--- title: Best Movies of All Time description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. canonical: https://time.com/archive/7126100/all-time-100-movies/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2005-02-12T13:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-06-10T12:34:27.488Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: TIME Magazine's All-TIME 100 Movies og:description: Critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel pick the 100 best movies since 1923—the beginning of TIME. og:url: https://time.com/archive/7126100/all-time-100-movies/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME Magazine's All-TIME 100 Movies twitter:description: Critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel pick the 100 best movies since 1923—the beginning of TIME. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # All-TIME 100 Movies by [TIME Staff](/author/time-staff/) Feb 12, 2005 1:00 PM CUT by [TIME Staff](/author/time-staff/) Feb 12, 2005 1:00 PM CUT ## Aguirre: The Wrath of God 
The 70s established Herzog as the most defiantly visionary of directors. In Every Man for Himself (And God Against All), Heart of Glass, Nosferatu the Vampire and his amazing documentary about the Guadeloupean volcano La Soufriere, he created worlds beyond civilization, whose ravishing beauty could drive intruders mad. Who better to play the overweening man, intoxicated to the point of insanity, than Klaus Kinski, Herzog's house demon? (Herzog made a fascinating documentary, the 1998 My Best Fiend, about his hectic relationship with the actor.) 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. | micahernst ## The Apu Trilogy 
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. It is, as another great master, Akira Kurosawa, said, "the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river"—the river of life as it is ordinarily lived. | micahernst ## 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. TIME judged it "the gayest screen comedy the season has seen," but these sly and ironic people are men and women for all seasons. | micahernst ## Baby Face 
In four fabulous years before a strict Motion Picture Code put the cap on audacity, Warner Bros. produced a garish gallery of rude, saucy films. Tough guys used guns and grapefruit to commandeer the urban nightscape; dames like Dorothy Mackaill and the young Bette Davis lured men to a heavenly Hades. But no actor was as tough as Barbara Stanwyck, and no actress used womanly wiles with an intelligence so cool and cutting. In this invigorating affront of a movie, dreamed up by Warners' departing production chief Darryl Zanuck, 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). Even in a version pruned for the New York state censors, Baby Face was the definitive pre-Code statement of how the Depression created a new morality of no morality. Now the missing five minutes have been restored, and we see how the movie snarled every bit as brazenly as Stanwyck did. | micahernst ## Bande à part 
Ennui, anarchy and jump cuts—that was Godard at his influential best in the 60s. And 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 his most weirdly entertaining efforts to rewrite not just the grammar of cinema, but its ruling narrative conventions as well. | micahernst ## Barry Lyndon 
The director dreamed of telling stories entirely through images, and in this extraordinarily beautiful existentialist anti-epic he came close to realizing that goal. In 18th century England his 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. In its cover story, TIME, almost alone, predicted history would judge the film a masterpiece. Thirty years later, history is beginning to agree. | micahernst ## Berlin Alexanderplatz 
"Genius or madman?" That question was often flung Fassbinder's way, back in the 70s when the Munich Wunder-brat was leading German cinema to its first great period since the Weimar years. The answer is not ours to provide. What's certain, whatever his eccentricities and cruelties, is that he had the focus to write and direct 40-some coruscating melodramas in a 13-year blast of creative energy that drew equal inspiration from Germany's political past and Hollywood's Golden Age. His 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. If you're looking for a Fassbinder starter set, try The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or Martha or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul or The Marriage of Maria Braun. But I suggest you rise to the challenge. Put a weekend aside to savor the director in full fester. What may seem like an ordeal will end in enthrallment. | micahernst ## Blade Runner 
Coming off the success of his grunge-horror-screaming-in-space movie Alien, Scott was given $30 million to put the dystopic future on film. The result was a commercial flop, and one of the most influential, densely designed visions ever made. Based on Philip K. Dick's s-f novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 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. Narrative drive and graphic ingenuity combine to create a compelling fantasy world, a disturbing future as near to us as our nightmares. | micahernst ## 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. TIME (Aug 25, 1967) originally dismissed the film's "sheer, tasteless aimlessness" but in December of that year made it the centerpiece of its cover story on "The Shock of Freedom in Films" and praised it for "the irony that weds laughter and horror, belly laughs and bullets in the face of life and death." | micahernst ## Brazil 
The machinery of repression never clattered with such goofy efficiency, never crushed a naive soul with such Rube Goldberg ruthlessness, as 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. Gilliam, the Monty Python animator whose script here had contributions from Tom Stoppard, makes unique films —madly, cannily extravagant, with a tone as dark as Jonathan Swift's —which may be one reason he gets to make so few of them. This satire of totalitarianism came out the year after 1984, and almost didn't surface at all, in anything like its maker's version. (A happy ending for a Terry Gilliam film? Now who's mad?) A public brawl with Universal Studios resulted in the film's liberation. Thus DVD connoisseurs can savor the director's capacious vision of post-industrial hell: part futurist, part retro and, for any office worker close to despair, very Right Now. | micahernst ## Bride of Frankenstein 
At first glance TIME called it "fully the equal of the original." It was wrong; 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. It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances. | micahernst ## Camille 
From the moment she went before the MGM cameras, at 19, Greta Garbo was the "older woman." Her body spoke of a connoisseur's awareness of sexual experience; the weight of that knowledge made her gleaming shoulders slump. When she played Dumas fils' "Lady of the Camellias," the courtesan Marguerite Gautier, Garbo was 30\. She had weathered seismic changes in Hollywood: the coming of talkies, the new style of rapid realism, the anachronizing of the poetic cinema she had embodied with such delicacy and power. Now her glamour had turned severe, and the mouth that could laugh or grimace using the same muscles was emitting Marguerite's fatal cough. 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. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## 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. If Charade doesn't allow the divine Audrey to reveal the aristocratic ache on sublime display in Sabrina (and, frankly, that film is missing from this list only because it would have meant a third Billy Wilder film), it exhibits the seemingly effortless buoyancy that, by the 60s, Hollywood had almost forgotten how to radiate. | micahernst ## Children of Paradise 
Made in occupied France under the long noses of the Nazis in the last year of World War II, this story about the convergence of theater, crime and sex in 1830s Paris can be seen as an act of subversion, of artistic heroism. But it needs no making-of back story for inclusion here. 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. A love story where soulmates are rarely matched, Les Enfants expresses the holy ache of poignance. Is marriage the repository of true love? "Oh," declares Baptiste, "if everyone who was married was in love, the earth would shine like the sun." | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## Chungking Express 
The epitome and apotheosis of art-house romance in the 90s, Wong Kar-wai developed a style like no other director —though, as his renown grew beyond China, dozens tried. It is atmosphere used to create the most fleeting or lasting emotion, a mix of longing gazes, swirling cigarette smoke, double-printed slo-mo images and the Colony's most gorgeous actors. Wong might have gone higher with the Eastern Western Ashes of Time, and deeper with that aching epic 2046, but we'll choose the more lighthearted Chungking Express as an admirable starter set. It's a set because 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. The love story is a genre inexplicably ignored by both art-house and commercial directors. Isn't it lovely, then, that Wong Kar-wai is always in that mood? | micahernst ## Citizen Kane 
Named the greatest of all films in poll after critics' poll for the past half-century, Kane might by now seem suitable for viewing not through the glass of the movie projector but under glass, in the museum of outmoded innovations. So, cynics say, Welles had the camera lowered and photographed the ceilings over his actors' heads... so, the impresario of CBS' Mercury Theatre On the Air hijacked radio techniques and put them on film... so, he shot scenes nearly in the dark, to save the cost of dressing a set. So what? 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. The kid who had never made a movie ignored the rules, and remade movies. We don't need to replace Citizen Kane with another all-time great film—its expansive, epic vitality remains fresh—but we sure could use another Welles. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## 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. Bang, you're dead. Ha ha. Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados portrayed similar young toughs in Mexico City a half-century earlier, using a mixture of realism and surrealism. Meirelles and Lund used a pinwheeling, hypertrophic style; no static camera could keep up with the hurtling pace at which these kids rushed to their doom. As sociology, it's tragic; as cinema, a stupendous, joyous jolt. | micahernst ## Closely Watched Trains 
In the brief cold war moment before the Soviet Union brutally crushed its vitality in the crackdown after the "Prague Spring," the Czech cinema exemplified the country's sly, humane rebelliousness to the world. And 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 its sweetly funny, curiously moving masterpiece. TIME thought Menzel kept his mood-shifting movie "on the track all the way." Indeed, he did. | micahernst ## The Crime of Monsieur Lange 
The movies' great humanist made more famous and warmly received films than this one, but none that was more intricate or insinuating. A product of Renoir's early 1930s commitment to Popular Front leftism, 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). It is a film that smoothly transcends its occasional improbabilities to offer a lovely, totally engaging portrait of ordinary people pressed down by the Depression but lifted up by their passionate decency. | micahernst ## The Crowd 
An American rarity, a big studio art film. 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. | micahernst ## Day for Night 
"One of the fondest compliments the movies have ever been paid," TIME said, utterly correctly, about what remains 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. | micahernst ## The Decalogue 
Here's my argument, and Schickel backs me up: In the last really rich decade for movies (sorry, 90s), the three great cinematic monuments — Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Singing Detective and this one — were all made for television. Kieslowski's series, which he wrote with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, is the TV-iest of the trio: 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. You needn't adhere to any religious creed (I don't know that the filmmakers had one) to be moved and exalted by these stories, to have your faith in the power of movies reaffirmed or restored. Viewers who haven't 10 hours to devote to Decalogue may get the most pleasure from episodes 1, 5, 6 and 7\. But that's like going to Mass just for Communion. | micahernst ## Detour 
Two people trapped in a room spit out their hatred for each other. Before Sartre's No Exit, before Pinter, Detour proved that Hell is these two people: 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. Ulmer, a classics-loving sophisticate trained at Germany's Ufa studios, worked almost exclusively on Poverty Row, lending his craftsman's luster and energy to shooting Yiddish- and Ukrainian-language musicals in New Jersey, Negro melodramas in Harlem, cheapo costume pictures in Italy and Spain. His most sustained stint was in the 40s at the off-Hollywood PRC, where, in six days on a few drab sets for $5,000, he made 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. Film noir? Yeah, baby. No film is noirer. | micahernst ## The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 
