Say you got invited to participate in the Sight & Sound poll? what list of 10 films would you submit? and what reasons do you have for your choices?

maybe I'll tally up all the votes, if enough participate(I hope to see Cook submit El Cid)
rankings within the lists don't matter, all films are counted equally. from the website:



http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sigh ... -time-2012

I'm leaning towards ten films that had the biggest impact on me, don't think I'm qualified to say what the 'greatest' were.


from an Ebert blog about the list earlier in the year



http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/04/post_5.html

here are what some directors submitted (not available online yet, but all the ballots are in the magazine on news stands right now) I have no idea why Tarantino & Scorsese were allowed 12 choices.



http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ ... 03?page=1#

Off the cuff, here is what I came up with:

Fight Club
American Beauty
The Hours
Watchmen
Citizen Kane
Metropolis
Nosferatu
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
King Kong
2001: A Space Odyssey

you can take your time with this, no deadline. and edit your picks if you want to. it really is quite hard for me to come up with a list of just 10 (esp if it was to count towards something that only came around 10 years, like S&S. some of those directors made changes to the 10 they submitted in '02)

Josh did something similar 2 years ago, feel somewhat sure I'll include 4 of the 5 I listed back then in my list of 10 today.

viewtopic.php?f=45&t=2776

I'll chime in with my list and the reasons thereof once I've had time to get my thoughts together. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to read Paul Schrader's essay The Film Canon, which contains some valuable insight into how to think about constructing such a list.

My list:

Metropolis
Battleship Potemkin
The Seven Samurai
The Wages Of Fear
Videodrome
Ace In The Hole
The Graduate
Modern Times
La Dolce Vita
Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom

I started with Schrader's advice:



And like Schrader, I'll keep my list down to one movie per director. Those lousy Coen Brothers need to know who's boss.

While this might be my America/talkie-centrism speaking up, I think the answer to Bloom's question is obvious. Orson Welles was a major instigator in codifying the visual language of movies--and if you don't have a visual language, you don't have movies. Thus, there could not be a definitive film list without Welles, and if there can be only one film by Welles, it has to be Citizen Kane.

The question then becomes, which movies are in that league? They don't have to do the same stuff, but they have to have the chops and the soul to compete. It helps if they hit like a kick to the balls.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958): Hitchcock's persuasive direction is the star of this one, but if Norman Bates were to star in his own movie, it would outdo Vertigo for twisted obsession.

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959): The simplicity and restraint make for a far more intense movie than any post-MTV snatch 'n' grab exercise, and Bresson accurately shapes a character who is not suicidal, but self-sabotaging.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968): The visions of outer space and the classical music join to create an emotional fugue that no mechanistic plot could ever achieve, and the bigness of what it implies about us is both enchanting and terrifying.

Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972): Many movies are about violence, but very few are about sex, and even fewer are as serious about sex as they are about violence. This one frankly deals in sex as an expression of human anguish.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976): The sad comedy of loneliness in movie form.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979): Any idea about war that has been attacked by other movies with a sledgehammer is attacked by this one with a grenade launcher.

Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985): This movie is every bit as fascinating, ordered, enigmatic, and insane as the man whose life it portrays.

Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991): The frustration of artistic impotence seems to emerge from the writer's brain as a sweltering, oozing hotel, or vice versa. If that sentence is very close to making sense yet deliberately nonsensical, so is the movie.

Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002): The performances, stellar direction, and cleverness with which it plays with nested layers of reality unfortunately overshadow the movie's true nature as prolonged Chinese water torture for its central character.

EDIT:

I am deliberately not indicating an order aside from the years the movies were made, but if I were to halve this list, it would read...

Citizen Kane
2001: A Space Odyssey
Taxi Driver
Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters
Barton Fink

The Searchers
The Bridge on the River Kwai (or Lawrence)
Hatari
El Cid (or Roman Empire)
The Godfather (or Part 2)
Nashville
Catch Me if You Can (or ET)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or another Bond)
The Warriors
Mission to Mars

Taxi Driver - Did Travis go insane, or did he go sane? Who really knows?

The Godfather Part II - just edges out its younger brother. A brilliant tale of personal corruption.

The Shining - had to have Kubrick. And this is a classic of the genre.

The Blues Brothers - a childhood favourite and still utterly unique achievement

Remains of the Day - a beautiful and compelling warning against holding back.

