My Top 1,000 Favorite Films
by armanmarok | created - 23 Oct 2014 | updated - 07 Jun 2018 | PublicAs the title states, this is the list of 1,000 films I like the most (and I consider plenty of these films to be some of the best ever made).
As a guy who grew up during the digital age, I am proud to have a film list that does not only extend as far back as 1995 (or sometimes even 2008), and I can safely say that I like films from every genre, both from the arthouse hemisphere and the mainstream hemisphere.
I limited it to 1 film per credited director because that was how Akira Kurosawa made his list, and if The Emperor did it that way, who am I to argue, eh? >_<
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1. Sunrise (1927)
Passed | 94 min | Drama, Romance
A sophisticated city woman seduces a farmer and convinces him to murder his wife and join her in the city, but he ends up rekindling his romance with his wife when he changes his mind at the last moment.
Director: F.W. Murnau | Stars: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston, Bodil Rosing
Votes: 53,810 | Gross: $0.54M
Dubbing F.W. Murnau’s 1927 silent opus, Sunrise, a “song” is an understatement. It is a grand aria of the human condition, an elaborate, orchestrated dance that shows us what it is to love and to be loved, to be strong and frail and conflicted and certain all at the same time–to be human, with all that it means. And more than anything, Sunrise is a paean to such faith–not just faith in love, but faith in our fellow man, and in the belief that good will always triumph over evil, and the light of the rising sun will always dispel the darkness. (Brandie Ashe)
2. L'Avventura (1960)
Not Rated | 144 min | Drama, Mystery, Romance
A woman disappears during a Mediterranean boating trip. During the search, her lover and her best friend become attracted to each other.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni | Stars: Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, Lea Massari, Dominique Blanchar
Votes: 32,607
Many films are called “classic,” but few qualify as turning points in the evolution of cinematic language, films that opened the way to a more mature art form. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura is such a work. It divided film history into that which came before and that which was possible after its epochal appearance. It expanded our knowledge of what a film could be and do. It is more than a classic, it’s an historical milestone. (Gene Youngblood)
3. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
PG | 102 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
A surreal, virtually plotless series of dreams centered around six middle-class people and their consistently interrupted attempts to have a meal together.
Director: Luis Buñuel | Stars: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier
Votes: 46,782 | Gross: $0.20M
Sly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film. (Jay Carr)
4. Ikiru (1952)
Not Rated | 143 min | Drama
A bureaucrat tries to find meaning in his life after he discovers he has terminal cancer.
Director: Akira Kurosawa | Stars: Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka
Votes: 87,432 | Gross: $0.06M
Centuries from now people just like us - mortal, seeking and often fearful - will look back at us, their ancestors, and look at our artwork as a key to how we coped with fragility and mortality. I'm sure they will look at the works of painter Pablo Picasso, they may gain understanding from the compositions of composers like Philip Glass and Samuel Barber, but I am absolutely certain that of all the works of the past century they will see themselves most in Kurosawa's masterpiece "Ikiru". (Chris Magee)
5. Metropolis (1927)
Not Rated | 153 min | Drama, Sci-Fi
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
Director: Fritz Lang | Stars: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
Votes: 185,325 | Gross: $1.24M
Is Fritz Lang's 1927 epic Metropolis the most influential film ever? It certainly spawned the cinema of futurism, and, watching it today, it's uncanny to see how many shadows of cinema yet to come it already contains. (Jonathan Romney)
6. The Decalogue (1989–1990)
TV-MA | 572 min | Drama
Ten television drama films, each one based on one of the Ten Commandments.
Stars: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini
Votes: 27,853 | Gross: $0.10M
Throughout the history of film, there has been a select group of standout pictures -- movies that, for technical or artistic reasons, have made an indelible imprint on viewers. Taken as one ten-hour exploration of the human experience, Dekalog is deserving of a place in that unique cadre of films. There is no other motion picture out there like Dekalog, the product of an expert storyteller/filmmaker at the height of his craft, creating a masterwork the likes of which comes along only once in a great while. (James Berardinelli)
7. Vertigo (1958)
PG | 128 min | Mystery, Romance, Thriller
A former San Francisco police detective juggles wrestling with his personal demons and becoming obsessed with the hauntingly beautiful woman he has been hired to trail, who may be deeply disturbed.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
Votes: 426,461 | Gross: $3.20M
One of the landmarks—not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art. A thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema. (Dave Kehr)
8. Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Not Rated | 90 min | Drama, Horror
A surgeon causes an accident which leaves his daughter disfigured and goes to extreme lengths to give her a new face.
Director: Georges Franju | Stars: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault
Votes: 35,098 | Gross: $0.05M
...may be the purest horror film ever made. From the subtle voyeurism of its opening credits through its impossibly bleak conclusion, it subjects us to the kind of unrelenting nightmare we only wish we could wake up from. (Rob Humanick)
9. Laura (1944)
Passed | 88 min | Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery
A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating.
Directors: Otto Preminger, Rouben Mamoulian | Stars: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price
Votes: 51,364 | Gross: $4.36M
A great antidote to the 'old movies are no fun' attitude many people slip into as soon as they learn a film is in black and white. (Brian Webster)
10. La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
Unrated | 238 min | Drama
The former famous painter Frenhofer revisits an abandoned project using the girlfriend of a young visiting artist. Questions about truth, life, and artistic limits are explored.
Director: Jacques Rivette | Stars: Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart, Marianne Denicourt
Votes: 9,355 | Gross: $0.41M
The best film I have ever seen about the physical creation of art, and about the painful bond between an artist and his muse. Some movies are worlds that we can sink into, and La Belle Noiseuse is one of them. (Roger Ebert)
11. Playtime (1967)
Not Rated | 155 min | Comedy
Monsieur Hulot curiously wanders around a high-tech Paris, paralleling a trip with a group of American tourists. Meanwhile, a nightclub/restaurant prepares its opening night, but it's still under construction.
