@ Chasing Butterflies: yeah, i soon realised your list wasn’t all-time, but 4 Mizoguchi was still welcome. In answer to your interest, some films i’ve enjoyed seeing over the last few months:
Afgrunden (Gad)
The Eleventh Year (Vertov)
They Do Not Exist (Abu Ali)
The Way Things Go (Fischli, Weiss)
Mother Dao the Turtlelike (Monnikendam), thread
Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl (Oliveira)
i wouldn’t say i’m exactly obsessed with any, fantabulous new discoveries are rare, but of those i think Mother Dao, with its Dutch colonial footage now with a different meaning than originally intended, is most impressive, while They Do Not Exist is an admirable hidden Palestinian film more directly against imperialism
The Leopard (Visconti)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
M (Lang)
A Man Escaped (Bresson)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
The Shining (Kubrick)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies)
The Party (Edwards)
Not my top10, mostly the ones i have in my head nowadays.
A Clockwork Orange (always an obsession)
Enter the void
Mulholland Drive
Not one less
The tenant
Castaway on the moon
Red (Kieslowski)
2046
Barry Lyndon
500 days of summer
These aren’t my actual top 10 films but I am totally obsessed with them right now.
Black Swan
Blow Out
Diabolique
Love In The Afternoon
The Big Lebowski
Vivre Sa Vie
The Vanishing
Deathly Hallows Part 2
Contempt
Andrei Rublev
Current obsession is anything by Rivette.
Pulp Fiction (I am living with my parents right now for a month while I close on house and in my room I have a tv witha VHS and this is the only VHS I own. So I watch it repeatedly.
Le Samourai
The Social Network
Days of Heaven
The Cranes Are Flying
Repulsion
Woman Under the Influence
M
400 Blows
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
10. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)
9. Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1974)
8. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
7. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
6. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
5. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)
4. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
3. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1964)
2. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Paradjanov, 1964)
#1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Honorable Mentions:
The Gold Rush
Pandora’s Box
City Lights
Modern Times
Ikiru
The Night of the Hunter
Wild Strawberries
The Seventh Seal
La Dolce Vita
Shoot the Piano Player
Andrei Rublev
Le Samourai
Amarcord
Dead Man
The Ice Storm
Here is my current obsession :
Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
Gummo (Harmony Korine)
Coffy (Jack Hill)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)
The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci)
Audition (Takashi Miike)
Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders)
Waking Life (RIchard Linklater)
The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad)
I have 8 at the moment. Here they are chronologically:
Citizen Kane
The Third Man
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
American Graffiti
Badlands
Star Wars
National Lampoon’s Animal House
Once Upon a Time in America
Oh, I forgot to mention Blast of Silence.
Also can’t believe I forgot to mention my fave horror film of all time, the original
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
And The Great Silence & Le Cercle Rouge.
Since this thread is for ‘current obsessions’, I’ve been watching a lot of 1930s/1940s screwball comedy recently, and these are 10 films I ‘m sure I’ll watch again:
To Be Or Not To Be – Ernst Lubitsch
The Palm Beach Story – Preston Sturges
Nothing Sacred – William Wellman
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek – Preston Sturges
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock – Preston Sturges
My Man Godfrey – Gregory La Cava
His Girl Friday – Howard Hawks
Twentieth Century – Howard Hawks
Libeled Lady – Jack Conway
The Thin Man – WS Van Dyke
I could easily have made a list only of Sturges and Lubitsch films, but I tried to diversify.
My current interests now are Wales-Patagonia- connections explored in films Patagonia (with Duffy in supporting role), and Separado (documentary involving Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, awaiting on mail order); Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, series just started on Channel 4 and doing the rounds elsewhere as mammoth film over 2 days, just been at Telluride i think
and
Oh Serendipity!! The films of Lester James Peries- 2 just seen, Rekava/Line of Destiny and Gamperaliya/Changes in the Village, both are great masterpieces from Sri Lanka, and i’ll have to start a thread on him later, got to go out now, These are treasures from the deep, to borrow the title of Kuxa Kanema’s great list on Sri Lankan cinema. I’d wanted to see Line of Destiny for many years, came across it unexpectedly, and it surpassed expectations. Changes in the Village if anything even better. Oh my!
currently:
Quiz Show (1994)
Zero for Conduct (1933)
Apropos de Nice (1930)
L’Atalante (1934)
Christmas in July (1940)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
The Social Network (2010)
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)
Broadcast News (1987)
The More the Merrier (1943)
Calendar (1993, Egoyan)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974, Cassavetes)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, Cassavetes)
Opening Night (1977, Cassavetes)
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941, Ozu)
The Life of Oharu (1952, Mizoguchi)
The Crucified Woman (1954, Mizoguchi)
Anatomy of Hell (2004, Breillat)
The Night of the Iguana (1964, Huston)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, Minghella)
Eureka (Aoyama Shinji)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terrence Davies)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
A Page of Madness (Kinugasa Teinosuke)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
Maborosi (Kore-eda Hirokazu)
Don’t know if I’d call them obsessions, but these ten are on my mind for one reason or another.
Amator (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1979)
La Double Vie de Véronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991)
Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski, 2002)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
Quatre Nuits d’un Rêveur (Robert Bresson, 1971)
The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
Der Siebente Kontinent (Michael Haneke, 1989)
Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
In alphabetical order:
8½ (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963)
Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France, 1946)
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966)
Closely Watched Trains (Jiří Menzel, Czechoslovakia, 1966)
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1982)
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964)
Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1962)
Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1965)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden , 1966)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002)
1. You Only Live Once (1937, Fritz Lang)
2. The Steamroller and the Violin (1961, Andrei Tarkovsky)
3. The Good Thief (2002, Neil Jordan)
4. Oleanna (1994, David Mamet)
5. Die Nibelungen (1924, Fritz Lang)
6. Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)
7. Sawdust and Tinsel (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
8. Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)
9. Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)
10. A Page of Madness (1926, Teinosuke Kinugasa)
Today:
1. Barry Lyndon (1975, Stanley Kubrick)
2. Satantango (1994, Bela Tarr)
3. In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-Wai)
4. Juventude em Marcha (2006, Pedro Costa)
5. Young Mr Lincoln (1939, John Ford)
6. Offret (1986, Andrei Tarkovsky)
7. Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)
8. Francisca (1981, Manoel de Oliveira)
9. Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
10. Vai e Vém (2003, João César Monteiro)
I guarantee at least one change by this time tomorrow:
Citizen Kane
Sunset Blvd.
The Apartment
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
American Graffiti
Badlands
Mean Streets
Star Wars
National Lampoon’s Animal House
One from the Heart
Once Upon a Time in America
[I know there’s 11 there, but it’s just too damn difficult to drop any of these]
@ Charles Deckert
The Good Thief over Bob Le Flambeur? Interesting.
The Macho King The Illmatic One
The films that are on my mind recently
The misfits
The third man
Touch of Evil
Enter the void
Scarface(de palma)
The dear hunter
The Thing(J.C. Version)
His girl friday
Singing in the rain
A place in the sun
*and if I may as a sidenote,I’m vary much obsessed with hbo’s “the wire”-IMO the best show ever,endless enduring replay value 4 so vary many diffent reasons