TIME S 100 Greatest Movies List

TIME's 100 Greatest Movies list
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TIME's 100 Greatest Movies

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1. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972 )
8.4
8.1
"The 70s established Herzog as the most defiantly visionary of directors. In Every Man for Himself (And God Against All), Heart of Glass, Nosferatu the Vampire and his amazing documentary about the Guadeloupean volcano La Soufriere, he created worlds beyond civilization, whose ravishing beauty could drive intruders mad. Who better to play the overweening man, intoxicated to the point of insanity, than Klaus Kinski, Herzog's house demon? (Herzog made a fascinating documentary, the 1998 My Best Fiend , about his hectic relationship with the actor.) Aguirre is the prototype HerzogKinski collaboration, about a Spanish explorer who loses his mission, men and mind on an Amazon adventure. Answering only to the logic of Peru's natural beauty, the film seems an examination of madness from the inside . Sumptuous, spellbinding and immediately , eternally scary. R .C." JxSxPx' s rating : TIME magazine's 100 Greatest All-Time Movies . The original list was presented in alphabetical order, and that is preserved here. This is NOT how they are ranked, merely how they are presented. I have also included the original abstracts for each movie as a note. TIME critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel compiled the list and wrote the abstracts. Two of the films, the first being "Berlin Alexanderplatz," was originally a 15 -hour 59 8.4 7.9 television mini-series before being shown in episodic installments in movie theaters. Because of this , it does not appear on this list. It is located in the TV section of Listal . The second, also not found in the movie section, was "The Singing Detective" (1980). It is also located in the TV section of Listal . The other 98 are all present and accounted for . Novels Albums Guilty Pleasures Performances Graphic Novels ENJOY!
2. Song of the Little Road (1955 )
"The story of a child growing to manhood in modern India. His triumphs are small, his tragedies large, but Ray 's filmmaking is direct in manner, simple in its means and profound in its impact. It is, as another great master, Akira Kurosawa , said, "the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river"the river of life as it is ordinarily lived.R.S ."
3. The Awful Truth (1937)
69
7.8
"A divorcing couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne ) squabble delightfully about custody of their dog, her lamebrained suitor (Ralph Bellamy), his waywardness and her career in what may be the most perfect romantic comedy ever made. TIME judged it "the gayest screen comedy the season has seen," but these sly and ironic people are men and women for all seasons.R.S."
4. Baby Face (1933)
21
7.5
"In four fabulous years before a strict Motion Picture Code put the cap on audacity, Warner Bros. produced a garish gallery of rude, saucy films. Tough guys used guns and grapefruit to commandeer the urban nightscape; dames like Dorothy Mackaill and the young Bette Davis lured men to a heavenly Hades. But no actor was as tough as Barbara Stanwyck, and no actress used womanly wiles with an intelligence so cool and cutting. In this invigorating affront of a movie , dreamed up by Warners' departing production chief Darryl Zanuck , Lily (Stanwyck) escapes to New York from an Erie, Pa., speakeasy where her father has rented her out to the customers. In a bigcity bank, she sleeps her way to the top, leaving a heap of discarded men (and one or two corpses). Even in a version pruned for the New York state
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censors, Baby Face was the definitive pre -Code statement of how the Depression created a new morality of no morality . Now the missing five minutes have been restored, and we see how the movie snarled every bit as brazenly as Stanwyck did. R.C ." TIME 's Great Performances 10 item list by JxSxPx 9 votes RSJ 100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time 199 8.1 8 100 item list by Fabricio Mendes DEBASED .COM's 100 Greatest Cult Movies Of All Time 100 item list by KingofPain 9 votes 6 comments
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5. Band of Outsiders (1964)
"Ennui, anarchy and jump cuts that was Godard at his influential best in the 60 s. And this film, about some slackers who drop out of a dubious language school and retreat to the suburbs for a lazy frolic that turns into absurdist murder, is among his most weirdly entertaining efforts to rewrite not just the grammar of cinema, but its ruling narrative conventions as well. R.S."
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6. Barry Lyndon (1975)
469
7.9
"The director dreamed of telling stories entirely through images, and in this extraordinarily beautiful existentialist anti-epic he came close to realizing that goal. In 18 th century England his eponymous protagonist peers into the candle-lit dimness of stately homes, seeking clues to correct behavior. He learns enough to rise in society , but not enough to prevent his fall. In its cover story , TIME, almost alone, predicted history would judge the film a masterpiece. Thirty years later , history is beginning to agree .R.S."
7. Blade Runner (1982)
1722
100 Greatest Films (Channel 4) 100 item list by tartan _skirt 3 votes 100 Greatest Actors and Where I've Seen Them 100 item list by NMartucci 2 comments View more top voted lists
"Coming off the success of his grunge-horror-screaming-in -space movie Alien, Scott was given $30 million to put the dystopic future on film. The result was a commercial flop, and one of the most influential, densely designed visions ever made. Based on Philip K . Dick's s-f novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner is set in the year 2019 , in a big city that suggests a Tokyo gone daft. Androids (like the ones played by Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and Darryl Hannah) are so evolved they think they're human. They need a 1940 s-style cop (Harrison Ford) to put a bullet through their delusion. Narrative drive and graphic ingenuity combine to create a compelling fantasy world, a disturbing future as near to us as our nightmares . R.C ." JxSxPx' s rating :
Join listal and create your own lists and much more 556 7.7 8.1
8. Bonnie and Clyde (1967 )
"Two beautiful idiots (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) find love, death and rollicking good humor as backroads bank robbers in 1930s America. And telling the story of their petty, bloody crime wave, director Arthur Penn creates a film that is both a signature work of its era (the troubled 60 s) and one that is as joyously entrancing now as it was the day it was released. TIME (Aug 25, 1967 ) originally dismissed the film' s "sheer, tasteless aimlessness" but in December of that year made it the centerpiece of its cover story on "The Shock of Freedom in Films" and praised it for "the irony that weds laughter and horror, belly laughs and bullets in the face of life and death ."R .S." JxSxPx' s rating :
9. Brazil (1985 )
877
7.8
"The machinery of repression never clattered with such goofy efficiency , never crushed a naive soul with such Rube Goldberg ruthlessness, as in Gilliam 's complex comic fantasia. A mild -minded bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) gets run through a police state's inner workings , like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, while being manipulated by an insurgent (Robert De Niro) who flies into his life like a deranged Douglas Fairbanks. Gilliam , the Monty Python animator whose script here had contributions from Tom Stoppard, makes unique films madly, cannily extravagant, with a tone as dark as
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Jonathan Swift's which may one reason he gets to make so few of them . This satire of totalitarianism came out the year after 1984 , and almost didn't surface at all, in anything like its maker's version. (A happy ending for a Terry Gilliam film? Now who's mad?) A public brawl with Universal Studios resulted in the film 's liberation. Thus DVD connoisseurs can savor the director' s capacious vision of post -industrial hell: part futurist, part retro and, for any office worker close to despair, very Right Now. R.C."
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10. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
225
7.8
"At first glance TIME called it "fully the equal of the original." It was wrong; this is one of those rare sequels that is infinitely superior to its source. Boris Karloff is a perfect klutz as the monstrously eager lover of Elsa Lanchester, whose creator, the divinely hysterical Colin Clive, endowed her with virginity and attitude. It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances .R .S" JxSxPx' s rating :
11. Camille (1936 )
57
7.4
7.5
"From the moment she went before the MGM cameras, at 19 , Greta Garbo was the "older woman." Her body spoke of a connoisseur's awareness of sexual experience; the weight of that knowledge made her gleaming shoulders slump. When she played Dumas fils ' "Lady of the Camellias ," the courtesan Marguerite Gautier , Garbo was 30 . She had weathered seismic changes in Hollywood: the coming of talkies, the new style of rapid realism, the anachronizing of the poetic cinema she had embodied with such delicacy and power . Now her glamour had turned severe, and the mouth that could laugh or grimace using the same muscles was emitting Marguerite's fatal cough. In this romance of selfless renunciation and the nobility of the call-girl class, Garbo's achievement may strike younger viewers as odd, silly, for she is performing in a gestural language utterly remote from today's. Yet it is an elegant, eloquent tongue, and no one "spoke" it as brilliantly as Garbo did in this great and grand soap opera . R .C."
