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What do you consider to be the best films ever made?

Taking into consideration some of the following:

1. Great production and direction
2. Great cinematic execution, good photography, sets, costumes, etc.
3. Good and meaningful plot
4. Meaningful thematic development
5. Great acting
6. The stories ability to draw the viewer in
7. The main characters transformation during the process (which is fundamental, I think)
8. The timeless and universally enduring quality of the film
9. Whatever else you might consider

What then do you think are some of the best movies ever made?

Using the above criteria, my top two choices would be To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck, and Apocalypse Now Redux with Martin Sheen.

Personally, on these kinds of lists that you see floating around, Citizen Kane is always at the top. Yet I fail to see how that could be. I hated Citizen Kane, and I can't help but feel that its classification as The Best Film Ever Made is one of those self-perpetuating lies or mistakes that just keeps being retold and retold because someone sees that list, thinks there must be something in it, and then repeats what they read.

What do you think?

Tags: Cinema, Film, Movies

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Craigart14 on September 12, 2011 at 9:38am

We already know "best" lists are a bit silly, just like every other label we slap on works of art. Discussing film with other buffs is still fun. Off the top of my head, some of my favs--which I also think are very good films--are Fellini's Roma (though Amarcord, Fanny and Alexander, The White Sheik, and La Strada also first rate); The Man Who Would Be King, based on a Kipling story; Cinema Paradiso; Otakar Vavra's Witches' Hammer; Monty Python and the Holy Grail, still funny after all these years; Woody Allen's Love and Death or Interiors; Andrei Rublev; Shoah;Apocalypse Now Redux;the 1970's BBC production of Hamlet, starring Sir Derek Jacobi.