As I’m off for a while, I thought I’d leave with a post that can get readers involved in a mutually beneficial way. I’m speaking of a list of favorite movies. I’ve given below my twenty all-time favorites, and since I’ve seen a lot of movies let me just call these the “best movies”.
And yes, I know this isn’t about biology or atheism or cats. And I also know that many of you will take issue with these choices, and argue that better movies were left out. I plead that this list is of course subjective, and also constructed this morning from memory.
To point us all to good films, do post your own list of five (or more) of your favorite movies, highlighting your all-time favorite with a few words. When I return I’ll send an autographed paperback of WEIT to the commenter who provides the best list (which of course includes a good blurb for the top movie).
For each movie I’ve added a link to the group of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, my favorite movie-rating site.
The Last Picture Show. My all-time favorite, a haunting black-and-white essay, at once hilarious and ineffably sad, on our loneliness and failure to connect with others. It’s set in the oil town of Archer City, Texas (called “Anarene”) in the 1950s, and has an all-star cast—before many of them became stars. I’ve put below a YouTube clip of my favorite scene, Sam the Lion’s (Ben Johnson’s) soliloquy. Shoot me for saying this, but I find the scene the emotional equal of anything in Shakespeare. Because of this movie I made a pilgrimage to Archer City in 1972, and found it exactly as it was in the movie.
The Passion of Joan of Arc. The only silent movie on this list, and the best silent movie of all time. Maria Falconetti gives a fantastic performance of Joan during her trial and execution. You won’t believe that a movie without sound can be this good.
Chinatown My favorite film noir, a wonderful interaction between Jack Nicholson, who plays a detective, and director Roman Polanski. This is the kind of movie that makes you feel really unsettled as you leave the theater.
Wings of Desire Wim Wender’s masterpiece. Angels hover over post-war Berlin, listening to the thoughts of its inhabitants and sometimes falling in love with them.
The Best Years of Our Lives. This was a “popular” movie, made to entertain Americans after WWII. But it far transcends entertainment. It’s a gripping story of three veterans as they return from the war and try to put their lives together. Harold Russell, a genuine vet and non-actor, who lost his hands in the war, gives a stirring performance.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Klaus Kinski’s best performance in Werner Herzog’s twisted tale of a group of conquistadors, led by a madman, trying to find the city of El Dorado.
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). You won’t have heard of this movie, for it’s simply been forgotten. I was put 0nto it by my film-maven nephew after telling him how much I liked Tokyo Story (see below). Like that movie, it’s a meditation on age—specifically, the rejection of aging parents by their children. Parts of it seem a bit cheesy now, but it will still break your heart. There are no reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, so I’ve linked to Roger Ebert’s review.
Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Early Spring, and Late Autumn. If you haven’t heard of director Yasujiro Ozu, you’re in for a treat. These four movies are, I think, his best. They’re slow moving essays on family life in postwar Japan, and not for fans of quick-cut, fast-paced plots. Tokyo Story, which deals with the relationship between aging parents and their children, may be (along with Ikiru) the best foreign film ever.
Lawrence of Arabia. The best Hollywood blockbuster of all time. Great acting (especially by Peter O’Toole, who was born for the part), great photography, great story.
On the Waterfront. Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando. Enough said. (Oh, and it was a tough choice between this movie and the other great film of this duo, A Streetcar Named Desire.)
The Wizard of Oz. Any list of best movies that leaves this out is deficient. Have you seen it lately? This is the only movie on the list that’s a masterpiece for both children and adults.
The Godfather Parts I and II. We all know that Part III sucked, but Part II is the best sequel ever made (unless you consider Ozu’s movies as sequels). I still consider Part I the best, but others disagree.
Y Tu Mama Tambien. Loosely translated as “So’s Your Momma,” this is a Mexican film directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It’s the only coming-of-age movie on this list (I suppose The Last Picture Show might qualify) but it’s more than that. It’s a depiction of class differences in modern Mexico, set within a comedy that includes a tragedy. Oh, and it’s the most erotic movie here.
Ikiru. I’ve seen all of Kurosawa’s “epic” films, but this, an early black-and-white movie, is far better—perhaps the best foreign film ever made. It’s about a Japanese bureaucrat who finds meaning in life only after discovering he has terminal cancer. Unless you have no feelings, it will make you cry. The last scene is unforgettable.