Minor social embarrassment—people start showing up for a dinner party its hosts are unaware they are throwing—turns into a genial exercise in surrealism. Buñuel, who had previously explored similar situations more dramatically, is in a good-natured, autumnal mood here (he was 72 when he made this movie). His 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. Buñuel, abetted by his long time screenwriting partner, Jean-Claude Carrière, is a deft and casual movie magician, here grown rather fond of a class he has previously savaged on a regular basis, so he never strains for effect or big-time meaning. He just lets the fun (and the surprises) roll on. The result is sheer delight. | micahernst ## Dodsworth 
Many of the "U.S." films on this list—at least those made up to 1960—were directed by foreigners. The Germans, French and English came to Hollywood—because that's where the action was, the reach and the money—and quite often brought an outsider's vision, as fascinated as it was skeptical, to American social issues. That surely was the case with the German-born 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. | micahernst ## 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), this is the Ur-film noir—broody, nasty, funny and utterly compelling. | micahernst ## Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 
Red Alert, the novel on which this movie was based, is a standard technothriller of its time: Cracked soldier launches H-bomb attack on Russia, with everyone pulling back from the brink in the nick of time. In Kubrick's version, one last bomber plows through to Armageddon, a food fight takes place in the U.S. War Room and a 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. | micahernst ## Drunken Master II 
The most important and entertaining star of east Asian cinema, Jackie Chan survived a boyhood in a punishing Peking Opera school, and his early screen days as "the next Bruce Lee" to create his own genre of martial-arts comedies. In each, he blended his engaging personality with beautifully choreographed, literally death-defying stunts —which, famously, Jackie performed himself. 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. Jackie starred in, and directed, many wonderful action films in his pre-Hollywood days. This one can stand at the peak. | micahernst ## E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial 
This was the closing-night attraction at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, a venue not known for blubbering sentiment. At the end, as the little critter bade his farewells and the Jules Verne-like space ship left the ground, the audience similarly levitated. One heard the audience's childlike applause; one felt their spirits lift. This was rapture made audible, palpable. And when E.T. played in commercial theaters, the effect was repeated around the world. 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. E.T. was the first film character to be a finalist in TIME's Man of the Year sweepstakes. It would have been fine with me if the little creature, this lovely film, had won. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## 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. TIME thought the director "impressively objective and mature." It did not mention his uncanny ability to achieve cinematic elegance on a shoestring. Or, more important, his ability to enlist sympathy for his protagonist without unduly sentimentalizing him. | micahernst ## 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. It's The Sunshine Boys with screechy singing, and 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. Chen Kaige's stately, volcanic epic was one of the first Mainland films to acknowledge that damage wrought by Maoism. Beyond that, it is a rich dramatization of the venial and mortal betrayals that are the secret, somber melodies of our lives. | micahernst ## Finding Nemo 
What Sergei Eisenstein and other art-film pioneers said of the Walt Disney studio in the 1930s —that it was making the best movies on earth, by finding exciting new ways to perfect the art of visual story-telling —directors and reviewers say today of Pixar. John Lasseter and his team are bringing the same care and genius to computer-generated animation that Walt did with handmade drawings. 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. But all the Pixar features (Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles) have the means of enthrallment. 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. It's as if the Pixar people have the first clue to the next, higher form of popular movie art. | micahernst ## The Fly 
It's despicable." My distinguished colleague practically spat on learning that I had deemed Cronenberg's remake of a mediocre s.f. movie as worthy of inclusion in a 100-best-of-anything list. Well, I love it. Yes, 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). But I see, and resee, the film as a profound parable on love and loss. 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. The scientist in him wants to study, understand and extend his metamorphosis into Brundlefly; the lover wants to protect his beloved from the danger he represents. Mixing self-aware wit with gross-out special effects, Cronenberg elicits a creepy unease, at least for those of us who think of middle age as the dress rehearsal for senility, or worse. | micahernst ## 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. Maybe it is, as some have said, only a pop masterpiece. But a masterpiece it surely is. | micahernst ## 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). This perfectly matches a narrative that encompasses sadistic brutality, wild humor and, yes, a tragic vision of war and its consequences. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## 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. It's a surprise the picture isn't a mess, a miracle it's so funny, expert and joyous. A Hard Day's Night captures a moment, maybe the last, when rock stars didn't take themselves seriously and could unaffectedly enjoy the pleasure of being rich (yeah!), famous (yeah!), adored (yeah!). Pretty good songs, too. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## Ikiru 
In any job, it's so easy to say no. (Film reviewers know this as well as anyone.) This film is about the importance of saying yes: to life, to adventure, to human need. 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. Replaying It's a Wonderful Life, but in reverse gear, the movie sends him on a journey through Tokyo's nighttown to demonstrate that, no, his life as husband, father, worker didn't make a difference. He might as well never have been born. Kurosawa makes Watanabe's conversion, revival, resurrection as inspiring as it is pure. And Shimura, a superb actor, makes his character a plausible saint, who can find poetry in a simple song, or sitting on a playground swing. | micahernst ## In A Lonely Place 
Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid screenwriter succumbing to a rage that may or may not be murderous. TIME thought it took forever to make its point. We love every minute of 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. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## It's A Gift 
Forget that director's credit— McLeod just placed the camera and had someone turn it on. Forget the cheesy filmmaking and the casually episodic narrative. Concentrate instead on 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. | micahernst ## It's a Wonderful Life 
Like a Christmas fruitcake that by New Year's has become a doorstop, or a paperweight in the trash bin, this fable risked being a major Yuletide ordeal, thanks to endless TV showings for a couple of decades when it was in the public domain. It's hard to see the thing fresh, but try. Like a dozen or more films on this list, Capra's 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. Capra briskly, artfully piles the misfortunes on James Stewart's slim frame; Stewart bears that load with spectacular range and grace. | micahernst ## Kandahar 
A conundrum: the Islamic Republic of Iran, no friend of Western-style liberty, somehow nurtured (well, permitted) the great humanist cinema of the 90s. We'll let the political scientists explain that one, and just note that men like Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami have directed on their own, and encouraged in others, films whose stripped-down, but never simple, artistry touches souls around the world. The stories are often about children —poor ones, blind or lame ones —who fight long odds not to triumph but simply to survive. In the past few years, the focus of Iranian films has shifted from within the country to its even more besieged neighbors in Kurdistan, Iraq and 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. Because he is also the great colorist of Iranian film, Makhmalbaf makes Kandahar an experience as visually elevating as it is emotionally devastating. | micahernst ## Kind Hearts and Coronets 
I saw this at an impressionable age (seven?). That first viewing addicted me to the English comedy of manners, and in many revisitings over the years Kind Hearts has lost none of its luster. Narrated by the fastidious Louis Mazzini (Denis 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. My favorite: the elderly parson, who delights in showing off his medieval chapel ("And I always say that my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the more concomitant crudities of his period.") Hamer's direction is a thing of dry delicacy, but it's the script that makes it the definitive Ealing Studio comedy. This is one of the few works of dramatic literature, and the only film I know, whose epigrammatic wit and wickedness bear comparison to Oscar Wilde's. In a word, perfection! | micahernst ## King Kong 
The greatest of the great apes tragically pursues his helpless, hopeless passion, and 72 years after he emerged from his jungle lair this remains one of the movies' immortal tales of unrequited love. And the heartbroken, heartbreaking look in his eyes as the planes shoot him off the Empire State building remains the greatest single special effects shot ever made. TIME (March 13, 1933) thought Kong too humongous to be "plausible"— an understatement if ever there was one—but also found him "wholly enjoyable," which is also a bit of an understatement, too.R.S. | micahernst ## The Lady Eve 
No writer-director has ever equaled Sturges's amazing burst of creative energy—the nine witty, mostly rowdy films he auteured in a four-year fury. Surely no moviemaker provided more intelligent, choleric pleasure. So including a Sturges film here was a given. But which one? We might have chosen his Hollywood satire Sullivan's Travels, or that pearly menage-a-quatre The Palm Beach Story, or one of his teeming, small-town, wartime parables (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero). But we're sticking with The Lady Eve, which comes damned close to perfection of writing, performing and sustained tone. 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. Splendid fun! | micahernst ## The Last Command 
A 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. | micahernst ## Lawrence of Arabia 
T.E. Lawrence was the British lieutenant who organized the Arab overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, then watched in dismay as the European powers reneged on their promise—his promise, actually—that "Arabia's for the Arabs now." A figure of enormous accomplishment and even huger charisma, Lawrence promoted himself as assiduously as he did Arab nationalism: a legend in the self-making. The film version met this epic in the flesh head-on. 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. The film, which seemed nostalgic upon its release, looks prescient now, as the debate over Western influence in Arabia is written daily in blood. | micahernst ## Léolo 
At some time in our youth, many of us have soberly concluded that these large people in our house cannot be our parents. They are clumsy or brutal, lacking the divine spark we surely possess; and rather than being stolen by gypsies, we were left on their doorstep by some superior beings as a test of our ability to absorb pain and indignity. Léo (Maxime Collin), 12, is nourished by this conviction as he 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. Our young hero does survive a (hilarious) suicide attempt, but Lauzon, alas, did not live to make another film. He died in a plane crash at 43\. | micahernst ## 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. By disdaining the facetiousness that informed nearly every other fantasy (and most other kinds of Hollywood-type movies), LOTR located a narrative and emotional grandeur that had been missing nearly as long as the ring that carries Middle Earth's destiny and Frodo the Hobbit's doom. The digital effects work, however imposing, built on the achievements of generations of Hollywood technicians. What remains amazing about the enterprise is that, over seven years of planning, production and digital effects work, Jackson kept his eye on the prize, never losing the epic heft or stinting on the telling visual or character detail. It's wonderful when moviemakers dream this big, and make their dreams ours. | krooney ## The Man with a Movie 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. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## Meet Me in St. Louis 
