Time's All-Time 100 Movies

Segons la Wikipèdia:

"All-Time" 100 Movies is a compilation by Time magazine featuring and celebrating 100 of "the greatest" films released between March 3, 1923 (when the first issue of Time was published) and early 2005 (when the list was compiled). The list was compiled by critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss and generated significant attention, receiving 7.8 million hits in its first week alone."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%27s_All-TIME_100_Movies

El problema es que costa una mica de consultar, sobre tot si vols analitzar-les cronològicament.

En realitat es tracta de 106 pel·lícules ja que algunes es consideren com una única entrada:

"There are 106 films in this list with Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia Part 1 and 2 (Independent, 1938), Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (Edward Harrison, 1955, 1956, 1959), Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part I and II (Paramount Pictures, 1972, 1974), and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (New Line Cinema, 2001–2003) all listed as single entries."

http://www.filmsite.org/timemagazinegreats5.html

L'ordenació cronològica amb el títol original en anglès i el director seria aquesta:
(BFOID = Best film of its decade)

Year	Film Name	Directed by:
1924	Sherlock, Jr.	Buster Keaton
1927 BFOID	Metropolis	Fritz Lang
1927	Sunrise	F.W. Murnau
1928	The Crowd	King Vidor
1928	The Last Command	Josef von Sternberg
1929	The Man With a Camera	Dziga Vertov
1931	City Lights	Charles Chaplin
1933	Baby Face	Alfred E. Green
1933	King Kong	Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
1934	It's A Gift	Norman Z. McLeod
1935	Bride of Frankenstein	James Whale
1936	Camille	George Cukor
1936	The Crime of Monsieur Lange	Jean Renoir
1936 BFOID	Dodsworth	William Wyler
1936	Swing Time	George Stevens
1937	The Awful Truth	Leo McCarey
1938	Olympia, Parts 1 and 2	Leni Riefenstahl
1939	Ninotchka	Ernst Lubitsch
1940	His Girl Friday	Howard Hawks
1940	Pinocchio	Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen
1940	The Shop Around the Corner	Ernst Lubitsch
1941 BFOID	Citizen Kane	Orson Welles
1941	The Lady Eve	Preston Sturges
1942	Casablanca	Michael Curtiz
1944	Double Indemnity	Billy Wilder
1944	Meet Me in St. Louis	Vincente Minnelli
1945	Children of Paradise	Marcel Carné
1945	Detour	Edgar G. Ulmer
1946	It's A Wonderful Life	Frank Capra
1946	Notorious	Alfred Hitchcock
1947	Out of the Past	Jacques Tourneur
1949	Kind Hearts and Coronets	Robert Hamer
1949	White Heat	Raoul Walsh
1950	In A Lonely Place	Nicholas Ray
1951	A Streetcar Named Desire	Elia Kazan
1952 BFOID	Ikiru	Akira Kurosawa
1952	Singin' in the Rain	Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
1952	Umberto D	Vittorio De Sica
1953	Tokyo Story	Yasujiro Ozu
1953	Ugetsu	Kenji Mizoguchi
1954	On the Waterfront	Elia Kazan
1955	Smiles of a Summer Night	Ingmar Bergman
1955, 1956, 1959	The Apu Trilogy	Satyajit Ray
1956	Invasion of the Body Snatchers	Don Siegel
1956	The Searchers	John Ford
1957	Pyaasa	Guru Dutt
1957	Sweet Smell of Success	Alexander Mackendrick
1959	The 400 Blows	François Truffaut
1959	Some Like It Hot	Billy Wilder
1960	Psycho	Alfred Hitchcock
1961	Yojimbo	Akira Kurosawa
1962	Lawrence of Arabia	David Lean
1962	The Manchurian Candidate	John Frankenheimer
1963	Charade	Stanley Donen
1963	8 1/2	Federico Fellini
1964	Bande à part	Jean-Luc Godard
1964	Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb	Stanley Kubrick
1964	A Hard Day's Night	Richard Lester
1966	Closely Watched Trains	Jirí Menzel
1966	The Good, The Bad and The Ugly	Sergio Leone
1966 BFOID	Persona	Ingmar Bergman
1967	Bonnie and Clyde	Arthur Penn
1967	Mouchette	Robert Bresson
1968	Once Upon a Time in the West	Sergio Leone
1971	A Touch of Zen	King Hu
1972	Aguirre: the Wrath of God	Werner Herzog
1972	The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie	Luis Buñuel
1972, 1974	The Godfather, Parts I and II	Francis Ford Coppola
1973	Day for Night	François Truffaut
1974 BFOID	Chinatown	Roman Polanski
1975	Barry Lyndon	Stanley Kubrick
1976	Taxi Driver	Martin Scorsese
1977	Star Wars	George Lucas
1980	Berlin Alexanderplatz	Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1980	Mon oncle d'Amérique	Alain Resnais
1980	Raging Bull	Martin Scorsese
1982	Blade Runner	Ridley Scott
1982	E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial	Steven Spielberg
1985	Brazil	Terry Gilliam
1985	The Purple Rose of Cairo	Woody Allen
1986	The Fly	David Cronenberg
1986	The Singing Detective	Jon Amiel
1987	Nayakan	Mani Ratnam
1987	Wings of Desire	Wim Wenders
1989 BFOID	The Decalogue	Krzysztof Kieslowski
1990	GoodFellas	Martin Scorsese
1990	Miller's Crossing	Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
1992	Léolo	Jean-Claude Lauzon
1992	Unforgiven	Clint Eastwood
1993	Farewell My Concubine	Kaige Chen
1993	Schindler's List	Steven Spielberg
1994	Chungking Express	Wong Kar Wai
1994	Drunken Master II	Chia-Liang Liu, Jackie Chan
1994 BFOID	Pulp Fiction	Quentin Tarantino
1995	Ulysses' Gaze	Theo Angelopoulos
2001	Kandahar	Mohsen Makhmalbaf
2001, 2002, 2003	The Lord of the Rings	Peter Jackson
2002	City of God	Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund
2002 BFOID	Talk to Her	Pedro Almodóvar
2003	Finding Nemo	Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich

pel que fa a l'argument:

1924 Sherlock, Jr.

Buster Keaton - the man with the flat hat and the dead pan has a night job as a movie theater projectionist but daydreams about becoming a famous (and natty) master detective. In real life he is falsely accused by a shameless cad of stealing a watch from his girlfriend's father. At work that evening he sleepwalks himself into the film he's projecting (its plot eerily mirrors his real-life problem) and solves the crime in a series of magnificently imaginative, physically perilous, perfectly orchestrated gags.

1927 Metropolis

It's an epic poem of urban dystopia (and class warfare) by a misanthropic director who, in his Weimar Republic phase, had a taste for spectacular imagery that, for all our modern digital wizardry, has not been aesthetically surpassed. And his imagined world remains, after all these years, eerily prescient.

1927 Sunrise

The acclaimed German director made his first, masterful American film the same summer Warner Bros. was cranking out The Jazz Singer, the talkie that brought the silent cinema to a (literally) screeching halt. History thinks the story of a farmer who deserts his wife for the bright lights of the big city, then returns to her sadder but wiser one of the last poetic masterpieces of a dying cinematic era.

1928 The Crowd

In this silent film, Vidor traces the sad life of a totally ordinary citizen, dreaming big, living small, in a brilliant expressionistic style. But his manner, which might have had a distancing effect, never interferes with the heartbreaking emotions this powerful film stirs.

1928 The Last Command

White Russian general emigrates to Hollywood, finds work as an extra, then dies on a movie set—while portraying a White Russian general. The ironies are broad, but the emotions are authentic. Emil Jannings won the first screen acting Oscar for this portrayal but William Powell is equally good as the director—once his rival in Russia, now risen to auteur status—who viciously exploits the old man.

1929 The Man With a Camera

The director loved machinery—looms, trolley cars, speeding automobiles. He also loved cinematic tricks—freeze frames, superimpositions, speeded-up action and slo-mo. He put both of his obsessions together in this jazzy, delirious portrait of urban Russia, and his innovative film retains its power to stun and delight 76 years after its release. Technically it is a documentary, but really it is a poetic tribute to modernism's hopeful beginnings.

1931 City Lights

The immortal tramp falls in love with a blind flower seller, with results that are both poignant and deeply comic. Chaplin's sentimental side was never more delicately stated. But his funny side, as he desperately tries to earn money for the operation that will restore the girl's sight, was never more hilariously deployed than it was in this spare, curiously haunting film.

1933 Baby Face

In this invigorating affront of a movie, Lily (Stanwyck) escapes to New York from an Erie, Pa., speakeasy where her father has rented her out to the customers. In a big-city bank, she sleeps her way to the top, leaving a heap of discarded men (and one or two corpses)...Baby Face was the definitive pre-Code statement of how the Depression created a new morality of no morality.

1933 King Kong

This remains one of the movies' immortal tales of unrequited love. And the heartbroken, heartbreaking look in [the great ape's] eyes as the planes shoot him off the Empire State building remains the greatest single special effects shot ever made.

1934 It's A Gift

W.C. Fields, stringing together a succession of his best gag sequences. He plays the proprietor of a moribund grocery store, tormented by his awful wife and children, driven half-mad by every passer-by, registering victimization and misanthropy in his best, curiously minimalist, comic manner.

1935 Bride of Frankenstein

This is one of those rare sequels that is infinitely superior to its source. Boris Karloff is a perfect klutz as the monstrously eager lover of Elsa Lanchester, whose creator, the divinely hysterical Colin Clive, endowed her with virginity and attitude.

1936 Camille

In this romance of selfless renunciation and the nobility of the call-girl class, Garbo's achievement may strike younger viewers as odd, silly, for she is performing in a gestural language utterly remote from today's. Yet it is an elegant, eloquent tongue, and no one "spoke" it as brilliantly as Garbo did in this great and grand soap opera.

1936 The Crime of Monsieur Lange

...it tells the story of a hack writer of pulp westerns, cruelly exploited by his crooked publisher, who finally, justifiably, murders the man. It is not, however, a mystery story. It is, among other things, an idealistic parable (the publishing house employees turn the company into a cooperative) and an affecting romance (it ends with Lange and his lover on the run, hoping for a better life, and the audience thinking perhaps they will attain the happiness they deserve).