Here are two movies that don’t come up to the others as world-class films, but I love them nonetheless:
Comedy: Annie Hall. Outstrips by a huge margin all other movies by Woody Allen. Every scene is a classic, and just thinking about them makes me smile. The Marshall McLuhan scene, the lobster scene, the dinner scene from Alvy’s childhood contrasted with that from Annie’s—sheer comic genius.
Musical: Yankee Doodle Dandy. You didn’t know that Jimmy Cagney could dance? He could—brilliantly, and his singing, dancing, and acting skills all make for a high-energy story of the songwriter George M. Cohan. As a kid I used to watch this every fourth of July (like It’s a Wonderful Life, it was always shown on the appropriate holiday), and I still have to watch it whenever it’s on. (Singin’ in the Rain runs a close second).
I’ve left off some universally acclaimed movies because I either haven’t seen them (e.g., The Bicycle Thief) or I can’t evaluate them properly because there’s been too much hype (Citizen Kane).
Now, tell us what you like.
Finally, a scene from The Last Picture Show:
The original ‘The Nutty Professor’ and the original ‘The Wicker Man’ – a couple of my faves, very different genres, that both had absolutely awful remakes that seem to have knocked the originals completely off the repeat scene.
*Three Days of the Condor (Redford & Faye Dunaway)
*The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Newman)
*Excalibur (Uther Pendragon & Igrayne)
While you do have a good list, I have to disagree with you about Dreyer’s film. It is a great film, but it is not the best silent movie ever made. The laurels for that title rest with Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed”.
Even in its’ presently extant form, sadly hacked to bits by the evil Irving Thalberg, it is a great movie. About 11 years about HBO (or maybe it was PBS) ran a reconstructed version which mixed production stills with existing footage to give the viewer an idea of what von Stroheim had envisioned for the second cut 5 hour version. In this form, it is clearly one of the finest films ever made. It is not easy to find anymore (a new copy of the 1999 version is available on Amazon for $160) and there was a laserdisc version which I did not pick up when I had a chance because I had the version I taped from HBO, er PBS, but if you can find a copy watch it!
The Palm Beach Story
Hands Across the Table
Bonjour, Tristesse
Advise and Consent
12 Monkeys
The Manchurian Candidate
Written on the Wind
The Tarnished Angels
Playtime
Mon Oncle
Red River
Support Your Local Sheriff
Network
And I will put in a plug for a little, not very important movie, that is one of my favorites because the cast is amazing, and they all appear to be having the time of their lives – Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards, Burgess Meredith,Kevin McCarthy, Charles Bickford (in his last role) and Paul Ford: A Big Hand for the Little Lady. It’s a movie about a game of poker, and the slyest, most subversive feminist movie ever made.
3 more:
White Christmas
The Court Jester
The Earrings of Madame d’….
OK, I’m pathetic, so I’ll try and come up with a list:
* Greed
An unabashed masterpiece. The wedding reception scene is brilliant.
* Chinatown
Yes, Polanski liked teenage girls. But damn, what a great director.
* Apocalypse Now
The original 70mm cut as shown at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood worked better than the slightly shorter version which had a weird ending which was shown in the multiplexes. I worked across the street from the Dome in Hollywood when the original was released and I saw it 1/2 dozen times or so. I’ve watched it numerous times since and never tire of it.
* Godfather I and II
Coppola again. He made 3 of the best movies of the ’70’s, a period which is arguably a golden age for American film.
* Citizen Kane
Predictable, I know. I’ve seen it in the neighborhood of 100 times, and never tired of it. Greg Toland’s cinematography set the stage for the look of modern film. And oh yeah, “Rosebud” was Kane’s sled. No point in watching the movie now… Also, check out “The Magnificent Ambersons” also.
* High Noon
One of the two finest westerns ever made. The political overtones from a film made in the McCarthy era still ring true today, and oh yeah, it has a young and absolutely gorgeous Grace Kelly.
* The Searchers
I’m a big fan of westerns, what can I say. A fascinating look at racism and the was it can twist people, this is the other one of the two best westerns ever made.
* Nosferatu (1922)
Still the best vampire movie ever made.
* North by Northwest
I ran a seminar on Hitchcock one semester in college. I think this is my favorite Hitchcock film, but they are all entertaining.
