Personal All-Time 25

Making these lists is always painful, but these are 25 masterpieces that are very close to my heart :)

Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese
Our Hitler: A Film from Germany – Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Raising Cain – Brian De Palma
35 Shots of Rum – Claire Denis
The Watermelon Woman – Cheryl Dunye
Sátántangó – Béla Tarr
Even Dwarfs Started Small – Werner Herzog
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly – Edwin
Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems – Clive Holden
Nothing But A Man – Michael Roemer
Late Spring – Yasujiro Ozu
Fox and his Friends – Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Enter the Void – Gaspar Noé
Death by Hanging – Nagisa Oshima
Céline and Julie Go Boating – Jacques Rivette
The Falls – Peter Greenaway
Devils on the Doorstep – Jiang Wen
The Future of Emily – Helma Sanders-Brahms
Shakes the Clown – Bobcat Goldthwait
Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock
Tropical Malady – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren
Foolish Wives – Erich von Stroheim
Hedgehog in the Fog – Yuriy Norshteyn
Nostalghia – Andrei Tarkovsky

Halloween – John Carpenter
The Exterminating Angel – Luis Bunuel
Raging Bull – Martin Scorsese
Walkabout – Nicholas Roeg
Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola
La Strada – Federico Fellini
The Kid – Charlie Chaplin
Zelig – Woody Allen
Blade Runner – Ridley Scott
Days Of Heaven – Terrence Mallick.
Synecdoche, New York – Charlie Kaufman
Last Tango In Paris – Bernardo Bertolucci
The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola
Blue Velvet – David Lynch
Stalker – Andrei tarkovsky
Fanny And Alexander – Ingmar Bergman
The Exorcist – William Friedkin
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini
Punch-Drunk Love – Paul Thomas Anderson
Inland Empire – David Lynch
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick
Chinatown – Roman Polanski
Double Life Of Veronique – Kryzstof Keislowski
Last Year At Marienbad – Alan Resnais
Cries And Whispers – Ingmar Bergman

Glad to see “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed” getting some appreciation, Leaves. That film doesn’t seem very popular among cinephiles, maybe because some regard it as pretentious, but it’s one of my absolute favorites from the New German Cinema.

It’s not actually a list of my favorites… but it has The NeverEnding Story sandwiched between On the Silver Globe and Painful Indifference, so there it is. Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed is the only Kluge I’ve seen thus far. I just ran across the film on Ed Howard’s blog today, so at least you have solidarity with another soul out there in the universe. Good film, though. I don’t know what a pretentious film looks like, but that’s not it. Probably looks something like 27 Dresses, I would imagine.

there are some heavy, rare, fucked lists here

last list:

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu)

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)

L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)

2 or 3 things I know About Her (Jean Luc Godard)

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)

The Leopard (Luchino Visconti)

The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau)

Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)

Satantango (Bela Tarr)

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)

Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse)

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi)

My Night At Maud’s (Eric Rohmer)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Sunrise (F. W. Murnau)

Fire Within (Louis Malle)

Street Angel (Frank Borzage)

Il’ Sorpasso (Dino Risi)

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais)

The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog)

Pandora’s Box (G. W. Pabst)

Blast of Silence (Allen Baron)

The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

Dr. Mabuse The Gambler (Fritz Lang)

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls)

Sandra of a Thousand Delights (Luchino Visconti)

Intentions of Murder (Shohei Imamura)

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)

Fire on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa)

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini)

Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

The Third Man (Carol Reed)

The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice)

Man Without a Map (Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)

Three Colors: Blue (Krzystof Kieslowski)

Playtime (Jacques Tati)

Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi)

Ludwig (Luchino Visconti)

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders)

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway)

Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)

The Travelling Players (Theodoros Angelopoulos)

Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)

Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog)

F For Fake (Orson Welles)

I posted a list when this thread first started, but it was interesting for me to go back and look at how my tastes have changed (in some cases, dramatically, in some cases, not so much). Here’s a new list, and some painful cuts had to be made to get it to 25 (no particular order this time) -

