Ten Best Éric Rohmer Directed Films

1. Le Rayon vert/The Green Ray/Summer (1986)
2. Ma nuit chez Maud/My Night at Maud's (1969)
3. Le genou de Claire/Claire's Knee (1970)
4. L'ami de mon amie/Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987)
5. Perceval le Gallois/Perceval (1978)
6. La femme de l'aviateur/The Aviator's Wife (1981)
7. Conte d'automne/An Autumn Tale (1998)
8. Le beau mariage/A Good Marriage (1982)
9. L'anglaise et le duc/The Lady and the Duke (2001)
10. Pauline à la plage/Pauline at the Beach (1983)

Plus, ten runners-up: Conte d'hiver/A Tale of Winter (1992), Les nuits de la pleine lune/Full Moon in Paris (1984), Le signe du lion/The Sign of Leo (1959), Conte de printemps/A Tale of Springtime (1990), Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon/The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007), Die Marquise von O.../The Marquise of O (1976), La Collectionneuse (1967), Les rendez-vous de Paris/Rendezvous in Paris (1995), La boulangère de Monceau/The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (1963), L'amour l'après-midi/Love in the Afternoon/Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)

Ten Best Clint Eastwood Directed Films

1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
2. Sudden Impact (1983)
3. A Perfect World (1993)
4. Mystic River (2003)
5. Unforgiven (1992)
6. The Gauntlet (1977)
7. Million Dollar Baby (2004)
8. Bronco Billy (1980)
9. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
10. White Hunter, Black Heart (1990)

Plus, ten runners-up: Gran Torino (2008), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Breezy (1973), Bird (1988), Space Cowboys (2000), Honkeytonk Man (1982), Firefox (1982), High Plains Drifter (1973), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Absolute Power (1997)

Ten Best Films' Pre-Code Favorites of 2009

Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth, 1931, Warner Bros.)
When Andrew Sarris claimed that Casablanca (1942) was "the most decisive exception to the auteur theory," clearly he had forgotten Roy Del Ruth's Blonde Crazy. Roy Del Ruth? Del Ruth's direction here borders on the genuinely experimental with his recourse to fantasy in a sequence strung together with multiple super-impositions, and in the elan of his overhead mobile framing of a local jail. Add to this Kubec Glasmon and John Bright's sparking dialogue - again, who? - and the charismatic, wise-cracking performances of the great James Cagney and Joan Blondell, and Blonde Crazy surely rates among the greatest Hollywood films of a lesser artistic pedigree.

Bombshell (Victor Fleming, 1933, M.-G.-M.)
A highpoint in Pre-Hays Code-era self-reflexivity, Bombsell involves re-shoots of the prior Victor Fleming-Jean Harlow smash hit Red Dust (1932), with the latter playing herself in this portrait of the perfectly vacuous star, Lola Burns. Harlow's Burns, however, is no match for Lee Tracy's epically manipulative press agent, who orchestrates Burns's contact with and exclusion from proper society. Fleming's direction, with the exception of a Trouble in Paradise (1932)-brand opening montage that confirms Burns's stardom, is very clean and classical, frequently motivated by figure movement within the frame. Bombshell is quite conceivably Fleming's best film.

City Streets (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931, Paramount)
See Lisa K. Broad's outstanding appreciation at Tativille.

Female (Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle and William A. Wellman, 1933, Warner Bros.)
There were amoral films made during the Pre-Code era and then there were amoral films. This Michael Curtiz signed picture (he was responsible, purportedly, only for the re-shoots, with William A. Wellman directing the majority of the film's scenes) certainly fits in the latter category, with Ruth Chatterton's auto executive callously seducing her more dashing male employees - she serves her pursuits vodka to "fortify" their "courage." In the end, Chatterton's exec opts for love over business, providing an unexpectedly conventional conclusion to what had been otherwise substantially radical stuff. Plus, and this is a very big plus, Female features extraordinary locations shot at Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis Hose.

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (Lewis Milestone, 1933, United Artists)
The strangest film on this or really any list, Lewis Milestone's career peak is also one of the best. With its sing-song dialogue, moments of microscopic, Eisensteinian montage, extremely mobile framing, and frequent looks into the camera, Milestone throws off virtually every popular cinema convention of the capitalist society that Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! seeks to critique. Gleefully supportive of life on the bum, Milestone and screenwriter Ben Hecht's opus advocates for a communal life and free moral system that clearly resides outside of American norms. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! is likewise noteworthy, though far more trivially, for providing one of the oddest understandings of amnesia ever committed to the screen.

Hot Saturday (William A. Seiter, 1932, Paramount)
Of all the films cited on this list, Seiter's Hot Saturday excels every other in its singular expression of place: here, a presumably Southern small town, surrounded by pinewood forests and pristine lakes, lensed gorgeously, especially in the deep dark of night, by Arthur L. Todd. The under-appreciated Nancy Carroll (see also The Man I Killed) and a rather young, and of course, quite dashing Cary Grant co-star in this portrait of small-town bigotry, which in this instance leads to a convincingly modern conclusion. But it is the careful construed atmosphere that most stays in the mind, making this one of the first films among the ten that I am looking forward to revisiting.

The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932, Paramount)
See my full-length piece at affiliate site Tativille.

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932, Fox)
Were I pressed to recommend a single film on this list, Me and My Gal would be it. Walsh's film is deliriously playful in its usage of nascent sound technologies: we get self-assured, gum-chewing dialogue from the film's exceptional leads, Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett; a mute witness to the film's crimes; and most spectacularly, internal monologues spoken in conversation, spoofing 1932 experiment Strange Interlude. It is moreover an absolute genre mash-up combining elements of romantic comedy, vaudeville and the gangster film, among others. Indeed, it becomes ever clearer that Walsh's best work was in the gangster film, whether it was Regeneration (1915), The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949), or perhaps the greatest of all his films, Me and My Gal.

The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932, Universal)
One of the genuinely great Universal horror titles of the Pre-Code years, The Old Dark House first off offers up a cast unrivaled among those works mentioned on this list: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton in his first American film, Raymond Massey, and the very alluring Gloria Stuart, a mere sixty-five years before her appearance in Titanic. Second, The Old Dark House provides unparalleled atmosphere in its secluded, hillside mansion, stumbled upon by a group of travelers stranded by a torrential, nocturnal downpour. Third, there is the film's distinctly terrifying denouement, this is one of Whale's scariest films...

Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, 1931, Warner Bros.)
The Pre-Code auteur discovery of 2009, thanks in no small measure to Turner Classics's Fobidden Hollywood, Vol. 3 box-set, is undeniably William A. Wellman, whose work in this period (see for example also Female, Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale; all 1933) seems to qualitatively dwarf his overall output in the coming two decades. Other Men's Women in particular rates among the better films of the era, with its displaced memory of the First World War - in the person of its wounded veteran - the sexual energy suggested by the film's title, and most remarkably of all, its sense of the kinetic: as in Wild Boys of the Road, Wellman closes his film with a pure expression of movement that as always expresses the very nature of the medium.

Note: The ten films selected were each pictures that I saw for the first time in 2009. Many are available on DVD and/or screen regularly on Turner Classic Movies. Because I am limiting myself only to first time viewings, I have not included anything by Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford, Frank Borzage, and so on, along with only a single title by Ernst Lubitsch. Were I doing a proper Pre-Code top ten, one could be certain that my list would be heavily represented by the aforesaid directors. For further favorites, see my ten best lists of the 1930s.

Ten Best Films of 2008

1. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/
Italy/Spain)
The clear choice for the year's best, Lucrecia Martel's third feature articulates its female lead's psychological distress in terms of a narrative opacity that lifts in tandem with its heroine's renewed perception of her world. This cognizance, however, does not extend to the level of the social, which Martel analyzes in a mise-en-scène that continually reserves focus for her female protagonist while locating society's more marginal figures in an out-of-focus periphery. As with her 2001 La Ciénaga, Martel powerfully visualizes her metaphor - though, it is worth adding, she does so to a much more rigorous degree in The Headless Woman. Form and subject are indeed remade into one in this foremost masterpiece of the new Argentine cinema.

2. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
J-horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa's generic change of pace represents nothing less than the director's best, savaging his nation's institutions (namely, the Japanese patriarchy, capitalist system, postwar anti-militarism and familial structure) and self-image, within a subtly expressionistic visually field. Timely mining remarkably similar thematic terrain to Laurent Cantet's Time Out (2001) with its out-of-work company man going to work daily, Kurosawa extends his critique to the film's other three family members who each challenge the authority of the aforesaid institutions. Kurosawa, however, reserves a revolutionary narrative "earthquake" or reversal for the final act, providing the ideal impetus for the film's ethos of resistance.

3. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
Yet another filmmaker working at his peak, Olivier Assayas essentially adopts the pattern of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times (2005) in remaking his own corpus - especially his previous peak Cold Water (1994) and the fine Late August, Early September (1998) - through a three-part structure. While less clearly demarcated than in the Hou, each segment centers on a generation, who demonstrate France's evolving materialistic values. In fact, Assayas seems most critical of his own age-group, positioned between their family-minded elders and communitarian juniors. This is Assayas at both his most French and Asian, registering their distinctive naturalisms through an often mobile camera.

4. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/
Germany/Spain)
Emphasizing tactile experience and sensory memory to extraordinary effect, Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool adopts a conventional modernist strategy of long, often static takes to procure these realist qualities. Alonso likewise often holds his shots well beyond their narrative purpose has concluded, thus providing a visual analogy for his narrative structure: Liverpool continues even after on-screen subject Farrel has left the field-of-vision for the final time, thus emphasizing the robustness of life that this single film is unable to contain in its entirety. In other words, Alonso adapts modernist film language in the image of a narrative that seeks to do the same.

5. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France/Germany)
Claire Denis's latest is the filmmaker in her most effective idiom, the romantic narrative poetics of her Friday Night (2002), following on the substantially more obscure fragmentation of the director's L'Intrus (2004). Here, as with her 1999 Beau Travail, movement returns to the fore, though in this instance it is less fetishistic exposition than the construction of a pattern of living particular to Paris's outer-suburb African immigrant community. These mobile, train-situated framings provide one of many echoes with Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949) source - as do the film's rice-cookers, static corridor set-ups, and its' concluding wedding - that Denis nevertheless transforms in the image of a racially-mixed 21st century France.

6. Two Lovers (James Gray, United States)
Perhaps the past year's biggest surprise - in spite of writer-director James Gray's notable previous forays into the Russian world of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, Little Odessa (1994) and We Own the Night (2007); Gray is, in this regard, the supreme hedgehog of the US cinema, never straying very far from home - Two Lovers is easily 2008's most precise piece of American filmmaking. Modifying its classical decoupage in the variable image of superlative lead Joaquin Phoenix's variable psychology, Two Lovers offers a very traditional Jewish morality to replace the explicitly aestheticized romance of Phoenix and WASP love interest Gwyneth Paltrow. French critics again appear to be on the vanguard when it comes to the American Gray.

7. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
One of this year's series of narratives depicting a rare family gathering, A Christmas Tale distinguishes itself for the pure bravado of Arnaud Desplechin's post-classical (and post-modern) direction. Adopting essentially every technique available to the filmmaker - from a shadow play to split-screen - Desplechin utilizes each as a means of maintaining a moment-to-moment quality of formal surprise; Desplechin, in other words, dislodges his signifiers from what they signify, selected instead for their syntactic effectiveness. This is filmmaking at its most free and intuitive, qualities that are no less present in the director's outstanding My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (1996) and Kings and Queen (2004).

8. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
In a year of vivid family portraits - see French instantiations Summer Hours and A Christmas Tale - none comes close to the robust sense of reality procured by director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Centering on matriarch Kirin Kiki's exceptional performance, where she shows herself to be as capable of cruelty as she is motherly affection, Still Walking manages to be equally Japanese in its deliberate pacing and style, as well as in the film's carefully selected cultural details, and global in its upper middle-class habits and especially in the film's governing humanism. Japanese or not, the ordering of (sushi) take-out for the family gathering feels remarkably familiar, as does the step grandson's combination of cola and ginger ale at a soda fountain. A film of extraordinary texture.

9. Jerichow (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Further affirmation of the strength of Germany's "Berlin School" of filmmaking - joining Valeska Grisebach's exceptional Longing (2006) and the director's own Yella (2007) - Christian Petzold's Jerichow articulates a burgeoning anxiety in which the sons and daughters of Old Europe have suddenly found themselves on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, in this instance beneath an entrepreneurial Turk (thus displaying a racial revisionism for this newest German cinema). Petzold establishes this point in a narrative that systematically and expertly delays its dramatic pay-offs within a distinctly voyeuristic visual field that is itself as accomplished in its with-holdings and revelations as is Petzold's narrative.

10. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, United States)
Reaffirming Michel Gondry's status as the single American filmmaker most interested in bringing the cinema into correspondence with its sister visual arts, see his 2006 The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind again establishes this relationship through its production of Nicolas Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics," where the residents of Gondry's rundown, environmentally-scarred suburban Passaic, New Jersey participate in the re-producing of VHS-era classics. Demonstrating both a nostalgia for Ghostbusters-period film art and a social consciousness, few if any contemporary American directors can come close to Gondry when it comes to the surfeit of his films' ideas. In the best sense, Gondry really is a filmmaker for film theorists.

2008: Lisa K. Broad

1. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
2. Two Lovers (James Gray, United States)
3. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
4. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/
Italy/Spain)
5. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
6. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, United States)
7. Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita, Japan)
8. Sparrow (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
9. Redbelt (David Mamet, United States)
10. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France/Germany)

Ten Best Films' 2008 Mini-Poll

1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin) - 46 points (AJ, LB, MA, ML, MS, PK, RSu, RSw)
2. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel) - 37 (AJ, LB, MA, RSu, RSw)
3. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry) - 31 (AZ, LB, MA, ML, PK)
4. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) - 28.5 (LB, MA, RSu, RSw)
5. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt) - 25 (AJ, KW, MS, RSw)
6. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007) - 24.5 (AJ, AZ, MS)
7. (tie) Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007) - 20 (AJ, PK, RSw)*
Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme) - 20 (AZ, KW, MS)
9. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan) - 18 (AZ, KW, ML, MS)
10. Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood) - 16 (AJ, PK, RSw)

Also receiving multiple citations: Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson) - 15 (AZ, ML, MS); Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) - 14 (KW, RSu); In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007) - 13.5 (MA, RSw)*; Sparrow (Johnnie To) - 13.5 (LB, ML, RSw); Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006) - 13.5 (PK, RSw)*; Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita) - 13 (LB, ML); Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky) - 13 (LB, RSu); The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, 2007) - 11 (LB, MA)*; JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri) - 11 (AZ, ML); The Wrestler (Darren Arnofosky) - 11 (AZ, MS); Milk (Gus Van Sant) - 10 (KW, MS); WALL·E (Andrew Stanton) - 9 (AJ, ML, PK); RR (James Benning, 2007) - 7 (MA, RSu); Step Brothers (Adam McKay) - 3 (AJ, PK); Chouga (Darezhan Omirbaev) - 2 (MA, RSu).

Note: Films featuring an asterisk [*] were selected by at least one participant in 2007, thereby lowering their totals - and rankings - this year.

The above list is comprised of top ten selections made by Andrea Janes (AJ), Alberto Zambenedetti (AZ), Karen Wang (KW), Lisa K. Broad (LB), Michael J. Anderson (MA), Mike Lyon (ML), Matt Singer (MS), P.L. Kerpius (PK), Richard Suchenski (RSu) and R. Emmet Sweeney (RSw). Points were alloted according to rankings with a #1 choice receiving 10, a #2, 9, and so on. For those lists in which no order was specified, 5.5 points have been awarded for all selections.

Richard Suchenski's 2008 Top Ten List

As usual, my rules are simple: any film that had its world premiere in 2008 is eligible. This time around, I’m bending these rules a bit by including two films that are technically 2007 releases (the ones with asterisk next to them). In both cases, the rationale for inclusion is the fact that, except for special screenings, it wasn’t really possible to see either of them anywhere until this year.

Top Ten:
1. Eniaios (Cycles 3-5) – Gregory Markopoulos (Greece)
2. Sarabande and Winter – Nathaniel Dorsky (USA)
3. Le Genou d’Artemide – Jean-Marie Straub (Italy)
4. The Headless Woman – Lucrecia Martel (Argentina)
5. Summer Hours – Olivier Assayas (France)
6. A Christmas Tale – Arnaud Desplechin (France)
7. Tokyo Sonata – Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan)
8. RR – James Benning (USA)*
9. 4 Nights with Anna – Jerzy Skolimowski (Poland/France)
10. Chouga – Darezhan Omirbaev (Kazakhstan/France)*

Runners-up:
11. Une Catastrophe – Jean-Luc Godard (Switzerland)
12. Birdsong – Albert Serra (Spain)
13. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – David Fincher (USA)
14. Tulpan – Sergei Dvortsevoy (Kazakhstan/Russia/Germany/Poland)
15. Horizontal Boundaries – Pat O’Neill (USA)
16. The Frontier of Dawn – Philippe Garrel (France)
17. Aberration of Starlight – Andrew Noren (USA)
18. 24 City – Jia Zhang-ke (China)
19. Of Time and the City – Terence Davies (UK)
20. Tony Manero – Pablo Larrain (Chile)

Retrospective of the year: James Quandt’s complete retrospective of Nagisa Oshima’s film work offered a perfectly-timed reminder of just how rich that sort of filmmaking can be, and how much we are losing with the passing of the postwar generation. Temenos screenings aside, it was the cinematic highlight of the year. The extensive, traveling Manoel de Oliveira retrospective was almost as impressive and credit should also go out to the Museum of the Moving Image for giving New York audiences a chance to see the films from Ford at Fox as they were meant to be seen.

2008 offered proof yet again that great films continue to be made all over the world, even though many of them will never receive any theatrical distribution in North America. Film culture is increasingly dependent on film festivals, but the complexities and idiosyncrasies of festival programming inevitably leave gaps, which accounts for the fact that I still have not been able to see Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda), 35 Rhums (Claire Denis), and Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso), three films which would probably have made this list. For now, at least, international auteur filmmaking is alive and well and one of the great pleasures of 2008 was seeing a number of extremely talented directors turning out some of their very best films.

That applies equally to avant-garde filmmaking and especially to the two new films by Nathaniel Dorsky. The montage in both Sarabande and Winter is denser and more rhythmically modulated than in his previous works, but it feels freer, more organic and also more mysterious. They are the richest expressions yet of his genuinely polyphonic sensibility, one that is sensitive to the immanent rhythms of people and things - that allows them to attain their own sufficiency - while still shaping them into works that strike a delicate balance between the subjectivity of the filmmaker and the objects being filmed. That Dorsky was able to inject a sense of bodily motion into his new films without suggesting the cinematic rhetoric of his close friend Stan Brakhage is nothing short of remarkable.

For me, though, the decisive event of the year was the first screening of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th cycles of Gregory Markopoulos’ 80-hour masterwork Eniaios at the Temenos (in Lyssaraia, Greece). This second set of screenings was even richer than the first (in 2004), helping to clarify the aesthetic stakes of Markopoulos’ project and also the underlying network of meanings linking one cycle to another. A work of the greatest possible ambition and integrity, Eniaios towers over not just every other film released this year, but this decade.

Richard is a joint PhD candidate in Film Studies and History of Art at Yale University.

Ten Best Films of 2007

1. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France)
In remaking Albert Lamorisse's 1956 French children's classic The Red Balloon, the Taiwanese-based Hou has created the year's most multi-layered mediation on its subject: namely of the melancholic content of the source material and its process of reproduction in Flight of the Red Balloon. This is a work where each formal element retains a narrative and thematic significance, whether it is the piano score that conveys the young boy's psychology or the camera movements that transit between the spaces in front of and behind the Taiwanese puppet stage (thus doing the formal work of de-mystification). In other words, The Flight of the Red Balloon is one more masterpiece from a filmmaker who has been making nothing but for the past two decades.

2. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/
Germany)
With his first two features, Japon (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), Carlos Reygadas showed himself to be the most spectacularly talented Mexican director of his generation. With Silent Light we may stop speaking of this talent in the implicit terms of promise; rather this is a work of exceeding formal rigor in the organic service of the film's subject. From the film's stupefying opening shot, Reygadas has remade the iconography of transcendent film practice. While the director's (literally) miraculous take on the theme of infidelity in the Mennonite world demonstrates its maker's continued taste for provocation, Silent Light never fails to be reverent. This is a much higher level of filmmaking than anything Reygadas has made to date.

3. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, France/Italy/
Spain)
Rumored to be Rohmer's final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon does not so much represent a "leap forward" as it does a summary of the director's previous corpus. Synthesizing the master's conceptual interest in period filmmaking and his predilection for location shooting (among his contemporary pieces), The Romance of Astrea and Celadon continues the director's strategy of perpetually responding to his own filmmaking past. Likewise, Rohmer's summa re-formulates his career-long interest in commingling erotic love and his Catholic faith - which in this instance transposes both to France's pre-Christian past. In short, one last master work from the nouvelle vague's greatest director.

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, United Kingdom/Canada/
United States)
Extending the director's interest in the epistemological, Eastern Promises qualifies as a companion piece to Cronenberg's 2005 masterpiece, A History of Violence: here, the formula of good to evil embedded in Viggo Mortensen's covert hero is reversed. If Eastern Promises falls slightly short of his recent career peak - perhaps the justification for the director's otherwise unexplainable neglect on most 2007 top ten lists - it remains one of the year's most extraordinary pieces of classical decoupage filmmaking, right down to the film's conventional exoticism and rear projections. This is Cronenberg as North America's finest living "B" filmmaker, and perhaps its finest contemporary director period.

5. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)
Spanish director José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia continues the twenty-first century's marked turn toward a Bazinian realism (cf. Lisandro Alonso's comparably accomplished Los Muertos, 2004) albeit in a form that mediates this interest in reality through the prism of a thoroughly-considered reflexivity. Guerín's work takes its near plotless conceit of an artist's beautiful female objects of vision - mostly spotted at a French café - and manages harrowing, cringe-inducing drama to surpass any other work on this year's list. Guerín's is a work of unmistakable, acutely observed truths, be it the sensation of being looked at or the weightless feeling of pursuit. For many, this writer included, In the City of Sylvia announced a previously-unknown major talent.

6. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, United States)
Even more than with Eastern Promises, critics have seemed blinded to The Darjeeling Limited's clear artistic virtues. While The Darjeeling Limited does cover similar stylistic and thematic terrain to Anderson's earlier corpus (a criticism that is rarely leveled against cinema's sister arts, though it is the chief objection leveled against Anderson) it does so in a fictional India that seems perfectly suited to the filmmaker's fiction. And it does so on a locomotive - a minor but rich sub-genre - that provides a rich metaphor for the film's meta-textual concern: in this case cinema rather than the theatre of Rushmore or the novel of The Royal Tenenbaums. In other words, this is the latest, essential variation in Anderson's closed corpus.

7. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)
Wang's non-fiction Fengming: A Chinese Memoir establishes a new twenty-first century standard for conceptual minimalism: a single frontal camera set-up for most of its 186-minute duration. In front of the filmmaker's mini-DV camera, the eponymous subject, in a near endless stream of expertly-narrated anecdotes, recounts her experiences as the victim of Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist purge and the subsequent Cultural Revolution. Wang uses neither archival footage nor photographs to illustrate Fengming's personal history, limiting his film instead to his subject's on-camera act of recollection. What emerges is one of the most vital and paradoxical visual films of the year, giving voice and embodied presence to Fengming.

8. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)
Yet another major work from an ageless nouvelle vague master, The Duchess of Langeais extends many of the director's career-long preoccupations - chief among which are its emphases on repetition, contingent duration and the interchangeability of roles - through a form that has fully narrativized, which is to say classicized these themes. As always, Rivette's style is equal parts Hawks (in the invisibility of its decoupage) and Mizoguchi (for its sense of volume conferred by an often mobile camera), which though theoretically self-canceling provides the ideal platform for Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu's acting pyrotechnics and William Lubtchansky's lush, period-recreating cinematography.

9. RR (James Benning, United States/Germany)
Another farewell - in its instance to the medium of 16mm rather than to the art form itself - Benning's RR returns to projected cinema's first subject - the train's arrival - to discover the baseline of moving image viewership: namely, in its cuing of spectator attention through the introduction of minor variations (be it the sudden ripple of a watery surface or an inconspicuous piece of refuse). Indeed, any interest in the eponymous subject of the film is quickly displaced onto those elements that do not obtain over the entire 112 min. duration. From the point-of-view of 2007 at least, RR, along with 13 Lakes and Ten Skies (both 2004), comprise the decade's most significant experimental corpus.

10. Chouga (Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan/France)
Darezhan Omirbaev's heavily distilled, if arguably felicitous adaptation of Anna Karenina submits Tolstoy's masterpiece to modern-day Kazakhstan and to that nation's nascent Russian-flavored gangsterism. Moving from countryside to city, and from the visual schema of steppe-set late Soviet cinema to the post-modernity of upscale urban strip clubs, Omirbaev doubles the original's moral parable with a disquisition on his nation's fate (with the director finally striking an optimistic closing note). Yet his achievement resides less in the strength of this allegory than in the palpable eroticism elicited through the film's semi-classical Bressonian mise-en-scène. Chouga compares favorably to 2008 Kazakh prize-winner Tulpan.

2007: Lisa K. Broad

1. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, United Kingdom/Canada/
United States)
2. The Man from London (Béla Tarr, Hungary/France/Germany)
3. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, United States)
4. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)
5. Zodiac (David Fincher, United States)
6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/
Germany)
7. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France)
8. Adrift in Tokyo (Satoshi Miki, Japan)
9. A Girl Cut in Two (Claude Chabrol, France/Germany)
10. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, United States)

2007: Emily Condon

1. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)
2. Great World of Sound (Craig Zobel)
3. Superbad (Greg Mottola)
4. This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006)
5. Ratatoullie (Brad Bird)
6. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy)
7. Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)
8. Exiled (Johnnie To, 2006)
9. The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006)
10. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Note (12/30/07): I haven't seen No Country for Old Men, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, or There Will Be Blood yet.

Emily is a graduate student at the New School for Social Research and a fellow native of Watertown, Minnesota.

2007: Richard Suchenski

Conditions: I restricted myself exclusively to films - narrative, avant-garde or documentary, distributed or otherwise - that were first premiered theatrically somewhere in the world in 2007. For that reason, I excluded exceptional films, like Colossal Youth and Honor de Cavalleria, that had their North American premieres in 2007 but played elsewhere in 2006.

1. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
2. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette)
3. Pitcher of Colored Light (Robert Beavers)
4. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
5. Alexandra (Aleksandr Sokurov)
6. The Man from London (Béla Tarr)
7. At Sea (Peter Hutton)
8. Zodiac (David Fincher)
9. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín)
10. Terror’s Advocate(Barbet Schroeder)

Please also note that I have not yet (as of 12/30/07) had the chance to see There Will Be Blood.

Richard is a PhD candidate in film studies and the history of art at Yale University.

Ten Best Films of 2006

1. Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
The year’s most elegant piece of filmmaking – witness the handling of multiple, interlocking storylines, separated by lyrical, snow-trimmed dissolves or the film’s remarkable balance between tonal lightness and thematic seriousness – Private Fears in Public Places is ‘Left-Bank’ maestro Alain Resnais’ best film in twenty years. It may also be his most directly personal work to date, signaling a new direction for this master of conspicuously impersonal art film entertainments. Private Fears joins Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke and Rivette's The Story of Marie and Julien as an absolute highlight of the nouvelle vague's latest extraordinary flowering.

2. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/
France/Austria)
Apichatpong’s structuralist-inspired Syndromes and a Century continues the director’s preference for comparative, bipartite narratives: in its case pitting languidly-paced, digression-filled country remembrances with an ecologically-calamitous present confined to the antiseptic interiors of an urban hospital. The Thai auteur does however mediate his ‘Walden’ with an ambivalent, new-urbanist coda. Clearly, Apichatpong is one of the most vital directors in the world; we may be living in his moment.

3. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong)
For one of the most rigorous film directors working anywhere, Still Life may just be its maker Jia Zhangke’s most thoroughly conceived yet: the filmmaker’s multi-layered consideration of cultural loss (Jia’s key theme) is extended to include the personal toll of China’s real-life Three Gorges Dam project. Jia utilizes DV to capture the site in an almost infinite depth-of-field, thereby securing a visual and thematic backdrop for the above subject. Still Life joins Platform (2000) as one of the director’s very best.

4. Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, United States)
As Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson have argued, Déjà Vu is director Tony Scott's Vertigo, his meditation on dead love brought back into a tactile proximity with the film's naive protagonist. Déjà Vu however extends well beyond its hypotext, providing one of 21st century Hollywood's most profound engagements with recent American tragedy from Oklahoma City to September 11 to Hurricane Katrina. This is Scott's masterpiece, consolidating the forms and obsessions of Enemy of the State, Man on Fire and Domino in an exactingly mimetic art.

5. Longing (Valeska Grisebach, Germany)
Valeska Grisebach’s Longing centers on an incidence of small-town adultery, and in particular on the faces of the three involved parties. On these canvases we see the disconsolateness of the two women – the wife as she learns of her perfect firefighter husband’s infidelity and his mistress as she discovers that he does not remember their first night together – and the enigmatic expressivity of the male. In this way, Grisebach reverses the conventional structure of filmic desire, which she likewise accomplishes (most spectacularly) in his impassioned dance to a Robbie Williams ballad.

6. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/France)
With a preternatural color palette and seemingly infinite depth – spectacularly rendered in the snowflakes that fall a hair in front of his DV lens – Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest easily bests his excellent Distant (2002). Here, the director co-stars with real-life wife Ebru Ceylan in his tale of marital disintegration. Nonetheless, Climates is fictional auto-biography, a Turkish Voyage in Italy (1953, Roberto Rossellini) less that masterpiece’s concluding miracle. For Ceylan, relationships never last, even if his has.

7. Kodak (Tacita Dean, United Kingdom/France/United States)
The year’s most striking exposure of celluloid, Kodak makes an argument for her 16mm medium’s specificity and superiority over digital technologies in its registration of sensuous tones (saffrons, royal blues, turquoise and sea-greens and pink-tinted purples) in exceedingly low light. Dean’s spare lighting often adorns empty corridors, thus drawing attention to film’s post-human character – that is as an indexical medium. However, it is a format that is disappearing: Kodak in fact depicts the last European 16mm manufacturer on the final day of production.

8. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France/
Austria)
Comprised of ravishing, static sequence-shots that mark discontinuous sections of narrative and culminate in visual punch lines, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone instantiates director Tsai’s inimitable film idiom. Situating a film for the first time in his native Malaysia, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone nevertheless signals a restoration rather than a departure: returning after The Wayward Cloud’s (2005) post-modern diversion, Tsai’s latest figures the subject of unconsummated romance around a single, ultimately under-utilized mattress.

9. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland)
A film endeavoring to reinvent the language of cinema with every fiber of its singular being, Pedro Costa's epic Colossal Youth was in some distant recess of the cinematic universe the film of the year. Establishing a new standard for modernist-inflected film minimalism, Costa's opus offers a multi-valent riff on the act of limitation, whether it is a narrative in which, in a traditional sense, nothing happens or more significantly, in the director's ever static, exceedingly tightly framed mise-en-scène. As aesthetically exhilarating as it is conventionally boring.

10. Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho, Indonesia/Austria)
Commissioned along with Syndromes and a Century and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone for the 'New Crowned Hope festival,' Opera Jawa combines Mozartian opera and indigenous Javanese art forms to forge one of the year’s most memorable works. This all-singing adaptation of the Ramayana continually highlights the gaps its presents between its local signifiers and the signified universals. As such, director Nugroho offers a point of entry into his folk art cinema: namely, in the Western viewer's cognizance of its poetic construction.

2006: Lisa K. Broad

1. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/France)
2. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France/
Austria)
3. Longing (Valeska Grisebach, Germany)
4. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong)
5. Inland Empire (David Lynch, United States/France/Poland)
6. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
7. Exiled (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
8. Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
9. Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)
10. Summer '04 (Stefan Krohmer, Germany)

2006: Michelle Orange

10. The Queen (Stephen Frears)
9. The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)
8. Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
7. Deliver Us From Evil (Amy Berg)
6. The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
5. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre)
4. Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
3. Fateless (Lajos Koltai, 2005)
2. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón)
1. Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)

Michelle writes for IFC News and The Village Voice.

2006: Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega

1. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)
2. Inside Man (Spike Lee)
3. The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005)
4. Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
5. Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)
6. The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
7. Boys of Baraka (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2005)
8. The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet, 2005)
9. Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2005)
10. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)

Vicente is pursuing his PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University.

Ten Best Films of 2005

1. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, United States)
No other contemporary Anglo director has as fastidiously examined the mysterious depths of human personality as has Canadian master David Cronenberg -- which certainly becomes all the more startling when once considers his propensity to engage psychological extremum. A History of Violence is no exception to this rule, even if it represents his most universal applicability: we have in this tale of salt-of-the-earth everyman Tom -- or is it Joey? -- a genuine inquiry into the nature of the human self that is singular in the contemporary cinema, let alone unique in Hollywood. To be sure, Cronenberg does address the more politically-seductive topic inherent in his title -- the nature of violence and our capacity to enjoy it is depiction -- but his conclusions may not warm everyone to whom a film like this would seem to speak: violence, he supposes, is inextricably within us (the impulses of Tom's son confer the very universality that Cronenberg's human curios often tend to mitigate). Yet in praising the ambitions of his message, it is important not to overlook the elegance of his very classical technique, which nevertheless he is quick to refashion when his narrative would seem to dictate that he do so -- as with the film's masterful opening sequence. A History of Violence is by quite a large margin the best English language release of 2005.

2. The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia/France/Italy/Switzerland)
Russian maestro Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun (Solntse) looks and feels like nothing else released during the past year, which of course could be said of any of the director's films. Then again, there is a particular bizarreness to The Sun's texture that reflects the film's alchemic combination of Sokurov's long-held preoccupations -- the mortal fate of a dictator, the passing of an imperial culture, Japanese aesthetics -- with a filmmaking technique that favors long takes, transgressions of the 180 degree rule, largely unaccountable manipulations of the visual track and a collection of sounds that trades heavily on the eerie and menacing. Likewise, the film's subject, Emperor Hirohito on the occasion of his renunciation of divinity following his nation's defeat, offers a splendidly mystical container for the Russian's favored examinations of the permeable boundary between life and death. All of this is to say that The Sun functions as something of a signature, revealing the vast sea of the director's aesthetic in a single, mesmerizing work.

3. Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy)
No 2005 release benefited more from the chaos in Paris' suburbs than Michael Haneke's Caché, an astute divination of the wages of French complicity in producing a permanent underclass of racially-other North Africans. To be sure, this is subtext -- but of such substantial and timely insight that it cannot help but confer upon the film a degree of brilliance. The ostensible focus of Caché is the manipulation of subject by an invisible contriver: not exactly a new topic for Haneke. Yet, from its Benny's Video surveillance conceit, Caché extends into new territory for the director -- namely, footage of the impossible, of a distant past and of the internal -- suggesting that it may just be Haneke himself whom we are to regard as the originator of the video tapes that the protagonist couple receive. This is to say that Caché allegorizes Haneke's relationship to his medium, which is particularly evident in the filmmaker's refusal to distinguish the surveillance footage from present-tense depictions. Indeed, given Haneke's complex interweaving of these distinct narrative modes, Caché is that moment when maturity becomes mastery.

4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
Cristi Puiu's second feature, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, reaches the upper-most of artistic stratas on the basis of its rigorous formal conveyance of content: long takes inscribe the indifference of Dante Lazarescu's physicians and tower block neighbors as they sluggishly aid the infirmed widower; on occasion, Lazarescu actually disappears from the frame, problematically, as his helpers persist about their business without even a hint of urgency -- while that is time continues to pass unabated. This assures that the film's prolonged duration confers not only a feeling of exacerbation -- equal to that of Dante's paramedic companion -- but further, that it determines the inevitability of the protagonist's expiration. Whether it comments purely on Romanian mores or serves instead as a broader statement on the human condition, the director displays a coherent philosophy in his inverted ER -- after all, even Lazarescu's mangy cats lie around unmoved by his plight. That Puiu imbues such minor details with discursive significance confirms his artistic stature, as does his masterful use of color: he invents separate swatches for each of the five Bucharest emergency rooms that Dante tours, harmoniously composing the spaces in these varied hues. In this way, Puiu's previous vocation, painting, adorns what is otherwise a profoundly cinematic work.

5. The New World (Terrence Malick, United States)
Though it initially alluded me, The New World represents another major work by America's most singular latter-day auteur. (Perhaps the 135 min. re-cut helped my belated appreciation.) Malick's poetic idiom is perfectly suited to this presentation of the first contact between English settlers and Virginia area "naturals," with the absence of experiential precedence articulated on both sides. As with Badlands (1973), The New World marks a truly moving expression of a first, under-age love; as with Days of Heaven (1978) this is landscape filmmaking at its very best, thanks to a series of 'golden hour' compositions; and as with The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's subjective voice-over shifts between multiple protagonists. History will decide if the hyper-romantic The New World is their equal, but clearly it is quite close indeed.

6. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
By a matter of degree, Hou Hsiao-hesien's finest since the 1990s -- though by no means the equal of his sublime Flowers of Shanghai (1998) -- Three Times is also the ultimate stretch for the Taiwanese master: a genuine crowd-pleaser. Even so, the director is not exactly new to gratifying diversions (A Summer at Grandpa's [1984] falls neatly within this category) nor is Three Times a visceral pleasure in the Hollywood blockbuster mode. Rather, it is that which might be best classified as cerebral entertainment, made accessible by a structure that provides the spectator easy critical entry. To this end, Three Times is constructed in three segments, all featuring the same couple in separate variations on the same love story. Situated in the 1960s, the first mines territory similar to his supreme The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985), though its closest precursor would seem to be Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (1991) -- with Hou casting a spell no less than his esteemed colleague. The second, set in the 1910s, references Flowers of Shanghai, replete with the silent technique (and intertitles) that that film appropriate lacks. And the neon-saturated third part, returning to a post-modern world where sex can be shown on-screen, seems to suggest the near future of Millennium Mambo (2001). These riffs on Hou classics suggests nothing so much as a 'best of' compendium, constructing film in a manner commensurate with pop music -- even as its disparate structure seems aware of the reality of DVD connoiseurship.

7. L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France)
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant (The Child), the Belgian brothers' second Cannes Palme d'Or winner, inverts the calculus of their previous masterwork, The Son (2002), to showcase the life of the sinner rather than the saint -- leading the pair into somewhat messier terrain narratologically. As with this earlier stunner, the sin committed veers toward the unforgivable: here, a new father -- the titular "child," in actuality -- sells his infant son for profit, leaving the boy's out-of-wedlock, teenage mother virtually catatonic. Presumably stricken by the workings of conscience, the young man seeks to right this transgression, only to lapse once again through a characteristic expression of his operative egoism (or in the parlence of the film, his childishness). Surely, the Dardenne brothers' exacting description of play likewise extends the analogy and recommends the film on another level -- the truth of its observations. Indeed, it is in such near-wordless passages that L'Enfant discloses its true genre -- the action film -- where the works enacting by the allegorical cipher lead him unevenly toward a Bressonian grace.

8. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, United States)
If 2005 was any indication, Werner Herzog has proven himself to be the New German cinema's survivor. The poet laureate of ecological antagonism and the abandonment of civilization, Herzog best work since his movement's heyday has come in the realm of non-fiction, whether it is the incomparably beautiful Lessons of Darkness (1992) or his stunning real-life fable, Grizzly Man. The latter, like his archetypal The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Fitzcarraldo repudiates the cabal that there is a harmony inherent in nature, offering instead a glimpse into the natural world's "chaos, disharmony and murder." The film's tragic subject, the titular ecologist Timothy Treadwell, assumes the former -- Herzog observes that Treadwell treated the objects of his study as if they were humans in bear suits -- for which he ultimately pays with his and his girlfriend's lives. More than the consistently compelling Treadwell, whom we see in a series of home movies that Herzog later assembled, Grizzly Man's achievement rests in its crystalline exposition of the director's philosophy through these compiled pieces -- more than any other film of its year, Grizzly Man argues that the ultimate measure of a work consists not simply in the text itself, but further in its extra-textual circumstances and its relation to a broader corpus of work.

9. Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan)
Nobuhiro Yamashita's Linda Linda Linda begins by asking whether one loses part of their personality when one becomes an adult. Yamashita's film proceeds to involve these same spectators in its high school narrative, which ultimately concludes with a performance of the titular song during a high school assembly (by a a trio of Japanese students and their Korean foreign exchange student front-woman). Following this penultimate sequence, Yamashita films a series of empty corridors and classrooms, thereby reminding the older spectator what he or she has lost. At this moment, Linda Linda Linda becomes Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets L'Eclisse. However, lest this makes Yamashita's picture sound anything but pleasurable, Linda Linda Linda operates on the basis of the Blue Heart's post-punk classic, achieving the same effect narratively as its rousing chorus. The universal Linda Linda Linda is one of the most purely entertaining films of 2005.

10. Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea/France)
Korean auteur of the moment Hong Sang-soo's latest meta-cinematic concoction, Tale of Cinema, opens with a rather conventional early adult romance, punctuated by some very unconventional (at least in international art film terms) amateurish zooms -- which would likewise seem firmly outside the visual program of this most rigorous of East Asian stylists. (Tale of Cinema, like the previous year's Tropical Malady, challenges modernism's ubiquity in trans-national Asian art cinema through the creation of a form that is meaningfully post-modern.) However, with the commencement of a second part, it becomes clear that the opening passage is itself a movie which characters and audiences have experienced simultaneously, placing the film solidly in the tradition of another of the director's mini-masterpieces, Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000), which like this latter-day work, manipulates story-telling structure -- rather that narratological modes -- in its expositional dissection of film form. Of course, Hong soon undermines our determinations of the fictional status of the second part, creating a work that is exactly what its title promises (albeit a tale whose cinema seems closest to the quasi-student films that its characters produce). In this way, one could say of Tale of Cinema that fiction/film and reality are no less unitary than are dream and verisimilitude in Cocteau or Mulholland Drive (2001).

2005: Lisa K. Broad

1. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, United States)
2. The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia/France/Italy/Switzerland)
3. The New World (Terrence Malick, United States)
4. Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy)
5. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, France)
6. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
8. Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan)
9. L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France)
10. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, United Kingdom)

Ten Best Films of 2004

1. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/
Germany/Italy)
The 34 year-old Thai auteur's third feature to garner significant international attention, Tropical Malady exceeds its recondite predecessors in virtually every respect, showcasing a form that provides a potential new direction for art cinema worldwide. Apichatpong splits the narrative of Tropical Malady into two parts: the first is a same-sex romance focusing upon a soldier and a small-town young man, while the second is a fable concerning another soldier's hunt for a shaman with the power of transforming himself into animal form. While this cursory description might make it sound as if Tropical Malady depicts two discordant short stories, the fact is that the folkloric second half serves to underscore the paucity of the oblique opening salvo, which in spite of its transparent form, offers a vision of society that is shown to be lacking. Indeed, Tropical Malady is, among other things, a critique of contemporary Asian art cinema, articulating a second way amid echoes of the traditional folk arts. After all, the default objectivity of part one obscures reality no less than the proto-cinematic fable of part two illuminates the same.

2. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, United States)
Given the high degree of political acrimony surrounding Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby and its supposed advocacy of euthanasia, it might be difficult to consider the Oscar-winning best picture in terms other than these. Still, it is absolutely necessary in order to get at Eastwood's bigger purpose in Million Dollar Baby: to refocus his viewer's attention on the imperative of faith. That he and writer Paul Haggis frame this politically-contentious issue in terms of the male lead's deficient religious belief suggests that it is less the moral implications of the narrative that interest them, than it is the spiritual health of Eastwood's character. In this way then, it is not only the boxing genre that acts as a framework for the picture's deeper thematic interests, but the euthanasia narrative itself. Moreover, it is necessary to isolate a second discursive level that pertains not to the director's intellection but rather to his anxieties. This additional interpretative plane manifests itself not only in the protagonist's spiritual want, but also in his estrangement from his daughter (a theme similarly picked up in the director's 1999 film, True Crime). Thus, it becomes possible to see the film as Eastwood's act of contrition and plea for forgiveness for his own paternal failures. While the narrative offers Eastwood's character a provisional redemption through his assumption of the role of surrogate father to Hillary Swank's fatherless boxer, his own reconciliation with his fictional daughter appropriately remains unsettled.

3. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Belgium/France/United Kingdom)
2004's best first feature -- and perhaps France's best debut in some time -- Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence sets to allegorize the experience of female adolescence in the place of a boarding school where the young girls arrive in coffins and wear bold-colored bows coded on the basis of age. As this cursory description makes it sound, Innocence presents a world determined entirely by the shape of the film's allegorical content, but one which nevertheless displays a rare graphic sensibility -- particularly for Hadzihalilovic striking utilization of contrasting colors -- as well as for her eye for the surreal, as in the case of the electric street lights which illuminate the forest. Her evocation of the surreal however does not connote subjectivity but instead a world composed of the unreal, which at the same time shows itself to be rigorously measured to the size of this experience. While the film may make some uneasy for its depiction of pre-pubescent and pubescent girls shirtless, its female director's treatment of the material reinforces rather than belies the title. This is a film about the innocence of girlhood which shows itself to be deeply ambivalent to the specter of womanhood.

4. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, China/France/Germany/Hong Kong)
A film consumed by the memory of Wong's In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 is more than mere sequel (to a film that itself was the follow-up to Days of Being Wild [1991]) -- it is a dissection of the feelings which prompted the earlier masterwork. In fact, 2046 is the very substance of the words spoken into the stone wall by the Tony Leung character (who reprises his role here) at the conclusion of In the Mood for Love: it is the director's reflection upon the relationship between his life and his art. Indeed, the lead's vocation as a writer and the picture's science fiction genre both underscore its reflexivity -- that is, each portends the process of producing fiction from the substance of reality. With that said, 2046 retains a number of the director's principle preoccupations, from the evanescence of time to the related persistence of memory: in keeping with the matrix of his earlier film, 2046 is marked by characters living with the weight of the past. It is a film scarred with regret, where "love is a matter of timing" and where "it is no good meeting the right person too early or too late." In this sense 2046 is also a piece with the earlier work in that each are very much documents of a mid-life moment, no less than Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) inscribe the feeling of being twenty-something.

