Seen: 11/100
[ ] Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080
Bruxelles - A magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering
a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life. -
Directed by Chantal Akerman, 1975 Belgium, France[ ] Vertigo - A former detective with
a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the
past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession. -
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 USA[-] Citizen Kane - Famously sitting at
the top of the Sight and Sound poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s
masterful debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an
enduring classic. - Directed by Orson Welles, 1941 USA[ ] Tokyo Story - Told in Yasujirō
Ozu’s simple and elegant style, this story of intergenerational discord
is heartbreaking and deeply human. - Directed by Yasujirō Ozu, 1953
Japan[ ] In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar
Wai’s masterpiece is a heartbreaking story of illicit love that pulses
with the ache of repressed desire. - Directed by Wong Kar Wai, 2000
Hong Kong, France[ ] 2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley
Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings
to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction
cinema. - Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968 USA, United
Kingdom[ ] Beau travail - Claire Denis’s
great gift is to evoke emotion with gesture and juxtaposition. In the
desert, water shimmers and ripples, naked shoulders perspire, black
mosquito nets recall sheer lingerie. - Directed by Claire Denis,
1998 France[ ] Mulholland Dr. - Hollywood is dark
and dangerous, yet alluring, in David Lynch’s acclaimed thriller. -
Directed by David Lynch, 2001 France, USA[ ] Man with a Movie Camera -
Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city
symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a
century after its release. - Directed by Dziga Vertov, 1929
USSR[ ] Singin’ in the Rain - Hollywood’s
troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the
1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie
musicals. - Directed by Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1951
USA[ ] Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans -
The first American film by one of German expressionism’s leading
exponents, this lush, atmospheric silent drama is replete with
groundbreaking cinematography. - Directed by F.W. Murnau, 1927
USA[x] The Godfather - The first of
Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is
the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia
affairs. - Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 USA[ ] La Règle du jeu - Huge-spirited
and sharp-eyed, Jean Renoir’s French-society fresco gathers high classes
and low for a weekend of country-house fallout. - Directed by Jean
Renoir, 1939 France[ ] Cléo from 5 to 7 - In real time,
Cléo becomes more real, more subject than object. She discards her
whipped-cream wig and polka dots for a simple black shift. She performs
less and feels more. - Directed by Agnès Varda, 1962 France,
Italy[ ] The Searchers - This poll’s last
western standing, John Ford’s sweeping, stirring rescue-or-revenge quest
remains a film of magnificent mystery and poetry. - Directed by John
Ford, 1956 USA[ ] Meshes of the Afternoon - Had
Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the
sharply etched dreamworld of Meshes of the Afternoon? - Directed by
Maya Deren, Alexander Hackenschmied, 1943 USA[ ] Close-up - The more ‘information’
we’re offered about the case, the more we come to realise that there are
no easy answers to any of the questions being raised. - Directed by
Abbas Kiarostami, 1989 Iran[ ] Persona - Any sense of a
conventional psychodrama is constantly disrupted by the experimental,
improvisatory filmmaking. - Directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1966
Sweden[ ] Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford
Coppola’s Vietnam War blowout, a hell-trip through the smoke and dazzle
of imperial America’s most grandstanding rogue show. - Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 USA[x] Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa’s
monumental, scintillating tale of hired samurai protecting a peasant
village: period thriller and moral/political fable in one. -
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954 Japan[ ] The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s rapturous silent masterpiece, with soulful close-ups of
Renée Jeanne “Maria” Falconetti’s tremulous martyr, transcending tyranny
and temporality. - Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, 1927
France[ ] Late Spring - The first of
Yasujirō Ozu’s great cycle of dramas that place the joys and sadnesses
of family life in the context of a Japan disrupted by modernity. -
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu, 1949 Japan[ ] Playtime - Jacques Tati’s most
painstaking accomplishment blends deft slapstick, endless visual
ingenuity and sonic comedy in a stupendous modern satire. - Directed
by Jacques Tati, 1967 France[ ] Do the Right Thing - Racial
tensions reach boiling point in Spike Lee’s incandescent portrait of a
Brooklyn neighbourhood on the hottest day of the year. - Directed by
Spike Lee, 1989 USA[ ] Au hasard Balthazar - Robert