Director: Jacques Tati | Stars: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Rita Maiden, France Rumilly
Votes: 25,887
To try and conjure simplistic notions about what Playtime is about deems to lessen the film's power and effect. Tati's magnum opus seems unlike anything before or after, it’s a true original and it was left to François Truffaut to define it as "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently". Unfortunately we still haven’t found that planet but while the search goes on we can revisit Tativille and marvel in wonderment like a child at the refracted brilliance of a true artist. (D.W. Mault)
12. The Godfather (1972)
R | 175 min | Crime, Drama
The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola | Stars: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Diane Keaton
Votes: 2,009,479 | Gross: $134.97M
A fantastic reminder of why 70s Hollywood is so often the benchmark for modern moviedom to aspire to. (Empire Magazine)
13. In a Lonely Place (1950)
Not Rated | 94 min | Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery
A potentially violent screenwriter is a murder suspect until his lovely neighbor clears him. However, she soon starts to have her doubts.
Director: Nicholas Ray | Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
Votes: 35,193
The grayest, most morally ambiguous of film noirs -- and arguably the most self-reflexive. (J. Hoberman)
14. The Lady Eve (1941)
Passed | 94 min | Comedy, Romance
A trio of classy card sharks targets a socially awkward brewery heir, until one of them falls in love with him.
Director: Preston Sturges | Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette
Votes: 23,354
A model for the entire corpus of American film comedy, the kind of script that you want to hold up and say "this is what you do" to aspiring writers. It is one of the most triumphant delights of pre-WWII Hollywood, the comedy upon which Sturges's great and well-earned reputation most securely resides, and there is not a single frame of it I would change, move, or take away. (Tim Brayton)
15. Band of Outsiders (1964)
Not Rated | 95 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
Two crooks with a fondness for old Hollywood B-movies convince a languages student to help them commit a robbery.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard | Stars: Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard, Louisa Colpeyn
Votes: 27,032 | Gross: $0.04M
It's as if a French poet took an ordinary banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines. (Pauline Kael)
16. Wild Strawberries (1957)
Not Rated | 91 min | Drama, Romance
After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.
Director: Ingmar Bergman | Stars: Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand
Votes: 114,877
I cannot begin to detail the apt and lovely devices by which Bergman conveys this excursion into a man's spirit. Its evocations are never pretentious, never sentimental---though often tender and usually painful. It is a ruthless lyricism that does not despair. Wild Strawberries is the testament, I suspect quite directly personal, of a man who thoroughly understands how terrible it is to be a human being, and who is glad to accept the consequences. The screen has never been used with greater art or for more humane needs. (Robert Hatch)
17. Sans Soleil (1983)
Not Rated | 100 min | Documentary, Drama
A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.
Director: Chris Marker | Stars: Amilcar Cabral, Florence Delay, Arielle Dombasle, Riyoko Ikeda
Votes: 12,122 | Gross: $0.03M
It is tempting, and not unjustified, to speculate that one reason for Marker’s growing visibility and popularity is that, as a culture, we have now finally caught up with works that once seemed like dispatches from another planet. (Catherine Lupton)
18. Day of Wrath (1943)
Not Rated | 110 min | Drama, History
The young wife of an aging priest falls in love with his son amidst the horror of a merciless witch hunt in 17th-century Denmark.
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer | Stars: Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Sigrid Neiiendam, Kirsten Andreasen
Votes: 11,068
A harrowing portrait of ideological persecution - the tragic consequences of a misdirected cruelty borne of intolerance and repression. (Strictly Film School)
19. Stalker (1979)
Not Rated | 162 min | Drama, Sci-Fi
A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes.
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky | Stars: Alisa Freyndlikh, Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolay Grinko
Votes: 144,571 | Gross: $0.23M
Represents the summit of Soviet cinema and remains one of the most poetic and beautiful of all Russian films. (Michael Wilmington)
20. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Not Rated | 106 min | Crime, Film-Noir, Mystery
A doomed female hitchhiker pulls Mike Hammer into a deadly whirlpool of intrigue, revolving around a mysterious "great whatsit".
Director: Robert Aldrich | Stars: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez
Votes: 22,063
In the dingy, black-and-white halls of the film-noir pantheon, they've a special place set aside for Kiss Me Deadly. (Film4)
21. Harakiri (1962)
Not Rated | 133 min | Action, Drama, Mystery
When a ronin requesting seppuku at a feudal lord's palace is told of the brutal suicide of another ronin who previously visited, he reveals how their pasts are intertwined - and in doing so challenges the clan's integrity.
Director: Masaki Kobayashi | Stars: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita, Tetsurô Tanba
Votes: 68,483
A small masterpiece of slow-build tension, progressive reveal and cinematic restraint, one whose gut-kick drama is potently infused with socio-political overtones that are in no way anchored to the time and place. (Cine Outsider)
22. Children of Paradise (1945)
Not Rated | 189 min | Drama, Romance
The theatrical life of a beautiful courtesan in 1830s Paris and the four men who love her.
Director: Marcel Carné | Stars: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoir
Votes: 21,155
Children of Paradise may not derive from an identifiable literary source, but watching it is like losing oneself in an immense novel, whose characters inhabit an occult world of moral absolutes, measured against which ordinary life feels pallid. No wonder Truffaut went back to it again and again. No wonder it remains, in every sense, a perennial classic. (Dudley Andrew)
23. Umberto D. (1952)
Not Rated | 89 min | Drama
An elderly man and his dog struggle to survive on his government pension in Rome.
Director: Vittorio De Sica | Stars: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova
Votes: 28,130 | Gross: $0.07M
A disconcerting and irrefutable observation on the human condition. I have no hesitation in stating that the cinema has rarely gone such a long way towards making us aware of what it is to be a man. (André Bazin)
24. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Not Rated | 106 min | Comedy, Crime
A distant poor relative of the Duke D'Ascoyne plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession.
Director: Robert Hamer | Stars: Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood
Votes: 39,685
A comedy made how they should all be made: pitch black and full of dry intelligent wit. Kind Hearts and Coronets, possibly the most well known and distinctive production from the famed Ealing Studios, brings together a brilliant combination of visual splendor, tour de force acting, and satirical writing to earn its place among the greatest comedies of all time. (Bonjour Tristesse)
25. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
PG | 95 min | Comedy, War
An unhinged American general orders a bombing attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop.