* Blazing Saddles
Mel Brooks is one of, if not the, best comedic directors. Blazing Saddles is so over the top and hits on so many different levels that I had to give it the nod. Maybe “The Producers” which is equally over the top and has some of the funniest musical scenes ever filmed.
* Ran
An amazing film. Moving, beautiful, expansive in scope. This is Kurosawa’s masterwork in a career filled with stunning films. Check out “Dodeskaden” or “Dersu Uzula” for less well known works by the same director. Of course “Seven Samurai” slots in there too.
So, I actually sneaked 12 or 13 in there. There are some weird ones I could have put in there like Attenborough’s “Oh What a Lovely War” or an early Kubrick film like “Paths of Glory”. But then, I am a film fetishist…
I recently got to see Wings of Desire in 35mm – gorgeous film, plus Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are one of my favorite bands, and that’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to seeing them live.
I’d have picked Fitzcarraldo or The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser over Aguirre, though Aguirre is quite good as well.
If you ever come to the University of Iowa (where my wife is a biology PhD student) I’ll have to gatecrash the after-guest-lecture drinking binge and we can have a chat about movies.
What about:
Stagecoach
The Informer
Rear Window
Dead of Night — Nightmare without end
Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing) — Truly demonic horror flick, directed by Geroge Sluizer. Not to be confused with the inferior American remake.
Damn Jerry, this sure did spur a torrent of comments. I had a list but seeing a posting including The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension pretty much put an end to that idea.
So, I will simply add a lone film to your very lonely silent genre: Buster Keaton’s The General.
Many great films are listed here. Not one Von Trier film mentioned yet, so I must add Breaking the waves. I really don’t believe in bells in the sky, but the ending always makes me weep anyway. Great movie in many ways. And Gilliam movies, havent seen The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus here. A film of pure beauty if you ask me.
The bird song in that Last Picture Show clip was, appropriately, an eastern bluebird, a bird that saw a large decline in numbers in the 70s because of habitat loss and nesting invasion from introduced species. It was a song heard often in the early 20th century, but is now not heard by most. I hear it on my nestbox trail daily….it’s a beautiful song. Nice to see the director add that authentic touch to the clip from that period.
http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=21
Reminds me of Whip-poor-wills in the part of Ontario where I grew up. As a kid I used to hear them nightly during summers. These days you hear them rarely with some years without hearing one.
In no order:
Hero
North by Northwest
Oh brother where art thou
Shawshank Redemption
Wild Things
Fargo
Kill Bill 1 & 2
Equilibrium (Invented Gun Kata for this movie)
Red Cliff 1 & 2
2001 A Space Odyssey
Dr Strange Love
Tron
A Clockwork Orange
The 5th Element
Hot Fuzz and Shawn of the Dead (Brilliant comedies)
12 Monkeys
Pulp Fiction
V for Vendetta
Usual Suspects
Ocean’s 11
The Hurt Locker
Up in the Air — ‘The Flying Dutchman’ redux.
Two by William Friedkin:
The French Connection
The Brinks Job
The Train
Time Bandits
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey — “The Seventh Seal” played for laughs, with Bill Sadler as “The Grim Reaper”. “Station!”
Burt Reynolds at his comic best.
Semi-Tough — Lampoon of professional football and new-age mumbo jumbo.
Fuzz — From an Evan Hunter novel. One of the ’87th Precint’ series written under his ‘Ed McBain’ pseudonym. The incompetence of the police proves that it’s better to be lucky than smart.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Robert Mitchum at his scariest.
Night of the Hunter — Scary, poignant and beautiful all at once. In the depression-era south, two children take to the river in order to escape the clutches of their mother’s murderer,
Cape Fear
Lots of great movies here! One I did not see listed is Witness. Harrison Ford is a hard-boiled Philadelphia cop who ends up hiding out with an Amish family in the countryside. Great performances, luminous cinematography, Arresting music, and interesting story.
Cape Fear-Scorsese. Only because I unintendly walked into a scene in downtown Ft Lauderdale. It was cut.
Key Largo
African Queen
Pythons’…Search for the Holy Grail
2001 Space Od.
Blazing Saddles
Manhatten-Allen
Dr. Coyne:
I saw “An Education” (a film you recommended in an earlier post). It was excellent.
