Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Like Magilla and DWS, I'm in the midst of updating my list of Top 250 films and will have it completed in early January. I'm going this for a project with a number of friends of mine and we had a lot of back-and-forth as to semantics: "Best Films?" "Favorite Movies?" "Greatest Pictures Ever?" We decided to leave it up to each individual how he wants to frame the rubric of his own list. In general, most people seem to be doing "The Films That Mean The Most To Me."

For me, like bizarre, "Best" = "Favorite." As for movies I love while realizing they're not, ummm, truly top drawer (such as The Bad Seed), I do an addendum containing Guilty Peasures.

A better title might be "Favorite Films" or "Films I'd Recommend".

That'll be tough for me. The movies that I like aren't all necessarily movies one would call the 'best'. So if there's a movie that doesn't appeal to me, I probably won't watch it. Even if it is technically superior.

Dien wrote:Is this "best" films or "favorite" films?

I'm of the mind that they should be one and the same, but let's go with 'best'.

We can make a new one.

There was a 250 Best Films of All Time thread, but I don't know what happened to it.

Is this "best" films or "favorite" films?

I didn't see a thread for this. So...

I rank according to a letter grade scale (A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D, F) and I dispense A+s rarely. Any film I give an A+ qualifies as a masterpiece and one of the best I've seen. Currently on this list are 52 films:

1. "L'avventura" (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)
2. "Persona" (1966, Ingmar Bergman)
3. "Céline and Julie Go Boating" (1974, Jacques Rivette)
4. "Maboroshi no hikari" (1995, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
5. "The Asthenic Syndrome" (1989, Kira Muratova)
6. "Au hasard Balthazar" (1966, Robert Bresson)
7. "Nights of Cabiria" (1957, Federico Fellini)
8. "Naked" (1993, Mike Leigh)
9. "Nashville" (1975, Robert Altman)
10. "El sol del membrillo" (1992, Víctor Erice)

11. "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
12. "L'Atalante" (1934, Jean Vigo)
13. "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
14. "A Man Escaped" (1956, Robert Bresson)
15. "Apocalypse Now" (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
16. "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962, Yasujirō Ozu)
17. "Caché" (2005, Michael Haneke)
18. "Diary of a Country Priest" (1951, Robert Bresson)
19. "Mulholland Dr." (2001, David Lynch)
20. "Children of Paradise" (1945, Marcel Carné)

21. "Peppermint Candy" (1999, Lee Chang-dong)
22. "Death by Hanging" (1968, Nagisa Ōshima)
23. "Taxi Driver" (1976, Martin Scorsese)
24. "Blue Velvet" (1986, David Lynch)
25. "The Spirit of the Beehive" (1973, Víctor Erice)
26. "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1977, Luis Buñuel)
27. "Floating Weeds" (1959, Yasujirō Ozu)
28. "Branded to Kill" (1967, Seijun Suzuki)
29. "8½" (1963, Federico Fellini)
30. "Opening Night" (1977, John Cassavetes)

31. "Japanese Summer: Double Suicide" (1967, Nagisa Ōshima)
32. "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
33. "The General" (1926, Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton)
34. "The Silence" (1963, Ingmar Bergman)
35. "Cœur fidèle" (1923, Jean Epstein)
36. "Pierrot le fou" (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
37. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004, Michel Gondry)
38. "The 400 Blows" (1959, François Truffaut)
39. "Flowing" (1956, Mikio Naruse)
40. "The Conformist" (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)

41. "Vibrator" (2003, Ryuichi Hiroki)
42. "Trouble in Paradise" (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
43. "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
44. "M" (1931, Fritz Lang)
45. "The Cranes Are Flying" (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov)
46. "Linda Linda Linda" (2005, Nobuhiro Yamashita)
47. "The Swimmer" (1968, Frank Perry)
48. "Salò" (1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
49. "Rosemary's Baby" (1968, Roman Polański)
50. "Buffalo '66" (1998, Vincent Gallo)

51. "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" (1927, F.W. Murnau)
52. "The Hole" (1998, Tsai Ming-liang)

Show me yours!