1936 Dodsworth

Wyler and his film of the Sinclair Lewis novel about the fraying ties of a plutocrat (Walter Huston), comfortable in his life of prosperity and propriety, and his restless wife (Ruth Chatterton), who needs a sexual fling to prove she is not ready to trudge placidly into old age. Here is a fearlessly mature drama, wise about affairs of the heart and the ego, with acute performances by the stars, including Mary Astor as a dream woman worth traveling the world for.

1936 Swing Time

Astaire's grace, as he gently steered Ginger Rogers across those parquet floors, defined easy elegance and defined the American style in Hollywood's Golden Age. In the comic duet "Pick Yourself Up," Fred turns Ginger from an angry competitor into a perfectly synchronous partner. The climactic number, "Never Gonna Dance," pours courtship, conquest, lovers' quarrel and loss into a five-minute poem in synchronized motion.

1937 The Awful Truth

A divorcing couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) squabble delightfully about custody of their dog, her lamebrained suitor (Ralph Bellamy), his waywardness and her career in what may be the most perfect romantic comedy ever made.

1938 Olympia, Parts 1 and 2

A two-part summary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics - Riefenstahl gave the heroic treatment to Jesse Owens, the black American track star. Politics and politiques aside, Olympia is an amazing technical and artistic achievement. The film's innovations directly influenced all televised sports coverage. Its narrative ingenuity unearthed the human stories behind every back-page headline.

1939 Ninotchka

Garbo's stern Soviet commissar understandably succumbs to the charms of Paris, less understandably to the more mysterious charms of louche Melvyn Douglas. "Garbo Laughs!" the ads proclaimed, and we were delighted to join in the fun.

1940 His Girl Friday

An adaptation of The Front Page, this may be the fastest- (and smartest-) talking romantic comedy ever made. With Cary Grant as a newspaper editor determined to win back his ex-wife (and best reporter), played by Rosalind Russell, who gives as good as she gets from her co-star. It is all heartless hilarity, directed in a mad but curiously logical rush by a great master of overlapping dialogue, vicious asides and over-the-shoulder put-downs.

1940 Pinocchio

Pinocchio is tops for its blending of the animator's craft and a theme—that a child is not human until he can feel loss and act with spontaneous generosity—that can move viewers of every age, and for all ages.

1940 The Shop Around the Corner

In far off, interwar Budapest, the intricately connected employees of an upscale shop live out their little, charmed lives. At the center of the story lives an Assistant Manager (James Stewart) who does not know that the woman with whom he is exchanging love letters is, in fact, his newest employee (Margaret Sullavan). Samson Raphaelson's perfectly plotted script is impeccably realized. The once-famous "Lubitsch touch" was a combination of wry observation, delicate sentiment and gently controlled romanticism.

1941 Citizen Kane

This crypto-biography of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst worked, fabulously, thanks to the insider's knowledge and narrative savvy of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, to cinematographer Gregg Toland's openness to experiment (he virtually created the film-noir style with this film) and, of course, to the boy-genius vigor the 25-year-old Welles brought to his first Hollywood enterprise.

1941 The Lady Eve

Relocating the Garden of Eden to a cruise ship on the North Atlantic, Sturges tosses a gullible Adam (Henry Fonda as a balletically awkward rich boy) into the expert hands of a conniving Eve (Barbara Stanwyck as a card shark). Her toying seduction of him is as smoldering as it is funny. His revenge is that this superior woman finally falls for the pathetic lug in her cross hairs.

1942 Casablanca

Everyone, by now, has come to Rick's—and come away continuing to admire the film's doomy romance, political idealism, crackling dialogue and wonderful performances. It's a studio film that exemplifies (and even justifies) the studio system at its best: slick, efficient, and able to make some pretty stale clichés feel to us like high truth. This is populist movie-making transformed into something like art.

1944 Double Indemnity

Fred MacMurray's weak-willed insurance agent falls under the spell of a client's scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck). They murder her husband, but, of course, bloodily fall out themselves. However dark the plotting, the dialogue (by Wilder and Raymond Chandler) remains bright as a penny and hard as nails. One of the few screen adaptations that actually improves on its source (a James M. Cain novel).

1944 Meet Me in St. Louis

It let real people burst into song in realistic settings—no backstage romances permitted. It had wonderful songs, a sweetly unneurotic performance by Judy Garland (the nutsiness in the piece was handled by Margaret O'Brien, as a little girl haunted by death). Despite its nostalgic charm, Minnelli infused the piece with a dreamy, occasionally surreal, darkness and it remains, for some of us, the greatest of American movie musicals.

1945 Children of Paradise

At 3hr. 9min. the film is an epic romance viewed through an ironic prism. Baptiste the ethereal mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), Garance the worldly-wise courtesan (Arletty) and a dozen other scapegraces and victims are creatures with the fullness and ambiguity of a Balzac novel, thanks to Jacques Prévert, the poet and screenwriter who more than anyone shaped French cinema in one of its richest periods.

