Top 100

1. Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

2. Mahanagar a.k.a. The Big City (1963, Satyajit Ray)

3. The Hole (1998, Ming-liang Tsai)

4. A Woman Under the Influence (1974, John Cassavetes)

5. Linda Linda Linda (2005, Nobuhiro Yamashita)

6. Charulata (1964, Satyajit Ray)

7. Scenes From a Marriage (1973, Ingmar Bergman)

8. Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

9. Time of the Gypsies (1988, Emir Kusturica)

10. An Angel at My Table (1990, Jane Campion)

11. Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese)

12. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

13. Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

14. Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

16. The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick)

17. Jules and Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)

18. Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)

19. The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000, Anh Hung Tran)

20. Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)

21. Revenge of a Kabuki Actor (1963, Kon Ichikawa)

22. What Time Is It There? (2001, Ming-liang Tsai)

23. Girl Walk//All Day (2011, Jason Krupnick)

24. The Trial (1962, Orson Welles)

25. The Blues Brothers (1980, John Landis)

26. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)

27. Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini)

28. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)

29. Stop Making Sense (1984, Jonathan Demme)

30. Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)

31. Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

32. Hausu a.k.a. House (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)

33. Once (2006, John Varney)

34. 8½ (1963, Federico Fellini)

35. All About My Mother (1999, Pedro Almodovar)

36. El Norte (1983, Gregory Nava)

37. The Scent of Green Papaya (1993, Anh Hung Tran)

38. Innocence (2004, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

39. The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)

40. Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker)

41. Drugstore Cowboy (1989, Gus Van Sant)

42. The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy)

43. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)

44. Winter Light (1962, Ingmar Bergman)

45. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

46. The Turin Horse (2011, Bela Tarr)

47. High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa)

48. Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)

49. Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais)

50. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Bela Tarr)

51. Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick)

52. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

53. Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

54. The Long Day Closes (1992, Terence Davies)

55. American Movie (1999, Chris Smith)

56. Red Beard (1965, Akira Kurosawa)

57. The Wayward Cloud (2005, Ming-liang Tsai)

58. Songs from the Second Floor (2000, Roy Andersson)

59. Syndromes and a Century (2006, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

60. Secrets & Lies (1996, Mike Leigh)

61. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)

62. Devils on the Doorstep (2000, Wen Jiang)

63. Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)

64. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nichols)

65. The Dead (1987, John Huston)

66. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli)

67. Safe (1995, Todd Haynes)

68. The Story of Qiu Ju (1992, Zhang Yimou)

69. Devi (1960, Satyajit Ray)

70. A Moment of Innocence (1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

71. The Lineup (1958, Don Siegel)

72. The New World (2005, Terrence Malick)

73. Three Colors: Blue (1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

74. In the Loop (2009, Armando Iannucci)

75. The Burglar (1957, Paul Wendkos)

76. I Fidanzati (1963, Ermanno Olmi)

77. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)

78. Hairspray (1988, John Waters)

79. Shame (1968, Ingmar Bergman)

80. Cairo Station (1958, Youssef Chahine)

81. Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)

82. All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse)

83. Wendy and Lucy (2008, Kelly Reichardt)

84. A Page of Madness (1926, Teinosuke Kinugasa)

85. A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)

86. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000, Jonas Mekas)

87. The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)

88. The Seventh Victim (1943, Mark Robson)

89. Ordinary People (1980, Robert Redford)

90. The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak)

91. Thirst for Love (1966, Koreyoshi Kurahara)

92. Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky)

93. Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk)

94. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir)

95. Rat-Trap (1982, Adoor Gopalakrishnan)

96. Rosetta (1999, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

97. Malcolm X (1992, Spike Lee)

98. The Match Factory Girl (1990, Aki Kaurismaki)

99. Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993, Nick Park)

100. Xanadu (1980, Robert Greenwald)

Very minor updates this year.  On principle, I hate to lose one of my few female-directed films, but I just no longer feel that Sita Sings the Blues belongs on this list.  It was also the only animated movie, but it’s been replaced with The Wrong Trousers… which is now the shortest film in my top 100.  I’ve resisted putting shorts on the list in the past, but a recent revisit with this delightful, masterful Wallace & Gromit tale convinced me to make an exception.

I also dropped Playtime, as my journey through the Tati box set was a disappointing one.  I simply don’t love him like I once did.  Taking up its spot is an old favorite, Ordinary People.  Somehow it never felt “worthy” of inclusion before, but I can no longer deny the emotional power the movie holds over me.  Perhaps I’ve lost another piece of burdensome cinesnobbery.

I also moved up Girl Walk//All Day and moved down All That Jazz.  Also just now I decided to knock The Exterminating Angel further down the list because it felt way too high up there.  Just minor fiddling with the arbitrary numbers that are somehow supposed to represent my tastes.

That’s all I did to the top 100, but there are also a few changes in the 101-250 list.  I had to make room for Sita and Playtime, so I dropped Le bonheur (with some regret again for shafting a female director) and The Bothersome Man.  I also wanted to add The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Black Stallion, so I removed The Wind Will Carry Us and The Thin Red Line.

You may have noticed I did not put “(2015 revision)” in the title of this post.  That’s because this is likely to be the last time I post an update to these lists.  If I have any changes to make in the future, I’ll just edit this entry.  For better and for worse, my tastes have gradually solidified into a personal canon that is unlikely to shift very much.  And really, this all feels a little too pointlessly anal.  More and more, movies are becoming a hobby to me rather than an obsession.  I can’t deny I get some satisfaction from assigning numbers to them and ranking them in lists, but it’s less important to me than it once was.