MUBI Greatest Films Poll- 2012 Edition

once I started to realize how difficult this was gonna be, I kinda just said fuck it and went with a list. I could fuss over this until the end of time, but:

A.I., Artificial Intelligence
Blow Out
Chinatown
The Godfather Part II
Jason and the Argonauts
Mulholland Drive
Play Time
Taxi Driver
They Live
The Thin Red Line

the most agonizing decision was whether to include They Live or Big Trouble in Little China. I love both and I knew I had to include some Carpenter, and I basically settled it by coin toss

Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr)
Tokyo Twilight (Ozu)
Pickpocket (Bresson)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
Russian Ark (Sokurov)
La Haine (Kassovitz)
Satantango (Tarr)
Persona (Bergman)

Belfast, Maine; Frederick Wiseman
Film Socialisme; Jean-Luc Godard
The Mother and the Whore; Jean Eustache
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Chantal Akerman
Breaking the Waves; Lars von Trier
Celine and Julie Go Boating; Jacques Rivette
The Trial; Orson Welles
The Terrorizers; Edward Yang
Playtime; Jacques Tati
Goodbye, Dragon Inn; Tsai Ming-liang

That’s how it’s been for a while, and I don’t think I’ll be changing it anytime soon (but what do I know?).

Savvy

Other than ordering directly from Wiseman, how would one go about finding a copy of Belfast, Maine?

1. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette)
2. La Cérémonie (Chabol)
3. Vagabond (Varda)
4. Cria Cuervos (Saura)
5. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda)
6. The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski)
7. Jules and Jim (Truffaut)
8. Wild Reeds (Techine)
9. Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer)
10. All About My Mother (Almodovar)

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
À bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard)
Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman)
Love and Death (Woody Allen)
Milky Way (Luis Bunuel)
The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville)
The Earrings of Madame De… (Max Ophuls)
A Short Film about Killing (Krzystof Kieslowski)
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)

1. Requiem for a Dream(2000)
2.Battle Royale(2000)
3.8 1/2 (1963)
4.Oldboy (2003)
5. The Skin I Live in (2011)
6.Sherlock Jr. (1924)
7.In The Mood for Love(2000)
8. Inception(2010)
9.Tree of Life(2011)
10. The Gleamers and I (2000) -This is one is purely for technique

More lists! I actually greatly enjoyed that big voting game we did a while back. I feel like I’ve seen a lot more since then (partly because of that game).

Anyway, may as well throw my picks out there. I chose to pick only one film per director:

- Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman)
- Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry)
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik)
- Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
- Magnolia (Anderson)
- No Country for Old Men (Coens)
- The Tree of Life (Malick)
- Manhattan (Allen)
- Naked (Leigh)

CASABLANCA (Curtiz)
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Mulligan)
NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Hitchcock)
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Wilder)
LAURA (Preminger)
OUT OF THE PAST (Tourneur)
THE BIG HEAT (Lang)
ANNIE HALL (Allen)
CHINATOWN (Polanski)
IN A LONELY PLACE (Ray)

@Takaawesome

I believe I’ve given and A+ to all of those films. Glad you love them as well.

Here’s my ten…for the moment atleast. To make things easier, I eliminated non-narratives from my list.

1. F for Fake – dir. Orson Welles (1974; Iran/West Germany/France)
2. Every Man for Himself/Sauve qui peut (la vie) – dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1980; Austria/Switzerland/West Germany/France)
3. Ugetsu Monogatari – dir. Kenji Mizoguchi (1953; Japan)
4. Woman Under the Influence – dir. John Cassavetes (1974; US)
5. Vertigo – dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1958; US)
6. The Passenger/Professione: reporter – dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1975; Italy/France/Spain)
7. The Terrorizers/Kong bu fen zi – dir. Edward Yang (1986; Hong Kong/Taiwan)
8. Harakiri/Seppuku – dir. Masaki Kobayashi (1962; Japan)
9. In a Lonely Place – dir. Nicholas Ray (1950; US)
10. Kagemusha – dir. Akira Kurosawa (1980; Japan)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans – F.W. Murnau – 1927
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer – 1928
M – Fritz Lang – 1931
Citizen Kane – Orson Welles – 1941
A Man Escaped – Robert Bresson – 1956
Shadows – John Cassavetes – 1959
The Cloud-Capped Star – Ritwik Ghatak – 1960
The Leopard – Luchino Visconti – 1963
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick – 1968
Mulholland Drive – David Lynch – 2001

1. Train of Shadows (Jose Luis Guerin)
2. The Inner Scar (Phillipe Garrel)
3. Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
4. Heroic Purgatory (Yoshishige Yoshida)
5. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage)
6. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)
7. Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg)
8. Savage Messiah (Ken Russell)
9. Limite (Mario Peixoto)
10. Faust (F.W. Murnau)

hey scottie out of curiosity whats the “deadline” to post your list,cause ill post mines either tonight or tomorrow.

