Found a challenge for cinephiles over on Letterboxd that I shamelessly stole. You can read the original challenge rules here. The best 100 films sourced from TSPDT's list of the top 250 directors - one film per selected director.
At the very least that would give me some leeway, right? Wrong. The original list turned out to be filled with films by overrated pinko hacks, foreign film makers no one had heard of, and the pretentious shite men pretend to like to score with artsy women. This was a tougher challenge than I imagined and it turned into something of an obsession.
Various individual auteurs have way too many classics, but I ended up including my
own personal fave pick from their filmography, despite not being regarded as their best by others.
Evidently, based on the blog title alone, I failed. I couldn't find that one last worthy entry and hit one hundred great films.
Here's the list regardless:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)
Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
A Matter of Life and Death (Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell, 1946)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)
In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
Les Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)
The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1955)
Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957)
The Magician (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)
Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960)
Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
The Hill (Sidney Lumet, 1965)
The Collector (William Wyler, 1965)
Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)
For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)
Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Paluka, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976)
Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards, 1976)
Star Wars (George Lucas)
Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Mad Max 2 (George Miller, 1981)
Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983)
The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986)
The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999)
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey, 2011)
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German, 2013)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
The House That Jack Built (Lars Von Trier, 2018)
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
Reasons Why TSPDT's List Sucks:
- Why are genre film makers like Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter and George A. Romero listed, while Wes Craven is omitted? All those directors experienced similar highs and lows.
- Michael Powell is listed twice in TSPDT's list; one on his own, and the other with Emeric Pressburger. I took this a valuable loophole to get closer to one hundred films. Besides, both films I listed are legitimately great.
- Wound up including certain rare great films from film makers that I'm not even a fan of, or in some cases - despise.
- Don't blame me for the miniscule number of 21st century titles. The likes of great contemporary auteurs such as Robert Eggers, Nicolas Winding Refn and Jonathan Frasier not being available says more about the source I had to work with. Here's your host's highest rated 21st century films.
- TSPDT's original list included Peter Greenaway and Ken Russell, but they were given the heave-ho for other film makers I was unfamiliar with, or just couldn't give a toss about. This was crucially costly for me as either The Devils (1971) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) would have helped me hit the finish line.
Please excuse the lack of a Christmas related post this year, this challenge took way too much time. Between all the "classics" and 2024 movies binged this month, it was too much. Also, I just couldn't be bothered, to be totally honest. Merry Christmas, though!!!
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