12. Casablanca (1942 )
1260
8.2
8.8
"Everyone, by now, has come to Rick' sand come away continuing to admire the film 's doomy romance, political idealism, crackling dialogue and wonderful performances. It's a studio film that exemplifies (and even justifies) the studio system at its best : slick, efficient, and able to make some pretty stale clichs feel to us like high truth. This is populist moviemaking transformed into something like art. R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
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13. Charade (1963 )
217
7.6
"The great movie-star man, Cary Grant, meets the great movie-star lady, Audrey Hepburn, in a souffle-light thriller-romance-comedy whipped up by Donen, who did blithe American elegance as well as anyone , and writers Marc Behm and Peter Stone. Audrey is a Parisian thief's widow, now in ignorant possession of his loot, and Cary is a mystery man with a protective or pernicious interest in her . Walter Matthau plays an avuncular type over at the U.S . Treasury office, and James Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass are bad guys whose consecutive demises were considered quite violent for the time. If Charade doesn' t allow the divine Audrey to reveal the aristocratic ache on sublime display in Sabrina (and, frankly, that film is missing from this list only because it would have meant a third Billy Wilder film), it exhibits the seemingly effortless buoyancy that, by the 60 s, Hollywood had almost forgotten how to radiate. R .C." JxSxPx' s rating :
14. Children of Paradise (1945)
80
8.4
"Made in occupied France under the long noses of the Nazis in the last year of World War II, this story about the convergence of theater , crime and sex in 1830s Paris can be seen as an act of subversion, of artistic heroism. But it needs no making-of back story for inclusion here. At 3hr . 9min. the film is an epic romance viewed through an ironic prism. Baptiste the ethereal mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), Garance the worldly-wise courtesan (Arletty) and a dozen other scapegraces and victims are creatures with the fullness and ambiguity of a Balzac novel, thanks to Jacques Prvert , the poet and screenwriter who more than anyone shaped French cinema in one of its richest periods. A love story where soulmates are rarely matched, Les Enfants expresses the holy ache of poignance. Is marriage the repository of true love? "Oh," declares Baptiste , "if everyone who was married was in love, the earth would shine like the sun."R.C."
15. Chinatown (1974 )
774
8.2
8.5
"Set against the background of innocent, sun -splashed Los Angeles in the 1930 s, this may be the movies' most resonant study of personal and political corruption. Robert Towne's great script is a high romantic tragedy, impeccably directed by Polanski and heart-breakingly played by Jack Nicholson as the private eye who falls and Faye Dunaway as the rich, mysterious and doomed dark lady with whom he falls in love in this perfect summary of the film noir spirit .R .S." JxSxPx' s rating :
16. Chungking Express (1994)
306
"The epitome and apotheosis of art-house romance in the 90 s, Wong Kar-wai developed a style like no other director though, as his renown grew beyond China, dozens tried. It is atmosphere used to create the most fleeting or lasting emotion, a mix of longing gazes , swirling cigarette smoke , double -printed slo-mo images and the Colony 's most gorgeous actors. Wong might have gone higher with the Eastern Western Ashes of Time, and deeper with that aching epic 2046, but we'll choose the more lighthearted Chungking Express as an admirable starter set. It's a set because the film tells two stories: one of young Takeshi Kaneshiro falling for ageless Brigitte Lin, the other pairing Hong Kong cop Tony Leung Chiu-wai with the elfin beauty Faye Wong . With his two essential collaborators, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and designer William Chang, Wong weaves a tapestry of longing and seduction that puts both the characters and the audience in the mood for love. The love story is a genre inexplicably ignored by both art-
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house and commercial directors. Isn' t it lovely , then, that Wong Kar-wai is always in that mood? R.C."
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17. Citizen Kane (1941 )
983
8.2
8.6
"Named the greatest of all films in poll after critics' poll for the past halfcentury, Kane might by now seem suitable for viewing not through the glass of the movie projector but under glass, in the museum of outmoded innovations. So, cynics say, Welles had the camera lowered and photographed the ceilings over his actors' heads... so, the impresario of CBS' Mercury Theatre On the Air hijacked radio techniques and put them on film... so, he shot scenes nearly in the dark , to save the cost of dressing a set. So what? This crypto-biography of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst worked, fabulously , thanks to the insider's knowledge and narrative savvy of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, to cinematographer Gregg Toland's openness to experiment (he virtually created the film-noir style with this film) and, of course, to the boy-genius vigor the 25 -year-old Welles brought to his first Hollywood enterprise. The kid who had never made a movie ignored the rules, and remade movies. We don't need to replace Citizen Kane with another all-time great film its expansive, epic vitality remains fresh but we sure could use another Welles. R.C." JxSxPx' s rating :
18. City Lights (1931 )
374
8.6
8.6
"The immortal tramp falls in love with a blind flower seller, with results that are both poignant and deeply comic. 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.R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
19. City of God (2002)
1330
8.2
8.8
"The Rio de Janeiro slum known as Cidade de Deus might be a Martian landscape, so remote in spirit is it from the smooth beaches where the rich work on their tans and lines of seduction. In the inner city the activity is lifeand-death , mostly death, and the ruthless men who run the place are boys, some not yet adolescents . Boys their age elsewhere play with plastic guns; these kids shoot real bullets , kill people, for the love or the hell of it. Bang , you're dead . Ha ha. Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados portrayed similar young toughs in Mexico City a half-century earlier, using a mixture of realism and surrealism. Meirelles and Lund used a pinwheeling, hypertrophic style; no static camera could keep up with the hurtling pace at which these kids rushed to their doom. As sociology, it's tragic; as cinema, a stupendous, joyous jolt. R.C ."
20. Closely Watched Trains (1966)
71
7.7
7.9
"In the brief cold war moment before the Soviet Union brutally crushed its vitality in the crackdown after the "Prague Spring ," the Czech cinema exemplified the country's sly, humane rebelliousness to the world. And Menzel's film , about a feckless young crossing guard at a sleepy railroad station who becomes an unlikely (and tragic) hero of the resistance to German occupation was its sweetly funny , curiously moving masterpiece. TIME thought Menzel kept his mood-shifting movie "on the track all the way." Indeed, he did.R.S."
21. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936)
14
7.2
7.6
"The movies' great humanist made more famous and warmly received films than this one, but none that was more intricate or insinuating. A product of
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Renoir's early 1930s commitment to Popular Front leftism, it tells the story of a hack writer of pulp westerns, cruelly exploited by his crooked publisher , who finally, justifiably, murders the man. It is not, however, a mystery story. It is, among other things, an idealistic parable (the publishing house employees turn the company into a cooperative) and an affecting romance (it ends with Lange and his lover on the run, hoping for a better life, and the audience thinking perhaps they will attain the happiness they deserve). It is a film that smoothly transcends its occasional improbabilities to offer a lovely, totally engaging portrait of ordinary people pressed down by the Depression but lifted up by their passionate decency.R.S."
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22. The Crowd (1928 )
43
8.2
7.9
"An American rarity, a big studio art film. In this silent film Vidor traces the sad life of a totally ordinary citizen, dreaming big, living small, in a brilliant expressionistic style. But his manner, which might have had a distancing effect, never interferes with the heartbreaking emotions this powerful film stirs.R.S ."
23. Day for Night (1973)
110
7.9
'"One of the fondest compliments the movies have ever been paid," TIME said, utterly correctly, about what remains perhaps the best movie about moviemaking ever made. Truffaut perfectly captures the romance and hysteria, the guiding obsessions, the lunatic distractions and the desperate improvisations of a company shooting a film, which may not be as great as they delude themselves into thinking it is.R.S."
24. Dekalog Dekalog, jeden (1989 )
58
8.8
8.3
"Here's my argument, and Schickel backs me up : In the last really rich decade for movies (sorry, 90 s), the three great cinematic monuments Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Singing Detective and this one were all made for television. Kieslowski's series, which he wrote with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, is the TV -iest of the trio: ten little dramas, each about 55 mins. long, each finding a contemporary metaphor for one of the Commandments. Its characters , all of whom live in a drab Warsaw apartment block, must cope with infidelity, cupidity, murder, abortion, the loss of a child . You needn't adhere to any religious creed (I don't know that the filmmakers had one) to be moved and exalted by these stories, to have your faith in the power of movies reaffirmed or restored. Viewers who haven 't 10 hours to devote to Decalogue may get the most pleasure from episodes 1, 5, 6 and 7. But that's like going to Mass just for Communion. R.C."
