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Critics' Top 100 - BFI
Critics' Top 100 - BFI
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Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO for his debut film, boy wonder Welles created a
modernist masterpiece that is regularly voted the best film ever made.
Made on the cusp of WWII, Jean Renoirs satire of the upper-middle classes was banned as
demoralising by the French government for two decades after its release.
Stanley Kubrick took science fiction cinema in a grandly intelligent new direction with this epic story of
mans quest for knowledge.
John Ford created perhaps the greatest of all westerns with this tale of a Civil War veteran doggedly
hunting the Comanche who have kidnapped his niece.
Silent cinema at its most sublimely expressive, Carl Theodor Dreyers masterpiece is an austere but
hugely affecting dramatisation of the trial of St Joan.
10 8 (1963) (http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-
people/4ce2b6b25bb2b)
Federico Fellini
A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere, Sergei Eisensteins film about a 1905 naval
mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content.
Robert Bressons distinctive pared down style elicits extraordinary pathos from this devastating tale of an
abused donkey passing from owner to owner.
A nurse (Bibi Andersson) and an actress who refuses to speak (Liv Ullmann) seem to fuse identities in
Ingmar Bergmans disturbing, formally experimental psychological drama.
Hollywoods troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the
inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.
The first of Francis Ford Coppolas epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a
son drawn inexorably into his fathers Mafia affairs.
Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide audiences, Akira Kurosawas breakthrough tells
the story of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.
Martins Scorseses unsettling story of disturbed New York cab driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a
classic of 70s cinema.
Vittorio De Sicas story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a
classic of postwar Italian cinema.
Federico Fellinis epic charts a week in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as the
excesses of modern Roman life go on around him.
The first part of Satyajit Rays acclaimed Apu Trilogy is a lyrical, closely observed story of a peasant
family in 1920s rural India.
Riffing on the classic couple-on-the run movie, enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard took the narrative
innovations of the French New Wave close to breaking point.
On the run from Chicago mobsters, two musicians don drag to join an all-girl jazz band fronted by Sugar
Kane (Marilyn Monroe) in Billy Wilders hugely popular comedy.
48 Histoire(s) du cinma
Jean-Luc Godard
Gillo Pontecorvos masterpiece about the turbulent last years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from
the perspective of both the guerrilla revolutionaries and the French authorities.
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Charles Chaplin
The Tramp wins the affections of a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) in this hilarious but heartbreaking
comedy one of Charlie Chaplins uncontested masterpieces.
In war-torn 16th-century Japan, two men leave their wives to seek wealth and glory in Kenji Mizoguchis
tragic supernatural classic.
Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, Scorseses biopic is widely
acknowledged as one of the greatest films of the 1980s.
56 M (1931) (http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-
people/4ce2b6af6aedd)
Fritz Lang
For his first sound film Fritz Lang turned to the story of a child killer (Peter Lorre), who is hunted down by
police and underworld alike.
Orson Welles return to Hollywood after ten years working in Europe is a sleazy border tale in which he
takes centre stage as gargantuan detective Hank Quinlan.
Keatons third feature is a breathtakingly virtuosic display of every silent comedy technique imaginable,
from his own formidable physical skills to some then-groundbreaking camera trickery.
This sweeping historical tragedy about two children separated from their parents and sold into slavery
continued a run of late masterpieces from Kenji Mizoguchi.
The final outing for Charlie Chaplins beloved Tramp character finds him enduring the pratfalls and
humiliations of work in an increasingly mechanised society.
Actor Charles Laughtons only film as a director is a complete one-off, a terrifying parable of the
corruption of innocence featuring a career-best performance from Robert Mitchum.
Loosely adapted from a novel by Phillip K. Dick, Ridley Scotts dark, saturated vision of 2019 Los
Angeles is a classic of popular science-fiction cinema.
Antonionis film charts the hot and cold relationship of a young couple in bustling Rome.
Jean Renoirs pacifist classic is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during WWI, where class kinship
is felt across national boundaries.
Roman Polanskis brilliant thriller stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye uncovering corruption in 1930s
Los Angeles, a desert town where water equals power.
The railroad rushes westward, bringing power and progress with it, in Sergio Leones grandest spaghetti
western, an operatic homage to Hollywoods mythology of the Old West.
An eccentric English officer inspires the Arabs to unite against the Turks during WWI in David Leans
seven Oscar-winner, an epic in every sense.
Everybody comes to Ricks bar, including expat Ricks (Humphrey Bogart) former lover Ilsa (Ingrid
Bergman), in one of Hollywoods most-loved romantic melodramas.
Silent cinemas most famous lost film, Erich von Stroheims monumental study of three ordinary lives
destroyed by avarice was ruinously edited down by the studio.
A gang of outlaws goes out in a blaze of violence and glory in Sam Peckinpahs elegiac film about the
dying days of the wild west.
In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers audacious Technicolor fantasy, WWII airman David Niven
finds himself summoned to heaven after surviving a plane crash that should have killed him.
Responding to criticisms of racism for his record-breaking The Birth of a Nation, film-making pioneer
D.W. Griffith made this epic drama depicting intolerance through the ages.
Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesy star in this wondrous British Technicolor classic one of cinemas
greatest studies of Englishness.
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