Friday, January 27, 2012

Top 5 Lists for Each Decade, Because Why Not?

I haven't gotten around to ranking the 1890s yet.  Maybe by the end of this year.  I did Top 50s for each decade a couple years ago (index here).  Here's a new stab at it:




1900s:

1. A Corner in Wheat (DW Griffith)
2. A Trip to the Moon (George Melies)
3. The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter)
4. The Pan-American Exposition by Night (Edwin S. Porter)
5. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Porter)




1910s:

1. Intolerance (DW Griffith)
2. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (DW Griffith)
3. The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin)
4. Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)
5. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)




1920s:

1. Sunrise (FW Murnau)
2. The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg)
3. The General (Buster Keaton)
4. Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton)
5. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)




1930s:

1. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
2. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)
3. Stagecoach (John Ford)
4. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
5. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)




1940s:

1. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
2. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
3. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch)
4. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne)
5. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)




1950s:

1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. The Searchers (John Ford)
4. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
5. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)




1960s:

1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
3. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)
5. Playtime (Jacques Tati)



1970s:

1. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
3. Manhattan (Woody Allen)
4. F for Fake (Orson Welles)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)




1980s:

1. Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
2. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
3. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
4. Sans soleil (Chris Marker)
5. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)




1990s:

1. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai)
2. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
3. The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers)
4. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
5. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)




2000s:

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)
2. Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)
5. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)




2010s:

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
3. Oki's Movie (Hong Sangsoo)
4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
5. Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Movie Roundup: The Last Six Months Edition


There's simply no way I'm going to be able to write about this massive backlog of movies I've watched over the last six months.  And since I'm trying anyway to transition from writing a little bit about every movie I've watched to writing a lot about the movies that most catch my interest, it seems kind of foolish to keep this list of films staring at me, waiting for me to write about them and judging me when I don't.  So I'm just going to list them here, along with their current ranks in The Big List.  Since my current plan for The BIg List is to have updatable entires for every movie in every year (I've done the first two already), these will all eventually get written about, at least a little, someday far into the distant future.  Some I hope to write about in more depth, I have ambitions of posts about King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Satyajit Ray and pre-Code films dancing around my head, laughing at me.


Cabiria - 1,1914
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - 4, 1921
The Phantom Carriage - 7, 1921
Camille - 9, 1921
He Who Gets Slapped - 4, 1924
The Thief of Bagdad - 6, 1924
The Sea Hawk - 8, 1924
What Price Glory? - 2, 1926
The Scarlet Letter - 4, 1926
The Wind - 4, 1928
Two Tars - 6, 1928
Show People - 10, 1928
Spione - 11, 1928
Un chien andalou - 2, 1929
The Broadway Melody - 7, 1929


People on Sunday - 3, 1930
Not So Dumb - 13, 1930
Street Scene - 3, 1931
One Way Passage - 5, 1932
Three on a Match - 15, 1932
American Madness - 16, 1932
Payment Deferred - 30, 1932
White Zombie - 35, 1932
Wild Boys of the Road - 9, 1933
Man's Castle - 10, 1933
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse - 12, 1933
Heroes for Sale - 22, 1933
Heat Lightning - 14, 1934
Carnival in Flanders - 5, 1935
Annie Oakley - 16, 1935
She - 23, 1935
Things to Come - 14, 1936
The Plough and the Stars - 17, 1936
History is Made at Night - 7, 1937
Swing High, Swing Low - 16, 1937
A Damsel in Distress - 19, 1937
Pygmalion - 12, 1938


Night Train to Munich - 19, 1940
Son of Fury - 17, 1942
Passage to Marseille - 9, 1944
Jammin' the Blues - 11, 1944
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes - 18, 1945
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House - 27, 1948
The Black Book - 7, 1949
I Was A Male War Bride - 12, 1949
Colorado Territory - 17, 1949
A Woman's Secret - 28, 1949


Born to be Bad - 24, 1950
Annie Get Your Gun - 26, 1950
The Crimson Pirate - 23, 1952
Blackbeard, the Pirate - 25, 1952
Night and Fog - 16, 1955
The Curse of Frankenstein - 22, 1957
The Music Room - 6, 1958
Elevator to the Gallows - 12, 1958
Jazz on a Summer's Day - 12, 1959


Les bonnes femmes - 8, 1960
The Innocents - 11, 1961
Mahanagar - 6, 1964
Charulata - 10, 1964
Journey to Jerusalem - 21, 1968
Paper Moon - 10, 1973
Edvard Munch - 13, 1974


Mon oncle d'Amérique - 5, 1980
Sherman's March - 22, 1986
All for the Winner - 24, 1990
God of Gamblers 2 - 26, 1991
God of Gamblers 3 - 38, 1991
The River - 13, 1997


Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench - 12, 2009
Alamar - 22, 2009
Another Year - 8, 2010
Boxing Gym - 17, 2010
Film Socialisme - 18, 2010
The Trip - 31, 2010
Bill Cunningham, New York - 33, 2010
Senna - 38, 2010
Tiny Furniture - 44, 2010


Drive - 2011
The Muppets - 2011
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown - 2011
Hugo - 2011
Moneyball - 2011
Super 8 - 2011
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films - 2011
Don't Expect Too Much - 2011
Page One - 2011
Rango - 2011
These Amazing Shadows - 2011