Made a year after Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, it did for the movie musical what that show did for the stage musical: 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. | micahernst ## Metropolis 
You've seen the stills—those immortal Art Deco representations of a chilling future. Now see the movie. 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. | micahernst ## Miller's Crossing 
The American Independent movement can be sluggish and aimless: stories of sensitive dislocation told at a snail's pace. Not so the films of the Coen brothers: writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan. Dextrously flipping and reheating old movie genres like so many pancakes, they serve them up fresh, not with syrup but with a coating of comic arsenic. Their wondrous facility can lead them into facetiousness; I for one still don't get Fargo, which seems to be about how the folks in Minnesota (the Coen's home state) talk funny and act criminally stupid. But 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. It's noir with a touch so light, the film seems to float on the breeze like the Frisbee of a fedora sailing through the forest. | micahernst ## Mon oncle d'Amérique 
We humans supposedly use only five percent of our brainpower. Filmmakers are similarly timid with the possibilities of the medium. Virtually all directors employ the visual vocabulary established 90 years ago by D.W. Griffith, and the presumption of realism: that those actors are these characters. Resnais, in a career spanning a half-century, is not always so constrained. His Last Year at Marienbad had the smart set guessing what was real and what was fantasy—and missing the correct answer that, on screen, everything is a fantasy, literally an optical illusion. 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. It's an exemplary experiment, and the highest form of movie fun. | micahernst ## Mouchette 
Robert Bresson, his detractors would say, has a lot to answer for. In 13 films over 40 years, he developed the whole slim repertoire of exalted minimalism. Blank glances that suggest both sanctity and reproach; pregnant silences that speak libraries of meaning; an hour of mundane injustices that often explode into beatings, murders, suicides galore—these have become the vocabulary, the very clichés, of European and Asian art-house cinema. But just as we needn't hold Steven Spielberg accountable for every crappy-sappy kids' adventure, we shouldn't blame Bresson for creating an art form that literally hundreds of imitators reduced to non-movie sterility. Bresson's films, however austere and obsessed with each man's own private Calvary, have a precision of imagery, an understanding of character, that gives them life, makes them a joy to watch. 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. | micahernst ## Nayakan 
Bollywood is shorthand for Bombay Hollywood, seat of the largest Indian film industry. But it manufactures only about 200 of the thousand or so Indian feature films; a half-dozen regions boast production sites larger than most of the world's national cinemas. Madras, capital of the Tamil state, is one such place, and its leader — arguably India's top pop-film auteur — is Mani Ratnam. His movies, often dramatizing social unrest and political terrorism, churn with narrative tension and camera energy that would be the envy of Hollywood directors, if they were ever to see them. Nayakan, an early, defining work in his 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. | micahernst ## 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. "Literate and knowingly directed," TIME said, somewhat understating the case for this lovely romantic comedy. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## Olympia, Parts 1 and 2 
The matter of Riefenstahl "the Nazi director" is worth raising so it can be dismissed. No question that, in the hallucinatory documentary Triumph of the Will, the cinema's first great woman filmmaker painted Adolf Hitler as a Wagnerian deity come to earth. But that was in 1934-35\. In her next documentary, a two-part summary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Riefenstahl gave the same heroic treatment to Jesse Owens, the black American track star. Mythologizing was her method, from her early alpine films to her later photographs of Nuba tribesmen; Hitler was only an incidental beneficiary of the Riefenstahl vision. 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. | micahernst ## 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. That theme is now a little dated, but 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, when TIME dismissed Kazan's powerfully realistic film as no more than "a shrewd piece of screen journalism." | micahernst ## Once Upon a Time in the West 
In the 50s and 60s, moviemaking's international decades, European auteurs came less frequently to Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood, in the form of itinerant American stars, came to them, where the directors could recast their love for old genres with their own distinct accents. One such was Leone, the Italian who had teamed with Clint Eastwood for the three Dollars westerns that brought fame to both men. Now, in a script co-written with Sergio Donati, he would expand his operatic vision to epic form. 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. The real stars, though, are Leone's camera, going eye-to-eye with his actors or tracking through the labyrinth of his invented West, and Ennio Morricone's score—arguably the richest in movie history. | micahernst ## 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. TIME (Dec. 15, 1947) didn't like Mitchum ("Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates") but found Greer "in an ancient idiom, as a hot number." | micahernst ## Persona 
An actress named Elisabeth (Liv Ullman) suddenly falls silent. She tired of playing roles, on stage, in life, no longer able to respond to the horrors and banalities of the world with idle politesse. Alma, her nurse (Bibi Andersson) is seemingly a chipper young woman, keeping up a stream of cheerful chatter as the two share a summer cottage. Eventually her good nature begins to elicit smiles and nods from her patient. But speaking into the void changes Alma more radically, especially after she recalls a hot sexual adventure (it is one of the movies' great erotic tropes; you can see what happened even though the incident is recounted in purely verbal terms). Eventually, Alma turns into a version of Elisabeth, full of disgust and self-loathing. 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. It is perhaps a movie none of us will ever fully understand, but the effort to do so is always at once unsettling and hypnotizing. | micahernst ## Pinocchio 
Friend Schickel, in his exemplary book The Disney Version, noted that Nelson Rockefeller, owner of Radio City Music Hall, chastised Walt Disney because every time the Music Hall showed a Disney cartoon feature, kids peed from fright so regularly that the seats had to be reupholstered. Such was the fear factor of Snow White, Bambi, Dumbo and this film in alerting children to the dangers of separation from a parent. Of all those primal horror homilies, 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. Now, for the first time since Steamboat Willie in 1928, traditional animation is dormant, replaced by the CGI geniuses at Pixar. I miss the greatness of the old format, which could persuasively mix barnyard critters with human motion and emotion. I wish, upon a star, that it could return. | micahernst ## 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 left TIME cold; it called the film "stomach churning." 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. | micahernst ## Pulp Fiction 
The (approximately) 46th, and most recent, film noir on this list, 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. Yeah yeah, but Pulp Fiction is still fresh—in fact, astonishingly impudent—and fully up to matching its cocksure ambition with its care for framing a scene and its love for the actors within them. The joy of filmmaking is evident and infectious. The film still has the impact of an adrenalin shot to the heart. | micahernst ## The Purple Rose of Cairo 
A 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. "Rare currents of wit and nostalgia," TIME's reviewer wrote. But in retrospect, it is much more than that. | micahernst ## Pyaasa 
Like Japan, India had a golden age in the 1950s. Independence from Britain sparked a robust, questioning artistry. While Satyajit Ray was pioneering the nation's art cinema, commercial filmmakers such as Raj Kapoor (Awaara), Mehboob Khan (Mother India) and Bimal Roy (Do Bigha Zamin) were grafting influences from Hollywood melodramas and Italian neo-realism onto the Indian tradition of musical narrative. Pyaasa, which means thirst, is the most soulfully romantic of the lot. 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. The writer-producer-director-star paints a glamorous portrait of an artist's isolation through dappled imagery and the sensitive picturizing of S.D. Burman's famous songs. And Rehman, in her screen debut, is sultry, radiant—a woman to bring out the poet in any man, on screen or in the audience. | micahernst ## 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. TIME thought it "bloated and repetitious." But 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. | micahernst ## 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. From this true story Steven Spielberg created a film that is an austere act of historical witness, a powerful and suspenseful drama, a high moral act and, finally, a movie that escapes the bounds of conventional criticism. | micahernst ## The Searchers 
John Wayne and John Ford made eight westerns together. This one, though it has cowboys and Indians, and Monument Valley vistas shot in gorgeous color, 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. The Searchers rides toward vengeance, opens and closes doors that lead to the darkest possibilities, deals with spat-out hatreds and unspoken love. Jeffrey Hunter, noble and hunky, heads the fine supporting cast of this immensely influential film, whose distinguished spawn includes Once Upon a Time in the West and Star Wars. | micahernst ## Sherlock, Jr. 
The impeccable comedian directs himself in an impeccable silent comedy. 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. Things work out all right for him as well in the waking world. Is this, as some critics have argued, an example of primitive American surrealism? Sure. But let's not get fancy about it. It is more significantly, a great example of American minimalism—simple objects and movement manipulated in casually complex ways to generate a steadily rising gale of laughter. The whole thing is only 45 minutes long, not a second of which is wasted. In an age when most comedies are all windup and no punch, this is the most treasurable of virtues. | micahernst ## 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. The touch was never more touching than it is here. | micahernst ## 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. | micahernst ## 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. It's Potter's voice that rages in every superb, suppurating monologue, that soars with each vintage tune running through the hero's addled mind. A fable of degeneration (shown with brutal precision) and regeneration (not entirely persuasive), the piece alternates ferocious confessional elements with bursts of musical comedy. The anger is cathartic for Marlow, the music transporting; its lilt almost allows him to cruise down a river toward sanity. In what is essentially a one-man show, Michael Gambon gives one the fiercest, most acute performances in modern film. Yes, Virginia, it is a film, a 6hr. 48min. one, made with unflinching brilliance. | micahernst ## Smiles of a Summer Night 
The Seventh Seal, made the following year, would establish Bergman as cinema's prime movie metaphysician; Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring would stamp his pure, dour philosophy on a generation of filmmakers and viewers. As much as anyone, he convinced the world that film was an art, and that handsome faces suffering in closeup could be the visual equivalent of literature. Yet 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. | micahernst ## Some Like It Hot 
This one is just plain funny—deviously, dextrously, remorselesly so. Two guys (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) dolled up as girls, and Marilyn Monroe between them. Say no more! But I will, because 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. Curtis shares three of the great screen kisses with Monroe, who is magnif, whether cascading out of her flapper gowns or lending her adorable tremolo to cutesy tunes ("I Wanna Be Loved by You") and suicidal torch songs ("I'm Thru With Love"). And yes, it's still funny, from first gag to the priceless last one. It's also one of the rare comedies that is enriched rather than exhausted at the end of a breathless two hours. Nobody's perfect, but this film is. | micahernst ## Star Wars 
Forget the phenomenon—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 the Millennium 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. One suspects that the peppy force of the thing will always be with us, preventing our surrender to the Force's Dark Side.



