• Here is the
supposed cream of the crop. Based on our calculations, these are the 300
most critically acclaimed films of all-time. If you've only seen a
handful of these, then you better get cracking! Or then again, please
yourself.
• Alongside each director's name is the
position each film held prior to our December 2008 update. For each film, we've also
included a list of 5 well-known critics and/or filmmakers that have
included it in their best-film-of-all-time lists.
"Far and
away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture
to have been seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes
close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood." -
Bosley
Crowther
1958
| 128m | Col | USA | Romantic Mystery, Psychological Thriller
"Of all
Hitchcock's films the one nearest to perfection. Indeed, its profundity
is inseparable from the perfection of form: it is a perfect organism,
each character, each sequence, each image, illuminating each other."
- Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Film's Revisited, 1989
Selected by
Andrew Sarris, Robin Buss, Amy Taubin,
Roger Ebert,
Paul Verhoeven.
1939
| 113m | BW | France | Comedy
Drama, Comedy of Manners
"How
brilliantly Renoir focuses the confusion! The rather fusty luxury of the
chateau, the constant mindless slaughter of wild animals, the minuets of
adultery and seduction, the gavottes of mutual hatred or
mistrust..." - Basil Wright, 1972
• Two Thousand and One: A
Space Odyssey (alternative spelling)
1968
| 139m | Col | UK | Science Fiction, Psychological Sci-Fi
"The
genius is not in how much
Stanley Kubrick
does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the
work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a
single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its
essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it,
to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies,
2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our
awe." -Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1997
Selected by Rian Johnson, Bennett Miller,
Tony Scott,
Alexander Walker, Jonathan Glazer.
"If all you
know about this exuberant, self-regarding 1963 film is based on
its countless inferior imitations (from
Paul Mazursky's
Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to
Woody Allen'sStardust Memories to
Bob Fosse'sAll That Jazz),
you owe it to yourself to see
Federico Fellini's
exhilarating, stocktaking original... It's
Fellini's
last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous
and inventive thing he ever did--certainly more fun than
anything he made after it."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
1972
| 175m | Col | USA | Gangster
Film, Crime Drama
"Taking a
best-selling novel of more drive than genius, about a subject of
something less than common experience (the Mafia), involving an isolated
portion of one very particular ethnic group (first-generation and
second-generation Italian-Americans),
Francis Ford Coppola has made one of
the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed
within the limits of popular entertainment." - Vincent Canby, New York
Times, 1972
1956
| 119m | Col | USA | Western, Revisionist Western
"We may still be
waiting for the Great American Novel, but
John Ford gave us the Great American
Film in 1956. The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of
American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way
available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a
supreme visual poet like Ford."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Selected by
Christopher Frayling, Andrew Sarris,
Martin Scorsese,
Tom Gunning, Bill Rothman.
1925
| 65m | BW | Russia | Historical Film, Political Drama
"Upon its release in
1925, Potemkin was hailed as a masterpiece, as much for the way
it dramatized the emotions behind the communist revolution as for its
innovative use of montage... Battleship Potemkin remains
remarkable for the way it builds over a brisk 69 minutes, setting the
pace for nearly every action movie made since."
- Noel
Murray, The A.V. Club, 2007
"It is as sheer
narrative, rich in incisiveness and sharp observation, that it makes its
strongest impact... It provides a fascinating display of talent, and
places its director in the forefront of creative film-makers of his
generation."
- Gavin Lambert, Sight & Sound
"Tokyo Story lacks
sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a
lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn't want to force our
emotions, but to share its understanding. It does this so well that I am
near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes,
a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2003
"One of the shining
glories of the American musical... The setting is Hollywood's troubled
transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on
the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to
structure the film's superb selection of numbers."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
1927
| 110m | BW | USA | Melodrama,
Romantic Drama
"Like Citizen Kane,
Sunrise is one of those movies that introduce viewers to the
notion of film as art... Part of what continues to make it great is its
creation in a particular utopian moment in film history: the end of the
silent era, when movies reached a certain pinnacle of visual
expressiveness that was tied to a dream of universality, a belief that
cinema could speak an international tongue."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Guardian, 2004
1962
| 216m | Col | UK | Epic, British Empire Film
"Here is an
epic with intellect behind it, an unforgettable display of action staged
with artistry. A momentous story told with moral force... A revolutionary
film in possessing an epic hero whom it doesn't hero-worship."