Director: Stanley Kubrick | Stars: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
Votes: 517,572 | Gross: $0.28M
Dr. Strangelove reverberates the necessity for satire through the ages and delivers a film worth re-watching again and again. Full of humor, excellent character performances, and an unbelievable grasp on satirical dialogue and the camera’s ability to capture golden improvisational performances that lend well to the overall uncontrollable and ludicrous context of the film and its subject matter. This director and this film will always be one of the great cinematic landmarks of the 20th century. (Todd McHenry)
26. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
PG-13 | 166 min | Western
A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad.
Director: Sergio Leone | Stars: Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards
Votes: 348,804 | Gross: $5.32M
Explores legends and entombs myths into a film that is timeless and will live on as a work of art even if the western as we once knew it disappeared alongside its heroes. (Ryan Cracknell)
27. The Earrings of Madame De... (1953)
Not Rated | 105 min | Drama, Romance
When an aristocratic woman known only as "Madame de . . ." sells a pair of earrings given to her by her husband in order to pay some debts, she sets off a chain reaction of financial and carnal consequences that can end only in despair.
Director: Max Ophüls | Stars: Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio De Sica, Jean Debucourt
Votes: 11,100
Should the day ever come when movies are granted the same respect as the other arts, The Earrings of Madame de... will instantly be recognized as one of the most beautiful things ever created by human hands. (Dave Kehr)
28. Paris, Texas (1984)
R | 145 min | Drama
Travis Henderson, an aimless drifter who has been missing for four years, wanders out of the desert and must reconnect with society, himself, his life, and his family.
Director: Wim Wenders | Stars: Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, Dean Stockwell, Sam Berry
Votes: 118,633 | Gross: $2.18M
Paris, Texas is that rare thing: a movie of intelligence and beauty and poetry, but also based on emotionally believable characters and a forward-moving, narrative thrust. You can watch it for its fascinating, moving story, or you can read between the lines and find something more profound. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
29. The Rules of the Game (1939)
Not Rated | 110 min | Comedy, Drama
A bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II, as the rich and their poor servants meet up at a French chateau.
Director: Jean Renoir | Stars: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély
Votes: 31,293
The word "Mozartean", denoting an uncanny combination of elegance and strength, pathos and wit, artifice and candor, is thrown around a little too eagerly by critics, but one movie, as almost everyone agrees, deserves this supreme benediction -- Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. (David Denby)
30. Out of the Past (1947)
Approved | 97 min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
A private eye escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up with him. Now he must return to the big city world of danger, corruption, double crosses, and duplicitous dames.
Director: Jacques Tourneur | Stars: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming
Votes: 40,871
Quite possibly the most perfect example of film noir to emerge from Hollywood during that genre's reign. (Matt Brunson)
31. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
R | 174 min | Drama, Romance
A filmmaker recalls his childhood when falling in love with the pictures at the cinema of his home village and forms a deep friendship with the cinema's projectionist.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore | Stars: Philippe Noiret, Enzo Cannavale, Antonella Attili, Isa Danieli
Votes: 282,572 | Gross: $11.99M
There are films as lovely, but none lovelier than "Cinema Paradiso," a folkloric salute to the medium itself, flickering with yesterday's innocence and lingering on the mind like bubbles in wine. This is a magic lantern in a Sicilian boy's hand, its warm light shed on the riches of life in a poor, stone-built land. It finds laughter in the burlesque of grade school dunces and the tedium of a granny's knitting needles. It finds courage in an old man's smile and a widow's tears. It is, in a word, exquisite. (Rita Kempley)
32. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Approved | 96 min | Drama, Film-Noir
Powerful but unethical Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker coerces unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco into breaking up his sister's romance with a jazz musician.
Director: Alexander Mackendrick | Stars: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner
Votes: 35,664
One of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk; and the movie can take a place, without blushing, among the best ever made. (TIME Magazine)
33. Amélie (2001)
R | 122 min | Comedy, Romance
Despite being caught in her imaginative world, Amelie, a young waitress, decides to help people find happiness. Her quest to spread joy leads her on a journey where she finds true love.
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet | Stars: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta
Votes: 793,698 | Gross: $33.23M
The rarest of cinematic rarities - a schmaltz-free feelgooder which doesn't just make you feel good, but reminds you that true love can exist and that beauty can be found in even the most seemingly mundane of places. Quite simply, c'est parfait. (Total Film)
34. Rio Bravo (1959)
Passed | 141 min | Drama, Western
A small-town sheriff in the American West enlists the help of a disabled man, a drunk, and a young gunfighter in his efforts to hold in jail the brother of the local bad guy.
Director: Howard Hawks | Stars: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson
Votes: 67,980 | Gross: $12.54M
To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water. (Roger Ebert)
35. Closely Watched Trains (1966)
Not Rated | 92 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
An apprentice train dispatcher at a village station seeks his first sexual encounter and becomes despondent when he is unable to perform.
Director: Jirí Menzel | Stars: Václav Neckár, Josef Somr, Vlastimil Brodský, Vladimír Valenta
Votes: 13,831 | Gross: $3.27M
Gentle, politically aware and, yes, closely observed, this is a beautiful paean to timidity, innocence and plain old growing up. (Empire Online)
36. Late Spring (1949)
Not Rated | 108 min | Drama
Several people try to talk 27-year-old Noriko into marrying, but all she wants is to keep on caring for her widowed father.
Director: Yasujirô Ozu | Stars: Chishû Ryû, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Haruko Sugimura
Votes: 19,283
...remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema's masterpieces. (Wally Hammond)
37. Network (1976)
R | 121 min | Drama
A television network cynically exploits a deranged former anchor's ravings and revelations about the news media for its own profit, but finds that his message may be difficult to control.
Director: Sidney Lumet | Stars: Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall
Votes: 170,430
A classic movie, whose qualities remind us that there once was a Hollywood where such sophisticated treats could be made. (Tony Sloman)
38. Yi Yi (2000)
Not Rated | 173 min | Drama, Romance
Each member of a middle-class Taipei family seeks to reconcile past and present relationships within their daily lives.