(More: Get the Commemorative Issue) | micahernst ## 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. We are simply harrowed by the drama he unleashed. | micahernst ## 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. TIME thought Sunrise "picturesquely soporific." 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. | micahernst ## Sweet Smell of Success 
A 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. The theatrical New York of the 1950s has by now been Disneyfied beyond recognition. But its scuzzy denizens remain recognizably alive and malevolent to us. | micahernst ## Swing Time 
By most standards, this would be one of the least worthy films on our list. Silly story (a gambler courts a gal engaged to a bandleader), vapid dialogue, ordinary direction, acting that Stanislavsky or Scorsese would deem subpar. But it's a musical, and oh those songs (by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields), oh those dances (choreographed by Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan). 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. With moves whose wit surpassed verbal cleverness, whose passion in a two-step or a twirl was warmer than any kiss, Fred and Ginger were a living metaphor for la belle, la perfectly swell, romance. | micahernst ## 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, which TIME accurately called a "profoundly witty and unique" experience. | micahernst ## Taxi Driver 
TIME hated the movie when it came out ("thoroughly depressing realism" was the best it could say). But 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. | micahernst ## Tokyo Story 
Yasujiro Ozu was the most austere of the Japanese masters—few camera movements or close-ups, a rigorously plain editing manner. His attention was intently focused on his people, who were usually ordinary members of the middle class. This is one of his most approachable movies: 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. | micahernst ## A Touch of Zen 
Kung-fu movies came to the West via the grunting charisma of Bruce Lee. But his were standard revenge thrillers, showcases for the acrobatics of machismo. For a marriage of martial and cinematic art, King Hu was the man. And A Touch of Zen, the first Chinese action movie to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is his masterpiece. In this three-hr. 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. His performers literally bounced (on unseen trampolines) through forests and over hills, and — because Hu's camera has a muscular grace as well — the viewer soars with them. Leading the acrobatic procession is Hsu Feng. Just 18 when the film was made, she remains the screen's gravest, most ravishing woman warrior. | micahernst ## Ugetsu 
They came in rapid succession, as if off a Japanese assembly line: masterpieces galore in the early 50s, from Kurosawa and Ozu and Mizoguchi, who ended his career with four films (The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, Street of Shame) whose pained wisdom and fluidity of form are the film equivalent of Beethoven's last Quartets. 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. One creates adventure, the other continuity. These are the building blocks of any story—including the haunting ghost story that Ugetsu, in one of the great tracking shots in cinema history, reveals itself to be. | micahernst ## Ulysses' Gaze 
A minimalist with an epic vision, Angelopoulos has created imposing cinematic tableaux about his homeland, from his first international successes, Days of '36 and Traveling Players. Typically, each scene, which may run for two, three or 10 mins., is a single shot, in which the educated eye discovers all manner of subtle drama in furtive glances, in silences when there's nothing to say, in the corners of the screen. 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." Life, Angelopoulos says, is a pageant best seen from a distance, where we can discern its larger contours, its greater meaning, its unbearable and heroic poignance. | micahernst ## 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. Cesare Zavattini, the writer who defined Neorealism as much as its directors did, never wrote more simply and directly and De Sica realizes his work with perfect clarity. | micahernst ## Unforgiven 
At the time it was called a "revisionist" western. Now it seems like a return to classicism—a bad man who thinks he has reformed returns to his old ways in order to revenge the death of his best friend. "Clintessence" TIME called it, and 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. | micahernst ## 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. The film that can, perhaps, be read as an unannounced satire on the gangster genre, but it still leaves you breathless at the sheer anarchy of the crime wave he and his mob loose on an innocent world. | micahernst ## Wings of Desire 
In movies angels are generally busy-body know-it-alls, running about rescuing humans from their vast varieties of sin and error. Not so in this movie, where they are poised on Berlin'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. It's a movie that might have fallen into sentimentality at any one of a dozen moments, but thanks to Peter Handke's wryly realistic writing and Wenders's gently controlled direction, it never does. It's a perfect fantasy for people who usually deplore fantasy. But people with a suspicious regard for the twee will like it as well. | micahernst ## 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. Kurosawa knew and loved American westerns, but deploying their conventions in feudal Japan he utterly transformed them—to our utter fascination and delight. | micahernst ## Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront 
Beaten up and beaten down, baffled Terry Malloy still yearns for redeeming love and heroic self-assertion. He achieves both in Elia Kazan's masterpiece of American realism. A half-century later the film's presentation of union corruption on the New Jersey docks seems a little quaint, but Brando's ferocious and tormented yearning for Eva Marie Saint's virginal Catholic girl will still tear your heart out. | micahernst ## James Cagney, White Heat 
He was most often a brass-knuckled sprite inhabiting the concrete jungles of an urbanizing America. But in Raoul Walsh's potent portrayal of a criminal gang roving backroads America, he permanently redefined psychopathic criminality in the movies. There's no charm in Cagney's work here—just a touch of pathos, as he squawks the unchained melodies of a murderously unbridled id. | micahernst ## Faye Dunaway, Chinatown 
Waiting for stylish, brittle women to break is one of the enduring pleasures of movies. Bette Davis built a great career on that dark device. Dunaway built a great performance on it as Evelyn Mulwray, the woman raped by her perfectly powerful, perfectly evil father (screenwriter Robert Towne thought the father's sexual predation perfectly matched his rape of the virginal California landscape). Her breakdown ("She's my sister, she's my daughter") is perhaps the iconic moment in post-modern American cinema. | micahernst ## Cary Grant, Notorious 
He is remembered—rightly—as Mr. Charm. But the slum kid from Bristol, England never forgot his harsh and lonely beginnings. It lent a flickering reality to his giddiest comic performances, but Alfred Hitchcock stressed Cary Grant's dark side in the five films they made together—never more effectively than in this brilliantly suspenseful tale of cruel love almost lost to the exigencies of counter-espionage. | micahernst ## Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity 
Tough gals don't cry. They scamalot. And the movies never had a more hypnotic double-dealer than Stanwyck. Whether she was sleeping her way to the top of a bank (Baby Face), playing a card sharp (The Lady Eve) or luring Fred MacMurray into mutually-assured destruction in Billy Wilder's scheming dream of L.A.'s dark side, she was always a bundle of barbed wire entrancingly encased in velvet. | micahernst ## Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game 
Not an actor by trade, only one of the greatest directors, Renoir cast himself as the bearish, garrulous friend of the aviator hero in this magnificent 1939 fresco of the French leisure class gamboling in the shadow of imminent war. As aristocrats and servants flirt and hurt one another, Renoir stands slightly apart, smiling and pained, understanding the sadness of the maxim "Everyone has his own reasons." Now here's my reason or this choice: 30 years ago, Andrew Sarris, Richard Roud and I were chatting, and someone wondered which film character we thought best expressed our own temperaments. Simultaneously, each of us exclaimed, "Jean Renoir in The Rules of the Game!" Three film lovers saw themselves in the mirror of Renoir's humane skepticism. 'Nuff said. | micahernst ## Raj Kapoor, Awara 
He was more than the primal star of Indian cinema. To most of the planet, Raj Kapoor was India in all its vitality, humanity and poignancy. Awara (1951) and the other '50s films Kapoor directed, produced and starred in with Nargis, his muse and mistress, were sensations not only in India and throughout the Arab world but in the Soviet Union (where the movies' songs became top hits) and Communist China (Mao once named Awara his favorite film). A Ronald Colman lookalike, Kapoor wanted to be India's Charlie Chaplin; Awara translates as "The Tramp." He plays Raju, son of a stern judge (Kapoor's own father Prithviraj) who had banished his wife after she was abducted, perhaps ravaged, by a brigand. Raju, not knowing his prominent, blighted parentage, grows up a vagabond, falls in love with the judge's adopted daughter (Nargis) and is charged with a crime that must be decided by ... his father. With a wild dream sequence, enough passions and plot anomalies for a dozen Hollywood soapers, and a luminous, startling seaside seduction, Awara serves as a superb primer for Indian cinema and its actor-auteur, forever revered as The Great Showman. | rcorliss ## Judy Holliday, Bells Are Ringing 
She had a little, kewpie-doll voice and a large frame; the 5ft.10in. comedienne would have bought her gowns at the Big & Tall Ladies' Salon. Judy Holliday was also the most dynamic, engaging musical comedy star of her generation. That makes her only movie musical, Bells Are Ringing, one to treasure. Adapted by her old Revuers pals Betty Comden and Adolph Green from their Broadway hit, with tunes by Jule Styne and direction by Vincente Minnelli, the film casts Holliday as Ella Petersen, an answering service operator who brightens her customer's lives but has no control over her own. Dean Martin is the wrong guy who becomes Mr. Right, and Eddie Foy Jr. a bookie with a scheme to take phone bets disguised as orders for classical records ("Who is Handel? Hialeah! Hialeah!"). But it's Judy's show, and she's a pearl: sweet, vulnerable, totally winning. Her farewell song ("I'm goin' back / Where I can be me / At the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company") has an extra poignance because this was Holliday's final film. She died of throat cancer five years later, at 44\. | micahernst ## Bill Murray, Groundhog Day 
Selfish and snarky, Murray's Phil Connors is a Pittsburgh weatherman who plans to be in Punxsutawney, Pa., for just one day: Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. Except that the day repeats itself, with infinitely minute variations, until Phil gets it right. Punxatawney becomes Phil's Purgatory, or maybe Limbo, a place with this weather report: "It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be gray, and it's gonna last you the rest of your life." The script for this 1992 film, by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis, superbly balances comedy and philosophy. (Is God a Groundhog? Discuss.) But it's Murray who sells, and inhabits, this rumination on life as an endless repetition of small inanities and indignities. Since Caddyshack and Ghostbusters, Murray has refined his amiable doofus into the minimalist modern man—his posture a question mark, his face a concrete poem of anticipated disappointment. Murray—Man should have won an Oscar for Lost in Translation, and certainly for this film, where he can rise to romance and sink to despair—and be wonderfully funny—all in the same day. | rcorliss ## Brigitte Lin, Swordsman II 
"To talk about Ching Hsia is like talking about Grace Kelly," cinematographer Christopher Doyle said in 1998 in Akiko Tetsuya's book, The Last Star in the East. "Because even to me, she represents what we hope the image of beauty in our world is. She is perfect." Ling Ching-hsia—Brigitte Lin to her western acolytes—was discovered on a Taipei street at 18 and became a star in her first film, Outside the Window. A ravishing presence for a decade in Taiwanese weepies, she came to Hong Kong in the 80s and changed her image. In the films of Tsui Hark (Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Peking Opera Blues, Swordsman II, East Is Red), she was cunning, sexy, enigmatic, often androgyne. Nobody could match her display of fiery charisma and tart wit. In the 1992 Swordsman II, Lin plays an evil male deity who has castrated himself to become a woman and achieve greater powers. Radiating a molten stare, and battling hero Jet Li in some of the most dizzyingly choreographed fights in Hong Kong history, Lin easily lives up to her character's name: Invincible Asia. Though she quit movies when she married in 1994, she remains just that, invincible and indelible. | micahernst ## Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S. 
Here's why this is not on our All-Time 100 Movies List: It is indefensible as social history; it lags in its second half; it lacks a strong directorial signature. All that leaves is the film's epic ambition, its steam train of story propulsion, a ravishing visual design and performances of glamour and power. Which makes this super-production of the Margaret Mitchell best-seller the ultimate Hollywood movie. No question that this is a producer's, not a director's project; David O. Selznick's grand and niggling obsession stamps the movie like Kong's footprint. So what? In its first two hours, which moves with whirring assurance, the film establishes two pairs of potent contradictions: the mercantile North vs. the slave-owning South, and the rakish male (Clark Gable) vs. the ferocious female (Vivien Leigh, in a performance of spectacular drive, complexity and star quality). In 1939 GWTW was the longest and most expensive film made to that time. Today it retains another distinction: in terms of tickets sold, it is the most popular movie ever.



