Another A-List

In 2002 the National Society of Film Critics got together and wrote a book about the 100 most essential films of all time. It was an interesting read that has sparked many lively debate on my end of the world. Knowing full well that there are more than 100 essential films I was contemplating adding an additional 100 to their list, but I need votes. So I ask you to select 100 additional films/film series that you believe to be essential. Remember these are going more for essential status than personal favorites, and keep the list to 100. Above else don't select any films from their list, which I will include in this post so no one has any excuse. Try and stick with Fiction films, and even though they didn't include animated films, I see no reason why we can't. So here is their list, and once your blood is boiled hot enough, try your own.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
42nd Street (1933)
The 400 Blows (1959)
All About Eve (1950)
Annie Hall (1977)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
L'Atalante (1934)
The Bank Dick (1940)
The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
The Birth Of A Nation (1915)
Blow-Up (1966)
Bonnie And Clyde (1967)
Breathless (1960)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Casablanca (1942)
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978)
Children of Paradise (1945)
Chinatown (1974)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Closely Watched Trains (1967)
Close-up (1990)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
The Decalogue (1988)
Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
Diner (1982)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
La Dolce Vita (1959)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Duck Soup (1933)
Easy Rider (1969)
Enter the Dragon (1973)
The Entertainer (1960)
The Exorcist (1973)
Faces (1968)
Fargo (1996)
Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The General (1927)
The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974)
Gone With The Wind (1939)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
The Graduate (1967)
Greed (1924)
Happy Together (1997)
High Noon (1952)
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Jailhouse Rock (1957)
Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Red Sorghum (1987)
Killer of Sheep (1977)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Landscape in the Mist (1988)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
M (1931)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)
Metropolis (1927)
Modern Times (1936)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Nashville (1975)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Nosferatu (1922)
Los Olvidados (1950)
On The Waterfront (1954)
Open City (1945)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Pandora's Box (1928)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Pather Panchali (1956), Aparajito (1958), The World of Apu (1960)
The Piano (1993)
Psycho (1960)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Raging Bull (1980)
Rashomon (1950)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
The Rules of the Game (1939)
Schindler's List (1993)
The Searchers (1956)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Singin' In The Rain (1952)
Star Wars (1977)
La Strada (1955) and Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Sunrise (1927)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Top Hat (1935)
Touch Of Evil (1958)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Ugetsu Monogatori (1953)
Unforgiven (1992)
Les Vampires (1915)
Vertigo (1958)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Winchester '73 (1953)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Written on the Wind (1956)

I figure I might as well post my own list. There are some directors that I want represented, but haven't decided exactly what film to pick, so I'll see what the masses say.

Intolerance (Griffith)
8 ½ (Fellini)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
The Grand Illusion (Renoir)
The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
Napoleon (Gance)
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimmer)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone)

A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
Persona (Bergman)
Jules and Jim (Truffaut)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
Goodfellas (Scorsese)
City Lights (Chaplin)
The Gold Rush (Chaplin)
White Heat (Walsh)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Wings of Desire (Wenders)
La Ronde/Lola Montes (Ophuls)
A Matter of Life and Death/The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 (Lassetter)
MASH/McCabe and Mrs. Miller/Short Cuts (Altman)
All About My Mother/Talk to Her (Almodovar)
To Live (Yimou)
Spirited Away/Princess Mononoke (Myazaki)

In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
Pierrot le Fou/Weekend (Godard)
Au Hasard, Balthazar (Bresson)
L’Avventura (Antonioni)
The Leopard (Visconti)
Belle du Jour (Bunuel)
Three Colors Trilogy (Kieslowski)
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich)
Sullivan’s Travels/The Lady Eve (Sturges)
The Red and the White (Jancso)

Man of Marble (Wajda)
Yi-Yi (Yang)
Underground/Time of the Gypsies/When Father Was Away on Business (Kustirica)
Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci)
Variety (Dupont)
Badlands/Days of Heaven/Thin Red Line (Mallick)
Picnic at Hanging Rock/The Last Wave (Weir)
Alien/Aliens (Scott/Cameron)
The Killer/Hard Boiled (Woo)
Boyz in the Hood (Singleton)