1945 Detour

Al (Tom Neal), a piano-playing loser hitching west to meet his girlfriend, and Vera (Ann Savage), the schemer who embodies all the bad luck a man could ever have...this uncompromisingly bleak tale of a sadist and a schlemiel. They can communicate only their mutual loathing in a realm where words can wound and a telephone cord is an inadvertently lethal weapon.

1946 It's A Wonderful Life

Capra traces the decline of a man driven to the edge of madness. George Bailey's life is not, in worldly terms, wonderful; he is Bedford Falls' designated saint, a suburban Job, for his fellow townsfolks' use as a friend or generous banker, through which they can exercise their weakness or meanness. It's a noir portrait with holly stuck in the frame, a sanity hearing in the form of a greeting card.

1946 Notorious

The master's masterpiece. A government agent (Cary Grant) introduces the hard-drinking daughter of a Nazi war criminal into a nest of spies in post-war Rio. She is obliged to marry one of them (Claude Rains in one of his great performances). And Grant, of course, is obliged to fall in love with her. The result is dark romance, dark comedy and, finally, almost unbearable suspense.

1947 Out of the Past

It has the smartest dialogue and the most persuasively labyrinthine plot of any film noir. And Robert Mitchum gives a great performance as the tough, laconic guy in a trench coat, undone by his love for—or is it merely sexual obsession with?—Jane Greer's scheming bitch-goddess.

1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets

Narrated by the fastidious Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), who has plotted to murder eight members of an aristocratic family that had slighted his saintly mother, the film proceeds on tiptoe through the blackest of comedy. It's fun noir. Price and his fellow conniver Joan Greenwood, whose voice plays dark music over every seductive syllable, are splendid, as is Alec Guinness as all eight d'Ascoynes...Hamer's direction is a thing of dry delicacy, but it's the script that makes it the definitive Ealing Studio comedy.

1949 White Heat

James Cagney's gangster at one point in this film climbs on to his Mommy's lap, seeking comfort from one of the blinding headaches that are the chief symptom of his raging psychopathy. But that's the only "explanation" this wonderfully vicious movie offers for his relentlessly bad behavior. The rest is all snarl and gunfire.

1950 In A Lonely Place

Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid screenwriter succumbing to a rage that may or may not be murderous...this sardonic portrayal of life on Hollywood’s fringes (the characters surrounding Steele are etched in acid). And we see him as a modern archetype—a talented, disappointed man surrendering to an anger he cannot govern, an existential blackness he cannot understand.

1951 A Streetcar Named Desire

It has been called the best adaptation of a great play ever made, and we're not going to dispute that judgment. Marlon Brando, repeating his stage performance as Stanley Kowalksi—half child, half animal, all menacing masculinity—is simply great. And so is Vivien Leigh, as his flirtatious, half-mad sister-in-law who teases him toward the brutal rape that destroys her. Tennessee Williams saw them symbolizing the contest between genteel civility and crude lower-class vitality.

1952 Ikiru

Ikiru, which means "to live," is about Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo office chief whose stamp of disapproval falls on almost any project, regardless of merit. Gray and unemotional, he's less a man than a stolid piece of furniture, a bureaucrat who might as well be a bureau. Then he learns he has stomach cancer, and takes stock of all he has left undone.

1952 Singin' in the Rain

Everybody's all-time favorite musical—and justifiably so. Ham actor (Kelly) falls in love with pert ingénue (Debbie Reynolds) while his best pal (Donald O'Connor) kibitzes from the sidelines. Meantime, Hollywood makes its panicky adjustment to the coming of sound pictures. The score is joyful, the comedy smart and knowing, the dancing spectacular in the most easily (and genuinely) likeable movie ever made.

1952 Umberto D

One of Italian Neorealism’s last and deepest sighs, with Carlo Battisti as a retired civil servant, impoverished and isolated trying to survive in a society that has dispensed with him. His only relationship is with his beloved dog, and when it runs away the effect on him—on us watching—is devastating.

1953 Tokyo Story

An old couple comes to the big city to visit their children, who are more irritated than pleased by this interruption of their lives, which are scarcely glamorous. "Isn't life disappointing?" one of them says. "Yes, it is" another replies. But this wry, ironic movie is anything but, as it patiently, wisely explores the generational and universal tensions between the generations.

1953 Ugetsu

Ugetsu is both a magnificent war film and a parable of careless love. A villager, Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), leaves his wife to go to battle, not to serve the Emperor but to find wealth in war's spoils. In a spooky castle he meets the glamorous Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo)and falls under her spectral spell. Ozu wants to define man's restless, acquisitive nature and woman's homing instinct.

1954 On the Waterfront

Brando gives his greatest performance as a young longshoreman who comes to political consciousness and helps oust a corrupt, mob-controlled union from the docks...the yearning love affair between Brando's roughneck and Eva Marie Saint's hesitant convent girl is as fresh and poignant as it was a half-century ago.

