Silver screen indeed

Have decided to write up a list of the films on my 'to watch' list. Since the most highly-regarded lists of top films are those done by the British Film Institute every ten years, I started there; basically put in all the films on their lists I haven't seen.

Here are the ten films directors around the world consider the best:

Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
La Régle du jeu (Renoir)
Rashomon (Kurosawa)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)

I've seen all of them, except for Citizen Kane and La Régle du jeu. I like all of the remaining films; but I'd rank them like this:

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Rashomon (Kurosawa)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)

Everything after Vertigo probably wouldn't be on my personal top ten. I'd probably include films from Satyajit Ray, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Charlie Chaplin and Edward Yang instead.

Here's how the critics voted:
Citizen Kane (Welles)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
La Régle du jeu (Renoir)
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Sunrise (Murnau)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Singin' in the Rain (Kelly, Donen)

Sunrise is the one additional film I haven't seen.

Looking at the directors full list, and the critics full list, I've seen 29 of the directors' top 50, and 28 of the critics' 60. For the most part, I liked the films or at least found them worthwhile (an exception being The Travelling Players by Theo Angelopoulos, which after watching about half of its 4 hours became the only film I've ever left, because I was falling asleep not because of any great dislike).

It's interesting how Western and old school the lists are. There's only one female director on the entire list of top films; and there aren't any films more recent that the 80s (maybe this was a ballot stipulation)?

Same trend holds true for the list of top ten directors as chosen by the directors, where Kurosawa's the only non-white male. The critics list adds Ozu.

Oh well; times change, I'm pretty sure the next list--in 2012--will be more accurate as the list of voting directors and critics changes and as Westerners become less myopic.

A bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
-#31 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-About an American girl student's encounter with a young hoodlum in Paris. Also known as Breathless.

Amarcord, Federico Fellini, 1979
-#31 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-The life of a small provincial town near Rimini during the Fascist rule of the 1930s as seen through the eyes of a 15 year old boy.

Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson, 1966
-#19 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A donkey, symbol of purity and sweetness, goes from bad masters to worse during the course of his life, as he encounters the sins of the world.

Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick, 1975
-#27 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-An ambitious but naïve adventurer is determined to gain a higher place in life, during the time of the Seven Years War in the 18th century.

Chinatown, Roman Polanski, 1974
-#24 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-A matrimonial investigator finds himself involved in a complicated web of murder and corruption with big wheels in California of the late Thirties.

The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970
-#41 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Study of a young bourgeois man who during the Mussolini regime joins the fascist's cause.

Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman, 1982
-#19 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-The title characters are children in the exuberant and colorful Ekdahl household in a Swedish town early in the twentieth century. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie, are the director and the leading lady of the local theatre company. (imdb)

The General, Buster Keaton, 1926
-#15 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Johnny Gray, a locomotive driver, is refused enlistment for the South, but in 1862 gets his chance. His engine and he, partly by audacity and largely by a set of curious chances, are instrumental in rescuing his girl from the Northern troops.

Greed, Erich von Stroheim, 1925
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Drama reviling lust for money.

Intolerance, D.W. Griffith, 1916
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-The theme of "Intolerance" is the emotional basis of history.

Ivan the Terrible, Sergie Eisenstein, 1945
-#27 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Story of Ivan the Terrible's assumption to power in 16th-Century Moscow.

L'Atalante, Jean Vigo, 1934
-#15 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
The film is devoted to the passing of a barge along the waterways of France. A newly-married couple, a barge-master and a boy take part in the action.

L'avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960
-#24 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-When Anna mysteriously disappears during a sailing trip around the Aeolian Islands, her boyfriend Sandro and her best friend Claudia begin an affair.

La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937
-#24 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Story of three French prisoners of war in Germany in the Great War, officers of different rank thrown together by circumstance.

La Règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939
-#9 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Tragedy and comedy effortlessly combine in Renoir's country house ensemble drama. A group of aristocrats gather for some rural relaxation, a shooting party is arranged, downstairs the servants bicker about a new employee, while all the time husbands, wives, mistresses and lovers sweetly deceive one another and swap declarations of love like name cards at a dinner party.

Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard, 1983
-#22 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-American producer Jeremy Prokosch is in Italy to make a version of The Odyssey with Fritz Lang as the director. Prokosch wishes to engage the scriptwriter Paul Javel. When Prokosch meets Javel's wife Camille he immediately makes a play for her attention which Camille finds repellent. Also known as Contempt.

Les Enfants du paradis, Marcel Carné, 1945
-#31 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Nostalgic story of two actors, and the mysterious woman in their lives, set in the atmosphere of the mime theatre in Paris in the 1840s.

Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophuls, 1948
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Story of a tragic love affair between a young Viennese girl and a famous concert pianist, set in Vienna in the early 1900's.

Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929
-#27 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-The film is a montage of Moscow life, showing the people of the city at work and at play.

Ordet, Carl Dreyer, 1955
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Parable of a village girl miraculously brought back to life.

Persona, Ingmar Bergman, 1966
-#41 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-The interaction of two women who resemble each other very closely physically. One keeps silent and the other carries on a monologue.

Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, 1959
-#41 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Psychological study of a thief.

Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A young man leaves wife and home in an effort to find a new life with a girl he meets. But she entangles him in perpetual violence and crime.

Sansho Dayu, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Eleventh century Japan. Zushio and Anju, respectively the son and daughter of a deposed nobleman, lead a struggle against the feudal corruption that is practised by Sansho the cruel bailiff.

The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman, 1957
-#31 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Knight returning, disillusioned, from the Crusades, postpones his death by playing a game of chess with Death.

Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A nine-hour documentary on the victims, perpetrators and witnesses to the Nazi extermination camps in Poland.

Sunrise, F.W. Murnau, 1927
-#7 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A young farmer is seduced by a woman from a city and for love of her attempts to drown his wife.

Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder, 1950
-#12 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A middle aged film star lives in solitary splendour and nostalgia, determined to recover her old glory. When an unemployed script writer happens upon her home, she forces him to stay and re-write the script with which she plans to make her come-back.

Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick, 1957
-#41 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Sidney Falco is an unscrupulous Press agent who does a famous columnist's dirty work to further his own ambition.

Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976
-#31 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Ex-Vietnam marine Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York cab driver, working the night shift to try to escape his oppressive sense of alienation from the corruption and filth that he sees all around him.

The Third Man, Carol Reed, 1949
-#41 in Sight and Sound's Directors poll 2002
-Story of an American writer who goes to Vienna just after the Second World War and tries to track down people who knew his friend, Harry Lime - a racketeer who has supposedly been killed in a street accident

Tokyo Story, Yasujiro Ozu, 1953
-#5 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-A poignant story of family relations and loss, Ozu's subtle mood piece portrays the trip an elderly couple make to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children. The shooting style is elegantly minimal and formally reticent, and the film's devastating emotional impact is drawn as much from what is unsaid and unshown as from what is revealed.

Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Jean-Luc Godard, 1966
-#45 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Examines life in a large housing estate in Paris, following particularly one woman.

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939
-#24 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Follows the career of a Kabuki actor whose inexperience leads him to initial failure on the stage, but who is encouraged to greater success by the girl who originally pointed out his shortcomings.

Ugetsu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953
-#27 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-Japan, 16th Century. Legendary love story about the passion of a ghost Princess for a poor potter.

Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman, 1957
-#27 in Sight and Sound's Critics poll 2002
-The life story of an old professor, recounted through his dreams and his attitude to his family and friends.

All descriptions save one from the oddly eratic BFI database.

More films to see, from various sources:

-The Parallax View, Times: In Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film “The Parallax View,” the nefarious Parallax Corporation uses a questionnaire to recruit potential assassins. Sociopaths and psychopaths are weeded in with a battery of questions that expose their psychological strengths and weaknesses, secrets and predilections. At the opposite end of the moral spectrum, and with utterly benign intent, the General Social Survey has been performing a similar exploration of the American psyche for 34 years.