We're on a new page. But what is "American Popular List" about these? Some were popular everywhere. Some you could hardly call popular. Many are not American, so I assume you mean popular in America, but if so, not with the general audience, which didn't see The Seven Samural or Amarcord, or many others here. Come on, tabuno, how did you make up this list, and what is it supposed to show?

Let's go back to Oscar's list.

What is the point of lists anyway? Trophy lists? Notches in your cineaste’s belt? No, I know, expressions of love. Wearing your love on your sleeve, so to speak. BUt what is the value of publishing such a list? They can be tips to someone on what may be worth looking up, but they can also alienate by reminding us how many of our favorite movies don’t mean much to somebody else. Oscar’s list contains many wonderful items, beautiful classics. But why so few listed for some years I can’t imagine, some great years. I especially find it odd that he has so few movies that he loves going back to again and again from the most recent years. And he seems to slight the French New Wave, and American movies generally. Here is a rough list of some of the main ones I could come up with for each year that he did not list but I’d have to, among others. When I say “I’d have to,” I mean I just can’t imagine omitting these, and some of them are just so great that they’d be on my top-twenty list. And this just a quick list, and there are others I’ve forgotten to mention. But what is the point, exactly? I still don’t get it.

What was the point of your list, Oscar? What prompted you to make up the list, and what prompted you to post it here? I'm not challenging you; I'm just really curious about the thoughts and motives that lie behind list-making. I've only posted these movies listed below in self defense, so to speak, to save some pieces of my world that were seemingly being swept under the carpet by these other lists. Kinda makes you realize why Rosenbaum made a list of his thousand favorites.


1949 King Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
1951 The Man in the White Suit (Mackendrick)
1953 The Wages of Fear (Clément)
1960 Tirez sur la pianiste (Truffaut)
1962 To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan)
-----The Elclipse (Antonioni)
1964 La Jetée (Marker)
1965 Alphaville (Godard)
-----Masculine Feminine (Godard)
1966 Sword of Doom (Kurosawa)
-----Blowup (Antonioni)
1967 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn)
-----Playtime (Tati)
-----Privilege (Watkins)
-----La prise de pouvoir de Louis XIV (Rossellini)
1969 The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
-----Ma Nuit chez Maud (Rohmer)
1970 Performance (Roeg)
-----The Spider’s Strategm (Bertolucci)
1971 THX-1138 (Lucas)
-----Tati’s Trafic
-----Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
1972 Solaris
1973 Last Tango in Paris should be 1972
-----Badlands (Malick)
-----The Long Goodbye (Altman)
1964 Kwaidan (Kobayashi)
-----The Conversation (Coppola)
1975 A Boy and His Dog (Jones)
1980 Atlantic City (Malle)
-----The Shining (Kubrick)
-----Melvin and Howard (Demme)
1981 Time Bandits
---Cutter’s Way (Passer)
1982 Blade Runner (Scott)
-----Diner (Levinson)
1984 Choose Me (Rudolph)
1984 Stranger Than Paradise (Jarmusch)
1986 Down by Law (Jarmusch)
-----Something Wild (Demme)
1987 Tin Men (Levinson)
1988 Hairspray (Waters)
-----Married to the Mob (Demme)
1989 Enemies, a Love Story (Mazursky)
-----Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant)
1990 Days of Being Wild (Wong)
1991 My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant)
1992 Naked Lunch (Cronenberg)
1993 My Favorite Season {Téchiné)
1994 Wild Reeds (Téchiné)
-----Ashes of Time (Wong)
-----Red (Kieslowski)
1995 Before Sunrise (Linklater)
1996 Les Voleurs (Téchiné)
1998 West Beirut (Ziyad Duweyri)
-----The Thin Red Line (Malick)
1999 Magnolia (Anderson)
2000 Yi Yi (Yang)
-----Hamlet (Michael Almareyda)
2001 A.I. (Spielberg)
-----Waking Life (Linklater)
-----What Time Is It There? (Tsai)
2002 Spider (Cronenberg)
-----Y tu mama tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)
-----Sweet Sixteen (Loach)
-----The Believer (Bean)
-----Punch Drunk Love (Anderson)
-----Bowling for Columbine (Moore)

2003 Elephant (Van Sant)
-----Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Tarantino)
-----City of God (Lund, Meirelles)