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  The 1,000 Greatest Films The Top 250 (101-150)  
  • The 1,000 Greatest Films Home  • The Top 250 Films  • The Top 100 Directors  • Full List by Ranking  • Full List by Title  • Full List by Director  • Full List by Year  • Full List by Country • Alternative Titles  
  The Top 250 Films: • 1-25  • 26-50   • 51-75   • 76-100  • 101-150  • 151-200  • 201-250  
     
     
 
 101    102    103
Stagecoach
JOHN FORD (99)
1939 | 96m | BW | USA | Western, Traditional Western
"Perhaps the most likeable of all westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything - adventure, romance, chivalry - and all of it very simple and traditional." - Pauline Kael, 1975
Selected by Philip French, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Robinson, Fred Zinnemann, Federico Fellini.
Amazon  Images Journal  Audience
 
Blue Velvet
DAVID LYNCH (83)
1986 | 120m | Col | USA | Mystery, Crime Thriller
"The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable - although many will be profoundly disturbed by Lynch's vision of male-female relationships - the terror very real, and the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequalled in recent cinema." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Selected by Lee Unkrich, Andrey Plakhov, Kim Newman, Michael Atkinson, Susan Seidelman.
Amazon  Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films  Village Voice (Guy Maddin)
 
Hiroshima mon amour
ALAIN RESNAIS (109)
1959 | 91m | BW | France-Japan | Psychological Drama, Romantic Drama
"It’s difficult to quantify the breadth of Hiroshima’s impact. It remains one of the most influential films in the short history of the medium, first of all because it liberated moviemakers from linear construction." - Kent Jones, Criterion Collection Essay
Selected by Jan Nemec, Eva Zaoralova, Jill Godmilow, Glenn Myrent, Russell Campbell.
Amazon  Criterion Collection Essay  Pop Matters
          
 104    105    106
The Battle of Algiers
GILLO PONTECORVO (107)
1965 | 123m | BW | Algeria-Italy | Docudrama, Political Drama
"The Battle of Algiers remains the basis of Pontecorvo's fame - a model of how, without prejudice or compromise, a film-maker can illuminate history and tell us how we repeat the same mistakes." - Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 2000
Selected by Paul Greengrass, Ken Loach, Irene Bignardi, Tim Robbins, Mira Nair.
Amazon  Derek Malcolm's Century of Films  Criterion Collection Essay
 
Duck Soup
LEO MCCAREY (98)
1933 | 70m | BW | USA | Anarchic Comedy, Satire
"The Marx Brothers' best movie and, not coincidentally, the one with the strongest director--Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Selected by Stuart Gordon, John Anderson, Frederick Wiseman, Lindsay Anderson, Sally Potter.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Film Reference
 
King Kong
MERIAN C. COOPER & ERNEST B. SCHOEDSACK (96)
1933 | 103m | BW | USA | Adventure, Monster Film
"If this glorious pile of horror-fantasy hokum has lost none of its power to move, excite and sadden, it is in no small measure due to the remarkable technical achievements of Willis O'Brien's animation work, and the superbly matched score of Max Steiner." - Wally Hammond, Time Out
Selected by Alex Cox, Peter Keough, Leonardo Garcia Tsao, Scott Rosenberg, Elliott Stein.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Combustible Celluloid
         
 107    108    109
The Treasure of the Sierre Madre
JOHN HUSTON (102)
1948 | 124m | BW | USA | Drama, Adventure Drama
"John Huston produced a number of great films, but this tale of greed, fear, and murder in Mexico is undoubtedly his finest, a towering masterpiece with Humphrey Bogart simply wonderful as the inimitable Fred C. Dobbs." - Baseline
Selected by Dennis Hopper, John Sayles, Paul Mazursky, John Dahl, Taylor Hackford.
Amazon  Roger Ebert’s Great Movies  Time Out
 
Vivre sa vie
JEAN-LUC GODARD (115)
1963 | 85m | BW | France | Psychological Drama, Urban Drama
"Only Godard could have made this film and at the time it seemed like a masterpiece. It remains so now, telling us more, sometimes by the simple device of telling us less, than any other film about what the French used to call 'the life'." - Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 2002
Selected by Chris Hegedus, Ann Hui, Peter Wollen, Georgia Brown, Geoffrey Macnab.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Film Reference
 