25. Detour (1945 )
59
7.4
"Two people trapped in a room spit out their hatred for each other. Before Sartre's No Exit , before Pinter, Detour proved that Hell is these two people: Al (Tom Neal), a piano-playing loser hitching west to meet his girlfriend, and Vera (Ann Savage), the schemer who embodies all the bad luck a man could ever have. Ulmer, a classics -loving sophisticate trained at Germany' s Ufa studios, worked almost exclusively on Poverty Row , lending his craftsman's luster and energy to shooting Yiddish- and Ukrainian-language musicals in New Jersey, Negro melodramas in Harlem, cheapo costume pictures in Italy and Spain. His most sustained stint was in the 40 s at the off-Hollywood PRC, where, in six days on a few drab sets for $5,000, he made this uncompromisingly bleak tale of a sadist and a schlemiel. They can communicate only their mutual loathing in a realm where words can wound and a telephone cord is an inadvertently lethal weapon. Film noir? Yeah, baby . No film is noirer.R .C."
26. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
216
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(1972 ) "Minor social embarrassmentpeople start showing up for a dinner party its hosts are unaware they are throwingturns into a genial exercise in surrealism. Buuel, who had previously explored similar situations more dramatically , is in a good-natured, autumnal mood here (he was 72 when he made this movie). His six middle-class friends keep trying to have a nice meal together, but somethinglove-making , military exercises, criminal activities, even a sequence where they find themselves on stage in a play , playing themselves keeps preventing them from breaking bread. Buuel, abetted by his long time screenwriting partner, Jean -Claude Carrire, is a deft and casual movie magician, here grown rather fond of a class he has previously savaged on a regular basis, so he never strains for effect or bigtime meaning. He just lets the fun (and the surprises) roll on. The result is sheer delight.R.S."
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27. Dodsworth (1936)
31
8.3
"Many of the "U.S." films on this listat least those made up to 1960 were directed by foreigners. The Germans, French and English came to Hollywood because that's where the action was, the reach and the money and quite often brought an outsider's vision, as fascinated as it was skeptical, to American social issues. That surely was the case with the German-born Wyler and his film of the Sinclair Lewis novel about the fraying ties of a plutocrat (Walter Huston), comfortable in his life of prosperity and propriety, and his restless wife (Ruth Chatterton), who needs a sexual fling to prove she is not ready to trudge placidly into old age. Here is a fearlessly mature drama, wise about affairs of the heart and the ego, with acute performances by the stars , including Mary Astor as a dream woman worth traveling the world for. R.C."
28. Double Indemnity (1944)
347
8.4
8.6
"Fred MacMurray's weak-willed insurance agent falls under the spell of a client's scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck). They murder her husband, but, of course, bloodily fall out themselves . However dark the plotting, the dialogue (by Wilder and Raymond Chandler ) remains bright as a penny and hard as nails. One of the few screen adaptations that actually improves on its source (a James M. Cain novel), this is the Ur-film noirbroody, nasty, funny and utterly compelling.R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
29. Dr. Strangelove or :

Stop Wo ...
How
Learned
to
1197
8.4
8.6
(1964)
"Red Alert, the novel on which this movie was based, is a standard technothriller of its time: Cracked soldier launches H-bomb attack on Russia, with everyone pulling back from the brink in the nick of time. In Kubricks version, one last bomber plows through to Armageddon, a food fight takes place in the U.S . War Room and crippled scientist is moved by the thrill of it all to lurch to his feet, raise his arm in the Nazi salute and cry out, Mein Fuhrer, I can walk. Kubricks remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era. R.S."
30. The Legend of Drunken Master (1994 )
214
7.1
7.6
"The most important and entertaining star of east Asian cinema, Jackie Chan survived a boyhood in a punishing Peking Opera school, and his early screen days as "the next Bruce Lee " to create his own genre of martial-arts comedies. In each, he blended his engaging personality with beautifully choreographed, literally death -defying stunts which, famously, Jackie performed himself. In his 1978 breakthrough , Yuen Wo-ping 's Drunken
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Master, Chan played the real-life kung-fu hero Wong Fei-hung as an impish young man in need of a sifu (teacher) who could purify his technique and his spirit . In the sequel, 16 years later, Jackie is still a young Fei-hung (Anita Mui, eight years his junior, played his mother!), now up against malicious generals, spies and a hundred bad guys with superhuman fighting skills. The greatest of these is Ken Lo (Chan 's offscreen bodyguard), whose battle over hot coals is an exhibition of flying arms and feet that leaves the two actors exhausted and the viewer 's jaw on the floor. Jackie starred in , and directed, many wonderful action films in his pre -Hollywood days. This one can stand at the peak. R.C."
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31. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
2936
7.1
7.9
"This was the closing -night attraction at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, a venue not known for blubbering sentiment. At the end , as the little critter bade his farewells and the Jules Verne -like space ship left the ground, the audience similarly levitated. One heard the audience 's childlike applause; one felt their spirits lift. This was rapture made audible, palpable . And when E.T . played in commercial theaters, the effect was repeated around the world. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison lent a fairy-tale clarity to the director's standard plot of a lost boy seeking his way back home. And Spielberg orchestrated the movements of the camera and the puppet spaceman with the feelings ofit has to be called loveexpressed in young Henry Thomas' yearning face . E.T. was the first film character to be a finalist in TIME's Man of the Year sweepstakes. It would have been fine with me if the little creature, this lovely film, had won. R.C."
32. 8 1/2 (1963 )
494
8.3
8.2
"Marcello Mastroianni's blocked movie director consults his dreams, his memories, his fantasies as he attempts to imagine the movie his producers are demanding of him. A suspicion of autobiography hovers over the film , but the comic frenzy of his imaginings redeems the movie from solipsism and its endingfigures from his past triumphs emerge on his set to rescue the moviemaker from his desperationis both calmative and lovely .R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
33. The 400 Blows (1959)
382
8.4
8.1
"The movie that defined the French New Wave for the world. Partly autobiographical, both realistic and gently experimental in manner , it tells the story of a mischievous boy flirting with full-scale delinquency. TIME thought the director impressively objective and mature. It did not mention his uncanny ability to achieve cinematic elegance on a shoestring. Or, more important, his ability to enlist sympathy for his protagonist without unduly sentimentalizing him.R.S."
34. Farewell My Concubine (1993 )
115
7.7
7.9
"Two boys meet as students in a punishing Peking Opera school in the 1920 s and remain partners, friends and enemies for 50 years. Its The Sunshine Boys with screechy singing, and one of the boldest, most beautiful Chinese films in a decade dominated by them. In the Concubine opera that becomes their trademark , stolid Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) plays the emperor, luscious Cheng Dieyi (the late, great Leslie Cheung) the concubine. Yin and yang are the roles they assume offstage as well, as Xiaolou has an affair with a courtesan (Gong Li, the imperious queen of Chinese cinema) and Dieyi flirts with the satrap of the occupying Japanese government. Sexual politics gives way to political horror during the Cultural Revolution, when personal betrayal may be the one way to stay alive. Chen Kaiges stately , volcanic epic was one of the first Mainland films to acknowledge that damage wrought by
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Maoism . Beyond that, it is a rich dramatization of the venial and mortal betrayals that are the secret, somber melodies of our lives. R.C."