From the TIME Archive:



1936: Review of Margaret Mitchell's book

1939: The premiere, and a look inside the movie's production | micahernst ## Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S. 
A word for the child actor. From Jackie Coogan in Chaplin's The Kid to Edmund Moeschke in Germany, Year Zero to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker to Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird to Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon to Mohsen Ramezani in The Color of Paradise to Alex Edel in Millions (to pick just seven of hundreds), children have shown an eerie affinity for the camera, and vice versa. What's that magic? Are stars really born, not made? Or is it the serendipity of the right kid in the right role under the right director? No idea. But of all the movie moppets, Margaret O'Brien had the earliest and most acute understanding of the screen's demand for charm and craft. It's said that when as director asked her to cry, she said, "Right eye or left?" She was terrif in Meet Me in St. Louis and Journey for Margaret, but I'm picking the 1948 Tenth Avenue Angel because this soapy Christmas drama has no reason for being other than to get its little star to cry. More than that: to doubt the goodness of her family and the existence of God. (This was way before Bresson and Bergman did their God movies.) Margaret, then 11, did it with her usual winsome brilliance. And I cried too. Right eye and left. | micahernst ## Sailor Beware, 1951, Hal Walker, U.S. 
The 50s top tandem in movies, TV and night clubs (and Dino had some hit records too), Martin and Lewis aren't ranked up there with the Marx Brothers—for some, not with the Ritz Brothers. To me, though, they had the best mixture of foolery and character of all movie comedy teams: Dean, the happy-go-hunky paisan, and Jer, the goony kid ("Mel-vin!") with a vast repertoire of gags, working in fabulous synch. Watch them in this service comedy, which has a couple of spiffy song-and-dance routines and lots of artful badinage—like the bit where Jer has been badgered into boxing a much bigger guy. Dean, the kid's trainer, dispenses pre-fight advice (with many sly slaps to the gut and face) while Jer does such an acute impersonation of a punch-drunk veteran that the tough guy and his team (including James Dean in his first film role) are scared away. Here or on their TV shows, the team was slick, rowdy and funny funny funny. | micahernst ## Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France 
At a seedy French boarding school, the unsatisfied wife (Vera Clouzot) and restless mistress (Simone Signoret) of the slimy headmaster (Paul Meurisse) drown the creep in the bathtub and dispose of his body. Brutal, efficient and final—until evidence starts to mount that the dead man is haunting the school. As a kid, I was avid to see Diabolique after reading a Newsweek review that gave the movie's moral as "You can lead a corpse to water but you can't make it sink." I think I found the school's fetid atmosphere, the long, underlighted hallways, the main characters' sourness and cynicism nearly as scary as the film's famous climax, in the bathtub where it all began. The movie asked its audience, "Can you be scared to death?" For one impressionable child, this, one, the answer was almost literally yes. To beg my parents to take me to a French film, and then, coming home, to beg them to leave my bedroom door open and the hall light on, just shows you how pretentious and naive an 11-year-old could be. | micahernst ## School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S 
This is, be warned, a Really Guilty one. But what's the point of Guilty Pleasures if there's no guilt involved? Listen, folks: one reason that a critic, like anybody else, goes to movies is to see beautiful people doing naughty things. In a word: sex! So flash back to the early 70s, when porn was briefly chic, and its makers fearlessly tested the bounds of legal behavior. Back then, hardcore had a naive vitality. It also produced a mini-masterpiece, School Girl, directed (pseudonymously) by San Francisco's Paul Gerber and starring the sweetly enthusiastic Debra Allen as a college student researching a paper on local subcultures. She chooses the swinger scene, which leads to a half-dozen specialty numbers: boy-girl, girl-girl, group grope. In the most intriguing scene, a lithe young woman "directs" an erotic encounter with her husband and Debra. As firm and bossy as any auteur, the woman finally joins the deux to make a ménage à trois. It's a funny, telling comment on how directors bring an audience's gamiest desires to life, and on how power helps define any human relationship. But School Girl is also, ho-boy, sexy—or it wouldn't be a guilty pleasure, would it? | micahernst ## There's Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S. 
Difficult as it may be to believe, movie critics are human, too. They share everyone's secret, primal need for jokes about bodily functions and cruel pet tricks, especially when they are as well-orchestrated as they were by the Farrelly brothers in their 1998 hit. Their outrages against common decency were balanced by their fundamental good nature. Maybe their people were doofuses, but they were also the always likable victims of their own klutziness. | micahernst ## Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S. 
Or, for that matter almost any other Preminger movie you'd care to name. His style was claustrophobic—lots of people jammed into tight spaces—and he had a sour view of people's infinite capacity for duplicitous behavior. But he was a master of dank melodramatics (see also Advise and Consent, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends) and most of his pictures ended on a forgiving note. Perhaps he was obliging the studio's demand for happy endings. Or maybe that touch of Austrian sentimentality that he never quite eradicated from his haughty, cultivated personality. Whatever. In any case, this is a brilliantly cast, bitingly cynical courtroom drama | micahernst ## Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S. 
A handsome young couple (John Dall and Peggy Ann Cummins) meet at a carnival, where they engage in a sharp-shooting contest. It's love at first (gun) sight. And soon they're off on a crime spree, which ends tragically. Written under a pseudonym by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and well-directed by the expert B picture craftsman, Joseph E. Lewis, this is, to be sure, a Bonnie and Clyde precursor. But it is as crisp, no nonsense melodrama, and as a pioneering study of America's curious passion for the sleek, shiny beauty of death-dealing objects, that it retains its hold on us, 56 years after it slipped on to the bottom of the bills in our long-lost (and sorely missed) neighborhood theaters. | micahernst ## The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S. 
Out on his boat one day, a man gets dusted by atomic particles and starts—well, yes—shrinking. To infinitesimal size. Eventually he's fighting for his life against the family cat and a passing spider. Most '50s Sci-Fi movies were about common creatures attaining enormous proportions thanks to atomic misadventures, but this radical variation on that theme was (especially if you are a kid, eager to grow up, not down) scarier and more profound than the competitors. It is long past time for a cult to form around its director, Jack Arnold, an efficient maker of B Pictures (mainly Sci-Fi and westerns) whose imagination was always A plus. | micahernst ## Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990, John Patrick Shanley, U.S. 
There are people who think this film, written and directed by the fine playwright John Patrick Shanley, may be the worst big budget film of modern times. We beg to disagree. True, you don't expect to see Tom Hanks to appear in an expressionistically shot movie about premature death. Or volunteering to leap into a volcano to prevent its eruption. But and if you set aside the routine comic expectations its marketing encouraged, you may find yourself entranced by a movie that is utterly sui generis. | micahernst ## The Adventures of Robin Hood 
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the greatest of Hollywood's many romantic composers—let's give a grateful nod here to Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein—and this is Korngold at his best—excitable, cheeky, yet always romantically caring. | micahernst ## Citizen Kane 
It's impossible to choose a single Bernard Herrmann score as his best. His was a protean talent, embracing every genre, but with a peculiar gift for illuminating psychotic behavior (Hangover Square, Psycho, Taxi Driver). Let his contribution to everyone's favorite great movie, Citizen Kane, represent everything that was wonderful about this most daring of Hollywood's musical sophisticates—his gift for blending major and minor chords (not to mention electronic music and sound effects), his skill with pastiche (the fake opera excerpts he composed for the film) and above all, his ironic spirit. | micahernst ## The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 
Moaning chorales, electric guitars, brass bands, the occasional twang of a Jew's Harp; Ennio Morricone, vastly expanded the movie composer's instrumental and tonal palate and this is but one of his several ear-bending, mind-expanding masterworks. | micahernst ## Laura 
Forget, if you can, the pop song derived from David Raksin's theme. Concentrate, instead, on the plaintive, permanently haunting variations he created for the film itself. It is largely his score that lifts this otherwise limited movie beyond its genre limits. Lest we forget: this is something great scores sometimes accomplish. | micahernst ## On the Waterfront 
Leonard Bernstein only wrote one film score, but it is a haunting masterpiece, seamlessly blending modernist tropes with the darker hues of late romantic melody, which he also loved. In a curious way this movie summarizes his tastes and strengths as a composer and as a conductor-proselytizer for Twentieth Century music. | micahernst ## Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO 
When Fred and Ginger paired for nine song-and-dance films in the 30s, the top pop composers of the day (which means, pretty much, the best of all time) lined up to provide them with great tunes. This two-CD set contains irrefutable evidence that Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and the Gershwins did some of their most lingering work for Ginger and Fred. It contains all 30 numbers from their RKO couplings, plus four from Fred's solo effort A Damsel in Distress and the Arlen-Mercer "One for My Baby" from The Sky's the Limit. Need more convincing? Here's just a taste of the playlist: "Night and Day," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Way You Look Tonight," "Nick Work If You Can Get It," "They All Laughed," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Case closed. | micahernst ## The Man With the Golden Arm 
For Otto Preminger's film about a Chicago card dealer (Frank Sinatra) who falls victim to heroin addiction, then tries to get the monkey off his back, Elmer Bernstein came up with a powerful, pioneering concoction of cool jazz, big band and the Hollywood symphonic style. The score sets a bunch of moods—tension, anxiety, the grand swagger of being a cool guy in a tough town—with varied orchestrations and memorable melodies. How memorable? I haven't seen the film (also highly recommended) in 30 years, yet a half-dozen tunes from Bernstein's score still lodge in my brain. I'm humming one now and—without the aid of any drug—man, do I feel juiced! | micahernst ## Jules et Jim 
Movie romance has no better friend than Georges Delerue. As scores became brasher and brassier, or clanged with rock chords, Delerue stuck to his plangent melodies. He was the house composer, the engaging sound and soaring soul, of the French New Wave; his music ornamented films by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Philippe De Broca (18 collaborations!) and Francois Truffaut—most spectacularly in Shoot the Piano Player and this eternally beguiling triangle tale. The score accompanies, and often carries, Jeanne Moreau through her affairs with best buddies Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre). But the indelible musical moment may be when Moreau sings a charming folkish tune, "Le tourbillon," as its composer Boris Bassiak plays guitar. | micahernst ## South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut 
Kids might sneak a play of this soundtrack for the kick of hearing four-letter words rarely put to music. But adults, especially those who grew up on Broadway melodies, love the South Park movie score for its fond, roguish evocations of songs from Oklahoma, Fiddler on the Roof and Les Miserables. Parker's not-so-secret sin is that—virtually alone among heterosexuals under 50—he loves the grand ambitions and soaring chords of the old songs. He stashes versions of them in the TV episodes of South Park (who can forget Cartman's rousingly lurid gospel number "Body of Christ"?) and, abetted by super-arranger Marc Shaiman, packed a dozen fabulous parodies into the movie. Actually, parody schmarody. These are terrific songs—the finest, sassiest full movie musical score since the disbanding of the Freed Unit at MGM. | micahernst ## Roja 
Though he is renowned as the preeminent composer of modern Bollywood, A.R. Rahman was born and still works in Madras, 1,000 miles south of Bombay. His Tamil compatriot, the writer-director Mani Ratnam, yanked him out of jingle-writing to compose his first full score for Roja (The Rose) the tale of a woman whose lover is kidnapped by terrorists. Through this grim political parable, Rahman laced some spectacular melodies that not only serve the drama, they create their own—as in the duet ballads "Yeh Haseen Vadiyan" and "Roja Jaaneman," which first are grounded in recitative, then suddenly ascend into celestial melody. This astonishing debut work parades Rahman's gift for alchemizing outside influences until they are totally Tamil, totally Rahman. He plays with reggae and jungle rhythms, fiddles with Broadway-style orchestrations, runs cool variations on Morricone's scores for Italian westerns. | micahernst ## Your Thoughts About TIME's ALL-TIME 100 Movie List 
This week, TIME presents the All-TIME 100 movies, our list of the 100 most influential movies of the past 82 years. The films span comedy, horror, drama, romance, action and more. With so many different movies to choose from, we want to hear your thoughts on our list. Which films should have been included and weren't? Were any movies on the list more influential than others?



