Talk:List of films voted the best/Archive 2

Making this article serious
Following the comments from the VfD debate above, I have been through the article and removed uncited entries. I now I have probably removed too many films, and we should be able to find cites for some of them, but I believe this is the only way to make a credible entry.

From the main list:


 * It's A Wonderful Life: The film by Frank Capra which initially was a box office disappointment but has grown to become known as a powerful film about the worth of a compassionate individual willing to sacrifice his dreams for others.

From the genre list:


 * Action and Adventure
 * The Adventures of Robin Hood: Errol Flynn's finest and most famous role, widely considered the greatest of all swashbucklers.
 * Goldfinger: The James Bond film which is part of one of the most successful and durable action film series of all.
 * Raiders of the Lost Ark: Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas' tribute to the adventure serials of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
 * Enter The Dragon: The  martial arts film starring the genre's first international star, Bruce Lee.
 * Animation (traditional)
 * Pinocchio: Generally considered Walt Disney's greatest narrative feature film.
 * Fantasia: Walt Disney opus from 1940 married animated scenes with classical music performances.
 * Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: first Technicolor feature from Disney.
 * Yellow Submarine:The first western animated film, featuring the music and characters of The Beatles, which was intended for an adult audience.


 * This is not true. Walt Disney's films (meaning the ones he himself worked on) are general-audience films intended for all ages. Yellow Submarine is not any more intrended for an adult audience than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was; remember 30 years, a world war, and a number of cultural revolutions seperate the films and the periods in which they were made. And, as far as "greatest i nthe genre go," neither Yellow Submarine... (continued) --b. Touch 19:30, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

...nor Fritz the Cat should be on the list. If limited to three entries, those enteries would be Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Beauty and the Beast. As is the case with Titanic, The Lion King's large box-office revenue cannot be used as the sole barometer of its greatness.
 * Fritz The Cat: One of the first animations intended exclusively for an adult audience.


 * Anime
 * Princess Mononoke, also made by Miyazaki, was the highest grossing in Japanese history for a time after its release and got critical acclaim there and elsewhere
 * Comedy
 * The General: known as one of the best silent films and Buster Keaton's greatest film which proved to be a generation ahead of its time.
 * City Lights: The Little Tramp film by Charles Chaplin
 * A Night at the Opera: the Marx Brothers' biggest hit, and often considered the best of their comedies (though the box-office flop Duck Soup often vies for the same honor)
 * Some Like It Hot: Billy Wilder's biggest hit, and considered to be Marilyn Monroe's best role in one of the funniest movies of all time.
 * Monty Python and The Holy Grail: the film production of the esteemed Monty Python troupe with its distinctive surreal farce.
 * Blazing Saddles: The American parody film


 * Documentary
 * Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens): Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary about Adolf Hitler and the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally is still regarded by many critics as cinema's greatest achievement in propaganda.
 * Why We Fight: A documentary film produced by Frank Capra was explicitly intended to be The Allies' propaganda counter-attack to Riefenstahl's films.
 * Woodstock: A cinematic recording of one of the greatest and most idealistic popular music concerts in history.
 * The Thin Blue Line: Errol Morris' acclaimed documentary that successfully proved the innocence of a man wrongly convicted for murder.


 * Film noir
 * The Big Sleep: Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, with his bride Lauren Bacall.
 * The Maltese Falcon: Bogart again, this time as Sam Spade.
 * Double Indemnity: The non private detective focused film of the genre.
 * Chinatown: The 1970s film of this genre with its profound political cyncism.
 * Fargo: The Coen Brothers' acclaimed film which turns the conventions of the genre on its head.
 * Touch of Evil: This 1958 film was restored in 1998 to the original vision of director Orson Welles.


