My Sight & Sound 2022 ballot

 

With each passing decade, choosing only ten "greatest" films becomes an increasingly perverse exercise.  But since perversity is the only exercise I'm getting these days, here's my ballot.  Most important criterion: I love all of these films, and with every viewing I continue to find new meanings and insights within them.

 

Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)

Can you find 45 minutes with more cinematic innovation and comedic genius?  Perhaps only in Keaton's The General (1926).

 

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Took murder out of the hands of gangsters and detectives and dropped it squarely in the lap of middle-class America, even providing a step-by-step guide narrated by its smirking insurance salesman turned cold-blooded killer.  Enormously influential on postwar American cinema and the hundreds of domestic crime films that followed in its wake.  Also, the best film ever made about claims adjusting.

 

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1947)

"A society is unjust when an honest man must steal to provide for his family." – Casare Zavattini, screenwriter.  What could have been a Marxist screed is made poignant, tender, heart-wrenching.

 

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1950)

When one is fully devoted to the power and purity of The Word (or Art), the petty cruelties of daily life can be a terrible burden to bear. The first of Bresson's several spare, somber masterpieces.

 

Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)

Proves the old adage, If sex is dirty, then you must be doing it right.  The most artistic of Bunuel's many films examining the neuroses resulting from civilized society’s containment of human desire.

 

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

First spoken line: "I believe in America." –Amerigo Bonasera, mortician.  America is a nation of immigrants—and violence.

 

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

On location in the Amazon, Herzog lays bare the hubris and madness of the conquerer's impulse to impose culture upon nature.

 

Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984)

Demonstrates a truly non-Western cinematic language—such as its framing of earth and sky and its narrative use of folk music—to tell a tragic story of arranged marriage in a poor, rural community of ethnic minorities.  Spearheaded China's brilliant and innovative Fifth Generation of filmmaking.

 

Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985)

Deliberately structured like Citizen Kane, but examining a life at the other end of the economic spectrum—a vagrant woman found dead in a ditch—to show how she too could profoundly impact many lives.

 

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Anderson, adapting the socialist Upton Sinclair, excavates the origins of Big Oil and unearths two dark forces—monopoly capitalism and fundamentalist religion—that have undermined modern American democracy.  Audacious and breathtaking, with a haunting score by Jonny Greenwood.