The deadline is July 27th, but I may shorten that if I see no new lists coming in. At any rate you’ve got plenty of time :)

Going by the decades:

Trouble In Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
Sansho The Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986)
Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

And 5 more I had to leave out….

Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948)
Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949)
Marketa Lazarova (1967)
Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Partie de campagne (Renoir, 1936)
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford, 1939)
Appointment in Honduras (Tourneur, 1953)
Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi, 1954)
Run of the Arrow (Fuller, 1957)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Brakhage, 1971)
Numéro deux (Godard, 1975)
Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (Garrel, 1985)
À Flor do Mar (Monteiro, 1986)

The Pearl (d’Ursel, 1929)
Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
The Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)
Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)
Paris, Texas (Wenders, 1984)
La double vie de Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jireš, 1970)

for now…

1 Belfast, Maine (Frederick Wiseman, 1999)
2 The General (Buster Keaton, 1926)
3 Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970)
4 Au hasard balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
5 Milestones (Robert Kramer, 1975)
6 On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1957)
7 Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)
8 Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002)
9 Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
10 Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)

Since most posters seem to go for obvious old classics I´ll add a modern perspective on cinematic greatness.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, original german version)
Alien 3 (David Fincher)
Lost Highway (David Lynch)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg)
Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma)
Calvaire (Fabrice du Welsz)
Sympathy For Mr Vengeance (Chan-Wook Park)
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz)
Leon (Luc Besson)

funny I was suprised (tho not impressed) by the lack of obvious old classics

Les Vampires – Feuillade
Our Hospitality – Buster Keaton
3 Bad Men – Ford
Sunrise – Murnau
Meet Me in St. Louis – Minelli
My Darling Clementine – Ford
Manoel on the Island of Miracles – Ruiz
Sans Soleil – Marker
The Hips of JW – Monteiro
Belfast, Maine – Wiseman

1)The New World
2)The Spirit of the Beehive
3)The Double Life of Veronique
4)Sansho the Bailiff
5)Aguirre: The Wrath of God
6)The Big Lebowski
7)The Godfather Part I
8)L’Avventura
9)Toy Story 3
10)Eyes Wide Shut

That’s a sweet list Mathias Palmberg, much respect for Lost Highway, Psycho, and Leon… Leon has wandered on and off my top 10 many times, a definite all time great!

Now Alien 3… that pick I’d call “interesting” ;)

1- Last Exit to Brooklyn
2- The Mill and the Cross
3- Curse of the Golden Flower
4- In Cold Blood
5- The White Ribbon
6- Freaks
7- Kafka
8- The Man Who Wasn’t There
9- Lost Highway
10- Clockers

I forget who devised this semi-random method, but I like it. To pick ten films, I’m going to my profile, clicking refresh ten times, and picking my favorite of the four favorites that pop up. The results:

Stray Dog (Kurosawa)
Pierrot le fou (Godard)
Black Orpheus (Camus)
Star Wars (Lucas)
Paths of Glory (Kubrick)
Adaptation (Jonze)
Nights of Cabiria (Fellini)
Casablanca (Curtiz)
Ratatouille (Bird)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)

^ Brilliant idea! This is my ten using the same method:

Juvenile Court (Wiseman)
Yi Yi (Yang)
The Red And The White (Jancso)
Saraband (Bergman)
Charulata (Ray)
Dekalog (Kieslowski)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
Groundhog Day (Ramis)
Songs From The Second Floor (Andersson)
Fear of Fear (Fassbinder)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dryer)
Vagabond (Agnes Varda)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse)
The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak)
Insiang (Lino Brocka)
Out One…Noli Me Tangere (Jacques Rivette)
Greed (Erich Von Stroheim)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard)

1. The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola)
2. The Big Lebowski (Coen brothers)
3. Fargo (Coen brothers)
4. The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen brothers)
5. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
6. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
7. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
8. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
9. The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin)
10. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
2. Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
3. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
4. Sunrise (FW Murnau)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
6. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson)
7. City Lights (Charles Chaplin)
8. M (Fritz Lang)
9. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
10. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)