Pulp Fiction - made me think about the art of film making

The Big Lebowski - I literally can't count the amount of times my friend and I have turned to this.

Saving Private Ryan - for me the best war film ever.

American Beauty - changed my life

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - so far ahead of its genre it's kinda ridiculous. Pure art.

Off the top of my head. In no particular order.

The Maltese Falcon (1941-John Huston) With this film Huston gave birth to both the film noir genre and the anitihero as leading character. It's easy to say that without it there would have been no Double Indeminity, no The Third Man, no Body Heat, no Sin City, no Blood Simple/The Man Who Wasn't There and so on. There would have been far fewer films where the hero was simply the better of the guys he went up against.

Sunset Boulevard (1950-Billy Wilder) A film liek this today would not be surprising. What's amazing is that this was made in 1950. A film made in 1950 that portrays Hollywood superstardom as the pipe dream it ultimately is for so many people. In addition to being brutally honest, WIlder was also prescient about our current tabloid/reality TV culture. Relevant then still effective today.

Taxi Driver (1976-Martin Scorsese) Easily the best portrayal of alienation, rage and insanity ever put on film. Offers an entry into teh minds of many real world psychos and sociopaths.

Do The Right Thing (1989-Spike Lee) Has a message. But doesn't shove it in your face. Instead it gets there subtly. Never preaches and takes time to develop recognizably human characters that are not easily shoved into hero and villain roles. Hasn't aged a minute since 1989. In short, this is easily the best social comment film ever.

Magnolia (1999-Paul Thomas Anderson) An epic film without mind blowing FX (unless you count the frogs) or battle scenes. Instead an epic film about regular day to day people trying to make their way in an ever changing world. A film about people cut off from happiness in the present because of what happened in the past. Despite the subject matter, no soap opera elements here. Anderson effortlessly integrates the surrealistic moments in with the realism and the film works all the better for it.

Dr. Strangelove (1964-Stanley Kubrick) The greatest satire of all-time, one of the greatest dark comedies of al-time and in the top 5 comdies of all-time list. I see quite a few people on here choosing 2001
as their Kubrick pick. This is mine.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966-Mike Nichols) Excellent adaptation of one of my favorite plays. Having come from the stage himself, Mike Nichols knows how to direct actors. Just as important he also understands how to make a film so it doesn't come off like a filmed play. Burton and Taylor give their best performances

Rosemary's Baby (1968-Roman Polanski) May be the best horror film of all-time. Also one of the ones that know how to generate suspense and not resort to needless gore.

Pulp Fiction (1994-Quentin Tarantino) One film that proves that cinema does not have to follow the Syd Field 3 act structure to work. Works well as a dialogue and character driven film rather than a plot-driven one and is full of some of the most memorable characters in cinema.

Apocalypse Now (1979-Francis Ford Coppola) An epic war film that burns its way into your subconscious the first time you see it, yet you find yourself discovering something new each time you watch it. A war film that transcends that limited classification and becomes an epic in the best sense of the word. As much as I love the first two Godfathers and The Conversation and as much guilty pleasure affection as I may have for the Outsiders, Rumble Fish and the Cotton Club, this is Coppola's masterpiece.

It's interesting that Pulp Fiction has popped up several times so far. It's an important film to me and to my evolution as a movie dweeb, but I had sort of an epiphany as I was winnowing my choices: as important as it is, I eliminated Pulp Fiction before I eliminated Inglourious Basterds.

I can't count the number of times my wife and I have turned to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But I think Citizen Kane might be a slightly better film, no?

Nice post. I'm surprised you think this highly of Pickpocket (though you're certainly not alone) as I think it's not even Bresson's best work: give me A Man Escaped any day. Particularly liked your rationale for Last Tango in Paris

Here's a list from me:

Pulp Fiction
Saving Private Ryan
Schindler's List
Citizen Kane
Ran
Henry V (Kenneth Branagh)
Grave of the Fireflies
No Country for Old Men
The Seven Samurai
Blade Runner

Some criteria (1) I have to actually like the film, although it's not necessarily one of my top 10. (2) I should admire it as a piece of art as well. (3) If it's influenced the art of filmmaking (for instance "Birth of a Nation," "Citizen Kane," "Potemkin") that counts extra. (4) It shouldn't put me to sleep.