 * Horror
 * Nosferatu: The innovative silent horror film.
 * Frankenstein: The sympathetic monster film.
 * King Kong: The giant monster and stop motion film.
 * The Birds: The definite example of the horror genre of nature inexplicably gone beserk.
 * Night of the Living Dead:The independent horror film
 * The Exorcist: A story of demon posession.
 * Jaws: The 1975 summer blockbuster has been a critical and audience favorite since its release, with its unforgettable theme music.
 * Halloween: The greatest of the slasher films.


 * Musical
 * Singin' in the Rain
 * West Side Story
 * The Wizard of Oz: An initially underperforming film whose regular exposure on television made it the family live action fantasy musical.
 * A Hard Day's Night: the innovative mockumentary featuring the most famous rock band of all, The Beatles.


 * Romantic comedy
 * Annie Hall: Oscar-winner for Best Picture cemented reputation of director Woody Allen. Voted best American comedy by the AFI.

''The AFI did NOT vote Annie Hall the best American comedy from what I can determine, so I removed it. --Samuel Wantman 19:59, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)''


 * The Philadelphia Story


 * Science fiction
 * A Trip to the Moon: The first science fiction film by the film pioneer, Georges Méliès.
 * Blade Runner: widely acclaimed science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott based on a Philip K. Dick story, which set the tone for the science fiction noir/cyberpunk genre
 * Forbidden Planet: first real instance of science fiction being taken seriously as a genre in Hollywood, with a large budget for its time; script was loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and an inspiration for Star Trek.
 * Alien: The most honoured American science fiction film with a horror focus which has a creditible extraterrestrial and the beginning of the first American major female feature action film hero, Ellen Ripley.


 * War
 * All Quiet on the Western Front: The first major American anti-war film.
 * Patton: The war film as biography, in this case of US General George Patton.
 * MASH: The war comedy about a Korean War medical staff using humour and mischief to keep their sanity admist war's horror.
 * Platoon: A personal film by Oliver Stone that definitely revealed war's horror in the midst of the 1980s film jingoism.
 * Glory: A film credited with finally giving African American's efforts in the American Civil War their belated due.
 * Das Boot: German Submarine-Epic, nominated for 6 Oscars.


 * Western
 * Stagecoach: established prominence of director John Ford.
 * The Searchers: Nearly twenty years after Stagecoach, John Ford directed what is often considered the greatest Western of all, and one of the greatest films ever.
 * High Noon: The Western as allegory of a sheriff faces a returning enemy even while his community deserts him as within latter day Mccarthyism.
 * Shane: The  story of a lone gunfighter coming to an embattled community.
 * The Wild Bunch: The film about a passing of an era as a group of gunfighters end their careers and lives in a bloody climax.
 * Little Big Man: The landmark film that fully established the reversal of the image the Native American nations as savages into the new traditional sympathetic characters in this genre.


 * Films that are considered greatest from a particular country:


 * Germany:
 * Das Boot: WWII submarine epic.


 * India:
 * Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray


 * Italy:
 * The Bicycle Thief


 * Japan:


 * Sweden:
 * The Seventh Seal: by Ingmar Bergman.


