The 1,000 Greatest Films (top 25)

"Far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to have been seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood."
Bosley Crowther, New York Times

"Its imagery (not forgetting the oppressive ceilings) as Welles delightedly explores his mastery of a new vocabulary, still amazes and delights, from the opening shot of the forbidding gates of Xanadu to the last glimpse of the vanishing Rosebud (tarnished, maybe, but still a potent symbol). A film that gets better with each renewed acquaintance."
Tom Milne, Time Out

"Of all Hitchcock's films the one nearest to perfection. Indeed, its profundity is inseparable from the perfection of form: it is a perfect organism, each character, each sequence, each image, illuminating each other."
Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Film's Revisited, 1989

"It's nice to see critics accepting Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 commercial flop as a masterpiece; when I first saw it more than 30 years ago it was a neglected film cited by Pauline Kael as a junky Hitchcock demonstrating the absurdity of auteurism. But masterpiece it is: I can think of no film that makes romance more palpable and affecting."
Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, 1996

Magnier, Odette Talazac
"How brilliantly Renoir focuses the confusion! The rather fusty luxury of the chateau, the constant mindless slaughter of wild animals, the minuets of adultery and seduction, the gavottes of mutual hatred or mistrust."
Basil Wright, 1972

"Every frame of La règle du jeu seems dominated by Renoir's personality; yet the most appealing facets of that personality are generosity, openness, responsiveness. As a result, La règle is at once the auteur film par excellence and a work of co-operation and active participation."
Robin Wood, Film Reference

"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe."
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1997

"Taking a best-selling novel of more drive than genius, about a subject of something less than common experience (the Mafia), involving an isolated portion of one very particular ethnic group (first-generation and second-generation Italian-Americans), Francis Ford Coppola has made one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment."
Vincent Canby, New York Times, 1972

"If all you know about this exuberant, self-regarding 1963 film is based on its countless inferior imitations (from Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini's exhilarating, stocktaking original... It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did--certainly more fun than anything he made after it."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made.... This rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led by a band of samurai warriors defending itself against a marauding army, sparked not only an American remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960), but went on to influence a score of other westerns, particularly those of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone."
Gavin Lambert, Sight & Sound

"We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford."
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"One of the shining glories of the American musical... The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers."
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"Upon its release in 1925, Potemkin was hailed as a masterpiece, as much for the way it dramatized the emotions behind the communist revolution as for its innovative use of montage... Battleship Potemkin remains remarkable for the way it builds over a brisk 69 minutes, setting the pace for nearly every action movie made since."
Noel Murray, The A.V. Club, 2007

"Tokyo Story lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn't want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding. It does this so well that I am near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections."
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2003

"Like Citizen Kane, Sunrise is one of those movies that introduce viewers to the notion of film as art... Part of what continues to make it great is its creation in a particular utopian moment in film history: the end of the silent era, when movies reached a certain pinnacle of visual expressiveness that was tied to a dream of universality, a belief that cinema could speak an international tongue."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Guardian, 2004

"As a shining example of a vanished breed of epic filmmaking it can't be beat. The scene most admirers remember best a near-dead Lawrence reemerging from the desert after risking his life to rescue a fallen comrade is so long and minimal that no director in the age of Spielberg & Co. would dream of attempting it.... In short, they don't make 'em like this one anymore. Viewing it is like taking a time machine to a movie age that was more naive than our own in some ways, more sophisticated and ambitious in others."
David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor, 2002

"Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves defined an era in cinema... Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy: emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty."
The Criterion Collection

"Combined, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II represent the apex of American movie-making and the ultimate gangster story. Few sequels have expanded upon the original with the faithfulness and detail of this one... The Godfather is not so much about crime lords as it is about prices paid in the currency of the soul for decisions made and avoided. It is that quality which establishes this saga as timeless. "
James Berardinelli, Reel Views, 1994

"Michael Curtiz's 1942 classic is irresistible, big-hearted film-making - a unique kind of romantic noir - with cracking dialogue and a thrilling leading man in Humphrey Bogart as bar owner Rick: a stateless, cynical American in second world war Casablanca, where desperate refugees plead for transit papers and which has become a sordid marketplace in cash and sexual favours."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2007

"The film is a masterpiece not because of the tragic story of its maker nor because of its awkward genesis, but because, as Truffaut has said, in filming prosaic words and acts, Vigo effortlessly achieved poetry... The poetic power of the film, however, had a lot to do with the cinematography of the Russian-born Boris Kaufman, who worked on each of Vigo's films."
Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 1999

"The film’s nonlinear narrative decisively marked it as a modernist work and as a part of the burgeoning world art cinema that was transforming the medium in the 1950s. With Rashomon and his subsequent films, Kurosawa came to rank among the leading international figures of the art cinema, in the company of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Satyajit Ray. Like their work, Rashomon was more than just commercial entertainment. It was a film of ideas, made by a serious artist with a sophisticated aesthetic design. "
Stephen Prince, The Criterion Collection, 2002

"Despite an initial flurry of rabbit punches (most of them from the Kael wing of the critical establishment), Raging Bull is now treasured as an American masterwork, a fusion of Hollywood genre with personal vision couched in images and sounds that are kinetic and visceral, and closer to poetry than pulp."
Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

"Dreyer's most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made. It deals only with the final stages of Joan's trial and her execution, and is composed almost exclusively of close-ups... The entire film is less moulded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving."
Tony Rayns, Time Out

"Touch of Evil is a flat-out all-cylinders-running, eye-popping masterpiece, one of a few monumental 1950s swan songs marking the end of the great epoch of traditional studio filmmaking. It belongs alongside Vertigo and The Searchers and Kiss Me Deadly and Some Came Running as a tribute to the kind of directorial vision that used the machinery of the studio to create a work of pure visual poetry."
Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, 1998

"Grand Illusion escapes the confines of the war movie genre. Scarcely a gun is fired in anger. The trenches are nowhere in sight. Yet through some alchemy, Renoir imbues the film with his passionate belief in man’s humanity to man... French critic André Bazin wrote of Renoir that “he has inherited from the literary and pictorial sensibility of his father’s era a profound, sensual and moving sense of reality." A film like Grand Illusion illustrates this to perfection."
Peter Cowie, The Criterion Collection, 1999

"A large part of what makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself. It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie history."
Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club

"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."
Richard Schickel, Time, 2005

"Setting aside the small gestures, the delicate observation of daily life and the sympathetic characterisation associated with neo-realism, La Dolce Vita is a large-scale satire with grand set pieces and forceful visual metaphors... The film has probably lost much of its ability to shock, and the orgies are tame by present standards. But it has not lost the power to fascinate, stimulate and provoke, and it remains a work of moral force and a visual delight."
Philip French, The Observer, 2008