In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
Brief Encounter (David Lean)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)
Le Jour Se Leve (Marcel Carne)
Letter From An Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls)
Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov)
The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim)
The Red and The White (Miklos Jancso)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Yol (Yilmaz Guney)
Kanal (Andrezj Wajda)
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann)
The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas)
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich)
Une Histoire De Vent (Joris Ivens)
Det Hemmelighedsfulde X (Benjamin Christensen)
Marketa Lazarova (Frantisek Vlacil)
The Last Letter (Frederick Wiseman)
L’Enclos (Armand Gatti)
The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha)

my top 25’s fave film in no particular order

kings of the road ( wim wenders)

mother dao, the turtlelike (vincent monnikendam)

phantom limb (jay rosenblatt)

wings of desire (wim wenders)

the thin red line (terrence malick)

taxi driver ( martin scorsese)

waking life (richard linklater)

satantango (bela tarr)

the new world (terrence malick)

au hasard balthazar (bresson)

stalker (tarkovksy)

late spring (ozu)

subarnarekha (ritwik ghatak)

mother and son ( sokurov)

harvest : 3000 years (haile gerima)

gertrud (dreyer)

encounters at the end of the world (herzog)

l’enfant (dardenne bros)

the new world (malick)

window water baby moving (stan brakhage)

come and see (elem klimov)

city lights (chaplin)

the lesson of darkness (herzog)

the pear tree (dariush mehrjui)

the exterminating angel (luis bunuel)

this is in no real order, i suppose, and all of them probably have their own specific reasons:

In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo)
Hana Bi (Takeshi Kitano)
Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Hard Boiled (John Woo)
Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii)
Porco Rosso (Hayao Miyazaki)
Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa)
Le Circle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Nikita (Luc Besson)
Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano)
Kwaiden (Masaki Kobayashi)
Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon)
Hero (Zhang Yimou)
The French Connection (William Friedkin)
Paprika (Satoshi Kon)
Kids Return (Takeshi Kitano)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz)
Oldboy (Park Chan-Wook)
Battles Without Honor and Humanity [all five chapters are being counted as one] (Kinji Fukasaku)
Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, but it doesn’t really matter)
Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita)
The 400 Blows (François Truffaut)

this is also with a stack of movies sitting in front of me that i haven’t watched yet, but these are the ones that have always stuck with me for as long as i’ve seen them. i never get tired of them, and they are infinitely watchable. some of them are nostalgic, without any pretense, and some are, in my opinion, some of the finest films ever made.

also, if there was a 26th slot open, i would put In The Mood For Love on there again.

25, without thinking about it too hard (and only allowing myself one showing per director) — going for what gives me personal aesthetic satisfaction and pleasure vs. what makes me look smart on mubi:

- Barbarella (Vadim)
- Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
- Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette)
- Week End (Godard)
- Day for Night (Truffaut)
- The Passenger (Antonioni)
- Persona (Bergman)
- O Lucky Man! (Anderson)
- Mr. Freedom (Klein)
- Aliens (Cameron)
- The Human Condition (Kobayashi)
- Performance (Cammell/Roeg)
- Repo Man (Cox)
- La Belle Personne (Honore)
- Videodrome (Cronenberg)
- The Thing (Carpenter)
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
- Robocop (Verhoeven)
- Aguirre the Wrath of God (Herzog)
- 24 Hour Party People (Winterbottom)
- A Prophet (Audiard)
- Volver (Almodovar)
- Sleuth (Mankiewicz)
- La Collectionneuse (Rohmer)
- A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)

I don’t think I’ve the strength . . . .

Come on, Josh. You can do it!

Even if I was inclined to do so, I’m currently in the midst of updating my top favorites list and I’m not planning on revealing it sooner than the thirty-first. >_>

I’m scared to do it. Everyone’s so much more cinephiley than me.

Looking forward to the 31st then, Josh. Hopefully “Au hasard Balthazar” is going to be among your choices.