- Alexander Walker, Evening Standard
• Ladri di
biciclette (original title); The Bicycle Thief (alternative
title)
1948
| 90m | BW | Italy | Family Drama, Urban Drama
" Hailed around the
world as one of the greatest movies ever made,
Vittorio De Sica’s
Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves defined an era in
cinema... Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight,
Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the
neorealist film movement in Italy: emotional clarity, social
righteousness, and brutal honesty."
- The Criterion Collection
"Michael
Curtiz's 1942 classic is irresistible, big-hearted
film-making - a unique kind of romantic noir - with cracking dialogue
and a thrilling leading man in Humphrey Bogart as bar owner Rick: a
stateless, cynical American in second world war Casablanca, where
desperate refugees plead for transit papers and which has become a
sordid marketplace in cash and sexual favours."
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2007
"The film is a
masterpiece not because of the tragic story of its maker nor because of
its awkward genesis, but because, as
Truffaut has said, in filming prosaic
words and acts, Vigo
effortlessly achieved poetry... The poetic power of the film, however,
had a lot to do with the cinematography of the Russian-born Boris
Kaufman, who worked on each of
Vigo's films."
- Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 1999
"Dreyer's
most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most
staggeringly intense films ever made. It deals only with the final
stages of Joan's trial and her execution, and is composed almost
exclusively of close-ups... The entire film is less moulded in light
than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably
moving."
- Tony Rayns, Time Out
"Despite an initial
flurry of rabbit punches (most of them from the Kael wing of the
critical establishment), Raging Bull is now treasured as an
American masterwork, a fusion of Hollywood genre with personal vision
couched in images and sounds that are kinetic and visceral, and closer
to poetry than pulp."
- Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
"The film is
much less formally daring than its literary source, but its virtues are
still plentiful:
Kurosawa's visual style at its most muscular,
rhythmically nuanced editing, and excellent performances."
- Tony Rayns, Time Out
1974
| 200m | Col | USA | Gangster Film, Crime Drama
"Combined, The
Godfather and The Godfather Part II represent the apex of
American movie-making and the ultimate gangster story. Few sequels have
expanded upon the original with the faithfulness and detail of this
one... The Godfather is not so much about crime lords as it is
about prices paid in the currency of the soul for decisions made and
avoided. It is that quality which establishes this saga as timeless. "
- James
Berardinelli, Reel Views, 1994
1958
| 108m | BW | USA | Film Noir, Psychological Thriller
"Touch of Evil is a
flat-out all-cylinders-running, eye-popping masterpiece, one of a few
monumental 1950s swan songs marking the end of the great epoch of
traditional studio filmmaking. It belongs alongside Vertigo and
The Searchers and Kiss Me Deadly and Some Came Running
as a tribute to the kind of directorial vision that used the
machinery of the studio to create a work of pure visual poetry."
-
Fred Camper, Chicago
Reader, 1998
"A large part of what
makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the
go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's
harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself.
It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie
history." -
Scott Tobias, The A.V.
Club
"Chaplin's
sentimental side was never more delicately stated. But his funny side,
as he desperately tries to earn money for the operation that will
restore the girl's sight, was never more hilariously deployed than it
was in this spare, curiously haunting film."
- Richard Schickel, Time, 2005
"The Third Man
is one of those rare films that captured its audience immediately and
was regarded as a classic almost from its first release. It marks one of
those unusual conjunctions of script, director, subject, cast and
setting—and, of course, music—in which everything works... This was the
one time Reed,
as a director, reached perfection; and he did it as much by assembling
and marshalling a brilliantly talented company as by the power of his
own vision."
- Michael Wilmington, The Criterion Collection, 1999
1939
| 113m | BW | France | War Drama, Anti-War Film
"Grand Illusion
escapes the confines of the war movie genre. Scarcely a gun is fired in
anger. The trenches are nowhere in sight. Yet through some alchemy,
Renoir imbues
the film with his passionate belief in man’s humanity to man... French
critic André Bazin wrote of
Renoir that “he has inherited from the
literary and pictorial sensibility of his father’s era a profound,
sensual and moving sense of reality." A film like Grand Illusion
illustrates this to perfection." -
Peter Cowie, The Criterion
Collection, 1999