5. Collateral (Michael Mann, United States)
Like Richard Linklater's fine Before Sunset (also 2004), Michael Mann's Collateral calls attention to its own endpoint: whereas the former film will end "before sunset," as its title surmises, Collateral will conclude prior to sunrise. While both films use a departing flight to narratively justify this conclusion, Mann's film is more dependent upon stylistic logic to reach his finale. In the end, the meaning of Collateral is discernible less through its plot than in the subject of Mann's high-definition digital video camera: the post-modern Los Angeles cityscape at night. Indeed, even when the presentation of this space is not narratively-motivated, Mann finds cause to show the neon glow of the depopulated center of America's second largest city. In this way, Collateral reminds its viewers that film is fundamentally a visual art form. Then again, there still remain novelistic congruences between the subject of this mise-en-scene and the behavior of the characters: Tom Cruise's charming hit man demonstrates a moral relativism that is at home in the postmodern universe inscribed in the architecture of the cityscape. Surely, it is this level of organic integration between style and content that sets Collateral apart from most contemporary works of its genre. At the same, Mann's film lacks for nothing in terms of visceral pleasure, which is often connected to the humor, romance, and pathos of Jamie Foxx's cab driver and even the combination of soundtrack and urban settings that Mann so carefully combines -- but even here, it should be noted that his musical selections signify the characters that they introduce, furthering Mann's multi-cultural program.

6. Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/
Switzerland)
One of the better films of an exceptionally rich moment in Argentine filmmaking, Lisandro Alonso's feature harkens back to the simplicity of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini (The Bicycle Thief [1948], Umberto D. [1952]) without succumbing to the melodrama that likewise characterized their 'male weepies.' From the outset, Alonso is concerned with the most quotidian of moments (like shaving or washing his dishes) as a late middle aged man prepares from his departure from prison. Yet, it is not simply that Alonso acknowledges these banal, transitional moments, but that he reproduces them in a simulation of their actual duration, thereby providing an unflinching portrait of a lead who like the rest of us, leads a routine, fairly boring life. Of course, this is also a man with a past: his crime (he committed homicide) is presented in an impressionistic, out-of-focus prologue situated in a sunny grove, which in tandem with the subsequent unembellished mise-en-scene invites a subjective reading. Second, there is the matter of his daughter, whom he sets off to see upon his release from prison. Still, this is not a film about their reunion at all, but about his journey upriver to see the grown woman; and even then, Los Muertos is not a film about psychological growth or coming to terms with his past, but about the protagonist experiencing life (often in its most quotidian form) in the meantime. It is precisely the sort of work that compels its viewer to observe their own daily routine more keenly, to think about life in aesthetic terms. It is, in other words, a film about life -- because it is a life filmed. For Alonso, like so many of his neo-realist progenitors, people are more similar than they are different.

7. The World (Jia Zhangke, China/Japan/France)
Continuing to chronicle China's ongoing integration into the global economic community, The World finds an analogy for China's approach in the place of an Epcot-style amusement park, glibly named "The World." Here, national exhibits featuring such famed landmarks as the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Twin Towers ostensibly present China's bourgeoisie with the possibility of "seeing the world, without ever leaving Beijing." In reality, what 'The World' portends is less a large-scale educational venture than a cheap imitation of global culture trading on the economic rewards inherent in the co-option of the West. If The World signifies an abnegation of traditional Chinese culture (the subject of his 2000 masterwork Platform), this is met with ambivalence by China's increasingly Western, though alienated twenty-something's, who are themselves being weaned to think only of their own radical self-interest. At the same, China's aimless young are often unsuccessful in finding their place in the larger global order, just as China's integration remains tenuous. In this way The World stands as a piece with Jia's previous Unknown Pleasures (2002). However, as that film is constructed according to a spatial logic wherein the viewer is continually reminded of a distinct off-camera space for which the character's pine, here the world beyond the frame -- the world beyond 'The World' -- is China itself. As such, the allegorical dimensions of the narrative are brought back into a slightly different focus: 'The World' is an inauthentic space in contrast to the reality outside its boundaries.

8. 13 Lakes (James Benning, United States)
James Benning's 13 Lakes contains exactly what it promises: thirteen lakes. Each is filmed in an identical ten minute take, which Benning composes statically, with equal portions of sky and water filling the frame. As this is one of the lone aesthetic variables -- at least visually -- allowed by his minimalist matrix, it may be possible to judge the value of 13 Lakes by the considerable beauty and richly-evoked textures of these audio and visual landscapes. Then again, it is less for its sensory merits than for the didactic consequences of 13 Lakes that Benning's should be viewed as a major work of art. Indeed, few recent films have so fully elucidated Andre Bazin's thesis that the frame serves to mask reality rather than to simply give shape to a filmic proscenium. It is little wonder that Benning achieves an effect similar to that of the Lumière's L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat (1895) for its creation of space exceeding the limits of the frame -- within which the camera exists.

9. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
As is true of his 1996 opus My Sex Life... Or How I Got into an Argument, the first quality of Arnaud Desplechin's neo-Hellenic epic that comes into focus is its startling ambition -- from an opening quotation that situates the film within the sphere of Greek drama, Desplechin seems intent upon colliding the categories of comedy and drama into a film that finally contains not only these but also musical numbers, flashbacks, fantasy sequences and every other narratalogical variation that strikes the director's fancy. It is in a word a "free" film, finding its overstuffed shape in the accumulation of forms rather than in their pairing down. For this reason, it might be easy to ignore Desplechin's accomplishment, alongside the year's many other, tighter masterworks. Yet, to do so would be to deny one of 2004's most visceral successes and one of the year's finest Francophonic works; in a lesse9r year, Godard's strong Notre Musique or Rohmer's corpus-defining Triple Agent would have been easy choices for a top ten. Yet next to Desplechin's fleet-footed giant, they seem almost slight by comparison. This is certain to be remembered as one of his greater works.

10. The Incredibles (Brad Bird, United States)
Though easily the most bankable American film brand at the commencement of the twenty-first century, and a consistent source of aesthetic innovation, the level of the art at Pixar nevertheless did not remain so constant, whatever critical opinion then maintained. For every Pete Docter or Andrew Stanton effort, as passable as they often are, the work of Brad Bird belongs in an entirely separate, much higher stratosphere. The Incredibles, the director’s first work for the studio, immediately established a new standard at Pixar, combining a felicitous direction of visceral action and genuinely funny, child - and adult - friendly dialogue. Of course, The Incredibles is far more than the sum of this equation, thanks to both its denunciation of the culture of self-esteem (divorced from any focus on results), which provokes comparisons between Bird’s work and more routine animated fare, and a sober look at global terrorism.

Ten Best Films of 2003

1. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
Goodbye Dragon Inn represents 2003's most distinctive example of a filmmaker recreating the language of the medium in the image of his or her subject matter. In this case, Tsai manipulates film time (the long take) and film space (the long shot) for the purpose of communicating the loneliness of a group of movie house patrons and employees on the day of a theatre's closing. Though Tsai's film succeeds in maintaining a comic tone throughout much of the work -- be it somebody chewing too loudly in the theatre, or standing in the urinal immediately beside the only other person in the bathroom -- there is a deep and undeniable undercurrent of unhappiness that embues the work. Finally, people are alone, with little hope for remedy: in Goodbye Dragon Inn, characters hoping for a meaningful romantic connection constantly miss one another. One of the most beautiful examples, for instance, is the burning cigarette that the crippled theatre employee finds on missing her coworker again. A second is the film's first lines of dialogue, occurring nearly one hour into the work: a young man approaches another for a tryst, only to discover, ironically, that the other gentleman does not even speak the same language. Moreover, its location is not incidental to its theme: that the narrative occurs in an old movie palace awaiting closure broadens the film into a critique of the current inadequacy of film culture -- few remain in the seats for King Hu's 1966 classic, Dragon Inn. And at the same time, the space becomes the perfect platform for Tsai's thought: here is a place where people find themselves in close proximity, even as they fail to interact with one another.

2. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, United States)
Like Unforgiven (1992) more than a decade earlier, Mystic River functions as a career-summarizing masterwork, coalescing the director's principle preoccupations into a single, classically-composed narrative. The film opens with three young boys carving their names into fresh concrete. Before one of them has finished, two police officers catch the young vandals in the act. The pair haul away the young man and proceeded to sexual molest him. Flash ahead to their adulthood, where the victimized child is now a mentally and emotionally crippled adult (played brilliantly by Tim Robbins). The incomplete vandalism thus becomes a metaphor for this child robbed of his youthful innocence -- a major theme in many of Eastwood's best, including his 1993 masterpiece, A Perfect World. Sean Penn also stars as the second grown child, now a small-time crime boss. As the story moves forward, his teenage daughter is raped and brutally murdered. Enter Kevin Bacon, the third of the three young men, who has since become a Boston police officer. As the investigation progresses slowly, Penn, unwilling to wait for justice to be meted, sets off to avenge his daughter's death. This provides the moral of Mystic River, the unintended consequences of vigilantism, which also confers upon the film its self-consciousness: provided that Eastwood is famous for his 'Man with No Name' and 'Dirty Harry' personas, it would seem that he is now asking what if any role his creations play in the proliferation of violence in American society. The somewhat contentious final scene indicates his complicity. Mystic River thus joins the very best of Hollywood past in enjoining a taut classical narrative and a procedural self-consciousness.

3. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)
From the nouvelle vague's least-known master, Jacques Rivette, The Story of Marie and Julien rates with any of the director's previous work in the complexity with which it dissects film form via a classical narrative structure. In fact, The Story of Marie and Julien excels his masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) to the extent that it goes further in its distillation of the filmmaking process into the form of its narrative: Rivette invisibly divides his work into passages that depict analogies for writing (pre-production), shooting (production), and editing (post-production) while maintaining an ostensibly classical romance. For the first of these, Rivette structures the narrative such that the flow of the story seems to depend either on the character's inner feelings and dreams or in the protagonists' active narrating within the space of the story. That is, the characters create the story. This is followed by the rigid recitation of lines and gestural repetitions -- even impossible ones such as one character's suicide, repeated again and again -- that comprise the production section of this work. However, when Marie particularly (played by the exquisitely beautiful Emmanuelle Beart) voices her dissatisfaction at what the narrative demands of her, a third section, post-production, commences. Here, however, the characters in the film no longer possess agency. As Marie says in this section, "only one person can free me" -- this person, one suspects, is none other than Rivette, forever interested in the process of filmmaking. In this case, only he can save her from the strictures of the narrative as it has been conceived, spooled, and re-spooled. Likewise, this final section also implies the end of the film shoot, a moment that no one can recapture once its over. In this way, The Story of Marie and Julien reads as the highly personal film of an auteur interested above all else in the process of narrative.

My full-length review of The Story of Marie and Julien (L'Histoire de Marie et Julien) can be found in the Senses of Cinema archive, Issue 32 (July-September 2004).

4. Zatôichi (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
Belonging to the same category as Eastwood's Mystic River (also 2003), Zatoichi likewise situates itself as a career-summarizing masterwork. First, there is the director's own inimitable modernist nihilism (modernist to the extent that he continues to ask the questions for which there exist no transcendent solutions) manifesting itself in intense passages of violence, followed by even longer longer breaks from these periods of aggression. In these interstices, Kitano has continually suggested that play and humor are supremely necessary in engaging the world as it is, violent and brutish; he again brings this idiosyncratic world view to his 'blind swordsmen' installment. Yet, this basic philosophy is not all that he brings to Zatoichi: as with his undervalued Dolls (2002), memory is again a principle theme; as with Kikujiro (1999), pedophilia is a leitmotif; and formally, as with all of his films since Boiling Point (1990), Kitano elides key dramatic moments, propelling his narrative directly from cause to effect. Then there is the self-consciousness with which the actor-director (he also plays Zatoichi, the blind swordsman) deals with the subject of rhythm -- making a symphony out of the field laborers, for example -- and more broadly with his vocation as a filmmaker, which he immortalizes in a final paean to both the film's clearest source, Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) and also to Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

5. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Scripted by the incomparable Abbas Kiarostami, former assistant director Jafar Panahi's fourth feature provides further confirmation, as if any were still necessary, that he is one of the most accomplished new film artists to have emerged anywhere in the previous decade. Part Bresson, part Chaplin, part Renoir, but somehow still all Panahi, Crimson Gold charts the trajectory that leads the pizza delivery guy and petty thief protagonist Hussein (real-life pizza delivery man Hossain Emadeddin in a flawless performance) to commit suicide. The director depicts this gesture at the film's beginning, structuring his film circularly to de-emphasize the suspense inherent in the plot, while calling attention to his character's psychological motivations and the broader social causes for his violence (and the precipitating criminal activity). Indeed, it is to society that Panahi ascribes guilt, charting the protagonist as he moves from his stark, Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959) - inspired apartment to a large penthouse overlooking nocturnal Tehran, where Hussein inexplicably dives into the pool of the exceptionally wealthy tenants (perhaps a nod to Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, 1932, though certainly also Chaplinesque). The Renoir influence also manifests itself stylistically in a circular pan through the courtyard of Hussein's apartment complex (The Crime of M. Lange, 1935), while the formal influence of his other French source, the more central Bresson, finds its mark in the film's precise modeling of off-camera space via a careful rendering of sound -- which ultimately leads one back to the most important of all Panahi's sources, his master Kiarostami.

6. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan/Taiwan)
Having long disputed any direct link between his work and that of Yasujiro Ozu, in 2003, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien released Cafe Lumiere on the occasion of the Japanese master's centenary. Though technically dedicated to Ozu, the film offers little insight into Hou's debt to the Japanese director (with the exception of a few static set-ups which were already present in the director's craft). What it does represent is yet another instance of the director selecting a single motif around which he structures his narrative. In this case, the key would seem to be present in the film's alternate English title: "Coffee Time." Specifically, the film's temporal structure -- that is, its languidness -- is modeled after the time one spends sitting in a cafe, sipping a cup of java. This is a movie of the breaks preceding the resumption of action. In terms of characterization, these are likewise persons caught in the flux preceding the formation of their own families and success in their careers. The female lead is pregnant but uninterested in marrying the father of her child. Of course, soon enough she will have her child and no longer will her life consist of waiting for something else; this moment, in other words, is inherently evanescent. Likewise her male counterpart records the sounds of passing trains with no clear sense of what he wants to do with the results -- he is an artist of sorts, with no sense of his purpose. It should be said that the trains themselves also mark a temporal passage (extended to level of structuring motif in Goodbye South, Goodbye [1996]), which in the end is the key theme of Hou's corpus.

7. A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France/Italy)
Leave it to the 94 year-old Oliveira to make a film that truly cuts against the grain of the political climate current in elite, European cultural circles. Long interested in charting the end of Europe (Abraham's Valley, 1993), and especially the aristocracy to which the director was born, Oliveira, in A Talking Picture, turns his interest to an external threat: radical Islam. The breathtaking Leonor Silveira plays a history professor who takes her young daughter on a voyage that simulates the backward progression of Western civilization from her home Portugal through France, Athens, Egypt, and finally to the Red Sea at civilization's cradle. Here, while on a cruise ship, she is invited -- quite literally -- to take her seat at the captain's table, where four very erudite Europeans and North Americans (played by such well-known international actors as John Malkovitch and Catherine Deneuve) converse with each other, each in their own separate language. Implicit in this conversation, to be sure, is a polyglot solution for European Union-era cultural divisions: Europe will be a multi-cultural/lingual defender of the riches of the West. Then, suddenly, this dream is shattered in a moment of enormous gravity that declares with no uncertainty that Islamic fundamentalism poses a substantial threat to the future of the continent. In a moment of ubiquitous political correctness among the cultured elite, A Talking Picture proves once again that Oliveira remains the most adventurous of European filmmakers, even as he approaches his ninety-fifth year.

8. Doppelgänger (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
Building upon the example of his last feature, 2002's Bright Feature, the "other Kurosawa" creates in Doppleganger a model for the new Japanese man. Deconstructing prevailing notions of Japanese masculinity, namely the self-sacrificing company man, Kiyoshi Kurosawa -- a student of the great Japanese film academic Shigehiko Hasumi -- offers a carnality and spirit of rebellion contrary to more traditional understandings of Japanese masculinity. This ideological strategy is subsumed by a classical narrative structure, however, that commences as a horror film. Thereafter, Doppleganger shifts genre gears on more than one occasion, mixing crime thriller, road movie, comedy, and science fiction before finally settling on romantic melodrama. Whatever it is, Doppleganger rates as one of 2003's most purely entertaining works, and lends further support to the notion that the much of the best Japanese cinema of the moment owes little to its golden age predecessors, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and the more well-known (but not necessarily greater) Akira Kurosawa. If Kiyoshi Kurosawa can be said to belong to a tradition of Japanese cinema, it would be the B-movie iconoclasm of Seijun Suzuki (one source that the younger Kurosawa has acknowledged): in other words, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a pulp artist with the emphasis on the latter.

9. Ana and the Others (Celina Murga, Argentina)
As Kent Jones adroitly put it, Ana and the Others is the "Comedies and Proverbs entry that Eric Rohmer never got around to making." Surely one of the most profoundly Rohmerian films ever made, female director Celina Murga's first film, Ana and the Others, is a film of interstices. Though possessing a dramatic arc -- Ana has set off in search of an old boyfriend in a small, provincial Argentine town -- in reality Murga's film is concerned less with what happens in the end than it is with the in-between moments that combine to fill Ana's days. Indeed these times (driving a car, eating with friends, playing with kids, etc.) are no less than the stuff that define life. Put another way, Ana and the Others, by virtue of its narrative form, suggests that life is about the journey, not the destination. This is the justification for the film's open ended denouement, as well as for the mystery that the director endeavors to preserve with reference to Ana's psychology. In this latter respect, Murga shows a debt to Eric Rohmer beyond their more obvious stylistic affinities. Similarly, Murga's film achieves the same degree of emotional pathos seen in the best of the French master's work. In other words, Ana and the Others is a very easy film to love.

10. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy)
At a duration of six hours, The Best of Youth signals a definitive break from the short story structure of most narrative cinema. This is the cinema of the novel -- of the historical epic -- where characters develop over the course of decades, not in a matter of hours. Indeed, if there is something exceptional about Marco Tullio Giordana's film, it is its ability to showcase the gradiations of human personality over a lifetime of joys and sorrows. Certainly, there are more of the latter than the former in a film that begins by telling us that "Italy is a country to be destroyed... beautiful, but useless." However, it is the film's capacity to affirm another of its quotations -- that "everything is beautiful" -- which finally bestows this work of monumental scope its humanistic grace.

Ten Best Films of 2002

1. Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia/Germany)
The fact that Russian Ark is comprised only of one 96-minute shot may give one the wrong impression about the film: that it is primarily a technical tour-de-force. While of course this unprecedented formal accomplishment is the most striking feature of its form, it is all-the-same a formal strategy subservient to its broader thematic concerns. With Russian Ark, director Aleksandr Sokurov has forged an ark of his own out of the world's largest museum, St. Petersburg's Hermitage, filling it thus with time. As the director moves his DV camera through the historic space, one moment in time collapses into another as Sokurov shuttles his spectator through three hundred years of Russian history. Consequently, multiple historical moments manifest themselves within the space of a single frame, provided that there is no cutting to delineate separate moments in time. In this way, it becomes clear that the film image is both time and space, though conceptually, it need not represent a single unity of the two. Time is thus spatialized in the image, as a single frame may contain at once multiple moments in time; a structure as old as the Hermitage is thus the perfect environment for the film, given its long history and succession of events. Pursuant to this grand history, Russian Ark becomes a film about the decline of European civilization, concluding in the emotional sweep present in the ultimate ball sequence (and subsequent exodus of the costumed revilers). With their departure, what remains is Russian Ark itself, an aesthetic object preserving Europe's high-art tradition as it targets not only its modern-day viewers, but also those in centuries to come.

2. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France)
Winner of the Un Certain regard prize at Cannes, structuralist-trained filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours can be read fruitfully in terms of its binaries, both thematically and formally - male/female, city/country, civilization/savagery, medicine/superstition, driving/walking, old/young, employed/unemployed, Thai/Burmese, objective/subjective, index/sign, on-screen/off-, shot/reverse - yet it is those moments, the odd, apaque gestures and modernist excesses that truly capture our attention: from the endless traversals of the semi-urban and rural landscapes, to the credit sequence inserted forty-plus minutes into the film's run time (a threshold over which the film's second half can be intuited) to an unexpectedly vivid sexual encounter on the edge of the Thai jungle. In light of recent Asian art cinema, in fact, Blissfully Yours, in its occasional indecipherablity, emerges less as modernist than post-modernist with an emphasis on the "post." Apichatpong's total breakthrough, to put it succinctly, represents the arrival of the 21st century art cinema, highlighting the new century's distance from late 20th century European-influenced modernism as practiced by its greatest practitioners Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

3. 10 (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran/United States)
With 10, Iran's greatest filmmaker has simultaneously forged a work that is thoroughly consistent with his corpus, even as it signifies a new direction. Here, Abbas Kiarostami's "half-made" cinema serves a relatively new purpose: sociopolitical change. As always, Kiarostami forces his audience to work in their interpretation of his film, prompting his viewer to create an aesthetic object from the ideas and questions included therein. (Certainly, there is an analogy between Kiarostami's framing and his view of cinema's relation to the broader world: in both cases, that which is presented is far less than that which isn't.) Indeed, Ten is less a political statement per se than it is a series of questions and problems that Kiarostami implores his audience to address. In the case of Ten, each of its open-ended interrogations relate to the role of women in Iranian society, whether it is divorce or motherhood that is at issue. Yet, as admirably as Kiarostami maintains a space for disagreement within the narration of his film, he does seem to give a sense of where he stands with Ten: the emblematic image of the woman removing her veil to reveal her shaved head no doubt communicates a concise political viewpoint. However, it is still a film that demands the viewer to interpret the issues in their own way, no less than Kiarostami's radical limitation of space demands the viewer to fill in the off-camera space that his mise-en-scene elides. In this way, Ten extends the director's aesthetic into this new subject matter, even as it remains the simplest of all the director's films: the camera leaves the space of the car only once to show a prostitute at work. This paring down of the film's visual content is facilitated by his use of digital technology for the second time. His previous venture, ABC Africa (2001) thus appears to be the transitional work in his corpus -- both for use of this technology and its social content.

4. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)
Understatement is not generally a quality associated with Spain's most infamous provocateur. No doubt, the baroque hyperbole of Pedro Almodóvar's art -- formally and thematically -- accounts for much of its international success. It is interesting therefore to consider the case of Talk to Her, perhaps his greatest accomplishment. In yet another film about sexuality, Almodóvar is famously homosexual in his preference, the director adopts a narrative that engages the issue via the topic of loneliness. Here, Almodóvar creates a series of characters whom all suffer from this emotional baggage for all or part of his work. Thus, when Marco moves into the apartment of friend Begnino, literally seeing what the latter saw before committing an act of unspeakable perversity, the former (like the audience itself) learns to understand the source of Begnino's psychosis. After all, he is no less lonely. Likewise, Almodóvar renders gender as something which is fundamentally fluid: Begnino is a nurse, Lydia a female bullfighter, and Marco, though masculine, weeps when seeing Lydia. In these ways, the director provides an argument for sexual tolerance without succumbing to heavy-handedness. In fact, it is the film's quality of metaphor which is perhaps its most striking feature: when it looks as though Marco's loneliness will be finally satiated at the end of the film, Almodóvar represents the emotional beauty of this connection in the visual of a series of couples dancing on stage. This after all is what the film is about.

