The 100 Greatest Films of

All Time
8 September 2020
Credit: Kobal Collection

1. Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1958

A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow

a woman apparently possessed by the past in Alfred
Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.

The accession of Vertigo to the top spot in this poll is

hardly in the nature of a coup d’état. Tying for 11th
place in 1972, Hitchcock’s masterpiece steadily
inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by
2002 was clearly the heir apparent to the long-ruling
Citizen Kane. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel
gratified at the modest revolution – if only for the
proof that film canons (and the versions of history
they legitimate) are not completely fossilised.

There may be no larger significance in the bare fact

that a couple of films made in California 17 years apart
have traded numerical rankings on a whimsically
impressionistic list. Yet the human urge to interpret
chance phenomena will not be denied, and Vertigo is
a crafty, duplicitous machine for spinning meaning…

— Peter Matthews’ opening to his commemorative

poll essay Vertigo rises: the greatest film of all time?

See all 191 votes for Vertigo

Also read Forever falling: Miguel Marías’s advocation

for Vertigo as the greatest film of all time
Watch Vertigo online in BFI Player
 Watch Kim Novak discuss Vertigo

2. Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, USA 1941

Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO

for his debut film, boy wonder Welles created a modernist
masterpiece that is regularly voted the best film ever
made.

Kane and Vertigo don’t top the chart by divine right.

But those two films are just still the best at doing what
great cinema ought to do: extending the everyday into
the visionary.
 — Nigel Andrews

In the last decade I’ve watched this first feature many

times, and each time, it reveals new treasures. Clearly,
no single film is the greatest ever made. But if there
were one, for me Kane would now be the strongest
contender, bar none.

— Geoff Andrew

All celluloid life is present in Citizen Kane; seeing it for

the first or umpteenth time remains a revelation.

— Trevor Johnston

See all 157 votes for Citizen Kane

Read The mark of Kane: David Thomson on Kane’s

long reign as the Greatest Film of All Time
3. Tokyo Story

Ozu Yasujiro, Japan 1953

The final part of Yasujiro Ozu’s loosely connected ‘Noriko’

trilogy is a devastating story of elderly grandparents
brushed aside by their self-involved family.

Ozu used to liken himself to a “tofu-maker”, in

reference to the way his films – at least the post-war
ones – were all variations on a small number of
themes. So why is it Tokyo Story that is acclaimed by
most as his masterpiece? DVD releases have made
available such prewar films as I Was Born, But…, and
yet the Ozu vote has not been split, and Tokyo Story
has actually climbed two places since 2002. It may
 simply be that in Tokyo Story this most Japanese tofu-
maker refined his art to the point of perfection, and
crafted a truly universal film about family, time and
loss.

— James Bell

See all 107 votes for Tokyo Story

Watch Tokyo Story online in BFI Player

Read The master of time: Thom Andersen on Ozu
Yasujirô

4. La Règle du jeu

Jean Renoir, France 1939

Made on the cusp of WWII, Jean Renoir’s satire of the
upper-middle classes was banned as demoralising by the
French government for two decades after its release

Only Renoir has managed to express on film the most

elevated notion of naturalism, examining this world
from a perspective that is dark, cruel but objective,
before going on to achieve the serenity of the work of
his old age. With him, one has no qualms about using
superlatives: La Règle du jeu is quite simply the
greatest French film by the greatest of French
directors.

— Olivier Père

See all 100 votes for La Règle du Jeu

Watch La Règle du jeu online on BFI Player (UK only)

5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

F.W. Murnau, USA 1927

Lured to Hollywood by producer William Fox, German

Expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau created one of the
silent cinema’s last and most luminous masterpieces.

When F.W. Murnau left Germany for America in 1926,

did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense
that change was around the corner – that now was the
time to fill up on fantasy, delirium and spectacle
before talking actors wrenched the artform closer to
reality? Many things make this film more than just a
morality tale about temptation and lust, a fable about
 a young husband so crazy with desire for a city girl
that he contemplates drowning his wife, an elemental
but sweet story of a husband and wife rediscovering
their love for each other. Sunrise was an example –
perhaps never again repeated on the same scale – of
unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio
system working together rather than at cross
purposes.

— Isabel Stevens

See all 93 votes for this Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Read Where to begin with F.W. Murnau

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA 1968

Stanley Kubrick took science fiction cinema in a grandly
intelligent new direction with this epic story of man’s
quest for knowledge.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a stand-along monument, a

great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man
and the universe. It was a statement that came at a
time which now looks something like the peak of
humanity’s technological optimism.

— Roger Ebert

See all 90 votes for 2001: A Space Odyssey

Watch 2002: A Space Odyssey online in BFI Player

See The letter from Stanley Kubrick that started
2001: A Space Odyssey

7. The Searchers
John Ford, USA 1956

John Ford created perhaps the greatest of all westerns

with this tale of a Civil War veteran doggedly hunting the
Comanche who have kidnapped his niece.

Do the fluctuations in popularity of John Ford’s

intimate revenge epic – no appearance in either
critics’ or directors’ top tens in 2002, but fifth in the
1992 critics’ poll – reflect the shifts in popularity of
the western? It could be a case of this being a western
for people who don’t much care for them, but I
suspect it’s more to do with John Ford’s stock having
risen higher than ever this past decade and the citing
of his influence in the unlikeliest of places in recent
cinema.

— Kieron Corless

See all 78 votes for The Searchers

Watch The Searchers online in BFI Player

8. Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, Soviet Union 1929

An impression of city life in the Soviet Union, The Man

with a Movie Camera is the best-known film of
experimental documentary pioneer Dziga Vertov.

Is Dziga Vertov’s cine-city symphony a film whose

time has finally come? Ranked only no. 27 in our last
critics’ poll, it now displaces Eisenstein’s erstwhile
perennial Battleship Potemkin as the Constructivist
Soviet silent of choice. Like Eisenstein’s warhorse, it’s
an agit-experiment that sees montage as the means
 to a revolutionary consciousness; but rather than
proceeding through fable and illusion, it’s explicitly
engaged both with recording the modern urban
everyday (which makes it the top documentary in our
poll) and with its representation back to its
participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie).

— Nick Bradshaw

See all 68 votes for Man with a Movie Camera

See also The Greatest Documentaries of All Time

poll
Watch Man with a Movie Camera online on BFI
Player (UK only)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer, France 1927

Silent cinema at its most sublimely expressive, Carl

Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece is an austere but hugely
affecting dramatisation of the trial of St Joan.

Joan was and remains an unassailable giant of early

cinema, a transcendental film comprising tears, fire
and madness that relies on extreme close-ups of the
human face. Over the years it has often been a
difficult film to see, but even during its lost years Joan
has remained embedded in the critical consciousness,
thanks to the strength of its early reception, the
striking stills that appeared in film books, its presence
in Godard’s Vivre sa vie and recently a series of
unforgettable live screenings. In 2010 it was
designated the most influential film of all time in the
Toronto International Film Festival’s ‘Essential 100’ list,
where Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “the
pinnacle of silent cinema – and perhaps of the cinema
itself.”

— Jane Giles

See all 65 votes for The Passion of Joan of Arc

Watch The Passion of Joan of Arc online on BFI

Player (UK only)
10. 8½

Federico Fellini, Italy 1963

Federico Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of a

bad case of creative block with this autobiographical
magnum opus about a film director experiencing creative
block.

Arguably the film that most accurately captures the

agonies of creativity and the circus that surrounds
filmmaking, equal parts narcissistic, self-deprecating,
bitter, nostalgic, warm, critical and funny. Dreams,
nightmares, reality and memories coexist within the
same time-frame; the viewer sees Guido’s world not
as it is, but more ‘realistically’ as he experiences it,
 inserting the film in a lineage that stretches from the
Surrealists to David Lynch.

— Mar Diestro-Dópido

See all 64 votes for 8½

Watch 8½ online on BFI Player (UK only)

See Fellini’s 8½ turns 50

11. Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union 1925

A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere,

Sergei Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was
revolutionary in both form and content.

Finally, Battleship Potemkin. There is little need to say

anything about this film. It is on my list because it is
one of the first films to show the power of cinema and
what it could achieve. Everyone talks about its use of
montage, and is fantastically done. But it is also
Brechtian in form, ie it is didactic. It wants to move
viewers to feel differently and to act differently as a
result of what they experience. As a result, it has been
banned in many places. This film will always move
people.

— Alby James

Battleship Potemkin because of the imagination of the

revolution and its filmic invention. – Sheila
Schwartzman
In my opinion, Battleship Potemkin is the greatest film
ever made. All of the future search of experimentalism
is contained within it. The story moves ahead in a
permanent tension between novelty (in terms of style
and the changes in Russian life at the time) and the
big frame of history in which the action takes place.

— Victor Fowler Calzada

See all 63 votes for Battleship Potemkin

Watch Battleship Potemkin online on BFI Player (UK

only)
12. L’Atalante

Jean Vigo, France 1934

Newly-weds begin their life together on a working barge

in this luminous and poetic romance, the only feature film
by director Jean Vigo.

L’Atalante is cinema as a diaphanous waft of half-

dreamed desire; the most beautiful erotic dream ever
put on film.

— Michal Oleszczyk

See all 58 votes for L’Atalante

13. Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard, France 1960

Jean-Luc Godard’s precocious feature debut was this

hugely influential jazzy, Noir-inflected crime drama.

Few works have gathered so many elements that

would come to transform film narration as Breathless.
Even today, we feel that Godard reinvented the art of
the cinema, pushing it to the boundaries of risk and
experimentation.
 — Victor Fowler Calzada

Breathless has an excellent mise en scène and

explores how narration merges with meta-film
reflections.

— Long Tin Shum

Effortless modernity retains its shock value in

Breathless. You wonder what there was to discover
after 1959. Most of all, it shows us what time just
passing might feel like between humming, naming
passing cars, rubbing our thumbs across our lips and
making faces at the mirror – and immediately
convinces us that it’s something the cinema was
always supposed to describe.

— Ben Gibson

Breathless redefined and reimagined the possibilities

of the medium.

— Jason Wood

See all 57 votes for Breathless

Watch Breathless online on BFI Player (UK only)

14. Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1979

Transplanting the story of Joseph Conrad’s colonial-era

novel Heart of Darkness to Vietnam, Francis Ford
Coppola created a visually mesmerising fantasia on the
spectacle of war.

Apocalypse Now is complex, random and visionary.

Everything about it is miraculous. It’s also a brilliant
film to project. I’ve seen projectionists ride the
fantastic sound like an engineer would ride levels of a
live band.

— Richard Sowada

Apocalypse Now is a compelling, groundbreaking film

 about the journey into the heart of darkness and the
insanity of war.

— Maura McHugh

From the opening shot to the bad trip climax,

Apocalypse Now is the war film for people who hate
war films, and a fitting cinematic end to a decade
when the rulebook was torn up and wild excess
encouraged. Everything else seems a little flat after
you see this.

— David Flint

See all 53 votes for Apocalypse Now

Watch Apocalypse Now online on BFI Player (UK

only)
15. Late Spring

Ozu Yasujiro, Japan 1949

Yasujiro Ozu’s exploration of the relationship between a

widower and his unmarried adult daughter is often
described as the perfect distillation of his style. Chishu
Ryu and Setsuko Hara star.

The transience of time, the inevitability of separation

and the pain of loss inform Ozu’s most
compassionate, most disarmingly tender picture Late
Spring.

— Joseph Fahim

It’s especially painful to have to choose one film to

 represent Ozu’s endlessly rich body of work, but Late
Spring, a sublimely beautiful meditation on family,
marriage and loneliness, is his most profoundly
moving film.

— Joseph McBride

See all 50 votes for Late Spring

16. Au hasard Balthazar

Robert Bresson, France/Sweden 1966

Robert Bresson’s distinctive pared-down style elicits

extraordinary pathos from this devastating tale of an
abused donkey passing from owner to owner.
 Au hasard Balthazar is a film that will continue to exist
outside the conventional limitations of time and space.

— Marco Mueller

Au Hasard is an overpowering experience, but nothing

to do with sentiment, more a troubling recognition of
the fathomless suffering in the world.

— Trevor Johnston

See all 49 votes for Au hasard Balthazar

Credit: Toho Co., Ltd

17=. Seven Samurai

Kurosawa Akira, Japan 1954

Rice farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them
against marauding bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s influential
epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

Akira Kurosawa’s majestic account of a village that

hires a motley crew of samurai to defend it from
bandit raids is so fluent and visually powerful that the
subtitles become incidental.

— Paul Whitington

Seven Samurai’s dynamism! It’s the pinnacle of

Kurosawa’s filmography and the best bridge between
western and Asian cinema.

— Jean Chanil

Seven Samurai is consummate Kurosawa and perhaps

the greatest action picture ever made, as emotionally
as it is physically exhausting.

— Patrick McGilligan

See all 48 votes for Seven Samurai

Watch Seven Samurai online on BFI Player (UK only)

See Still crazy-good after 60 years: Seven Samurai
17=. Persona

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1966

A nurse (Bibi Andersson) and an actress who refuses to

speak (Liv Ullmann) seem to fuse identities in Ingmar
Bergman’s disturbing, formally experimental
psychological drama.

Bergman’s Persona is uncanny. It is like a conundrum

that changes every time you watch it. Hence it stands
outside of time (yes, it is vampiric, if you like).

— Vigen Galstyan

Persona is the best example of what Béla Balázs

 termed as the ‘dimension of physiognomy’. Together
with Nykvist, Andersson and Ullman, Bergman
explores the soul behind the mask.

— Cesar Ballester

See all 48 votes for Persona

Read Persona archive review: where the mask meets

the face

19. Mirror

Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union 1974

Andrei Tarkovsky drew on memories of a rural childhood

before WWII for this personal, impressionistic and
unconventional film poem.

The most personal of Andrey Tarkovsky’s movies, in

The Mirror he found a poetic equivalent for the verses
of his father Arseny Tarkovsky and convinced the
world of the immortality of the great Russian artistic
tradition.

— Peter Shepotinnik

Mirror, an attempt at a cinematic autobiography, ends

up as a story about the main character’s relationship
with himself. If – following the usual method of film
watching – we identify with the protagonist, then the
film becomes a meditation on our own relationship
with ourselves: narrative cinema brought full circle to
its point zero.

— Vlastimir Sudar

See all 47 votes for Mirror

20. Singin’ in the Rain

Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, USA 1951

Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking

pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration
for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.

Through the faked-up DIY of Singin’ in the Rain,

seemingly a mad throwing together of stuff that
somehow just gels, we’re allowed to feel the joy of
creativity and to glimpse the very human face of
genius. It’s the least improvised film providing the
most thrillingly spontaneous feeling to be had in a
cinema.
 — Ben Gibson

Singin’ in the Rain is an all-singing all-dancing course

on the dawn of talking pictures, bursting with Roaring
Twenties-inspired gags.

— Martin Tudor Caranfil

See all 46 votes for Singin’ in the Rain

21=. L’Avventura

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking and

controversial arthouse milestone, the mystery of a
woman’s disappearance from a Mediterranean island is
left unresolved.

Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy 1960

I choose L’Avventura not just for the landmark open

 narrative, but for Antonioni’s amazing architectural
sense that composition is expression.

— Trevor Johnston

Antonioni’s L’Avventura has the kind of plotline that

gives arthouse cinema a bad name, but somehow a
lacklustre search for a young woman who’s gone
missing on a small volcanic island becomes an
existential investigation of the human condition. Every
time you watch it, you notice something new.

— Paul Whitington

Postmodernism found a voice in Antonioni’s

revolutionary cinematic language and changed the
face of arthouse cinema. The post-God world the
visionary chronicler of the alienated and the
disaffected valiantly confronts in L’avventura speaks
of truths filmmakers have tended to ignore ever since.

— Joseph Fahim

See all 43 votes for L’Avventura

Great wide open: L’Avventura by Robert Koehler

21=. Le Mépris

Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy 1963

Working with his biggest budget to date, Jean-Luc

Godard created a sublime widescreen drama about
marital breakdown, set during pre-production on a film
shoot.

Contempt is a beautiful opus to Nouvelle Vague

cinema, and one of Godard’s most experimental
movies. I love his troubled and troubling narration, his
obsession with breaking the codes of popular cinema
using some typical Godardian tropes: minimal
dialogues with strange gestures, stares and situations.
It’s intellectual as usual but also aesthetically different
and courageous.
 — Mustapha Benfoldi

One of the finest films ever made about both

coupledom and the cinema, Le Mépris is also – with
good reason – Godard’s most mythical film, in which
he allows himself a degree of lyricism that was only to
resurface again in much later work.

— Olivier Pėre

Le Mépris has always been my favorite Godard. It is

the pinnacle of something, and is so beautifully
inspired by classical Greco-German-Roman culture. It
is even dedicated to Fritz Lang as a master.

— Sylvia Pierre

See all 43 votes for Le Mépris

Watch Le Mépris online on BFI Player (UK only)

21=. The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1972

The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the

Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son
drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.

The Godfather Part I works as a masterful portrait of

modern societies. Coppola does not analyse his
characters, nor seeks to moralise, but instead
constructs these characters with all those ingredients
that constitute the human condition. The visual and
narrative elements are simply fascinating.

— Juan Antonio Garcia Borrero

See all 43 votes for The Godfather

24=. Ordet

Carl Dreyer, Denmark 1955

The penultimate film by the Danish master Carl Theodor
Dreyer is a parable on the power of faith, set in a remote
religious community.

Dreyer was the first filmmaker to ask the big questions

about life, God and the mysteries of the human soul,
and in Ordet he delivered his most impassioned
address on the elusive concept of faith.

— Joseph Fahim

See all 42 votes for Ordet

Watch Ordet online on BFI Player (UK only)

24=. In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai, China 2000

Wong Kar-wai’s ravishing romance stars Maggie Cheung

and Tony Leung as two wronged spouses in 1960s Hong
Kong who find comfort in each other’s company.

In the Mood for Love is built on rapture, ecstasy, and

the suffering it entails – on wheels. Blasting away all
the conventions of melodrama, Wong comes up with a
fiction of emotions powered by music (melos) that
leaves everyone else in the dust. For fluidity, color,
editing, music and unforgettable romance, this is it.

— Martha P. Nochimson

See all 42 votes for In the Mood for Love

26=. Rashomon
Kurosawa Akira, Japan 1950

Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide

audiences, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough tells the story
of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.

Rashomon shows us impossibility of understanding

the world and the inability of discovering the truth –
those are, at first sight, European existential values,
but they were brought to cinema by its Eastern film
director.

— Gulnara Abikeyeva

See all 41 votes for Rashomon

Watch Rashomon online on BFI Player (UK only)

26=. Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966

The life of a 15th-century icon painter takes centre stage

in Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic meditation on the place of art
in turbulent times.

Andrei Rublev is a strongest story about the artist –

the suffering of the creator and creation. Tarkovski
made the individual story of Rubljov much bigger then
it was in reality until finally it is like a symbol, an
archetype of the artist and his relationships with
power and absolutist authority. I also like the visual
language of the film. The scene with bells is one of the
greatest in history of the cinema.

— Tiina Lok

I wouldn’t say these films are necessarily in an order,

but I do find Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev to be a film
that still enchants and intrigues. There is something
about the warp and weft of his film, and its attempt to
understand the nature of the votive and the creative,
that seems to me cinematic poetry of the highest
order.

— Roger Clark

See all 41 votes for Andrei Rublev

 Cinematic gold: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev by
Theodora Clarke

28. Mulholland Dr.

David Lynch, USA 2001

In David Lynch’s labyrinthine neo-noir, Naomi Watts plays

an aspiring ingénue who moves in with an amnesiac
woman on her arrival in Hollywood. The famously open-
ended plot reflects the film’s origin as a TV pilot.

Non-linear narratives had already been explored in

film, but Lynch took the form to a different and unique
level in Mulholland Dr.

— Fernanda Solórzano
 Mulholland Dr. thrives effortlessly on the idea that
films can reverse time and turn interpretations upside
down, while its filmmaker character is a lost, self-
obsessed arse.

— Vlastimir Sudar

See all 40 votes for Mulholland Dr.

Remain in light: Mulholland Dr. and the cosmogony

of David Lynch by B. Kite

29=. Stalker

Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union 1979

The Stalker guides illegal visitors through the overgrown

labyrinth of the Zone, an area of alien traps and
treasures, containing a room where wishes may come
true…

Stalker is a genius melancholy utopist’s filmic fever-

dream come true.

— Michel Lipkes

Stalker is about searching for the truth inside us. Not

one of its main protagonists is able to cross the border
of the miraculous room: they are afraid of their real
inner desires. It is also a film about victimising oneself
for others; and about human modesty and
humbleness.

— Zuzana Gindl-Tatarova

See all 39 votes for Stalker

29=. Shoah

Claude Lanzmann, France 1985

An epic eyewitness account of the Holocaust told by

those who lived through it.

Shoah seems to me the most important film ever

made…

— Graham Fuller

See all 39 votes for Shoah

31=. The Godfather Part II

Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1974

Both prequel and sequel to the original, The Godfather
Part II follows two generations of the Corleone family as
they fight for supremecy in the treacherous world of
organised crime.

“That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me.” When Michael

Corleone utters these words to his WASP girlfriend at
his sister’s wedding in The Godfather he is setting up
the sequel as certainly as if it had all been pre-
planned. The second movie is an answer to this line of
dialogue, an operatic crime melodrama that seems to
cover all the great themes of classical drama.

— Philip Molloy

With The Godfather: Part II, Coppola may be the only

director who surpassed his own masterpiece. Even
without Marlon Brando.

— Balint Szaloky

The Godfather: Part II because it is the best family

film, a Greek tragedy set in a 20th-century Mafia clan.
That’s why it wins over Martin Scorsese’s Mafia films:
it balances organised crime against the Corleone
family tragedy, which enables us to identify that much
more with the characters – and wonder at our own
morals.

— Sabine Niewalda
See all 38 votes for The Godfather Part II

31=. Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese, USA 1976

In this searing portrait of urban paranoia one man’s

search for redemption ends in a violent showdown.

Taxi Driver is a ferociously raw exploration of isolation

and a modern classic with which many people feel a
deep and personal connection.

— Trevor Johnston

See all 38 votes for Taxi Driver

33. Bicycle Thieves

Vittoria De Sica, Italy 1948

The theft of a bicycle becomes the catalyst for a father

and son’s odyssey through the poverty-stricken streets
of post-war Rome. One of the defining classics of Italian
neorealism.

It’s a touching story that engages the audience’s

emotions and has them rooting for the protagonists all
the time. And it is told in the neorealist style that
makes it very affecting. Such a film will always remain
a great example for new filmmakers without large
funds. It proves that a simple premise and characters
 that we can care about are all you need to make a
story work.

— Alby James

Bycicle Thieves’ mix of traditional dramatic structures

with an unprecedented representation of city,
characters and social condition is still effective and
enormously touching in its depiction of contradictory
ethical and political issues.