Director: Edward Yang | Stars: Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issei Ogata, Kelly Lee
Votes: 28,337 | Gross: $1.14M
Yi Yi is ultimately a film that imparts its meaning and its impact through its exquisite sense of balance—between here and elsewhere, past and present, the ideal and the conditional, the mundane and the extraordinary. It is a film of, and about, grace. And that is a rare thing. (Kent Jones)
39. Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Not Rated | 124 min | Drama
In medieval Japan, a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi | Stars: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyôko Kagawa, Eitarô Shindô
Votes: 18,206
Partly realistic, partly poetic, fully moral, this deservingly canonized behemoth is one of the relatively few films that transcends the medium to become a mandatory viewing experience for anyone that identifies themselves as a human being. (Rob Humanick)
40. Nashville (1975)
R | 160 min | Comedy, Drama, Music
Over the course of a few hectic days, numerous interrelated people prepare for a political convention.
Director: Robert Altman | Stars: Keith Carradine, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Shelley Duvall
Votes: 28,535 | Gross: $14.82M
If Robert Altman’s radically freewheeling, multicharacter country-music extravaganza didn’t revolutionize filmmaking as some of its partisans predicted it would, it did capture as no other film has ever done the full complexity of America, rich with contradictions, rife with neurosis, and convulsed by the celebrity madness of ambition and envy. (Molly Haskell)
41. Léon: The Professional (1994)
R | 110 min | Action, Crime, Drama
12-year-old Mathilda is reluctantly taken in by Léon, a professional assassin, after her family is murdered. An unusual relationship forms as she becomes his protégée and learns the assassin's trade.
Director: Luc Besson | Stars: Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman, Danny Aiello
Votes: 1,244,205 | Gross: $19.50M
It’s everything you could want in a movie; tragedy, action, love, laughter and more but most of all, it’s down to earth. It’s a must-see if you haven’t already, and a must-watch-again if you already have. (Film Muse)
42. Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Not Rated | 103 min | Drama, Romance, War
As World War II and the German occupation ends, the Polish resistance and the Soviet forces turn on each other in an attempt to take over leadership in Communist Poland.
Director: Andrzej Wajda | Stars: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Adam Pawlikowski
Votes: 13,452
When you watch Ashes and Diamonds, remember, you're not just seeing a film: you're looking at a manifesto that has found a voice and a face and speaks for a whole deceived generation. (Alexander Walker)
43. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Passed | 83 min | Comedy, Crime, Romance
A gentleman thief and a lady pickpocket join forces to con a beautiful perfume company owner. Romantic entanglements and jealousies confuse the scheme.
Director: Ernst Lubitsch | Stars: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles
Votes: 16,142 | Gross: $1.04M
A masterclass in performance and directing -- and shows how romantic comedy is not for amateurs. (Urban Cinefile Critics)
44. Brazil (1985)
R | 132 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
A bureaucrat in a dystopic society becomes an enemy of the state as he pursues the woman of his dreams.
Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond
Votes: 211,092 | Gross: $9.93M
It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kafka and Salvador Dalí, and shot from cruelly low angles. (Wesley Morris)
45. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
Not Rated | 110 min | Biography, Drama, History
A young man named Kaspar Hauser suddenly appears in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to talk or walk, and bearing a strange note.
Director: Werner Herzog | Stars: Bruno S., Walter Ladengast, Brigitte Mira, Willy Semmelrogge
Votes: 18,886
Werner Herzog is a nonpareil filmmaker. If there can be such a thing as instinct into so rigorous an art as filmmaking, then Herzog is as close to a pure beast in that art as one can get. His hour and fifty minute long 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which he wrote, produced, and directed, and which won that year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, about the infamous case of a wild child who strode into Nuremburg in 1828, with a note proclaiming his name, and a bizarre tale of being raised in a dark cell for perhaps a decade and a half, which led to decades of articles, books, and a place in Fortean lore, is one of those films that no other filmmaker could make. (Dan Schneider)
46. A Gentle Woman (1969)
88 min | Drama, Romance
A young woman kills herself, leaving no explanation to her grief-stricken pawnbroker husband. We learn in flashback about how they met, married, and how she failed to adapt her lifestyle to... See full summary »
Director: Robert Bresson | Stars: Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin, Jeanne Lobre, Claude Ollier
Votes: 3,053
A film of extraordinary power, and even within Bresson's almost clinical approach, it is practically exploding with humanity of the most indelible kind. Bresson plunges us headlong into the terrible beauty of life and what it means to be human. We are, without a doubt, all the better for it. (Greg Klymkiw)
47. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Not Rated | 112 min | Comedy, Romance
When a rich woman's ex-husband and a tabloid-type reporter turn up just before her planned remarriage, she begins to learn the truth about herself.
Director: George Cukor | Stars: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Ruth Hussey
Votes: 73,794
If ever a production was endowed with an over-abundance of what normally represents the epitome in entertainment, it is The Philadelphia Story. (Boxoffice Magazine)
48. Landscape in the Mist (1988)
TV-MA | 127 min | Drama
Two children journey the long road to Germany to find the man they believe to be their father.
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos | Stars: Michalis Zeke, Tania Palaiologou, Stratos Tzortzoglou, Eva Kotamanidou
Votes: 9,634
One of the most neglected movie masterpieces of our time. (Michael Wilmington)
49. Taxi Driver (1976)
R | 114 min | Crime, Drama
A mentally unstable veteran works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City, where the perceived decadence and sleaze fuels his urge for violent action.
Director: Martin Scorsese | Stars: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks
Votes: 919,379 | Gross: $28.26M
A landmark of 70s American cinema that announced to the world the arrival of director Martin Scorsese, screenwriter Paul Schrader and star Robert De Niro. Though critics remain divided over the ultimate merits of Taxi Driver, it is an undeniably brilliant, nightmarish portrait of one man's personal hell. (TV Guide Magazine)
50. L'Atalante (1934)
Not Rated | 89 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
Newly married couple Juliette and a ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'atalante along with the captain's first mate Le père Jules and a cabin boy.
Director: Jean Vigo | Stars: Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Gilles Margaritis, Louis Lefebvre
Votes: 17,457
Some movies are entertaining, funny, romantic, insightful, exciting, tragic, mysterious, surprising, thought provoking, or any number of other various pleasing adjectives. Some movies are good, really good even -- and then some movies, some special, truly rare movies, are simply…magic. Something inherently without form, yet so perfectly expressed through sight, sound, and motion. Jean Vigo's 1934 masterpiece, 'L'Atalante,' is such a film. A joyous celebration of life and cinema, an achingly beautiful achievement. While I've tried my best, in the end, there just aren't words to express what its images so simply convey. After all, how could there be? It's about love. (Steven Cohen)
51. The Apartment (1960)
Approved | 125 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
A Manhattan insurance clerk tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but complications and a romance of his own ensue.