As for films I would recommend, I’ll pick a couple of foreign films that atheists and agnostics might like (because of their existentialist/modernist themes):
1. Russian Ark
2. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
3. Alphaville
4. Amelie
All of these are interesting/profound films, but I’ll comment on Russian Ark:
The film consists of a single tracking shot, of about 90 minutes, set at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The famous museum is conceived as Noah’s Ark, and it is carrying the precious objects of civilization through the Dionysian storms of St. Petersburg’s history. As you watch, it dawns on you that you are a ghost and are being escorted through time by a nineteenth century French diplomat (who is also a ghost). It is a staggering, dizzying cinematic achievement.
Might I suggest two additional contests over the next year or so?:
1. Documentary films that atheists like
2. A piece of literature (a short story, a poem, a play) that your readers think is profound or says something true about the world.
—Santi
Jerry,
You have a very interesting list. A few comments:
– Y tu mama is a good film, but is it really a classic?
– I have always considered David Lean’s best film to be Brief encounter. His epic films seem a bit cold to me.
– Ikiru’s swing scene with Shimura’s lonely stare is truly one of the great moments in 20th century art.
– Annie Hall is a masterpiece.
– Last picture show as THE film is an admirable choice. Ben Johnson was one of the greatest character actors in the history of movies. But are there any other classics in Bogdanovich’s filmography?
My own list (I decided not to include more than 3 films by one director):
1. John Ford: Wagonmaster. The most beautiful film ever? Young Ben Johnson as a cowboy (which he was!) & John Ford’s “poetry of style”. Bogdanovich, of course, is a Ford fan.
2. Ford: The Quiet man. Maureen O’Hara’s red hair against the green landscape, when Duke Wayne sees her the first time. Everything Barry Fitzgerald says makes me weep with joy.
3. Ford: Young Mr. Lincoln. Hank Fonda as Abe Lincoln. Of course, this is a myth, but so beautiful that I want to believe it.
4. Preston Sturges: The Lady Eve. Hugely erotic. Hank Fonda as an amateur biologist (“You know me Mack, nothing but reptiles.”) & Babs Stanwyck as the embodiment of sexy intelligence.
5. Howard Hawks: His girl Friday. More Hollywood erotica. Cary Grant in his most virtuosic role.
6. Akira Kurosawa: Seven samurai. Takashi Shimura as the leader of the Samurai is just magnificent. I would follow him. This is so perfect that it is painful to watch run of the mill films after it.
7. Billy Wilder: Double indemnity. Stanwyck was the most charismatic female star of the classical Hollywood. And Wilder was the most consistent of its directors. He never made a truly bad movie.
8. Wilder: Fortune cookie. This is underrated, because many critics think it’s not funny enough. But it was not indented to be funny in the conventional sense. This is slow burning cynicism, a very black film. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon together is always a joy.
9. Ingmar Bergman: Wild strawberries. Bergman’s films are about the horror of loneliness. Victor Sjöström, one of the greatest silent era directors, in the leading role.
10. Bergman: Smiles of a summer night. Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck are a great romantic pair in this wonderful comedy, where both sexes humiliate each other.
11. Bergman: Fanny and Alexander. An artistic testament. The long version is the real one.
12. Frank Capra: It happened one night. Even more Hollywood erotica, this time with Gable and Claudette Colbert, “believe you me”.
13. Federico Fellini: Amarcord. Italians, the funniest people in the world.
14. Michael Curtiz: Casablanca.
15. Ridley Scott: Blade runner. Casablanca and Blade runner are similar in one way. Both have a director, who is not really an artist, but a capable professional. Both films benefitted from lucky coincides during the production and the results are spectacular. I prefer the original cut of Blade runner. And no – Deckard is not a replicant. That would spoil the beauty of his love affair.
16. Luis Bunuel: That obscure object of desire. I swear I didn’t notice that there are two women who alternate in the leading role from scene to scene.
17. Jean-Pierre Melville: The red circle. When a director borrows his surname from Herman Melville, his films must be great. I love the tragic deterministic atmosphere and the mutual appreciation of the leading men, Delon, Montad and Volonte.
18. Emir Kusturica: When father was away on business. Nothing he has done since this one is nearly as good. A sad and hilarious drama about a Bosnian family during Tito’s regime.