Los Olvidados
LUIS BUÑUEL (113)
1950 | 88m | BW | Mexico | Drama, Juvenile Delinquency Film
"This low-budget account of Mexico City street kids, inspired by actual cases as well as Buñuel's impressions of his new country, is a masterpiece of social surrealism and the founding work of third-world barrio horror." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 2005
Selected by Paul Verhoeven, Richard Linklater, Robert Sklar, Woody Allen, Jerzy Skolimowski.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Village Voice
          
 110    111    112
Star Wars
GEORGE LUCAS (104)
1977 | 121m | Col | USA | Science Fiction, Space Adventure
"Forget the phenomenon—it changed forever the way movies are marketed. Forget the endlessly hyped sequels... Remember the innocence (and technological inventiveness) of the film, the fun of the dialogue, the astonishment of the creatures we encountered, the propulsive dash of the editing." - Richard Schickel, Time
Selected by Roger Corman, M. Night Shyamalan, Anurag Mehta, Scott Rosenberg, Gary Dauphin.
Amazon  The Guardian (1977)  Roger Ebert's Great Movies
 
Dekalog
KRSZYSTOF KIESLOWSKI (94)
1988 | 550m | Col | Poland | Drama, Psychological Drama
"The Dekalog was the last film that Krzysztof Kieslowski would set entirely in his native Poland and, less flashy in its metaphysics than his subsequent French co-pros, it remains his masterpiece—a sardonic riff on the foundation laws that govern the Judeo-Christian cosmos." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Selected by David Denby, Derek Malcolm, Roger Ebert, Dennis Lim, Mira Nair.
Amazon  Strictly Film School  The Onion A.V. Club
 
Napoléon
ABEL GANCE (116)
1927 | 235m | BW | France | Epic, Historical Film
"Despite its simplistic view of Napoleon himself, the film is completely vindicated by Gance's raving enthusiasm for his medium. All of the brilliant experiments with film language remain potent, from the montages of flash-frames to the bombastic poetry of the triptych finale; even the gags are still funny." - Tony Rayns, Time Out
Selected by David Robinson, Lewis Gilbert, Ronald Neame, Terry Gilliam, Tom Luddy.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Films de France
         
 113    114    115
Jaws
STEVEN SPIELBERG (131)
1975 | 124m | Col | USA | Thriller, Natural Horror
"It's a noisy, busy movie that has less on its mind than any child on a beach might have. It has been cleverly directed by Steven Spielberg for maximum shock impact and short-term suspense, and the special effects are so good that even the mechanical sharks are as convincing as the people." - Vincent Canby, New York Times
Selected by Kevin Smith, Bobby Farrelly, M. Night Shyamalan, Robert Rodriguez, Alejandro Amenábar.
Amazon  Roger Ebert's Great Movies  metacritic
 
Manhattan
WOODY ALLEN (152)
1979 | 96m | BW | USA | Comedy Drama, Romantic Comedy
"I had forgotten what perfect pitch Woody Allen brought to ''Manhattan''--how its tone and timing slip so gracefully between comedy and romance... Seeing it again I realize it's more subtle, more complex, and not about love, but loss." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2001
Selected by Cameron Crowe, José Luis Garci, Patrice Leconte, Edward Yang, Mark Borchardt.
Amazon  Seattle Weekly (J. Hoberman)  metacritic
 
GoodFellas
MARTIN SCORSESE (112)
1990 | 146m | Col | USA | Gangster Film, Crime Drama
"Mr. Scorsese invests his characters' savagery with a giddy, invigorating energy. The scariest thing about GoodFellas is its sheer entertainment value, which is so disorientedly high." - Janet Maslin, New York Times 
Selected by Richard Linklater, Noel Murray, Michael Wood, Susan Seidelman, Mark Schilling.
Amazon  Bright Lights Film Journal  metacritic
         