1955 Smiles of a Summer Night

It was this comedy that earned "the solemn Swede" his first international eminence. On the long night of the summer solstice, ten people from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the servant class stumble through brief trysts until they find their proper mates. Indefatigable lover of women's wisdom, remorseless anatomizer of men's insecurities, Bergman would make sterner, possibly more profound works, but never again one so blithely understanding of the mischief humans commit on one another—the folly they know is sex and fleetingly convince themselves is love.

1955, 1956, 1959 The Apu Trilogy

Comprising three films: Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. The story of a child growing to manhood in modern India. His triumphs are small, his tragedies large, but Ray's filmmaking is direct in manner, simple in its means and profound in its impact.

1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers

You never see the alien invaders in what may be the best of the science fiction breed. They just quietly replace them with pod. They look the same, but they’re turned into them into smiling, completely passive conformists. Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter do their best to resist (with mixed results) in this parable about McCarthyism, which remains a suspenseful (and still relevant) icon of its era.

1956 The Searchers

Though it has cowboys and Indians, and Monument Valley vistas shot in gorgeous color, this is at heart the grimmest film noir—the story of a man's obsession for the ravages done to his niece (Natalie Wood) by a Comanche chief. Conflicting impulses of race, sex and violence smolder throughout the Frank Nugent script, and on Wayne's implacable face, in an epic that spans five years of brutal winters and scalding summers.

1957 Pyaasa

Vijay (Dutt) is an unpublished poet, dismissed by family and office colleagues but befriended by a prostitute (Waheeda Rehman). In a twist out of  Sullivan's Travels, Vijay is believed dead and his poetry "posthumously" lionized.

1957 Sweet Smell of Success

Psychopathic gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) rules Broadway with an iron fist, destroying everyone who dares to cross him. These include a small time press agent (Tony Curtis) and a sister (Susan Harrison) on whom he casts an incestuous eye. The dialogue (by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets) is etched in acid, and Mackendrick's direction perfectly captures the dark side of The Great White Way.

1959 The 400 Blows

The movie that defined the French New Wave for the world. Partly autobiographical, both realistic and gently experimental in manner, it tells the story of a mischievous boy flirting with full-scale delinquency.

1959 Some Like It Hot

Two guys (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) dolled up as girls, and Marilyn Monroe between them...Some Like It Hot is also plenty smart in its twisting of gender stereotypes (Lemmon gets more romantic action in a dress than he did in pants) and the possibility that a wolf (Curtis, donning thick glasses and a Cary Grant accent) could find true love the hard way.

1960 Psycho

The nut case managing the motel, the not-so innocent woman who takes refuge there one dark and stormy night, the inevitable murder and the deeply weird explanation of the crime that follows. History is less shocked by the doings at the old Bates place, appreciating Hitch's masterful technique, the formal elegance of his style and, above all, the way he toys with some of his favorite themes—guilt, obsession and the wayward ways they drive us all.

1961 Yojimbo

A Samurai (the great Toshiro Mifune) having lost his master discovers an utterly corrupt town and uses both his cunning and his sword to clean it up. The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

1962 Lawrence of Arabia

Robert Bolt’s eloquent, epigrammatic script traced Lawrence’s career from mapmaking in the British army’s Cairo headquarters to masterminding Arab nationalism. Lean, a superb pictorial dramatizer, filled the wide screen with an endless desert occasionally peopled by passionate warriors (well played by Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness and an actual Arab, Omar Sharif). Peter O’Toole’s swashbuckling incarnation made Lawrence a towering, tragic, high-camp sheik of Araby.

1962 The Manchurian Candidate

The plot is preposterous: Brainwashed Korean War POW (Laurence Harvey) becomes a political assassin when he returns home to Momma (the divinely clutching Angela Lansbury). But who cares? The flash and conviction of Frankenheimer's filmmaking drives our commonsensical dubiousness right out of our heads, replacing it with high-energy paranoia. And sheer delight at this manic boldness.

1963 Charade

The great movie-star man, Cary Grant, meets the great movie-star lady, Audrey Hepburn, in a souffle-light thriller-romance-comedy whipped up by Donen, who did blithe American elegance as well as anyone, and writers Marc Behm and Peter Stone. Audrey is a Parisian thief's widow, now in ignorant possession of his loot, and Cary is a mystery man with a protective or pernicious interest in her. Walter Matthau plays an avuncular type over at the U.S. Treasury office, and James Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass are bad guys whose consecutive demises were considered quite violent for the time.

1963 8 1/2

Marcello Mastroianni's blocked movie director consults his dreams, his memories, his fantasies as he attempts to imagine the movie his producers are demanding of him. A suspicion of autobiography hovers over the film, but the comic frenzy of his imaginings redeems the movie from solipsism and its ending—figures from his past triumphs emerge on his set to rescue the moviemaker from his desperation—is both calmative and lovely.

1964 Bande à part

...This film, about some slackers who drop out of a dubious language school and retreat to the suburbs for a lazy frolic that turns into absurdist murder, is among [Godard's] most weirdly entertaining efforts to rewrite not just the grammar of cinema, but its ruling narrative conventions as well.

1964 Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

In Kubrick’s version, one last bomber plows through to Armageddon, a food fight takes place in the U.S. War Room and crippled scientist is moved by the thrill of it all to lurch to his feet, raise his arm in the Nazi salute and cry out, “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk.” Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era.

