Every decade, BFI magazine Sight and Sound publishes a list of the “Top 100 Greatest Films Of All Time”, polling hundreds of critics and filmmakers across the globe to come up with a would-be-definitive list of the medium’s most acclaimed achievements. Not part of the poll, of course, are the ordinary film fans who’re left to pick apart and debate every little piece of the list to their heart’s content – and for those so inclined, to maybe even come up with their own version of what a Top 100 Films list should be. We do it out of love.
That said, it’s something I’ve never actually tried to do before, but this year the QCW discord server thought it would be fun if we all submitted and compiled our own Sight and Sound-inspired lists, and so I took a crack at this and participated.
As usual, I put way more thought into it – and made it way crazier – than I was probably supposed to. The “correct” way would’ve just been to figure out the best 100 movies that come to mind, right – whether my favorites, or those I simply think are the best, or (more likely) a fluid marriage of the two. And that’s definitely the heart of where I ended up.
But giving yourself that much latitude can feel overwhelming. I mean how are you supposed to whittle down every film you’ve ever enjoyed to a meager 100?
To help narrow my choices, I decided on a few basic – but defining – rules.
Rule 1: No Short Films
This first one is all on me – I’m just not nearly as familiar with short films as I am with full-length features. I would’ve given a shout out to the ones I enjoy, but in the end, I’ve never really gone out of my way to find and watch too many shorts on the whole. And yes, the list is limited anyway by what I’ve seen, but it’d feel like a discredit to make shorts eligible when I’ve never been even vaguely familiar with 90% of them. So to take what feels like the less-disrespectful option, only films with run-times over 40 minutes are eligible.
Rule 2: No Films Released After 2019
Second, I wanted to set a simple cut-off: films with an initial release year after 2019 are disqualified (and to be clear, for non-United States features, this is based on their original theatrical release in any country, so no worries over whether Neon screwed over anyone’s chances of making it in. IMDB over RottenTomatoes). It feels arbitrary, but I wanted to be sure there was some measure of distance from each film’s release as that helps evaluate its merits a bit better. Yes, it isn’t impossible to foresee whether a film’s quality will hold up even before we’re removed from the context of its release period, but it does put our judgement on a more even field to have allowed for every film’s initial impact to be digested by the world at large, so that we can more confidently say if there’s more to it than zeitgeist collateral. Is 30 months enough time? Maybe, maybe not, but I’d say that for this consideration it works fine. I already don’t know if I can defend putting Mass in my top films of 2021, which was at least partly from its closeness to that year’s post-grief outlook and undercurrents of civil division. I’d definitely still defend it as a good movie, but should it have bumped off Spencer? Nah. Whereas I can look at Systemsprenger (2019) as a movie whose charm I’d worried might wear off on me down the road, and – though it didn’t make the list – find that it still holds up as something that hits my particular tastes hard, and that I still highly recommend seeking out.
Next, we move on to the fussier considerations that tailor to my variety obsession.
Rule 3: One Film Per Director
Ask a moviegoer to come up with 100 favorites off the top of their head, and many would find they’ve named multilple Ford’s, Ozu’s, Minnelli’s, etc. Which is completely agreeable. But so many great directors out there bring such singular voices to their works, and so going out of your way to include as many distinct names as possible is, frankly, a cheat to make the list more interesting (if not necessarily “better”), and one I’m happy to use. You could set a rule of, say, no more than 5 films from a single director; again, the standouts have plethoras, and there are at least 5 Hitchcock films that few would question all being together in a top 100.
You could tighten the list and say only 2 per director, maybe going to 3 on a few exceptions. Or… you could be puritan and keep it to only a single entry per filmmaker. A hundred films is a challengingly small number for most moviegoers to grapple with. But having a hundred unique voices almost adds a touch of canonicity, whether or not it steers you in the right direction.
Some films will appear on the list with more than one credited director, and for these cases I go by the strictest interpretation: we’re only allowing each director to appear on the list once, whether it’s a sole credit or co-director credit. So if I’d chosen to put down When the Clouds Roll By (Victor Fleming and Theodore Reed), I’d have given up both Gone with the Wind and Double or Nothing (and no, none of those specific 3 are in the final list).
And now for the crazy one – the rule that will instantly ruin this exercise for some, yet which made it infinitely more fun to draw up, believe it or not.
