All-Time 100 Best Movies

Time Magazine's respected movie critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, offered their picks in mid-2005 for the All-Time 100 Best Movies. Their unranked list comprised the 100 most influential movies of the past 82 years (since 1923, Time's first year of publication). The films spanned comedy, horror, drama, romance, action and more.

Facts About the List: Almost half of the films were made outside the United States. Britain was represented by the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Sir David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Of the 33 chosen films before 1950, all but six were from Hollywood during its "Golden Age." Of those 27 American films, nearly half (13), were directed by men born abroad: three in England (Chaplin, Hitchcock and James Whale), three in Germany (F.W. Murnau, Wyler and Lubitsch), three in Austria (Sternberg, Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer - all native Viennese), one each in Hungary (Michael Curtiz), France (Jacques Tourneur) and one in Sicily (Capra). Of the 100 films, all were directed by men - except for one, Germany's Leni Riefenstahl. And there were 11 non-Caucasian directors - all Asian: Japanese, Chinese or Indian.

Also, the list contained more entries—two—by each of five different directors (Lubitsch, Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Leone) with Martin Scorsese scoring three entries. Robert DeNiro, who starred in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, had five of his films on the list, more than any other actor.

Omissions: Some of the more obvious choices (of American English-language films) were missing from Time's list, however, as noted by many readers, such as: Vertigo (1958), Touch of Evil (1958), Paths of Glory (1957), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Third Man (1949), Duck Soup (1933), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Gone With the Wind (1939), Modern Times (1936), The General (1927), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Graduate (1967), From Here to Eternity (1953), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Fantasia (1940), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), North By Northwest (1959), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Annie Hall (1977), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Do the Right Thing (1989), and more.

Note: The films that are marked with a yellow star are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films".


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