- Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu (1953) Never heard of it.
= 2. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick (1968) Still haven’t been able to stay awake through the whole thing.
= 2. Citizen Kane – Orson Welles (1941) I agree with this one. - 8 ½ - Federico Fellini (1963) Nope.
- Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese (1976) Barely makes the list of the 10 best Scorsese films
- Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola (1979) Nope also.
= 7. The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola (1972) I agree with this one.
= 7. Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock (1958) Barely makes the list of the 10 best Hitchcock films. - Mirror – Andrei Tarkovsky (1974) Never heard of it.
- Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio De Sica (1949) What???
I think you’re on the right track with these theories. Especially the third idea: a work of art has to stand the test of time before people are ready to declare them great works.
I’d be more interested in a Straight Dopers’ list of the all-time great movies. Mine would include:
*My Life as a Dog
The Godfather, Part 2
Boogie Nights
Almost Famous
My Cousin Vinnie
The Nasty Girl
Robocop
Aria
Dr. Death * (Erroll Morris)
Raising Arizona
Broadcast News
Iron Man
Midnight in Paris
I think that would make more sense as well. Whenever I hear an actor or director talking about their favorite movies, a lot of them tend to be much older movies that, IMO, a lot of people wouldn’t put at the top of their list. I can’t imagine director or actor that puts Citizen Kane or 2001 at the top of their list couldn’t find a ‘greater’ movie than those.
What I think happens, at least in part, is that many of these movies are studied (and with good reason) in film school. After years of dissecting them and appreciating them, they feel much more connected to them than the average movie watcher. Also, especially when it comes to directors, it’s more about new and innovative techniques than how good the movie is as a whole.
Orson Wells had a particular way of filming Citizen Kane, Vertigo introduced us to the dolly zoom, 2001 had all the special effects.
Most influential (or most studied in film school) sure, but I wouldn’t pick them as the greatest movies ever. In fact, ask 358 actors and you’ll probably get different answers.
MortSahlFan, what point were you trying to make by posting the list in the first post in this thread? Were you trying to say that you agreed with the choices? Were you trying to say that you disagreed with the choices? Did you want to know our choices? What was your point? You’ve started 39 threads just this year already, most of them about choices in movies and music. What do you want to know? Do you want to know about other lists of great movies? There are hundreds of such lists that can be linked to. Do you want to get us to trash this list (or maybe praise this list)? That seems to be what a lot of us have done. What was your point in posting this list? Please, everyone else, don’t try to guess what MortSahlFan meant to do. He/she hasn’t posted anything to this thread since the first post. I want to get him/her to tell us what he/she meant in posting this list.
Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, The Third Man, Goodfellas, All About Eve…
If you have ever watched the CineFix channel on YouTube you will have heard of Mirror. I have not yet seen it but I want to see it. It is a very deep and layered work of art.
I really like CineFix. They do a really good job of going far deeper into a movie, or even a specific scene of a specific movie than most other channels. IIRC, they’re film students which gives them the ability to do a much better job than, say WatchMojo (which is also good, don’t get me wrong).
Checking out their site and youtube channel for a Top 10 movies of all time proves difficult since they tend to break things into very specific categories. However, I did find “our 50 favorite movies of all time”. The top 10 being:
10. Flowers of Shanghai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1998)
9. Hero, Zhang Yimou (2002)
8. The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)
7. City Lights, Charlie Chaplin (1931)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (1968)
5. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles (1941)
4. The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
3. The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola (1974)
2. Casablanca, Michael Curtiz (1942)
- Chinatown, Roman Polanski (1974)
For those of you not familiar with Cinefix, many of their lists contain a lot of foreign (To North America) and/or art house movies. I know it’s common, at least for me, to not know a handful of the movies they’re discussing in any particular video.
In any discussion of this kind, “overrated” usually means “something a lot of other people like that doesn’t appeal to me personally.”
Most of the movies listed in the OP are generally acknowledged to be among the greatest movies of all time not just by directors but also by critics as well as the movie going public (at least those who are more than casual movie goers). Maybe they’re not in the top 10, but almost any list, from whatever source, will include most of them among the top 50 at least.
Personally, I don’t particularly care for 8 1/2. I do think it’s self-indulgent, and among Fellini movies I much prefer La Dolce Vida and La Strada. But I wouldn’t deny it’s a great movie. Among Scorcese movies, I personally enjoy Goodfellas the most, but I think Taxi Driver is a more significant movie.
This is the URL for Cinefix’s Top 50 Movies of All Time
As I said, there are hundreds of interesting lists of best movies. If you include every list from everybody on the Internet, there are ten of thousands of such lists, at least. You can never, no matter how hard you try, see all movies. You can’t even see all interesting movies
Good luck. Do a little searching, and you’ll find a whole army of people named MortSahlFan on message boards, doing the same thing.
Another internet detective. Call the FBI or Halliburton immediately!
It would be better if you would put a little effort into your OPs. Occasionally you will post a few sentences, but all too often they are just a list, a link, or a few words. If you are so interested in these subjects, you might at least give us your own take on them. And you haven’t even participated or responded to any posts in this thread until now.
For those who haven’t heard of/seen Tokyo Story, it is on archive.org.
It is Bicycle Thieves. It’s been incorrectly called The Bicycle Thief (which makes more sense, really, in the context of the movie) in the US, but everywhere else in the world knows it and has always known it as Bicycle Thieves.
I’ve seen them all except Mirror and think it’s a great list. I don’t agree with all the choices but I believe they’re all great movies. I understand why those filmmakers would choose those movies.
I’m happy that Tokyo Story came in at number one. Even though it’s not as well-known as most of the others, it really does deserve to be there, IMO of course. It’s crushingly sad though, devastatingly depressing. Emotionally, it makes everything else look like a Saturday morning cartoon.
- Haven’t heard of it
2a) Eh, it’s filmed pretty, but sort of boring/silly.
2b) Good film. - Thought it was just softporn?
- Not a horrible character study, but there are better - more interesting / more meaningful.
- Boring and way too long to have no real point. The book was a character study, this doesn’t even have that. And it is painfully obvious that the director just filmed a bunch of random scenes and cut down to the ones he liked most. That’s piss-poor directing in my book, not exquisite.
7a) Not horrible, but has been outdone by later films in the genre.
7b) Haven’t seen it. - Never heard of it.
- Never heard of it.
Are you maybe thinking of 9 1/2 Weeks?
Yeah, I can hardly think of a more bizarre thing to say about 8 1/2. I have to assume Sage Rat has never seen it and is unfamiliar with Fellini in general.
Clearly a cinephile.
I’m surprised that filmmakers didn’t see fit to include a say, Spielberg film on their list. If the list is admiring the craft of filmmaking as much as the materiel of the movie itself, surely one of his movies should have made this list.
Before any of us make any statement about what the directors liked in this poll (which, again, was done in 2011 and published in 2012), it would be a good idea to look at the complete list of the top 100 films as chosen by the directors in the poll. The films in the complete list were made in years up to 2007. Looking at just a small part of the poll is deceptive. That’s like looking at the top film in the poll and saying, “Well, I guess you think that all great films were made before 1954.” And note that one Spielberg film is in the list. Each of the directors polled had seen thousands of films in their life. Trying to characterize the tastes of these people by just the films in their overall average top ten is ridiculous. Here’s the complete list of the top 100: