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The 100 greatest movies of all time
Every 10 years since 1952, the cinephile bible Sight & Sound has asked critics, programmers and academics to vote on a list of the greatest films ever made. The first top pick was the Italian neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves, whose brief reign led into the half-century dominion of Citizen Kane, which was toppled in turn seven years ago by Vertigo.
Meanwhile, world cinema warhorses such as Tokyo Story, The Rules of the Game and 8½ have found a regular foothold in the poll over the years, and arguably their places in history along with it. This ongoing, tectonically slow but forceful process, is more or less where the cinematic canon comes from. So whatever you do, please don’t mistake this thing for that.
Think of the list below as less of a canon than a pop gun. It is the unabashedly partial and self-serving result of one critic – me – being asked to set down the 100 greatest films as I saw them, then cook up a rationalisation post hoc. Like I suspect many cinephiles, I already had a running best-of Rolodex in the back of my head, but I took this opportunity to start again from scratch, filling and then endlessly reshuffling a spreadsheet over a couple of weeks, and setting myself three rules to stick to in the process.
The first was that my choices would be split into categories, starting with 13 well-established genres: comedy, romance, psychological drama, thriller, film noir, western, war, science fiction, horror, action, documentary, blockbuster and musical. I added five more of my own, based on common themes: childhood, family life, journeys, specific times and places, and film itself.
This was mainly to ensure I didn’t end up overloading on film noir – easily done when you’re talking about the essence of cinema, not least because its signature mood of shadow-skulking voyeurism is basically what watching a movie actually is.
But by stopping at five, it would keep things as lively and varied as possible, even if it meant snubbing the likes of Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Never mind. The thing about noir is that it turns up everywhere, and there are at least another 10 buried elsewhere on the list.
I’d also planned to carve out a separate, 19th category for animation. But the second rule – anything running 40 minutes or longer would be eligible, in line with the British Film Institute’s definition of “feature length” – put paid to that. In theory anyone can shoot a movie, but it takes serious time and effort to animate one, which is why long-standing, well-resourced studios like Disney, Pixar and Ghibli tend to dominate the best-ofs.
That’s no slight on the three companies’ work, terrific examples of which appear below. But a standalone top 10 of animated features could only make so much sense of a medium whose most radical and influential work is often very short – no Chuck Jones, no Tex Avery, no Alison de Vere, no Brothers Quay, no Frédéric Back. So I scrapped it and decided animations should have to earn their places by genre and theme, just like everything else. In the end, nine did.
The features-only rule made things harder in a couple of other categories too: documentaries, which had to manage without short-form masterpieces like Listen to Britain and Night and Fog, and also comedy, in which the early classics, including all the best work of Laurel and Hardy, tended to be “two-reelers” that ran for 20 minutes. But in both cases, it didn’t feel unduly restrictive.
That was the job of Rule Three: only one film per director would be permitted. On the most recent Sight & Sound top 50, there are four Godards, three each from Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Francis Ford Coppola, and two Akira Kurosawas, Ozus and Hitchcocks. No doubt these men are among the most influential directors who ever lived. But greatness and influence isn’t quite the same thing, and I was wary that a slew of repeated big names would only end up crowding out everyone else.
Besides, finding common ground is what polls are all about, but a critic who tries to second-guess the consensus isn’t much of a critic. And let’s be honest: monumental figure that Godard is, if you think he’s responsible for four of the best 100 films ever made, you should probably watch some more films.
One happy upshot of the third and final rule was that it immediately disbarred half of the most obvious picks. I couldn’t have both Vertigo a Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey a Barry Lyndon, Groundhog Day a Caddyshack. But to me, their absence only makes the list stronger: there’s a sense, or at least I hope there is, that every appearance by a top-ranking auteur had to be doubly justified, and nothing was waved through out of a sense of obligation. (On a related note, there’s no Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, The Shawshank Redemption or Mary Poppins either. I don’t think they’re missed.)
With some directors, selecting a favourite project felt like picking the best course from an all-time-great meal: working out which Brian De Palma or Andrea Arnold or Robert Altman topped all others in bodies of work that seemed to be in constant conversation with themselves was like weighing chocolate mousse against steak.
For others – Richard Linklater, François Ozon, Takashi Miike, Werner Herzog – I came to realise the collective value of their oeuvre meant more to me than any single part of it. And in at least one case, it meant choosing a film I don’t even think is the director in question’s personal best, but it was needed to paint the fullest possible picture of what cinema is. (Like it or not, one of the 100 had to be a superhero movie.)
But beyond that, I gave myself no quotas to fill – no guidelines around the balance of high and low, new and old, male and female, subtitled and anglophone, talkie and silent. Beforehand, I assumed I’d be less likely to describe recent releases as all-time-greats than more established classics. But almost a third of the films are from either the 1980s, the decade in which I was born, or the 2000s, the decade in which I became a critic.
Eleven of them have British directors, which I suspect may be more than a non-British critic would choose. More than half are American, but then they would be – thinking in terms of genre means thinking like Hollywood. Split the thing 50/50 between comedies and dramas and it would have doubtless looked very different – but lists like this are just freeze-frames of arguments that never end.
Is The Palm Beach Story opravdu better than The Lady Eve? Ask me again in 10 years, or minutes, and we’ll see.
Best comedy movies
The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)
No on-screen chemistry has ever out-crackled that of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a divorcing couple lobbing spanners into each other’s rebound romances.
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