Last year Sight & Sound published their decennial list of "the best films" ever made. I published my top ten too. Since it was a pain to choose ten films I have now allowed myself to make a new list with films that might as well have ended up on last year's list. Here they are, in chronological order. I still enforce the rule that any director gets only one film. 15 films was the target this time but I failed...
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924, US)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau 1927, US)
La grande illusion (Jean Renoir 1937, France)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940, US)
They Were Expendable (John Ford 1945, US)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls 1948, US)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1948, UK)
Casque d'or (Jacques Becker 1952, France)
A Star is Born (George Cukor 1954, US)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks 1959, US)
The Apartment (Billy Wilder 1960, US)
Le doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville 1962, France)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962, UK)
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti 1963, Italy)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976, US)
After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998, Japan)
Here are the ten films that were on the previous list:
Holiday (George Cukor 1938, US)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir 1939, France)
Laura (Otto Preminger 1944, US)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1946, UK)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946, US)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946, US)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948, US)
Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini 1954, Italy)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville 1967, France)
The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann 1973, UK/France)