1964 A Hard Day's Night

They didn't have enough time to make an ordinary pop musical. A month or two for Alun Owen to write situations and dialogue for a quartet of non-actors, and for Lester to prepare his on-the-fly shoot; then four months from first day of filming to premiere.

1966 Closely Watched Trains

...Menzel's film, about a feckless young crossing guard at a sleepy railroad station who becomes an unlikely (and tragic) hero of the resistance to German occupation was [Czech cinema's] sweetly funny, curiously moving masterpiece.

1966 The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Leone's reinvention of the western reaches its epic apotheosis in a movie about the pursuit of gold lost by the Confederates during the Civil War in the Texas theater. Clint Eastwood is the "good" (slow to anger, but quick on the trigger), Lee Van Cleef is the bad (an elegant exemplar of absolute evil) and Eli Wallach is the "ugly" (a menacingly funny, totally amoral bandido whose relationship with the Eastwood character consists largely of betrayals). Leone's magnificent style is all contrasts (huge panoramic shots alternating with tight close-ups, very slow build-ups to lightning-fast action).

1966 Persona

This story is presented as a film-within-an (unrealized)-film and it constitutes Bergman's most austere masterpiece—his camera placements and editing have a simple rightness that belies the complex and enigmatic psychologies he is exploring.

1967 Bonnie and Clyde

Two beautiful idiots (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) find love, death and rollicking good humor as backroads bank robbers in 1930s America. And telling the story of their petty, bloody crime wave, director Arthur Penn creates a film that is both a signature work of its era (the troubled 60s) and one that is as joyously entrancing now as it was the day it was released.

1967 Mouchette

Mouchette, one of the purest Bressons, is the story of a teenage outcast (Nadine Nortier) so abused by everyone in her village that death seems like God's caress, and so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself. Its effect as you watch it is beautifully unforgiving; as you recall it, brutally radiant.

1968 Once Upon a Time in the West

This is a story of the "civilizing" of the West through two agents: one coolly mechanical (the railroad), the other warmly human (Claudia Cardinale, representing womanhood at its most nurturing and radiant). Shooting in Italy, Spain and, for one spectacular moment, Monument Valley, Leone turned Charles Bronson into a leading man, and Henry Fonda into a sneering villain.

1971 A Touch of Zen

In this three-hour epic, a modest scholar (Shih Jun) hooks up with a resolute girl (Hsu Feng) to challenge a vicious warlord. Influenced, like so many major Hong Kong action directors of the period, by the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa and other Japanese directors, Hu brought a unique buoyancy to the action genre.

1972 Aguirre: the Wrath of God

Aguirre is the prototype Herzog-Kinski collaboration, about a Spanish explorer who loses his mission, men and mind on an Amazon adventure. Answering only to the logic of Peru's natural beauty, the film seems an examination of madness from the inside. Sumptuous, spellbinding and immediately, eternally scary.

1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

People start showing up for a dinner party its hosts are unaware they are throwing—turns into a genial exercise in surrealism. Six middle-class friends keep trying to have a nice meal together, but something—love-making, military exercises, criminal activities, even a sequence where they find themselves on stage in a play, playing themselves—keeps preventing them from breaking bread.

1972, 1974 The Godfather, Parts I and II

The gangster movie transformed into dark epic—and, more important, into a metaphor for every family's dysfunction, and a lot of America's, too. The burnished darkness of Gordon Willis's cinematography sets an unforgettable tone. The grandeur of the acting (Brando, Pacino, DeNiro among others) gives it a curious nobility and the multigenerational narrative has the power to move us to terror, pity and, occasionally, bitter laughter.

1973 Day for Night

...perhaps the best movie about moviemaking ever made. Truffaut perfectly captures the romance and hysteria, the guiding obsessions, the lunatic distractions and the desperate improvisations of a company shooting a film, which may not be as great as they delude themselves into thinking it is.

1974 Chinatown

Set against the background of innocent, sun-splashed Los Angeles in the 1930s, this may be the movies' most resonant study of personal and political corruption. Robert Towne's great script is a high romantic tragedy, impeccably directed by Polanski and heart-breakingly played by Jack Nicholson as the private eye who falls and Faye Dunaway as the rich, mysterious and doomed dark lady with whom he falls in love in this perfect summary of the film noir spirit.

1975 Barry Lyndon

In 18th century England [Kubrick's] eponymous protagonist peers into the candle-lit dimness of stately homes, seeking clues to correct behavior. He learns enough to rise in society, but not enough to prevent his fall.

1976 Taxi Driver

Robert DeNiro's portrait of that increasingly familiar American figure-the lone (psycho) gunman-grows ever scarier and more relevant. The movie's great twist, in which he becomes a media hero, also engenders deep, dark thoughts about the world we live in. The power of Scorsese's filmmaking grows ever more punishing with the passage of time.

1977 Star Wars

It changed forever the way movies are marketed. Forget the endlessly hyped sequels. Try to recall the rushing joy in your heart when Harrison Ford first threw theMillennium Falcon into hyperspace. Remember the innocence (and technological inventiveness) of the film, the fun of the dialogue, the astonishment of the creatures we encountered, the propulsive dash of the editing.

1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz

[Fassbinder's] biggest film, likely his masterpiece, is this 15-1/2 hr. made-for-TV adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel, which had thrilled Fassbinder since his teen years. In the lumpen figure of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), the filmmaker found a passive, pathetic non-hero around whom dozens of predators and victims could swarm.

1980 Mon oncle d'Amérique

Mon oncle d'Amérique, written by Jean Gruault, is a science lesson, given by the biologist Henri Laborit, that is made lucid and entertaining by illustrative skits featuring three characters (Roger-Pierre, Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia) and a lab full of white mice. Laborit's questions about the impact of behavioral codes in inhibiting man’s so-called free will dovetail elegantly with Resnais's and Gruault's mission to overthrow the codes of film behavior.

1980 Raging Bull

Boxer Jake LaMotta's brutal life becomes in Robert DeNiro’s towering performance, a study of blind fate driving a man to the edge of self-destruction. This brilliantly shot film finally does allow LaMotta a sliver of redemption and leaves us harrowed by its unblinking portrayal of a life lived essentially without conscience or useful consciousness.

1982 Blade Runner

Blade Runner is set in the year 2019, in a big city that suggests a Tokyo gone daft. Androids (like the ones played by Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and Darryl Hannah) are so evolved they think they're human. They need a 1940s-style cop (Harrison Ford) to put a bullet through their delusion.

1982 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison lent a fairy-tale clarity to the director's standard plot of a lost boy seeking his way back home. And Spielberg orchestrated the movements of the camera and the puppet spaceman with the feelings of—it has to be called love—expressed in young Henry Thomas' yearning face.

1985 Brazil

...in Gilliam's complex comic fantasia, a mild-minded bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) gets run through a police state's inner workings, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, while being manipulated by an insurgent (Robert De Niro) who flies into his life like a deranged Douglas Fairbanks.

1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo

Leading man (Jeff Daniels) steps down off the movie screen to bring a touch of romance to the life of Mia Farrow's downtrodden waitress. Set in Depression-era America, this astonishing exercise in Magic Realism is both an arresting spin on romantic comedy conventions and a light, lovely meditation on the cost of surrendering our lives to commercialized fantasy.

1986 The Fly

The Fly is about a scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who slowly and irrevocably morphs into a giant insect, much to his horror and that of his girlfriend (Geena Davis). Brundle might be the victim of any degenerative disease—cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's—who struggles to retain his humanity even as he decays into something ... monstrous.

1986 The Singing Detective

Jon Amiel was the director of this magnificent six-part BBC series, and a suave job he made of it. But the true guiding and compelling force was the author, Dennis Potter. He poured much of his own biography into the script—a childhood in the Forest of Dean, a lifelong siege of crippling eczema—then extended it into the interior epic of a hospitalized pulp-fiction writer (named Philip Marlow!) whose agonized misery drives him into dark fantasy and bitter memory.

1987 Nayakan

Nayakan, an early, defining work in [Ratnam's] career, tells the Godfatherish tale of Velu, a boy who embraces a life of crime after his father is killed by the police. Velu (Kamal Hasan) has trouble juggling his family life with his life-and-death mob "family"; Ratnam has no such difficulty blending melodrama and music, violence and comedy, realism and delirium, into a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration that, when a gangster's miseries are mounting, the most natural solution is to go singin' in the rain.

1987 Wings of Desire

Angels are poised on Munich’s rooftops, privy to every conversation, every stupid idea and intention going on below, but powerless to intervene. Or, for that matter, to smell, taste or feel an apple. One of them (the superb Bruno Ganz) notices an equally lost and lonely trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encouraged by Peter Falk (playing a version of himself) his needs break through the barriers of angelic convention, love sweetly triumphs and a black and white film blushes into color.

1989 The Decalogue

Kieslowski's [made for television] series: ten little dramas, each about 55 mins. long, each finding a contemporary metaphor for one of the Commandments. Its characters, all of whom live in a drab Warsaw apartment block, must cope with infidelity, cupidity, murder, abortion, the loss of a child...Viewers who haven't 10 hours to devote to Decalogue may get the most pleasure from episodes 1, 5, 6 and 7.

1990 GoodFellas

The director wanted his bloody, dirty-talking study of small-time Mafiosos to have the spirit of "a rollicking road picture," and he achieved this paradoxical goal brilliantly. The picture only seems amoral. Behind its grinning mask it is an acute parody of "family values" and of moral incomprehension. And Joe Pesci is awesome as the most psychopathic of hoods.

1990 Miller's Crossing

In Miller's Crossing (a reworking of the social chicanery in Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest), the antagonists are smart and out-smarter. Albert Finney runs a corrupt town in the 1920s, Gabriel Byrne is a brainy sort sometimes allied with Finney, and a stellar lineup of eccentrics (John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito) fills in the background of this marvelous, and pretty serious, fresco.