I found your list interesting and valid. I know people will be up in arms because you left out Gone With the Wind, as well as classics like Rocky and The Usual Suspects. However, the one movie I feel should have definatley made the list (of top 3 movies, let alone 100), is Seven Samurai. Maybe this was an oversight because you didn't want more than two Kurosawa films on the list? If this was the case, I feel Seven Samurai is a better movie than Yojimbo. Plus, it is arguably the first action movie ever made, and one of the single most influential movies of all time, not to mention it's a riveting movie and great fun at the same time.

John Ferrigno

Meriden, CT



What are you smoking! That's a terrible list.

Mae Teron



You've got to be kidding with this movie list of loser movies!!. Are you the same people who left Elvis Presley out of the list of most influential people of the century?

Jean Wilkey

Washington, D.C.



I am never one to read anything a critic may say about a movie because I've learned that an opinion is like a nose....everyone has one but there all different, however, I love "top lists" of any kind. Leaving The Colour Purple, Malcolm X & Do The Right Thing out is shocking to me. Have you gentelmen seen these movies?? I have to wonder because any "top" list without any of these titles is worthless. Start recognizing that the "black" movies have worth and tell a history that America would like to forget. The Shawshank Redemption & are 2 more movies not on this list. This has to be the worst top movie list I think I've ever seen.

Chey

Toronto



Fight Club, Monty Python, The Matrix (only the first, of course), and some type of James Bond movie. Add those and I'd be happy. And just a FYI to you guys: Gone With the Wind was boring...this list seems to be more "funnest movies to watch" than "quality movies."

Josh

Florissant, MO



Is this a joke? It must be to include some of the out and out dogs for film selections. What was the criteria? Drunken stupidity on a dark and lonely night? Where is Shawshank Redemption? Sound of Music? Gone With The Wind? Modern Times? The General? It's time for Time to call it a career! What a joke!!

Ernest Reed

Toronto, Ontario



To include such movies as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Bride of Frankenstein and A Hard Day's Night, but leave out such classics as Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity, and To Kill a Mockingbird is pure insanity. These classics have some of the best writing and acting that has ever been on a movie screen. These two have shown that they have no taste and need to resign from their profession as movie critics.

Charlotte C. Brown

Columbia, SC



You can't be serious about this top 100 movies of all time list, if you didn't include The Gods Must be Crazy (with Nixau the Bushman) or Night of the Living Dead which portrays hicks in western PA as zombies (not much of a stretch, considering they voted for Sen. Rick Santorum).

James Burnette

Buffalo, NY



A good list. I am a buff who has seen all but a few of the films you've selected. I agree with most of them, but here are three of my top ten list that didn't make it: Lacombe, Lucien,

Hard Times and Samurai Trilogy. Worst films ever: Goto, Il d-Amore and Todo Modo (with Mastroianni).

Rick Ackerman

Boulder, CO



I'm shocked, shocked, that you didn't include the greatest adventure film ever filmed — Gunga Din. In fact, the other two movies made in the "Golden Year of Hollywood" (1939) were left off the list (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz).

David Kornreich

San Ramon, CA



HAT??? You overlooked The Usual Suspects Great list, fun to look at and DISAGREE!!

Enecia Miller

Columbus, OH



I can't believe this list is considered complete without Gone With The Wind........

Stacey Williams

PA



Where's Shawshank Redemption in this line-up? I've seen this movie more than seven times, and it still gives me pause if I catch it playing as I'm channel surfing. It is my personal all-time favorite movie.

Rachel

Boston, MA



Obviously your film critics and myself are far from being on the same page as to the choice for top 100 movies. Couldn't you have given Ben Hur an honorable mention?

Buddy Soles

Oklahoma City



I agree with about 20 films on this list. But where is Malcolm X, which was the best film of the 90's. How can you leave off A Soldier's Story? Do the Right Thing and Menace II Society were amazing too. I have seen many lists and it seems like you overlook many of the black films. The only critic who doesn't is Roger Ebert. The list you have is entertaining but it is very disappointing.

Ronald Warren

North Wales, PA



Some of my favorites are: Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity, Titanic, On the Waterfront,Giant, This Land is Mine, Parrish and Pillow Talk

J.Watson

Clarksburg, WV



I feel that major films like Braveheart and Titanic were left out wrongly. I am 52 and I only recognized a few of the 100 and I am an avid movie person. Way to many old movies on the list.

Wilma Wright

Iron City, TN



With all the fantastic movies made in the 20th and 21st centuries, 100 may be too restrictive a number. In choosing the "Top 100," the critics have left out some incredibly popular classics: The Wizard of Oz, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Gone With the Wind, Jezebel, Tootsie, The Graduate, The Kid, La Strada, Bang the Drum Slowly, An American in Paris, and Fargo to name but a few. One of my own personal favorites, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, never makes it onto "best" lists, but it's a gorgeous film and, interestingly enough, Elia Kazan's Hollywood directorial debut.

Joyce O'Connor

North Arlington, NJ



I cant believe that you left out the Lion King.

Melissa

Marine City, MI



I would like to see your list from 1 to 100 . Number one being the movie you consider best of all.

Ralph Smith

Parry Sound, Ontario



I actually really like the list very much. I am pleasantly suprised to see works like Tokyo Story and Brazil among the greats.

However, one truly great film was left out. This week, Harper Lee was honored for her only book, To Kill A Mockingbird. To leave out this excellent story, perhaps Gregory Peck's finest work, actually hurts me a little inside. I have seen very few films and do not know much about the industry or it's history, but this exclusion I'm sure is a mistake.

Otherwise, a fine job!

Drew

Bay Area, CA



A good list, but some glaring omissions. one that I feel strongly about in Dances with Wolves. That movie is one of the greatest of all time. Forrest Gump too, but I can live with that. No Dances with Wolves. is crazy and makes the list easily. Its crazy that its not there!

C. P. McCabe

Henrietta, NY



Through all the ages, I find it incredible that the top 100 left out a raft of ourstanding flicks. Just a few to jog your memory... Fantasia, Sgt. York, War of the Worlds, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ...and a few others which I would challenge you to consider. I guess critics are supposed to be a bit "elitist" or sophisticated and while I agree with many of your choices, I would remind you look up the derivative of the word "sophistication"

Brett Rippee

Seymour, MO



This list is absurd. My guess is it was compiled with the objective of getting the most response. Why not publish a list that you really believe in? Are you up to it? Do you really believe that Bride of Frankenstein is a better movie than Gone with the Wind?

Ed Malliinson

Orlando, FL



What happaned to 2001, A Space Odessey; where's Fantasia; where's Sound of Music; where's The Sting; Gone With The Wind; it amazes me these and so many others were not included in your top 100!

Nancy

Macedonia, OH | timeadmin ## Best Movies of ALL TIME 
You like us, you really like us. You also hate us. Anyway, you click on us, which is the surest way a website has of measuring interest in its content. The All-TIME 100 Movies feature—compiled by Richard Schickel and me, and handsomely packaged by Josh Macht, Mark Coatney and all the smart folks at TIME.com—attracted a record-busting 7.8 million page views in its first week, including 3.5 million on May 23rd, its opening daym, in time for Father's Day. Thousands of readers have written in to cheer or challenge our selections, and thousands more have voted for their own favorites. The response simply underscores Richard's and my long-held belief that everybody has two jobs: his own and movie critic.



The idea was to assemble 100 estimable films since TIME began, with the March 3, 1923 issue. Later, each of us was asked to contribute five items in sidebars called Great Performances (acting), Guilty Pleasures (trash treasures) and Top Scores (soundtracks). Essentially, though, a century of movies from 82 years. That shouldn't be hard: pick a picture for each year, with 18 slots left for honorable mentions.