So
The Maltese Falcon (Gets a big bonus for its influence on film noir.)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (gets a huge bonus under 2)
Citizen Kane
Sunrise (gets a huge bonus under 2)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
City Lights (I like "Modern Times" a bit better but "City Lights" is more influential.)
The Wizard of Oz (finishes ahead of "Singin' in the Rain" under criterion 3.)
Samurai Rebellion
8 1/2 (Gets a big bonus under 3)
Ugetsu

The next ten would include "Schindler's List," Modern Times," "All About Eve," "Pinocchio," "Singin' in the Rain," "High and Low," "Potemkin" and "It Happened One Night." The most difficult choice is between "Ugetsu" and "Schindler's List."

"The Human Condition" would be in the top 10 if I could consider it a single film rather than a trilogy.

Tarantino had Carrie & Bad New Bears on his list, but no Kane(only 18% of all the S&S voters had Kane on their lists)
At least post your own list before criticizing others.

For what it's worth, The Big Lebowski was on my list of candidates along with a few other Coen Brothers films. Sticking to the self-imposed rule of one movie per director, I had to pick Barton Fink.

Okay, now that you've seen what an off the cuff list looks like, here's one I'm going to put a little more thought into.

But first the nominees:

Top films by Genre:

Queer Cinema:
Ma Vie En Rose
Farewell My Concubine
Angels in America
The Hours
The Crying Game
Boys Don't Cry
Bound
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Superhero/Comic Book
Watchmen
X-Men and X-Men United
Spiderman 1 and 2
Superman Returns
The Dark Knight
V For Vendetta

War
Platoon
Full Metal Jacket
Jarhead
Saving Private Ryan
The Hurt Locker
Hero

Comedy
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
I *Heart* Huckabees
Hot Fuzz
The Birdcage
Being John Malkovich
Stranger than Fiction

Drama
Black Snack Moan
The Hours
The Godfather Trilogy
Memento
The Brave One
Rashomon
Citizen Kane

Science/Fiction and Fantasy
Lord of the Rings
Pans Labyrinth
Star Wars (A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back)
Harry Potter (The Prisoner of Askaban and The Order of the Phoenix)
Children of Men
Contact
Inception
The Matrix
Metropolis
Nosferatu
King Kong
The Truman Show

Top Films by Director:
Steven Spielberg:
Schindlers List
Minority Report
A.I: Artificial Intelligence

David Fincher
Fight Club
The Social Network
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Quentin Tarantino
Inglorius Bastards
Pulp Fiction
Kill Bill

The Coen Brothers
No Country For Old Men
The Big Lebowski
Fargo
A Serious Man

Kuberick
2001: A Space Odyssey
A Clockwork Orange
Full Metal Jacket

Spike Lee
Do the Right Thing
25th Hour
She Hate Me

By Era:
(90's to Present)
Fight Club
Contact
The Hours
American Beauty
Watchmen
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
AI: Artificial Intelligence
The Hurt Locker
Pulp Fiction
Inglorious Bastards
Lord Rings
25th Hour

60's though the 80's
The Detective
2001: A Space Odyssey
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Platoon
Blade Runner
Do the Right Thing

Pre-60's
Nosferatu
Metropolis
King Kong
Rashomon
Citizen Kane
High Noon

So...Drumroll please, the final list:

Fight Club
The Hours
American Beauty
Contact
King Kong
Citizen Kane
Metropolis
Nosferatu
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Inglorious Bastards

I criticized his rationale, not his movie. And Tarantino's picks are idiotic too. People making lists like this often are trying to make a statement, either about themselves or about a movie they want to bring attention to.

And meanwhile, I don't think posting my own list makes me any more qualified to criticize, but sure.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

It's amazingly made, defies conventionality at every turn, is about America and ambition and power while simultaneously being juicy and watchable. It is a singular vision, and a great film. There are days when I don't know for sure that it's the greatest, but it's a perfect choice

2. Apocalypse Now (1979)

One of my most stringent criteria for this list is that the movie be cinematic. Someone mentioned The Hours earlier, and quite apart from the fact that I think it's mediocre, it could never make my list because it's too literary. The best films of all time should be ones that take advantage of the visual medium that is cinema, and few do that better than this one. Sure it's a literary adaptation, but it turns Conrad's anti-colonial screed into a journey straight into hell, and completely transcends the war genre while doing so.