— Francesco Pitassio

Bicycle Thieves is neo-social realist melodrama that

verges on tragedy, a document of devastated post-
war Italy. Its delicate treatment of the (cinematic)
space is recognised both in Bazin’s and Deleuze’s
writings.

— Nevena Dakovic

See all 37 votes for Bicycle Thieves

Watch Bicycle Thieves online on BFI Player (UK only)

34. The General

Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, USA 1926

Set during the American civil war, Buster Keaton’s most

ambitious film combines spectacular action sequences
and hilarious comedy aboard the runaway locomotive of
the title.

From the golden age of silent comedy, The General is

as funny as it gets, with ingenious storytelling and
filmmaking.

— Patrick McGilligan

Orson Welles described The General as “the greatest

 comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever
made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made”, and
he wasn’t wrong. The vision, clarity and economy with
which Keaton tells his story are remarkable.

— Paul Whitington

See all 35 votes for The General

35=. Metropolis

Fritz Lang, Germany 1927

Lang’s pioneering work of science-fiction depicts a

dystopian future in which a privileged elite rule over the
futuristic city of Metropolis until one day the workers rise
up from underground to rebel against their masters.
 I’ve recently (re)saw Metropolis (the restored version,
at the Transylvania International Film Festival in 2010)
with live and very modern, industrial-sounding music
performed by Antonio Bras – the effect was
astonishing: everything that cinema means was there:
editing, tension, (melo)drama, acting, music…
everything! Simply remarkable.

— Florin Barbu

See all 34 votes for Metropolis

Watch Metropolis online on BFI Player (UK only)

35=. Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1960

Often imitated but never bettered, Hitchcock’s low

budget “shocker” paved the way for the modern horror
film.

There has never been a more influential horror film

than Psycho and everything since has referenced it
somehow.

— Alan Jones

Psycho takes the Hitchcock slot just like City Lights

takes the Chaplin one, because every great Hitchcock
movie testifies to his masterful blending of
entertainment and psychological depth.

— Eric Kohn

See all 34 votes for Psycho

35=. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du
Commerce 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France 1975

In precise detail Akerman observes the daily routines of a

single mother in her apartment and the consequences
that transpire when things begin to unravel.

Jeanne Dielman, first seen at college, shocked me

with a new language and showed me the power of a
form that could make me literally shout out just
because someone hadn’t flicked a light switch.

— Briony Hanson

An essential inclusion for its aesthetically and

politically groundbreaking qualities.

— Annette Kuhn

Akerman filmed Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai de

Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at a lower camera height
than one is used to – her own height (she is quite
short) – and a feeling of claustrophobia seems to
follow from that, pervading the film and, despite its
dramatic ending, never fully abating.

— Melissa Gronlund

See all 34 votes for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du

Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
35=. Sátántangó

Béla Tarr, Switzerland/Germany/Hungary 1994

An epic seven-hour evocation of life in an isolated

Hungarian village told in Tarr’s slow-moving meditative
style.

Satantango is an artistically unforgettable experience

by the Hungarian master that deals with a part of his
country’s history in a very unconventional way.

— Ludmila Cvikova

Satantango is the most ambitious film of the greatest

of contemporary classics.

— Jurica Pavicic

See all 34 votes for Sátántangó

39=. The 400 Blows

François Truffaut, France 1959

Truffaut drew inspiration from his own troubled childhood

for this classic account of a troubled adolescent looking
for an escape route from an unhappy life.

My favourite Truffaut film and my favourite coming-of-

age movie, Les Quatre cent coups is comparable to
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in its insightful depiction of the awakening of an
artistic sensibility.

— Paul Whitington

The Four Hundred Blows is the epitome of a personal

 film, the kind of film I found, to my chagrin, that
Hollywood doesn’t want.

— Joseph McBride

See all 33 votes for The 400 Blows

39=. La dolce vita

Federico Fellini, France/Italy 1960

Marcello Mastroianni is the paparazzi journalist whose life

is an endless round of hedonistic parties and superficial
liaisons as he searches for meaning amidst the crumbling
grandeur of Rome’s once imperial city.

The superbly thorough study that Fellini makes of a

 world characterised by the loss of moral values
remains intact. But La Dolce Vita is not only about
moral denunciation; it’s a film that has managed to
leave for posterity sequences that work in the
collective imaginary in an autonomous way.

— Juan Antonio Garcia Borrero

La Dolce Vita captures (in tabloid snapshot) the

ambivalence of the modern age by exulting in the very
decadence and excess that it also decries…

— Anton Bitel

A wonderful snapshot of Roman society at the time, a

sneering look at hedonism and at the same time an
exploration of human emptiness.

— Naman Ramachandran

See all 33 votes for La dolce vita

41. Journey to Italy

Roberto Rossellini, France/Italy 1954

Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a middle-aged

English couple whose marriage falls apart during a
journey through Italy. A pioneering work of modernism
that links Italian neo-realism with the French new wave.

See all 32 votes for Journey to Italy

Watch Journey to Italy online on BFI Player (UK only)

42=. Pather Panchali

Satyajit Ray, India 1955

The first part of Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed Apu Trilogy is a

lyrical, closely observed story of a peasant family in
1920s rural India.

Made for half-nothing, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali

is among the most seamless and graceful movies ever
made, the best of the Apu Trilogy and a stunning
achievement.

— Paul Whitington

See all 31 votes for Pather Panchali

42=. Some Like It Hot

Billy Wilder, USA 1959

On the run from Chicago mobsters, two musicians don

drag to join an all-girl jazz band fronted by Sugar Kane
(Marilyn Monroe) in Billy Wilder’s hugely popular comedy.

Some Like It Hot is quite simply the funniest film ever

made. Wilder’s farce educated me and my generation
about the strange nuances of adult sexuality and
provided the sex craze of my youth, Marilyn Monroe,
with her most iconic role.