5. The Son (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France)
The Dardenne Brothers third film is a Christian allegory that modifies the art of Robert Bresson to accommodate the epistle of James' theology: in The Son, a faith with works is, as the books says, dead. Olivier Gourmet (in a flawlessly intractable performance) plays the father of a murdered teenager. When his son's teenage killer is released, Gourmet's character accepts the young man as an apprentice carpenter (another instance of allegory, of course). When finally he confronts the boy with his identity, the boy responds with a sort of nervous violence. However, the moral of the allegory is forgiveness, which is necessary even in this most extreme of cases. What makes the film Jamesian is the expression of his forgiveness through his actions, whether it is initially taking the boy on his apprentice or his response after the latter gives him every cause to sever their relationship. In narrative terms, the fact that the Dardennes' devote so much attention to the training of the boy in his new vocation likewise belies the particular shade of the Brother's Christian allegory. Stylistically, the camera's tight, over-the-shoulder framing of Gourmet's foreman, presented in long take, emphasizes the physicality of his labor. It also strips the film's visual space of everything but the fact of the labor, thereby reinforcing the film's principle preoccupation. In this way there exists in The Son an organic consistency in the relationship between the film's style and its religious content.

6. Friday Night (Claire Denis, France)
Friday Night opens with an apartment littered with boxes. A woman is leaving her Parisian flat to move in with her boyfriend. In the next scene, following images of a nocturnal Paris, the woman is shown in her car, stuck in horrendous traffic. It would seem that the city has been shutdown by a monumental transit strike. A man knocks on the window and she immediately locks the doors and pulls away. The woman then calls her boyfriend Francois and shortly thereafter offers a handsome young man a ride. He declines. After making eye contact with another, Denis cuts to a beautiful blond, applying lipstick in her adjacent automobile -- surely the man whom she had just glimpsed would prefer this gorgeous woman to herself. However, the gentleman does approach her and the pair sit beside each other in the protagonist's vehicle. Denis shoots point-of-view shots of the man's body, his hands, his breathing chest. To be sure, this is a film where the gender of its female director is absolutely essential to its style, which revises the male-privileged gaze. Ultimately, the pair will spend the night with one another, before parting the next morpresumablymeably never to see one another again. But this is not the point. In fact, a strong case could be made that this romantic coupling does not occur at all, but instead represents the woman's desire (and latent anxiety) on the occasion of moving in with her boyfriend. Denis certainly encourages this interpretation both in the associations that her editing elicits and in the male objectification of her mise-en-scene. Certainly, there is no regret in Denis' film. Yet, this is less Denis' moral than it is a confirmation that Friday Night is nothing more than it pretends to be: a film. In this way she remains very much a student of her former boss Jacques Rivette.

7. Spider (David Cronenberg, Canada/United Kingdom)
David Cronenberg's Spider surely stands as one the Canadian director's signature accomplishments. Spider stars Ralph Fiennes, whose character has been recently dispatched from a London asylum. He finds himself in an East End halfway house, situated in a postindustrial wasteland. In consultation with an unnegligible diary, the title character begins to explore a childhood where it seems as though his father killed his mother in order that he might live with the local tart. Interestingly, in many of the memories, both the adult and childhood Spider are present; in the one's concerning the murder, however, it is only the adult incarnation. As such, the intimation that this is memory begins to break down, lending credibility to an alternative interpretation where Fienne's fantasies are instead extrapolation. Ultimately, when the director clarifies what actually occurred that day, it becomes evident that Spider is suffering from schizophrenia. As a result, Cronenberg suggests that Spider was incapable of differentiating conflicting feelings that he possessed towards his mother (played by actress Miranda Richardson). Without revealing too much of the plot, suffice it to say that the film is almost anti-Freudian in its ill-ease with the Oedipal conflict: Spider's mental illness ultimately belies the problematic at the core of Freud's understanding of the relationship between mothers and sons. Moreover, the title character's mental illness also structures the picture's narrative form, providing a form to match the director's long-held ideas and preoccupations. Ultimately, the strength of Spider rests in its success in universalizing the basic conflict characterizing the film's narrative, even as the film's protagonist is non-universal in his psycho-pathology. As such, Spider also succeeds in illuminating many of the director's early works, lending them a scope not immediately evident in their narratives.

8. Springtime in a Small Town (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China/Hong Kong/France/Netherlands)
A remake of perhaps the greatest mainland Chinese film, Fei Mu's 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town, Tian's update does not simply evade the inherent problem of remaking one of the all-time great works of world cinema, but further serves as a model of filmmaking at its best, which is to say filmmaking at its most exact. The beauty of the director's long-awaited follow-up to his immensely powerful indictment of China's Cultural Revolution, The Blue Kite (1993) -- which coincidentally got Tian banned from filmmaking for nearly a decade -- rests in the precision with which Tian controls his character's gestures and in the careful modulation of his mise-en-scene. To the former, it is the director's exacting use of a furtive glance or a stolen caress to communicate character psychology. With reference to the content of his images, Springtime stands as a very detailed evocation of a postwar world, where, apropos of the original (as Tony Rayns noted) a feeling of defeat in victory pervaded. Here, as in Fei's work, the collapsing homestead is a visual analogy for the failing marriage. With the arrival of an old friend of the couple's, the woman's dormant desire is again woken, having been rendered dormant consequent to her husband's suggested impotence. Add to this triage the teenage sister of the husband, who herself has a crush on the guest, and what results is a stage upon which the pains of unconsummated love are worked out through the film's very careful gestural construction. While none of this would seem to suggest the radical matrix of his best-known earlier works, The Blue Kite and the anti-authoritarian Horse Thief (1986), the very fact that Tian emphasizes the personal rather than the political, a revolutionary statement in its own right, reconfirms Tian as the most courageous of the Fifth Generation filmmakers.

9. Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhangke, China/South Korea/France/
Japan)
Another of the year's major DV features -- in film historical terms, 2002 might yet prove a watershed in the displacement of film by digital technology, at least within the world of the international art film -- Unknown Pleasures confirms Jia Zhangke as the leading talent of China's Sixth Generation (just as Springtime in a Small Town reestablished Tian's ascendancy among the previous generation). Indeed, one could not chose two better works to illustrate the gap between the two movements: whereas Springtime in a Small Town manifests a classical precision and interest in themes pertaining to China's past, Unknown Pleasures is thoroughly modern film, both in terms of its aesthetic and its subject matter -- namely, a group of listless and outward looking twenty-somethings in a provincial Chinese town. Whereas the homestead in Springtime is the whole world (at least as concerns the emotional interests of Tian's characters), in Unknown Pleasures the world is anywhere but the backwater presented on screen. In terms of the film's presentation of space, it is essential to note that the off-screen world evoked is always far greater than what is depicted on camera. Of course, this exposition of space is consummate with the film's discursive interest in a generation's obsession with the world beyond their narrow corner of China. In this way, also, Jia references the U.S., the W.T.O., and most importantly Beijing's successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, whose announcement becomes cause for a gathering and celebration in the sleepy town. Surely with these referents, and such later images as a long highway leading out of the town, what Jia ultimately constructs is a landscape of metaphors negotiating the uneasy relationship between China's young and the outside world.

10. The Uncertainty Principle (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
Nonagenarian director Manoel de Olveira's fourth feature released in the 2000s, and his fifth since turning 90 in late 1998, The Uncertainty Principle synthesizes a number of the key formal and thematic preoccupations of the master's recent work: the director's emphasis on telling (over and above mimesis; cf. Francisca and No, or the Vainglory of Command, among others), the removal of primary action from the on-screen story and the use of intertitles (The Letter), the emphases on sin and the soul (The Convent and Party), his appropriation of a mythic European figure within his particular national context (Abraham's Valley), the enigmatic beauty as dangerous cipher (again Abraham's Valley), and finally, its predilection for linger upon the film's locations (Oporto of My Childhood). As per the last of these, this is Oliveira's 'open-air theatre' with a particular emphasis on the former, the open-air, thereby introducing a late-style looseness into this otherwise rigorous instantiation of the director's craft. This is essential Oliveira, a film where the whole of his corpus is present.

Ten Best Films of 2001

1. I'm Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, France/Portugal)
Nonagenarian master Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home is the most perfect final film made, with one caveat: it would not be the director's last. Following his performance as a 400 year-old king in Ionesco's "Exit the King," Michel Piccoli's lead is informed of his wife's death by messengers waiting just off stage. In a stroke, Oliveira has thus established the two principle themes of his work -- mortality and the relationship between theatre and cinema. In each case, the director develops his thesis before deconstructing the logic upon which it is built. As to the former, after an elided period of bereavement, Piccoli's character slowly reacclimates himself to the everyday, becoming once again a man of vigor, whether it is in his play with his grandchildren or in his acceptance of a part in an English-language film adaptation of Joyce to be directed by John Malkovich's filmmaker. However, during the course of the production, Piccoli's character wearies, finally walking off set with his declaration, "I'm going home." As he steps out costumed into the Parisian sunlight, Oliveira suddenly eviscerates the distinction he has spent the duration of the film constructing -- namely between theatre, the space of art, and cinema which is equated with life. Nonetheless, in this single, concluding gesture, the director shows the separation to be artificial, thereby reestablishing his on-going belief in cinema as open-aired theatre. Thus, I'm Going Home can be read as a film about its medium, which can be read similarly in the film's slow integration of sound, thereby allegorizing the medium's own early transition. Surely this is a fitting subject for Oliveira, the cinema's last remaining silent filmmaker -- and a fitting subject for the great final film that never was, thankfully.

2. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, United States/France)
Begun as an American television pilot, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive certainly would have been the most surreal program ever to grace this country's small screen, had it not been cancelled prior to its premiere. As it stands, Lynch's supreme masterpiece distinguishes itself from its latter-day Hollywood counterparts for its thorough integration of dream-inspired logic into the structure of the narrative. Said differently, everything in Mulholland Drive is a dream, or better yet, a nightmare. Lynch's 'City of Dreams' is truly nightmarish, a company town whose system destroys its wide-eyed newbies. Then again, Lynch's victims are not quite as helpless as this cursory description, or the opening passage of the film would suggest. Naomi Watt's Betty is not the naif that we are initially led to believe; she is instead a performer intent on using Los Angeles to achieve her ultimate purpose, stardom. To be sure, Lynch's work allegorizes the star system, but truly it is more than this. Following Jacques Rivette's lead in Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Mulholland Drive is a meditation on the nature of performance in the film medium: actor is divested from role via the characters' conscious creations of their identities (the amensiac Rita takes her name from a Gilda poster) and later in Lynch's reversals and denials of said identities. As such, Lynch calls attention to the gap between character and performance, thereby revealing the scaffolding of his work.

3. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
Japan's all-time box office champion, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is at once supreme art and superlative entertainment. That it is the subjective latter is relatively incontrovertible, provided its unprecedented domestic box office. As to its stature as great art, Spirited Away's success is similarly dependent upon its facility to reach not only an audience, but indeed multiple audiences simultaneously. On a primary level, Miyazaki's picture addresses ten year-old girls as they prepare for adolescence, chronicling their many anxieties: what would happen were my family to move? What if I'm left to fend for myself? What will it be like to have a job -- can I handle it? Can I trust boys? In each of these, Miyazaki articulates an understandable fear before giving this specific audience cause for hope. Alternately, for those persons outside his targeted audience, Miyazaki provides a glimpse into what it is like to be a young woman. Moreover, the master animator's film also allegorizes Japan's economic crisis of the prior decade (placing within an abandoned amusement park -- a typical reminder of the economic bust). Similarly Japanese-specific is the picture's Shintoist description of a world inhabited by scores of kami, which its animated form gracefully depicts, making no distinction between human and spirit, lend each the same degree of verisimilitude.

4. The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, France)
Always the most Bazinian of the New Wave directors, Eric Rohmer's DV The Lady and the Duke is a period film that preserves only those elements which can be replicated in a work of cinema: namely, the costumes, the furniture, the gestures, the language, and the patterns of speech -- that is, everything which remains under the director's control. At the same time, Rohmer eliminates signifiers of time and place, which themselves cannot be reproduced with shattering the film's purportion of reality. As such, Rohmer calls attention to the illusion inherent in period work, producing a cinema that is profoundly literal in its conscription of the real: the film's eighteenth century cityscapes are depicted by matte paintings, digitally incorporated into a typically dialogue-intensive work (for the director). Then again, The Lady and the Duke does retain something else of the period: its anachronistic, royalist politics. How many politically anti-French Revolution pictures are there? In this manner, Rohmer does not succumb to the near-universal tendency to bring one's own time into the period described. Hence, one could even say of The Lady and the Duke that it is authentically eighteenth century; had there been cinema during this epoch, Rohmer's film may well be what it would have looked lime.

5. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, United States)
The mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of a new generation of highly talented American filmmakers, including P.T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Alexander Payne. However, it was another, Wes Anderson, who would be responsible for the most idiosyncratic vision of their generation, even as he arguably conformed most fully to the period's intellectual zeitgeist. His is a postmodern art, emphasizing style for its own sake and manifesting an ironic sense of humor, each of which are commensurate with this movement's implicit nihilism. Yet, like any world view, Anderson's possesses its own tenor, which in his case can be seen in his sense of the tragic and corresponding redemptive thesis. In the case of The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson presents a world, a heterocosm, populated by persons of genius, who nevertheless destruct after their early rise; the three Tenenbaum children were childhood proteges who find themselves incapable of translating this talent into latter-day success (a very American subject, to be sure). Yet, The Royal Tenenbaums does offer a probationary solution in the reconstitution of the family, making Anderson's work something of a reverse Ambersons. If Welles's work is thus American tragedy -- with its perfunctory happy ending -- then Tenenbaums remains comedy in its most classical sense, where its lesser characters still find a grace.

6. Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France)
From Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) onward, Taiwanese great Hou Hsiao-hsien has structured his films around a single, repeated motif: in that film it was rhythmic movement of the omni-present passenger trains, while in the subsequent Flowers of Shanghai Hou replicates the experience of smoking opium in one of the titular houses. Here, in a picture located ten years into the future, the film's structuring characteristic is its ubiquitous techno music, which fills the discos that Vicky (Qi Shu) and her fellow young adults frequent. Like the music itself, repetition is the guiding trait in these youth's lives -- they continue to make the same (unwise) decisions time and time again. When finally the music does stop, on the occasion of Vicky's visit to Hokkaido, Hou briefly implies that perhaps she will break free from the holding pattern in which she finds herself. However, the music soon recommences, as do the same mistakes, thereby denying the character any progress. Ultimately, Hou remains skeptical of growth, placing his faith instead in the tragic passage of time, from which no one is immune.

7. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) (Zacharias Kunuk, Canada)
As it is, there may be no greater contemporary argument for the primacy of narrative cinema than Zacharias Kunuk's The Fast Runner. The feature, the first ever produced in the Inuit language, forms the ideal pair with Robert Flaherty's epochal documentary Nanook of the North. Whereas, Flaherty's film was ethnographic in its purpose, Kunuk's successful inscription of culture is a second-order function. The Fast Runner is first an attempt by Kunuk to forge Inuit myth, presumably under a project of identity-building. In the case of this work, the hieratic narrative focuses upon infidelity, jealousy, and revenge -- all transnational signifiers of myth. Where it accumulates its particularly Inuit flavor is one in its reference to the spirit world, and two in the exigencies of the place. Regarding the later, it is indeed Kunuk's mise-en-scene that determines the interpersonal dynamics that lead to the ultimate tragedy: the tight interiors spawn the sexual infidelity, while the expansive exteriors threaten the title character's survival. In this way, then, the film's spatial organization is the vehicle through which the myth's cultural specificity is conveyed. Beyond Kunuk's DV camera work, his sound likewise adds to our experience of Arctic culture: the roar of the dogsled tracks cutting through the ice communicate a great deal to the non-Inuit viewer. This might be only a detail and not the subject of 'Fast Runner, but it no less than construes an identity every bit as much as Flaherty's film does.

8. Pistol Opera (Seijuin Suzuki, Japan)
Some artists become more classical as they progress in their craft, while others move in the direction of abstraction. Given the pinnacle of incomprehensibility that Seijuin Suzuki reached in his late 1960s B-movies (such as Tokyo Drifter [1966] and especially Branded to Kill [1967]) one would think that the only direction that Suzuki could move would be toward classicism, as did fellow provocateur Nagisa Oshima in Gohatto/Taboo (1999). Nevertheless, Pistol Opera represents an even greater level of abstraction than his notoriously indecipherable earlier work. Here, Suzuki refashions his Branded to Kill narrative -- replete with its famed hitman ranking system -- that initially got the director fired from his studio. In this saturated color remake, Suzuki ups the abstract ante by severing the casual connections between individual shots, thereby calling attention to the imagistic construction of film art. In other words, Suzuki dispenses with the illusion that one is watching a coherent universe represented over a specific duration. Rather Pistol Opera is narrated by a series of indelible images which are ultimately the source of the film's visceral pleasure, whether it is in their compositional grace or in the immense physical beauty of the picture's lead, Makiko Esumi.

9. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, France)
Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl is Spirited Away's evil twin. Both delve into the psycho-pathologies of preteen and teen girls, but with very different results: while Miyazaki tells his spectators that everything will be alright, Breillat makes no such promises (to her admittedly much older audience). In her film, male adolescent psychology is simple enough, young men want to have sex. However, for her young women, matters are not so one-note. The film, whose actually title translates "Oh My Sister!," is the story of two siblings (played by real life sisters) on holiday as they each encounter sex for the first time. The older is a beautiful young woman who acts out this behavior in front of her portly younger sister. Breillat causes her audience to literally identify with the titular character as she watches with horror and interest. To the younger woman, sex is not exactly something she desires for its pleasure; rather she hopes that it will make her like everyone else. In the meantime, Breillat crouches her cynical vision in the most mundane of moments -- following the lead of Chantal Akerman -- and with characteristically glib sense of humor. Without spoiling the film's shocking conclusion, suffice it to say that Breillat resolves her narrative poetically, equating the loss of virginity with both rape and violence. There is no reassurance here.

10. La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Spain)
Lucrecia Martel's very impressive first feature can in some respects be viewed as an impressionistic counterpart to the European fin-de-siècle cinema of Roy Andersson and Béla Tarr, with Martel forging a mise-en-scène that is as uncertain as the picture's narrative content. Of course, La Ciénaga's registration of psychology is anything but indistinct thanks to its use of framing, blocking and lighting to connote an essential anxiety. Similarly clear are the implications of Martel's incestuous upper-class critique, which found an unfortune confirmation into 2001's financial crisis. La Ciénaga however provided unmistakable evidence of the Argentine cinema's health, in addition to introducing one of the key figure's of that cinema's nascent renaissance.

Ten Best Films of 2000

1. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary/Italy/Germany/
France)
"What they think is ridiculous. They think because they are afraid. He says he likes it when things fall apart." Werckmeister Harmonies represents one of Béla Tarr's clearest yet distillations of his worldview: the world was created and ordered, but ever since, things have been falling apart, disintegrating. The picture opens with the arrival of a carnival in a bleak rural Hungarian community. The principle attraction of this traveling show is a dead whale, which Tarr will come to bestow with metaphorical significance, even if he refuses to define what precisely that significance is. Indeed, as things begin to break down, the audiences is compelled to ask whether the arrival of this creature has some sort of causal connection to burgeoning chaos. Yet, as the opening dialogue makes clear, Tarr refuses to grant myth any sort of authority in explaining the decaying order. Concurrently, Tarr adopts a visual strategy to accentuate this philosophy: his extended traveling takes often begin with a maximum degree of visual clarity and conclude with a spatial uncertainty to underscore the moral one. When Tarr does offer a rare point of clarity, it serves to undercut the false assumptions that the viewers may have developed toward his narrative -- as when a helicopter appears late in the film to shatter the illusion that this is a work situated at the turn of the last century, which Tarr may suggest through the backwardness of his village, but which he never states directly. Importantly, this is a work of the fin-de-sicle to be sure, but it is the post-communist end of this century rather than the previous one.

2. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan)
Winner of numerous international awards, including the 'Best Director' prize at the Cannes international film festival and the National Society of Film Critics' top award -- the first foreign-language film to receive this honor in 15 years -- Edward Yang's Yi Yi contains more than virtually any other film ever made. What is meant by more is not excess, but rather the full scope of existence: comedy and tragedy, happiness and sadness, feeling and empathy, the physical and the metaphysical, art and life. Indeed, Yi Yi represents nothing more than it does a prayer, offered on the part of its maker for its many characters who continue to make the same mistakes in their lives, generation after generation. After all, the literal translation of the title is 'One One,' intimating precisely this sort of repetition, which is likewise picked up in the names of the younger generation's protagonists, Ting Ting and Yang Yang. The latter, a clear stand-in for the director, becomes a photographer in order that he might show people the half of life that they do not normally see: in this case, the backs of their heads. His engagement is thus art, as his older sister, who repeats the same romantic mistakes as her father, chooses to speak to her comatose grandmother, who thusly becomes a stand in for god. At one point she even breaks from her coma (her silence) to comfort the young girl, even if it remains unclear as to whether this represents a literal occurrence. Either way, Yang's is a film that intentionally confronts as much of life as possible, offering open conclusions to the eternal questions it raises.

3. Platform (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong/Japan/France)
Jia Zhangke's international art cinema breakthrough, Platform charts the transformation of itinerant performers Fenyang Peasant Culture Group into the All Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band, over the course of a decade. Commencing as Maoist propagandists, the group's mutation into the latter incarnation figures China's development from an archaic collectivism to an uneasy melding of Communism and Capitalism. Through this transmutation, Jia shows modernity's price: the dissolution of institutions such as the family and a slackening moral hygiene. Moreover, the the latter incarnation belies a cheap aping of Western style befitting the performer's constant curiosity with all things Western. Indeed, Jia's style is shaped by this very concern, constructing a world beyond the frame that is far more expansive than the often visually unintelligible space on-screen. In particular, Jia effects this analogy by his extensive use of off-camera sound. Ultimately, this off-screen utopia -- referenced early on by a postcard which reads that "the world outside is great" -- is brought into the frame as Chinese society liberalizes, and as it has been noted, the results are anything but positive.

4. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, United Kingdom/France/
Germany/United States)
Without question, The House of Mirth is a significant formal departure for cinema's most Proustian director: Terence Davies' film is defiantly objective in its refusal to break from a mimetic (shown) reality. At the same time, Davies' hyper-externalization succeeds in a continually referencing the sub-surface, thereby evoking his most consistent subject -- the internal life of his characters. Here, his subject is Lily (Gillian Anderson), a turn-of-the-century socialite who is recalcitrant in her desire to marry for love rather than social standing. However, Lily's world does not abide such choices, countenancing instead her tragic fate: once her beauty is gone, any opportunity at happiness that her youth may have presented her is forever lost. In the unimpeachable narrative logic of Davies' world, he thus creates a work to equal that of cinema's grandest tragedian, Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, to whom he also aspires in his masterful direction of his lead actress. Indeed, The House of Mirth is above all else a work of directorial precision, allowing each facial expression, every gesture the time demanded by it in order to convey its associative psychological meaning. This is a work again where everything is communicated through meticulously modulated surfaces, thereby producing a masterpiece of objectivity to stand beside his subjective master works, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), even as they all take the same internal life as their subjects.