Not so simple, in fact, for we faced a couple of complications. The first was that two of us were to agree on the selections; and, though my admiration for Schickel is hardly bounded, and he probably doesn't mind me, no two critics will agree on all, or even most, great films. The other is the onus of the list-making process. It's a truism that a list like this takes either an hour (go with your initial inspirations) or a month (weigh every film with Solomonic probity). Our effort clocked in at about four months, off and on. And the clock is still running.



Why do the list? I guess Josh and Mark and Jim Kelly, our peerless leader, hoped to sharpen the profile of the website, and indirectly the magazine. (Mission accomplished.) Our genial PR mavens saw some benefits in media exposure. (Schickel and I, in our first joint TV appearance after 25 years sharing the TIME film-critic gig, gassed with Charlie Rose last week.) It's possible that someone involved with the enterprise wanted to make money. Not I, of course. As a TIME staff member, I write for the website pro bono, or rather pro ego. Or, honestly, for the fun of it. That's how this TIME 100 started for me, and how it ended.



LISTOMANIA

I feel one of my grand gender generalizations coming on, and I can't resist it, so here goes. Guys love to make lists. The assembling and codifying of useless information speaks to our inner math nerd, our rampant nostalgiast. Girls can play Little League baseball now, but the kid in the stands keeping the box score, and tallying individual achievements into season slugging percentages, is very likely to be a boy. Turning our pastimes into numbers is a way not only of quantifying but also of justifying them. They acquire an atomic weight; to rank them is to give them solidity, meaning.



As a kid I would study the major league batting averages in the Sunday paper more assiduously than any school subject, and I kept box scores of the games our neighborhood team played. Sometimes I devised imaginary box scores too. I know what you're thinking: he must have been a lonely child. Actually, I wasn't; I had a loving, indulgent family. But around the nation, countless other kids, more talented or preoccupied than I, were doing the same thing, bending the MLB numbers, reconfiguring the figures. Eventually they would form a group, the Society for American Baseball Research, SABR for short. One of their group, Bill James, coined the term SABRmetrics to describe the grown-up, boy-like study of those numbers. The statistics they produced, and the inferences they made from those stats, would enrich the game and change the way it was played. So there.



As with baseball, so with favorite movies, TV shows, comics. One of my youthful heroes was Fred Von Bernewitz, a Maryland boy not much older than I was. He created, mimeographed and published the E.C. Checklist, a compilation of every story in each of the dozen or so "New Trend" comic books (Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Mad, etc.) that EC published from 1950 to 1954\. Bless his innocent obsession. His list was a signal to hundreds of other E.C. fan-addicts that our love was not a waste of time. I mean, how could it be, if so many other shared it? A half-century later, with the hardcover, much-expanded edition of the Checklist still in print (under the title Tales of Terror! The EC Companion), Von Bernewitz's labor of adolescent love is easy to celebrate as trash-art pedantry. Back then, though, applying the rudimentary scholarship of list-making to comics was as radical as Brando's first movie mumble, or the scream of Little Richard on "Long Tall Sally."



I too was a teenage listmaker. I saw a lot of movies and, at year's end, picked my favorites. I recently dug up my Top Five of 1959: The Seventh Seal, Some Like It Hot, North By Northwest, Rio Bravo and Imitation of Life. Looking at this quintet, I marvel at the maturity of my youthful tastes—or do I curse my lifelong adolescence?—since, 46 years later, I nominated all five for the TIME 100\. The point is that listmaking is a first step to an informed enthusiasm. Juggling, sifting, thinking about the best films leads to measured judgments, the plundering of film histories, a nascent critical acuity. That's how a hobby becomes a craft, sometimes a career. Just add verbs and thoughts.







Can the choices Schickel and I made have the shelf life of the Von Bernewitz checklist? Probably not; this is just one of what must be a hundred 100-best-films lists. Does film criticism have an equivalent to SABRmetrics—cinemetrics? Not really. You can't calibrate genius. There are no Win Scores, no Favorite Toy, for movies and their makers. Many readers would say that Schickel and I have no greater claim than anyone else to impose our crotchets on you. Doesn't everyone see a lot of movies and, gradually, amass some all-time preferences? Sure.



But, pardon me, we're better. Our claims to expertise: 1\. a combined 80 years (yikes!) writing about films; 2\. even more years—going back to our movie-mad youths—as consumers, lovers and analyzers of this art-entertainment-business hybrid; and 3\. a magazine, TIME, that has generously underwritten our cinephilia for, respectively, 32 and 25 years. Our employment is our diploma.



Still and all, list of favorites like the All-TIME 100 Movies is just that: a banquet, a groaning board of our fondest prejudices. You're all invited to devour the food, or throw it at us.



ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES 100

There are 101 ways to choose 100 of anything. But I participated only in this century selection, so I'll tell you what I did.



First it's like a game: I'm throwing a party—who should be on the guest list? My idea was to invite different sorts for a richer mix. Highbrows and no-brows, the solemn and the frivolous, embracing many genres (musical, western) and forms (short films, experimental, documentaries). I want the Marx Brothers to co-exist with a Robert Bresson nano-drama. And Indian family melodramas to rub shoulders with 70s porno. An eight-decade, international melange.



Then it's research. I re-viewed many of the films under consideration. I looked at the IMDb's list of the top 250 films, as voted on by the site's members. I dipped once more into Roger Ebert's two volumes called The Great Movies, which contain some very thoughtful journalism on the subject. I also took a long browse through the stacks of that moldy old library of film trivia, my brain. The result was about 120 movies, leaving some wiggle room for negotiation. Richard the First (Schickel) had already compiled a list of 116 favorites. Neither of us knew the other's preferences until we'd finished this initial round. After this double-blind taste test, the serious work began on the All-TIME 100 Movies.



Finally, then, it's like a marriage—the intimate exchange of opinions and passions, the business of collating, collaborating and compromising. Once, twice, three times 100: Schickel's list, my list, our list.



For movie critics, deciding which films are best is an anecdotal way of debating first principles. It's theoretical and, toward the end of the process, it's personal. Schickel and I were the co-captains of a lifeboat, with some of our favorites clinging to the sides, and we had to determine whose stiff fingers to pry off, which noble films to send into the sea of anonymity.



One of the great, not guilty, pleasures of this exercise was to spend lots of quality schmoozing time—on the phone, through e-mail and frequently in person—with my colleague on the other coast. I live and work in Manhattan, Schickel is based in L.A. But whereas I do all my work for TIME, the magazine and website, he is a busy-busy freelance: writing books, contributing a book review column to the Los Angeles Times and cobbling up feature-length documentaries on top auteurs, most recently Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin and Martin Scorsese. (He has a documentary on science-fiction films, Watch the Skies, premiering Tuesday, July 6, on Turner Classic Movies.) He's a one-man film-critical conglomerate, a grand resource of probing, sensible thought.



My bibliography isn't nearly as long as Schickel's, but my will is as strong, So we had a few debates. He snorted at some of my selections (notably, The Fly); I yawned at some of his. He thought I was too much the China hand and Bolly-woosiast; I rankled at the inclusion of nearly every film noir melodrama ever made. I argued that, with A Streetcar Named Desire representing Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan, the presence of the Kazan-Brando On the Waterfront was redundant; he trumped my nagging by citing Waterfront in the Great Performances and Top Scores sections. (I used the sidebars to introduce favorite films, performances and music not covered in the prime TIME 100.)



Over the months of discussion, I learned many things—not least that Schickel, whom everyone at TIME calls Dick, prefers to be known as Richard. (Hence my frequent use here of his surname, to avoid reader confusion.) And the debate never degenerated into rancor. Schickel and I knew we were playing a game; we did our research; and we're still married.



CUTTING ROOM FLOOR:



Here are the films from our original lists that were dropped:



Schickel's Cuts



Corliss's Cuts



INSIDE THE LISTS

A scanning of both lists shows that Schickel and Corliss agreed on 31 films that got into the holy hundred: Sherlock Jr., Sunrise, City Lights, King Kong, Bride of Frankenstein, His Girl Friday, Pinocchio, The Lady Eve, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Children of Paradise, Detour, White Heat, Kind Hearts and Coronets, A Streetcar Named Desire, Singin' in the Rain, Ikiru, Ugetsu, Smiles of a Summer Night, Sweet Smell of Success, Yojimbo, The Manchurian Candidate, 8-1/2, Persona, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, E.T. and Talk to Her. Note that, as we approach the present day, agreement gets rarer. We had 10 coincidental selections in the 1940s, exactly as many as we did in the four-and-a-half decades from 1960 to today. That mirrors a consensus on classic films, especially classics from Hollywood, and a fragmenting of taste ever since.







There were also five movies on both early lists that didn't make the final selection: Potemkin, Scarface, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Raise the Red Lantern and All About My Mother. All worthy films. What happened? I guess we came to think of Potemkin an "official" great film that lodged in our memories more than in our guts. Raise the Red Lantern I reluctantly dumped in favor of another Gong Li-starring Chinese film, Farewell My Concubine, with its explicit approach to Chinese politics and a great performance by Leslie Cheung. As for directors of the other three films, they already had films on the final list—though Hawks, Sturges and Almodovar are all as deserving of being multiple-film directors on the TIME 100 as Scorsese, Lubitsch, Wilder, Bergman, Stanley Kubrick and Leone.



Ah, Leone. You see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West—consecutive films from the director of spaghetti westerns—and ask, Why both? (Perhaps you demand, Why either?) Well, because Schickel preferred the first film, and I love the second, and neither of us would budge.



A more general question: Why directors? Listen to the conversation Mark Coatney conducted with Schickel and me, and you'll learn that, among the strategies Richard the First used in preparing his original list, one was to start with the directors he thought the best, then choose his favorite of their films. Further, he wanted to reward peak periods in the careers of great directors. Chaplin, Sternberg, Vidor, Lubitsch, Hawks, De Sica, Kazan, Godard, Scorsese, Allen and Almodovar all are cited for two works within a few years, sometimes consecutive films. Sturges gets three mentions in four years. A director-centric selection is one way to go. A film-savvy fellow I know said he would have found slots for all six of the films Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich.



