Ranking: #51/111 Director: Richard Fleischer (USA) Genre: War Drama As a historical war epic, Tora! Tora! Tora! has depth, breadth and vision. It is a masterful war picture with stunning aerial battle scenes and photography. In fact, all the battle scenes are visual...

Ranking: #50/111 Director: Yasujirō Ozu (Japan) Genre: Social & Psychological Drama Tokyo Twilight is probably Yasujirō Ozu’s darkest family drama, but perhaps the one with the most emotional power. Set in mid-winter in post-war Tokyo, it tells the tragic story of...

Ranking: #49/111 Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot (France) Genre: Noir Romance Drama       French film critic and theoretician, André Bazin, studied extensively the adaptations of novels into films. He rated Manon, based on Abbé Prévost’s Manon...

Ranking: #48/111 Director: Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy) Genre: Social Drama This is a magnificent social drama by Michelangelo Antonioni, the master of what is sometimes called “interior realism”, by which is meant a shift away from the school of Italian Neo Realism...

Ranking: #47/111 Director: Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia) Genre: Historical Drama It’s fitting that both the artist who is the subject of the film and the film’s director are called Andrei, because there seems to be a deep affinity between these two Russian artists, both...

Ranking: #46/111 Director: David Lynch (USA) Genre: Biographical Social Drama Quite simply, this is one of the most extraordinary films ever made. It’s also one of the deepest movies. For example, after watching The Elephant Man, it’s unlikely one would look upon...

Ranking: #45/111 Director: Robert Bresson (France) Genre: Historical Drama Robert Bresson used his minimalist style of filming to great effect in recreating the trail of Joan of Arc with a starkness not seen since Carl Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece of the silent cinema...

Ranking: #44/111 Director: Jean-Luc Godard (France) Genre: Social Drama Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live) is a major work of French New Wave cinema. The film is a masterpiece from the mercurial filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who reminds me of Stanley Kubrick in that no two...

Ranking: #43/111 Director: Lindsay Anderson (Britain) Genre: Film Noir Social Drama/Romance In one of the finest sports dramas of all time, and in perhaps the highpoint of the British New Wave in cinema, Lindsay Anderson has created a masterpiece of dark, social...

Ranking: #42/111 Director: Yousef Chahine (Egypt) Genre: Social & Psychological Drama Made in 1958, this must be the greatest African film of all time. It has an unparalleled emotional intensity, thematic richness and cinematic dynamism. Few could argue with the...

Ranking: #41/111 Director: Hiroshi Inagaki (Japan) Genre: Historical Samurai Drama Duel at Ganryu Island is the final film in Hiroshi Inagaki’s trilogy of Samurai dramas. One of the world’s greatest ever male actors, Toshiro Mifune, plays Musashi Miyamoto, a legendary...

Ranking: #40/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa Genre: Samurai Drama One of the most influential films in cinema history, Seven Samurai is a profound blend of the Western and the Japanese samurai, or sword-fighting, drama. An epic production, it’s another visual and...

Ranking: #39/111 Director: Alain Resnais Genre: Social Drama/Romance/Arthouse Hiroshima Mon Amour is one of the most abstract, poetic and innovative films ever made. As US filmmaker and theoretician, Lee Bobker said: “The film combines some of the most complicated...

Ranking: #38/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Genre: Period Drama/Crime Mystery This could be the most influential Japanese film of all. It was the first Japanese film to receive massive international recognition, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film,...

Ranking: #37/111 Director: Robert Bresson (France)             Genre: Allegorical Social Drama Au Hasard Balthazar is a revered film which may be described as an allegorical fable about the life and death of...

Ranking: #36/111 Director: Kon Ichikawa (Japan)    Genre: War Drama The Burmese Harp is the most touching, evocative and profound war drama I’ve seen. Towards the end of World War 2 and the Burma Campaign, a harp-playing Japanese soldier, Private...

Ranking: #35/111 Director: Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia) Genre: Science Fiction/Apocalypse Stalker is an artistic interpretation of a modern Russian science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic written by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The well-received novel,...

Ranking: #34/111 Director: Frederico Fellini (Italy) Genre: Road Movie/Social Drama Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) established a new film style of poetic realism in Italian cinema, built on the substratum of realism founded by the Italian school of Neo Realism. As in...

Ranking: #33/111 Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin (Russia) Genre: Social Drama Every now and then, there’s an unusual confluence of factors which are conducive to the creation of a work of art which later is recognised as a historical milestone. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother...

Ranking: #32/111 Director: G.W. Pabst (Austria) Genre: Disaster Drama At a mine near the border between France and Germany at Lorraine-Saar, an explosion and fire collapses part of a mine, trapping some French miners underground. After they hear about the accident,...

Ranking: #31/111 Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany) Genre: Period Drama/Romance Effi Briest is a masterpiece of New German Cinema. It is also a classical period drama of the highest order. Rainer Fassbinder wrote, directed and narrated the film, adapting...

Ranking: #30/111 Director: Sergei Eisenstein (Russia) Genre: Political Drama For a number of reasons, Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin is a milestone in cinematic history. Firstly, it contains what many cinephiles, myself included, regard as the...

Ranking: #29/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Genre: Crime and Detective Drama High and Low is one of the greatest crime dramas in cinema. It is also a masterpiece of the Film Noir genre. The director uses a muted grey tone, however, rather than sharply...

Ranking: #28/111 Director: Roman Polanski (Poland)            Genre: War Drama One of the most powerful and shattering war dramas of all time, The Pianist portrays the oppression of Polish Jews in Warsaw during...

Ranking: #27/111 Director: David Lean (Britain) Genre: Social Drama/Romance This is an epic social drama adapted from the novel of the same name by Charles Dickens. So many of the greatest films have been adapted from the best novels and plays. The difficult part is...

Ranking: #26/111 Director: John Ford (USA) Genre: Western The Searchers, beautifully filmed in VistaVision and Technicolor, is my choice for the greatest Western movie of all. It was a unique time in cinema history, when John Ford was still at the peak of his artistic...

Ranking: #25/111 Director: Satyajit Ray (India) Genre: Social Drama All great works of art carry a power which those viewing them can feel. That’s how you recognise a work of art – you sense a power emanating from it which you can’t always explain but which you can...

Ranking: #24/111 Director: Elia Kazan (USA) Genre: Film Noir Social Drama In 1951, Elia Kazan successfully adapted Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire from Broadway to the Big Screen, using some of the same actors for the movie...

Ranking: #23/111 Director: John Houston (USA) Genre: Biblical Drama The Bible has been humanity’s best-selling and most influential book for centuries, but directors and producers have struggled for decades to capture its epic dramatic content in plausible cinematic...

Ranking: #20/111 Director: David Lean (Britain) Genre: Social Drama The Sound Barrier, like The Rocking Horse Winner, is a seriously underrated film. David Lean’s aviation masterpiece could even be Britain’s finest ever film. For one thing, it’s a great human drama,...