Sunday 26 August 2012

Ten Best Films

In the spirit of the newly-released Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, I thought I would compile my own list. Mine is obviously not as well-informed as those of the critics polled as I've not seen nearly as many films as they have (I especially lack experience with Japanese films and silents), so this is really a list of the best films I've seen, rather than the best of all time. It's a list that will surely change as I see more films. To compile it I wrote down all of the films I felt I couldn't live without (I came up with eighty), then I painstakingly put them in order. These are the ten that came out on top:

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
2. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
4. Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1951)
7. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
9. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
10. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

So it isn't a particularly surprising list, and all of these but Key Largo (I wasn't aware how much I like it!) showed up somewhere in the Sight and Sound poll (all the results can be seen here: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/). It looks like I'm definitely a Hitchcocko-Hawksian Cahiers du CinĂ©ma-style auteurist, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

Now the grand project is to write about each of these films, and eventually all eighty on my list.