Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
The Top 10 Greatest Films (This List Goes to 11)
11
items Your portable complete course in film history, so you can sound supercool at fancy parties. Looking cool not included.
Mention the factory letting out, the baby's first meal, the train arrival panic (and your skepticism over whether it really happened). You will be recognized as the toast of 19th century film scholars.
Lumiere brothers | Biography, Inventions, Movies, & Facts
Avoid any mention of Birth of a Nation and go right to this epic historical meditation on institutional cruelty, addiction to spectacle, women's rights, and the brutal cycles of history. Mention how American filmmakers adopted the Kuleshov effect
Intolerance by DW Griffith
Don't allow conversation to stray from the Weimar films of pre-war Germany. Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg are easy digressions that everyone will have opinions about. As a last resort, bring up the Belgian Dadaist movement that spread all over E...
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by FW Murnau
Yeah, everybody puts it on their lists, but it really is that good a film. It was written in a fever dream by a last-minute replacement writer with no experience, based on character sketches and a play nobody had seen. The director filmed script page... Bonus trivia: The evil Nazi bad guy is the same actor (still creepy without his makeup) as the sleepwalker in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”.
Casablanca by Michel Curtiz
Noir ruled cinema for the next two decades, from wartime to the Kennedy era. There were always Westerns, but you can say “Johhny Guitar ended Westerns,” and move on. Fuller was a crime reporter and spoke the language of violent losers barely survivin...
Pickup on South Street by Sam Fuller
This film shattered Western cinema, winning the Venice Golden Lion in 1951. Kurosawa had no idea he was nominated. The film shows us the same incident four times, told in conflicting stories from four witnesses, only some of which are alive. It's act...
Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa
A modern fairy tale of an indomitable woman's odyssey from one kind of hell to another, intercut across decades and continents, proved that sub-Saharan African filmmakers were way ahead of the curve. In Europe, young film critics had grabbed cameras ...
La Noire De...
The inevitable collapse of the optimism of the 1960s created the tortured antihero protagonist who still dominates cinema half a century later. The film is the spiritual godfather of films like “Good Will Hunting,” as it paints a period portrait of a...
Five Easy Pieces by Bob Rafaelson
What is even real anymore? Postmodernism was all about the madness of trying to live without any source of reliable truth about anything. Corruption exposed the criminally selfish motives of politicians, religion couldn't answer questions anymore, sc...
Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami
It's the end of the world. They don't feel fine. A rogue planet, just a tiny star in the night sky at first, is hurtling toward the Earth. A bride is harassed during her wedding because her boss wants her to come up with a clever advertising slogan b...
Melancholia by Lars Von Trier
Shhhh. Here's the secret. Don't tell anyone. There is no top 10 list. Films are meals. There are some that are well made by world class chefs and there is slop, but only your hunger determines what is great. Pâté de foie gras is crap when you want a ...
The Criterion Collection - Top 10 Lists