Director: Billy Wilder | Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
Votes: 196,555 | Gross: $18.60M
A tale of unbearable sadness made bearable by an oversized pinch of comic wit. Unarguable is the fact that this is a masterpiece. This is the film people who want to write movies should watch to see just how to do it; the characters, the situations, the dialogues, the plotting, they're all so simple at first glance and yet they're all so deeply, richly constructed to the point of flawlessness. And above all, it's just a great watch, and isn't that why we love the movies? (David Cornelius)
52. Pandora's Box (1929)
Not Rated | 109 min | Crime, Drama, Romance
The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her.
Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst | Stars: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz
Votes: 11,846 | Gross: $0.01M
A stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice -- a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological references. (Ed Gonzalez)
53. Jaws (1975)
PG | 124 min | Adventure, Mystery, Thriller
When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Cape Cod, it's up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.
Director: Steven Spielberg | Stars: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
Votes: 658,743 | Gross: $260.00M
A genre film of the absolute highest order with intelligence and pretty much the best craftsmanship that ever went into the making of a film that could honestly be tagged with the label of "horror". It is, simply put, one of the absolute masterpieces of populist cinema, and worthy of more respect and love than I or any one writer could ever send its way. (Tim Brayton)
54. A City of Sadness (1989)
157 min | Drama, History
The story of a family embroiled in the "White Terror" that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s.
Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou | Stars: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Shu-Fen Hsin, Sung-Young Chen, Jack Kao
Votes: 6,089
To grant "A City of Sadness" a little patience-and perhaps, the ultimate favor of seeing it twice-is to be rewarded with a reminder of what movies can be at their best-of what an amazing way they can be of apprehending the world. "A City of Sadness" is a great film, one that will be watched as long as there are people who care about the movies as an art. (Dave Kehr)
55. Opening Night (1977)
PG-13 | 144 min | Drama
A renowned actress teeters on the edge of a breakdown as she counts down the days toward a big Broadway opening.
Director: John Cassavetes | Stars: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell
Votes: 12,177
...defy a century’s worth of film theory, screenwriting tips, and film school orthodoxy. Like Proust before him, Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer. (Kent Jones)
56. Pather Panchali (1955)
Not Rated | 125 min | Drama
Impoverished priest Harihar Ray, dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work.
Director: Satyajit Ray | Stars: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Banerjee, Chunibala Devi
Votes: 38,489 | Gross: $0.54M
To have not seen the films of Ray is to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon and the sun. (Akira Kurosawa)
57. The Red Shoes (1948)
Not Rated | 135 min | Drama, Music, Romance
A young ballet dancer is torn between the man she loves and her pursuit to become a prima ballerina.
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | Stars: Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann
Votes: 39,106 | Gross: $10.90M
More than any other film, The Red Shoes deals with the dangerous, magical process by which art is distilled from preparation and effort. And, not content with creating and showing at full length “The Red Shoes” ballet which links all the characters’ destinies, it dares to take us into the inner world of fantasies which art can unleash. (Ian Christie)
58. City Lights (1931)
G | 87 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
With the aid of a wealthy erratic tippler, a dewy-eyed tramp who has fallen in love with a sightless flower girl accumulates money to be able to help her medically.
Director: Charles Chaplin | Stars: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers
Votes: 195,886 | Gross: $0.02M
An indelible masterwork of cinema and, it seems fairly safe to say, Western civilization, represents both a beginning, in that it has been endlessly imitated, and an end, in that it has never been superseded. (Gary Giddins)
59. The Conformist (1970)
R | 113 min | Drama
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci | Stars: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio
Votes: 33,653 | Gross: $0.54M
At a time when films tend to treat the audience as children, it is quite something to watch The Conformist, a film that only feels dated because it harks back to a time when intelligence and class were the true hallmarks of great cinema. (Film4)
60. Blade Runner (1982)
R | 117 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi
A blade runner must pursue and terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.
Director: Ridley Scott | Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
Votes: 822,298 | Gross: $32.87M
'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' declares one of the androids late in the going. And if you've seen this film, you can make the same claim. (Shawn Levy)
61. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
PG | 161 min | Adventure, Drama, War
British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai for their Japanese captors in occupied Burma, not knowing that the allied forces are planning a daring commando raid through the jungle to destroy it.
Director: David Lean | Stars: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa
Votes: 233,109 | Gross: $44.91M
The Bridge on the River Kwai will be called a tragedy; it is. It will be called a comedy; it is. It will be called a swell adventure story, a slickly calculated piece of commercial entertainment, an angry razz at the thing called war, a despairing salute to the men war makes, and an ironic masterpiece; it is in some degree all of these things. It is a whale of a story, and in the telling of it, David Lean does a whale of a job. (TIME Magazine)
62. Charade (1963)
Passed | 113 min | Comedy, Mystery, Romance
Romance and suspense ensue in Paris as a woman is pursued by several men who want a fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Whom can she trust?
Director: Stanley Donen | Stars: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn
Votes: 85,481 | Gross: $13.47M
An appealing hybrid of romantic comedy and spy thriller. It's one of the best Hitchcock films that Hitchcock had nothing to do with. (Dan Lybarger)
63. The Good Time Girls (1960)
Not Rated | 100 min | Drama, Mystery, Romance
Four Parisian women navigate the world of romance and daily life looking to fulfill their dreams but often find real-life to be inescapable.
Director: Claude Chabrol | Stars: Bernadette Lafont, Clotilde Joano, Stéphane Audran, Lucile Saint-Simon
Votes: 3,177 | Gross: $0.01M
A riveting study in psychological perversion done with a taut, razor-sharp style, by a witty director who is at the top-of-his game. (Dennis Schwartz)
64. The Vanishing (1988)
Not Rated | 107 min | Mystery, Thriller
Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation. They stop at a busy service station and Saskia is abducted. After three years and no sign of Saskia, Rex begins receiving letters from the abductor.