Wow, I’ve already changed my list. I put The Third Man in! Sorry, Oklahoma!…

Okay, to parrot the rest: off the top of my head and in no particular order:

- Belvaux, “Man Bites Dog”
- Peckinpah, “Straw Dogs”
- Godard, “Pierrot le fou”
- Godard, “Contempt”
- Godard, “La Chinoise”
- Bunuel, “That Obscure Object of Desire”
- Bunuel, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
- Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage”
- Ray, “Bigger Than Life”
- Rose, “Ivans XTC”
- Rohmer, “La Collectionneuse”
- Ferreri, “Dillinger Is Dead”
- Chabrol, “L’enfer”
- Oshima, “Japanese Summer: Double Suicide”
- Oshima, “Sing a Song of Sex”
- Pennell, “The Whole Shootin’ Match”
- Bertolucci, “Partner”
- Bellocchio, “Fists in the Pocket”
- Roeg, “Performance”
- Stillman, “Metropolitan”
- Eustache, “The Mother and the Whore”
- Malle, “The Fire Within”
- Antonioni, “La Notte”
- Antonioni, “The Passenger”
— Welles, “F for Fake”

By no means definitive, and my knowledge is obviously eclipsed by many on this site, but here goes:

1. Chinatown- Roman Polanski
2. Last Year at Marienbad- Alain Resnais
3. Pulp Fiction- Quentin Tarantino
4. The Godfather- Francis Ford Coppola
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- Michel Gondry
6. 8 1/2- Federico Fellini
7. The Apartment- Billy Wilder
8. L.A. Confidential- Curtis Hanson
9. Citizen Kane- Orson Welles
10. Breathless- Jean-Luc Godard
11. 2001: A Space Odyssey- Stanley Kubrick
12. There Will Be Blood- Paul Thomas Anderson
13. Mulholland Dr.- David Lynch
14. Persona- Ingmar Bergman
15. Raging Bull- Martin Scorsese
16. Rules of the Game- Jean Renoir
17. Apocalypse Now- Francis Ford Coppola
18. Do the Right Thing- Spike Lee
19. Vertigo- Alfred Hitchcock
20. Barton Fink- Joel & Ethan Coen
21. Ikiru- Akira Kurosawa
22. Rear Window- Alfred HItchcock
23. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie- Luis Buñuel
24. Seven Samurai- Akira Kurosawa
25. Solaris- Andrei Tarkovsky

[Edited list]

- Belvaux, “Man Bites Dog”
- Peckinpah, “Straw Dogs”
- Godard, “Pierrot le fou”
- Godard, “Contempt”
- Godard, “La Chinoise”
- Bunuel, “That Obscure Object of Desire”
- Bunuel, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
- Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage”
- Ray, “Bigger Than Life”
- Rose, “Ivans XTC”
- Rohmer, “La Collectionneuse”
- Ferreri, “Dillinger Is Dead”
- Chabrol, “L’enfer”
- Oshima, “Japanese Summer: Double Suicide”
- Oshima, “Sing a Song of Sex”
- Pennell, “The Whole Shootin’ Match”
- Bertolucci, “Partner”
- Bellocchio, “Fists in the Pocket”
- Hitchcock, “North by Northwest”
- Assayas, “Summer Hours”
- Eustache, “The Mother and the Whore”
- Malle, “The Fire Within”
- Antonioni, “La Notte”
- Wenders, “Paris, Texas”
- Welles, “F for Fake”

[Edited list: the last time I’m doing this, I swear]

- Belvaux, “Man Bites Dog”
- Peckinpah, “Straw Dogs”
- Godard, “Pierrot le fou”
- Godard, “Contempt”
- Godard, “La Chinoise”
- Bunuel, “That Obscure Object of Desire”
- Bunuel, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
- Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage”
- Ray, “Bigger Than Life”
- Rose, “Ivans XTC”
- Rohmer, “La Collectionneuse”
- Ferreri, “Dillinger Is Dead”
- Fellini, “La Dolce Vita”
- Anderson, “If . . .”
- Oshima, “Sing a Song of Sex”
- Pennell, “The Whole Shootin’ Match”
- Bertolucci, “Partner”
- Bellocchio, “Fists in the Pocket”
- Pialat, “A nos amours”
- Assayas, “Summer Hours”
- Eustache, “The Mother and the Whore”
- Malle, “The Fire Within”
- Antonioni, “La Notte”
- Wenders, “Paris, Texas”
- Welles, “F for Fake”

