Ranking: #19/111 Director: Stanley Kubrick (USA) Genre: War Drama This is an anti-war masterpiece which ruthlessly exposes the gulf between the grandiose power and opulence of military elites running World War 1 and the horrors of trench warfare faced by the soldiers....

Ranking: #18/111 Director: Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia)          Genre: War Drama Tarkovsky was an inventive, authentic and abstract film artist who thought very deeply about cinema’s unique artistic strengths and its...

Ranking: #17/111 Director: Aleksandr Sokurov (Russia)        Genre: Poetic Drama Mother and Son might be the most painterly film ever made. It appears on the Big Screen like a living Impressionist painting. The narrative is minimal...

Ranking: #16/111 Director: Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)        Genre: Allegorical Fantasy/Period Drama The Seventh Seal sets the benchmark for the genre of cinematic allegories. At the same time, it succeeds as a medieval period drama....

Ranking: #15/111 Director: Mikhail Kalatozov (Georgia/Soviet)   Genre: War Drama At the height of his powers, Georgian-born Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov made three timeless cinematic works of art in the space of only seven years: The Cranes Are Flying...

Ranking: #14/111 Director: John Ford (USA) Genre: Epic Social Drama French film and cultural critic André Bazin once pointed out that seven out of ten American films at that time were adaptations of novels. Many of these adaptations, he said, failed. The success of...

Ranking: #13/111 Director: G.W. Pabst (Austria)     Genre: War Drama In the history of cinema, there have been numerous powerful war dramas, such as Le Silence de la Mer (1949), The Burmese Harp (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), The Cranes are Flying...

Ranking: #11/111 Director: Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy) Genre: Social Drama/Mystery L’Avventura is a post-modernist cinematic masterpiece, as well as one of the most unusual movies ever made. I struggled to categorise its genre, eventually coming up with the...

Ranking: #10/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Genre: Film Noir Crime Drama Drunken Angel is an intense, yet charming, story of a volatile friendship that develops between two “strays” of society, Dr Sanada, an alcoholic, down-and-out medical doctor with a...

Ranking: #9/111 Director:  Zhang Yimou (China)  Genre: Epic Period Drama When French film theoretician and critic, André Bazin, deliberated about the acute competition faced by cinema in the 1950s from television, he concluded in his essay “Will CinemaScope...

Ranking: #8/111 Director: Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy) Genre: Social Drama In my view, this is Michelangelo Antonioni’s finest film. As with all his work, what’s most impressive is the way in which his distinctive techniques of filming reinforce the themes of an...

Ranking: #7/111 Director: Sergei Eisenstein (Russia)  Genre: Epic Historical Drama Ivan Grozniy (Ivan the Terrible or Ivan the Formidable) is a two-part historical epic written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is the biopic of Ivan IV Vasilyevich...

Ranking: #5/111 Director: Satyajit Ray (India) Genre: Social Drama Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) is, for me, the most compelling and moving depiction of poverty I’ve seen on the Big Screen. The fact that this was Satyajit Ray’s first ever film, probably...

Ranking: #4/111 Director: Carl Dreyer (Denmark) Genre: Historical Drama The Passion of Joan of Arc broke new ground in cinema by creating a purely psychological film, virtually bereft of action. Dreyer achieved this by developing a new lexicon of camera shots in which...

Ranking: #3/111 Director: Wim Wenders Genre: Poetic Fantasy This film by Wim Wenders, who was part of the New German Cinema, exemplifies a sublime cinematic beauty and level of artistic originality. Wings of Desire is a stunning work of film art which can stand...

Ranking: 2#111 Director: Fritz Lang (Germany) Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy Given André Bazin’s understanding that the essence of cinema is “spectacle”, it’s probably not so surprising that the two greatest films in this all-time list of works of cinematic genius are...

Ranking: #22/111 Director: Sidney Lumet     Genre: Courtroom Drama Sometimes, outstanding cinematography and a gritty screenplay lie behind the success of a great movie, as with John Ford’s The Searchers. Other movies build up a compelling atmosphere and tone, with...

   Ranking: #21/ 111 Director: Jean-Pierre Melville (France)   Genre: War Drama Le Silence de la Mer is a brilliant debut feature film by Jean-Pierre Melville, made shortly after he was demobilised from the French Resistance at the end of World War 2. The film...

                                 Ranking: #6/111 Director: Orson Welles (USA)        Genre: Social Drama Citizen Kane has been described by the Criterion Collection as “the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history.” Many cinephiles and critics consider it the...

Ranking: #1/ 111 Director: Stanley Kubrick (USA)    Genre: Science Fiction Epic Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed almost entirely on studio sets, gets my vote for the greatest film made (so far), due to the exquisite visual and narrative...

Ranking: #12/111 Director: Mikhail Kalatozov (Georgia/Soviet)       Genre: Adventure Drama In Letter Never Sent, Kalatozov returns to some of the themes explored in his 1930 ethnographic documentary film, Salt for Svanetia. The setting...