Films receiving the same number of votes have been separated by their ranking on individual lists.
- Citizen Kane (1941) .. Orson Welles
- Vertigo (1958) .. Alfred Hitchcock
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ..
- The Godfather (1972) .. Francis Ford Coppola
- Casablanca (1942) .. Michael Curtiz
- The Third Man (1949) .. Carol Reed
- Taxi Driver (1976) .. Martin Scorsese
- Seven Samurai (1954) .. Kurosawa Akira
- Psycho (1960) .. Alfred Hitchcock
- Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) ..
- The Godfather: Part II (1974) .. Francis Ford Coppola
- The Searchers (1956) .. John Ford
- Rear Window (1954) .. Alfred Hitchcock
- Singin' in the Rain (1952) .. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
- Persona (1966) .. Ingmar Bergman
- Chinatown (1974) .. Roman Polanski
- Sunset Boulevard (1950) .. Billy Wilder
- Sunrise (1927) .. F.W. Murnau
- Tokyo Story (1953) .. Ozu Yasujiro
- Pulp Fiction (1994) .. Quentin Tarantino
- La Règle du Jeu (1939) .. Jean Renoir
- 8½ (1963) .. Federico Fellini
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) .. David Lean
- The Night of the Hunter (1955) .. Charles Laughton
- Apocalypse Now (1979) .. Francis Ford Coppola
- City Lights (1931) .. Charles Chaplin
- Bicycle Thieves (1948) .. Vittorio De Sica
- Annie Hall (1977) .. Woody Allen
- Touch of Evil (1958) .. Orson Welles
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) .. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Blade Runner (1982) .. Ridley Scott
- M (1931) .. Fritz Lang
- The General (1927) ..
- Some Like It Hot (1959) .. Billy Wilder
- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) .. Sergio Leone
- The Four Hundred Blows (1959) .. Franτois Truffaut
- Duck Soup (1933) .. Leo McCarey
- Double Indemnity (1944) .. Billy Wilder
- Raging Bull (1980) .. Martin Scorsese
- All About Eve (1950) .. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
- A Clockwork Orange (1971) ..
- The Apartment (1960) .. Billy Wilder
- La Grande Illusion (1937) .. Jean Renoir
- Ikiru (1952) .. Kurosawa Akira
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946) .. Frank Capra
- Rashomon (1950) .. Kurosawa Akira
- The Wizard of Oz (1939) .. Victor Fleming
- Do the Right Thing (1989) .. Spike Lee
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) .. Sergio Leone
- L'Avventura (1960) .. Michelangelo Antonioni
40 comments:
Watching any of these splendid films is time well used. Thanks.
Interesting results; good job, Iain! I am happy to see THE APARTMENT making it to the top 50 -- it rarely does.
No critic in the world worth his salt would put Pulp Fuction in the top 20 films OF ALL TIME - ahead of City Lights, The Wizard of Oz or Bicycle Thieves...
Good work Iain.
Surprisingly it's very similar to the various other Best of lists out there.
I agree re Pulp Fiction - it came in 20th on my internet survey, I was surprised..
I compiled a top 1011 list on the net, found over 1300 entries on all the big surveys..
The top: 1-Godfather, 2-2001, 3-Chinatown, 4-Star Wars, 5-Citizen Kane, 6-Vertico, 7-Seven Samurai, 8-Psycho, 9-Godfather Pt II, 10-Its a Wonderful Life
Not what I would pick: 2001 is ok, Dr Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia, Best Years of Our Lives belong here for me. Yimou's HERO, etc..
see our list, Top Ranked Films on the Net at: http://worldsbestfilms.blogspot.com
we have the full 1011 ranked and alphabetical.. also highest ranked directors...
Good stuff Iain!! -- Jose S
ps - also agree with Seven Samurai up high. find Psycho laughable, Wonderful Life overrated, and Blade Runner (I like the P.K. Dick story Minority Report by Spielberg more, and I'm a big Dick fan.. wait -that didn't sound right!)
SUnset Boulevard is better crime than Pulp Fiction, by far..also Once Upon a Time in America..
L'AVVENTURA is a classic, glad it made the list - I'd have it about 10-20th on mine.. the more I remember it, the higher it goes!
ps - its BICYCLE THIEF, singular not plural - I found it both ways on the net so I checked better sources.. when I saw it at college it was "Thief" - only the dad steal a bike, not the kid..
I liked UMBERTO D better from De Sica, loved FLIKE the dog, deserved a special oscar!
..jose, worldsbestfilms
Hmm lets not have the 'Thief' debate - the 'ladri' of the original title is italian for thieves, hence the plural, but I think that both ways work as elegantly as each other.
PS: Great job Iain!!