5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong/France/Thailand)
In the Mood for Love signals the beginning of a new phase in Wong Kar-wai's work: middle age. Throughout the 1990s, Wong created some of the clearest expressions ever of what it meant to be twenty-something -- think Chungking Express (1994) or Fallen Angels (1995) -- where it could be said that any moment, everything was possible for its young protagonists. This to be sure is not the same world on screen in In the Mood for Love. In the director's profoundly Bressonian description of romantic desire, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play the spouses of an off-screen pair of adulterous lovers. They never do succumb to their mutual passions, not necessarily because they choose to respect their marital vows, but rather by virtue of something deep in the recesses of their personalities that prevent them from uniting as a couple, even if this might mean their happiness. Whereas the end of one relationship inevitably foretold of the beginning of another in early Wong, here, his lover's time had passed before they even met. Indeed, it is not simply that Wong creates works that are specific to singular moments in his character's lives, but moreover that their fates are determined by where they find themselves in life. Presumably like the artist himself, Wong's narratives have gradually awakened over time to the possibility that life does not always afford one a second chance.

6. Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, Japan)
Shinji Aoyama's Eureka opens with great tragedy: all but two passengers on a bus -- and the driver -- are executed by a man before he turns his gun on himself. When the two young survivors are orphaned two years later, they are effectively set adrift in a world in which they are by no means prepared to cope. Enter the bus driver, who has himself suffered from the emotional burden of this horrific event. Gradually, he accepts the role of surrogate parent for the two dumb children, being joined by their cousin in short shrift. However, their constitution of a replacement familial unit is mitigated by a suspicion that one of their members is guilty for a series of killings that has begun to haunt the local community. In clarifying this mystery, Aoyama skillfully establishes a reason for the violence that finds its source in the initial killing: that acts such as these belie a feeling of powerlessness, which is only to be overcome in mankind's love for each other. Yet, as humanistic as this might sound, Aoyama's work is decidedly transcendent in its longing, established most succinctly in the penultimate visual of the young girl wading out into the sea. When the bus driver yells to her "let's go home," its clear that he means something more than the physical home that they have come to inhabit.

7. The Circle (Jafar Panahi, Iran/Switzerland/Italy)
Jafar Panahi's third feature opens with a birth, which because it is a girl is an occasion for sorrow, not joy. From here, Panahi follows four different women through the labyrinth streets of Teheran, preserving a facsimile of real time, as the camera passes from one protagonist to the next. Spatially, Panahi's cinema juxtaposes his frequent close-ups and rigorous identification with a much larger off-camera sphere emulating his master Abbas Kiarostami's adoption of a Bressonian sound aesthetic. And like Kiarostami, Panahi's schema confirms an interest in involving the viewer in the creation of the work. However, where Panahi departs Kiarostami is in the explicitness of his social critique: whether it is the film's opening salvo or the closing existential camera movement that spatially equates all of the film's female protagonists (in a narratively impossible 360 degree pan) Panahi makes clear the dire position of the female in Iranian society. Indeed, the film's title, The Circle serves suggests precisely this condition, showing that the concluding imprisonment is no different that the opening birth. What happens next, of course, provides the film with its revolutionary political message.

8. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, United States)
Following the enormous critical success of L.A. Confidential (1997), director Curtis Hanson opted for the story of a writer struggling to replicate the popularity of his earlier novel, which is to say he has created personal art. Or, at the very least, Wonder Boys invites comparison to the director's own situation in the aftermath of the earlier film. Yet, if Wonder Boys represents a departure into autobiographical territory, it remains unmistakably similar to the earlier film in both its style and its content. As to the former, Wonder Boys adopts a supremely Hawksian classical decoupage form, assuring that the technique never detracts from the story being relayed. As to the message, Hanson's picture manifests the same moral relativism as the earlier work: after breaking up with his wife, Michael Douglas' writer/professor impregnates the married school chancellor, becomes an accomplice in the shooting of her husband's dog, and then spends the weekend in a marijuana-induced haze rather than making the decisions his situation demands. However, Hanson refuses to make martyrs of his characters, maintaining instead a consistent good-humor, providing the film with its undeniable emotional core. In the end, Wonder Boys' importance rests in its autobiographical subject matter and emotional depth, which is to say in the qualities of a personal art which is exceedingly rare in modern-day Hollywood. Wonder Boys is also Curtis Hanson's best work to date.

9. Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Norway/
Finland)
Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, the director's first feature in near twenty-five years, is the finest Swedish film since Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander twilight - though it only marginally edges Liv Ullmann's similarly impressive, oxymoronic redemptive Bergman Faithless from this same year. (In a less exceptional year, both would easily rate among the year's best.) Andersson's uber-formalist, long-take - and near plotless - comedic narrative is equal parts Luis Bunuel and Jacques Tati, formulating one of the most remarkable dystopian fin-de-siecle visions in the contemporary European art cinema.

10. Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea/Japan)
A signature work of the then developing Korean "new wave," Peppermint Candy operates according to a narrative structure much like Christopher Nolan's Memento (also 2000): the Korean film is in fact divided into discrete segements organized in reversal temporal order. However, Lee's film bests its English-language counterpart in virtually ever respect, not the least of which is its application of form to articulate content. Namely, Peppermint Candy's denial of causality produces an act of looking commensurate with that of reality and its actualization on celluloid: we see without reading, though the combination of the film's parts nevertheless creates the unmistakable impression of a better life that never comes to fruition. In fact, Lee's narrative choice amplifies this feeling, delaying the pivitol moment in the lead's life until the film's penultimate act. In many ways a Korean companion piece to Jia's Platform, Peppermint Candy is one of the very finest contemporary Korean films.

1990s

1990
1. Close-up (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
2. An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, Australia/United Kingdom/
New Zealand)
3. No, or the Vainglory of Command (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/
France/Spain)
4. Boiling Point (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
5. To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, United States)
6. A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer, France)
7. The Second Circle (Aleksandr Sokurov, Soviet Union)
8. White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood, United States)
9. Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland/France)
10. The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/Sweden)

1991
1. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
2. Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
3. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, France/
Poland/Norway)
4. A Scene at the Sea (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
5. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, France/Switzerland)
6. Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, France)
7. Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, United States)
8. Side/Walk/Shuttle (Ernie Gehr, United States)
9. Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh, United Kingdom)
10. Once Upon a Time in China (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)

1992
1. The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice, Spain)
2. Life and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
3. Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong)
4. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
5. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, United States)
6. Guelwaar (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal/France/Germany)
7. A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, France)
8. Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, Germany/France/United Kingdom)
9. Simple Men (Hal Hartley, United States/Italy/United Kingdom)
10. Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal)

1993
1. Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France/
Switzerland)
2. A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, United States)
3. The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
4. Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
5. D'Est (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France/Portugal)
6. Naked (Mike Leigh, United Kingdom)
7. The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China/Hong Kong)
8. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, United States)
9. Calendar (Atom Egoyan, Armenia/Canada/Germany)
10. Sopyonje (Im Kwon-taek, South Korea)

1994
1. Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France)
2. Sátántangó (Bela Tarr, Hungary/Germany/Switzerland)
3. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
4. Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
5. Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, France)
6. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, Canada)
7. Three Colors: White (Krzysztof Kieslowski, France/Poland/
Switzerland/United Kingdom)
8. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, United States)
9. Joan the Maid (Jacques Rivette, France)
10. Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/Germany)

1995
1. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
2. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, United States/Germany/Japan)
3. The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, United States)
4. Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, United States/Austria/
Switzerland)
5. JLG/JLG (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
6. La Ceremonie (Claude Chabrol, France/Germany)
7. Heat (Michael Mann, United States)
8. The Convent (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
9. The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
10. Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, India)

1996
1. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, United Kingdom/United States)
3. Crash (David Cronenberg, Canada/United States)
4. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Demark/Sweden/France/
Netherlands/Norway/Iceland)
5. My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
6. Tierra (Julio Medem, Spain)
7. Party (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
8. Mother (Albert Brooks, United States)
9. Leila (Dariush Mehrjui, Iran)
10. Big Night (Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, United States)

1997
1. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
2. Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, Germany/Russia)
3. Hana-bi/Fireworks (Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
4. L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, United States)
5. Fragments * Jerusalem (Ron Havilio, Israel)
6. Kundun (Martin Scorsese, United States)
7. Same Old Song (Alain Resnais, France/Switzerland/United Kingdom)
8. Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
9. The River (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
10. Ulee's Gold (Victor Nunez, United States)

1998
1. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. An Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer, France)
4. Inquietude (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France/Spain/ Switzerland)
5. The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
6. Rushmore (Wes Anderson, United States)
7. The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
8. Dil Se.. (Mani Ratnam, India)
9. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem, Spain/France)
10. After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)

1999
1. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France)
2. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, United States/United Kingdom)
3. Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, France/Italy/Portugal)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France)
5. Gohatto/Taboo (Nagisa Oshima, Japan/France/United Kingdom)
6. Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, France/Belgium)
7. The Letter (Manoel de Oliveira, France/Spain/Portugal)
8. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, United States)
9. The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, United Kingdom/United States)
10. Human Resources (Laurent Cantet, France)

The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): Abraham's Valley (Oliveira); A Brighter Summer Day (Yang); Centre Stage (Kwan); Days of Being Wild (Wong); Flowers of Shanghai (Hou); A Perfect World (Eastwood); The Quince Tree Sun (Erice); Satantango (Tarr); The Thin Red Line (Malick); Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami).

1980s

1980
1. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
2. Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, United States)
3. Loulou (Maurice Pialat, France)
4. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
5. Mon oncle d'Amérique (Alain Resnais, France)
6. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, United States)
7. Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood, United States)
8. Germany, Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms, West Germany)
9. Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Austria/West Germany/Switzerland)
10. Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis, United States)

1981
1. Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
2. Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
3. The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, France)
4. Mandala (Im Kwon-taek, South Korea)
5. Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, United States)
6. Man of Iron (Andrezj Wajda, Poland)
7. Lola (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
8. Orderly or Disorderly (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
9. Thief (Michael Mann, United States)
10. Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, United States)

1982
1. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden/France/West Germany)
2. Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland)
3. A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, France)
4. Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, France)
5. Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia)
6. Danton (Andrezj Wajda, France/Poland/West Germany)
7. Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, United States)
8. Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski, United Kingdom/West Germany)
9. Yol (Serif Gören and Yilmaz Güney, Turkey/Switzerland/France)
10. Finye (Souleymane Cissé, Mali)

1983
1. L'Argent (Robert Bresson, France)
2. Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, France)
3. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France)
4. À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, France)
5. Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, United States)
6. Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, France)
7. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy/France/Soviet Union)
8. Razia Sultan (Kamal Amrohi and G. P. Pawar, India)
9. The Golden 80's (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France)
10. First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

1984
1. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, United States)
2. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, United States)
3. A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
4. Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, China)
5. Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer, France)
6. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, Italy/United States)
7. My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei German, Soviet Union)
8. Long Arm of the Law (Johnny Mak, Hong Kong)
9. A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier, France)
10. Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, France)

1985
1. The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. Taipei Story (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
3. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France)
4. Lost in America (Albert Brooks, United States)
5. No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
6. Vagabond (Agnès Varda, France)
7. Rendez-vous (André Téchiné, France)
8. Himatsuri (Mitsuo Yanagimachi, Japan)
9. Wuthering Heights (Jacques Rivette, France)
10. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, United States)

1986
1. The Green Ray/Summer (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/United Kingdom/France)
3. Mélo (Alain Resnais, France)
4. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, United States)
5. Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
6. Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)
7. The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China)
8. Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, United States/West Germany)
9. Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, United States)
10. Heartbreak Ridge (Clint Eastwood, United States)

1987
1. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Where is the Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)
3. Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, Mali/Burkina Faso/France/West Germany)
4. Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
5. The Dead (John Huston, United Kingdom/Ireland/United States)
6. King of the Children (Chen Kaige, China)
7. Hope and Glory (John Boorman, United Kingdom)
8. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, United States)
9. Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, France)
10. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, West Germany/France)

1988
1. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, United Kingdom)
2. My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
3. Damnation (Béla Tarr, Hungary)
4. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, Canada/United States)
5. Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy)
6. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, United States)
7. Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland)
8. A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
9. A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, France/
West Germany/United Kingdom/Netherlands)
10. Days of Eclipse (Aleksandr Sokurov, Soviet Union)

1989
1. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
2. The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland)
3. The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, Soviet Union)
4. Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, France/Switzerland)
5. The Killer (John Woo, Hong Kong)
6. Recollections of the Yellow House (João César Monteiro, Portugal)
7. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, United States)
8. Say Anything... (Cameron Crowe, United States)
9. Freeze-Die-Come to Life (Vitali Kanevsky, Soviet Union)
10. Leningrad Cowboys Go to America (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/
Sweden)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): L'Argent (Bresson), A City of Sadness (Hou), Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies), Francisca (Oliveira), The Green Ray/Summer (Rohmer), The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky), Shoah (Lanzmann), Taipei Story (Yang), Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz), Where is the Friend's House? (Kiarostami).

1970s

1970
1. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Tristana (Luis Buñuel, Spain/France/Italy)
3. The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
4. Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy)
5. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/West Germany)
6. There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, Soviet Union)
7. Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, United States)
8. Le Cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, France/Italy)
9. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, United Kingdom)
10. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, United States)

1971
1. La Région centrale (Michael Snow, Canada)
2. The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, France)
4. The House in the Woods (Maurice Pialat, France)
5. Love (Károly Makk, Hungary)
6. Get Carter (Mike Hodges, United Kingdom)
7. Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, United States)
8. A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Taiwan)
9. Trafic (Jacques Tati, France/Italy)
10. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, United States)

1972
1. Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, India)
2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, France/
Italy/Spain)
3. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
4. Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
5. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
6. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, West Germany/Peru/
Mexico)
7. Ulzana's Raid (Robert Aldrich, United States)
8. The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
9. Avanti! (Billy Wilder, United States/Italy)
10. Love in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer, France)

1973
1. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain)
2. Badlands (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. The Age of Cosimo de Medici (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, France)
5. Reed: Insurgent Mexico (Paul Leduc, Mexico)
6. A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak, India/Bangladesh)
7. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal)
8. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, United States)
9. Breezy (Clint Eastwood, United States)
10. The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, United States)

1974
1. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France)
2. Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson, France)
3. Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France)
4. F for Fake (Orson Welles, France/Iran/West Germany)
5. Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, West Germany)
6. Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
7. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, United States)
8. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, West Germany)
9. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
10. Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, France)

1975
1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France)
2. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
3. The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
4. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
5. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, France/Italy/United States/Spain)
6. India Song (Marguerite Duras, France)
7. Xala (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal)
8. Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Austria/
France/West Germany/Italy)
9. Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, India)
10. Two Solutions for One Problem (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)

1976
1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, United States)
2. The Messiah (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France)
3. Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, United States)
5. The Shootist (Don Siegel, United States)
6. In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, Japan/France)
7. Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, West Germany)
8. The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, West Germany/France)
9. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, Switzerland/France)
10. L'Innocente (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)

1977
1. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, France/Spain)
2. Providence (Alain Resnais, France/Switzerland)
3. Man of Marble (Andrezj Wajda, Poland)
4. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, United States)
5. Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal)
6. The Chess Players (Satyajit Ray, India)
7. The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, France)
8. The Gauntlet (Clint Eastwood, United States)
9. Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, India)
10. 11 x 14 (James Benning, United States)

1978
1. Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. Perceval (Eric Rohmer, France/Italy/West Germany)
4. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France/West Germany)
5. Violette (Claude Chabrol, France/Canada)
6. Place Without Limits (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico)
7. Halloween (John Carpenter, United States)
8. Alexandria... Why? (Youssef Chahine, Egypt/Algeria)
9. An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, United States)
10. The Green Room (François Truffaut, France)

1979
1. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
2. Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, Soviet Union)
3. "10" (Blake Edwards, United States)
4. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
5. The Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (Raoul Ruiz, France)
6. Vengeance is Mine (Shohei Imamura, Japan)
7. ¡Que viva Mexico! (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, United States)
8. Eureka (Ernie Gehr, United States)
9. My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, Australia)
10. Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, United States)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): Barry Lyndon (Kubrick), Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette), Doomed Love (Oliveira), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Buñuel), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman), The Outlaw Josey Wales (Eastwood), Pakeezah (Amrohi), The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), Stalker (Tarkovsky), The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos).

1960s

1960
1. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
5. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, Italy/France)
6. The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, India)
7. Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
8. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, United States)
9. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, France/Italy/United Kingdom)
10. The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, South Korea)

1961
1. Lola (Jacques Demy, France/Italy)
2. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, Spain/Mexico)
3. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
4. Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy)
5. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
6. Alyonka (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
7. Two Daughters (Satyajit Ray, India)
8. The Aimless Bullet (Yoo Hyeon-Mok, South Korea)
9. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
10. The Girl with a Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, Italy/France)

1962
1. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
2. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
3. Hatari! (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, United States)
5. The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, France)
6. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
7. My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
8. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, France/Italy)
9. Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, United States)
10. La Jetée (Chris Marker, France)

1963
1. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
2. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
3. Muriel (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
4. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
5. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran)
6. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
7. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
8. The Big City (Satyajit Ray, India)
9. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, United States)
10. Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)

1964
1. Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
3. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France/West Germany)
4. Man's Favorite Sport? (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, Brazil)
6. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
7. Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, France/Italy)
8. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, United States)
9. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France)
10. A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

1965
1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
2. Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, France)
3. Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, United Kingdom)
4. Outer and Inner Space (Andy Warhol, United States)
5. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, Spain/Switzerland)
6. Paris vou par... Gare de Nord (Jean Rouch, France)
7. Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, India)
8. Sandra (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
9. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
10. The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary)

1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France/Sweden)
2. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
3. 7 Women (John Ford, United States)
4. The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, France)
5. Unsere Afrikareise/Our African Journey (Peter Kubelka, Austria)
6. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, United Kingdom/Italy)
7. The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura, Japan)
8. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, France/Senegal)
9. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, Italy/Spain)
10. Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)

1967
1. Playtime (Jacques Tati, France)
2. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, France)
3. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary/Soviet Union)
5. Wavelength (Michael Snow, Canada)
6. Mouchette (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
8. Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, France/Italy)
9. La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, France)
10. Jewel Thief (Vijay Anand, India)

1968
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
2. Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov, Soviet Union)
4. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, Italy/United States)
5. Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba)
6. The Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, West Germany/Italy)
7. Faces (John Cassavetes, United States)
8. Shame (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
9. Carry On... Up the Khyber (Gerald Thomas, United Kingdom)
10. Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, United Kingdom)

1969
1. My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Boy (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. Antonio das Mortes (Glauber Rocha, Brazil/France/West Germany)
4. The Unfaithful Wife (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy)
5. L'Amour fou (Jacques Rivette, France)
6. Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
7. Kes (Ken Loach, United Kingdom)
8. The Structure of Crystal (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland)
9. A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson, France)
10. Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri, Italy)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson), An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu), Charulata (S. Ray), L'Eclisse (Antonioni), Gertrud (Dreyer), My Night at Maud's (Rohmer), Playtime (Tati), Psycho (Hitchcock), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard), The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy).

1950s

1950
1. The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
2. Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, France)
3. Wagonmaster (John Ford, United States)
4. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, United States)
5. Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, United States)
7. La Ronde (Max Ophüls, France)
8. Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
9. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)

1951
1. Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. The River (Jean Renoir, France/India/United States)
3. Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France)
4. Awaara (Raj Kapoor, India)
5. The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, United Kingdom)
6. Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, United States)
7. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
8. Repast (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. The Kaiser's Lackey (Wolfgang Staudte, East Germany)
10. The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, United States)

1952
1. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Limelight (Charles Chaplin, United States)
3. Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, France)
5. Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, United States)
6. Él (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
7. Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, United States)
8. Mother (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
10. The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, United States/Italy/France/Morocco)

1953
1. Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
3. The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, France/Italy)
4. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, France)
5. The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, United States)
6. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, United States)
7. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
8. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, United States)
9. The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
10. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, United States)

1954
1. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France)
4. A Star is Born (George Cukor, United States)
5. Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
6. Chikamatsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, United States)
8. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
10. Track of the Cat (William A. Wellman, United States)

1955
1. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
3. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, India)
4. Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, France/West Germany)
5. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, United States)
6. Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, France/Spain/Switzerland)
7. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
8. French Cancan (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
9. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, United States)
10. Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, United States)

1956
1. The Searchers (John Ford, United States)
2. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, France)
3. Streets of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
4. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, United States)
5. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, United States)
6. Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, United States)
7. The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank Tashlin, United States)
8. There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, United States)
9. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
10. Crazed Fruit (Kô Nakahira, Japan)

1957
1. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, India)
2. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
3. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
4. Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, United States)
5. A King in New York (Charles Chaplin, United States)
6. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, Italy/France)
7. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, United States)
8. Le Notti bianche (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
9. An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, United States)
10. The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, United States)

1958
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
2. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrezj Wajda, Poland)
4. Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, United States)
5. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, France/Italy)
6. Madhumati (Bimal Roy, India)
7. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, United States)
8. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, India)
9. Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
10. Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (Leo McCarey, United States)

1959
1. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France)
2. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, France/Japan)
5. Kaagaz Ke Phool (Guru Dutt, India)
6. The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, India)
7. Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, United States)
8. The Sign of Leo (Eric Rohmer, France)
9. Nazarin (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
10. Picnic on the Grass (Jean Renoir, France)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): Early Summer (Ozu), The Earrings of Madame de... (Ophüls), Floating Clouds (Naruse), The Flowers of St. Francis (Rossellini), Ordet (Dreyer), Pickpocket (Bresson), Rear Window (Hitchcock), Rio Bravo (Hawks), Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi), The Searchers (Ford).

1940s

1940
1. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, United States)
4. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
5. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, United States)
7. Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, United States)
8. The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
10. London Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings, United Kingdom)

1941
1. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, United States)
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, United States)
4. Hellzapoppin' (H. C. Potter, United States)
5. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
6. The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, United States)
7. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
8. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
9. Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
10. Words for Battle (Humphrey Jennings, United Kingdom)

1942
1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, United States)
2. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, United Kingdom)
3. Aniki Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
4. There Was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, United Kingdom)
8. To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
9. Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, United States)
10. The Loyal 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

1943
1. Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, United States)
5. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. Les Anges du péché (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Air Force (Howard Hawks, United States)
8. Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
9. Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Wild Flower (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)

1944
1. Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
4. Laura (Otto Preminger, United States)
5. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)
8. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, United States)
9. At Land (Maya Deren, United States)
10. The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, United States)

1945
1. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, France)
2. They Were Expendible (John Ford, United States)
3. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, United States)
5. The Southerner (Jean Renoir, United States)
6. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, France)
7. I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
8. The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
9. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, United States)
10. The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, United States)

1946
1. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, United States)
2. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
5. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France)
6. Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. The Diary of a Chambermaid (Jean Renoir, United States)
8. Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
9. Enamorada (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)
10. The Killers (Robert Siodmak, United States)

1947
1. Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, United States)
2. Antoine and Antoinette (Jacques Becker, France)
3. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
4. The Love of Sumako the Actress (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
5. Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
6. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
7. The Exile (Max Ophüls, United States)
8. They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti, United Kingdom)
9. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, United States)
10. The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz, United States)

1948
1. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, United States)
2. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, China)
3. La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
4. Red River (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
6. Fort Apache (John Ford, United States)
7. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
8. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. The Silence of the Sea (Jean-Pierre Melville, France)

1949
1. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, United Kingdom)
3. Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, China)
4. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. White Heat (Raoul Walsh, United States)
6. Rendezvous in July (Jacques Becker, France)
7. The Third Man (Carol Reed, United Kingdom)
8. The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, United States)
9. Mahal (Kamal Amrohi, India)
10. Andaz (Mehboob Khan, India)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson), Day of Wrath (Dreyer), His Girl Friday (Hawks), Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein), Late Spring (Ozu), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophüls), A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger), My Darling Clementine (Ford), The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch), Spring in a Small Town (Fei).

