Apropos nothing, I made a list of my favorite narrative feature films. I’m sure it’s wrong. But if you’re curious here y’are, time-stamped and everything. I should probably watch things not made by French people and American people more often.
- Celine et Julie vont en bateau, Jacques Rivette, 1974
- Esther Kahn, Arnaud Desplechin, 2000
- The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey, 1937
- Playtime, Jacques Tati, 1967
- The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock, 1963
- Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks, 1939
- A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson, 1956
- The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, 1998
- On Dangerous Ground, Nicholas Ray, 1952
- French Cancan, Jean Renoir, 1954 [or Le crime de M. Lange, 1936, or all of’m at the top of this silly thing]
- Ordet, Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955 [or Gertrud, 1964]
- Last Year At Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961 [or Wild Grass, 2009]
- Syndromes and a Century, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2006
- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson, 2004
- Le bonheur, Agnès Varda, 1965
- A Brighter Summer Day, Edward Yang, 1991 [or The Terrorizers, 1986]
- Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 [or Mirror, 1975]
- I Walked With A Zombie, Jacques Tourneur, 1942 [or Cat People, 1942]
- Beau Travail, Claire Denis, 1999
- The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog, 1974
- Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara, 1992
- Vivre Sa Vie, JLG, 1962 [or all of JLG more than a few spots up]
- Le Rayon Vert, Eric Rohmer, 1986
- I Know Where I’m Going!, Powell & Pressburger, 1945
- Simon of the Desert, Luis Buñuel, 1965 [or Viridiana, 1961]
- Happy Together, Wong Kar Wai, 1997
- The Earrings of Madame de…, Max Ophüls, 1953
- Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946
- Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick, 1975
- Meet Me In St. Louis, Vincente Minnelli, 1944 [or Some Came Running, 1958]
- Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami, 1991
- World On A Wire, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973
- Miami Vice, Michael Mann, 2006
- In Vanda’s Room, Pedro Costa, 2000
- The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Preston Sturges, 1944 [or The Palm Beach Story, 1942]
- Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002
- Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Leos Carax, 1991
- INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch, 2006
- Le Garçu, Maurice Pialat, 1995 [or all of them way further up]
- Love Streams, John Cassavetes, 1984 [or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1975]
- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford, 1962
- Underground U.S.A., Sam Fuller, 1961
- Angel Face, Otto Preminger, 1952 [or Bonjour Tristesse, 1958]
- La maman et la putain, Jean Eustache, 1973
- Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino, 2007
- A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg, 2011
- Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas, 2007
- The City Below, Christoph Hochhaüsler, 2010
- Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton, 1955
- F for Fake, Orson Welles, 1974
- A Serious Man, Coens, 2009
- Still Life, Jia Zhang-ke, 2006
- Holiday, George Cukor, 1938
- The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh, 2009
- Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay, 2002
- Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant, 2007
- Life Is Sweet, Mike Leigh, 1990
- The Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991
- Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, 1973
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman, 1971 [California Split, 1974]
- Dazed & Confused, Richard Linklater, 1993
- Jaws, Steven Spielberg, 1975
- The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974
- Bad Timing, Nicholas Roeg, 1980
- Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer, 1998