Rule 4: One Film Per Release Year
The art of cinema is still relatively young, which makes it more than doable for a top 100 to have representation from most of its lifetime. Every decade has more than a few legitimate contenders for “best one ever” and I always try to sustain my belief that the craft itself – as we see progress in diversity, technology, and refinement – is still getting better with each year, even as the classics only become more and more potent with their throughlines clearer, stronger, and more directly linked to the present than ever before.
But everyone has their preferences; some wouldn’t even think to consider any films from the past 20 years, others would more naturally gravitate and put most of the weight to films past 1970, some would avoid anything from the eras where the craft was in its infancy, etc. Again, all fair ways to narrow things down.
So of course, I went ahead and thought, “but wouldn’t it be fun if I could only pick one film per year? Then I wouldn’t just be forcing myself to throw Chocolat into the fire if I wanted to keep Beau Travail – I also get to pit Foxy Brown against Celine and Julie Go Boating!” (and, again, just so I’m not setting expectations, I ended up with none of the four).
One film per year is ludicrous on the face of it. Whether or not you’re applying the “one per director” rule above, what’s the logic of excluding a great film that just happens to fall on the same year as another? What value can a rule like this possibly add?
My only argument would be…is it really that limiting? There are so many great movies out there, and in the end, 100 is too small a number anyway to capture everything I love. By forcing myself to spread out the wealth and make sure 100 different years all get their due, it naturally widens the scope a bit, similar to the director rule above. And, yes, there’s some novelty in the idea that the list can take you on a literally-sequential journey of what cinema has put forward over its remarkable history – the parts of it I like, at the least.
Which does lead to the final and most important “rule”…
Rule 5: Rules Aside, These Are My Top 100
All told, they might not be the only 100 I could have picked, but in the weeks since I put this together, I firmly stand by these as films I not only love above most others, but that I genuinely wanted to share with anyone interested in the medium. As mentioned, I had fun through the whole ridiculous process, with the only tough part being the many movies – and directors – I chose to leave out in the end…but including them would’ve only knocked off other directors and/or films I wanted to recognize anyway. Including a stretch of films from the late ’90s to the mid-2000’s that I discovered – and that left lasting impressions on me – when my taste was probably at its dirt worst. You’ll see.
Some of the overall results did genuinely surprise me; at the outset, I never would have imagined excluding – just for starters (deep breath) – Kurosawa, Leone, Akerman, Miyazaki…heck, I came this close to not having a Laurence Olivier film on here, which stopped me dead when I realized it. I’m sure many, for good reason, are shaking their heads right now. You should be. It’s disgraceful. There are other names I left out that some would feel even more disgusted about. It kills me to have some of these omissions…but, all told, I can’t sincerely say that I regret them, if it means I get to at least keep the ones I’ve settled on. Even though I guarantee you’re going to laugh at my choice for Bergman.
So that said, this really is as personal a canon as they come, Hopefully my affection’s infectious. Maybe you’ll think of some of the weirder choices on the list in a different way than before. And maybe you might even give some of those you’re less familiar with, or have hazier memories of, another viewing. And that would definitely make me pretty happy.
So, unnecessarily long-winded introduction aside, let’s roll them out. For one last bit of fun, I’m listing them in a random, formula-generated order – with the sole exception of starting off with the earliest film by release date.
1920
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
dir. Robert Wiene
2004
Bad Education
dir. Pedro Almodóvar
1942
To Be Or Not to Be
dir. Ernst Lubitsch
1983
Zelig
dir. Woody Allen
1932
The Mummy
dir. Karl Freunde
1947
The Spring River Flows East
dir. Cai Chusheng
1934
The Goddess
dir. Yonggang Wu
1929
Man With a Movie Camera
dir. Dziga Vertov
1961
Girls of the Night
dir. Kinuyo Tanaka
1924
Sherlock Jr.
