Welcome to MovieJawn’s first ever Sound & Vision Poll, where our writers share why they love their 10 favorite movies of all time!

by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

In the early days of the pandemic, my boyfriend and I decided to spend our time trapped in our apartment working our way through the 2012 edition of Sight and Sound’s list of greatest films of all time. When else were we going to have seven uninterrupted hours to watch Sátántangó? Over a year later, in a new apartment, with a new job (for me) and two doses of Covid vaccines (for both of us), we finished our journey through the list with Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. Along the way, the list had given us plenty to consider – movies I hadn’t seen before and loved (Children of Paradise, Andrei Rublev), others that I was able to appreciate even more after a rewatch (Fanny and Alexander, Barry Lyndon), and a couple that didn’t seem to belong anywhere near a list of greatest films (Sans Soleil, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp).

Ultimately, it does seem kind of silly to try to translate our subjective responses to works of art into any sort of objective-seeming list or ranking. What does it even mean to say that Pather Panchali ranks 39 places ahead of Lawrence of Arabia? What do 846 critics see in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp that I just don’t get? And why did they vote for Colonel Blimp when The Red Shoes was right there!?

That being said, however, I have always been fascinated with lists and rankings. As a kid, I’d set an alarm on weekend mornings so I could listen to Casey Kasem’s full American Top 40 countdown and eagerly wait to hear if my favorite songs were moving up the chart. Decades later, it was no surprise that I kept thinking about how I’d rank the films on the Sight and Sound list, what I’d put on a hypothetical ballot, and what changes I thought we might see on the 2022 edition of the list. So when Dan Santelli and Ryan Silberstein suggested that we conduct our own MovieJawn poll of greatest films of all times, I was thrilled – and a little intimidated about the prospect of narrowing my list down to just ten movies.

My first pass at a list almost exclusively consisted of films released between 1964 and 1979. While I’m certainly willing to argue that those 15 years represent one of the greatest periods of moviemaking worldwide, I wasn’t ready to restrict my list to one decade and a half. Thinking more critically about my list led to more and more questions: Did I need a musical in my final list of ten? What about a western? Were there too many English-language movies on my list? What even makes a movie great anyway? Is it all about the craft of the film and my response to it? Or do you have to consider a movie’s influence and impact? I don’t know that I ever reached a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, but after many drafts, I settled on a list of ten movies. All are very different, with the only common thread being that I think they’re all great. Some are more well-known or have been more influential than others, and if you asked me to come up with this list on another day, you might get a completely different set of films. 

The final ten that I settled on are below, unranked and listed in chronological order. I’ve put together some thoughts about each movie – what makes them so great and why I decided to include them on my list. And even after all the time I spent deliberating, I still wound up with a majority of movies from that same 15-year period (1964 – 1979) – can you blame me?

The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Until I actually started watching silent movies, I always assumed they’d be boring and stodgy, relics from a time when technology hadn’t caught up to the current era. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the early years of cinema contain some of the most exciting and innovative filmmaking of all time. Having now seen many films from Charlie Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, and Sergei Eisenstein, just to name a few, I know just how wrong I used to be. When thinking of a silent film to include on my list, I immediately thought of Fritz Lang, a favorite of mine. While my brain short-circuited trying to decide between Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Metropolis, and M, my thoughts drifted north from the German Lang to Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer and his The Passion of Joan of Arc.

I was in college when I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc for the first time, and I remember being astonished. As Joan, Renée Jeanne Falconetti appears both arresting and otherworldly with her face shot in angled close-ups, unlike anything that had been seen on film before. Dreyer masterfully marshals everything at his disposal – the sets, lighting, cinematography, and most importantly, Falconetti, in order to create something gripping, urgent, scary, and powerful. In Dreyer’s film, the last days of Joan of Arc become some the first moments of cinema as we know it today.

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

It’s a shame that Charles Laughton didn’t get to enjoy a longer career as a director. After his first and only directorial effort flopped, both critically and commercially, he settled for only being an Oscar-winning actor and never directed a film again. You only have to watch The Night of the Hunter once to know that we were robbed of a huge talent with an uncanny ability to marry image and performance. Laughton transforms Davis Grubb’s novel into a film noir fairytale featuring three of the 20th century’s most notable performers: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. Between its chiaroscuro contrast and pulse-pounding tension, Laughton’s Gothic thriller remains clear-eyed in its portrayal of childhood, Americana, and hypocrisy. A true feat that makes you wish Laughton would’ve had more opportunities to direct.

