Name: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Job title: film critic, teacher
Country: USA
Your votes
- Greed
Year: 1924
Director: Erich von Stroheim - M
Year: 1931
Director: Fritz Lang - Spring in a Small Town
Year: 1948
Director: Fei Mu
Comment: The most neglected great film on my list, at least in the Western world. - Ordet
Year: 1955
Director: Carl Dreyer - A Man Escaped
Year: 1956
Director: Robert Bresson - Ivan the Terrible, Part II
Year: 1958
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Comment: Like Welles’ equally worthy Touch of Evil, a monument to hyperbolic excess.
- PlayTime
Year: 1967
Director: Jacques Tati - Vagabond
Year:1985
Director: Agnès Varda
Comment: Like Resnais’ Providence and Françoise Romand’s Mix-up, a masterpiece of magisterial juxtapositions.
- Satantango
Year: 1994
Director(s): Bela Tarr - A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Year: 2000
Director: Steven Spielberg
Comment: Not only Spielberg’s best picture but also Kubrick’s; a collaboration between a dead director and a friend who survived him seems appropriate for a meditation on the differences between human and nonhuman, living and dead that comprises a searing allegory about cinema itself.
Further remarks: I’ve omitted Chaplin (City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux) Hitchcock (Rear Window, North by Northwest), and Welles (Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight) as “goes without saying”. But it’s also painful to exclude, among others, Akerman, Antonioni, Bergman, Brakhage, Buñuel, Burnett, Cassavetes, Cocteau, Costa, Denis, Dovzhenko, Feuillade, Ford, Godard, Hawks, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Keaton, Kiarostami, Mizoguchi, Muratova, Murnau, Manoel de Oliveira, Max Ophüls, Ozu, Portabella, Renoir, Resnais, Rivette, Rossellini, Sembène, Snow, Preston Sturges, Tarkovsky, Tashlin, Jacques Tourneur, Tsai Ming-liang, Visconti, Wiseman, Wong Kar-wai, and Edward Yang.