Page 9
35. Finding Nemo (2003)
3816
7.6
8.2
"What Sergei Eisenstein and other art-film pioneers said of the Walt Disney studio in the 1930 s that it was making the best movies on earth , by finding exciting new ways to perfect the art of visual story-telling directors and reviewers say today of Pixar . John Lasseter and his team are bringing the same care and genius to computer-generated animation that Walt did with handmade drawings. Finding Nemo is, so far, the apotheosis of the Pixar style: the ultimate fish -out-of-water story , with a fretful dad (voiced by Albert Brooks) enlisting a forgetful friend (Ellen DeGeneres) to find his lost son . But all the Pixar features (Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug' s Life , Monsters Inc., The Incredibles) have the means of enthrallment. Pixar doesn't make cute movies for kids. It tells universal stories through a graphic language so persuasive that children and adults respond with the same pleasure and awe. It's as if the Pixar people have the first clue to the next, higher form of popular movie art. R.C." JxSxPx' s rating :
36. The Fly (1986)
754
6.9
7.5
"'It' s despicable." My distinguished colleague practically spat on learning that I had deemed Cronenberg's remake of a mediocre s.f. movie as worthy of inclusion in a 100-best-of-anything list . Well, I love it. Yes, The Fly is about a scientist , Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who slowly and irrevocably morphs into a giant insect, much to his horror and that of his girlfriend (Geena Davis). But I see, and resee, the film as a profound parable on love and loss. Brundle might be the victim of any degenerative disease cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer' swho struggles to retain his humanity even as he decays into something ... monstrous. The scientist in him wants to study, understand and extend his metamorphosis into Brundlefly; the lover wants to protect his beloved from the danger he represents. Mixing self-aware wit with gross-out special effects , Cronenberg elicits a creepy unease, at least for those of us who think of middle age as the dress rehearsal for senility, or worse . R.C." JxSxPx' s rating :
37. The Godfather (1972 )
2354
8.6
9.2
"The gangster movie transformed into dark epic and, more important, into a metaphor for every family's dysfunction, and a lot of America's, too. The burnished darkness of Gordon Willis 's cinematography sets an unforgettable tone. The grandeur of the acting (Brando, Pacino, DeNiro among others) gives it a curious nobility and the multigenerational narrative has the power to move us to terror, pity and, occasionally, bitter laughter . Maybe it is, as some have said, only a pop masterpiece. But a masterpiece it surely is. R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
38. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
1039
8.4
"Leone's reinvention of the western reaches its epic apotheosis in a movie about the pursuit of gold lost by the Confederates during the Civil War in the Texas theater. Clint Eastwood is the "good" (slow to anger, but quick on the trigger), Lee Van Cleef is the bad (an elegant exemplar of absolute evil) and Eli Wallach is the "ugly" (a menacingly funny , totally amoral bandido whose relationship with the Eastwood character consists largely of betrayals). Leone's magnificent style is all contrasts (huge panoramic shots alternating with tight close -ups, very slow build-ups to lightning-fast action). This
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perfectly matches a narrative that encompasses sadistic brutality, wild humor and, yes, a tragic vision of war and its consequences.R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
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39. GoodFellas (1990)
1505
8.3
8.8
"The director wanted his bloody, dirty-talking study of small -time Mafiosos to have the spirit of "a rollicking road picture," and he achieved this paradoxical goal brilliantly. The picture only seems amoral. Behind its grinning mask it is an acute parody of "family values" and of moral incomprehension. And Joe Pesci is awesome as the most psychopathic of hoods.R .S." JxSxPx' s rating :
40. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
274
7.3
7.6
"They didn 't have enough time to make an ordinary pop musical. A month or two for Alun Owen to write situations and dialogue for a quartet of nonactors, and for Lester to prepare his on-the-fly shoot; then four months from first day of filming to premiere. It's a surprise the picture isn' t a mess, a miracle it's so funny, expert and joyous. A Hard Day's Night captures a moment , maybe the last, when rock stars didn't take themselves seriously and could unaffectedly enjoy the pleasure of being rich (yeah!), famous (yeah!), adored (yeah!). Pretty good songs, too. R .C." JxSxPx' s rating :
41. His Girl Friday (1940 )
197
8.1
"An adaptation of The Front Page, this may be the fastest- (and smartest-) talking romantic comedy ever made. With Cary Grant as a newspaper editor determined to win back his ex-wife (and best reporter), played by Rosalind Russell, who gives as good as she gets from her co-star. It is all heartless hilarity, directed in a mad but curiously logical rush by a great master of overlapping dialogue , vicious asides and over-the-shoulder put -downs.R.S ."
42. Ikiru (1952 )
215
8.5
8.2
"In any job, it' s so easy to say no. (Film reviewers know this as well as anyone .) This film is about the importance of saying yes: to life, to adventure, to human need. Ikiru, which means "to live," is about Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo office chief whose stamp of disapproval falls on almost any project, regardless of merit. Gray and unemotional, he's less a man than a stolid piece of furniture, a bureaucrat who might as well be a bureau. Then he learns he has stomach cancer, and takes stock of all he has left undone. Replaying It's a Wonderful Life, but in reverse gear, the movie sends him on a journey through Tokyo's nighttown to demonstrate that, no, his life as husband, father, worker didn 't make a difference. He might as well never have been born. Kurosawa makes Watanabe' s conversion, revival, resurrection as inspiring as it is pure. And Shimura, a superb actor , makes his character a plausible saint, who can find poetry in a simple song, or sitting on a playground swing. R.C."
43. In a Lonely Place (1950 )
98
"Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid screenwriter succumbing to a rage that may or may not be murderous. TIME thought it took forever to make its point. We love every minute of this sardonic portrayal of life on Hollywood s fringes (the characters surrounding Steele are etched in acid). And we see him as a modern archetypea talented, disappointed man surrendering to an anger he cannot govern, an existential blackness he cannot understand.R .S." 232 7.3 8
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44. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 )
"You never see the alien invaders in what may be the best of the science fiction breed. They just quietly replace them with pod. They look the same, but theyre turned into them into smiling, completely passive conformists. Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter do their best to resist (with mixed results) in this parable about McCarthyism, which remains a suspenseful (and still relevant) icon of its era.R.S."
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45. It's a Gift (1934)
31
7.7
"Forget that director s credit McLeod just placed the camera and had someone turn it on. Forget the cheesy filmmaking and the casually episodic narrative . Concentrate instead on W.C. Fields, stringing together a succession of his best gag sequences . He plays the proprietor of a moribund grocery store, tormented by his awful wife and children, driven half-mad by every passer-by, registering victimization and misanthropy in his best, curiously minimalist, comic manner.R.S ."
46. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
763
8.1
8.7
"Like a Christmas fruitcake that by New Year's has become a doorstop, or a paperweight in the trash bin, this fable risked being a major Yuletide ordeal, thanks to endless TV showings for a couple of decades when it was in the public domain. It' s hard to see the thing fresh, but try. Like a dozen or more films on this list, Capra's traces the decline of a man driven to the edge of madness . George Bailey's life is not, in worldly terms, wonderful; he is Bedford Falls ' designated saint, a suburban Job , for his fellow townsfolks' use as a friend or generous banker, through which they can exercise their weakness or meanness. It' s a noir portrait with holly stuck in the frame, a sanity hearing in the form of a greeting card. Capra briskly, artfully piles the misfortunes on James Stewart's slim frame; Stewart bears that load with spectacular range and grace. R.C."
47. Kandahar (2001)
32
6.1
6.7
"A conundrum: the Islamic Republic of Iran , no friend of Western-style liberty, somehow nurtured (well, permitted) the great humanist cinema of the 90 s. We' ll let the political scientists explain that one, and just note that men like Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami have directed on their own, and encouraged in others, films whose stripped-down, but never simple, artistry touches souls around the world. The stories are often about children poor ones, blind or lame ones who fight long odds not to triumph but simply to survive. In the past few years, the focus of Iranian films has shifted from within the country to its even more besieged neighbors in Kurdistan, Iraq and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. That is the setting for Makhmalbaf 's masterpiece, with scenes of horrific beauty . At a Red Cross outpost , artificial legs rain from the sky in parachutes dropped from a plane, and the legless Afghani men race out of the tents to scavenge for them. Because he is also the great colorist of Iranian film, Makhmalbaf makes Kandahar an experience as visually elevating as it is emotionally devastating. R.C ."
48. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949 )
112
8.1
8.3
"I saw this at an impressionable age (seven?). That first viewing addicted me to the English comedy of manners, and in many revisitings over the years Kind Hearts has lost none of its luster. Narrated by the fastidious Louis Mazzini (Denis Price), who has plotted to murder eight members of an aristocratic family that had slighted his saintly mother, the film proceeds on tiptoe through the blackest of comedy. It's fun noir. Price and his fellow conniver Joan Greenwood, whose voice plays dark music over every seductive syllable , are splendid, as is Alec Guinness as all eight d'Ascoynes . My favorite: the elderly parson, who delights in showing off his medieval
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chapel (" And I always say that my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the more concomitant crudities of his period.") Hamer's direction is a thing of dry delicacy, but it's the script that makes it the definitive Ealing Studio comedy. This is one of the few works of dramatic literature, and the only film I know, whose epigrammatic wit and wickedness bear comparison to Oscar Wilde's. In a word , perfection!R.C."