dir. Buster Keaton
2000
Love & Basketball
dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood
1948
Germany Year Zero
dir. Roberto Rossellini
2011
The Tree of Life
dir. Terrence Malick
1928
The Passion of Joan of Arc
dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
1921
The Phantom Carriage
dir. Victor Sjostrom
1990
The Match Factory Girl
dir. Aki Kaurismäki
1925
Battleship Potemkin
dir. Sergei Eisenstein
1988
Distant Voices, Still Lives
dir. Terence Davies
2006
This Is England
dir. Shane Meadows
1984
Amadeus
dir. Milos Forman
1952
Scaramouche
dir. George Sidney
1969
Fellini Satyricon
dir. Federico Fellini
1962
Harakiri
dir. Masaki Kobayashi
1954
Late Chrysanthemums
dir. Mikio Naruse
2005
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
dir. Steve Box and Nick Park
1975
The Magic Flute
dir. Ingmar Bergman
1945
Mildred Pierce
dir. Michael Curtiz
2002
Ten
dir. Abbas Kiarostami
2009
A Serious Man
dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
1938
The Lady Vanishes
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
1951
Alice in Wonderland
dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske
1989
Do The Right Thing
dir. Spike Lee
2007
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
dir. Andrew Dominik
1936
Modern Times
dir. Charlie Chaplin
1944
Double Indemnity
dir. Billy Wilder
1992
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
dir. David Lynch
1955
Rebel Without a Cause
dir. Nicholas Ray
1922
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
dir. F.W. Murnau
1978
The Marriage of Maria Braun
dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1937
The Grand Illusion
dir. Jean Renoir
1939
Dark Victory
dir. Edmund Goulding
2003
In the Cut
dir. Jane Campion
1959
The 400 Blows
dir. Francois Truffaut
2017
A Fantastic Woman
dir. Sebastián Lelio
1982
Boat People
dir. Ann Hui
1964
Red Desert
dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
1979
Being There
dir. Hal Ashby
2014
Mommy
dir. Xavier Dolan
1943
Cabin in the Sky
dir. Vincente Minnelli
1970
Claire’s Knee
dir. Eric Rohmer
1980
The Shining
dir. Stanley Kubrick
1963
The Big City
dir. Satyajit Ray
1997
Perfect Blue
dir. Satoshi Kon
2018
Shoplifters
dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
1972
Cabaret
dir. Bob Fosse
1965
The Collector
dir. William Wyler
1973
Love and Anarchy
dir. Lina Wertmüller
1966
Daisies
dir. Vera Chytilova
1968
The Great Silence
dir. Sergio Corbucci
1931
M
dir. Fritz Lang
1985
Vagabond
dir. Agnès Varda
1995
Crumb
dir. Terry Zwigoff
1953
The Bigamist
dir. Ida Lupino
1956
Baby Doll
dir. Elia Kazan
2008
Waltz with Bashir
dir. Ari Folman
1949
The Third Man
dir. Carol Reed
1994
Satantango
dir. Béla Tarr
1971
The Boy Friend
dir. Ken Russell
1930
Animal Crackers
dir. Victor Heerman
1933
42nd Street
dir. Lloyd Bacon
2010
The Illusionist
dir. Sylvain Chomet
1927
The King of Kings
dir. Cecil B. DeMille
2001
Monsoon Wedding
dir. Mira Nair
2013
The Dance of Reality
dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
1993
The Age of Innocence
dir. Martin Scorcese
1941
That Hamilton Woman
dir. Alexander Korda
1986
When the Wind Blows
dir. Jimmy T. Murakami
1950
No Way Out
dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1998
Dark City
dir. Alex Proyas
1974
A Woman Under the Influence
dir. John Cassavetes
2019
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
dir. Céline Sciamma
1999
Peppermint Candy
dir. Lee Chang-dong
1940
His Girl Friday
dir. Howard Hawks
1976
Assault on Precinct 13
dir. John Carpenter
1958
Touch of Evil
dir. Orson Welles
2012
The Master
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
1923
Safety Last!
dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
1967
One-Armed Swordsman
dir. Chang Cheh
1946
My Darling Clementine
dir. John Ford
1977
The Ascent
dir. Larisa Shepitko
1935
An Inn in Tokyo
dir. Yasujiro Ozu
1996
The Watermelon Woman
dir. Cheryl Dunye
1981
Gallipoli
dir. Peter Weir
2016
20th Century Women
dir. Mike Mills
1926
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
dir. Lotte Reiniger and Carl Koch
1957
The Pajama Game
dir. George Abbott and Stanley Donen
2015
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
dir. Marielle Heller
1960
Two Women
dir. Vittorio De Sica
1991
Center Stage
dir. Stanley Kwan
1987
Wings of Desire
dir. Wim Wenders
flies on the ceiling 