Bresson gave us a typically stark vision of humanity as experienced by a
put-upon, maltreated beast of burden that passes from owner to owner. -
Directed by Robert Bresson, 1966 France, Sweden[ ] The Night of the Hunter - Actor
Charles Laughton’s only film as director, starring Robert Mitchum as an
implacable child-hunting preacher, still leaves an indelible mark. -
Directed by Charles Laughton, 1955 USA[ ] Shoah - To make sense of the 20th
century’s most horrific atrocity, Claude Lanzmann reinvented documentary
itself, giving the form colossal new significance. - Directed by
Claude Lanzmann, 1985 France[ ] Daisies - This feminist milestone
is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as
exuberant as the film’s two protagonists. - Directed by Věra
Chytilová, 1966 Czechoslovakia[ ] Taxi Driver - Martin Scorsese and
Paul Schrader’s high-art vigilante movie for fallen times, with a coiled
Robert De Niro as psycho-saviour of an infernal NYC. - Directed by
Martin Scorsese, 1976 USA[ ] Portrait of a Lady on Fire -
Portrait of a Lady on Fire demonstrates Céline Sciamma’s ability to make
a timelessly beautiful film that also crystallises the gender politics
of her era. - Directed by Céline Sciamma, 2019 France[ ] Mirror - Cinema scaled new heights
of visual poetry in this deeply personal, elliptical film by the master
of ‘sculpting in time’. - Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
USSR[ ] Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock’s
unsparing wrong-motel shocker starring Janet Leigh is a watershed for
mainstream horror and still seminal in its suspense games. -
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 USA[x] 8½ - Federico Fellini’s portrait
of the film director as harried ringmaster and unreliable dreamer,
spinning gold from his memories and fantasies. - Directed by
Federico Fellini, 1963 Italy, France[ ] L’Atalante - Jean Vigo’s headily
poetic portrait of young newlyweds on – and off – Michel Simon’s barge
on the Seine. - Directed by Jean Vigo, 1934 France[ ] Pather Panchali - All the
mischief, discoveries, joys and tragedies of life are given endlessly
lyrical expression in Satyajit Ray’s debut, the first entry in ‘The Apu
Trilogy’. - Directed by Satyajit Ray, 1955 India[ ] City Lights - A purely beautiful
outing from the Tramp, this delightful urban romance features one of
cinema’s most heartbreaking smiles. - Directed by Charles Chaplin,
1931 USA[x] M - Fritz Lang’s rack-taut first
talkie, with a searing, animalistic Peter Lorre as a serial
child-murderer turned manhunt target. - Directed by Fritz Lang, 1931
Germany[ ] Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder’s
supreme gender-bending comedy has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as
female-posing musicians on the lam, and many knickers in a twist. -
Directed by Billy Wilder, 1959 USA[ ] À bout de souffle - Jean-Luc
Godard’s cock-of-the-walk calling card, mixing pulp pastiche and upstart
rebellion with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s footloose Parisian delinquent. -
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 France[ ] Rear Window - The Master of
Suspense ratchets up the tension while dishing out insights into
obsession, urban living and the dangers of the gaze. - Directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954 USA[ ] Bicycle Thieves - The film that
topped our inaugural poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s indelible
neorealist parable offers a sharp-eyed portrait of Italy ’s post-war
privations. - Directed by Vittorio De Sica, 1948 Italy[ ] Rashomon - The film that brought
Japanese cinema to the world, this 88-minute firecracker proved a
seminal assault on the notion of objectivity. - Directed by Akira
Kurosawa, 1950 Japan[ ] Killer of Sheep - Charles
Burnett’s tender and witty tale of a disillusioned slaughterhouse worker
and the solace to be found in the simplest moments of life. -
Directed by Charles Burnett, 1977 USA[ ] Stalker - Two men recruit a guide
to take them into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious realm where one’s innermost
wishes come true, in this metaphysical sci-fi epic. - Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 USSR[ ] The Battle of Algiers - A window
on Algeria’s wider liberation war, recreating a violent phase of
guerrilla struggle and suppression in powerful free-documentary style. -
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 Italy, Algeria[ ] North by Northwest - Insouciant
big-screen thrill-games from the Master of Suspense, hounding Cary
Grant’s smug adman across a continent’s span of peerless set pieces. -
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1959 USA[ ] Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick’s
meticulously designed epic recounts the picaresque exploits of an
18th-century Irish adventurer. - Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975
USA, United Kingdom[ ] Wanda - Barbara Loden’s tough,
unsentimental portrait of a woman adrift in the industrial heartlands of
the north-eastern United States. - Directed by Barbara Loden, 1970
USA[ ] Ordet - An austere parable on the
power of faith, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s penultimate film culminates in a
transcendent resurrection scene. - Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955
