When they asked me to make a list of the 20 best films ever I thought: this is a crazy undertaking! Among classics, cults, new high-tech flashes, it’s a bit like getting lost in a labyrinth of mirrors, in a candy shop, in a paint shop of lush colours. Lights, temptations, old and fresh loves. Films that made the cinema history, some that age well and others that creak over time, electrocutions that shake the heart even before the critical sense. How can you exclude one title to insert another?
But the challenge is accepted, of course. With a strong eye on personal taste, obviously, and another on the titles that have made cinema great, here are my 20 best films of all time. With one basic rule: only one title per director. And with the certainty that probably, in a few years or a few hours, the list of the 20 best films will always be different. In constant change, fortunately.
1) Sunset Boulevard (1950) by Billy Wilder
ORh as he writes Billy Wilder! Each of his screenplays is littered with flashes, in a balance of acute lightness and dark depth. As Sunset BoulevardThe masterpiece. The greatest film about the bittersweet glory of Hollywood.
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Gloria Swanson in the film “Sunset Boulevard”
2) The rear window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock
Between Psycho And The woman who lived twiceother beautiful ones from the master of thrills, in the end he won The rear window. You feel a sense of helplessness James Stewart and the tension that mounts.
3) the good, the bad and the ugly (1966) by Sergio Leone
If the frontier of the Old West of immense and arid spaces has a deity, this is it Sergio Leone. And his right hand man is Ennio Morricone.
4) The seventh seal (1957) by Ingmar Bergman
Cold, enigmatic, severe, Bergman’s charm does not age. With him we play chess every day with Death.
5) A particular day (1977) by Ettore Scola
While the crude machismo of the fascist regime presses on the backs of the neck, with the “different” Sophia Loren And Marcello Mastroianni we flutter like laundry in the wind.
6) The pianist (2001) by Michael Haneke
Haneke! Oh how well she knows how to torture her audience! Sadistic and magnificent.
7) Fourth estate (1941) by Orson Welles
Milestone of the history of cinema, it is the inevitable part of every list of the most beautiful films of all time.
8) The Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa
An epic classic from memorable action sequences whose influence still gushes forth.
9) The Godfather (1972) by Francis Ford Coppola
The timeless. The majestic masterpiece that he delivers to us Marlon Brando with highlighted jaw and Al Pacino electric and disturbing, on the notes sculpted in time by Nino Rota.
10) Mother (2009) by Bong Joon-ho
The initial sequence is a pearl of poetry and aesthetics that immediately takes you elsewhere, enraptured, enraptured. Not Parasitesfour Oscars, but it is Mother the South Korean director’s most visceral and intense film.
11) Eve against Eve (1950) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
It cannot fail to be among the most beautiful films of all time. Bette Davis towers in this sharp satire on the fragility of celebrity.
12) Mulholland Drive (2001) by David Lynch
It is sublime to get lost in the labyrinthine meanders of Lynch’s creativity, between past, dream and present. Between blue keys and playback of No hay gang!. Uncanny.
13) The four hundred shots (1959) by François Truffaut
A raw portrait of adolescence, from the founder of New Wave, which still resonates melancholy. With the wonderful final scene and the look into the camera Jean-Pierre Léaud which is like a blade.
14) Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Quentin Tarantino
Usually the favorite films of Tarantino’s filmography are Hyenas And Pulp Fiction, cult genius. But… how wonderful is history rewritten in Inglourious Basterdswith Melanie Laurent prodigious in a red dress setting the cinema on fire with Hitler and Goebbels!
15) Taxi drivers (1976) by Martin Scorsese
A great one Robert De Nirodisturbed, sleepless, alienated… A monument of cinema.
16) The Empire strikes again (1980) by Irvin Kershner
It’s still in the progenitor trilogy of Star Wars that the best of science fiction takes hold. Especially in the second chapter, which introduces a legendary character like Yoda.
17) Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott
No special effects, for a scifi rainy and pitchy that stays with you for decades.
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Harrison Ford in “Blade Runner”
18) The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick
Almost only cult among Kubrick’s films. With The Shining peak of tension. Who doesn’t tremble at the mere memory of the psychiatric fury of Jack Nicholson?
19) All about my mother (1999) by Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar’s masterpiece, a riot of reds, emotions, fragility and waste humanity that can be so warm.
20) We want to live! (1942) by Ernst Lubitsch
A cult comedy that never gets old, it’s still a joy. As biting and witty in mocking Nazism, when the Führer had not yet fallen.