— Joseph McBride
See all 31 votes for Some Like It Hot

42=. Gertrud

Carl Dreyer, Denmark 1964

The conflict of a woman between her husband, her lover,

and the lover of her youth, and her failure to find
happiness with any of them.

Gertrud is a stream of poetic hypnosis, and includes

one of the best performances in the history of cinema
by Nina Pens Rode.

— David Lipkes

Dreyer’s Gertrud, in my opinion, makes a persuasive

 case of how magnificent an art form cinema can be.
Jonathan Rosenbaum once confessed he had been
writing an article about it for over a year, so granted, I
don’t believe my tiny blurb would do the film justice.

— Boris Nelepo

See all 31 votes for Gertrud

42=. Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy 1965

Riffing on the classic couple-on-the run movie, enfant

terrible Jean-Luc Godard took the narrative innovations
of the French New Wave close to breaking point.

For me Pierrot Le Fou was the first really postmodern

 movie. The colourful story (a couple on the run) is
covered by pure cinematic invention and references to
all kinds of arts and culture.

— Zuzana Gindl-Tatarova

See all 31 votes for Pierrot le fou

Credit: Les Films de Mon Oncle

42=. Play Time

Jacques Tati, France 1967

Jacques Tati directs and stars in this fun account of the

bumbling M Hulot’s day in Paris.

Play Time shows the beauty and power of subtlety in

both cinema and comedy. The nuances of
performance and craft create a world that feels like no
 other but whose effect is universal to audiences.

— Charlotte Cook

Radical in every facet, Tati’s anarchic magnum opus

Play Time breaks every narrative rule, and is built on a
stunning mise en scène that remains unmatched
nearly half a century later. Most imperative of all, Play
Time is a wondrous film that compels you to observe
the world in a way you never have before.

— Joseph Fahim

See all 31 votes for Play Time

42=. Close-Up

Abbas Kiarostami, Iran 1990

Drama-documentary, based on the true story of an
unemployed movie buff who passes himself off as the
celebrated movie director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a
woman he meets on a bus. He leads her cinephile family
to believe that they will appear in his next film. Eventually
he ends up in jail where his trial is filmed by Kiarostami…

In Tehran some years ago it was reported, perhaps

apocryphally, that Jean-Luc Godard had said,
“Cinema is Griffith to Kiarostami.” My list certainly
reflects that idea, and I’m particularly glad to include
Kiarostami’s Close-up as a way of extending the
purview of the poll beyond the 1970s and
Europe/America.

— Godfrey Cheshire

Close-Up completely obliterates the boundary

between fiction and documentary in order to turn the
most seductive aspect of cinema upside down. And it
also shows how solemn and painful it can be (to want)
to be a filmmaker.

— Vlastimir Sudar

See all 31 votes for Close-Up

48=. The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo, Algeria/Italy 1966

Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece about the turbulent last

years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from the
perspective of both the guerrilla revolutionaries and the
French authorities.

A seminal political film of the 1960s and 1970s, and

banned in France as well! Although directed by an
Italian director, the film was made in collaboration with
the Algerian government and presents an African
perspective on events, marking it an important work in
the naissance of African cinema. Its neutral
perspective and documentary-style vérité
cinematography allegedly made it a manual for armed
insurrection, as well as a guide for counter-
 insurgency. Morricone’s driving score combine with
the film’s sly visual style and Pontecorvo’s passion for
the cause to produce a lasting impression.

— Michael Koller

See all 30 votes for The Battle of Algiers

Watch The Battle of Algiers online on BFI Player (UK

only)

48=. Histoire(s) du cinéma

Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland 1998

Godard’s dense, sprawling essay meditation on cinema

and its relationship to the political history of the twentieth
century.

As for Godard’s Histoire(s), while ostensibly about

 cinema’s past it is also, in its extraordinary collage of
forms, very much about its future.

— Chris Darke

See all 30 votes for Histoire(s) du cinéma

50=. City Lights

Charlie Chaplin, USA 1931

The Tramp wins the affections of a blind flower seller

(Virginia Cherrill) in this hilarious but heartbreaking
comedy – one of Charlie Chaplin’s uncontested
masterpieces.

No one merged emotional mush with slapstick

 brilliance in quite the same way at Chaplin in City
Lights – you can be angry at the movie for tugging at
your heartstrings, but you stand no chance of
resisting its pull.

— Michal Oleszczyk

City Lights is one of the highlights of film history,

where lofty classical melodrama happily coexists with
brilliant humour.

— Peter Shepotinnik

See all 29 votes for City Lights

50=. Ugetsu monogatari

Mizoguchi Kenji, Japan 1953

In war-torn 16th-century Japan, two men leave their

wives to seek wealth and glory in Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic
supernatural classic.

Via several dramatic and fantastic stories set in 16th

century feudal Japan, Ugetsu monogatari is a film of
extraordinary power and accuracy about the human
condition. The greatest of Japanese filmmakers, in his
films Mizoguchi expresses perfectly the universality of
an art that is however rooted in Japanese culture and
history. It is the apogee of film classicism.

— Olivier Pere

See all 29 votes for Ugetsu monogatari

50=. La Jetée

Chris Marker, France 1962

This science-fiction short directed by Chris Marker is
composed almost complete of still images. Its story,
about time travel following a nuclear apocalypse, inspired
Terry Gilliam’s 1995 feature 12 Monkeys.

La Jetée is still the short film that best embodies what

short film can do better than feature-length films: it
tells a complex story in a condensed way that leaves
much to our imagination, uses a visual style that you
could never uphold over feature length (at least not
without getting boring) but which is perfectly
employed here, and at 28 minutes it is exactly the
right length.

— Sabine Niewalda

See all 29 votes for La Jetée

53=. North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1959

Cary Grant’s ad exec falls foul of a mysterious crime plot

and a low-flying cropduster in Hitchcock’s witty, cross-
country thriller co-starring Eva-Marie Saint.

