Comedy , noir, action, science fiction...
are these the finest movies ever made? For Telegraph critic Robbie Collin – and for now, at least – they definitely are. Think of the list below as less of a canon than a pop gun. It is the unabashedly partial and self-serving result of one critic – me – being asked to set down the 100 greatest films as I saw them, then cook up a rationalisation post hoc.
Like many cinephiles, I already had a running best-of Rolodex in the back of my head, but I took this opportunity to start again from scratch, filling and then endlessly reshuffling a spreadsheet over a couple of weeks, and setting myself three rules to stick to in the process. The first was that my choices would be split into categories, starting with 13 well-established genres: comedy, romance , psychological drama, thriller, film noir, western, war, science fiction, horror, action, documentary , blockbuster and musical. I added five more of my own, based on common themes: childhood, family life, journeys, specific times and places, and film itself.
Only one film per director would be permitted. One happy upshot of this was that it immediately disbarred half of the most obvious picks. I couldn’t have both Vertigo and Psycho , 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon , Groundhog Day and Caddyshack .
But to me, their absence only makes the list stronger: there’s a sense, or at least I hope there is, that every appearance by a top-ranking auteur had to be doubly justified, a.