19. Sam Peckinpah: Junior Bonner. This is an understated family drama. Steve McQueen in his best role as an ageing rodeo star. Beautiful. And pessimistic like all Peckinpah films.
20. Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch. I started with a western with Ben Johnson in it, and I’m going to finish with a western with Ben Johnson in it. This is THE film. Everything is perfect: dialogue, actors, music, editing. And think about the relevance: Darfur, Congo, Afghanistan… Our modern world has many places like revolutionary Mexico.
I begin with what some would call a cop-out: naming Casablanca as my favorite movie. The real cop-out would be refusing to wed myself to a single title (or five or ten), but this choice carries little more distinction. I hate telling people it’s my favorite because the response is invariably, “Of course it is.” I’d love to cite some esoteric masterpiece from deep within the vault, but at the end of the day, everybody comes to Rick’s…even pretentious cinephile me.
The reason, of course, is the sheer, fortuitous perfection of all its working parts. Not one casting decision is debatable, from Bogart to the peerless Claude Rains to S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall (Carl the waiter). No theme song would suffice but “As Time Goes By.” No writers but the Epstein brothers could do the job. Without the legendary closing line (“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”), there would be no movie. How many films are that synergistic? Citizen Kane is a director’s vision, All About Eve a writer’s piece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf an actors’ field day and Days of Heaven a cinematographer’s triumph. Casablanca, though…well, the only sane course of action would be to throw out the categories and let everyone down to the set designer share one gigantic Oscar. Because like no other film in the canon, it’s all of a piece.
Yet it very nearly starred George Raft, showcased a new song by Max Steiner and ended with the line “Louis, I might have known you’d mix your patriotism with a little larceny.” Unthinkable but true.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is indeed a landmark, with Falconetti’s mesmerizing close-ups, but my favorite silent drama is F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Unencumbered by sound equipment, the camera achieved a buoyancy not recaptured for decades (at least until Max Ophuls came along). Words like “lissome” and “luminous” exist to describe this Expressionistic wonder.
Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Chaplin’s City Lights are no less essential.
I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Bogdanovich and asking which director he most admired. His answer: “I’ve known hundreds of directors, but only one saint. His name was Jean Renoir.” Watch Grand Illusion and you’ll understand. The greatest antiwar statement ever filmed contains no battle scenes. Its setting is a POW camp in which the ideology-blind European social order thrives. The aristocratic French prisoner and elegant German commandant effect what in peacetime would be called a friendship. Instead of satirizing the buffoonery of military conduct as Kubrick did, Renoir tenders a profoundly humanistic (though hardly naive) affirmation of faith in character and consciousness against a backdrop of groupthink. His visual and thematic focus is on the intrusion of the unplanned–of contingency–into the frame.
The warble of the zither, the child’s balloon, the telltale kitten, and the beaming face of Orson Welles…corruption lurks in the most benign foundations. The Third Man, with its canted angles and twisted logic, captures postwar nihilism like no other movie. Look down at those thousands of bustling dots; would you really tell Harry to keep his money? The answer may keep you up nights.
Technicolor splendor and stunted sexuality were the hallmarks of the Archers (writer/director/producers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), and the apogee of their partnership may have been Black Narcissus, a devastating study of repression among Anglican nuns cloistered in the Himilayas. Features a flawless Deborah Kerr performance and stunning photography by Jack Cardiff.
Positioned at the junction of Italian neorealism and the stylization for which he’d later become known, Federico Fellini made his masterpiece with La Strada, the emotional account of a waifish young girl and the bestial strongman undeserving of her love. Remembered for Giuletta Masina’s Chaplinesque turn as Gelsomina and Anthony Quinn’s barbarous man-child Zampano, perhaps the film’s most poignant scene belongs to Richard Basehart’s Fool–exuding otherworldly warmth, explaining that somehow even a pebble has a purpose. The texture of the scene is uniquely ethereal, and it works beautifully.
