Directors reveal their top 10 films

Somewhere - over the rainbow, perhaps, or in a yellow-brick university - a psychologist is no doubt hard at work studying why critics love making Top 10 lists of the world's greatest films. I have just taken the habit to extremes by completing a list of the best 1,000 films ever released, and have supported this with a number of offerings from other critics, producers and directors (some of which are shown opposite).

Somewhere - over the rainbow, perhaps, or in a yellow-brick university - a psychologist is no doubt hard at work studying why critics love making Top 10 lists of the world's greatest films. I have just taken the habit to extremes by completing a list of the best 1,000 films ever released, and have supported this with a number of offerings from other critics, producers and directors (some of which are shown opposite).

I began by listing my Top 10 and working backwards from there. Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute's monthly magazine, has for 50 years invited critics and film-makers to list the 10 movies they regard as the best - this provided a great resource for me while compiling Halliwell's Top 1000. Its Top 10s since the 1960s have included the usual suspects (Citizen Kane, Battleship Potemkin), though over the decades it's noticeable that Buster Keaton has replaced Charlie Chaplin as the great silent comedian, and directors such as Robert Flaherty and Vittorio De Sica have fallen out of favour, as have once highly regarded films such as Mizoguchi's marvellous war and ghost story Ugetsu Monogatari.

The real interest in Top 10s is what they tell you about the people who make them. In Quentin Tarantino's Top 10 listed in Halliwell's Top 1000, he lives up to his image as a geek by including movies that nobody else ever would have voted for, even if they were threatened with repeated showings of Kill Bill. Cameron Crowe was one of four directors to include Tarantino's Pulp Fiction in his list, but Tarantino didn't return the favour, though Anurag Mehta (so far the writer-director of one film a decade ago) did put Crowe's Jerry Maguire in his.

Tarantino's choice included Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed, which brought little amusement to audiences, contained one of Audrey Hepburn's least-loved performances and confirmed Mr T's lack of a sense of humour; and Five Fingers of Death, the martial-arts movie that began the kung-fu craze in the US in the early 1970s, though it was regarded as bog-standard stuff in its home-town of Hong Kong.

He also endorsed John Flynn's Rolling Thunder, the first treatment of a vengeful Vietnam War veteran continuing the battle back in the US. It never matched the popular appeal of the later Rambo movies, maybe because the sinister William Devane was a less appealing action hero than Sylvester Stallone. And the blaxploitation movie Coffy, starring Pam Grier, whom he cast in Jackie Brown, his salute to the genre 24 years later.

They're all movies with a cult reputation, just the thing to add a little vicarious violence to a quiet afternoon in a video store. Apart from their deserved obscurity, they seem timid choices, particularly from a director who likes to be thought of as transgressive.

There are rule-breaking directors around who make Tarantino seem like the old-school conservative he is, such as the prolific Japanese Takashi Miike, who made the terrifying Audition, the comic The Happiness of the Katakuris, about a sing-a-long family whose hotel is never without a dead body or three, and the horrific Ichi the Killer, in which bodies are sliced and diced with excessive abandon. Perhaps we should have included him in Halliwell's Top 1000.

Top 10s can confirm what we already suspect. It is no surprise to find that Terry Jones likes comic films: Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Leo McCarey's Duck Soup, with Groucho Marx as a president who wages war just for the hell of it, Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day and Jacques Tati's delight in the ramshackle rural life, Jour de Fête.

Nor is it unexpected to discover that sex is not far from the mind of French feminist director Catherine Breillat, who treated sexual encounters as a battlefield in Romance and Anatomy of Hell, both utilising the talent of Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, who is more accustomed to appearing in series entitled True Anal Stories and Reverse Gangbang.

Briellat's list included the finest exploration of sexual obsession, Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida, where not even the presence of servants interrupts the non-stop copulation; Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, with Carroll Baker as a thumb-sucking child-wife; and Pasolini's Salo or 120 Days of Sodom, an investigation of sado-masochism as a byproduct of capitalism, that requires its consumers to have a strong stomach.

My own list in Halliwell's Top 1000 reflects a certain dissatisfaction with current films: Raging Bull is the most recent movie in my Top 10, and it was made a quarter of a century ago. The fact that the first Hollywood film is The Godfather at No 4 indicates that I'm not American. I regard myself as European, being descended from immigrants who arrived in London in the 1760s from Bad Wimpfen, wherever that might be. (One of the Top 10 Things An Englishman Doesn't Know is geography, but I imagine it's a place where the population wear hoods and happy slap one another).

It's a bias that means, further down my list, you will find comedies starring Will Hay rather than Jerry Lewis. And Jean Renoir is represented by six films, compared to the two accorded classic status by the critics of The New York Times, whose reviewer dismissed the sublime La Règle du Jeu as "a buzzard's nest".

It's a reminder that the most enjoyable criticism to read (and the easiest to write) is unkind. Certainly cinema is ripe for more Bottom 10 lists.

