2.9
August 8, 2009

The Mindful Critic’s 50 Greatest Films

     

Over at his blog for the Chicago Sun-Times, the marvelous film critic Roger Ebert writes about “greatest movies ever” lists just as another one debuts.  He writes correctly, I think:

All lists of the “greatest” movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them.

That in mind, I present to you my own propaganda: a list of the 50 greatest movies I’ve ever seen.  My hope in presenting this is that you find a title or two that moves you as much as they all have moved me…

(And please share some of your favorites with us–we’re always on the look-out for good flicks!)

1. La Grande Illusion (1937), dir. Jean Renoir
2. Citizen Kane (1941), dir. Orson Welles
3. City Lights (1931), dir. Charlie Chaplin
4. Ikiru (1952), dir. Akira Kurosawa
5. The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), dir. Francis Ford Coppola
6. The Searchers (1956), dir. John Ford
7. Vertigo (1958), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
8. The Thin Blue Line (1988), dir. Errol Morris
9. Persona (1966), dir. Ingmar Bergman
10. Raging Bull (1980), dir. Martin Scorsese
11. La Règle du Jeu (1939), dir. Jean Renoir
12. Shichinin No Samurai (1954), dir. Akira Kurosawa
13. Lawrence of Arabia (1962), dir. David Lean
14. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), dir. Stanley Kubrick
15. Psycho (1960), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
16. Tôkyô Monogatari (1953), dir. Yasujiro Ozu
17. Smultronstället (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman
18. Casablanca (1942), dir. Michael Curtiz
19. Notorious (1946), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
20. Ran (1985), dir. Akira Kurosawa
21. The Quiet Man (1952), dir. John Ford
22. The Third Man (1949), dir. Carol Reed
23. Sunset Blvd. (1950), dir. Billy Wilder
24. 4 Little Girls (1997), dir. Spike Lee
25. Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola
26. Shadow of a Doubt (1943), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
27. Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), dir. Stanley Kubrick
28. Rear Window (1954), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
29. Pather Panchali (1955), dir. Satyajit Ray
30. Modern Times (1936), dir. Charlie Chaplin
31. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
32. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), dir. Steven Spielberg
33. 8 1/2 (1963), dir. Federico Fellini
34. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), dir. Orson Welles
35. Jules et Jim (1962), dir. Francois Truffaut
36. Andrey Rublyov (1966), dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
37. Det Sjunde Inseglet (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman
38. Les Quatres Cents Coups (1959), dir. Francois Truffaut
39. High Noon (1952), dir. Fred Zinnemann
40. North by Northwest (1959), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
41. Schindler’s List (1993), dir. Steven Spielberg
42. Vivre sa Vie (1962), dir. Jean-Luc Godard
43. M (1931), dir. Fritz Lang
44. Il Conformista (1970), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
45. Unforgiven (1992), dir. Clint Eastwood
46. Chinatown (1974), dir. Roman Polanski
47. Annie Hall (1977), dir. Woody Allen
48. Pulp Fiction (1994), dir. Quentin Tarantino
49. Habla Con Ella (2002), dir. Pedro Almodóvar
50. Nashville (1975), dir. Robert Altman

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