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49. King Kong (1933)
452
7.2
8.1
"The greatest of the great apes tragically pursues his helpless, hopeless passion , and 72 years after he emerged from his jungle lair this remains one of the movies' immortal tales of unrequited love. And the heartbroken, heartbreaking look in his eyes as the planes shoot him off the Empire State building remains the greatest single special effects shot ever made. TIME (March 13, 1933 ) thought Kong too humongous to be "plausible" an understatement if ever there was one but also found him "wholly enjoyable ," which is also a bit of an understatement , too.R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
50. The Lady Eve (1941 )
85
7.7
8.1
"No writer-director has ever equaled Sturges' s amazing burst of creative energy the nine witty, mostly rowdy films he auteured in a four-year fury. Surely no moviemaker provided more intelligent , choleric pleasure. So including a Sturges film here was a given. But which one? We might have chosen his Hollywood satire Sullivan's Travels, or that pearly menage-aquatre The Palm Beach Story, or one of his teeming , small-town, wartime parables (The Miracle of Morgan 's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero). But we're sticking with The Lady Eve, which comes damned close to perfection of writing, performing and sustained tone. Relocating the Garden of Eden to a cruise ship on the North Atlantic, Sturges tosses a gullible Adam (Henry Fonda as a balletically awkward rich boy) into the expert hands of a conniving Eve (Barbara Stanwyck as a card shark). Her toying seduction of him is as smoldering as it is funny. His revenge is that this superior woman finally falls for the pathetic lug in her cross hairs. Splendid fun! R.C."
51. The Last Command (1928)
14
8.5
7.9
"A white Russian general emigrates to Hollywood, finds work as an extra, then dies on a movie set while portraying a White Russian general. The ironies are broad, but the emotions are authentic . Emil Jannings won the first screen acting Oscar for this portrayal but William Powell is equally good as the director once his rival in Russia, now risen to auteur status who viciously exploits the old man.R.S."
52. Lawrence of Arabia (1962 )
504
7.9
8.6
"T.E. Lawrence was the British lieutenant who organized the Arab overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, then watched in dismay as the European powers reneged on their promisehis promise, actuallythat Arabia s for the Arabs now. A figure of enormous accomplishment and even huger charisma, Lawrence promoted himself as assiduously as he did Arab nationalism: a legend in the self-making. The film version met this epic in the flesh head on. Robert Bolts eloquent, epigrammatic script traced Lawrences career from mapmaking in the British army s Cairo headquarters to masterminding Arab nationalism . Lean, a superb pictorial dramatizer, filled the wide screen with an endless desert occasionally peopled by passionate warriors (well played by Anthony Quinn , Alec Guinness and an actual Arab, Omar Sharif). Peter OTooles swashbuckling incarnation made Lawrence a towering, tragic, high -camp sheik of Araby. The film , which seemed nostalgic upon its release,
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looks prescient now, as the debate over Western influence in Arabia is written daily in blood. R.C."
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53. Lolo (1992)
29
7.7
7.3
"At some time in our youth , many of us have soberly concluded that these large people in our house cannot be our parents. They are clumsy or brutal, lacking the divine spark we surely possess; and rather than being stolen by gypsies , we were left on their doorstep by some superior beings as a test of our ability to absorb pain and indignity. Lo (Maxime Collin), 12 , is nourished by this conviction as he watches his deranged Qubecois brood mismanage their lives . He renames himself Lolo after determining that his mother had actually been impregnated by a Sicilian tomato. This is the first of Lauzon' s extravagant fantasies and , like other, odder ones, it is cogently grounded in the solitude that can smother any childanybody. Lurching from the everyday obscenities of Lo' s home life to his rapturous dream life and back again, Lolo takes the elixir of Latin America s magical realism and spikes it with the tartest French-Canadian satire. Our young hero does survive a (hilarious ) suicide attempt, but Lauzon, alas, did not live to make another film. He died in a plane crash at 43 .R .C."
54. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the ... (2001)
4407
7.9
8.8
"Conceived and executed as one gigantic, 9hr. 18 min. film , this faithful, innovative adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy kept children and everyone else hanging on to the grand story, though it was released over three consecutive Decembers. By disdaining the facetiousness that informed nearly every other fantasy (and most other kinds of Hollywood-type movies), LOTR located a narrative and emotional grandeur that had been missing nearly as long as the ring that carries Middle Earth's destiny and Frodo the Hobbit's doom. The digital effects work, however imposing, built on the achievements of generations of Hollywood technicians. What remains amazing about the enterprise is that, over seven years of planning, production and digital effects work, Jackson kept his eye on the prize, never losing the epic heft or stinting on the telling visual or character detail. It's wonderful when moviemakers dream this big, and make their dreams ours. R.C."
55. Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
142
8.9
8.3
"The director loved machinerylooms, trolley cars , speeding automobiles. He also loved cinematic tricksfreeze frames , superimpositions, speeded-up action and slo-mo. He put both of his obsessions together in this jazzy, delirious portrait of urban Russia, and his innovative film retains its power to stun and delight 76 years after its release. Technically it is a documentary, but really it is a poetic tribute to modernism's hopeful beginnings.R.S ."
56. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
203
7.6
8.3
"The plot is preposterous: Brainwashed Korean War POW (Laurence Harvey) becomes a political assassin when he returns home to Momma (the divinely clutching Angela Lansbury). But who cares? The flash and conviction of Frankenheimer's filmmaking drives our commonsensical dubiousness right out of our heads, replacing it with high-energy paranoia. And sheer delight at this manic boldness. R.S."
57. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
114
7.8
7.6
"Made a year after Oklahoma! opened on Broadway , it did for the movie musical what that show did for the stage musical: it let real people burst into song in realistic settingsno backstage romances permitted . It had wonderful songs, a sweetly unneurotic performance by Judy Garland (the nutsiness in the piece was handled by Margaret O'Brien, as a little girl
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haunted by death). Despite its nostalgic charm, Minnelli infused the piece with a dreamy, occasionally surreal, darkness and it remains, for some of us, the greatest of American movie musicals.R .S." JxSxPx' s rating :
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58. Metropolis (1927 )
667
8.3
8.4
"Youve seen the stillsthose immortal Art Deco representations of a chilling future. Now see the movie . It's an epic poem of urban dystopia (and class warfare) by a misanthropic director who, in his Weimar Republic phase, had a taste for spectacular imagery that, for all our modern digital wizardry, has not been aesthetically surpassed. And his imagined world remains, after all these years, eerily prescient .R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
59. Miller's Crossing (1990)
419
7.9
"The American Independent movement can be sluggish and aimless : stories of sensitive dislocation told at a snail's pace. Not so the films of the Coen brothers: writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan. Dextrously flipping and reheating old movie genres like so many pancakes, they serve them up fresh , not with syrup but with a coating of comic arsenic. Their wondrous facility can lead them into facetiousness; I for one still don't get Fargo, which seems to be about how the folks in Minnesota (the Coen's home state) talk funny and act criminally stupid . But in Miller's Crossing (a reworking of the social chicanery in Dashiell Hammett 's novel Red Harvest), the antagonists are smart and out-smarter. Albert Finney runs a corrupt town in the 1920s, Gabriel Byrne is a brainy sort sometimes allied with Finney, and a stellar lineup of eccentrics (John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito) fills in the background of this marvelous, and pretty serious, fresco. It's noir with a touch so light , the film seems to float on the breeze like the Frisbee of a fedora sailing through the forest. R .C."
60. Mon oncle d'Amrique (1980 )
35
7.7
7.8
"We humans supposedly use only five percent of our brainpower. Filmmakers are similarly timid with the possibilities of the medium. Virtually all directors employ the visual vocabulary established 90 years ago by D.W . Griffith, and the presumption of realism: that those actors are these characters . Resnais, in a career spanning a half-century, is not always so constrained. His Last Year at Marienbad had the smart set guessing what was real and what was fantasyand missing the correct answer that, on screen, everything is a fantasy, literally an optical illusion. Mon oncle d'Amrique, written by Jean Gruault, is a science lesson, given by the biologist Henri Laborit , that is made lucid and entertaining by illustrative skits featuring three characters (RogerPierre, Grard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia) and a lab full of white mice. Laborit' s questions about the impact of behavioral codes in inhibiting mans so-called free will dovetail elegantly with Resnais's and Gruault's mission to overthrow the codes of film behavior. Its an exemplary experiment, and the highest form of movie fun. R.C."