See all 28 votes for North by Northwest

53=. Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1954

Hitchcock’s fascination with voyeurism reached its

apotheosis in this mystery thriller, in which James
Stewart suspects he has witnessed a murder in a
neighbouring apartment.
See all 28 votes for Rear Window

53=. Raging Bull

Martin Scorsese, USA 1980

Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake

La Motta, Scorsese’s biopic is widely acknowledged as
one of the greatest films of the 1980s.

See all 28 votes for Raging Bull

56. M

Fritz Lang, Germany 1931

For his first sound film Fritz Lang turned to the story of a
child killer (Peter Lorre), who is hunted down by police
and underworld alike.

See all 27 votes for M

57=. The Leopard

Luchino Visconti, France/Italy 1963

Sumptous adaptation by Luchino Visconti of

Lampedusa’s classic novel, set in Sicily during the
Risorgimento of the 19th century. Burt Lancaster plays
the Prince of Salina, Alain Delon his nephew, and Claudia
Cardinale the beautiful woman they both fall for.

See all 26 votes for The Leopard

57=. Touch of Evil

Orson Welles, USA 1958

Orson Welles’ return to Hollywood after ten years working

in Europe is a sleazy border tale in which he takes centre
stage as gargantuan detective Hank Quinlan.

See all 26 votes for Touch of Evil

59=. Sherlock Jr

Buster Keaton, USA 1924

Keaton’s third feature is a breathtakingly virtuosic display

of every silent comedy technique imaginable, from his
own formidable physical skills to some then-
groundbreaking camera trickery.

See all 25 votes for Sherlock Jr

59=. Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA 1975

Stanley Kubrick’s exquisitely detailed adaptation of

William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about the
picaresque exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer.

See all 25 votes for Barry Lyndon

59=. La Maman et la putain

Jean Eustache, France 1973

Deals with the relations, largely sexual, between an

anarchic young man and his two mistresses, one
seemingly permanent, who keeps him, the other
seemingly casual.

See all 25 votes for La Maman et la putain

59=. Sansho Dayu

Mizoguchi Kenji, Japan 1954

This sweeping historical tragedy about two children

separated from their parents and sold into slavery
continued a run of late masterpieces from Kenji
Mizoguchi.

See all 25 votes for Sansho Dayu

63=. Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1957

On a road trip to receive an honorary degree, an elderly

academic (Victor Sjöstrom) looks back over his life in
Ingmar Bergman’s art-cinema classic.

See all 24 votes for Wild Strawberries

63=. Modern Times

Charles Chaplin, USA 1936

The final outing for Charlie Chaplin’s beloved Tramp

character finds him enduring the pratfalls and
humiliations of work in an increasingly mechanised
society.

See all 24 votes for Modern Times

63=. Sunset Blvd.

Billy Wilder, USA 1950

The most caustic of European émigré directors, Wilder

explored the movie industry and the delusions of stardom
in Hollywood’s great poison pen letter to itself.

See all 24 votes for Sunset Blvd.

63=. Night of the Hunter, The

Charles Laughton, USA 1955

Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as a director is a

complete one-off, a terrifying parable of the corruption of
innocence featuring a career-best performance from
Robert Mitchum.

See all 24 votes for The Night of the Hunter

63=. Pickpocket

Robert Bresson, France 1959

Robert Bresson chronicles the life of a petty thief in this

philosophical film, with a screenplay inspired by
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and a cast
featuring several non-professional actors.

See all 24 votes for Pickpocket

63=. Rio Bravo

Howard Hawks, USA 1958

A decade after Red River (1947), Howard Hawks

reteamed with John Wayne for this rambling western
riffing on the director’s usual themes of friendship and
professionalism.

See all 24 votes for Rio Bravo

69=. Blade Runner

Ridley Scott, Hong Kong/USA 1982

Loosely adapted from a novel by Phillip K. Dick, Ridley

Scott’s dark, saturated vision of 2019 Los Angeles is a
classic of popular science-fiction cinema.

See all 23 votes for Blade Runner

69=. Blue Velvet

David Lynch, USA 1986

In David Lynch’s idiosyncratic drama, a young man’s

curiosity draws him into the twisted criminal sub-culture
operating beneath the placid surface of his cosy
hometown.

See all 23 votes for Blue Velvet

69=. Sans Soleil

Chris Marker, France 1982

A veteran cameraman who has travelled throughout the

world relays his impressions on the different countries
and life in general to a female commentator.

See all 23 votes for Sans Soleil

69=. A Man Escaped

Robert Bresson, France 1956

True story of the hazardous and daring wartime escape

of a French officer from the condemned cell of a Nazi
prison, with action set to Mozart’s Great C-Minor Mass.

See all 23 votes for A Man Escaped

73=. The Third Man

Carol Reed, UK/USA 1949

An American abroad in post-war Vienna pursues his

missing friend down a rabbit hole of intrigue and moral
corruption in Carol Reed’s masterpiece of European noir.

See all 22 votes for The Third Man

73=. L’eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni, France/Italy 1962

Antonioni’s film charts the hot and cold relationship of a

young couple in bustling Rome.

See all 22 votes for L’eclisse

73=. Les enfants du paradis

Marcel Carné, France 1945

Made during the Nazi occupation of France, Marcel

Carne’s romantic epic of the 19th-century theatre world
is a life-affirming tribute to love, Paris and the stage.

See all 22 votes for Les enfants du paradis

73=. La grande illusion

Jean Renoir, France 1937

Jean Renoir’s pacifist classic is set in a German prisoner-

of-war camp during WWI, where class kinship is felt
across national boundaries.

See all 22 votes for La grande illusion

73=. Nashville

Robert Altman, USA 1975

Made to celebrate the bicentennial of American

Independence, Robert Altman’s footloose epic blends the
lives of 24 characters in the capital of country music.