 * Movies that are widely considered important, if not the greatest ever


 * The 400 Blows: seminal coming of age comedy launched the career of Francois Truffaut.
 * 8½: autobiographical film by Federico Fellini is widely considered the greatest film about filmmaking.
 * The Birth of a Nation: considered a watershed film in developing cinema narrative. In more recent times, it has been critcized for expressing racism.
 * Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: scathing black comedy about US/Soviet Cold War tensions by Stanley Kubrick.
 * A Fistful of Dollars: first film in Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name" or "Dollars" trilogy introduced international audiences to both the spaghetti western genre and Clint Eastwood; a remake of Yojimbo.
 * The Gold Rush: Charlie Chaplin in his role as "The Little Tramp".
 * The Great Dictator: Charles Chaplin in his first full sound film and the first feature film produced to directly satirically attack Adolf Hitler when it was thought unthinkable.
 * Greed: Socially-conscious silent film by Erich von Stroheim, cut down from original eight-hour running time, still galvanizes audiences; noted for climactic scene shot in Death Valley.
 * Intolerance: three-hour D.W. Griffith silent epic was the biggest production of its time.
 * The Jazz Singer: A semi sound film whose tremendous success signalled the eventually end of the silent film.
 * The Last Laugh: One of the last great silent films about a doormans humiliation told with an absolute minimum of title cards
 * The Matrix: a breakthrough in special effects, one of the first major American science fiction films to address the issue of virtual reality replacing reality
 * Mean Streets: early Martin Scorsese film paved the way for extreme realism in American films in the 1970s, launched career of Robert de Niro.
 * Metropolis: German expressionist science fiction epic by Fritz Lang pioneered many optical special effects.
 * Modern Times: last silent film by Charlie Chaplin.
 * Pulp Fiction: elaborately structured crime saga redefined American independent cinema in the 1990s, made Quentin Tarantino America's most emulated and prominent director.
 * Rebecca: gothic romance by Alfred Hitchcock from the Daphne du Maurier novel.
 * The Red Shoes: by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with noteworthy Technicolor cinematography.
 * The Shawshank Redemption: box office failure that became a popular rental, highly ranked on IMDb's list of the top 250 films; generally held in higher regard by the public than critics.
 * Superman:The blockbuster film that proved that the superhero genre was a viable subject for major feature films.
 * Vertigo: labyrinthine mystery by Alfred Hitchcock, cited by some as more important than Psycho.
 * Who Framed Roger Rabbit: The live action and animation mixed film that revived the art of animation in North America.
 * Yojimbo: seminal samurai action film, widely copied and remade.


 * I agree with your removals unless citations can be found a movie should not be placed on this list. There are two films that have good citatations and that you removed, however.  LOTR is tied for the most Oscars and The Third Man which was named the best British film of all time by the BFI. - SimonP 14:27, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * You are quite right of course. I did it too fast. I will put those back. Pcb21| Pete 15:37, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * OK, done. I also put back Citizen Kane into the United States section - figuring it was ok to list twice because we will probably be able to rebuild the country specific list. What do you reckon? Pcb21| Pete 15:43, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Sounds good. - SimonP 19:28, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Many of these films are actually good. Most of those on the list are not, they are merely popular. Explain. Localperson118 11:22, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Saving Private Ryan considered the best and most accurate portrayal of World War II combat ever by revered historian Stephen Ambrose, on which he also acted as military advisor.

Hey, if Ambrose served as advisor, he might be slightly biased, what? Burschik 12:34, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree and will remove it. It'sa ridiculous to use the opinion of someone involved in making the film to support such a judgment.Lisiate 02:07, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What about Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - described by John Waters as "beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future."? The Recycling Troll 00:34, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * It needs to be something more substantial than one person's opinion (with the exception of extremely notable film critics like Roger Ebert). [[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 00:47, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * If we could gather a few more of these sorts of quotes together though, with attributions, then it might work as another section. "Individual favourites of film world luminaries"/"Wacky selections"... something like that. Interviews with Tarantino for example should be a goldmine for choice quotes about films both "good" and "so bad they're good". Pcb21| Pete 11:20, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm giving Fahrenheit 9/11 a seperate bullet from Bowling for Colombine due to it's historic critical and commercial success.

Bias towards modern films?
Looking over the list, I notice that there are very few films made before about 1965. Of particular alarm are the deletions of the early Walt Disney animated features from the list. Is there a particular reason why Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia are no longer on this list? Is it okay to add them back? Those three films are the ones Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King stand in the shadows of, and, while a casual viewer might (of course) prefer the newer films, the older films are still upheld by critics for their storytelling, audience appeal, and artistic quality. --b. Touch 19:22, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * If you can come up with a significant critic to cite (which shouldn't be difficult, I imagine), sure. Basically, anything that can be backed up by a reliable (and relevant) source can be included. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 21:59, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Very nice
This is a really nice list. Good job to all those who worked on it!