Chungking Express (Kar-Wi)
The Color of Pomegranates (Paradjanov)
The Shop on Main Street (Kadar/Klos)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
Manhattan (Allen)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam/Jones)
Eraserhead/Blue Velvet/Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
Terminator/Terminator 2 (Cameron)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy)
My Night at Maude’s (Rohmer)

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette)
Malcolm X (Lee)
Ivan the Terrible 1 and 2 (Eisenstein)
Earth (Doveshenko)
Shivers (Cronenberg)
Safety Last/The Freshman/For Heaven’s Sake/The Kid Brother (Lloyd-starring)
Sherlock Jr./Steamboat Bill Jr./The Navigator/Our Hospitality (Keaton)
A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavettes)
Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger)
North by Northwest/Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols)
Medium Cool (Wexler)
A Hard Day’s Night/Help (Lester)
Dog Star Man (Brakhage)
Shock Corridor/Pickup on South Street (Fuller)
Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara)
Platoon (Stone)
Brief Encounter/Great Expectations/Oliver Twist (Lean)
This Sporting Life/Tom Jones/Look Back in Anger (Anderson/Richardson)
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday/Mon Oncle/Play Time (Tati)

Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
Early Summer/Late Spring (Ozu)
Ikiru (Kurosawa)
The Cranes Are Flying
The Third Man (Reed)
Beauty and the Beast/Orpheus (Cocteau)
The Grapes of Wrath/Stagecoach (Ford)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise)
Marius/Fanny/Cesar (Korda/Allegret/Pagnol)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)

The Blue Angel (Sternberg)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone)
Scarface/His Girl Friday/The Big Sleep/To Have and Have Not/Rio Bravo (Hawks)
The Big Parade/The Crowd (Vidor)
Ben-Hur (Wyler)
Fantasia (various)
The Phantom of the Opera/The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Chaney)
King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack)
East of Eden (Kazan)
The Burmese Harp (Ichikawa)

I know I didn't follow my own rules, but hey, its my post. With any luck you'll just agree with me completely, and we can get on with this. Some of these are far from personal favorites, but I do recognize their status as masterpieces. Seeing as how other topics seem to get immediate responses, lets try this one.

Funny you mention this book- I just read it! It's a great book and a great list.

Ebert's writings on Battleship Potemkin are awesome- he saw it with live musical accompaniment with the band Concrete in Chicago. The critic choices for the writings are perfect. This book is at the Van Public Library but you cannot take it out- it's a reference book only. No matter- I jotted down a lot of notes from it.

I'll post more comments later here as I'm pressed for time.

Originally posted by wpqx
So I ask you to select 100 additional films/film series that you believe to be essential. Remember these are going more for essential status than personal favorites

Trying to separate what's essential from one's personal biases/values/esthetics is a losing proposition. All canons are subjective anyway. I could add some titles to the 240 posted but maybe you'd call them "personal". A minor point: some films like Close-Up from the Crits list includes both fiction and non-fiction elements. Fritz Lang called M a documentary. How did the crits make these distinctions? Why exclude "docs"?

The main reason is simplicity. Regardless of what Fritz Lang said, M is a fiction film. Now Man with a Movie Camera might not be fiction, but it isn't exactly a documentary. I would suggest that films like Nanook of the North and Man of Aran (both from Flaherty) could technically count because they each contain "staged" actualities. The reason I excluded them was length. It was more than easy to fill up 100+ films for part 2, and since there were no real documentaries (i.e. Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity, Woodstock) on their list, I figured they could be excluded.
As for personal choices, well that is inescapable. I do think All Quiet on the Western Front is an essential, but it also happens to be my third favorite film of all time, so needless to say I am letting my own judgement add weight to it. On the other hand Ordinary People, a film in my top ten I didn't pick, because I recognize the fact that most people would sooner die than consider this essential filmmaking.
As for the original request it is for a list. Your list may have ninety of the films I selected, but believe me there are more essentials than what I have written. I have a list of about another hundred films beside these worth picking. Now for my own personal list I included more than one film from a movement or filmmaker depending on how the voting turns out. I believe Godard must be represented a second time, but am still up in the air to pick Pierrot le Fou or Weekend (my personal favorite). This is where other votes would play out. I would also argue that I don't find It's a Wonderful Life to be that fantastic. There are about six other Capra films I would prefer to it (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take it With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and maybe even State of the Union), but it is still the most "essential". Anyways submit your list, then feel free to bitch, I need votes on this so help a brother out.

