Eric Barker

I’m primarily a film historian, but I’ve acted, directed, and even been a critic on occasion. Some thoughts on recent cinema here: ShotgunReviews.com

Re-ranking the Sight and Sound 100


As always with list-making, I’m struck not only by the biases (and other limitations) of film critics, but by my own, which inevitably rear up to haunt me as soon as I contemplate capital-A Art and the arc of film history. That’s why I’m less enthusiastic about this activity than I used to be. After fifty-something years of studying movies and writing about them, the task of making a list of favorites or bests, or critiquing someone else’s, mostly serves to heighten my awareness of how much I don’t know. I’m torn between feeling that I’ve missed the point of some really good films and righteous indignation that the definition of greatness seems to have changed under our feet (even though revealing such change is one of the stated purposes of the S&S poll).


Thus, when it came to a preferential re-ranking of the 2012 poll, I decided to make it completely personal, to set aside as much of the critical and historical noise in my head as I could, remove all pretense to objectivity, and just rank the movies according to their personal importance to me. Forget where they should be ranked; frankly, I don’t know. 

  1. Rear Window | Alfred HITCHCOCK | 1954
  2. Chinatown | Roman POLANSKI | 1974
  3. Citizen Kane | Orson WELLES | 1941
  4. The Third Man | Carol REED | 1949
  5. Wild Strawberries | Ingmar BERGMAN | 1957
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley KUBRICK | 1968
  7. The Wild Bunch | Sam PECKINPAH | 1969
  8. Sunset Blvd. | Billy WILDER | 1950
  9. Psycho | Alfred HITCHCOCK | 1960
  10. Seven Samurai | KUROSAWA Akira | 1954
  11. M | Fritz LANG | 1931
  12. Lawrence of Arabia | David LEAN | 1962
  13. Rio Bravo | Howard HAWKS | 1959
  14. The Seventh Seal | Ingmar BERGMAN | 1957
  15. Singin' in the Rain | Stanley DONEN & Gene KELLY | 1952
  16. Battleship Potemkin | Sergei EISENSTEIN | 1925
  17. La Grande Illusion | Jean RENOIR | 1937
  18. Greed | Erich VON STROHEIM | 1924
  19. The Passion of Joan of Arc | Carl Th. DREYER | 1928
  20. Sherlock Jr. | Buster KEATON | 1924
  21. Vertigo | Alfred HITCHCOCK | 1958
  22. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F.W. MURNAU | 1927
  23. North by Northwest | Alfred HITCHCOCK | 1959
  24. Tokyo Story | OZU Yasujirō | 1953
  25. The Godfather | Francis Ford COPPOLA | 1972
  26. Barry Lyndon | Stanley KUBRICK | 1975
  27. Le Mépris | Jean-Luc GODARD | 1963
  28. City Lights | Charles CHAPLIN | 1931
  29. La Règle du Jeu | Jean RENOIR | 1939
  30. Touch of Evil | Orson WELLES | 1958
  31. Pather Panchali | Satyajit RAY | 1955
  32. Casablanca | Michael CURTIZ | 1942
  33. Taxi Driver | Martin SCORSESE | 1976
  34. Mulholland Dr. | David LYNCH | 2001
  35. Modern Times | Charles CHAPLIN | 1936
  36. The General | Clyde BRUCKMAN & Buster KEATON | 1927
  37. Apocalypse Now | Francis Ford COPPOLA | 1979
  38. Persona | Ingmar BERGMAN | 1966
  39. Fanny & Alexander | Ingmar BERGMAN | 1982
  40. The Searchers | John FORD | 1956
  41. The Magnificent Ambersons | Orson WELLES | 1942
  42. Blue Velvet | David LYNCH | 1986
  43. The Night of the Hunter | Charles LAUGHTON | 1955
  44. Un Chien Andalou | Luis BUÑUEL | 1929
  45. Rashomon | KUROSAWA Akira | 1950
  46. The Godfather: Part II | Francis Ford COPPOLA | 1974
  47. Intolerance | D.W. GRIFFITH | 1916
  48. L'Avventura | Michelangelo ANTONIONI | 1960
  49. Some Like It Hot | Billy WILDER | 1959
  50. La Jetée | Chris MARKER | 1962
  51. Nashville | Robert ALTMAN | 1975
  52. The 400 Blows | François TRUFFAUT | 1959
  53. A Matter of Life and Death | POWELL & PRESSBURGER | 1946
  54. Raging Bull | Martin SCORSESE | 1980
  55. Breathless | Jean-Luc GODARD | 1960
  56. Once upon a Time in the West | Sergio LEONE | 1968
  57. Bicycle Thieves | Vittorio DE SICA | 1948
  58. Metropolis | Fritz LANG | 1927
  59. The Leopard | Luchino VISCONTI | 1963
  60. 8½ | Federico FELLINI | 1963
  61. Ugetsu Monogatari | MIZOGUCHI Kenji | 1953
  62. L'Atalante | Jean VIGO | 1934
  63. Imitation of Life | Douglas SIRK | 1959
  64. Les Enfants du Paradis | Marcel CARNÉ | 1945
  65. The Battle of Algiers | Gillo PONTECORVO | 1966
  66. Aguirre, Wrath of God | Werner HERZOG | 1972
  67. Blade Runner | Ridley SCOTT | 1982
  68. Man with a Movie Camera | Dziga VERTOV | 1929
  69. La Dolce Vita | Federico FELLINI | 1960
  70. Andrei Rublev | Andrei TARKOVSKY | 1966
  71. L'Eclisse | Michelangelo ANTONIONI | 1962
  72. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp | POWELL & PRESSBURGER | 1943
  73. In the Mood for Love | WONG Kar-wai | 2000
  74. Au Hasard Balthazar | Robert BRESSON | 1966
  75. Pickpocket | Robert BRESSON | 1959

Unranked


100 Additional Titles

Films I think are as worthy of canonization as the S&S 100, listed chronologically.

For this list, I allowed all the critical and/or historical voices to once again have their say in my head. Seven percent of the list is made of silent films, which is only fair when almost a quarter of film history remains in that ever more distant, underappreciated era. If I have a particular bias about which I feel the least guilt, it’s that I champion genre films, which have often illuminated the possibilities of narrative cinema more fully than the more self-consciously artistic films that critics generally hold in the highest esteem. A critic doesn’t have to do the work of filmmaking; he/she merely reports on the final objet d’art as if the circumstances of production had nothing, or should have nothing, to do with collaboration, financing, or necessity. Put another way, I don’t dispute that there are auteurs, but I don’t believe all auteurs are directors (some are producers, some are actors, and some are multi-hyphenates), or that all directors are auteurs. 

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