Top 100 Films

As I was invited by the fine folks at A Band Apart blog to contribute in their colossal task of assembling yearly Top 100 of the greatest films of all-time. I decided to join, first because I love to help fellow cinephiles and second, because I love to make lists of films.


I already did a Top 100 of my favourite films, but this task is a never-ending work. I imposed myself a rule that was supposed to help me but instead made the choices even harder and painful. Let’s call it the “One film per director rule”. The 75 first choices were pretty obvious since they are all directors/films I love and would watch anytime. But the last 25 were difficult, let’s say nearly impossible to determine in which order and who should be in and who should be left out?

However, it was a great opportunity to sit back and make a retrospective of the movies that let a mark into this cinephile’s mind. Sometimes you will finish a film and immediately say that it is the greatest film of all time! But five years later your opinion can change positively or negatively. Films like Renoir’s La règle du jeu just seem to be better and better with time. While Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, in my opinion, will seem lesser than the first impression I had.

Enough of this already here’s the list:



Top 100 films – Michaël Parent

“One film per director rule”



1. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

2. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1963)

3. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

4. Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

5. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

6. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

7. La règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

8. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

9. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

10. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

11. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

12. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

13. There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007)

14. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1963)

15. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

16. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

17. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

18. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

19. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

20. Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1995)

21. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

22. Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

23. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

24. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

25. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1948)

26. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean. 1962)

27. Ma nuit chez Maud (Eric Rohmer, 1969)

28. Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)

29. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

30. The General (Buster Keaton, 1927)

31. Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

32. Dog Day Afternoon (Sydney Lumet, 1975)

33. Lola Montes (Max Ophüls, 1955)

34. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

35. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

36. Solaris (Andreï Tarkovsky, 1972)

37. Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1961)

38. The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

39. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

40. Hatari! (Howard Hawks, 1962)

41. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

42. The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1952)

43. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

44. Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972)

45. Singin’ In the Rain (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, 1954)

46. Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot. 1955)

47. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

48. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)

49. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

50. The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968)

51. La belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

52. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

53. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

54. Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1993)

55. All The President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1975)

56. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

57. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

58. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

59. It’s A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

60. Ordet (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955)

61. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

62. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

63. Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980)

64. Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

65. Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1972)

66. Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1982)

67. The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

68. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

69. M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)

70. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

71. The Killer (John Woo, 1988)

72. Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

73. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

74. Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

75. The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1972)

76. Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

77. Anatomy of A Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

78. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2004)

79. The Man Who Would be King (John Huston, 1975)

80. Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

81. Heat (Michael Mann, 1994)

82. The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

83. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

84. Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965)

85. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1976)

86. Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

87. Horror of Dracula (Terrence Fisher, 1958)

88. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

89. Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

90. The Naked Jungle (Byron Haskins, 1954)

91. The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976)

92. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

93. An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1955)

94. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)

95. A Time To Love and A Time To Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

96. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

97. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1998)

98. The Birth of A Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)

99. The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)

100. The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919)



Films that were sadly left out:

Le voyage dans la Lune (George Méliès, 1902)

Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)

The Man With the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

The Scarlett Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)

Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

Ivan the Terrible I & II (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1944 & 1945)

The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)

Au hazard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966)

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1968)

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle, 1974)

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1978)

Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)

Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)

Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987)

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

The Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000)

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2002)

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)