90 Essential Films

The following list, like the entirety of this blog, is an experiment for the sake of posterity. The criteria are simple: 90 films, one film from each year in which a film was made that I have seen. No more than one film from each year. To further complicate/simplify things, I am only allowing one film per director.

The nature of these criteria prevent this from becoming an authoritative list of the "90 greatest films ever made," which is fine, because that is not the point. This list is neither meant to represent the best film from any particular year (for that you can peruse the rest of this blog), nor is it necessarily meant to display the best film by any of the auteur's represented. My goal for this is to distill the knowledge acquired through my career in movie-watching into an easily manageable list which will hopefully provide a kind of historical context and chronology for the progress of the motion picture art form.

In many cases I have intentionally decided to eschew the more well-known, critically successful films, not because they are inherently lesser works, but because the more I watch, the more I realize that there is an entire universe of cinema that even some of the most accomplished film viewers are still unaware exists. Each film in some way represents the year it was released in my own mind. They each manage to capture the spiritual, political, or cultural conditions of their time and, in my opinion, ultimately transcends them for all time. So while this may not necessarily represent the 90 greatest films ever made, these are 90 essential films which no true cinephile (or filmmaker) should go too long without seeing.

If anyone ever actually reads this, I'd welcome your comments, thoughts, arguments, discussions, complaints, etc.


1916: Intolerance (D.W. Griffith)
1920: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene)
1921: The Kid (Charles Chaplin)
1922: Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty)
1923: Our Hospitality (John G. Blystone)
1924: Greed (Erich von Stroheim)
1925: Seven Chances (Buster Keaton)
1926: Faust (F.W. Murnau)
1927: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann)
1928: Street Angel (Frank Borzage)
1929: The Man With the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)
1930: Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko)
1931: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian)
1932: Shanghai Express (Joseph von Sternberg)
1933: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang)
1934: L'Atalante (Jean Vigo)
1935: Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale)
1936: My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava)
1937: The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)
1938: Holiday (George Cukor)
1939: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi)
1940: The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch)
1941: Meet John Doe (Frank Capra)
1942: The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges)
1943: I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
1944: Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eistenstein)
1945: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer)
1946: A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
1947: The Red House (Delmer Daves)
1948: Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls)
1949: I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks)
1950: Wagon Master (John Ford)
1951: The River (Jean Renoir)
1952: Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini)
1953: I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock)
1954: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray)
1955: Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
1956: Attack! (Robert Aldrich)
1957: The Tin Star (Anthony Mann)
1958: Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu)
1959: Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher)
1960: Le Trou (Jacques Becker)
1961: Viridiana (Luis Bunuel)
1962: The Trial (Orson Welles)
1963: Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller)
1964: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Paradjanov)
1965: Repulsion (Roman Polanski)
1966: Kill, Baby... Kill! (Mario Bava)
1967: Playtime (Jacques Tati)
1968: Shame (Ingmar Bergman)
1969: A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson)
1970: Husbands (John Cassavetes)
1971: Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah)
1972: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
1973: Badlands (Terrence Malick)
1974: Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
1975: The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)
1976: Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter)
1977: Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
1978: In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
1979: Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
1980: Atlantic City (Louis Malle)
1981: Blow Out (Brian De Palma)
1982: Tenebre (Dario Argento)
1983: And the Ship Sails On (Federico Fellini)
1984: Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
1985: Come and See (Elem Klimov)
1986: Castle In the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki)
1987: September (Woody Allen)
1988: The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese)
1989: The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
1990: Vincent and Theo (Robert Altman)
1991: Slacker (Richard Linklater)
1992: Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara)
1993: A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood)
1994: Satantango (Bela Tarr)
1995: JLG/JLG (Jean-Luc Godard)
1996: A Summer's Tale (Eric Rohmer)
1997: A Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami)
1998: Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos)
1999: Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
2000: George Washington (David Gordon Green)
2001: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
2002: Japon (Carlos Reygades)
2003: The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev)
2004: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)
2005: Junebug (Phil Morrison)
2006: L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
2007: Southland Tales (Richard Kelly)
2008: Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)