I've posted a list of 209 "Great Films I Love" but I've never ranked them, except to pick 10 for my website profile. I hope I get it: A ranked list of 100 NOT including any from the Critics Society list and NO docs. This was very hard for me but I'll play by your rules. Just don't take the rankings too seriously.

Sansho The Bailiff
The Spirit of the Beehive
Cria
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Ikiru
Bicycle Thieves
Au Hasard Balthazar!
Color of Pomegranates
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Monsieur Verdoux

Day of Wrath
Last Year at Marienbad
8 and 1/2
Alexander Nevsky
Floating Weeds
Life of Oharu
Ordet
Andrei Rublev
Earth
Ivan the Terrible

The Third Man
Grand Illusion
Gertrude
Scarlett Empress
The Puppetmaster
The Conformist
Boudu Saved from Drowning
Ossessione
The Earrings of Madame de...
Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors

Pickpocket
L'Atalante
Intolerance
Rear Window
Fritz Lang's Indian Epic
La Terra Trema
Eraserhead
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Foolish Wives
Actress

Dr. Strangelove
The River (Renoir)
City Lights
The Wind Will Carry Us
The River (Ming Liang)
Grave of the Fireflies
Au Revoir Les Enfants
A Brighter Summer Day
Eclipse
Distant Voices, Still Lives

A Man Escaped
Playtime
The Blue Angel
La Caza (The Hunt)
The Magnificent Ambersons
L' Innocente
Un Chien Andalou
Orphans of the Storm
Mulholland Dr.
Shadows

Toto les Heros
The Leopard
Three Colors
Apocalypse Now
Peeping Tom
In The Mood For Love
The Boys of St. Vincent
M. Hire
El Verdugo
Rio Bravo

Contempt
The Last Laugh
Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Underground
Last Tango In Paris
The Manchurian Candidate
The Best Years of our Lives
Last Temptation of Christ
Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!
Ashes of Time

Flowers of Shanghai
The Cranes are Flying
The Time to Live and the Time to Die
Shock Corridor
Christmas in July
Alas de Mariposa (Butterfly Wings)
Pinocchio
La Historia Oficial
Barry Lyndon
Kundun

The Taste of Cherry
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Arsenal
Salt of the Earth
Dead Man
Before The Rain
Exotica
Deep Crimson
El Compadre Mendoza
Viridiana

Sorry if I made it more difficult than it had to be. The list does not need to be ranked. This works because the NSFC listed their films in alphabetical order. As for the 100 that they didn't have, that is on the money. Interesting list by the way, a few sure shots, and a couple of surprises. Just to let you know, Nights of Cabiria made their list, grouped with La Strada. Close enough, and feel free to substitute.

Write about the surprises if so inclined. I will take advantage of the opportunity to add one title in the place of Cabiria. The only reason I hesitated to include Distant Voices/Still Lives is because I've only seen it once, about 15 years ago. It's an autobiographical musical of sorts directed by Terence Davies from Liverpool, England. From the Blitz to about the mid 50s, boyhood memories emphasizing those dealing with his father's death and brother's wedding, are stylized and set to period music, mostly sung by the women in a patriarchal working-class family. Highly evocative and emotional, without a trace of melodrama. Melancholic yet full of hope. Operatic and mundane at the same time. I keep waiting for the dvd that never comes. The vhs copies available are pricy and worn-out, ex-rentals. A restoration of this Cannes winner to the marketplace is overdue.