Kevyn Knox

Kevyn Knox is a Film Historian and Critic from Harrisburg Pennsylvania. He is the Film Columnist for The Burg and the Senior Film Lecturer at the Midtown Cinema. He has sat upon the jury of the Harrisburg Artsfest Film Festival five times. His work has also appeared in Film International, Plume-Noire and The Next Page as well as on Greencine.com. His reviews can be found on his website at The Cinematheque.

Making a Top 10 list is next to impossible. Trying to narrow down all the great films you've seen to just a mere ten. Well, ya know what? Narrowing it down to just fifty isn't all that easier a thing to do.

I made it a little easier by allowing only one film per director. This did leave such films as Psycho, Taxi Driver, Gold Rush, Weekend, Jules et Jim, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Lola Montes, Out 1, Battleground, Johnny Guitar, I Walked With a Zombie, Au hasard Balthazar, Open City, Rashomon, Blue Velvet, The Big Sleep, Rules of the Game and (forgive me purists) 8 1/2 and Citizen Kane all lying dead on the cutting room floor. At least this did manage to narrow down my search without leaving out films for no reason. That was the easy part.

Having to make last minute cuts to such favourites as Some Like It Hot, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Intolerance, The Godfather (I and II), Ordet, L'Avventura, The Man With the Movie Camera, Senso, The Third Man, Satantango and Jeanne Dielmann was heartbreaking.

Another thing that stopping at fifty did (I could have gone on to at least 150-200 and still had nothing but great films included) was inevitably leave off some of the great directors. No Dreyer. No Tarkovsky. No Visconti. No Ozu. No Antonioni. No Pasolini. No Griffith. No Eisenstein. No Wilder. No Altman or Coppola. No Bela Tarr or Kiarostami. No Fritz Lang.

Oh well. The list will probably change in my mind tomorrow or next week. It might even change mere minutes after I send this list off. That is what is so great about cinema. It's an ever-changing, ever-flowing entity all its own. Who are we to try to understand it?

With all that said, here is my (very fraught over) Top 50 Films, in chronological order.

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