As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I participated in the Skuriels earlier this summer. The Skuriels are an alternative to the recent Sight and Sound poll. Here's my ballot of twenty movies that I think are the best ever made (or at least favorites on the day I made the ballot). The usual list-making caveats apply. Soooo....
This is in no particular order.
Singin' In the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen)
Viridiana (1961, Luis Bunuel)
Pandora's Box (1929, G. W. Pabst)
Rocco and His Brothers (1960, Luchino Visconti)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
Rififi (1954, Jules Dassin)
Girl Shy (1924, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)
Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
Chimes At Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
The Mask of the Demon (aka: Black Sunday) (1960, Mario Bava)
Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding)
My Brilliant Career (1979, Gillian Armstrong)
I Know Where I'm Going (1945, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressberger)
The Unknown (1927, Tod Browning)
Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)
The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn Le Roy)
A Touch of Zen (1969, King Hu)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960, Akira Kurosawa)
La Pointe-Courte (1955, Agnes Varda)
I was apparently the only voter for the majority of my picks, which is fine. The only one of my films to make the top fifteen was Singin' In the Rain, unsurprisingly. The lack of any films by Kubrick, Hitchcock, Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, and Godard is deliberate, by the way. They don't need my love. They're all already in the canon. Besides, I don't love any of their films more than what I've listed here (though I love many of them just as much), so it's honest enough. Some of these films are in the canon and that's fine, too. Check with me next time someone asks me to make a list like this and the entire contents will change.
Some nice choices -- especially The Unknown, which is one of my favorites.
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