3. Schindler's List (1993)

I wonder if the fact that this is Spielberg and a Holocaust film make people think it's self-important Oscar prestige-y fare rather than the masterpiece of filmmaking that it actually is. Either way, it happily occupies a spot in my top 10

4. Chinatown (1974)

I think this one's falling out of favor in recent times (though it held fairly steady in the AFI polling) but I think it's a masterpiece. Nicholson's best performance, examination of the rot underneath Los Angeles, terrific direction, amazing ending -- it is the apotheosis of noir. It is what noir always wanted to be but couldn't due to the production code. And it is amazing.

5. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

I know it's only six years old, but that's about as old as Bicycle Thieves was when it was crowned the best film of all time in the first Sight & Sound poll. Regardless of its infancy, it belongs here. Every time I see it I'm astonished at how good it is. We are all lucky to have had such a film released in our lifetime.

6. The Godfather (1972)

Interestingly, this is great for all the reasons I said Citizen Kane was great, albeit a tad more conventionally. Ken will forgive me for having two Coppolas I hope.

7. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

A beautiful, devastating film featuring one of cinema's all-time great marriages of director and star, even if they hated each other. As good a take on madness and imperialism as ever has been made, it's something special.

8. Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

There have been very few great films made about women (and even fewer by them, but that's a different story) but RtRL is one of them. Beautifully filmed, riveting from start to finish, and with a wonderfully implied criticism of how men treat women, it's both deep and interesting -- a rare combination.

9. Pulp Fiction (1994)

I worry I'm being too fanboy here, but hey whatever. It's great, it's influential, it's cinematic, it's fascinating, it's well-acted...I can't leave it off.

10. Taxi Driver (1974)

There's no question I like Goodfellas more, but I think Taxi Driver is the greater film. Kind of. I'm really torn and it's killing me. But it's such an amazing distillation of New York in the 70s and its combination of Schrader's writing and Scorsese's direction is a match made in heaven. Plus DeNiro is fantastic and the ambiguous ending is terrific. Still, ask me tomorrow and I'll say Goodfellas.

Alright so I'm pretty sure of my Top 6 and pretty unsure of my Bottom 4. But that's not a bad list.

Major props for including that on the short list, but did we watch the same movie? If that's a comedy, so's Platoon. Hell if that's a comedy, then Before Sunrise is queer cinema

Yay!!

01: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Kubrick, 1968)
One of the most beautifully controlled and elegantly made films I've ever seen, Kubrick's 2001 is a cinematic ode to ideas beyond itself. In it's contrasting simplicity and grandiosity its inspires awe, remaining thoroughly focused yet distinctly abstract. Brilliantly designed in conception and masterfully handled in execution, 2001 remains one of the only films to mystify as much as it inspires; I find it a surpassingly beautiful cinematic experience.

02: ‘Nashville’ (Altman, 1975)
Altman's Nashville is as grand a picture as it is intimate, spending close to three hours simply observing a mass cavalcade of characters that Altman patiently allows to develop in front of our eyes, shedding a light upon them as equally as the entire nation he wished to convey. Nashville is at times a funny film, a ridiculous film, a serious film, a truly and tragically heartbreaking film. No scene will be as tragic to me as the character Sueleen Gay's striptease towards the end of the film, and nothing will ever persuade me against this film's undying greatness.

03: ‘The Wages of Fear’ (Clouzot, 1952)
People like to throw the term "existential" around a lot when they come across a "serious" film they don't really seem to wish to inquire upon in depth. Existential in nature it may be, Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 masterpiece, The Wages of Fear, is quite simply one of the bleakest, most nihilistic and devastating studies of characters reaching futilely for something beyond survival and suffering miserably in a world seemingly designed for their failure as much by the powers that be as by themselves. It is precisely and masterfully written, brilliantly executed by the man Alfred Hitchcock himself viewed as a personal artistic rival, and in every way one of the most perfectly (and most definitely intricately) designed films produced.

04: ‘Apocalypse Now’ (Coppola, 1979)
Coppola's 1979 madhouse masterpiece Apocalypse Now's triumphs as a film as often as ephemeral as they are bombastic. Cinematic in its core, it is one of the few films where its conception is as fascinating if not more so then its final execution, ranking with Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo in that narrow field. In its evaluation of the "hell of war", the film entered near as much its own hell in production. You could spend more hours and words than I currently have simply attempting to process this film, but as artistically defensible as it may remain in regards to its every behind the screen/on the screen aspects, nothing quite compares to the experience of simply beholding this physically messy and psychologically horrifying behemoth as watching it.