It's a good list. A solid list. But not a very exciting one. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
NIce work, Iain - it's good to run surveys like this every couple years. I suppose when a bunch of people vote, they'll generally end up picking most of the same films, so the most interesting effect is comparing them over time... Kind of notable that nothing made since 1994 made the top 50....
A sample size of 187 is quite impressive, and lends credibility to the results. Congrats Iain on a terrific job.
Ken Thompson (Lechuguilla)
Where's Unforgiven, Go Tell the Spartans, or They Live. Those are my top three and they're not even on the list!
This list mainly strikes me as 'what someone told you to like' than anything; very few of them would make my "top 50" - if I made such doggerel. "Pulp Fiction"? You have got to be kidding.
"Once Upon a Time in the West"? "Psycho"? Please.
Was this really a survey, or did you just copy every other movie from the AFI one hundred? Martin Scorcese makes the list twice, but nothing at all from Tarkovsky or Sergei Eisenstein, not to mention Robert Bresson, Jules Dassin, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Werner Herzog, and at least a dozen others I can think of. I spit on your movie list!
You know, when I saw that someone had posted Anonymously about this list, I knew without reading the comment that it would be a slam against the list.
I have no problem with criticism or debate, but I really hate chicken shits. Have the balls to put a name to the criticism.
And Scorcese is actually spelled Scorsese, you Moron!
And this isn't even my list.
P.S. I just cross-checked this list with the AFI 100, because at first glance it looked like there were way too many similarities. Here are my (unofficial) results:
(1) 9 out of the top 10 on the OLR list are English-language films. Every one of these appears on the AFI list.
(2) 17 out of the top 20 on the OLR list are English-language films. Every one of these appears on the AFI list.
(3) 35 of the 50 on the OLR list are English-language films. 33 of these 35 appear on the AFI list. The only exceptions are Touch of Evil and Night of the Hunter.
So to sum up, the English-language selections make up 90% of the top 10, 85% of the top 100, and 70% of the total list. And 94% of these selections are identical to those on the AFI list.
I call B.S. on these results. Who exactly did you survey here? What percentage of the "filmmakers, critics, bloggers, historians, and other assorted cinephiles" were from the U.S. or UK? If it was a similarly disproportionate amount, in what manner does this represent a "consensus"? Moreover, did they just plagiarize the AFI list and then add their favorite foreign film?
Anonymous guy one last time. I just saw Iain Stott's own top "50" list, and it actually looks pretty awesome--lots of more important and less conventional stuff there. Please take my previous remarks as directed at the critics surveyed, and not at this individual, who seems to me to have quite excellent and diverse tastes.
WHERE is Tarkovsky? Bunuel? Eisenstein? Marker? Something by Lynch belongs in here somewhere, also Terry Gilliam. And really, Allen's done better than Annie Hall.
Where are the short films, and short film directors?
This is the same BS with Casablanca, Citizen Kane and Kurosawa's samurai films in it. It's tired.
Peter Hall,
They Live on a top 50? It's bold. I love it, but mostly only because I love John Carpenter.
Tim,
You're right that something by Lynch should be here. And Annie Hall is not Allen's best work. But I'm more of a Allen cornball sympathizer. Give me Sleeper or Love and Death over any of them.
Where are the great documentary films? I can think of several off the top of my head that should be in any top 50 list:
"Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control"
"Fog of War"
"March of the Penguins"
"Battle for Algiers"
"Triumph of the Will" (although this is a very un-PC choice)
As some have indicated, a solid list and great for beginners (especially since it takes a lot of the stronger films from the AFI list but combines them with the most celebrated classics of foreign cinema) - but with a sort of a been-there, done-that feel for the more experienced film buff. Interesting to see Anon eat his words after checking out the blogger's individual list. Perhaps he/she should have held his/her tongue - proverbially speaking of course - before lashing out?
I am big on canons, but more in the sense of many individual lists taken together than a composite made from majority opinion; heterogenous rather homogenous. Not sure if I spelled that right - don't kill me, Piper! At any rate, I find myself most interested in my own - and others' - "favorite great movies", not so much the guilty pleasures or momentary obsessions nor the objective "best" lists (unless they have an ironically idiosyncratic bent to them).
At any rate, it's quite hard to argue with the quality of any movies on this list. Even Pulp Fiction, irritating as its influence has been, is quite an accomplishment taken on its own terms.
It's a respectable list, but I'm with movieman - the "Participants" page is the real time sink... the final top 50 is like the center of gravity, with all those other lists orbiting around it...
Movieman,
I'll let you slide, but you're on thin ice.
I agree with the films in this list, but certainly not in the order presented, and I do feel that the 90s are not represented.
Since the list is titled the "Greatest" and not "Best" I agree with films such as Psycho being on the list. The lasting impression truly has made it one of the greatest, but certainly far from the best.
And it should be Bicycle THIEVES because not only is the main character a thief, but also the person who stole his bike.
