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90 - TRAINSPOTTING (Danny Boyle, 1996)
You need both hands to count the number of careers this heroin-laced black comedy helped to launch. On screen, there’s Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson, and off it the author Irvine Welsh, the director Danny Boyle, and the photographer Lorenzo Agius, whose publicity shots for the film still adorn a million student bedsits. The film was shot in just eight weeks. For its first hour, Boyle’s frenetic editing style produces a rush that perfectly matches his subject matter. Nigel Kendall
89 - TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958)
Touch of Evil may not have the dazzling virtuosity of Welles’s debut, Citizen Kane. But it has far uglier, darker and truer things to say. The agile opening tracking shot, which follows a car across the US-Mexican border, is legendary. Atmosphere and words conspire as Charlton Heston’s self-righteous Mexican narcotics agent goes toe-to-toe with Welles’s monumentally sleazy detective, Hank Quinlan, over the motives behind a fatal bombing. The moral corruption is as ripe as Welles’s enormous gut. His relationship with Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy brothel keeper is an unconsummated mystery. James Christopher
88 - WILD STRAWBERRIES (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
This beautiful film gives the lie to Bergman’s reputation as difficult to watch. An ageing professor, as dusty as the tomes on his study wall, makes the trip across Sweden to collect a prestigious award, and memories of his youthful, playful self flood back. An elegy to lost youth and the regretted compromises of adult life, the film is notable for its spectacular camera work, and for the performance of Swedish film pioneer Victor Sjöström in the lead role. Sjöström, who directed Lillian Gish in the silent classic The Wind (1928), died three years after Wild Strawberries was released. This was his last acting role. Nigel Kendall
87 - THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
A stunning movie that introduced the greatest monster of them all. Brian Cox had already played Hannibal “Lecktor” in Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, but it was Anthony Hopkins who turned the erudite, Chianti-loving cannibal into an unforgettable icon. The brilliance of the film is that it excels on every level: as a nerve-shredding whodunnit, horror film, chase movie, and vertiginous psycho-drama. The inspired idea of using a psychopath to catch a serial killer reinvigorated a genre that had been flat-lining since Dirty Harry. The mental chess between Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s perfectly still, perfectly precise Lecter will forever send shivers down the spine. James Christopher
86 - NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
As the disturbing flipside to the patrician Draculas of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, the vermin-like bloodsucker in Murnau’s silent masterpiece is a creature not from Hollywood, but from the id itself. The film, which brazenly pilfers Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the German production company was later sued into bankruptcy by Stoker’s widow), follows the misfortunes of real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) who is summoned to the Carpathian hideout of bald-headed, crooked-framed, kohl-eyed, bat-eared, rat-toothed Count Orlock (Max Schreck). Much neck-biting ensues, Orlock moves to Hutter’s home town, and the film produces some seminal horror images, including Orlock’s final agonising fade in the morning light. Kevin Maher
85 - DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
A real-life botched Brooklyn bank robbery is the subject of this fascinating portrait of a charismatic criminal caught in the glare of the media spotlight. Al Pacino gives the wildcard performance of his career (he was beaten by Jack Nicholson’s Cuckoo’s Nest turn at that year’s Oscars) as Sonny, the skittish bisexual Vietnam veteran who’s robbing the bank to fund his gay lover’s sex-change operation. His incendiary relationship with the gathering crowds, the police and the rapacious news media quickly becomes the real focus of the film. Director Lumet’s depiction of the flimsy and treacherous nature of instant celebrity seems eerily prescient. Kevin Maher
84 - FESTEN (Thomas Vinterberg, 1999)
This incredibly savage comedy about a Danish family reunion was a genuine breath of fresh air. It is the first, and finest, of the Dogme films whose collective ambition was to rescue cinema’s credibility as an art form by stripping it to the bone. Vinterberg duly ditched every prop except his camera, and the result has influenced a generation of guerrilla film-makers. The splintered story about grown-up siblings who fail to bury their differences at their father’s 60th birthday party has a documentary intensity that is cleverly aggravated by an almost alarming lack of editorial control. The oldest son (Ulrich Thomsen) is manhandled out of the dining room before the main course for toasting his father’s sexual abuse of himself and his twin sister. The way the guests plough politely on is horribly real. An extraordinary piece of story-telling: chaotic, spontaneous, and refreshingly unpredictable. James Christopher
