Zhang Yimou directed Farewell My Concubine. And yes, he definitely deserves inclusion, though I’d choose To Live instead as his best picture.
Seconded.
You can have your Welles, your Kurosawa, your Keaton and Sturges, but give me the McKenzie oeuvre for pure cinematic bliss.
Boy, the auteur theory’s pretty much conquered cinema criticism, I guess.
Is that on the list? Cause I have it, and I agree!
No, Chen Kaige directed FMC. Zhang is MIA.
I’ll be damned. I’d thought Zhang Yimou directed FMC ever since I saw it; it would fit perfectly into his oeuvre. In that case, it must be stricken in favor of To Live; I’ll get the editors on the horn immediately.
No Shawshank Redemption? I guess it’s time to get busy living, or get busy dying. 
Not a single Eisenstein film? No Griffith either.
I guess on someone’s top 100 list there’s a Steven Segal film, too.
Time has made a really poor decision to allow their top 100 films of all time to be chosen by one person! Good films on the list along with some undeniably great ones, but the 100 finest? There are at least 70 missing! I don’t trust any list that leaves off Babette’s Feast and that’s not even on my top ten.
Time should have left well enough alone with the AFI’s list and perhaps made another list of “really good films that you might have missed.” I am always looking for good films that I didn’t see the first time around.
Two people: Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel (both esteemed historians as well as critics)
No single film’s exclusion will ever “invalidate” a Top 100 list. BF is lovely, but wouldn’t make my Top 250 (though neither would a number of the Time entries). The list’s value is in the cumulative effect–any glaring omissions in artists? Genres? Countries? Styles? Nit-picking a single film here or there is different than seeing how well-rounded and comprehensive a list is, and this one is far better than most that come down the pike…
…and it’s certainly leagues better than the incredibly crappy AFI list. The sooner people forget that POS the better.
Well, this list has a lot of them–how many have you already seen, exactly?
It seems like they tried to include films from all genres.
But is this a good idea? I mean is the best kung-Fu or monster movie really better than another Griffith or Kurosawa film?
Maybe a better way to make such a list would be to catagorize it.
Of course, another mark against the list is that it’s only the Best 100 Films Since 1923 (when Time began publishing), leaving off some 15 years worth of movies, including most of Griffith’s best work, as well as Mickey Neilan, Rex Ingram, John Collins, early DeMille and and some superb German and French films.
This is sort of the Affirmative Action of movie ranking isn’t it? A ‘well rounded’ list cannot represent the 100 best.
I see several posters classifying Cronenberg’s Fly as a horror film, and I think that’s a mistake. Yes, it fits horror better than any other genre. But it isn’t a film designed to scare the audience or depicting frightening things so much as it is a film about some truly sick things. I used to think of it as ‘revolting, but I can’t look away’. Then, something a friend said cracked it open for me. When he notices his increased strength etc, Brundle is happy. When he notices other changes, he becomes frightened. At some point, he becomes “gleeful”. His teeth drop out and he makes a speech on why he doesn’t need them anymore. His penis falls off, he happily adds it to the museum in his medicine cabinet (it’s in one of the jars netx to his ears and the rest). At some point, he goes from the shock, horror and disgust that the audience is feeling to being a giddy child in wonderland.
However, if they were going to put a Cronenberg film on the list they should have gone with M Butterfly. Cronenberg is usually angry, sickening, disturbing, and bizarre. When the credits for M Butterfly rolled, I was stunned. For the most part, the film is a beautiful fairytale of a pure love.
Well, lists like these are meant to engender debate, and including DM2 & Zen aren’t just cultish fanboy inclusions, but do provoke the idea that there are genres that continue to be ghettoized. For decades, nobody thought of westerns or musicals or comedies as high art (except for the overtly arty ones), but now they are understood as some of the most dramatic vehicles for doing what movies do best–allowing movement and editing and composition inform a traditional “story” with more depth and texture and complexity than is apparent at first glance. Should a Jackie Chan movie be treated any differently?
Kurosawa dealt with genres all the time, but since they were foreign, somehow they’re seen as classier. And for my money, 2 Kurosawas is still 1 too many in a Top 100 list (though I’m very glad that his contemporaries and equals Ozu & Mizoguchi show up as well). Eisenstein’s not there, but Vertov is, and Mw/aMC is better than Potemkin without being as famous.
Are there enough silents? No (though I can think of a number I’d prefer to see before a Griffith). Are there still some glaring omissions? Sure (though everyone will debate on what those actually constitute).
But what makes most of these lists tedious is that they’re slaves to canons, and most of those canonized films are usually due for some re-assessment (including a number in this thread people revere so highly: Mockingbird, Third Man, Kwai, Apocalypse. I’d say Cronenberg’s The Fly is certainly the equal of any of these, and one I’d more eagerly rewatch because it works on so many levels (as love story, metaphor, and scary-ass monster movie) so satisfactorily (and there are other Cronenberg films that are even, debateably, better!)
No list will make everyone happy, but at least this one is more provocative and thought-provoking than most (though certainly not “perfect” or without its problems), instead of tediously predictable or overtly stupid the way most generic lists are cranked out.
I never once mentioned quotas, but I would argue that a truly Best 100 would have to be well-rounded.
Anyone who argues that a vast majority of the Great Movies are in the English-language is myopic and ignorant of huge swaths of cinematic history.
Ditto for anyone who argues that a vast majority of the Great Movies were made in the past 20 years (or who, conversely, argues that nothing post-1970 can compare with what preceded it).
In being well-rounded, you aren’t simply gratuitously including things for the sake of inclusion (1 porno–check; 1 Jerry Lewis–check; 1 Shakespeare adaptation–check); but you are recognizing that there is not one strict, rigid criteria to what makes a movie Great. Kong’s greatness is different than Tokyo Story’s, but both films are remarkable in their own right. The Crowd and City of God deserve to be in the same conversation, even though they’re separated by 75 years and an equator.
By being well-rounded, a list shows it’s mature enough to see that movies are great for a myriad of reaons. That may not make the list “right” in your eyes, but it does show that a lot of thought went into the list, instead of your typical knee-jerk laundry list of tired-old Favorites.
No Blazing Saddles? No Airplane? No Jaws? No Gone with the Wind? No Ben Hur? No Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
Once again, Porky’s is just screwed right over by the corporate oligarchy.
Why are people even mildly surprised by this list? It’s no more or less idiosyncratic than one would expect for a list created by two film critics. I’ve spent the last several years looking through various personally created best film lists. There are hundreds of them out there in books, magazines, websites, etc. Take this list as it’s intended. It’s not supposed to limit your viewing. It’s no better and no worse than listening to a friend’s suggestions of his favorite films. If it leads you to see a few great films that you haven’t see before, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, it still isn’t time wasted to learn what other people think are great films.
I never mentioned quotas either, but you must admit, if you are determined to included movies from all genres, you must excluded some worthy entries from some larger genres, simply because they would be over-represented if you didn’t.
To exclude great films simply because they are on your 'typical knee-jerk laundry list of tired-old Favorites" is rather elitist, don’t you think? They are on that list for a reason.