1930s

1930
1. Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
2. Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Soviet Union)
3. The Dawn Patrol (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. L'Âge d'or (Luis Buñuel, France)
5. The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, France)
6. Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair, France)
7. The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany)
8. City Girl (F. W. Murnau, United States)
9. Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
10. Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

1931
1. M (Fritz Lang, Germany)
2. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, United States)
3. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, United States)
4. À nous la liberté (René Clair, France)
5. Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth, United States)
6. Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
7. La Chienne (Jean Renoir, France)
8. Le Million (René Clair, France)
9. Marius (Alexander Korda, France)
10. Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, United States)

1932
1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. Scarface (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, France)
4. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. La Nuit du carrefour (Jean Renoir, France)
6. Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, United States)
7. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, United States)
8. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, France)
9. The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Back Street (John M. Stahl, United States)

1933
1. Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Liebelei (Max Ophüls, Germany/Austria)
3. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, United States)
4. Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, France)
5. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, Germany)
6. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, United States)
7. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (Lewis Milestone, United States)
8. The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone, United States)
9. Bombshell (Victor Fleming, United States)
10. Topaze (Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, United States)

1934
1. La Signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, Italy)
2. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France)
3. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
4. Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
6. Judge Priest (John Ford, United States)
7. Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, United Kingdom)
8. The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, China)
9. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Yasujiro Shimazu, Japan)

1935
1. Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
2. Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, United States)
3. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
4. The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
5. Steamboat 'Round the Bend (John Ford, United States)
6. An Inn at Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
7. Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)
8. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, United States)
9. A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, United States)
10. Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen, United States)

1936
1. By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
2. Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
3. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, France)
4. A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, France)
5. Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, France)
6. Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, United States)
7. Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, United States)
8. Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
9. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
10. Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, United States)

1937
1. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, United States)
2. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, United States)
3. Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
4. You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, United States)
5. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)
6. Stella Dallas (King Vidor, United States)
7. Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
8. Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
9. Children in the Wind (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
10. History is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, United States)

1938
1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, United States)
2. Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, Germany)
3. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
4. You and Me (Fritz Lang, United States)
5. La Bête humaine (Jean Renoir, France)
6. Holiday (George Cukor, United States)
7. Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, United States)
8. The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, France)
9. The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (Mark Donskoi, Soviet Union)
10. Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, United States)

1939
1. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France)
3. Stagecoach (John Ford, United States)
4. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Love Affair (Leo McCarey, United States)
6. Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
7. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
8. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, United States)
9. The Whole Family Works (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
10. The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, United States)


The Decade's Ten Best (in alphabetical order): L'Atalante (Vigo), By the Bluest of Seas (Barnet), Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey), The Rules of the Game (Renoir), Scarface (Hawks), The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg), La Signora di tutti (Ophüls), The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Mizoguchi), Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch), Woman of Tokyo (Ozu).

The Silent Era [Updated: 6/29/09]

Short films (Louis and Auguste Lumière, c1890s, France)
Short films (Georges Méliès, c1900s, France)
Short films (Edwin S. Porter, c1900s, United States)
A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith, 1909, United States)
The Country Doctor (D.W.Griffith, 1909, United States)
Drive for Life (D.W.Griffith, 1909, United States)
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D.W. Griffith, 1912, United States)
Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström, 1913, Sweden)
Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914, Italy)
Mute Witnesses (Yevgeni Bauer, 1914, Russia)
The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915, United States)
The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915, United States)
Daydreams (Yevgeni Bauer, 1915, Russia)
Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915, United States)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16, France)
Hell's Hinges (William S. Hart, 1916, United States)
Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916, United States)
Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916, France)
Shoes (Lois Weber, 1916, United States)
The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin, 1917, United States)
Wild and Woolly (John Emerson, 1917, United States)
The Bluebird (Maurice Tourneur, 1918, United States)
The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918, Sweden)
Tih Minh (Louis Feuillade, 1918, France)
Blind Husbands (Erich von Stroheim, 1919, United States)
The Doll (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919, Germany)
Don't Change Your Husband (Cecil B. DeMille, 1919, United States)
The Oyster Princess (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919, Germany)
Sir Arne's Treasure (Mauritz Stiller, 1919, Sweden)
Sunnyside (Charles Chaplin, 1919, United States)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920, Germany)
Last of the Mohicans (Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown, 1920, United States)
The Parson's Widow (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1920, Denmark)
Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920, United States)
Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921, Germany)
Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921, United States)
The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921, Sweden)
Seven Years Bad Luck (Max Linder, 1921, United States)
The Burning Earth (F.W. Murnau, 1922, Germany)
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922, Germany)
Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922, United States)
Grandma's Boy (Fred C. Newmeyer, 1922, United States)
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922, United States)
Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922, Germany)
Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone, 1923, United States)
Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Wood, 1923, United States)
A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin, 1923, United States)
Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924, France)
The Crazy Ray (René Clair, 1924, France)
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Lev Kuleshov, 1924, Soviet Union)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924, United States)
The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924, United States)
The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924, Germany)
The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924, United States)
The Navigator (Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp, 1924, United States)
Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924, United States)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, Soviet Union)
The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925, United States)
The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925, United States)
Lady Windermere's Fan (Ernst Lubitsch, 1925, United States)
Lazybones (Frank Borzage, 1925, United States)
The Salvation Hunters (Josef von Sternberg, 1925, United States)
Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925, United States)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, Soviet Union)
Tartuffe (F.W. Murnau, 1925, Germany)
Variety (E. A. Dupont, 1925, United States)
3 Bad Men (John Ford, 1926, United States)
By the Law (Lev Kuleshov, 1926, Soviet Union)
Dog Shy (Leo McCarey, 1926, United States)
Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926, Germany)
The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926, United States)
The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1926, United Kingdom)
So This is Paris (Ernst Lubitsch, 1926, United States)
The End of St. Petersburg (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1927, Soviet Union)
The Girl with the Hat Box (Boris Barnet, 1927, Soviet Union)
La Glace à trois faces (Jean Epstein, 1927, France)
The Italian Straw Hat (René Clair, 1927, France)
The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde and J.A. Howe, 1927, United States)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927, Germany)
Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927, United States)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927, United States)
Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, 1927, United States)
Zvenigora (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1927, Soviet Union)
Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1928, Soviet Union)
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928, United States)
The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928, United States)
A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks, 1928, United States)
The House on Trubnaya Square (Boris Barnet, 1928, Soviet Union)
Four Sons (John Ford, 1928, United States)
Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928, United States)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928, United States)
The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928, United States)
Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929, United Kingdom)
The Blue Express (Ilya Trauberg, 1929, Soviet Union)
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, 1929, Spain)
The General Line (Sergei Eisenstein, 1929, Soviet Union)
The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, Soviet Union)
Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929, Germany)
The River (Frank Borzage, 1929, United States)
Spite Marriage (Edward Sedgwick, 1929, United States)

Admittedly, when it comes to cinema, one of the greatest deficiencies of this website has been the absence of the silent era. Nowhere is this more clear than in my compendium of ten best lists, which begin near the dawn of the sound era (1930) and run through the present. While there is something arbitrary to my selection of 1930 as a starting point, the basic thinking was that I could be confident that I would find ten at least 'very good' films for each of the subsequent years, while looking backwards, I realized that sometime during the 1920s -- 1929, to be exact -- my system of ten films per year would break down. So, 1930 seemed the correct starting point (as it still does), even if it would mean ignoring most of the silent era -- most, the greatest remaining silent films date from the post-1930 era, for the most part, in nations like China and Japan.

As to the selections, I put no limit on the number of films selected either by director or country of origin. Consequently, what I hope emerges is a sense of where silent cinema excelled most during the final decade of the 19th and first three decades of the 20th centuries. Of course, my system is nowhere near perfect as, one, far fewer films remain from this period than from later eras, and two, I haven't seen even a fraction of what truly rates as "important." Yet, like all of my other film lists on this site, the point is that it serve as a series of recommendations of exceptional works of film art, that in my opinion, rate with the best work of subsequent periods. In the end, I settled on one hundred films, mimicking my ten best lists available elsewhere on the site (that is, as each is grouped by decade).

As to my favorites among these favorites, rather than citing specific films, let me instead mention my ten favorite silent directors: Boris Barnet, Charles Chaplin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Louis Feuillade, D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Yasujiro Ozu and Victor Sjöström.

Ten Favorite Female Leads

Sandrine Bonnaire
Favorite Films: À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983), Vagabond (Agnès Varda, France), Joan the Maid (Jacques Rivette, 1994), The Ceremony (Claude Chabrol, 1995)

Irene Dunne
Favorite Films: Back Street (John M. Stahl, 1932), The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), Love Affair (McCarey, 1939), My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940)

Setsuko Hara
Favorite Films: Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949), Early Summer (Ozu, 1951), Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953), Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

Meena Kumari
Favorite Film: Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972)

Nargis
Favorite Films: Andaz (Mehboob Kahn, 1949), Barsaat (Raj Kapoor, 1949), Awaara (Kapoor, 1951), Shree 420 (Kapoor, 1955)

Marie Rivière
Favorite Films: The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981), Summer (Rohmer, 1986), An Autumn Tale (Rohmer, 1998)

Leonor Silveira
Favorite Films: Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira, 1993), Inquietude (Oliveira, 1998), The Uncertainty Principle (Oliveira, 2002), A Talking Picture (Oliveira, 2003)

Barbara Stanwyck
Favorite Films: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933), Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940), Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Hideko Takamine
Favorite Films: Mistress (Shirô Toyoda, 1953), Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955), Untamed (Naruse, 1957), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, 1960)

Kinuyo Tanaka
Favorite Films: Love of the Sumako the Actress (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1947), The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi, 1952), Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952), Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)

Lisa K. Broad's Ten Most Delightful Male Stars

James Cagney
Favorite Films: The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder, 1961)

Joseph Cotton
Favorite Films: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Alain Delon
Favorite Films: Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960), L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962), Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)















Johnny Depp & Joe Odagiri ("The Japanese Johnny Depp")
Favorite Films: Depp: Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990), Ed Wood (Burton, 1994), Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003) Odagiri: Sad Vacation (Shinji Aoyama, 2007), Adrift in Tokyo (Satoshi Miki, 2007)

Ralph Feinnes
Favorite Films: Quiz Show (Robert Redford, 1994), Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999), Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)

Cary Grant
Favorite Films: The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H. C. Potter, 1948), North by Northwest (Cary Grant, 1959)

Jeremy Irons
Favorite Films: Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988), Damage (Louis Malle, 1992), M. Butterfly (Cronenberg, 1993)

Tony Leung
Favorite Films: Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994), Cyclo (Tran Anh Hung, 1995), Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998), In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000)

Marcello Mastroianni
Favorite Films: Le Notti Bianche (Luchino Visconti, 1957), La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), 8½ (Fellini, 1963)

Jacques Tati
Favorite Films: M. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953), Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958), Playtime (Tati, 1967)

Greatest Directors [Updated: 6/29/09]

1. Alfred Hitchcock 21

2. Howard Hawks 18
2. Eric Rohmer 18

4. John Ford 15

5. Ernst Lubitsch 14
5. Jean Renoir 14

7. Robert Bresson 13
7. Luis Buñuel 13

9. Clint Eastwood 12
9. Jean-Luc Godard 12
9. Manoel de Oliveira 12

12. Hou Hsiao-hsien 11
12. Kenji Mizoguchi 11
12. Yasujiro Ozu 11

15. Charles Chaplin 10
15. Jacques Rivette 10
15. Roberto Rossellini 10

18. Abbas Kiarostami 9
18. Mikio Naruse 9
18. Max Ophüls 9
18. Josef von Sternberg 9

22. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 8
22. D.W. Griffith 8
22. Fritz Lang 8
22. Leo McCarey 8
22. F.W. Murnau 8
22. Orson Welles 8

28. Frank Borzage 7
28. Buster Keaton 7
28. Satyajit Ray 7
28. Alain Resnais 7
28. Luchino Visconti 7

33. Carl Theodor Dreyer 6
33. Krzysztof Kieslowski 6
33. Michael Powell (& Emeric Pressburger) 6 (5)
33. Andrei Tarkovsky 6

37. Michelangelo Antonioni 5
37. René Clair 5
37. David Cronenberg 5
37. Sergei Eisenstein 5
37. Werner Herzog 5
37. Takeshi Kitano 5
37. Stanley Kubrick 5
37. Mitchell Leisen 5
37. Nagisa Oshima 5
37. Maurice Pialat 5
37. Nicholas Ray 5
37. Aleksandr Sokurov 5
37. Jacques Tourneur 5
37. Tsai Ming-liang 5
37. Raoul Walsh 5
37. Wong Kar-wai 5

53. Boris Barnet 4
53. Ingmar Bergman 4
53. Albert Brooks 4
53. Claude Chabrol 4
53. John Cassavetes 4
53. Jia Zhangke 4
53. Aki Kaurismäki 4
53. Terrence Malick 4
53. Vincente Minnelli 4
53. Ousmane Sembene 4
53. Victor Sjöström 4
53. Preston Sturges 4
53. Jacques Tati 4
53. Andrezj Wajda 4

67. Chantal Akerman 3
67. Kamal Amrohi 3
67. Wes Anderson 3
67. James Benning 3
67. Jean Cocteau 3
67. George Cukor 3
67. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 3
67. Terence Davies 3
67. Jacques Demy 3
67. Claire Denis 3
67. Arnaud Desplechin 3
67. Aleksandr Dovzhenko 3
67. Emilio Fernández 3
67. Louis Feuillade 3
67. Samuel Fuller 3
67. Ernie Gehr 3
67. Ritwik Ghatak 3
67. Jim Jarmusch 3
67. Humphrey Jennings 3
67. Kiyoshi Kurosawa 3
67. Sergio Leone 3
67. Anthony Mann 3
67. Michael Mann 3
67. Jafar Panahi 3
67. Pier Paolo Pasolini 3
67. Otto Preminger 3
67. Raoul Ruiz 3
67. Hiroshi Shimizu 3
67. Erich von Stroheim 3
67. Seijun Suzuki 3
67. Béla Tarr 3
67. Tian Zhuangzhuang 3
67. Agnès Varda 3
67. Apichatpong Weerasethakul 3
67. Billy Wilder 3
67. Edward Yang 3

Note: The above rankings are based on the number of appearances that each director makes on my 1930-2008 Ten Best Lists, and on my 100 Best of the Silent Era.

Original Text and Reader Response: This past weekend, Total Film, a website of which I was previously unaware, published its list of "The Greatest Directors Ever", replete with cute little descriptions for each entry, such as François Truffaut ('The Sage'), Ang Lee ('The Outsider') and David Fincher ('The Perfectionist'). How anyone could possibly name David Fincher the #10 filmmaker of all-time is beyond me - or how he of all directors deserves the tag 'The perfectionist' is equally unclear. Nevertheless, I must commend Total Film for allowing their tastes to be scrutinized, which as I know can be quite nerve-wracking however confident one is.

In that same spirit I have included my own choices for the "Greatest Director of the Sound Era," which is a limitation necessitated by the process I have adopted for selecting the films: namely, I awarded each director one point - the number beside their name - for each film of theirs I list among the ten best for its given year (these annual lists date back to 1930). The second, parenthetical number represents the total number of #1 films I have likewise awarded the director. By including this number, I believe that my list offers a slightly more representative account of my actual tastes - such as that I really value the work of Edward Yang, whose three films I count I have named the best of their given years.

Ultimately, the above methodology favors a high level of quality over a large body of work, which all-to-often can be obscured in lists of the 'greatest films of all-time,' which make no amendment for artistic consistency. Hence, the position of Alfred Hitchcock at the top of the list (a judgment that I will add I share with Total Film), with Eric Rohmer and Howard Hawks right behind. Rohmer's place may be a surprise to some, though let me offer my belief that over his entire corpus of features - all of which I have seen, to date - every last film is good, which for a director of his productivity may well be unprecedented. Also, let me briefly single out Robert Bresson, whose entire features corpus of 13 works are all among my favorites for their respective years.

Of course, there are even surprises for me: for instance the relatively high places of Ingmar Bergman (of whom I am often quick to say that he is not among my favorites - though statistically, I guess he is) and Takeshi Kitano (really, his place reflects his position as one of the dominant figures of the 1990s, along with Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Clint Eastwood); or, the relatively lower ranking for Michelangelo Antonioni, whom at least for my system may have been hurt by his lower productivity, and particularly by the fact that his peak coincided with perhaps the greatest fifteen years in film history: 1949-1964.

Also, my choice of limiting myself to the sound era prevented the inclusion of such silent/sound giants as Boris Barnet and Sergei Eisenstein. (With the silent period, both of these Soviets would safely place on the survey.) Similarly, some of the greatest early sound and classical period auteurs, such as Sadao Yamanaka in Japan, Fei Mu in China and Guru Dutt in India did not quite place on my survey due no doubt to the small number of each filmmaker's works available in the United States. As an example, only three of Yamanaka's films are extant - though two are on my lists (Pot Worth One Million Ryo and Humanity and Paper Balloons) - while the single Fei picture I've seen (Spring in a Small Town) rates as the greatest Chinese film I know. In the same way, the lone Souleymane Cissé picture I've viewed (Yeelen) ranks first among the few Sub-Saharan African pictures I've seen.

If productivity were less an issue, I would also certainly include Spaniard Victor Erice, whose three features are each quite remarkable. Among younger directors, Stanley Kwan made one of the better films of the 1990s (Centre Stage) - and a second really good work in the late 1980s (Rouge) And then there's animation, one of my bigger blind-spots, and one of its greatest artists, Hayao Miyazaki, who again made one of the best works of the 1980s (My Neighbor Totoro) and more recently, of the earlier part of this decade (Spirited Away). Perhaps it is simply my photography-based prejudice rearing its ugly head.

Finally, there is David Lynch, who like Miyazaki, made one of the definitive films of the 1980s (Blue Velvet) and the American film I suspect will rank as the best of this decade (Mulholland Drive). If I could add television - i.e. Twin Peaks - Lynch too would make the list. Which, if you've been counting, brings me to 100. As always, let me know what you think.

Michael,

You're insane.

Now that the preliminaries are dispensed with, I think the main flaw with your system is the propensity for massive ties, like the 17-way photo-finish for 42nd place and the 31-person debacle that is 59th, not to mention the tigher, perhaps more interesting knots at 33rd, 25th, and 17th. Not to worry: I have a solution that is as clever, and probably as insane, as your methodology.

Take these masters of cinema, these geniuses, great artists of the twentieth century, and pit them against each other in no-holds-barred Battle Royale-style cage matches.

It will immediately become obvious, not to mention statistically incontrovertible, who is really the 42nd (and 12th, and 17th, and 20th, and 25th, etc.) greatest film director of the sound era.

For instance, "Grizzly Man" Werner Herzog would make short work of the cunning yet doughy Stanely Kubrick, the maple syrup-guzzling (though not averse to violence) David Cronenberg, the effete Chabrol, the pacifistic (i.e., wussy) Charlie Chaplin (that boxing match in City Lights was clearly rigged), and the, let's say for the sake of argument and based on what I've seen of his films, probably malnourished Satyajit Ray. Herzog got shot in the gut and continued with an interview: 'nuff said.

For 42nd, pretty much everybody quickly drops out of the competition and you're left with a three-way, alcohol-fueled, bare-knuckled, bare-chested street fight between John "Big Trouble" Cassavetes, Anthony "Dr. Broadway" Mann, and Vincente "The Reluctant Debutante" Minnelli. I give it to Cassavetes: he's hungry. (I know what you're thinking: don't underestimate the repressed anger of Albert Brooks and the intimidating reach of Jacques Tati. Wajda survived the Holocaust. Suzuki fought in WWII. To all this I say: Whooptee-do. Look in Cassavetes' eyes, man. He's an animal!)

4th might come as a surprise: Godard is the clear victor. Hear me out. Ozu would be too blitzed on American bourbon to raise his eyelids, let alone his fists, plus his mom probably wouldn't even let him fight, and "sad sack" Renoir would go down like a little match-stick girl with a sucker punch to that big gut. Take off the bear costume and put down the cheese, JR! This is a competition for 4th best sound director, not a day in the country! You're about to enter a whirlpool of fate! (Thank you, IMDB.)

17th obviously goes to Fassbinder. The guy's a lunatic. In his prime Welles might put up a fight with his reach and his mass, but post-1950 his weight becomes a liability. One swift punch to Ophuls' nose and he'd crumble like a cheap suit.

Sternberg probably wins 20th because I have a feeling he can scan people's brains and make their heads explode. Sorry, Luchnio Visconti! You're damned to die in venice, and there's nothing that Rocco OR his brothers can do to help you!

John Ford vs. Robert Bresson. Please. Ford had a frigging eyepatch for God's sake. An eyepatch. Ford in 2 rounds, and he barely breaks a sweat. He begs for a shot against Godard, but the Vegas boxing commission denies his request on the grounds that Jean-Luc could die. Ward Bond has to hold him back while his buddy Howard Hawks gloats good-naturedly. Hitch is above the fray. Rohmer smokes and makes another movie.

Appropriately, Clint Eastwood stands alone. I don't blame any of these guys for not challenging him: Did you see those movies with him and the monkey?! Holy shit!

The 59th place bout is such a clusterfuck I hate to even try to predict, but I can tell you who the leaders are on my scorecard: Borzage, Fuller (the favorite at 5:1), the Dardenne Boys (depends on how well they use the tag-team advantage), Ousmane Sembene (fought for the Free French, the toughest Frenchmen around (which isn't saying much) (ZING!)), and the dark horse of the leaders, Chantal Akerman. Yeah, I said it. As one of the only women in the field, she's angry, she's got something to prove, sort of a "fighting on behalf of all women" thing, and, let's face it, chicks fight dirty. Hair pulling, fingernails, groin stuff, you name it. Women are dirty.

Picking a winner in this contest is tough, but I'm going outside all the favorites for a true dark horse, one you probably missed on your tip sheets: Emilio Fernandez. First of all, he's half Kickapoo Indian. Listen to me when I say this: Do not fuck with the Kickapoo. Consider yourselves warned. He even already has a fighter nickname: "El Indio." Second, he dropped out of school to fight in a revolution. Third, when that didn't work out he ESCAPED FROM PRISON. (Thank you wikipedia.) This guy's a true badass, LITERALLY a revolutionary. He would mop the floor with those fruity Dardennes and the drunk Americans (NB: I'm assuming Borzage was an alcoholic because he was Swedish). El Indio "Mercenary of Death" Fernandez is obviously the 59th best film director since 1930.

May the most animalistic, out-of-control, brawling master of the cinematic arts win.

-Matt Hauske

All-Time Best

Michael J. Anderson
Yale University/Tativille

Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1971)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)



Lisa K. Broad
New York University
(updated: 9/2/06)

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939)
Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)
The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)
The Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, 1983)



Emily Condon
Sound Unseen Film + Music Festival

1. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)
2. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
3. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975
4. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
6. Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)
7. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
8. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
9. Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
10. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Comments: Here's my more or less arbitrary top ten list (in no particular order). I wouldn't say 10 "best." Maybe 10 "most admired" or something like that.