Kind of in order…subject to change whenever I realize what I left out…

The Fountain (Aronofsky)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr)
Pickpocket (Bresson)
Dealer (Fliegauf)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
The Round-Up (Jancsó)
The Mirror (Tarkovsky)
The Sound of Music (Wise)
Goodfellas (Scorsese)
The Wind That Shakes The Barley (Loach)
Boogie Nights (PT Anderson)
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer)
Le SamouraÏ (Melville)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul)
Kingdom of Heaven (Scott)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren)
Los Muertos (Alonso)
My Twentieth Century (Enyedi)
Touch of Evil (Welles)
The House is Black (Farrokhzad)
In Memory of the Day Passed By (Bartas)
Blue Velvet (Lynch)
Videodrome (Cronenberg)
Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock)

I’ll chip in too!

1. Rosemary’s Baby-Roman Polanski
2. Naked-Mike Leigh
3. The Mother and the Whore-Jean Eustache
4. Aguirre: the Wrath of God-Werner Herzog
5. Chungking Express-Wong Kar Wai
6. Repulsion-Roman Polanski
7. The Squid and the Whale-Noah Baumbach
8. Werckmeister Harmonies-Bela Tarr
9. If…-Lindsay Anderson
10. A Nos Amours-Maurice Pialat
11. The Conversation-Francis Coppola
12. The Exterminating Angel-Luis Bunuel
13. Knife in the Water-Roman Polanski
14. Together-Lukas Moodyson
15. Taxi Driver-Martin Scorsese
16. I Vitelloni-Federico Fellini
17. Blue Velvet-David Lynch
18. The Long Goodbye-Robert Altman
19. A Woman Under the Influence-John Cassavetes
20. Scorpio Rising-Ken Anger
21. Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (I Call First)-Martin Scorsese
22. Vengeance is Mine-Shohei Imamura
23. The Passion of Joan of Arc-Carl Th. Dreyer
24. Fanny and Alexander-Ingmar Bergman
25. Husbands-John Cassavetes

for a second I thought that was the real drew.

It’s obviously just a counterfeiter. The real Drew has a dot added to his name.

also known as a period.

or full stop.

Sorry, I’m a total fraud.

1. a zed and two noughts (greenaway, 1985)
2. poison (haynes, 1991)
3. eyes wide shut (kubrick, 1999)
4. totally fucked up (araki, 1993)
5. picnic at hanging rock (weir, 1975)
6. fireworks (anger, 1947)
7. querelle (fassbinder, 1982)
8. the devils (russell, 1971)
9. sebastiane (jarman, 1975)
10. the passion of joan of arc (dreyer, 1928)
11. twin peaks: fire walk with me (lynch, 1994)
12. un chant d’amour (genet, 1950)
13. in the realm of the senses (oshima, 1976)
14. my own private idaho (van sant, 1991)
15. stroszek (herzog, 1977)
16. welcome to the dollhouse (solondz, 1995)
17. pierrot le fou (godard, 1965)
18. the brown bunny (gallo, 2003)
19. rope (hitchcock, 1948)
20. persona (bergman, 1966)
21. harold and maude (ashby, 1971)
22. the return (zvyagintsev, 2003)
23. desperate living (waters, 1977)
24. shortbus (mitchell, 2006)
25. blow job (warhol, 1963)

limit: one film per director. my list definitely has a lean towards films from the past few decades / films about sexuality & identity. but it’s a personal favourites list, not a best-films-of-all-time list. y’know?

it’s a personal favourites list, not a best-films-of-all-time list. y’know?

I don’t know. I do know that it has A Zed and Two Noughts atop it, so it’s better than those stupid other ‘best’ lists.

I’m bored enough to make up a list.

This is unordered.

Bicycle Thieves
A Woman Under The Influence
No Country For Old Men
Mulholland Drive
Persona
Cleo From 5 to 7
Ran
Sunrise
8 1/2
Taxi Driver
Chinatown
Pulp Fiction
Satantango
Dr Strangelove
Andrei Rublev
The Mirror
Fargo
The Corridor
Fanny and Alexander
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Wings of Desire
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The Battle of Algiers
The Age Of The Earth

Yeah I know too much canon shut up.

I was excited to see Fireworks so high, Jordaan. What’s your opinion of Scorpio Rising?