To the pairing of Tokyo Story and Make Way for Tomorrow I would add Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a young man’s meditation on old age. Flash forward nearly 30 years to Fanny and Alexander, as that same artist, older and somewhat mellowed, recalls childhood with clarity and candor. But in between–at his gloomiest and most pensive–he made his “God’s Silence” trilogy, peaking with Winter Light. Concerning a priest at the end of his physical and spiritual tether, the film poses all the Big Unanswerables but then offers a scene that exposes the fraudulence of traditional modes of questioning. The deformed church sexton, perhaps the most enlightened character in all of Bergman, considers where Christ’s suffering is generally attributed and judges it not false but (in light of personal experience) misplaced. At once Christ is removed from his sacrosanct pedestal and recast as a fellow victim of divine detachment.
We’re on our own again in Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s sole venture behind the camera. Relaying his parable of childhood innocence and religious fanaticism, he creates the most dreamlike of auras, reducing the viewer to a childlike state in which each presence is construed as ally or threat. Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell, his knuckles spelling out L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, his melodious hymns imbued with a current of terror, is perhaps the most menacing figure in cinema.
Hitchcock’s Vertigo is the last word in romantic obsession/subjugation, to say nothing of authorial reflexivity. The Master’s repackaging of Kim Novak as his icy ideal is just as thorough – you might say just as sinister – as the makeover Scottie inflicts on Judy/Madeleine. When Stewart beseeches, “Did he train you? Rehearse you? Tell you what do do and what to say??”, one wonders how many “he”s are being implicated.
And in many ways Hitchcock’s disciple, Francois Truffaut applied all his New Wave tricks to an old-fashioned revolving love story, and the result was Jules and Jim. Besides being a film that yields a different interpretation on each viewing, especially when the viewings are years apart, it attests to the cyclical nature of life as only a visual, musical medium is able to do. If it’s possible for a film to have a heartbeat, this is that film.
From the French New Wave to the New Hollywood, Five Easy Pieces boasts the era’s most complex protagonist. Notions of hero and antihero are rendered meaningless by Robert Eroica Dupea, disgusted by the privilege into which he was born, restless and stifled in his blue collar retreat – too critical to be content but too flippant to be contemplative. Only a young Jack Nicholson could have brought to light every nuance and contradiction. The high water mark for character studies.
Finally, two mid-’80s works that probe the introspective possibilities of cinema: Chris Marker’s videographic essay Sans Soleil, building a case for memory as “not the opposite of forgetting,” but, rather, a means of choosing how to narrativize past events (explicitly linked to filmmaking); and Russ McElwee’s Sherman’s March, one part Proust, one part Woody Allen, as his grant-funded historical documentary morphs into a quirky exploration of his own failed relationships and media-fueled obsessions. I would cite this as evidence that the medium has become the message, but I fear Marshall McLuhan would step out from behind a poster and claim I know nothing of his work…
Unmentioned movies that I’d give an A+:
Pandora’s Box, Far From Heaven, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Miller’s Crossing, I Am Cuba, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Harold and Maude, Evil Dead 2, Andrei Rublev, Oldboy, Once Upon a Time in America, Edward Scissorhands, Donnie Darko, Heimat and Withnail and I.
Why isn’t the Life of Brian on this list??? And what about Harold and Maude?
Not one mention of “Koyaanisqatsi”? I know I’m not that alone.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
The Passion of Joan of Arc
City Lights
The Wizard of Oz
La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game)
Pinocchio
Citizen Kane
Casablanca
Notorious
Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)
The Third Man
Sunset Boulevard
Singin’ in the Rain
Ikiru
On the Waterfront
The Searchers
Rio Bravo
Floating Weeds
Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows)
Psycho
La Dolce Vita
Lawrence of Arabia
Winter Light
8½
Dr. Strangelove
Persona
Bonnie and Clyde
2001: A Space Odyssey
Il conformista (The Conformist)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Last Picture Show
Cries and Whispers
The Spirit of the Beehive
Nashville
Taxi Driver
Stroszek
Apocalypse Now
Raging Bull
Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)
After Hours
Hannah and Her Sisters
My Neighbor Totoro
Grave of the Fireflies
Do the Right Thing
GoodFellas
The Crying Game
Schindler’s List
Crumb
Pulp Fiction
Hoop Dreams
Fargo
L.A. Confidential
Almost Famous
Minority Report
Million Dollar Baby
Pan’s Labyrinth
Ratatouille
Goodbye Solo
The Hurt Locker
Up
The Social Network
The Tree of Life
A Separation
Life of Pi
Mud
Masterpieces all.