83 - SPARTACUS (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
The making of Kubrick’s epic tale of slave rebellion under Roman rule would make an epic in itself. Kubrick was summoned by the film’s star and producer Kirk Douglas, who was at daggers drawn with the original director, Anthony Mann. Douglas also insisted that the script be written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and the finished film therefore emphasises the power of mass uprising against a tyrannical state. Kubrick found the experience so draining that he returned to the UK, never to work in Hollywood again. The original director Mann’s work is uncredited, as it had been on the earlier epic Quo Vadis. The veteran western director finally got back into the epic saddle with El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Nigel Kendall
82 - CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
Wong Kar Wai’s parallel stories of lovelorn Hong Kong cops is an impressionistic feast of vivid neon and jewel-like colour. With its trademark slow motion and artful blurring, this was one of the films to launch the career of the maverick cinematographer Christopher Doyle. The two stories are slight, as disposable as the fast food and pop culture that form the movie’s backdrop. But there’s something seductive about the half-realised love affairs. Story one has a femme fatale and a lost soul looking for meaning in the sell-by dates of cans of pineapple; story two stars Faye Wong as a fast-food waitress obsessed with a cop in a half-hearted relationship with an air hostess. Wendy Ide
81 - NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Hitchcock’s classic contains many elements familiar to viewers of his films, notably the theme of mistaken identity, the “MacGuffin” (a term coined by Hitchcock to denote an object that the cast is chasing, in this case a microfilm), a beautiful blonde, and a monumental climax, here on Mount Rushmore. But the film also leavens its thriller components with humour. The makers of the Bond films, three years later, would use this formula, MacGuffin and all, to create the most successful franchise in cinema history. Serious critics, notably the French, point out that every single character in the film is playing a part and that even Cary Grant’s hero, the executive mistaken for a government agent, works in advertising: his profession is deception. The crop-dusting chase scene is rightly fêted. Nigel Kendall
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I agree that Wild Strawberries should be placed in the top five. However, my hopes were not high, and I am a little surprised that it made it into the list at all! It appears there are not many who compile these lists who are willing to try a Bergman film, even if it is achingly beautiful.
Fraser Dalziel, Glasgow, Scotland
C'mon! Wild Strawberries - Top 5 at least. A masterpiece.
Kev, Q8 City, Kuwait
I am disappointed that Wild Strawberries was ranked so low. And maybe Touch of Evil and Nosferatu should be higher. North by Northwest and The Silence of the Lambs are good and placed appropriately.
Sam Bailey, Florida,
"Wild Strawberries" should be in the top 25 at the VERY least. Is this a "75 best american films" list, with a handful of foreign masterpieces thrown into mockingly low slots to get 100? Where's Tarkovsky? every film of his, especially "Andrei Rublyev", creams at least 80 of the titles listed.
Sam W., Saint Paul, Minnesota
Silence of the Lambs? I laughed long and loud it wasn't scary just sad trash, it had all the psychological edginess of an Oxo cube.
steven rainbow, southend on sea essex, ENGLAND
Where's 'Paths Of Glory'?
Art, Vero Beach, Florida
Yeah. What? No Lawrence of Arabia? Oh your probably right. Waste of film that was.Undeserving of your high standards.
R. Adams, Vancouver, Canada
Lawrence of Arabia. You guys hear of that one? Or Citizen Kane? Wow....
David, Minneapolis, MN, USA
So glad that Dog Day Afternoon made the list. So many of these definitive film lists neglect it but I think it's not only Al Pacino's finest performance but one of the best films I've ever seen.
Hannah, Yateley,
Touch of Evil. Great movie. Would like to have seen The Third Man included.
chas, dfw, usa
So glad to see that Dog Day Afternoon is on the list. These definitive film lists always seem to neglect it but I think it's not only Al Pacino's best performance but one of the best films I've ever seen.
Hannah, Yateley,
silence of the lambs - hopkins is not lecktor, his performance was poor (or the direction he got was poor), at least with brian cox I believed he would have ate my liver.
phil, dalton, cumbria