James Crawford
Reverse Shot/Museum of the Moving Image

1. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
4. Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
5. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
6. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
7. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
8. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
9. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
10. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)



Andrea Janes
Kino International

10. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
9. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
8. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
7. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
6. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
5. Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
4. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
3. Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
2. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
1. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)

Comments: Okay, so I did go to the BFI list, after making my list, and was surprised to see some of my movies on there. I may be less lowbrow than I thought. Not more highbrow, just less lowbrow.

I wasn't going to put The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on my list because I thought it may be too much, like putting Sherlock Jr. on it. But they both get honorable mentions, Liberty Valance because it's my favorite western and just so thematically rich and brilliant and Sherlock because it's Buster, dammit. Then I saw them on the BFI list and felt I couldn't leave them off. So those are my post-BFI-reading honorable mentions.

To narrow the possibilities, I tried to concentrate on English language and writing aspects (e.g., I valued a good screenplay/story over beautiful photography or art direction, etc.). This cut out some of my favorite foreign language films, like Umberto D., which I like better than The Bicycle Thief, and Pierrot le Fou, which I like better than Breathless for some reason, and Fanny & Alexander and Persona, which I love love love. Themes of identity intermingling, what's real, what's not, I don't know! Which is also why I love Vertigo, other than it's so damn stylish. So those are my foreign language honorable mentions.

Then I had about twenty films left and it was hard deciding among them, obviously, so here are the other honorable mentions first:

All About Eve - Always gets mentioned as one of the great comedies, but sometimes this movie's a bit rich for me. Still, admirable.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - No one could pretend this is one of the time great movies, but I love it so much. Jane Rusell has the best lines. I can sing all the songs from this movie, which I tend to do at weddings, when drunk.
Vertigo - it was a tough call cutting it from my list to the honorable mentions, but if I could have an 11th, this would be it. So damn stylish.
African Queen - great writing, love Bogart and Hepburn together, and love that he's a drunk Canuck, and love it when he calls her a "psalm-singing skinny old maid."
Working Girl - you know why. Staten Island Ferry baby! Plus great one liners.
Tootsie - this is a really well-written film & has a great character arc, if you're into that sort of thing.
Revenge of the Nerds - the proto teen comedy, so good, and I love the techno rap Little Darlings - another proto teen comedy, surprisingly charming.

Okay, here is my real list:
10. His Girl Friday - for the dialogue
9. Days of Heaven - for the character development (though it was largely improvised, not written, a writer could stand to take it as an example of story growing out of character. it took a year for them to grow organically and in the end their fates and actions emerged from these sensitively developed characters) - plus so gorgeous, too
8. Annie Hall - for romantic comedy that isn't god-awful and sappy
7. Heavenly Creatures - for creating complex heroines and making me cry for a friendship lost during a horrific murder scene
6. The Apartment - I think it's my favorite wilder, possibly
5. Fargo - for characters, imagery, dialogue (that great tender last line about needing the little stamps restores my faith in humanity) - for giving Frances McDormand a role/character like Marge Gunderson
4. The Lady Eve - master class in comedy writing - love Barbara Stanwyck in this role
3. Rushmore - for ingenuity, tenderness, characters, dialogue (can you sum up an entire friendship in the line, "I'll take punctuality," and "I'm a little lonely these days") forget the story between Max and Miss Cross, it was all about Bill Murray for me
2. Jaws - for the dynamic between Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss - the second half of this film trascendes genre & has great dramatic writing
1. Back to the Future (1) - a great commercial comedy. a perfect example of using imagination while working within the parameters of the Hollywood formula. I love Marty, Doc Brown, the Flux Capacitor and especially George McFly. He is my density.

According to this list I haven't seen a great movie since 1998. Though The Royal Tenenbaums was good too. But still that's kind of sad.



Pamela Kerpius
Seen Film/Termite Art

1. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
2. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
3. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
4. Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
8. Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)
9. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
10. My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)



Mike Lyon
Tits & Gore

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Kinji Fukasaku, 1972)
Vengeance is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
Tetsuo - The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)
Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993)
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)
Ichi the Killer (Takashi Miike, 2001)

Comments: "The Ten Best Japanese Films"

Feeling ill-equipped and lacking the confidence to present a serious list of the ten greatest films of all time, I chose instead to focus on my area of speciality, the cinema of Japan - and even within this milieu, each decision and excision caused interminable bouts of hand wringing! The difference between a "best of" list and a "favorites" list may seem subtle, since personal preference plays handily into both, but here I have attempted at all times to avoid my numerous biases and focus on those films that have had the greatest impact on the direction of Japanese and world cinema. As such, important but transitional periods in Japanese film history are unfortunately underrepresented, notably the masterfully filthy pinku eiga of the 1960s. But as I viewed the films that ultimately comprised the top ten as well as many others over the past week, I found myself reinvigorated in my passion for Japanese film and the power of its greatest directors and actors, some choices solidifying themselves easily while others snuck up on me quite unexpectedly.

So then, the films, in no numbered order but instead listed chronologically, with brief justifications-

TOKYO STORY (dir. Yasujiro Ozu - 1953)
-More than 50 years removed from its release, Tokyo Story remains one of the most profound and understated human dramas ever committed to film. Of all the films listed, its inclusion was the one that was never in doubt; Ozu meticulously examines family ties, love and loss without a single flourish or overwrought emotion. Far from boring in its quiescence, its evocation of real humanity, simple and painful, will remain as soulful and immediate in another 50 years.

UGETSU (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953)
-It seems like too easy a choice until you watch it again (and again, and again...) Mr. Anderson's own recent essay on this site regarding the film far outstrips any insights I may have, so let me simply say: few if any truly beautiful films are this substantive and so rewarding after repeated viewings. It may be the most pitch-perfect morality play ever executed.

SEVEN SAMURAI (dir. Akira Kurosawa - 1954)
-The old workhorse of Japanese film somehow seems perpetually fresh, almost mythical, no matter how much praise is thrown at it. Still mesmerizing is Kurosawa's unearthly command of the camera and deft deconstruction of social hierarchy, a class divide exposed and bridged by Toshiro Mifune in his greatest performance. Kurosawa closes the book on the Confucian class system, abolishing the long-cherished romantic ideal of the wandering warrior. Of all Kurosawa's considerable triumphs, it remains the most satisfying.

UNDER THE FLAG OF THE RISING SUN (dir. Kinji Fukasaku - 1972)
-Fukasaku's Battle Royale may become the film he is most remember for, but Rising Sun stands as his masterwork, and indeed as one of the greatest anti-war pictures ever filmed. Fukasaku's own wartime experiences inform this brutal mystery, peppered with all the director's trademark freeze frames, sharp pans, oblique angles and shifting film stocks. Even today, its condemnation of Japan and even the Imperial institution is shocking, if not flatly offensive, to polite Japanese society; in 1972, it was an act of supreme artistic courage.

VENGEANCE IS MINE (dir. Shohei Imamura - 1979)
-No one doubts Imamura's chops, but in Vengeance is Mine he masterfully rides a razor wire of moral ambiguity, painstakingly examining the lives of a serial killer and his family. There are no traps in place to implicate society or the viewer, no sympathy extended for the family or the killer. In the end they are simply human, perhaps too human to not be unsettling and moving at the same time.

NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (dir. Hayao Miyazaki - 1984)
-Utopian, socialist, feminist, environmentalist, Christian (or is it Buddhist?) - everyone has their own axe to grind with Nausicaa. In the end, it easily escapes categorization by simply being a good story, well told. The world is destroyed, but Miyazaki never stoops to suggesting it should be rebuilt. The disjuncture between man and nature cannot be resolved, only lived with. Animation may have been considered art in Japan before Nausicaa's release, but afterwards, the whole world began to understand.

TETSUO - THE IRON MAN (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto - 1989)
-Where would Japanese film be without Tetsuo? Few paradigm shifts are this stark, but there's no denying that Tsukamoto opened a door, perhaps the door, into the future for young Japanese filmmakers. Dehumanization in the machine age is taken to its ultimate limit as Tsukamoto's ageless everyman, the brilliant Tomorowo Taguchi, mutilates himself by shoving metal into his body, grows a sawblade metal cock and becomes the bastard child of the only truly living organism in Japan - Tokyo.

SONATINE (dir. Takeshi Kitano - 1993)
-I've had an incredible amount of difficulty writing this justification, not because it seems an inappropriate inclusion or because Sonatine is not Kitano's best, but because his hypnotic style so often defies examination. Perhaps it is true that Kitano's cinema is a cinema of shared moments, of nostalgia and violence intertwined into slight, surprisingly sad packages. Kitano's own Murakawa may be his ultimate protagonist - aging, physically and mentally isolated, yet somehow born before our eyes, and truly living, briefly and childishly.

EUREKA (dir. Shinji Aoyama - 2000)
-Aoyama's beautiful and heart-wrenching allegory for national recovery in the wake of the Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks is a brutally honest indictment of a society's role in creating and burying national tragedy. The omnipresent Koji Yakusho could wring blood from a stone with the intensity of his performance; if only every world crisis was followed by such a thoughtful and universal appeal for the triumph of humanity.

ICHI THE KILLER (dir. Takashi Miike - 2001)
-It would be a dire mistake to ignore the films of prolific and troubled Takashi Miike, who at 45 has already produced a staggering 68 films. Ichi may have become a pop benchmark for cinematic shock, but beneath the waves of blood and outlandish characters, Miike spins the old pinku trope of sadists and masochists finding paradise in one another into a scathing condemnation of modern Japan sacrificing its youth at an altar of excess.



Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega
New York University
(updated: 9/9/06)

1. Underground (Emir Kusturcia, 1995)
2. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
3. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
4. The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)
5. Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
6. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995)
7. Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
8. Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970)
9. Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
10. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)



Brian Shirey
Kino International

The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Comments: To state the obvious one more time, this is impossible...
It's chronological.

Ask me again next week, you'll get a different 10...



Matthew Singer
IFC News/Village Voice/Termite Art

1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
2. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
3. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
4. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
5. Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)
6. Gymkata (Robert Clouse, 1985)
7. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
8. L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
9. The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder, 1966)
10. Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Comments: "The Top 10 Movies of All Time (At The Moment)"

This list comprises my 10 favorite films of all time
as of August 24, 2006. A couple of films were obvious
inclusions, but parsing the biggies down to just ten
was no easy task: I finally approached it by imagining
I was going off into space and could only take ten
movies with me. Ultimately, I decided these are the
ten I would take (though I'd probably try to sneak a
few more in amongst the freeze-dried ice cream).

The date of the list is crucial because, to me, these
sorts of lists are and should be in a constant state
of flux. Five years ago, my list would have looked
very different. Five years from now, it could look
very different still. I do not consider myself
qualified to state definitely what are the "best"
movies of all time: I haven't seen enough movies to
speak with such authority, and if at some point in the
future I claim I have, I am lying and should be
smacked briskly across the face. To me, the movies
are what we see in them, and these are the ones I
currently see the most in.



R. Emmet Sweeney
Village Voice/Termite Art/Kino International

1. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
2. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
3. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)
4. On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
5. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
6. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
7. The Naked Gun (David Zucker, 1988)
8. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
9. It's Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1955)
10. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Comments: My only limitation was one film per director - and it's surprising how many films from the fifties made it - four out of ten. I have a thing for end of genre films, I guess - with Rio Bravo, It's Always Fair Weather, and On Dangerous Ground all appearing near the end of their respective genre's cycle. The list would be different depending on what day it was, and what I've seen recently - but I think my top three will always be around. Perfect, I call them.



Frank Tarzi
Kino International

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Where Eagles Dare (Brian G. Hutton, 1968)

Comments: This is the best I could do right now, I know I missed many of my favorites. I’d probably have an easier time with a top 100, or top 10 genres.

The 25 Greatest Songs of All-Time

As per the suggestion of the lovely and intelligent Lisa K. Broad, what follows is a compendium of many of my more musically literate and savvy friends' favorite songs of all-time, all of which thus far are confined to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (If I were to bend this criteria, which I myself used, to include songs and/or movements that preceded our current epoch in popular music, I certainly would had to have found space for J.S. Bach's "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden"; then again, as my long-time friend Emily Condon says, we can't really consider such things to be "songs" anyway.)

Concerning the contents of the lists, let me flatter the respondents with my feeling that they all have showed their high level of knowledge, and have, without exception, bested my own list. Kudos to Lisa for her inclusion of the wonderful "Miles from Nowhere" from one of the most underrated bands in music history, THE ONLY ONES, as well as "Carry Home" from the equally-impressive and even lesser known GUN CLUB; to Emily for rightfully including LEONARD COHEN -- what kind of list would this be without him? -- as well as two of my favorite records by NEW ORDER and THE REPLACEMENTS, "Temptation" and "Unsatisfied" respectively; to Bob Klevay for his archeological survey of pop music and his keen citation of JONATHAN RICHMAN; to Patrick Mattingly for filling the holes that the rest of us left (i.e. U2, BECK, WEEZER, etc.); to Matt Singer for choosing such highpoints as "Half a Person" by THE SMITHS and "Jesus, Etc." by WILCO; and to Rob Sweeney, who anyone can see encouraged my taste for IRIS DEMENT, to say nothing of SHELBY LYNNE.

My own selections are often less adventurous (if not astute) though I do feel as if an aesthetic is discernable in my choices. Of my list, let me point to the final track, THE GO! TEAM's "Ladyflash," which to me encapsulates exactly where pop music is today. To see where it's been, peruse these lists.

-Michael J. Anderson


Michael J. Anderson
(updated: 4/10/06)

1. "I Know it's Over," THE SMITHS
from The Queen is Dead (1986)
2. "Trouble Loves Me," MORRISSEY
from Maladjusted (1997)
3. "I'll Be You," THE REPLACEMENTS
from Don't Tell a Soul (1989)
4. (tie) "Only You," YAZ
from Upstairs at Eric's (1982)
& "Only You," FLYING PICKETS
from Lost Boys (1984)
5. "Blue in Green," MILES DAVIS
from Kind of Blue (1959)
6. "Regret," NEW ORDER
from Republic (1993)
7. "Black Star," RADIOHEAD
from The Bends (1995)
8. "Elephant Stone," THE STONE ROSES
from The Stone Roses (1989)
9. "Cucurrucucu Palomo," CAETANO VELOSO
from Fina Estampa - Ao vivo (1994)
10. "Can't Let Go," LUCINDA WILLIAMS
from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)
11. "Love Will Tear Us Apart," JOY DIVISION
from The Complete BBC Recordings (1979)
12. "The Killing Moon," ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN
from Ocean Rain (1984)
13. "Can't Stand Me Now," THE LIBERTINES
from The Libertines (2004)
14. "Northern Sky," NICK DRAKE
from Bryter Layter (1970)
15. "NY State of Mind," NAS
from Illmatic (1994)
16. "Sweet is the Melody," IRIS DEMENT
from My Life (1993)
17. "Straight to You," NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
from Henry's Dreams (1992)
18. "Mr. Brightside," THE KILLERS
from Hot Fuss (2004)
19. "To the End," BLUR
from Parklife (1994)
20. "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," THE ARCADE FIRE
from Funeral (2004)
21. "Sharp Darts," THE STREETS
from Original Pirate Material (2002)
22. "Another Girl, Another Planet," THE ONLY ONES
from The Only Ones (1978)*
23. "Lonely Planet Boy," THE NEW YORK DOLLS
from New York Dolls (1973)
24. "Love is the Law," THE SUBURBS
from Love is the Law (1983)
25. "Ladyflash," THE GO! TEAM
from Thunder, Lightning, Strike (2005)

* Initially, my list featured DAVID BOWIE's "Changes" in the #22 slot. However, the more I think about it, particularly after listening to the song again only moments ago, the more I think I am probably "over" Bowie, just as I have come to concede that I am over ELVIS COSTELLO, another of my former all-time favorites. And if you haven't already noticed, self-revisionism is one of the key ethos of my list-making on Tativille.


Lisa K. Broad

1. "Two-Headed Boy," NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL
from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
2. "Moya," GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR!
from Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada (1999)
3. "Holiday Song," PIXIES
from Come On Pilgrim (1987)
4. "Old Jerusalem," PALACE MUSIC
from Viva Lost Blues (1995)
5. "Intervention," THE ARCADE FIRE
forthcoming (2005)
6. "I Wanna Be Your Dog," IGGY POP
from Nude & Rude: The Best of Iggy Pop (1996)
7. "Modern World," THE MODERN LOVERS
from The Modern Lovers (1976)
8. "Love Will Tear Us Apart," JOY DIVISION
from The Complete BBC Recordings (1979)
9. "Miles from Nowhere," THE ONLY ONES
from Even Serpents Shine (1979)
10. "I Know it's Over," THE SMITHS
from The Queen is Dead (1986)
11. "Marquee Moon," TELEVISION
from Marquee Moon (1977)
12. "Sugar On My Tongue," TALKING HEADS
from Popular Favorites:1976-1992 ~ Sand in the Vasoline (1992)
13. "Loveless Love," THE FEELIES
from Crazy Rhythms (1980)
14. "Banquet," BLOC PARTY
from Silent Alarm (2005)
15. "Head On," THE JESUS & MARY CHAIN
from Automatic (1989)
16. "C'mon Billy," PJ HARVEY
from To Bring You My Love (1995)
17. "Do You Love Me?," NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
from Let Love In (1994)
18. "Carry Home," GUN CLUB
from Miami (1982)
19. "Monolith," T REX
from Electric Warrior (1971)
20. "The Man Comes Around," JOHNNY CASH
from American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002)
21. "I Think I Need a New Heart," THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
from 69 Love Songs, Vol. 1 (1999)
22. "Nothing's Going to Happen," ELF POWER
from Nothing's Going to Happen (2002)
23. "Add It Up," THE VIOLENT FEMMES
from Add It Up (1981-1993) (1993)
24. "Evil," INTERPOL
from Antics (2004)
25. "Maps," YEAH YEAH YEAHS
from Fever to Tell (2003)


Emily Condon

The parameters: I stuck to "popular music." I avoided classical,opera, and some kinds of jazz, as it seemed in keeping with what you'll be getting. (And those genres aren't really about "songs" so much, anyway). I only chose one song per artist-I thought that would be a lot more interesting than listing 6 Bowie songs, 10 by Nina Simone, and 4 each by The Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen. I have 25
listed in a rough, arbitrary order and couldn't help but adding a few honorable mentions that you are free to include or not.

Also, for clarity's sake: I've listed the artist of the song, who often are not the writer. I did it this way for a few reasons--especially in the case of songs like the first title I have listed, it's important, because dozens of artists have recorded that song but hers is the version I prefer. Also, they'll be more familiar
that way.

This was surprisingly difficult, fun, and easy to obsess over.

"I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good," NINA SIMONE
"A Change is Gonna Come," THE NEVILLE BROTHERS
"Famous Blue Raincoat," LEONARD COHEN
"Starman," DAVID BOWIE
"Innocent When You Dream," TOM WAITS
"The Beautiful One," PRINCE
"Beast of Burden," THE ROLLING STONES
"Lost In the Flood," BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"Across 110th Street," BOBBY WOMACK
"Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground," WILLIE NELSON
"Summertime," SAM COOKE
"Jesus Walks," KANYE WEST
"Calling America," ELO
"Unsatisfied," THE REPLACEMENTS
"Trailer Trash," MODEST MOUSE
"Hurricane," BOB DYLAN
"Temptation," NEW ORDER
"The Book I Read," TALKING HEADS
"Wouldn't it Be Nice," THE BEACH BOYS
"Remember (Walking in the Sand)," THE SHANGRI-LAS
"What A Difference a Day Made," DINAH WASHINGTON
"Aquarius/ Let the Sunshine In," THE FIFTH DIMENSION
"Killer Parties," THE HOLD STEADY
"You Turn Me On," PATTI LaBELLE
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," ROBERTA FLACK

Honorable mention: "Whiskey in the Jar" by THIN LIZZY, "Half a Person" by THE SMITHS, "Folsom Prison Blues" by JOHNNY CASH, and the live version of "Go Your Own Way" by FLEETWOOD MAC.


Trevor Johnson
(added: 4/11/06)

After many hours of deliberation over the rules of how I would pick my top 25 songs, the songs fell into place. Picking my top 25 songs is nearly impossible. I tried to follow some of the rules that others on this blog have used (only one song per artist), but I had to limit myself even more than that. Being the fan of live music that I am, I have limited myself to one song per artist which I have seen live. I may not have HEARD that particular song performed, but I at least saw the artist. (There are a couple of exceptions which I have noted.) Also, I'm a big Minneapolis music fan, but I have kept my list to national acts.

1. "Daughter," PEARL JAM
from Versus
2. "Baba O'Riley," THE WHO
from Who's Next
3. "Avoiding the Angel," DAVE NAVARRO
from Trust No One
4. "Bite the Hand that Feeds," NINE INCH NAILS
from With Teeth
5. "Ramble On," LED ZEPPLIN
from Led Zeppelin II (Robert Plant opened for The Who)
6. "Forty Six and 2," TOOL
from Aenima
7. "My Hero," FOO FIGHTERS
from The Colour and the Shape
8. "Rockin' in the Free World," NEIL YOUNG
from Freedom
9. "Bohemian Rhapsody," QUEEN
from A Night at the Opera (seen with Paul Rodgers)
10. "Takin' It Easy," BRAD
from Welcome to Discovery Park
11. "Rhythm of our World," ARTURO SANDOVAL
from Hot House
12. "Undone (The Sweater Song)," WEEZER
from Weezer
13. "If I Can't Change Your Mind," SUGAR
from Copper Blue (I saw Bob Mould solo)
14. "You and Me and the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight," BIG BAD VOODOO DADDY
from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
15. "Kick Out the Jams," MC5
from Kick Out the Jams
16. "Oh My God," KAISER CHIEFS
from Employment
17. "Too Little Too Late," HOOBASTANK
from Hoobastank
18. "Killing Game," SKINNY PUPPY
from Last Rights
19. "Crash 17 (X-Rated Car)," GIRLS AGAINST BOYS
from House of GvsB
20. "Unhand Me," STONE GOSSARD
from Bayleaf (I didn't see him solo, but I've seen him seven other times with Pearl Jam and Brad)
21. "Birdland," MAYNARD FERGUSON
from Carnival
22. "In Remote Part/ Scottish Fiction," IDLEWILD
from Remote Part
23. "Supermodels Don't Drink Colt 45," DILLINGER FOUR
from Midwestern Songs of the Americas (okay, one Mpls. band that isn't huge, but they have a small national following)
24 and 25. Mike is going to have to pick the songs... THE JAYHAWKS and LUCINDA WILLIAMS*

*Editor's Note: How about "Blue" from Tomorrow the Green Grass and "Ventura" from World Without Tears? The latter I saw performed live with Trevor, before the album's release, at a show I still consider to be the best I've ever seen. He disagrees.


Robert Klevay

These are in no particular order. They’re just 25 songs I like.