61. Mouchette (1967)
41
7.7
7.8
"Robert Bresson, his detractors would say, has a lot to answer for . In 13 films over 40 years, he developed the whole slim repertoire of exalted minimalism. Blank glances that suggest both sanctity and reproach ; pregnant silences that speak libraries of meaning; an hour of mundane injustices that often explode into beatings, murders, suicides galorethese have become the vocabulary, the very clichs, of European and Asian art-house cinema. But just as we neednt hold Steven Spielberg accountable for every crappysappy kids' adventure, we shouldn t blame Bresson for creating an art form that literally hundreds of imitators reduced to non-movie sterility . Bressons
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films, however austere and obsessed with each mans own private Calvary, have a precision of imagery , an understanding of character, that gives them life, makes them a joy to watch . Mouchette, one of the purest Bressons, is the story of a teenage outcast (Nadine Nortier) so abused by everyone in her village that death seems like God's caress, and so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself . Its effect as you watch it is beautifully unforgiving ; as you recall it, brutally radiant. R.C ."
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62. Nayakan (1987 )
8.5
8.3
"Bollywood is shorthand for Bombay Hollywood, seat of the largest Indian film industry. But it manufactures only about 200 of the thousand or so Indian feature films; a half-dozen regions boast production sites larger than most of the world s national cinemas . Madras, capital of the Tamil state, is one such place, and its leader arguably India's top pop -film auteur is Mani Ratnam . His movies, often dramatizing social unrest and political terrorism, churn with narrative tension and camera energy that would be the envy of Hollywood directors, if they were ever to see them. Nayakan, an early , defining work in his career, tells the Godfatherish tale of Velu, a boy who embraces a life of crime after his father is killed by the police. Velu (Kamal Hasan) has trouble juggling his family life with his life-and-death mob "family"; Ratnam has no such difficulty blending melodrama and music, violence and comedy, realism and delirium, into a two -and-a-half-hour demonstration that, when a gangster 's miseries are mounting, the most natural solution is to go singin' in the rain. R.C."
63. Ninotchka (1939 )
112
7.9
"Garbo's stern Soviet commissar understandably succumbs to the charms of Paris, less understandably to the more mysterious charms of louche Melvyn Douglas. "Garbo Laughs!" the ads proclaimed, and we were delighted to join in the fun. "Literate and knowingly directed," TIME said, somewhat understating the case for this lovely romantic comedy.R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
64. Notorious (1946)
373
7.9
8.3
"The master's masterpiece. A government agent (Cary Grant) introduces the hard-drinking daughter of a Nazi war criminal into a nest of spies in postwar Rio. She is obliged to marry one of them (Claude Rains in one of his great performances). And Grant, of course, is obliged to fall in love with her . The result is dark romance, dark comedy and, finally, almost unbearable suspense. R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
65. Olympia Part One : Festival of the Nation

(1938 )
34
7.9
8.2
"The matter of Riefenstahl "the Nazi director" is worth raising so it can be dismissed . No question that, in the hallucinatory documentary Triumph of the Will, the cinema's first great woman filmmaker painted Adolf Hitler as a Wagnerian deity come to earth. But that was in 1934 -35. In her next documentary, a two-part summary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Riefenstahl gave the same heroic treatment to Jesse Owens, the black American track star. Mythologizing was her method, from her early alpine films to her later photographs of Nuba tribesmen; Hitler was only an incidental beneficiary of the Riefenstahl vision. Politics and politiques aside, Olympia is an amazing technical and artistic achievement. The film's innovations directly influenced all televised sports coverage. Its narrative ingenuity unearthed the human stories behind every back-page headline. R.C."
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66. On the Waterfront (1954)
318 8.1 8.4
Page 16
"Brando gives his greatest performance as a young longshoreman who comes to political consciousness and helps oust a corrupt, mob -controlled union from the docks . That theme is now a little dated , but the yearning love affair between Brando' s roughneck and Eva Marie Saint's hesitant convent girl is as fresh and poignant as it was a half-century ago, when TIME dismissed Kazans powerfully realistic film as no more than "a shrewd piece of screen journalism."R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
67. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
576
8.5
8.8
"In the 50s and 60 s, moviemaking' s international decades, European auteurs came less frequently to Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood, in the form of itinerant American stars, came to them, where the directors could recast their love for old genres with their own distinct accents. One such was Leone, the Italian who had teamed with Clint Eastwood for the three Dollars westerns that brought fame to both men. Now , in a script co-written with Sergio Donati*, he would expand his operatic vision to epic form. This is a story of the "civilizing" of the West through two agents: one coolly mechanical (the railroad), the other warmly human (Claudia Cardinale, representing womanhood at its most nurturing and radiant). Shooting in Italy, Spain and, for one spectacular moment , Monument Valley , Leone turned Charles Bronson into a leading man , and Henry Fonda into a sneering villain. The real stars, though, are Leone 's camera, going eye-to-eye with his actors or tracking through the labyrinth of his invented West, and Ennio Morricone's scorearguably the richest in movie history. R .C."
68. Out of the Past (1947)
117
7.8
8.1
"It has the smartest dialogue and the most persuasively labyrinthine plot of any film noir. And Robert Mitchum gives a great performance as the tough, laconic guy in a trench coat, undone by his love foror is it merely sexual obsession with? Jane Greer' s scheming bitch-goddess . TIME (Dec. 15 , 1947 ) didn't like Mitchum (" Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates") but found Greer "in an ancient idiom, as a hot number."R .S."
69. Persona (1966 )
386
8.5
8.1
"An actress named Elisabeth (Liv Ullman) suddenly falls silent. She tired of playing roles, on stage, in life, no longer able to respond to the horrors and banalities of the world with idle politesse. Alma , her nurse (Bibi Andersson) is seemingly a chipper young woman, keeping up a stream of cheerful chatter as the two share a summer cottage. Eventually her good nature begins to elicit smiles and nods from her patient. But speaking into the void changes Alma more radically, especially after she recalls a hot sexual adventure (it is one of the movies' great erotic tropes; you can see what happened even though the incident is recounted in purely verbal terms). Eventually, Alma turns into a version of Elisabeth, full of disgust and self-loathing. This story is presented as a film-within -an (unrealized)-film and it constitutes Bergman' s most austere masterpiecehis camera placements and editing have a simple rightness that belies the complex and enigmatic psychologies he is exploring. It is perhaps a movie none of us will ever fully understand, but the effort to do so is always at once unsettling and hypnotizing.R.S."
70. Pinocchio (1940 )
1048
6.7
7.7
"Friend Schickel, in his exemplary book The Disney Version, noted that Nelson Rockefeller, owner of Radio City Music Hall, chastised Walt Disney because every time the Music Hall showed a Disney cartoon feature, kids peed from fright so regularly that the seats had to be reupholstered . Such
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was the fear factor of Snow White, Bambi, Dumbo and this film in alerting children to the dangers of separation from a parent. Of all those primal horror homilies, Pinocchio is tops for its blending of the animator 's craft and a themethat a child is not human until he can feel loss and act with spontaneous generosity that can move viewers of every age, and for all ages. Now , for the first time since Steamboat Willie in 1928 , traditional animation is dormant, replaced by the CGI geniuses at Pixar . I miss the greatness of the old format , which could persuasively mix barnyard critters with human motion and emotion. I wish, upon a star, that it could return. R.C ." JxSxPx' s rating :
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71. Psycho (1960 )
1334
8.2
8.7
"The nut case managing the motel, the not-so innocent woman who takes refuge there one dark and stormy night, the inevitable murder and the deeply weird explanation of the crime that follows left TIME cold; it called the film "stomach churning." History is less shocked by the doings at the old Bates place, appreciating Hitch' s masterful technique, the formal elegance of his style and, above all, the way he toys with some of his favorite themes guilt , obsession and the wayward ways they drive us all.R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
72. Pulp Fiction (1994)
3480
8.3
8.9
"The (approximately) 46th, and most recent, film noir on this list , Tarantino's multipart murder comedy is (unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90 s. It established the former video-store geek as the auteur of the decade, proved that the Weinsteins at Miramax could produce films as well as import them, sparked the third or fourth coming of John Travolta' s career (while, sort of, killing him off in the middle of the movie) and gave directors not a tenth as gifted as Q.T. the license to daub their pictures with gaudy mayhem. Yeah yeah, but Pulp Fiction is still freshin fact, astonishingly impudentand fully up to matching its cocksure ambition with its care for framing a scene and its love for the actors within them . The joy of filmmaking is evident and infectious. The film still has the impact of an adrenalin shot to the heart . R.C."
73. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
281
7.9
7.6
"A leading man (Jeff Daniels) steps down off the movie screen to bring a touch of romance to the life of Mia Farrow's downtrodden waitress. Set in Depression-era America, this astonishing exercise in Magic Realism is both an arresting spin on romantic comedy conventions and a light, lovely meditation on the cost of surrendering our lives to commercialized fantasy. "Rare currents of wit and nostalgia," TIME 's reviewer wrote. But in retrospect, it is much more than that.R.S ." JxSxPx' s rating :
74. Pyaasa (1957)
"Like Japan, India had a golden age in the 1950 s. Independence from Britain sparked a robust, questioning artistry. While Satyajit Ray was pioneering the nation' s art cinema, commercial filmmakers such as Raj Kapoor (Awaara), Mehboob Khan (Mother India) and Bimal Roy (Do Bigha Zamin) were grafting influences from Hollywood melodramas and Italian neo-realism onto the Indian tradition of musical narrative. Pyaasa, which means thirst, is the most soulfully romantic of the lot. Vijay (Dutt) is an unpublished poet, dismissed by family and office colleagues but befriended by a prostitute (Waheeda Rehman). In a twist out of Sullivan's Travels, Vijay is believed dead and his poetry "posthumously" lionized. The writer-producer-director -star paints a
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glamorous portrait of an artist' s isolation through dappled imagery and the sensitive picturizing of S.D. Burman's famous songs. And Rehman, in her screen debut, is sultry, radiant a woman to bring out the poet in any man , on screen or in the audience. R.C."
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75. Raging Bull (1980 )
752
8.1
8.4
"Boxer Jake LaMotta's brutal life becomes in Robert DeNiros towering performance, a study of blind fate driving a man to the edge of selfdestruction. TIME thought it "bloated and repetitious." But this brilliantly shot film finally does allow LaMotta a sliver of redemption and leaves us harrowed by its unblinking portrayal of a life lived essentially without conscience or useful consciousness.R.S ."
76. Schindler's List (1993)
2358
8.3
8.9
"Before the war, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) was the Playboy of the Eastern World, a hard-drinking, womanizing wastrel. After the war, he was essentially a failure. But during the Holocaust a mysterious grace fell upon him and he bravely, cleverly schemed to save the Jews working in his factory from the Nazi death camps. From this true story Steven Spielberg created a film that is an austere act of historical witness, a powerful and suspenseful drama, a high moral act and, finally, a movie that escapes the bounds of conventional criticism .R .S." JxSxPx' s rating :
77. The Searchers (1956)
231
"John Wayne and John Ford made eight westerns together. This one, though it has cowboys and Indians , and Monument Valley vistas shot in gorgeous color, is at heart the grimmest film noir the story of a man' s obsession for the ravages done to his niece (Natalie Wood) by a Comanche chief. Conflicting impulses of race, sex and violence smolder throughout the Frank Nugent script, and on Wayne' s implacable face, in an epic that spans five years of brutal winters and scalding summers. The Searchers rides toward vengeance, opens and closes doors that lead to the darkest possibilities, deals with spat -out hatreds and unspoken love. Jeffrey Hunter, noble and hunky, heads the fine supporting cast of this immensely influential film, whose distinguished spawn includes Once Upon a Time in the West and Star Wars . R.C."
78. Sherlock, Jr. (1924 )
120
8.8
8.4
"The impeccable comedian directs himself in an impeccable silent comedy. The man with the flat hat and the dead pan has a night job as a movie theater projectionist but daydreams about becoming a famous (and natty) master detective . In real life he is falsely accused by a shameless cad of stealing a watch from his girlfriend's father. At work that evening he sleepwalks himself into the film he's projecting (its plot eerily mirrors his reallife problem) and solves the crime in a series of magnificently imaginative, physically perilous, perfectly orchestrated gags. Things work out all right for him as well in the waking world. Is this, as some critics have argued, an example of primitive American surrealism? Sure. But let's not get fancy about it. It is more significantly, a great example of American minimalism simple objects and movement manipulated in casually complex ways to generate a steadily rising gale of laughter. The whole thing is only 45 minutes long, not a second of which is wasted. In an age when most comedies are all windup and no punch, this is the most treasurable of virtues.R.S."
79. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
103
7.5
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"In far off, interwar Budapest, the intricately connected employees of an upscale shop live out their little, charmed lives. At the center of the story lives an Assistant Manager (James Stewart) who does not know that the woman with whom he is exchanging love letters is, in fact, his newest employee (Margaret Sullavan). Samson Raphaelson' s perfectly plotted script is impeccably realized. The once-famous "Lubitsch touch" was a combination of wry observation, delicate sentiment and gently controlled romanticism. The touch was never more touching than it is here.R.S ."
Page 19
80. Singin' in the Rain (1952)
686
8.4
"Everybody 's all-time favorite musicaland justifiably so. Ham actor (Kelly) falls in love with pert ingnue (Debbie Reynolds) while his best pal (Donald O'Connor) kibitzes from the sidelines. Meantime , Hollywood makes its panicky adjustment to the coming of sound pictures. The score is joyful, the comedy smart and knowing , the dancing spectacular in the most easily (and genuinely) likeable movie ever made. R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
81. Smiles of a Summer Night (1955 )
77
7.5
7.8
"The Seventh Seal, made the following year, would establish Bergman as cinema's prime movie metaphysician; Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring would stamp his pure, dour philosophy on a generation of filmmakers and viewers . As much as anyone , he convinced the world that film was an art, and that handsome faces suffering in closeup could be the visual equivalent of literature. Yet it was this comedy that earned "the solemn Swede" his first international eminence. On the long night of the summer solstice, ten people from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the servant class stumble through brief trysts until they find their proper mates. Indefatigable lover of women's wisdom , remorseless anatomizer of men's insecurities, Bergman would make sterner, possibly more profound works, but never again one so blithely understanding of the mischief humans commit on one another the folly they know is sex and fleetingly convince themselves is love. R.C ."
82. Some Like It Hot (1959 )
699
8.2
8.4
"This one is just plain funny deviously, dextrously , remorselesly so. Two guys (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) dolled up as girls, and Marilyn Monroe between them . Say no more! But I will, because Some Like It Hot is also plenty smart in its twisting of gender stereotypes (Lemmon gets more romantic action in a dress than he did in pants) and the possibility that a wolf (Curtis, donning thick glasses and a Cary Grant accent) could find true love the hard way. Curtis shares three of the great screen kisses with Monroe, who is magnif, whether cascading out of her flapper gowns or lending her adorable tremolo to cutesy tunes (" I Wanna Be Loved by You") and suicidal torch songs (" I'm Thru With Love") . And yes, it's still funny , from first gag to the priceless last one. It's also one of the rare comedies that is enriched rather than exhausted at the end of a breathless two hours. Nobody's perfect, but this film is. R.C ." JxSxPx' s rating :
83. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

(1977 )
2745
7.9
8.8
"Forget the phenomenon it changed forever the way movies are marketed. Forget the endlessly hyped sequels. Try to recall the rushing joy in your heart when Harrison Ford first threw the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace. Remember the innocence (and technological inventiveness) of the film, the fun of the dialogue, the astonishment of the creatures we encountered, the propulsive dash of the editing. One suspects that the peppy force of the
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thing will always be with us, preventing our surrender to the Force's Dark Side .R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
Page 20
84. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 )
413
7.8
8.1
"It has been called the best adaptation of a great play ever made, and we're not going to dispute that judgment . Marlon Brando, repeating his stage performance as Stanley Kowalksihalf child, half animal, all menacing masculinityis simply great. And so is Vivien Leigh , as his flirtatious, halfmad sister-in-law who teases him toward the brutal rape that destroys her. Tennessee Williams saw them symbolizing the contest between genteel civility and crude lower -class vitality. We are simply harrowed by the drama he unleashed R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
85. Sunrise (1927 )
173
8.5
8.3
"The acclaimed German director made his first, masterful American film the same summer Warner Bros. was cranking out The Jazz Singer, the talkie that brought the silent cinema to a (literally) screeching halt. TIME thought Sunrise "picturesquely soporific." History thinks the story of a farmer who deserts his wife for the bright lights of the big city, then returns to her sadder but wiser one of the last poetic masterpieces of a dying cinematic era.R.S."
86. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
69
8.2
"A psychopathic gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster ) rules Broadway with an iron fist, destroying everyone who dares to cross him. These include a small time press agent (Tony Curtis) and a sister (Susan Harrison) on whom he casts an incestuous eye. The dialogue (by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets) is etched in acid, and Mackendrick's direction perfectly captures the dark side of The Great White Way. The theatrical New York of the 1950s has by now been Disneyfied beyond recognition. But its scuzzy denizens remain recognizably alive and malevolent to us. R.S."
87. Swing Time (1936)
62
7.7
7.7
"By most standards , this would be one of the least worthy films on our list. Silly story (a gambler courts a gal engaged to a bandleader), vapid dialogue , ordinary direction, acting that Stanislavsky or Scorsese would deem subpar. But it's a musical, and oh those songs (by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields), oh those dances (choreographed by Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan). Astaire's grace, as he gently steered Ginger Rogers across those parquet floors, defined easy elegance and defined the American style in Hollywood's Golden Age. In the comic duet "Pick Yourself Up," Fred turns Ginger from an angry competitor into a perfectly synchronous partner . The climactic number, "Never Gonna Dance," pours courtship, conquest , lovers' quarrel and loss into a five-minute poem in synchronized motion. With moves whose wit surpassed verbal cleverness, whose passion in a two-step or a twirl was warmer than any kiss, Fred and Ginger were a living metaphor for la belle, la perfectly swell, romance.R.C."
88. Talk to Her (2002 )
621
7.8
"The male nurse tending a beautiful comatose woman bathes her nude body , talks endlessly to her of art (she was a dancer) finally makes love to her and impregnates her . Escandalo. The nurse is jailed but , giving birth, speech and movement are restored to his patient. And out of dark materials and an offhand surrealist style, Almodvar fashions a wondrously ironic tale of
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redemption , which TIME accurately called a "profoundly witty and unique" experience. R.S."
Page 21
89. Taxi Driver (1976)
1650
8.2
8.6
"TIME hated the movie when it came out ("thoroughly depressing realism" was the best it could say). But Robert DeNiro's portrait of that increasingly familiar American figure-the lone (psycho) gunman-grows ever scarier and more relevant. The movie's great twist, in which he becomes a media hero , also engenders deep, dark thoughts about the world we live in . The power of Scorsese's filmmaking grows ever more punishing with the passage of time.R.S." JxSxPx' s rating :
90. Tokyo Story (1953)
166
8.7
"Yasujiro Ozu was the most austere of the Japanese mastersfew camera movements or close-ups , a rigorously plain editing manner. His attention was intently focused on his people, who were usually ordinary members of the middle class. This is one of his most approachable movies: An old couple comes to the big city to visit their children, who are more irritated than pleased by this interruption of their lives, which are scarcely glamorous. "Isn't life disappointing?" one of them says. "Yes, it is" another replies . But this wry, ironic movie is anything but , as it patiently, wisely explores the generational-and universal tensions between the generations.R.S.
91. A Touch of Zen (1969 )
35
7.3
7.6
"Kung-fu movies came to the West via the grunting charisma of Bruce Lee. But his were standard revenge thrillers , showcases for the acrobatics of machismo. For a marriage of martial and cinematic art, King Hu was the man. And A Touch of Zen, the first Chinese action movie to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is his masterpiece. In this three-hr. epic, a modest scholar (Shih Jun) hooks up with a resolute girl (Hsu Feng) to challenge a vicious warlord. Influenced , like so many major Hong Kong action directors of the period, by the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa and other Japanese directors, Hu brought a unique buoyancy to the action genre. His performers literally bounced (on unseen trampolines ) through forests and over hills, and because Hus camera has a muscular grace as well the viewer soars with them. Leading the acrobatic procession is Hsu Feng. Just 18 when the film was made, she remains the screens gravest, most ravishing woman warrior. R.C."
92. Tales of Ugetsu (1953 )
123
8.5
8.1
"They came in rapid succession, as if off a Japanese assembly line: masterpieces galore in the early 50 s, from Kurosawa and Ozu and Mizoguchi, who ended his career with four films (The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, Street of Shame) whose pained wisdom and fluidity of form are the film equivalent of Beethoven' s last Quartets. Ugetsu is both a magnificent war film and a parable of careless love. A villager, Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), leaves his wife to go to battle , not to serve the Emperor but to find wealth in war' s spoils. In a spooky castle he meets the glamorous Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo )and falls under her spectral spell. Ozu wants to define man 's restless, acquisitive nature and woman's homing instinct. One creates adventure, the other continuity. These are the building blocks of any story including the haunting ghost story that Ugetsu, in one of the great tracking shots in cinema history, reveals itself to be. R.C."
93. Ulysses' Gaze (1995 )
20
8.5
7.2
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"A minimalist with an epic vision, Angelopoulos has created imposing cinematic tableaux about his homeland, from his first international successes, Days of '36 and Traveling Players. Typically, each scene, which may run for two, three or 10 mins., is a single shot, in which the educated eye discovers all manner of subtle drama in furtive glances, in silences when there's nothing to say, in the corners of the screen. Ulysses' Gaze is nothing less than a synopsis of 20 th century Greek history in a film of about three hours and 60 shots. Dozens, then hundreds of protestors materialize on an Athens street . A ship with a huge bust of Lenin floats down a canal. The most amazing scene, again a single shot , tells the story of five family gatherings on New Year's Eve during the Communist insurgency from 1945 to 1950 . "Auld Lang Syne" is sung; a son is arrested; the son returns; a death is announced; "Auld Lang Syne." Life , Angelopoulos says, is a pageant best seen from a distance, where we can discern its larger contours, its greater meaning, its unbearable and heroic poignance. R.C."
Page 22
94. Umberto D. (1952)
135
8.3
8.3
"One of Italian Neorealisms last and deepest sighs , with Carlo Battisti as a retired civil servant, impoverished and isolated trying to survive in a society that has dispensed with him. His only relationship is with his beloved dog , and when it runs away the effect on himon us watchingis devastating. Cesare Zavattini, the writer who defined Neorealism as much as its directors did, never wrote more simply and directly and De Sica realizes his work with perfect clarity.R.S."
95. Unforgiven (1992)
752
8.3
"At the time it was called a "revisionist" western. Now it seems like a return to classicisma bad man who thinks he has reformed returns to his old ways in order to revenge the death of his best friend. "Clintessence" TIME called it, and the actor-director achieved his masterpiece with this dark , brooding tale of souls seeking redemption but doomed by their flawed natures to a tragic outcome.R.S."
96. White Heat (1949)
115
8.1
8.1
"James Cagney 's gangster at one point in this film climbs on to his Mommy's lap, seeking comfort from one of the blinding headaches that are the chief symptom of his raging psychopathy. But that's the only "explanation" this wonderfully vicious movie offers for his relentlessly bad behavior. The rest is all snarl and gunfire. The film that can , perhaps, be read as an unannounced satire on the gangster genre, but it still leaves you breathless at the sheer anarchy of the crime wave he and his mob loose on an innocent world. R.S ."
97. Wings of Desire (1987)
270
8.2
"In movies angels are generally busy-body know-it-alls, running about rescuing humans from their vast varieties of sin and error. Not so in this movie, where they are poised on Munich s rooftops , privy to every conversation, every stupid idea and intention going on below , but powerless to intervene. Or, for that matter, to smell, taste or feel an apple. One of them (the superb Bruno Ganz) notices an equally lost and lonely trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encouraged by Peter Falk (playing a version of himself) his needs break through the barriers of angelic convention , love sweetly triumphs and a black and white film blushes into color. Its a movie that might have fallen into sentimentality at any one of a dozen moments, but thanks to Peter Handke s wryly realistic writing and Wenders s gently controlled direction, it never does. Its a perfect fantasy for people who usually deplore fantasy. But people with a suspicious regard for the twee will like it as well.R.S."
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Page 23
98. Yojimbo (1961 )
282
8.3
8.3
"A Samurai (the great Toshiro Mifune) having lost his master discovers an utterly corrupt town and uses both his cunning and his sword to clean it up. The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious. Kurosawa knew and loved American westerns, but deploying their conventions in feudal Japan he utterly transformed themto our utter fascination and delight. R.S."
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TIME S 100 Greatest Movies List

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Added by JxSxPx on 10 Nov 2008 10 :08