John Walker's 'Halliwell's Top 1000', will be published by HarperCollins on 13 June, £17.99

The Directors' Cut: Film-Makers Choose Their Favourite Movies

QUENTIN TARANTINO

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
2. Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
3. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
4. His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1939)
5. Rolling Thunder (Flynn, 1977)
6. They All Laughed (Bogdanovich, 1981)
7. The Great Escape (J Sturges, 1963)
8. Carrie (De Palma, 1976)
9. Coffy (Hill, 1973)
10. Five Fingers of Death (Chang, 1973)

TIM ROBBINS

1. The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
2. The Clowns (Fellini, 1971)
3. Don't Look Back (Pennebaker, 1967)
4. The Lower Depths (Kurosawa, 1957)
5. McCabe & Mrs Miller (Altman, 1971)
6. My Man Godfrey (La Cava, 1936)
7. Nashville (Altman, 1975)
8. Network (Lumet, 1976)
9. Underground (Kusturica, 1995)
10. Waiting for Guffman (Guest, 1996)

PAUL VERHOEVEN

1. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein, 1958)
3. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
4. Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1951)
5. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
6. The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1956)
7. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
8. Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
9. Los Olvidados (Buñuel, 1950)
10. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959)

GILLIAN ARMSTRONG

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
3. La Strada (Fellini, 1954)
4. The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974)
5. Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1951)
6. Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
7. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
8. 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963) 9. Singin' in the Rain (Kelly, Donen, 1952)
10. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI

1. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
2. Sansho Dayu (Mizoguchi, 1954)
3. Germany, Year Zero (Rossellini, 1947)
4. A Bout de Souffle (Godard, 1959)
5. Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
6. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
7. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
8. Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964)
9. Accattone (Pasolini, 1961)
10. Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)

JOHN BOORMAN

1. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
2. The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1956)
3. 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
4. That Obscure Object of Desire (Buñuel, 1977)
5. Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963)
6. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
7. Sunset Blvd (Wilder, 1950)
8. Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
9. La Roue (Gance, 1923)
10. The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)

JIM JARMUSCH

1. L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)
2. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
3. They Live by Night (N Ray, 1949)
4. Bob le flambeur (Melville, 1955)
5. Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
6. The Cameraman (Sedgwick, 1928)
7. Mouchette (Bresson, 1967)
8. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
9. Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 1919)
10. Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945)

MILOS FORMAN

1. Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)
2. American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
5. The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)
6. Les Enfants du Paradis (Carné, 1945)
7. Giant (Stevens, 1956)
8. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
9. Miracle in Milan (De Sica, 1951)
10. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)

CATHERINE BREILLAT

1. Ai No Corrida (Oshima, 1976)
2. Sawdust and Tinsel (Bergman, 1953)
3. Baby Doll (Kazan, 1956)
4. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1996)
5. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
6. Salo (Pasolini, 1975)
7. L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
8. Ordet (Dreyer, 1954)
9. Lancelot du Lac (Bresson, 1974)
10. 10 (Kiarostami, 2002)

CAMERON CROWE

1. The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
2. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
3. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
4. Manhattan (Allen, 1979)
5. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)
6. To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962)
7. Harold and Maude (Ashby, 1971)
8. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
9. Quadrophenia (Roddam, 1979)
10. Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939)

SAM MENDES

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982)
3. The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974)
4. The Piano (Campion, 1993)
5. The Red Shoes (Powell, Pressburger, 1948)
6. Sunset Blvd (Wilder, 1950)
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
8. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
9. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
10. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)

LUKAS MOODYSSON

1. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
2. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982)
3. Gummo (Korine, 1997)
4. La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)
5. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971)
6. The Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)
7. On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954)
8. Riff-Raff (Loach, 1990)
9. Secrets & Lies (Leigh, 1996)
10. Where Is My Friend's House? (Kiarostami, 1987)

MIKE NEWELL

1. The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
2. Bad Day at Black Rock (J Sturges, 1955)
3. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982)
4. La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
5. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, 1949)
6. Lacombe Lucien (Malle, 1974)
7. The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)
8. My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)
9. Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
10. War and Peace (Vidor, 1956)

TERRY JONES

1. Annie Hall (Allen, 1977)
2. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
3. Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933)
4. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982)
5. Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
6. Guys and Dolls (Mankiewicz, 1955)
7. Jour de Fête (Tati, 1949)
8. Napoléon (Gance, 1927)
9. The Pathfinder (Salkow, 1952)
10. Steamboat Bill, Jr (Riesner, 1928)

MICHAEL MANN

1. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
2. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963)
5. Faust (Murnau, 1926)
6. Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
7. My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)
8. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
9. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
10. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)

KEN LOACH

1. A Bout de Souffle (Godard, 1959)
2. The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
3. A Blonde in Love (Forman, 1965)
4. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
5. Closely Observed Trains (Menzel, 1966)
6. Fireman's Ball (Forman, 1967)
7. Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962)
8. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
9. The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (Olmi, 1978)
10. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)

SIDNEY LUMET

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)
2. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982)
3. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
4. The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940)
5. Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
7. Ran (Kurosawa, 1985)
8. Roma (Fellini, 1972)
9. Singin' in the Rain (Kelly, Donen, 1952)
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)