1. "Movie Mag,” CARL PERKINS
from The Complete Sun Singles
2. "Headin’ for the Texas Border," FLAMIN' GROOVIES
from Flamingo
3. "Goodnight Irene," LEADBELLY
from Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Leadbelly Legacy Vol. 1
4. "Anything Goes," FRANK SINATRA
from Swinging Lovers
5. "Designs on You," OLD 97'S
from Satellite Rides
6. "It’s Too Bad," THE JAM
from All Mod Cons
7. "I Thank You," SAM AND DAVE
from The Best of Sam and Dave
8. "Jet Boy, Jet Girl," THE DAMNED
from The Best of the Damned
9. "Uncontrollable Urge," DEVO
from Devo: Pioneers Who Got Scapled: The Anthology
10. "Underwear," PULP
from Hits
11. "Expectations," BELLE AND SEBASTIAN
from Tigermilk
12. "Skin and Bone," THE KINKS
from Muswell Hillbillies
13. "Soul Meeting," SOLOMON BURKE AND THE SOUL CLAN
from The Very Best of Solomon Burke
14. "Mannish Boy," MUDDY WATERS
from His Best, 1947-1955
15. "Vampire Girl," JONATHAN RICHMAN
from The Best of Jonathan Richman
16. "Burn the Witch," QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE
from Lullabies to Paralyze
17. "Putty (In Your Hands)," THE DETROIT COBRAS
from Mink Rat or Rabbit
18. "Time Bomb High School," REIGNING SOUND
from Time Bomb High School
19. "House of Pain," OINGO BOINGO
from Oingo Boingo: The Anthology
20. "The Irony of It All," THE STREETS
from Original Pirate Material
21. "She's Looking Good," WILSON PICKETT
from Wilson Pickett’s Greatest Hits
22. "Catman," GENE VINCENT
from The Screaming End: The Best of Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps
23. "The Jeep Song," THE DRESDEN DOLLS
from Dresden Dolls
24. "(Nothing But) Flowers," TALKING HEADS
from Sand in the Vaseline
25. "One Hundred Years from Now," THE BYRDS
from Sweetheart of Rodeo


Patrick Mattingly

beautiful fun classic new etc
sure, most of these have become cliche BUT
I wish I could've made just one of these

"One," U2
"Loser," BECK
"Everybody Hurts," R.E.M.
"River Man," NICK DRAKE
"Lonely Teardrops," JACKIE WILSON
"Paranoid Android," RADIOHEAD
"Undone (The Sweater Song)," WEEZER
"God Only Knows," THE BEACH BOYS
"Bittersweet Symphony," THE VERVE
"Something," THE BEATLES (George Harrison)
"Needle in the Hay," ELLIOTT SMITH
"Lover, You Should've Come Over," JEFF BUCKLEY
"Glory Box," PORTISHEAD
"All Apologies," NIRVANA
"I Want You Back," THE JACKSON 5
"Try a Little Tenderness," OTIS REDDING
"Let's Stay Together," AL GREEN
"Let's Get It On," MARVIN GAYE
"Oh! Darling," THE BEATLES (Paul McCartney)
"Use Me," BILL WITHERS
"Closer," NINE INCH NAILS
"Somewhere a Clock is Ticking," SNOW PATROL
"So You'll Aim Toward the Sky," GRANDADDY
"Imagine," JOHN LENNON
"Foolproof," RON SEXSMITH


Maggie Purifoy
(added: 4/10/06)

Okay, so through this I've discovered I only really like sad music. That being said, even the saddest I could listen to a hundred times, and on the right day, they can probably even draw a tear. There are a couple of non-sad ones, too. Enjoy:

1. "There is a Reason," ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION
2. "Devant le garage," LICARI, DANIELLE & JOSH BARTEL (from Parapluies de Cherbourg)
3. "Do What You Have to Do," SARAH McLACHLIN
4. "Ghost," INDIGO GIRLS
5. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," SUSAN TEDESCHI
6. "I Can't Make You Love Me," BONNIE RAITT
7. "Crawling Back to You," TOM PETTY
8. "Lover, You Should've Come Over," JEFF BUCKLEY
9. "My Life," IRIS DEMENT
10. "Long Black Veil," JOHNNY CASH
11. "Station to Station," DAVID BOWIE
12. "For the Good Times," ELVIS PRESLEY
13. "Still Fighting It," BEN FOLDS
14. "Strong Hand," EMMYLOU HARRIS
15. "Black Diamond Bay," BOB DYLAN
16. "Paper Bag," FIONA APPLE
17. "Jolene," DOLLY PARTON
18. "Unwed Fathers," JOHN PRINE
19. "Texan Love Song," ELTON JOHN
20. "Late in the Evening," PAUL SIMON
21. "Sir Duke," STEVIE WONDER
22. "Baby You've Got What it Takes," BROOK BENTON & DINAH WASHINGTON
23. "Still in Love with You," AL GREEN
24. "Father & Son," CAT STEVENS
25. "It's Not," AIMEE MANN


Matthew Singer

25. "Comeback (Light Therapy)," JOSH ROUSE
24. "Champagne Supernova," OASIS
23. "Babylon," DAVID GRAY
22. "My Favorite Things," JOHN COLTRANE
21. "Aquemini," OUTKAST
20. "Half a Person," THE SMITHS
19. "Jamming," BOB MARLEY
18. "Sabotage," BEASTIE BOYS
17. "Folsom Prison Blues," JOHNNY CASH
16. "This Is It," KENNY LOGGINS
15. "Jesus Etc.," WILCO
14. "Hotel California," THE EAGLES
13. "Do It Again," STEELY DAN
12. "Young Americans," DAVID BOWIE
11. "Alison," ELVIS COSTELLO
10. "Last Goodbye, JEFF BUCKLEY
9. "New York State of Mind," BILLY JOEL
8. "Move On Up," CURTIS MAYFIELD
7. "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," TEARS FOR FEARS
6. "Like a Rolling Stone," BOB DYLAN
5. "Billie Jean," MICHAEL JACKSON
God I wanted to be Michael Jackson when I was a kid,and this song, an unholy blend of r&b, pop, disco, andfilm noir, was reason numero uno. It's funky, it'scatchy, it's -- to borrow a later Jackson title -- just plain bad. Just because the dude'sbatshit insane now doesn't change any of that.
4. "Brown Sugar," THE ROLLING STONES
Most of the words are gibberish but there's noquestioning what Mick's talking about: he wants to getit on with a foxy black chick. And that, as a rockgod of the highest order at the very top of his game,is his absolute right. There might not be a bettersax break in all of pop music.
3. "What's Going On," MARVIN GAYE
Activism has never been this sexy before or since.And; I've always liked that it's not a call to action;just a call to paying attention.
2. "God Only Knows," THE BEACH BOYS
This is the sound of falling in love.
1. "Hey Jude," THE BEATLES
The distillation of a century of pop music. Writtenas a pick-me-up to John's depressed son Julian, "Jude"transforms tragedy into hope. Until you hear it, youcould never imagine how much emotion the word "na"could express.


R. Emmet Sweeney

"Don’t Take Your Guns to Town," JOHNNY CASH
from Columbia Records: 1958-1986 (1958)
"My Life," IRIS DEMENT
from My Life (1993)
"Mood Indigo," DUKE ELLINGTON
from The Definitive Duke Ellington (1930)
"Work It," MISSY ELLIOT
from Under Construction (2002)
"Shine, Shave, Shower (It's Saturday)," LEFTY FRIZZELL
from Look What Thoughts Will Do (1950)
"Conference of the Birds," DAVE HOLLAND
from Rarum X (1972)
"It’s All Right," THE IMPRESSIONS
from The Anthology (1963)
"He Stopped Loving Her Today," GEORGE JONES
from The Essential George Jones: The Spirit of Country (1980)
"Kerosene," MIRANDA LAMBERT
from Kerosene (2005)
"Where I'm From," SHELBY LYNNE
from I Am Shelby Lynne (2000)
"I Wanna Get Married," NELLIE MCKAY
from Get Away From Me (2004)
"Track A – Solo Dancer: Stop! Look! And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney!," CHARLES MINGUS
from The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (1963)
"Misterioso," THELONIUS MONK
from The Best of Thelonious Monk: The Blue Note Years (1948)
"Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul)," JASON MORAN
from The Bandwagon (2003)
"Barrier Reef," OLD 97'S
from Too Far to Care (1997)
"B.O.B," OUTKAST
from Stankonia (2000)
"Salt Peanuts," CHARLIE PARKER
from The Definitive Charlie Parker
"Rock Me," LIZ PHAIR
from Liz Phair (2003)
"Average Guy," LOU REED
from The Blue Mask (1982)
"What Does Your Soul Look Like Pt. 1: Blue Sky Revisit," DJ SHADOW
from Entroducing... (1996)
"Sweet Jane," THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
from Loaded (1970)
"I'll Shoot the Moon," TOM WAITS
from The Black Rider (1993)
"Gone," KANYE WEST
from Late Registration (2005)
"There's a Tear in My Beer," HANK WILLIAMS
from The Ultimate Collection (1951)
"Joy," LUCINDA WILLIAMS
from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)


Frank Tarzi
(added: 4/12/06)

"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," THE ANIMALS
"Because," THE BEATLES
"Ashes to Ashes," DAVID BOWIE
"Spill the Wine," ERIC BURDON DECLARS 'WAR'
"Hurt," JOHNNY CASH
"Famous Blue Raincoat," LEONARD COHEN
"I'd Rather Be Without You," BOOTSY COLLINS
"Solitary Man," NEIL DIAMOND
"Deep Cover," DR. DRE & SNOOP DOGGY DOGG
"Simply Beautiful," AL GREEN
"Delilah," TOM JONES
"Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp," LED ZEPPELIN
"Jealous Guy," JOHN LENNON
"Right On for the Darkness," CURTIS MAYFIELD
"Band On the Run," PAUL McCARTNEY
"Welcome to the Machine," PINK FLOYD
"The Bed's Too Big Without You," THE POLICE
"Bohemian Rhapsody," QUEEN
"Street Spirit (Fade Out)," RADIOHEAD
"I've Been Loving You For Too Long," OTIS REDDING
"Ceclia," SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
"Brilliant Disguise," BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"Drowning Man," U2
"As," STEVIE WONDER
"Southern Man," NEIL YOUNG


Alberto Zambenedetti
(added: 4/08/06)

1. "Senza Parole," VASCO ROSSI
2. "Starless," KING CRIMSON
3. "Black Water," RAIN TREE CROW
4. "Hyper-Ballad," BJORK
5. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," BILLY JOEL
6. "Mon Manège à moi c’est toi," EDITH PIAF
7. "Jungleland," BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
8. "Homesick," THE CURE
9. "Us and Them," PINK FLOYD
10. "Io dal Mare," CLAUDIO BAGLIONI
11. "Flowers in the Window," TRAVIS
12. "Why Should I Cry for You?," STING
13. "The Sound of Goodbye," TONY LEVIN
14. "Maschere," ODT
15. "The Bitter End," PLACEBO
16. "Stories," THERAPY?
17. "Sunday Morning," THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
18. "You Can’t Get What you Want (Till you know what you want)," JOE JACKSON
19. "Secret World," PETER GABRIEL
20. "Strangers When we Meet," DAVID BOWIE
21. "Last Goodbye," JEFF BUCKLEY
22. "One Step Closer," SIMPLE MINDS & PLANET FUNK
23. "No Surprises," RADIOHEAD
24. "Piano Trio in E flat D.929, Allegro Moderato," SCHUBERT
25. "Mellow My Mind," NEIL YOUNG

1930-2008

1930
1. Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
2. Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Soviet Union)
3. The Dawn Patrol (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. L'Âge d'or (Luis Buñuel, France)
5. The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, France)
6. Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair, France)
7. The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany)
8. City Girl (F. W. Murnau, United States)
9. Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
10. Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

1931
1. M (Fritz Lang, Germany)
2. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, United States)
3. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, United States)
4. À nous la liberté (René Clair, France)
5. Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth, United States)
6. Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
7. La Chienne (Jean Renoir, France)
8. Le Million (René Clair, France)
9. Marius (Alexander Korda, France)
10. Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, United States)

1932
1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. Scarface (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, France)
4. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. La Nuit du carrefour (Jean Renoir, France)
6. Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, United States)
7. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, United States)
8. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, France)
9. The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Back Street (John M. Stahl, United States)

1933
1. Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Liebelei (Max Ophüls, Germany/Austria)
3. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, United States)
4. Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, France)
5. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, Germany)
6. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, United States)
7. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (Lewis Milestone, United States)
8. The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone, United States)
9. Bombshell (Victor Fleming, United States)
10. Topaze (Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, United States)

1934
1. La Signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, Italy)
2. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France)
3. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
4. Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
6. Judge Priest (John Ford, United States)
7. Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, United Kingdom)
8. The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, China)
9. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Yasujiro Shimazu, Japan)

1935
1. Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
2. Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, United States)
3. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
4. The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
5. Steamboat 'Round the Bend (John Ford, United States)
6. An Inn at Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
7. Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)
8. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, United States)
9. A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, United States)
10. Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen, United States)

1936
1. By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
2. Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
3. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, France)
4. A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, France)
5. Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, France)
6. Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, United States)
7. Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, United States)
8. Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
9. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
10. Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, United States)

1937
1. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, United States)
2. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, United States)
3. Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
4. You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, United States)
5. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka Sadao, Japan)
6. Stella Dallas (King Vidor, United States)
7. Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
8. Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
9. Children in the Wind (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
10. History is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, United States)

1938
1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, United States)
2. Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, Germany)
3. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
4. You and Me (Fritz Lang, United States)
5. La Bête humaine (Jean Renoir, France)
6. Holiday (George Cukor, United States)
7. Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, United States)
8. The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, France)
9. The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (Mark Donskoi, Soviet Union)
10. Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, United States)

1939
1. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France)
3. Stagecoach (John Ford, United States)
4. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Love Affair (Leo McCarey, United States)
6. Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
7. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
8. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, United States)
9. The Whole Family Works (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
10. The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, United States)

The Ten Best Films of the 1930s (in alphabetical order)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France)
By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, United States)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France)
Scarface (Howard Hawks, United States)
The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
La Signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, Italy)
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

1940
1. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
2. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, United States)
4. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
5. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, United States)
7. Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, United States)
8. The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
10. London Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings, United Kingdom)

1941
1. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, United States)
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, United States)
4. Hellzapoppin' (H. C. Potter, United States)
5. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, United States)
6. The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, United States)
7. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
8. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan)
9. Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, United States)
10. Words for Battle (Humphrey Jennings, United Kingdom)

1942
1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, United States)
2. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, United Kingdom)
3. Aniki Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
4. There Was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
5. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, United Kingdom)
8. To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
9. Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, United States)
10. The Loyal 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

1943
1. Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, United States)
5. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. Les Anges du péché (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Air Force (Howard Hawks, United States)
8. Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
9. Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
10. Wild Flower (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)

1944
1. Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
4. Laura (Otto Preminger, United States)
5. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
6. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, United States)
7. María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)
8. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, United States)
9. At Land (Maya Deren, United States)
10. The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, United States)

1945
1. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, France)
2. They Were Expendible (John Ford, United States)
3. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, United States)
5. The Southerner (Jean Renoir, United States)
6. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, France)
7. I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
8. The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
9. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, United States)
10. The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, United States)

1946
1. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, United States)
2. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
3. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
5. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France)
6. Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. The Diary of a Chambermaid (Jean Renoir, United States)
8. Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
9. Enamorada (Emilio Fernández, Mexico)
10. The Killers (Robert Siodmak, United States)

1947
1. Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, United States)
2. Antoine and Antoinette (Jacques Becker, France)
3. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
4. The Love of Sumako the Actress (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
5. Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
6. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
7. The Exile (Max Ophüls, United States)
8. They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti, United Kingdom)
9. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, United States)
10. The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz, United States)

1948
1. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, United States)
2. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, China)
3. La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, Italy)
4. Red River (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
6. Fort Apache (John Ford, United States)
7. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
8. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, United States)
9. They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. The Silence of the Sea (Jean-Pierre Melville, France)

1949
1. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, United Kingdom)
3. Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, China)
4. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. White Heat (Raoul Walsh, United States)
6. Rendezvous in July (Jacques Becker, France)
7. The Third Man (Carol Reed, United Kingdom)
8. The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, United States)
9. Mahal (Kamal Amrohi, India)
10. Andaz (Mehboob Khan, India)

The Ten Best Films of the 1940s (in alphabetical order)
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, France)
Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, United States)
Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, United States)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, United States)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, United States)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, China)

1950
1. The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
2. Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, France)
3. Wagonmaster (John Ford, United States)
4. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, United States)
5. Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, United States)
6. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, United States)
7. La Ronde (Max Ophüls, France)
8. Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
9. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, United States)
10. Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)

1951
1. Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
2. The River (Jean Renoir, France/India/United States)
3. Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France)
4. Awaara (Raj Kapoor, India)
5. The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, United Kingdom)
6. Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, United States)
7. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
8. Repast (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. The Kaiser's Lackey (Wolfgang Staudte, East Germany)
10. The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, United States)

1952
1. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Limelight (Charles Chaplin, United States)
3. Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, France)
5. Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, United States)
6. Él (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
7. Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, United States)
8. Mother (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
10. The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, United States/Italy/France/Morocco)

1953
1. Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
3. The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, France/Italy)
4. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, France)
5. The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, United States)
6. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, United States)
7. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
8. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, United States)
9. The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
10. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, United States)

1954
1. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
2. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France)
4. A Star is Born (George Cukor, United States)
5. Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
6. Chikamatsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
7. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, United States)
8. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
9. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
10. Track of the Cat (William A. Wellman, United States)

1955
1. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
3. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, India)
4. Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, France/West Germany)
5. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, United States)
6. Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, France/Spain/Switzerland)
7. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
8. French Cancan (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
9. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, United States)
10. Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, United States)

1956
1. The Searchers (John Ford, United States)
2. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, France)
3. Streets of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
4. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, United States)
5. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, United States)
6. Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, United States)
7. The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank Tashlin, United States)
8. There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, United States)
9. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
10. Crazed Fruit (Kô Nakahira, Japan)

1957
1. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, India)
2. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
3. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
4. Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, United States)
5. A King in New York (Charles Chaplin, United States)
6. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, Italy/France)
7. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, United States)
8. Le Notti bianche (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
9. An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, United States)
10. The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, United States)

1958
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
2. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, United States)
3. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrezj Wajda, Poland)
4. Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, United States)
5. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, France/Italy)
6. Madhumati (Bimal Roy, India)
7. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, United States)
8. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, India)
9. Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, United States)
10. Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (Leo McCarey, United States)

1959
1. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France)
2. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, United States)
3. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
4. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, France/Japan)
5. Kaagaz Ke Phool (Guru Dutt, India)
6. The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, India)
7. Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, United States)
8. The Sign of Leo (Eric Rohmer, France)
9. Nazarin (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
10. Picnic on the Grass (Jean Renoir, France)

The Ten Best Films of the 1950s (in alphabetical order)
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, France/Italy)
Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, United States)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
The Searchers (John Ford, United States)

1960
1. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
3. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
5. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, Italy/France)
6. The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, India)
7. Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
8. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, United States)
9. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, France/Italy/United Kingdom)
10. The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, South Korea)

1961
1. Lola (Jacques Demy, France/Italy)
2. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, Spain/Mexico)
3. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
4. Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy)
5. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
6. Alyonka (Boris Barnet, Soviet Union)
7. Two Daughters (Satyajit Ray, India)
8. The Aimless Bullet (Yoo Hyeon-Mok, South Korea)
9. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
10. The Girl with a Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, Italy/France)

1962
1. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
2. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
3. Hatari! (Howard Hawks, United States)
4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, United States)
5. The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, France)
6. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
7. My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
8. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, France/Italy)
9. Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, United States)
10. La Jetée (Chris Marker, France)

1963
1. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
2. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
3. Muriel (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
4. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
5. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran)
6. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
7. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
8. The Big City (Satyajit Ray, India)
9. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, United States)
10. Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)

1964
1. Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
2. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
3. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France/West Germany)
4. Man's Favorite Sport? (Howard Hawks, United States)
5. Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, Brazil)
6. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
7. Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, France/Italy)
8. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, United States)
9. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France)
10. A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

1965
1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
2. Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, France)
3. Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, United Kingdom)
4. Outer and Inner Space (Andy Warhol, United States)
5. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, Spain/Switzerland)
6. Paris vou par... Gare de Nord (Jean Rouch, France)
7. Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, India)
8. Sandra (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France)
9. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy)
10. The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary)

1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France/Sweden)
2. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
3. 7 Women (John Ford, United States)
4. The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, France)
5. Unsere Afrikareise/Our African Journey (Peter Kubelka, Austria)
6. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, United Kingdom/Italy)
7. The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura, Japan)
8. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, France/Senegal)
9. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, Italy/Spain)
10. Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, Japan)

1967
1. Playtime (Jacques Tati, France)
2. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, France)
3. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
4. The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary/Soviet Union)
5. Wavelength (Michael Snow, Canada)
6. Mouchette (Robert Bresson, France)
7. Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
8. Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, France/Italy)
9. La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, France)
10. Jewel Thief (Vijay Anand, India)

1968
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
2. Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov, Soviet Union)
4. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, Italy/United States)
5. Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba)
6. The Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, West Germany/Italy)
7. Faces (John Cassavetes, United States)
8. Shame (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
9. Carry On... Up the Khyber (Gerald Thomas, United Kingdom)
10. Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, United Kingdom)

1969
1. My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Boy (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. Antonio das Mortes (Glauber Rocha, Brazil/France/West Germany)
4. The Unfaithful Wife (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy)
5. L'Amour fou (Jacques Rivette, France)
6. Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
7. Kes (Ken Loach, United Kingdom)
8. The Structure of Crystal (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland)
9. A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson, France)
10. Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri, Italy)

The Ten Best Films of the 1960s (in alphabetical order)
Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France/Sweden)
An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, France)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, France)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, France)

1970
1. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, France)
2. Tristana (Luis Buñuel, Spain/France/Italy)
3. The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, France/Italy)
4. Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy)
5. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/West Germany)
6. There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, Soviet Union)
7. Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, United States)
8. Le Cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, France/Italy)
9. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, United Kingdom)
10. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, United States)

1971
1. La Région centrale (Michael Snow, Canada)
2. The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
3. Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, France)
4. The House in the Woods (Maurice Pialat, France)
5. Love (Károly Makk, Hungary)
6. Get Carter (Mike Hodges, United Kingdom)
7. Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, United States)
8. A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Taiwan)
9. Trafic (Jacques Tati, France/Italy)
10. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, United States)

1972
1. Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, India)
2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, France/
Italy/Spain)
3. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
4. Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, United Kingdom)
5. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
6. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, West Germany/Peru/
Mexico)
7. Ulzana's Raid (Robert Aldrich, United States)
8. The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
9. Avanti! (Billy Wilder, United States/Italy)
10. Love in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer, France)

1973
1. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain)
2. Badlands (Terrence Malick, United States)
3. The Age of Cosimo de Medici (Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
4. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, France)
5. Reed: Insurgent Mexico (Paul Leduc, Mexico)
6. A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak, India/Bangladesh)
7. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal)
8. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, United States)
9. Breezy (Clint Eastwood, United States)
10. The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, United States)

1974
1. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France)
2. Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson, France)
3. Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France)
4. F for Fake (Orson Welles, France/Iran/West Germany)
5. Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, West Germany)
6. Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
7. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, United States)
8. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, West Germany)
9. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
10. Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, France)

1975
1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France)
2. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, United States)
3. The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
4. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union)
5. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, France/Italy/United States/Spain)
6. India Song (Marguerite Duras, France)
7. Xala (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal)
8. Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Austria/
France/West Germany/Italy)
9. Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, India)
10. Two Solutions for One Problem (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)

1976
1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, United States)
2. The Messiah (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/