 116    117    118
A Man Escaped
ROBERT BRESSON (103)
1956 | 102m | BW | France | Drama, Prison Film
"Based on a French lieutenant's account of his 1942 escape from a Gestapo fortress in Lyon, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of Robert Bresson, one of the cinema's foremost artists." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Selected by David Ehrenstein, Jan Nemec, Olivier Assayas, Errol Morris, Georgia Brown.
Amazon  Masters of Cinema  Strictly Film School
 
Stalker
ANDREI TARKOVSKY (119)
1979 | 160m | Col-BW | Russia | Science Fiction, Psychological Sci-Fi
"As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." - Chris Peachment, Time Out
Selected by Michael Haneke, Joel Schumacher, Paul Cox, Henrik Uth Jensen, Slavoj Zizek.
Amazon  The Guardian  Slant Magazine
 
The Red Shoes
MICHAEL POWELL & EMERIC PRESSBURGER (140)
1948 | 133m | Col | UK | Romantic Drama, Musical Drama
"The most popular movie ever made about the ballet and one of the most enigmatic movies about anything... The film is voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don't watch it, you bathe in it." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005
Selected by Ken Russell, Martin Scorsese, Paul Bartel, Seijun Suzuki, Pam Cook.
Amazon  Screen Online  Criterion Collection Essay (Ian Christie)
         
 119    120    121
The Grapes of Wrath
JOHN FORD (134)
1940 | 129m | BW | USA | Rural Drama, Americana
"Ford, Nichols, Fonda and the supporting cast translated Steinbeck's novel to the screen with proper fidelity, the distortions far outweighed by the spectacular rightness of Fonda's casting and the remarkable cinematography of Gregg Toland... The Grapes of Wrath abounds with examples of Ford's skill in visual language." - John Baxter, Film Reference
Selected by Dennis Hopper, Roger Corman, David Stratton, Harold Becker, Sidney Lumet.
Amazon  Roger Ebert's Great Movies  DVD Savant Review
 
Chimes at Midnight
ORSON WELLES (105)
1966 | 115m | BW | Spain-Switzerland | Drama, Tragi-comedy
"The most deeply felt of all Welles's works; a film that is the product of pain itself, of Welles coming to grips with the realities of middle age, old age, and death." - Charles Higham, 1970
Selected by Todd McCarthy, Tony Rayns, Bruce Beresford, John Pym, John Carpenter.
Amazon  Roger Ebert's Great Movies  Senses of Cinema
 
Earth
ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO (110)
1930 | 90m | BW | Russia | Drama, Rural Drama
"The astonishingly beautiful Earth is unlike anything else in movies. Drafted to make a film on rural collectivization, Dovzhenko produced a myth presenting the creation of the kolkhoz as a natural phenomenon, part of a cosmic cycle of birth and death." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 2002
Selected by Dusan Makavejev, Karel Reisz, Gilles Jacob, Donald Richie, Gilberto Perez.
Amazon  Senses of Cinema  Film Reference
         
 122    123    124
The Best Years of Our Lives
WILLIAM WYLER (114)
1946 | 172m | BW | USA | Drama, Family Drama
"I'd call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I've ever seen--the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader 
Selected by Jan Nemec, Sidney Lumet, Cameron Crowe, Scott McGehee, Billy Wilder.
Amazon  Film Reference  James Berardinelli's Reel Views
 
Black Narcissus
MICHAEL POWELL & EMERIC PRESSBURGER (123)
1946 | 99m | Col | UK | Melodrama, Religious Drama
"Run, don't walk to see this 1946 classic from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger... The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2005
Selected by Nick James, Philip Strick, Peter Bradshaw, James Mangold, Julien Temple.
Amazon  Screen Online  Criterion Collection Essay
 
The Exterminating Angel
LUIS BUÑUEL (139)
1962 | 95m | BW | Mexico | Comedy Drama, Satire
"Devastatingly funny, illuminated by unexpected shafts of generosity and tenderness, it remains one of Buñuel's very best. " - Tom Milne, Time Out
Selected by Michael Haneke, Alex Cox, Terry Gilliam, John Carpenter, Neil Jordan.
Amazon  Roger Ebert's Great Movies  Strictly Film School
         