05: ‘Casablanca’ (Curtiz, 1942)
Imagine the rare film that surpasses itself. The film where every shot and edit, every delivery of a line of dialogue, every move and motion made by an actor in their role and every twist of the plot and screenplay is perfect; achieving a cinematic tranquility that remains impossible to deny and simply wonderful to behold. That is Casablanca.

06: ‘Come and See’ (Klimov, 1985)
If anything, Eli Klimov's 1985 Come and See is actually a more horrifying war film than both Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon put together. Ingrained with the pain of personal experience many praise Polanski's The Pianist for (I personally find it superior but overrated as compared to its often inexhaustible accolades), Come and See invites you to view a generally overlooked mass genocide from the viewpoint of a child, as the director was when these events occurred. No amount of reading or knowledge of the subject can prepare you for the sheer impact of Klimov's fascinatingly controlled yet almost apocalyptically chaotic treatise on the true horrors of war, less stemming from having survived the terrors involved than the anger having survived has accompanied.

07: ‘Au Revoir, Les Enfants’ (Malle, 1987)
Louis Malle's 1987 Au Revoir, Les Enfants is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. It is simply approached, beautifully controlled and devastating in impact. I can give no higher praise to the film than simply to watch it.

08: ‘Breathless’ (Godard, 1960)
Watching Breathless is like taking a breath of fresh air. Godard's approach is simple yet invites thoughtful analysis, implores you to look deeper than simply what is seen yet consistently delivers beautiful images that allow the viewer to take in the film at hand. Many ask, "what's so great about Breathless?", I find it to be the rediscovery and reevaluation of complexity versus and in correlation with simplicity that so fascinated its original viewers in 1960. It is as much apart of the cinematic cannon as it against it, and goddamn it I love it so!

09: ‘Pinocchio’ (Sharpsteen/Luske, 1940)
Between my love for Spielberg's (and Kubrick's) A.I. and Disney Studio's original Pinocchio I think you can tell I have a special attachment to this tale of a child who wanted to be a real boy. Let me put this down in writing real quick: I fucking love this movie. I find it to be one of the most beautifully animated films I've ever seen with some of the most thoroughly and invitingly realized characters to grace the screen. It's thematically dense and in my opinion remains one of the most magical film experiences to have ever graced cinema. Snow White and Cinderella can suck it, nothing in the Disney cannon got nothing on this.

10: ‘Magnolia’ (Anderson, 1999)
One day in one of my favorite video stores (now, unfortunately, gone the way of the dinosaur) I was looking for a film to complete the "3 for $20" DVD deal they always ran. Searching the shelves I came across Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. I had heard of the film and had an idea of some of the actors involved, but had no idea of its plot or just what the fuck exactly the film was about. It remains to this day one of the fastest three hours I've sat through and I've still seen it more than any other film on this list besides Pinocchio (because lord knows I wasn't watching this shit when I was five). Anderson's 1999 magnum opus shares all the best qualities of Altman's Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, at once precisely focused on its many colliding and coinciding characters yet also obtusely fascinated by the themes that make the story tick. I cannot express enough love for this film, a kaleidoscope of the elder's sins being expelled upon the young and the never ending cycle of pain, loss, hope and transcendence the human experience brings.

This list is as true to myself as it is objective as I feel I can be. Here are some other films that competed for a spot.
‘Aliens’ (Cameron, 1986)
‘Amadeus’ (Forman, 1984)
‘Chinatown’ (Polanski, 1974)
‘Dazed and Confused’ (Linklater, 1993)
‘Fargo’ (Coen, 1996)
‘The Godfather’ (Coppola, 1972)
‘In the Mood for Love’ (Wong, 2000)
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (Akerman, 1975)
‘L’Age d’Or’ (Bunuel, 1930)
‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ (Altman, 1971)
‘Platoon’ (Stone, 1986)
‘Pulp Fiction’ (Tarantino, 1994)
‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (Spielberg, 1981)
‘Se7en’ (Fincher, 1995)
‘Silence of the Lambs’ (Demme, 1991)
‘Vertigo’ (Hitchcock, 1958)