I tend to think of The Night of the Hunter as a unique sort of film, a masterpiece with its own style and point of view. But here, I am thinking of this not only as an achievement on its own, but also a stand-in for the other noirs that turned tropes and shadows into timeless classics – The Third Man, Mildred Pierce, Sweet Smell of Success. I also want to place Laughton among a legacy of actor-directors, whose experiences on stage and in front of the camera informed their approach behind the camera, including Orson Welles, Barbra Streisand, Todd Field.

Bande à part (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) may not have been the first French New Wave film (or even Jean-Luc Godard’s first), but it might be the most New Wave film. Godard’s seventh feature is an anarchic romp through the idea of a gangster movie, with pit stops along the way for impromptu dance scenes or a race through the Louvre. Almost defiant in its discursiveness, like its main trio, the film delights in its flouting of convention. Even 60 years later, it still feels fresh and daring.

Perhaps the definitive movement in film history, the French New Wave saw a group of young Parisians cobble together their favorite aspects of decades of filmmaking and then reinvent movies according to their own tastes and theories. Decades later, filmmakers are still finding inspiration in the energy and experimentation of the French New Wave, and it doesn’t seem like that will change anytime soon. It would be hard to argue with a list made up of only New Wave films, but I’ll restrain myself and leave Cléo from 5 to 7, The 400 Blows, and The Young Girls of Rochefort off my list… for now. 

Black Girl (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1966)

While the French New Wave was making a splash around the world in the 1960s, another French-language film was making its own quiet yet significant impact. Initially released in 1966, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl was the first Sub-Saharan African film to receive international attention. The winner of the Prix Jean Vigo for best feature film, Black Girl didn’t exactly fly under the radar, but it doesn’t have quite the same name-recognition as other landmark films. In Black Girl’s brief hour-long runtime and with his own distinct style, the Senegalese Sembène doesn’t shy away from the toll that racism and colonialism take on Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), the titular “black girl” – or in a more direct translation of its even more cutting French title (La noire de…), “someone’s black girl.” 

Before his death in 2007, Sembène continued to make films, including several in his own native Wolof – Mandabi and Faat Kiné, for two excellent examples. Though their stories take vastly different shapes, I think you can still place Black Girl at the beginning of a line of monumental post-colonial films, more recently including Hyenas and Bacurau. At the same time, I think you can also group Black Girl with a series of some of my favorite films from the 1960s, all dealing with female alienation: L’Avventura, Charulata, Persona. 

The Color of Pomegranates (dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1969)

Though I was impressed by many films on the Sight and Sound list, none were quite as staggering as The Color of Pomegranates. Sergei Parajanov’s colorful interpretation of the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova proved to be too opaque and stylized for the Soviet censors, who tried to limit the film’s distribution outside of Armenia. Luckily for us, the film eventually made its way out (and in 2014 was restored nearly to Parajanov’s original vision) and has been mesmerizing viewers for decades. Simply put, in The Color of Pomegranates, Parajanov uses colors and images in ways that no one else ever had or ever has since. It’s a hypnotizing experience and perhaps one of the most beautiful movies ever made.  

A sui generis movie like The Color of Pomegranates defies comparison, but I won’t let that stop me from including it in two broad categories. The first is Soviet film, an idiosyncratic national cinema that gave us Solaris, Man with a Movie Camera, and montage theory. The second – even broader – is filmmakers with distinctive uses of color: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Wong Kar-wai, Jacques Demy (uh oh, he’s come up twice already and I didn’t really include any of his films on my list – I’m already starting to reevaluate).

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman, 1975)

The Sight and Sound list is notoriously non-diverse. The list is heavily skewed towards films directed by white men of American or European descent. When putting together my list, I wanted it to contain more than just ten films that I think are great, but also to showcase the breadth of films that I think are great. In the end, I think I did a better job than Sight and Sound, but only barely. My list is still centered on English- and French-language films. The directors are mostly white, and almost all men – with Chantal Akerman as the one exception. Hell, seven of these films were already on the Sight and Sound list! 

That’s not to detract from Akerman’s triumph of a film at all. Until I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, I had never been so riveted by someone peeling potatoes or been so stunned by someone dropping a freshly washed spoon. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman forces the viewer to observe a woman’s domestic routine, while becoming attuned to the minor changes that signal that something is amiss on quai du Commerce. It’s a pivotal work of feminist slow cinema. While Jeanne Dielman has already been recognized on the Sight and Sound list, I’m hoping that this year’s list will be more representative of the vast world of cinema from the past century. And ten years from now, maybe another decade will have convinced me that it isn’t too soon to add a Céline Sciamma or Lucrecia Martel film to my ballot. Or maybe I will finally have watched something from Larisa Shepitko, Ann Hui, or Julie Dash and realize what I’ve been missing this whole time.

Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975)

I said that this list was unranked – and it is – but I will also say that I have listened to “Tapedeck in His Tractor” from Nashville approximately one million times. Robert Altman’s 1975 satire of the intersection of the Nashville country music industry, populism, celebrity, and American politics was certainly relevant in its time and has grown even more so in the decades since its release. But Nashville is so much more than just a well-executed satire. Its 24 characters crisscross throughout the film (with Altman’s signature overlapping dialogue), each transforming what could’ve been a stock character into something memorable – Ronee Blakley’s tragic, angelic country darling, Keith Carradine’s dissatisfied folk singer, Geraldine Chaplin’s star-obsessed reporter. And the final sequence, where Barbara Harris’s wannabe finally sees her opportunity and grabs the mic, might just be the most American moment ever filmed.

It’s no small feat to make a film with an ensemble this large move so smoothly and naturally. When done right, these ensemble films often become some of my favorite movies. I see shades of Nashville in Boogie Nights, The Thin Red Line, and BPM (Beats per Minute), different as all four movies may be.

Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

As I narrowed down my list, I was faced with a seemingly impossible Francis Ford Coppola conundrum. As a New Jersey native, I shocked myself when I took The Godfather Part II off my list in favor of Apocalypse Now. But I think I made the right choice. The first time I watched Apocalypse Now, I thought it was great. Harrowing, visceral, disturbing – a multimillion dollar evisceration of the Vietnam War with a teenaged Laurence (“Larry”) Fishburne. But watching it again, years later, I was in awe. Everything was just more vivid: the colors, the brutality, the disgust. Coppola’s transformation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a towering achievement.

There are many films that detail the horrors of war, some almost as successfully as Apocalypse Now, most much less successfully. What comes closest to matching Coppola’s urgency is Roberto Rossellini’s Neorealist Trilogy, about World War Two and its aftermath, set in the rubble of Italy and Germany. In particular, it’s Rome, Open City that matches Apocalypse Now in intensity. With a completely different style, Rossellini’s unrelenting realism has a similar effect to Coppola’s wartime maximalism, dragging its viewers along a path through inevitable tragedy.

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

To some extent, Do the Right Thing feels like a synthesis of every other movie on my list. Spike Lee’s embrace of film history, rejection of convention, and moments of provocation all position him as an inheritor of Godard’s French New Wave legacy (though his commercial ability probably places him somewhere closer to François Truffaut). And Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) LOVE and HATE rings are direct references to Robert Mitchum’s con artist’s knuckle tattoos in The Night of the Hunter. Lee’s films examine the modern African American experience in his signature style – stylized colors, evocative music, and dolly shots galore. Do the Right Thing, Lee’s insistent third feature film approaches race relations in Brooklyn with gravity, humor, and a distinct point of view – a necessary perspective that courted controversy and still does, decades later.

There are no directors exactly like Spike Lee, but the final years of the 20th century saw a spate of directors independently redefining what cinema can be. All draw from prior years of film history, but now that these filmmakers and their films have become enduring classics of their own, maybe they deserve inclusion on my list: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang, just to name a few. 

Yi Yi (dir. Edward Yang, 2000)

Released on the eve of the new millennium, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is a sweeping yet intimate portrait of a Taiwanese family on the precipice of the 21st century. Facing capitalism, urbanization, technology, and cultural shifts, the Jians exist at a specific point in Taiwanese history, between modernity and tradition, but their emotions and relationships are so well-defined that their experiences become universal. Rarely has a director been able to express the emotional clarity and compassion that Yang displays throughout Yi Yi. Though he was in his early 50s when he completed the film, Yi Yi would turn out to be the final film of Yang’s career – sadly he passed away in 2007 after a long battle with cancer.

Surely there will be more films from the 21st century on subsequent editions of the list. I considered adding Spirited Away, Ash Is Purest White, and Moonlight to mine. But I wonder what the 21st century’s Night of the Hunter or Color of Pomegranates might be. What films will overcome a quiet reception to claim their spots among the greatest films of all time? It’s likely that I haven’t even seen it yet. Working on this list has shown me that while putting together a list like this can be fun (and a bit stressful), the real joy of enjoying film comes from broadening your horizons. Although I have strong opinions about the films I love (and the ones I don’t), I continue to look forward to discovering new works and reconsidering the films that I’ve already seen. I can’t wait to change my mind.