 125    126    127
Out of the Past
JACQUES TOURNEUR (155)
1947 | 97m | BW | USA | Crime, Film Noir
"Out of the Past... is Jacques Tourneur's noir classic... The script is dense, subtly shaped, and bristles with stylised, often witty hard-boiled dialogue and voice-over narration." - Philip French, The Observer, 2007
Selected by Nick James, Pedro Almodóvar, José Luis Garci, Julien Temple, Richard Schickel.
Amazon  Bright Lights Film Journal  Film Reference
See Also: 250 Quintessential Noir Films
 
Belle de jour
LUIS BUÑUEL (159)
1967 | 100m | Col | France-Italy | Drama, Satire
"Never before has Buñuel’s view of the spectacle seemed so obliquely Ophülsian in its shy gaze from behind curtains, windows and even peepholes... Buñuel was one of the few men of the left not afflicted by Puritanism and bourgeois inhibitions about the sex lives of the masses." - Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer, 2006
Selected by Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Philip Kaufman, John Powers, Bryan Forbes.
Amazon  Strictly Film School  Slant Magazine
 
The Lady Eve
PRESTON STURGES (118)
1941 | 94m | BW | USA | Romantic Comedy, Sophisticated Comedy
"A movie like The Lady Eve is so hard to make that you can't make it at all unless you find a way to make it seem effortless. Preston Sturges does a kind of breathless balancing act here, involving romance, deception and physical comedy." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Selected by Pauline Kael, Karel Reisz, Stephen Frears, Richard Leacock, Mark Jancovich.
Amazon  Criterion Collection Essay  Senses of Cinema
          
 128    129    130
The Birth of a Nation
D.W. GRIFFITH (111)
1915 | 187m | BW | USA | Epic, Historical Film
"The Birth of a Nation holds the watcher as in a vice because it shows such ingenuity in integrating a very intimate story within the framework of so large an historical canvass. However much you object to its actual interpretation of history, you have to admit this." - Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
Selected by John Boorman, Terry Gilliam, Jean Douchet, Jonas Mekas, Linda Williams.
Amazon  Roger Ebert's Great Movies  Variety (1915)
 
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
ROBERT WIENE (133)
1919 | 69m | BW | Germany | Horror, Costume Horror
"Aided and abetted by one of Carl Mayer's best scripts and remarkable, distorted sets painted by Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann, this is more than just a textbook classic; the narrative frame creates ambiguities that hold certain elements of the story in disturbing suspension. A one-of-a-kind masterpiece." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Selected by Dusan Makavejev, Peter Wollen, Roger Corman, Mike Leigh, Paul Bartel.
Amazon  All Movie Guide  Movie Reviews UK
 
Ran
AKIRA KUROSAWA (125)
1985 | 161m | Col | France-Japan | Historical Epic, Samurai Film
"Ran is slightly marred by some too obvious straining toward masterpiece status, yet it's a stunning achievement in epic cinema. Working on a large scale seems to bring out the best in Kurosawa's essentially formal talents." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Selected by Sidney Lumet, Mike Hodges, Tanvir Mokammel, Clara Law, Digvijay Singh.
Amazon  Images Journal  Criterion Collection Essay
         
 131    132    133
Umberto D.
VITTORIO DE SICA (122)
1952 | 89m | BW | Italy | Drama, Urban Drama
"One of Italian Neorealism’s last and deepest sighs... Cesare Zavattini, the writer who defined Neorealism as much as its directors did, never wrote more simply and directly and De Sica realizes his work with perfect clarity." - Richard Schickel, Time
Selected by Bryan Forbes, James Mangold, Michael Sragow, John Schlesinger, Edgar Reitz.
Amazon  Strictly Film School  Criterion Collection Essay
 
Rome, Open City
ROBERTO ROSSELLINI (143)
1945 | 105m | BW | Italy | War Drama, Resistance Film
"Open City is unquestionably one of the strongest dramatic films yet made about the recent war. And the fact that it was hurriedly put together by a group of artists soon after the liberation of Rome is significant of its fervor and doubtless integrity." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1946
Selected by Aki Kaurismäki, Jim Jarmusch, Walter Salles, David Parkinson, Howard Feinstein.
Amazon  Cinema-Scope  All Movie Guide