I didn't work that way. For me, in compiling this list, the films were the thing, not their makers. In the Church of Auteurism, I'd be sitting in the back pew, sometimes agreeing with the dogma, sometimes whispering heresies. Not an anti-auteurist, but a not-quite. I'm a bit like Henry, the hero of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing, who is agonizing over his choice of eight Desert Island Discs for a radio show. He knows he is expected to name eight pieces of "real music"—yet he is haunted by his unfashionable, unabashed love for the perkier forms of old pop rock. "I like Herman's Hermits, and the Hollies, and the Everly Brothers, and Brenda Lee, and the Supremes," he says, adding, "I don't mean everything they did. I don't like artists. I like singles."



Well, I do like directors. But they aren't the only artists who make films great. Hence Swing Time for the music and dance, Camille for Greta Garbo's brave and merciless performance, and Baby Face for its thrillingly low moral tone. Schickel also had a few non-auteur choices, such as "Norman Z. McLeod's" It's a Gift. I guess Schickel would make the case, and I wouldn't quibble, that W.C. Fields is the author of that rough comedy gem.



We have favorites, but we didn't play favorites—reward friends with slots. Schickel, out in L.A., necessarily is on nodding terms with lots of filmmakers, some of whom are very good ones, and represented on the 100\. I put four Chinese films on the list and, as it happens, I have dined congenially (once or twice) with the makers of all those films: King Hu, Chen Kaige, Jackie Chan and Wong Kar-wai. But that's mostly because I do some reporting along with critiquing for TIME Asia movie stories, and because these filmmakers agreed to have a meal with me. (Conversely, I've noshed with only two of the Americans on the final 100, Scorsese and Spielberg.) Schickel can fairly say he dines with one of his honorees every night. He put the 2004 restored version of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One on his list, and he did the restoration. Nice job too. But it didn't make the cut.



Our work wasn't over when we finished the 100\. We still had the Guilties, the Greats and the Scores, and I did a selection of Short Subjects. Richard and I used these slots as a kind of B list for some of our original favorites. He worked Gun Crazy and Anatomy of a Murder showed up among his five Guilty Pleasures. I managed to get nine of these into subsidiary sections: The Rules of the Game and Awara in Great Performances, Jules and Jim in Soundtracks, Gone With the Wind and School Girl in Guilty Pleasures, some of the animated and experimental films in Selected Short Subjects. And if you're wondering why Robert Bresson's Mouchette (obviously a Corliss choice) appears on the final list but not on my original one, the answer is: the first time around, I forgot! If there's a theme to this column, it's that we're all human, even critics.



POLITICS AND GEOGRAPHY

Of the 33 TIME 100 films before 1950, all but six were from Hollywood. Assessing the so-called golden age, we seem to be very Home Team. Ah, but of those 27 American films, nearly half, 13, were directed by men born abroad: three in England (Chaplin, Hitchcock and James Whale), three in Germany (F.W. Murnau, Wyler and Lubitsch), three in Austria (Sternberg, Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer are all native Viennese), one each in Hungary (Michael Curtiz), France (Jacques Tourneur) and one in Sicily (Capra).







Why did they come to the U.S.? You may deduce that, at least for the Germans, Austrians and Hungarian, most of them Jewish, the answer was one word: Hitler. Yet except for Wilder, all the German speakers had emigrated during the Weimar years, when Nazism was barely a cyst in Mittel Europe's eye. Another word explains the lure of these directors for and to Hollywood: Ufa. That was the German studio where Lubitsch, Murnau and others made the films that attracted the attention of the Eastern European men who ran the U.S. movie industry. They had made films at Ufa because that's where the European action was. They came to Hollywood for the same reason—except that, there, not Europe but the world was their audience.



I argued, more stridently than Schickel, for geographical politics. "Ya gotta have an Iranian film!", I said, even as Richard insisted on a representative of the 60s Czech New Wave. Yet we both ignored gender politics. Of the 100, 99 were directed by men, and the only auteuse, if that's a word, is the German Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite director. Pressed for a second film made by a woman, I would have chosen Kasi Lemmons' magical melodrama, Eve's Bayou, which was among my semi-finalists. It happens that Lemmons is an African-American, so the inclusion of her film would have addressed another nagging deficiency in the list—if you believe, as I half do, that the 100 should be as inclusive as possible. (The non-Caucasian directors, 11, are all Asian: Japanese, Chinese or Indian.)



Speaking of half-thoughts, here's a half-serious suggestion. To compliment our selection of Guilty Pleasures, we might have had another sidebar called Guilty Conscience—a contingent of films from developing countries and other underrepresented regions and ethnicities. Such a U.N. General Assembly of cinema might comprise, from Egypt, Youssef Chahine's Alexandria, Why?; from sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade; from Brazil's Cinema Novo, Glauber Rocha's Land in a Trance; from Korea, Im Kwon-taek's Seopyeonje... I could go on singing. Last month TCM played more than a dozen Mexican movies from the 40s and 50s. As with Indian musicals, these robust artifacts made me wonder: What have I been missing? Life is a contnuing film education. And I remain a very impressionable lad.



Some readers might think that I shoehorned and strong-armed too many obscure titles onto the list—all those Asian films that were barely or never released in the U.S. It's true that, when push came to shove, I deleted Hollywood movies I love and respect to make room for four Chinese-language films (A Touch of Zen, Farewell My Concubine, Drunken Master II and Chungking Express) and two Indian pop-musical dramas (Pyaasa and Nayakan). But even those titles are fewer than I'd wanted; I cut Awara and Peking Opera Blues at the last minute.



Anyway, I'd argue that a grand cinematic decade, from the mid-80s to mid-90s, belonged to the Chinese; their emergence and speedy supremacy was thrilling to watch. As for the Bollywood-style films, my recent inundation in India film instructed me in the subcontinent's teeming movie achievements, and persuaded me that in its Golden Age, for about 20 years after Independence in 1947, India produced films whose quality matched Hollywood's. Apparently some of you agree: Pyaasa, Nayakan and Concubine are often near the top of our readers' poll. Which proves that one man's obscurity is another's great and glowing treasure. Thanks, India and China, for voting early and often.



And the half-argument against such a niche: great films don't come from places, or groups, but from individuals. That's one reason the list contains more entries—two—by each of six different directors (Lubitsch, Kubrick, Scorsese, Bergman, Kurosawa, Leone) than from the whole African continent. The other reason: we're white males, and philistines!



IF WE ONLY HAD A HEART

We hear your pain. Reading some of the e-mail, Schickel and I sympathize, a little, that our selections didn't always jibe with your favorites. "Bride of Frankenstein but not Gone With the Wind?" was a frequent keen. "Way too many old films," one of you wrote. Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, your criticism was about our color-blind, or color-myopic choices—why no Spike Lee film?







But the main complaint is that so few of the films we chose had heart. Among the movies deemed unfairly missing were Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Sergeant York, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, From Here to Eternity, La Strada, Ben-Hur, Parrish, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sound of Music, Bang the Drum Slowly, Dances With Wolves and The Shawshank Redemption—all films that touched the people who saw them. The most frequently cited title was Mockingbird.



It's true that, by nature, critics are skeptics. We have been trained to spot the puppet strings, to be suspicious of the heroine's oh-so-noble renunciation, to note how the swelling of violins can cue a flood of audience tears. Aware as we are of all the manipulations, we find it harder to articulate an argument for humanist drama than for other kinds of films. Discussing a comedy, we can point to the wit and surprise, the shapeliness of construction, the Swiss-watch timing, the outsize bravura of a performance. We can even get away with the boast, "It made me laugh." With a weepie, we can only say, "It made me cry." For some reason, that is a confession as maudlin as the movie we're trying to defend. Defending comedy is easy; defending sentiment is hard.



I saw that last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where the 10-film Competition contained exactly one forthrightly emotional film, Marco Tullio Giordana's Once You're Born. The movie, about a 12-year-old Italian boy whose sweetly naive outlook on life is tested when he is thrown in with some illegal immigrants, challenged the audience both to feel for these characters and to examine those feelings. It was both a sentimental movie and a comment on sentiment. Between us, reader, I sobbed through about half of the film. Most of the critics didn't; it was roundly, often joyously scorned. And though Once You're Born was one of my favorite films at Cannes, I soon stopped praising it while talking with other critics. I was ashamed to be thought a softie.



But I'm telling you, reader. So you know I wouldn't be ashamed to put a movie that made me cry on the all-Time 100\. Indeed, you will find there many films that stir powerful sentiments: City Lights, Dodsworth, Camille, The Shop Around the Corner, Meet Me in St. Louis, Children of Paradise, It's a Wonderful Life (can you get any weepier?), Ikiru, Umberto D., Tokyo Story, Closely Watched Trains, The Singing Detective, Wings of Desire, Leolo, Farewell My Concubine, Kandahar, The Lord of the Rings, Talk to Her... and more, depending on whose heart is speaking.



If the list were a little longer, I would have been proud to stand up for Mr. Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Shawshank and other personal favorites: One Way Passage, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Miracle Worker, Empire of the Sun. Also a picture that was on my original, rough-draft list: Gone With the Wind. Until Schickel, the heartless bastard, snorted it off.



I don't think of these films as sentimental (no one does, when itemizing his top sentimental films). I think of them as touching some honest emotion. Translation: They made me cry, and I felt elevated, not manipulated, in the process.



LIKING AND HATING

So thanks for liking and hating the list. All of us who worked on this feature got a lot of satisfaction from the lavish response. The Indian press was pleased that The Apu Trilogy and two Indian musicals were in the 100, and that Raj Kapoor and A.R. Rahman graced the sidebars (though my fact-checkers at Bollywhat.com were pissed that I used the Hindi, not Tamil, names for songs from Rahman's Roja). Speaking of musicals, I was floored to get a thank-you note from Marc Shaiman, co-composer and arranger of the songs in South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut. He teased me for calling him "SuperArranger": "Maybe I can get them to add me into The Fantastic Four"...



And as for those complaints—"What are you smoking!" one reader asked—maybe this will help. Look, I helped make up the list, and I have a few objections. I'm sure Richard Schickel has his own grievances. It must have hurt to cut From Here to Eternity,his favorite World War II romance, at the last minute. But this is my column, so I get to kvetch. I mean, The Rules of the Game has for decades been in my all-time top ten. How come it's not here? And two Ingmar Bergman films, but not The Seventh Seal? That movie changed my life, man! No Max Ophuls? No Antonioni or Rossellini? And Audrey Hepburn—was the screen's greatest lady ever more radiant or ethereally seductive than in Sabrina?



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