
JPB & all other previous posters: When I tried putting together a list of significant films into a film ‘canon’ thread, I realized the futility of it, because there are so many great movies out there I still need to see or discover. All of these films belong on any canon list and shows just how long such a list needs to be. It is never ending, as we keep adding possibilities from all those great films we have seen and can share. This is the only utility I can see in concocting these lists, but we can use them to expand our own possibilities. What I would like to see is one great gi-normous auteurs list compiling all the top 5, 10, 100, etc., lists on all the threads – allowing for no duplication (each film only being listed once no matter how many people put it on there own list). This would provide the ultimate list we could add to and haggle over, including those obscure and totally ‘out-there’ suggestions. Now that would be a list!
My list mainly goes by directors, I believe one should see the full range of the director’s works ( this isn’t totally comprehensive i have alot of films to see but so few dollars.)
Ran or Ikiru or Seven Samurai- Akira Kurosawa
8 1/2 – Frederico Fellini
The 400 Blows- Francois Truffaut
Hara-Kiri Masaki Kobayshi Louis Malle (haven’t seen this one but i’m a huge fan of louis malle and hear it’s the best)
Viridiana – Luis Bunel
Fire within
Breathless Jean Luc Godard Jean Pierre Melville
Army of Shadows
Brazil- Terry Gilliam
Taxi Driver or Mishima: Life in Four Chapters- The first is directed by Scorsesse and written by Paul Schrader, the the second Written and Directed by Paul Schrader
those are just some, There’s alot more i’m probally forgetting, much more on favorites list on profile.
city of god (cidade de deus)
8 1/2 – fellini
the seventh seal – bergman
taxi driver – scorsese
stalker – tarkovsky
a clockwork orange – kubrick
breathless – godard
the third man – reed
la strada – fellini
the 400 blows – truffaut
in no particular order..
my other personal favorites that i did not put on here are;
olboy, le samourai, etc. etc.
The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund)
The Apu trilogy (Satyajit Ray)
Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa)
Kagaz Ke Phool (Guru Dutt)
The Happy End (Chung Ji-woo)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
Dev D. (Anurag Kashyap)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Tae Guk Gi (Kang Je-gyu)
It’s so exciting that soon, thanks to Adam and our auteurs poll, we are finally going to see the true “top ten films of all time” Then we can check it against our own. For me, it is a way of expanding my own horizons and discovering good films I need to see.
I definitely agree that that is one of the main benefits of the poll. I can’t wait to discover some more films that I otherwise may have missed out on.
top 10 for representing different aspects of human culture including mostly films i think are the greatest of all time as well as a few particular favorites
Ordet (dreyer) faith
Pickpocket (bresson) crime
Teorema (pasolini) poetry
The Wind (sjostrom) nature
Hitler: A Film From Germany (syberberg) nationality
The 47 Ronin (mizoguchi) revenge
Dog Star Man (brakhage) creation
The Servant (losey) class
City Lights (chaplin) romance (could have also gone with L’Atalante or Sunrise but picked this cuz of its humor)
Zero De Conduit (vigo) rebellion
I think TheAuteurs list is pretty much correct.. Out of that list and my personal favorites I would say:
8 1/2
City of God (cidade de deus)
M
Seven Samurai
The Passion of Joan of Arc
In The Mood for Love
The 400 Blows
The Godfather
Andrei Rublev
Oldboy
1) Strangers Than Paradise
2) Metropolis
3) A Clockwork Orange
4) Blade Runner
5) The Passion of Joan Of Arc
6) Fitzcarraldo
7) The Golden Age
8) Dead Man
9) Nosferatu (from Herzog)
10) Buffalo ’66
What the hell:
1. THE WIZARD OF OZ
2. SUNRISE
3. DETOUR
4. 3 WOMEN
5. STROSZEK
6. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
7. THE GOLD RUSH
8. TROUBLE IN PARADISE
9. SECONDS
10. CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
11. THIS IS SPINAL TAP
No Hitchcock is included, simply because my list could be filled entirely by Hitchcock. I’d give it to SHADOW OF A DOUBT, though…
Arturo: You have a unique way of classifying your top ten that is refreshingly original. Great idea to list them thematically in such a creative manner. It makes me now re-evaluate why certain films were on my own list, or if I can now see them in terms of your defintions. The next time I attempt a list, I might consider films from something like the four temperaments, then seven deadly sins, etc. Also, it might be interesting to create a list based on the ten commandments – oh, wait – Kieslowski has already done that one. Thanks!
I love the other lists posted, too. Hopefully, Adam will share everyone’s picks with us, if that is possible. But I am really going to see if I can now match my own films up thematically, like Arturo. I am sorry that I have left some of these very important films, like Passion of Joan of Arc, Metropolis, Wizard of Oz, etc., off my own list, because ten is so limiting in terms of inclusion. Oh well…
1. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
2. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)
5. Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
6. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
7. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
8. The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)
9. Man with a movie camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)
Rushmore
Magnolia
Lost in Translation
Mahattan
Fargo
The Science of Sleep
Adaptation.
Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory
Amelie
Little Miss Sunshine
I know, I know. My list is fairly current but I’m fifteen so I’ve only been alive for that many years of movies anyway.
Vertigo
Pit and the Pendulum
Black Sunday (Italian)
Body Heat
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
Ben Hur
Lawrence of Arabia
Psycho
North by Northwest
The Searchers (or Red River)
Seven Samurai
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Network
Vertigo
A Clockwork Orange
GoodFellas
Citizen Kane
Mister Roberts
Once Upon a Time in the West
Sunset Blvd.
Bear in mind that if you asked me again tomorrow, you’d probably get a completely different list.
let’s give it a shot…here’s my opinion:
Seven Samurai
Schindler’s List
Pulp Fiction
Casablanca
Raging Bull
Do the Right Thing
Apocalypse Now
Raging Bull
Jules and Jim
& LAST, but never LEAST…
Juno!!! (just kidding…)
The Seventh Seal
these are just my top films of the moment, and are OBVIOUSlY subject to change and/or switching around whenever i feel like it. :-) cheers
these are just my top films of the moment, and are OBVIOUSlY subject to change and/or switching around whenever i feel like it. :-) cheers
…okay, yea i know. most of these movies are the OBVIOUS examples of what is conidered a “great” film, but FUCK IT! you wanted a list, this is my list, these are my movies, and y ou KNOW you love them…oh shit you know you do! fuck yea…
yea, i’m drunk. go screw.
Jason Callen
Justin-Don’t bother. Lists like that are always transitory when you really care about film and are constantly seeing new things and revisting old ones. Well, maybe don’t bother is to harsh. Perhaps don’t take it too seriously is better. To answer your question about TCM…you are a crazy nerd and I would also love to program TCM for a month. Fuck a month, I want a year!