Director: George Sluizer | Stars: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
Votes: 44,046
A clinical, compelling and convincing evocation of obsession, The Vanishing turns the standard into the sinister with smarts, style and an ominously simmering undercurrent. (Sarah Ward)
65. Knife in the Water (1962)
Not Rated | 94 min | Drama, Thriller
A couple pick up a hitchhiker on the way to their yacht. The husband invites the young man to come along for their day's sailing. As the voyage progresses, the antagonism between the two men grows. A violent confrontation is inevitable.
Director: Roman Polanski | Stars: Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka, Zygmunt Malanowicz, Anna Ciepielewska
Votes: 23,574
Like slipping a needle on a vinyl groove, the film cracks and pops and skips until the first sensation hits you, and the viewer is awash with a deep, encompassing mid-range of powerful intimacy. It ends slithering back onto itself, almost exactly where it started, only entirely transformed by the artistry that brought it full circle. (Matthew Millheiser)
66. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Passed | 100 min | Crime, Film-Noir, Mystery
San Francisco private detective Sam Spade takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar and their quest for a priceless statuette, with the stakes rising after his partner is murdered.
Director: John Huston | Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre
Votes: 166,485 | Gross: $2.11M
"The stuff that dreams are made of," comments Spade about the elusive black bird of the title, a sentiment easily applied to this indisputable masterpiece. (Matt Brunson)
67. Branded to Kill (1967)
Not Rated | 91 min | Action, Crime, Drama
After a botched assignment, a rice-fetishizing hitman finds himself in conflict with his organization, and one mysterious, dangerous fellow-hitman in particular.
Director: Seijun Suzuki | Stars: Jô Shishido, Mariko Ogawa, Annu Mari, Kôji Nanbara
Votes: 10,199
One of those films that feels so far ahead of its time, we may still not have caught up to it. The violence is raw, the sex even more so, and the monochrome photography is flawless. (Tom Huddleston)
68. Touch of Evil (1958)
PG-13 | 95 min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
A stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping and police corruption in a Mexican border town.
Director: Orson Welles | Stars: Charlton Heston, Orson Welles, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia
Votes: 109,726 | Gross: $2.24M
One of the truly great works of the American cinema, and it shows just what kind of excellence movies are capable of. If Citizen Kane isn't enough, Touch of Evil stands alongside it as a true testament to just how brilliant Welles really was, and what a terrible, terrible waste it was that Hollywood couldn't...and wouldn't understand him. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
69. Chungking Express (1994)
PG-13 | 102 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious female underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal waitress at a late-night restaurant he frequents.
Director: Kar-Wai Wong | Stars: Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Faye Wong
Votes: 95,602 | Gross: $0.60M
It's a stunning new wave "art film" that also succeeds as a bouncy pop-culture valentine to Hong Kong. It's an affecting exploration of personal heartbreak and a uniquely cosmopolitan take on urban alienation. And, probably most affecting of all, it's a marvelous demonstration of love in and of the cinema. (LoveHKFilm)
70. The Informer (1935)
Approved | 91 min | Crime, Drama
In 1922, an Irish rebel informs on his friend, then feels doom closing in.
Director: John Ford | Stars: Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Margot Grahame
Votes: 7,173 | Gross: $2.07M
John Ford's "The Informer" is one of the director's greatest films and therefore one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. (Allan Peach)
71. Where Is the Friend's House? (1987)
Not Rated | 83 min | Drama, Family
Eight-year-old Ahmed has mistakenly taken his friend Mohammad's notebook. He wants to return it, or else his friend will be expelled from school. The boy determinedly sets out to find Mohammad's home in the neighbouring village.
Director: Abbas Kiarostami | Stars: Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Khodabakhsh Defaei, Iran Outari
Votes: 18,641
There are moments while watching a film by Abbas Kiarostami when I feel cinema being reinvented in front of my eyes. It’s a feeling that sneaks up through the surface modesty of his features. With an approach that combines grace, complexity, and pure, unconditional humanism in his multi-faceted layering of reality and fiction, he comes closer than any director in revealing the truth of the human soul. (Sean Axmaker)
72. Greed (1924)
Not Rated | 140 min | Drama, Thriller, Western
The sudden fortune won from a lottery fans such destructive greed that it ruins the lives of the three people involved.
Director: Erich von Stroheim | Stars: Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller
Votes: 10,751 | Gross: $0.16M
A perfect reflection of the anxiety permeating the passage into the 20th century and the absolute dehumanization that was to come. (Guillermo del Toro)
73. Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
Not Rated | 98 min | Comedy, Drama
Where are we humans going? A film poem inspired by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. We meet people in the city. People trying to communicate, searching compassion and get the connection of small and large things.
Director: Roy Andersson | Stars: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson, Bengt C.W. Carlsson, Torbjörn Fahlström
Votes: 20,327 | Gross: $0.00M
Rare is a film which you can take every moment, every frame, snip it, enlarge it, nail it to your wall and then marvel at the eye that captured it, a singular work of art. Kubrick had that quality, much of Antonioni, Fellini too. And after a quarter-century hiatus following a commercial failure in the 1970s director Roy Andersson emerged from the wilderness of Scandinavian advertisements to join them with this unique work. (Blair Stewart)
74. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Not Rated | 96 min | Horror, Thriller
A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls that are ravaging the Northeast of the United States.
Director: George A. Romero | Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman
Votes: 138,959 | Gross: $0.09M
A simple story of survival against an unknown, and possibly occult or otherworldly, opposition force, Night of the Living Dead remains an undisputed, unsettling and oft-copied seminal classic: nightmarish yet nuanced opus of violence and gore, the low-budget zombie film to end all zombie films. (Sarah Ward)
75. Murmur of the Heart (1971)
R | 118 min | Comedy, Drama
As France is nearing the end of the first Indochina War, an open-minded teenage boy finds himself torn between a rebellious urge to discover love, and the ever-present, almost dominating affection of his beloved mother.
Director: Louis Malle | Stars: Lea Massari, Benoît Ferreux, Daniel Gélin, Michael Lonsdale
Votes: 10,837 | Gross: $0.35M
With Murmur of the Heart, Malle walks us through the sun and the shadows of adolescent longing and awkward maturation. The ambiguous ending, then, is a perfect capper, fashioned by Malle without the stylistic flourish of a Bergman or a Fellini but all of their generous humanism and invention. In all their messiness, here are love, sex, society, and family, met with cleansing laughter. (Peter Canavese)
76. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Not Rated | 90 min | Drama, Romance
A French actress filming an anti-war film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese architect as they share their differing perspectives on war.