I wouldn't put 8 1/2 so low it's definitely a top 5 film, and City lights is too low aswell
all are deserving, good films, but the list is hardly inspiring in its originality. tho when u have that many participants the general consensus is never going to be very surprising. but a good list nonetheless. i dont fully understand the scorn at pulp fiction in the comments, perfect position imo.
my own gripes with the list:
godfather 1 and 2 are both about 5-10 spots too high in their respective positions of 3 and 11, imo, and vertigo at 2 is a little hard to justify. 8 1/2 and rules of the game should be a little higher. a little more noir representation would be nice as well. i never saw the huge fuss about the searchers, and dr strangelove never scored that highly in my books either, but overall nothing is outrageously wrong in this list. i definitely like seeing the third man at 6 tho :)
i would have liked to have seen a lynch film there, especially seeing as the same group of participants named him as a top 20 director, so blue velvet or mulholland drive (or if my own rantings and ravings are to be believed, lost highway) probably deserve spots.
other films excluding these 3 that are definitely in my top 50 would be the conversation, the seventh seal, the trial, magnolia and the deer hunter.
Any time I throw together a 'All Time' list, I usually end up listing them 'in no particular order,' as I don’t really know how to put one film I love at #5 versus another at #7 and so on…
However, for my number one film… that one stands alone.
The greatest film that I've ever seen would have to be Werner Herzog's "Agguire, The Wrath of God."
It really baffles me how this film isn’t one of these standard accepted top 20 films on any of these lists. I don't know why it doesn’t share the same rarified air as "Seventh Seal" or "Rules of the Game" or any of these other universally lauded foreign films.
Certainly I would think film scholars/ critics would know of and worship the film, but I would even think its a film that just your average lover of film would find themselves blown away by it.
If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and check out "Agguire, the Wrath of God" immediately.
And then name for me a better closing image... wow.
erin, i agree that aguirre is one of the greats. tho the audio was terrible on what i saw - neither the german or english ( i cant remember which was dubbed and which wasnt) was ok, on the R4 release at least. but yeh, great film, and i agree there are few better closing images - maybe 2001?
What's with all the hate on Psycho? If you don't like Psycho that's fine, but it's an incredible film and most people would agree it's one the best.
And, I'm a little sad to see The Battle of Algiers and Aguirre: The Wrath of God didn't make the list.
I know it was mostly Americans surveyed, but surely such a high percentage of the ten best ever made haven't really all been made in one country?!?
Sight and Sound's a british magazine and yet its list usually has much more foreign repreresentation...
There are very few films that I can stand to watch more than once. Hitchcock I can't deal with at all. Otherwise, I like your list. Here's some of my favorites. Time Bandits, The Triplets of Belleville, Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, It's a Wonderful Life, and Groundhog Day.
T think that this is a really great looking list! I have seen every movie on here and agree that they are all good. I'm glad Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver and Blade Runner are here (my favorite's)But everyone has there own opinion and I don't think that dr Strangelove, Night of the Hunter, Do the Right thing belong here...how about English Patient, Magnolia and Unforgiven instead
Too Western-centric, other than the three films by Ozu and Kurosawa. No films by Satyajit Ray or any other movies by Asian directors. A shame.
has anybody even bothered to check out satyajit ray?
I, personally, can't stand Citizen Kane. Although I know why it's on the list. I think M is far more compelling a film than Citizen Kane. Sure, beautiful cinematography. Never once during the film do I give a rats-ass about Kane or "who he is." Not even long enough to suspend my disbelief to become interested in the fact that is what the plot of the film is about... "Oh, Rosebud! Rosebud! Why should I care?"
And the AFI list is a *complete* joke. Seriously, Titanic scores higher than Sidney Lumet's Network? Dagger out of my back, please... Oh, wait, that's right... James Cameron is on the *board* of AFI, now I see how this list works.
I think L'AVVENTURA is quite overrated, but otherwise, I can't really argue with the list, which includes most of my all-time favorites. It was nice to see at least a few silent films making the list. Too many Best of lists these days skew toward only the most recent titles.
sorry, but a toplist without eisenstein obviously is not a toplist
I agree Pulp Fiction should be on the list. If anything, newer films are habitually underrated and the older canonized ones by famous directors get placed too high. Like, I haven't been impressed by any Kubrick film that does not involve bomb riding.
And American mafia films are *way* overrated.
I agree with most of the choices but I feel some of the movies are too high: 2001, taxi driver, rear window, so on.
Also, good to see the apartment.
I love that TOUCH OF EVIL is on this list. the story isn't as deep as Welles' Citizen Kane, but it visually is its equal or better. The Third Man should be on here as well, and i love that once upon a time in the west made it. I don't know if i saw La Dolce Bita either. Was it there? If not it should be.
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