1992 Léolo

Léo (Maxime Collin), 12...watches his deranged Québecois brood mismanage their lives. He renames himself Léolo after determining that his mother had actually been impregnated by a Sicilian tomato. This is the first of Lauzon's extravagant fantasies and, like other, odder ones, it is cogently grounded in the solitude that can smother any child—anybody. Lurching from the everyday obscenities of Léo's home life to his rapturous dream life and back again, Léolo takes the elixir of Latin America’s magical realism and spikes it with the tartest French-Canadian satire.

1992 Unforgiven

A bad man who thinks he has reformed returns to his old ways in order to revenge the death of his best friend. The actor-director achieved his masterpiece with this dark, brooding tale of souls seeking redemption but doomed by their flawed natures to a tragic outcome.

1993 Farewell My Concubine

Two boys meet as students in a punishing Peking Opera school in the 1920s and remain partners, friends and enemies for 50 years...one of the boldest, most beautiful Chinese films in a decade dominated by them. In the “Concubine” opera that becomes their trademark, stolid Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) plays the emperor, luscious Cheng Dieyi (the late, great Leslie Cheung) the concubine. Yin and yang are the roles they assume offstage as well, as Xiaolou has an affair with a courtesan (Gong Li, the imperious queen of Chinese cinema) and Dieyi flirts with the satrap of the occupying Japanese government. Sexual politics gives way to political horror during the Cultural Revolution, when personal betrayal may be the one way to stay alive.

1993 Schindler's List

Before the war, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) was the Playboy of the Eastern World, a hard-drinking, womanizing wastrel. After the war, he was essentially a failure. But during the Holocaust a mysterious grace fell upon him and he bravely, cleverly schemed to save the Jews working in his factory from the Nazi death camps.

1994 Chungking Express

The film tells two stories: one of young Takeshi Kaneshiro falling for ageless Brigitte Lin, the other pairing Hong Kong cop Tony Leung Chiu-wai with the elfin beauty Faye Wong. With his two essential collaborators, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and designer William Chang, Wong weaves a tapestry of longing and seduction that puts both the characters and the audience in the mood for love.

1994 Drunken Master II

In his 1978 breakthrough, Yuen Wo-ping's Drunken Master, Chan played the real-life kung-fu hero Wong Fei-hung as an impish young man in need of a sifu (teacher) who could purify his technique and his spirit. In the sequel, 16 years later, Jackie is still a young Fei-hung (Anita Mui, eight years his junior, played his mother!), now up against malicious generals, spies and a hundred bad guys with superhuman fighting skills. The greatest of these is Ken Lo (Chan's offscreen bodyguard), whose battle over hot coals is an exhibition of flying arms and feet that leaves the two actors exhausted and the viewer's jaw on the floor.

1994 Pulp Fiction

Tarantino's multipart murder comedy is (unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s. It established the former video-store geek as the auteur of the decade, proved that the Weinsteins at Miramax could produce films as well as import them, sparked the third or fourth coming of John Travolta's career (while, sort of, killing him off in the middle of the movie) and gave directors not a tenth as gifted as Q.T. the license to daub their pictures with gaudy mayhem.

1995 Ulysses' Gaze

Ulysses' Gaze is nothing less than a synopsis of 20th century Greek history in a film of about three hours and 60 shots. Dozens, then hundreds of protestors materialize on an Athens street. A ship with a huge bust of Lenin floats down a canal. The most amazing scene, again a single shot, tells the story of five family gatherings on New Year's Eve during the Communist insurgency from 1945 to 1950. "Auld Lang Syne" is sung; a son is arrested; the son returns; a death is announced; "Auld Lang Syne."

2001 Kandahar

The Taliban-ruled Afghanistan - that is the setting for Makhmalbaf's masterpiece, with scenes of horrific beauty. At a Red Cross outpost, artificial legs rain from the sky in parachutes dropped from a plane, and the legless Afghani men race out of the tents to scavenge for them.

2001, 2002, 2003 The Lord of the Rings

Conceived and executed as one gigantic, 9hr. 18min. film, this faithful, innovative adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy kept children and everyone else hanging on to the grand story, though it was released over three consecutive Decembers.

2002 City of God

The Rio de Janeiro slum known as Cidade de Deus might be a Martian landscape, so remote in spirit is it from the smooth beaches where the rich work on their tans and lines of seduction. In the inner city the activity is life-and-death, mostly death, and the ruthless men who run the place are boys, some not yet adolescents. Boys their age elsewhere play with plastic guns; these kids shoot real bullets, kill people, for the love or the hell of it.

2002 Talk to Her

The male nurse tending a beautiful comatose woman bathes her nude body, talks endlessly to her of art (she was a dancer) finally makes love to her and impregnates her. Escandalo. The nurse is jailed but, giving birth, speech and movement are restored to his patient. And out of dark materials and an offhand surrealist style, Almodóvar fashions a wondrously ironic tale of redemption.

2003 Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo is, so far, the apotheosis of the Pixar style: the ultimate fish-out-of-water story, with a fretful dad (voiced by Albert Brooks) enlisting a forgetful friend (Ellen DeGeneres) to find his lost son...Pixar doesn't make cute movies for kids. It tells universal stories through a graphic language so persuasive that children and adults respond with the same pleasure and awe.