Director: Alain Resnais | Stars: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud
Votes: 35,853 | Gross: $0.09M
An almost wholly unique cinematic experience, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” takes its audience on a journey through the entirety of the human condition, exploring war, love, peace and hatred. Resnais' film is an invaluable and powerful film from one of the most celebrated periods in film history; a cinematic experience one is not likely to soon forget. (Jordan Brooks)
77. The Silent Partner (1978)
R | 106 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
A timid bank teller anticipates a bank robbery and steals the money himself before the crook arrives. When the sadistic crook realizes he's been fooled, he tracks down the teller and engages him in a cat-and-mouse chase for the cash.
Directors: Daryl Duke, Curtis Hanson | Stars: Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Céline Lomez
Votes: 7,722
An impressive, complete and consistently gripping crime thriller with neatly timed twists and well drawn characters, and like so many fondly recalled examples of North American cinema from the 1970s, it leaves you quietly aching for a time when such films were more the rule than the striking exception. (Cine Outsider)
78. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Not Rated | 83 min | Action, Comedy
Three go-go dancers holding a young girl hostage come across a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert. After learning he's hiding a sum of cash around, the women start scheming on him.
Director: Russ Meyer | Stars: Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams, Ray Barlow
Votes: 16,115
It's a movie that's not only critic-proof, but actively antagonistic to criticism. Like its protagonist/antagonist gang of Amazonian thrill-seekers, it laughs in the face of your rules. It refuses to behave. It's mad, bad, and dangerous to know. It's a threat, and it means business. (The Vicar of VHS)
79. The Killer (1989)
R | 111 min | Action, Crime, Drama
A disillusioned assassin accepts one last hit in hopes of using his earnings to restore vision to a singer he accidentally blinded.
Director: John Woo | Stars: Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Kong Chu
Votes: 51,046
One of the few films to hold a legitimate claim to the title of Greatest Action Movie of All Time. (Rob Humanick)
80. Lost in Translation (2003)
R | 102 min | Comedy, Drama
A faded movie star and a neglected young woman form an unlikely bond after crossing paths in Tokyo.
Director: Sofia Coppola | Stars: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
Votes: 488,031 | Gross: $44.59M
Lost in Translation revels in contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road. (Richard Corliss)
81. Cría Cuervos (1976)
PG | 105 min | Drama
In the twilight of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, an 8-year-old orphan and her two sisters find shelter in the house of their stern aunt and try their best to acclimatize to a new reality. Can they summon up the courage to grow up?
Director: Carlos Saura | Stars: Ana Torrent, Conchita Pérez, Mayte Sanchez, Geraldine Chaplin
Votes: 11,385
Saura’s vision of a caged childhood, disquieting in itself, gives us a very particular window on sex, death, authority and abandonment. It unfolds like a kind of morbid reverie, reverberating with strange frissons about what one generation passes to the next, and how even rebellion is a kind of heirloom. (Tim Robey)
82. L'Immortelle (1963)
M | 101 min | Drama, Mystery
A sad man meets a beautiful, secretive woman who may or may not be involved in some conspiracy ring dealing in kidnapped women used as prostitutes. After several days of their sadly ... See full summary »
Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet | Stars: Françoise Brion, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Guido Celano, Ayfer Feray
Votes: 1,388
Like an inverted travelogue, L’Immortelle forces the audience to reevaluate the comfort of sameness versus the inherent unease in facing the strange and alien. It's a film that defies everything, says nothing, but leaves you craving more. It is a subversive meditation on the inexplicable nature of our own lives and a satire of traditional storytelling. It is the impenetrable castle wall that breaks the Turkish coastline of our souls. (Eric Young)
83. All About Eve (1950)
Passed | 138 min | Drama
A seemingly timid but secretly ruthless ingénue insinuates herself into the lives of an aging Broadway star and her circle of theater friends.
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Stars: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm
Votes: 138,657 | Gross: $0.01M
Compelling prima facie evidence that the phrase 'black-and-white movie' needn't at all be synonymous with 'boring night at my grandparents.' (Brent Simon)
84. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Not Rated | 202 min | Drama
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. However, something happens that changes her safe routine.
Director: Chantal Akerman | Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Votes: 13,856 | Gross: $0.02M
A piece of revolutionary art, on its own terms an essential work, and a masterpiece according to any definition of that word that has any meaning. (Tim Brayton)
85. Love in the Afternoon (1972)
R | 97 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
Though he has an adoring wife, a bourgeois man is still tempted to pursue other women.
Director: Éric Rohmer | Stars: Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Françoise Verley, Daniel Ceccaldi
Votes: 9,333
A beautiful character study about what it is to love one woman and yet be in love with all women. (Jay Antani)
86. A Heart in Winter (1992)
105 min | Drama, Music, Romance
Stéphane is an emotionally distant but professionally dedicated violin restorer whose cold heart is tested when his employer's new girlfriend, a beautiful violinist, falls for him.
Director: Claude Sautet | Stars: Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, André Dussollier, Elizabeth Bourgine
Votes: 10,635 | Gross: $1.67M
Those attracted only to Hollywood's shallow waters may find this picture too intimidating, but for anyone who enjoys a more complex cinematic experience, Un Coeur en Hiver offers an alternative. (James Berardinelli)
87. Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Not Rated | 110 min | Drama
A waifish prostitute wanders the streets of Rome looking for true love but finds only heartbreak.
Director: Federico Fellini | Stars: Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Franca Marzi, Dorian Gray
Votes: 51,889 | Gross: $0.75M
A lover of films lives for that day when he or she watches that true masterpiece. That film that shakes your emotions and makes you feel; reminding you that you are alive. These films are out there, it's just that sometimes it takes us a while to get to them. But when we finally find them, you feel like the search was worth it. Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria is one of these special films. (Francisco Gonzalez)
88. Shanghai Express (1932)
Approved | 82 min | Adventure, Drama, Film-Noir
A notorious woman rides a train through a dangerous situation with a British captain she loved.