Denmark[ ] The 400 Blows - François
Truffaut’s free-wheeling debut, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his
rebel-schoolboy surrogate, is still a banner film for nouvelle vague
lyric realism. - Directed by François Truffaut, 1959
France[x] The Piano - This virtuoso drama of
a mute woman’s and her daughter’s silent defiance of patriarchy in
19th-century New Zealand still has searing emotional heft. -
Directed by Jane Campion, 1992 Australia, France[ ] Fear Eats the Soul - Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama of a doomed romance across racial
and age divides probes social hypocrisy with feeling. - Directed by
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974 Federal Republic of Germany[ ] News from Home - Chantal Akerman’s
epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance
from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother. - Directed
by Chantal Akerman, 1976 France, Belgium[-] Blade Runner - Iconic neo-noir in
a befouled sci-fi Los Angeles where humans and their machine replicas
vie to be predators rather than prey. - Directed by Ridley Scott,
1982 USA, Hong Kong[ ] Battleship Potemkin - Sergei
Eisenstein’s renowned agit-drama of proto-revolutionary mutiny and
repression, often quoted but still powerful in its montage effects. -
Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925 USSR[ ] Le Mépris - Disillusion in love
and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production,
with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri. - Directed by
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 France, Italy[ ] Sherlock Jr. - Buster Keaton’s
would-be sleuth dreams himself into movie-heroic mastery in this
dazzling, evergreen, meta masterpiece of silent comedy. - Directed
by Buster Keaton, 1924 USA[ ] The Apartment - Billy Wilder’s
then-risqué romcom, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine finding love
amid corporate New York’s sea of sexual deception. - Directed by
Billy Wilder, 1960 USA[ ] Sans Soleil - Chris Marker’s
speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in
narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland. - Directed by
Chris Marker, 1982 France[ ] Moonlight - Instantly heralded as
a modern masterpiece, Barry Jenkins’ stunning three-part story of queer
identity is both a technical and an emotional marvel. - Directed by
Barry Jenkins, 2016 USA[ ] La dolce vita - Federico Fellini’s
ode to Rome presents a lush, vibrant exterior to the swinging city,
before revealing its rotting moral core. - Directed by Federico
Fellini, 1960 Italy, France[ ] Daughters of the Dust - Julie
Dash’s visionary visual marriage between Afrocentric aesthetics and the
rich emotional depth of Black - 1991 USA, womanhood is a cinematic
triumph.[ ] Casablanca - Ingrid Bergman
rallies Humphrey Bogart’s embittered cynic to the anti-Nazi cause in
this classic romance. - Directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942
USA[ ] GoodFellas - The dizzying story of
wiseguy Henry Hill, from his seduction into a life of crime to his
paranoid, cocaine-fuelled departure. - Directed by Martin Scorsese,
1990 USA[ ] The Third Man - Joseph Cotten
chases Orson Welles’s agent of corruption through the ruins of divided
post-war Vienna in this evocative classic thriller. - Directed by
Carol Reed, 1949 United Kingdom[ ] Touki Bouki - A restless young
couple dream of escaping Senegal for Paris in Djibril Diop Mambéty ’s
stylish, poetic, irreverent expression of post-colonial fantasies. -
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973 Senegal[ ] The Gleaners and I - Agnès Varda’s
essay portrait of society ’s scavenger-recyclers – herself included – is
both free-radical and infectious. - Directed by Agnès Varda, 2000
France[ ] La Jetée - The rare short film in
this list, Marker’s dazzling photo montage ruminates on memory from
beyond the apocalypse. - Directed by Chris Marker, 1962
France[ ] Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky’s
epic portrait of a medieval artist may be the most wrenching depiction
of belief, creativity and the search for meaning ever filmed. -
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 USSR[x] Metropolis - Fritz Lang’s
bombastic, stylised depiction of a future of profound inequality has
influenced generations of genre filmmakers. - Directed by Fritz
Lang, 1927 Germany[ ] The Red Shoes - The feverish
Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so
renowned are as spellbinding as they are disturbing. - Directed by
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948 United Kingdom[x] My Neighbour Totoro - The
storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a
series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences. - Directed
by Hayao Miyazaki, 1988 Japan[ ] Journey to Italy - Roberto
Rossellini’s plaintively simple portrait of a marriage on the rocks,
imprinted with the ghosts of love, cultures and civilisations. -
Directed by Roberto Rossellini, 1954 Italy, France[ ] L’avventura - Michelangelo
Antonioni’s high-modernist breakthrough sends Monica Vitti in search
less of her disappeared friend than her own self, via images to get lost
in. - Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 Italy,
France[ ] Imitation of Life - Douglas Sirk’s
melodrama holds a mirror to the hypocrisies of 1950s America with its