See all 22 votes for Nashville

78=. Chinatown

Roman Polanski, USA 1974

Roman Polanski’s brilliant thriller stars Jack Nicholson as

a private eye uncovering corruption in 1930s Los
Angeles, a desert town where water equals power.

See all 21 votes for Chinatown

78=. Beau Travail

Claire Denis, France 1998

Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd but with

the action transferred to contemporary Djibouti, and the
French Foreign legion, Claire Denis’s film is balletic,
oblique and photographically stunning.

See all 21 votes for Beau Travail

78=. Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone, Italy/USA 1968

The railroad rushes westward, bringing power and

progress with it, in Sergio Leone’s grandest spaghetti
western, an operatic homage to Hollywood’s mythology
of the Old West.

See all 21 votes for Once Upon a Time in the West

81=. The Magnificent Ambersons

Orson Welles, USA 1942

Among the most famous of broken films, Orson Welles’

masterful follow-up to Citizen Kane was taken out of his
control and re-edited by the studio.

See all 20 votes for The Magnificent Ambersons

81=. Lawrence of Arabia

David Lean, UK 1962

An eccentric English officer inspires the Arabs to unite

against the Turks during WWI in David Lean’s seven
Oscar-winner, an epic in every sense.

See all 20 votes for Lawrence of Arabia

81=. The Spirit of the Beehive

Víctor Erice, Spain 1973

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, two small

sisters live in a remote village in Castille. A mobile cinema
screening of Frankenstein captures Ana’s imagination
vividly, and is still in her mind when she finds a wounded
soldier in the barn.

See all 20 votes for The Spirit of the Beehive

84=. Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman, France/Sweden 1984

The grand summation of Ingmar Bergman’s career, this

epic family drama drew on the director’s own childhood
experiences in early 20th century Sweden.

See all 19 votes for Fanny and Alexander

84=. Casablanca

Michael Curtiz, USA 1942

Everybody comes to Rick’s bar, including expat Rick’s

(Humphrey Bogart) former lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), in
one of Hollywood’s most-loved romantic melodramas.

See all 19 votes for Casablanca

84=. The Colour of Pomegranates

Sergei Parajanov, USSR 1968

Parajanov’s lyrical evocation of the life of the 18th century

Armenian poet Harutyan Sayatyan uses symbolic imagery
patterned after Armenian icons and the folk theatre
traditions of masque and mime, and is told through a
series of titled episodes.

See all 19 votes for The Colour of Pomegranates

84=. Greed

Erich von Stroheim, USA 1925

Silent cinema’s most famous ‘lost’ film, Von Stroheim’s

monumental study of three ordinary lives destroyed by
avarice was ruinously edited down by the studio.

See all 19 votes for Greed

84=. A Brighter Summer Day

Edward Yang, Taiwan 1991

Through a focus on one central male protagonist, an

idealistic student who refuses to compromise his moral
standards, Edward Yang’s historical memoir looks at
growing up in Taiwan during the 1960s and the problems
of military dictatorship, unemployment and immigration
from mainland China.

See all 19 votes for A Brighter Summer Day

84=. The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah, USA 1969

A gang of outlaws goes out in a blaze of violence and

glory in Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac film about the dying
days of the wild west.

See all 19 votes for The Wild Bunch

90=. Partie de campagne

Jean Renoir, France 1936

This featherlight, 40-minute romance directed by Jean

Renoir and based on a Guy de Maupassant story follows
a love affair over the course of a summer afternoon in the
countryside outside Paris.

See all 18 votes for Partie de campagne

90=. Aguirre, Wrath of God

Werner Herzog, Federal Republic of Germany 1972

Klaus Kinski stars as a megalomaniacal soldier leading a

group of conquistadores down river in search of El
Dorado on Werner Herzog’s oblique study of madness.

See all 18 votes for Aguirre, Wrath of God

90=. A Matter of Life and Death

Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, UK 1946

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s audacious

Technicolor fantasy, WWII airman David Niven finds
himself summoned to heaven after surviving a plane
crash that should have killed him.

See all 18 votes for A Matter of Life and Death

93=. The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1957

During the plague-ravaged middle ages, a knight buys

time for himself by playing chess with Death in Bergman’s
much-imitated arthouse classic.

See all 17 votes for The Seventh Seal

93=. Un chien andalou

Luis Buñuel, France 1928

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali collaborated in this

surrealist silent short, notorious for its eye-slashing
opening scene, its perplexing Freudian imagery and
dream-logic narrative flow.

See all 17 votes for Un chien andalou

93=. Intolerance

D.W. Griffith, USA 1916

Responding to criticisms of racism for his record-

breaking The Birth of a Nation, filmmaking pioneer D.W.
Griffith made this epic drama depicting intolerance
through the ages.

See all 17 votes for Intolerance

93=. A One and a Two

Edward Yang, Japan/Taiwan 1999

Edward Yang’s second film in our top 100 films offers a

lucid, novelistic tapestry of contemporary Taiwanese
anomie through the layers of multiple generations of a
Taipei family.

See all 17 votes for A One and a Two

93=. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, UK 1943

Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesey star in this wondrous

British Technicolor classic – one of cinema’s greatest
studies of ‘Englishness’.

See all 17 votes for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
93=. Touki Bouki

Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal 1973

A young boy and a girl decide to emigrate from Senegal

to France in search of a better life. They travel around the
country on a motorbike trying various schemes to raise
the money for the trip.

See all 17 votes for Touki Bouki

93=. Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federal Republic of Germany

1974

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough is an

unconventional love story with devastating emotional
power.

See all 17 votes for Fear Eats the Soul

93=. Imitation of Life

Douglas Sirk, USA 1959

Lana Turner shines in Douglas Sirk’s moving rags-to-

riches tale.

See all 17 votes for Imitation of Life

93=. Madame de…

Max Ophüls, France/Italy 1953

Tragic consequences ensue when a society woman

pawns the earrings her husband gave her, in Max Ophuls’
graceful and opulent period drama.

See all 17 votes for Madame de…