Director: Josef von Sternberg | Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland
Votes: 10,315
With its style, humor, glamour, performance, and pure panache, Shanghai Express is an immersive experience, arguably the apex of Dietrich and von Sternberg’s collaboration. (Jenny Jediny)
89. The Red and the White (1967)
Not Rated | 90 min | Drama, War
During the Russian Civil War, the Red Army - aided by Hungarian Communists - and the White Army fight for control of the area surrounding the Volga.
Director: Miklós Jancsó | Stars: József Madaras, Tibor Molnár, András Kozák, Jácint Juhász
Votes: 3,942
One of the most effective pacifist arguments ever committed to celluloid. It is a torturous vision of death devoid of glory. (Jamie Russell)
90. Underground (1995)
Not Rated | 167 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
Two underground black marketeers, Marko and Blacky, sell weapons to the Communist resistance in wartime Belgrade, living the good life along the way.
Director: Emir Kusturica | Stars: Predrag 'Miki' Manojlovic, Lazar Ristovski, Mirjana Jokovic, Slavko Stimac
Votes: 61,221 | Gross: $0.17M
The film's real heart is its devastating idea of a morning after: the moment when, after being in the grip of a political delusion lasting several decades, a man can emerge from a subterranean hiding place in his native Yugoslavia and be told that there is no Yugoslavia any more. Mr. Kusturica's impassioned metaphorical fable about the tragic fate of his homeland also reaches this terrible insight: ''There is no war until a brother kills his brother.'' (Janet Maslin)
91. Slnko v sieti (1963)
90 min | Drama
Oldrich "Fajolo" Fajták (Marián Bielik), a student who directs quasi-existentialist verbal abuse at his girlfriend Bela Blazejová (Jana Beláková), takes off to a formally volunteer summer work camp at a farm where he meets her grandfather.
Director: Stefan Uher | Stars: Marián Bielik, Jana Beláková, Olga Salagová, Pavol Chrobák
Votes: 989
It's youthful, fresh and rewarding, with all the sounds and sensuality of those seemingly endless hot summers of adolescence. (Sophia Satchell-Baeza)
92. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
R | 112 min | Action, Crime, Drama
An American barroom pianist and his prostitute girlfriend go on a trip through the Mexican underworld to collect the bounty on the head of a dead gigolo.
Director: Sam Peckinpah | Stars: Warren Oates, Isela Vega, Robert Webber, Gig Young
Votes: 21,506 | Gross: $0.58M
Few filmmakers have had the nerve to make a film as wantonly repugnant as Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Even fewer have made such nastiness this bizarrely spellbinding. (Nick Schager)
93. The Son (2002)
103 min | Drama, Mystery
A joinery instructor at a rehab center refuses to take a new teen as his apprentice, but then begins to follow the boy through the hallways and streets.
Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne | Stars: Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
Votes: 10,087 | Gross: $0.07M
"The Son" is complete, self-contained and final. All the critic can bring to it is his admiration. It needs no insight or explanation. It sees everything and explains all. It is as assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen. If you were spellbound, moved by its terror and love, struck that the visual style is the only possible one for this story, then let us agree that rarely has a film told us less and told us all, both at once. (Roger Ebert)
94. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Not Rated | 93 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance
A beautiful young woman takes her father's place as the prisoner of a mysterious beast, who wishes to marry her.
Directors: Jean Cocteau, René Clément | Stars: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon
Votes: 28,056 | Gross: $0.30M
A film that does not look so much imported from the 1940s as blown in from another world. Cocteau's film is antic and playful, but there is real pain (and genuine eroticism) behind its flamboyant façade. La belle et la bête is full of wonder and mystery. It's cinema's ultimate love story, dressed up as a monster. (Xan Brooks)
95. The Seventh Continent (1989)
Not Rated | 108 min | Drama
A European family who plan on escaping to Australia seem caught up in their daily routine, only troubled by minor incidents. However, behind their apparent calm and repetitive existence, they are actually planning something sinister.
Director: Michael Haneke | Stars: Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer, Udo Samel
Votes: 16,946
A film that subjects its audience to rigorous emotions and painful realizations, a brutally honest and unrestrained mirror held before us. As cold as the life it depicts, this is no easy watch, but its value may well be inestimable. (Ronan Doyle)
96. My Man Godfrey (1936)
Approved | 94 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
A scatterbrained socialite hires a vagrant as a family butler - but there's more to Godfrey than meets the eye.
Director: Gregory La Cava | Stars: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick
Votes: 26,429
Possibly the screwiest of all screwball comedies, but for hilariously outrageous behaviors and merciless satirical zaniness, My Man Godfrey is an unsurpassed comic treasure. (Steven D. Greydanus)
97. Deep Red (1975)
R | 127 min | Horror, Mystery, Thriller
A jazz pianist and a wisecracking journalist are pulled into a complex web of mystery after the former witnesses the brutal murder of a psychic.
Director: Dario Argento | Stars: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril
Votes: 42,574
There is no better Italian thriller, giallo, detective, horror, or slasher style film than Deep Red. It is a tour de force of camera, composition, and film craft skills. It is such a benchmark of smart, passionate film construction that it surpasses expectations and thwarts potential imitations. And it would announce Argento as that rarity among directors - a visionary. It is his skill as a great cinematic artist that makes Deep Red work so well, and simultaneously ruining it for all who follow. Kind of like Hitchcock, come to think of it. (Bill Gibron)
98. WALL·E (2008)
G | 98 min | Animation, Adventure, Family
In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
Director: Andrew Stanton | Stars: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard
Votes: 1,199,060 | Gross: $223.81M
Among its many wondrous achievements, the animated WALL-E is a sci-fi trifecta: a vision of the future, a tale for our times and a blast from the past. (Joe Williams)
99. RoboCop (1987)
R | 102 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi
In a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories.
Director: Paul Verhoeven | Stars: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox
Votes: 282,772 | Gross: $53.42M
100. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Passed | 91 min | Drama, Romance
An elderly couple are forced to live hundreds of miles apart when they lose their house and none of their five children will take both parents in.
Director: Leo McCarey | Stars: Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell
Votes: 9,499
One of the saddest, much touching, and most powerfully introspective films produced during the classical era of Hollywood cinema. (James Kendrick)
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