pairs of mothers and daughters across class and racial divides. -
Directed by Douglas Sirk, 1959 USA[ ] Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji
Mizoguchi’s tragic folk saga of the tribulations of an exiled governor’s
family in feudal Japan, tracked with exquisitely moving camerawork. -
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954 Japan[ ] Spirited Away - Hayao Miyazaki’s
rich anime fantasy follows its ten-year-old heroine into the labyrinth
of a spirit-world bathhouse, teeming with phantoms and peril. -
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, 2001 Japan[ ] Sátántangó - As timely as ever in
its grim poeticisation of demagogues and doom, helplessness and hope. If
music be the food of death, play on. - Directed by Béla Tarr, 1994
Hungary, Germany, Switzerland[ ] A Brighter Summer Day - Young love
and teen delinquency in Taiwan’s early 1960s adolescence, in Edward
Yang’s slow-burn, bittersweet epic. - Directed by Edward Yang, 1991
Taiwan[ ] Céline and Julie Go Boating -
Jacques Rivette’s most playful, innovative frolic, in which his
irreverent Parisian heroines dissolve worlds, genres, social codes and
boundaries. - Directed by Jacques Rivette, 1974 France[ ] Sunset Blvd. - Tinseltown’s
greatest self-satire, a gothic requiem for big-screen bygones and the
highs of screen stardom. - Directed by Billy Wilder, 1950
USA[ ] Modern Times - Industrial
modernity proves mercilessly madcap in Charlie Chaplin’s final (mostly)
silent feature, one of the most inspired and ingenious of all his
comedies. - Directed by Charles Chaplin, 1936 USA[ ] A Matter of Life and Death - Love
is rescued from the jaws of the afterlife in the Archers’ delirious
World War II air-pilot fantasia. - Directed by Michael Powell,
Emeric Pressburger, 1946 United Kingdom[ ] Histoire(s) du Cinéma - The
apotheosis of Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental era, this sprawling essay
film indicts the 20th century through its most popular medium. -
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1988 France, Switzerland[x] Pierrot le fou - Jean-Luc Godard’s
most effervescent escapade, a primary-coloured lovers-on-the-run
blow-out heading south with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. -
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 France, Italy[ ] The Spirit of the Beehive - Victor
Erice’s exquisite impressionistic distillation of childhood fear and
wonder in the ruins of the recently ended Spanish Civil War. -
Directed by Víctor Erice, 1973 Spain[ ] Blue Velvet - David Lynch’s adult
fairytale follows teen sleuth Kyle MacLachlan’s murder inquiry into the
surreal, perverse corners of small-town America. - Directed by David
Lynch, 1986 USA[ ] CHUNGKING EXPRESS - A sense of
wistful, romantic longing joins the two stories in Wong Kar Wai’s
freewheeling portmanteau portrait of Hong Kong. - Directed by Wong
Kar Wai, 1994 Hong Kong[x] The Shining - Stanley Kubrick’s
much analysed and often spoofed psychological horror spends a chilling
and claustrophobic winter at the empty Overlook Hotel. - Directed by
Stanley Kubrick, 1980 USA, United Kingdom[ ] Madame de… - Max Ophuls’ woozy
whirligig tracks a pair of unwanted earrings around high-society Paris –
until they bear the weight of lost time and passion. - Directed by
Max Ophuls, 1953 France, Italy[ ] The Leopard - Luchino Visconti’s
sumptuous epic portrays the fall of 19th-century Sicilian nobility, its
decadent displays of wealth tinged with melancholy. - Directed by
Luchino Visconti, 1963 Italy, France[ ] Ugetsu Monogatari - Kenji
Mizoguchi’s bewitching, insinuating Edo-period ghost story renders civil
war as a parable of heedless male greed. - Directed by Kenji
Mizoguchi, 1953 Japan[ ] Yi Yi - Urban anomie and
multi-generational growing pains are given rich, relaxed expression in
Edward Yang’s heartfelt Taipei family tapestry. - Directed by Edward
Yang, 1999 Taiwan, Japan[x] Parasite - Like Get Out, Bong Joon
Ho’s endlessly twisty, blackly sincere class-war thriller is a pop
provocation for our unequal times. - Directed by Bong Joon-ho, 2019
Republic of Korea[x] Get Out - A poster film for Black
Lives Matter, Jordan Peele’s horror-satire of white vampirism gleefully
needles America’s racial malaise. - Directed by Jordan Peele, 2017
USA, Japan[ ] Tropical Malady - A work that
defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may
be overrated. - Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004 France,
Thailand, Germany, Italy, Switzerland[ ] Black Girl - Ousmane Sembène lifts
the mask on France’s racist post-colonial relationship with Senegal in
his small yet commanding feature debut. - Directed by Ousmane
Sembène, 1965 Senegal, France[ ] The General - Buster Keaton’s most
lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a
train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War. - Directed by Buster
Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, 1926 USA[ ] A Man Escaped - This prison-break
study is Robert Bresson at his most starkly essential: a man, four
walls, his ingenuity and the mysterious inflections of fate. -
Directed by Robert Bresson, 1956 France[ ] Once upon a Time in the West -
Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with
the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad. -
Directed by Sergio Leone, 1968 Italy, USA