"This list was compiled in a book called John Kobal Presents The Top 100 Movies, published in 1988. Kobal polled 81 international critics/filmmakers, the more famous of which include Nestor Almendros, Lindsay Anderson, Penelope Gilliatt, Leonard Maltin, Tony Rayns, Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag, and Bertand Tavernier. Kobal used the typical point system where he solicited top 10 lists with #1 getting 10 points, and #10 getting 1, with films on unranked lists getting 5.5. I actually tallied the lists myself and found that Kobal wasn't too careful with his math. Dovzhenko's Earth at #67 shouldn't even be on the list, and a lot of the bottom 10 shouldn't be on there either. For those films that tied, [of] which there are several, Kobal ranked [them] alphabetically -- hardly a fair method."
Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance.
A bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II, as the rich and their poor servants meet up at a French chateau.
A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.
A silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resulting street demonstration which brought on a police massacre.
The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman.
After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.
A prospector goes to the Klondike in search of gold and finds it and more.
In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.
A heinous crime and its aftermath are recalled from differing points of view.
Set in Post-WWII Italy, a working class man's bicycle is stolen. He and his son set out to find it.
With the aid of a wealthy erratic tippler, a dewy-eyed tramp who has fallen in love with a sightless flower girl accumulates money to be able to help her medically.
The theatrical life of a beautiful courtesan and the four men who love her.
A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.
In the Paris of the late 19th century, Louise, wife of a general, sells the earrings her husband gave her as a wedding gift: she needs money to cover her debts. The general secretly buys ...
During the first World War, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are sent to a seemingly impenetrable fortress which seems impossible to escape from.
A Civil War veteran embarks on a journey to rescue his niece from an Indian tribe.
Humanity finds a mysterious, obviously artificial object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the intelligent computer H.A.L. 9000, sets off on a quest.
When two musicians witness a mob hit, they flee the state in an all-female band disguised as women, but further complications set in.
During the early part of his reign, Ivan the Terrible faces betrayal from the aristocracy and even his closest friends as he seeks to unite the Russian people.
Decades of a love triangle concerning two friends and an impulsive woman.
A group of people traveling on a stagecoach find their journey complicated by the threat of Geronimo and learn something about each other in the process.
A San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.
A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.
An old couple visit their children and grandchildren in the city; but the children have little time for them.
The life, times and afflictions of the fifteenth-century Russian iconographer.
Two young Swedish children experience the many comedies and tragedies of their family, the Ekdahls.
Newly married couple Juliette and a ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'atalante along with the captain's first mate Le père Jules and a cabin boy.
Viridiana, a young nun about to take her final vows, pays a visit to her widowed uncle at the request of her Mother Superior.
A distant poor relative of the Duke of D'Ascoyne plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession.
Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, Harry Lime.
A fantastic tale of war, love, family and ambition set in the midst of the Japanese Civil Wars of the sixteenth century.
In a repressive boarding school with rigid rules of behavior, four boys decide to rebel against the direction on a celebration day.
A bureaucrat tries to find a meaning in his life after he discovers he has terminal cancer.
Impoverished priest Harihar Ray, dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work.
A pretentiously artistic director is hired for a new Broadway musical and changes it beyond recognition.
A manipulative Southern belle carries on a turbulent affair with a blockade runner during the American Civil War.
A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.
A series of stories following a week in the life of a philandering paparazzo journalist living in Rome.
A French actress filming an anti-war film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese architect as they share their differing perspectives on war.
During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is chased by Nazis and he seeks refuge and escape.
A stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping, and police corruption in a Mexican border town.
A surrealist tale of a man and a woman passionately in love with one another, but their attempts to consummate that passion are constantly thwarted by their families, the Church, and bourgeois society.
A chronicle of the trial of Jeanne d'Arc on charges of heresy, and the efforts of her ecclesiastical jurists to force Jeanne to recant her claims of holy visions.
A man seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
A series of comedic and nostalgic vignettes set in a 1930s Italian coastal town.
In mediaeval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
A woman disappears during a Mediterranean boating trip. During the search, her lover and her best friend become attracted to each other.
When Union spies steal an engineer's beloved locomotive, he pursues it single-handedly and straight through enemy lines.
Follows a woman's fight and survival amid the vicissitudes of life and the cruelty of the society.
A surreal, virtually plotless series of dreams centered around six middle-class people and their consistently interrupted attempts to have a meal together.
A film about the French Field Marshal's youth and early military career.
At the dawn of World War III, a man searches for a way to restore peace to the world and finds he must give something in return.
A waifish prostitute wanders the streets of Rome looking for true love but finds only heartbreak.
After being tricked and cast out of Bagdad by the evil Jaffar, King Ahmad joins forces with a thief named Abu to reclaim his throne, the city, and the Princess he loves.
The story of how a great Russian prince led a ragtag army to battle an invading force of Teutonic Knights.
A wilful young man contends against his brother for the attention of their religious father while reconnecting with his estranged mother and falling for his brother's girlfriend.
While traveling in continental Europe, a rich young playgirl realizes that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train.
Two spoiled rich people find themselves trapped on an empty passenger ship.
People believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living.
A criminal pleads insanity after getting into trouble again and once in the mental institution rebels against the oppressive nurse and rallies up the scared patients.
During the German occupation noble, bourgeois and worker's partisan groups lived in peace with another. On the first day of freedom they start to fight each other. In these fights is weaved a most tender love story.
A troubled and neurotic Italian Countess betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian Lieutenant.
A dying man in his forties remembers his past. His childhood, his mother, the war, personal moments and things that tell of the recent history of all the Russian nation.
Three World War II veterans return home to small-town America to discover that they and their families have been irreparably changed.
On holiday, a conflicted man lusts after beautiful stepsisters despite his betrothal to a diplomat's daughter.
In the peaceful countryside, Vassily opposes the rich kulaks over the coming of collective farming.
In rural Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and operate independently.
Hypnotist Dr. Caligari uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murders.
Six vignettes follow the Allied invasion from July 1943 to winter 1944, from Sicily north to Venice. Communication is fragile. A woman leads an Allied patrol through a mine field; she dies ...
In an open-air dance hall, the members of Leca's gang are relaxing with their ladies. One of them, Marie, aka "Casque d'Or" (Golden Helmet) meets Manda, a carpenter. Her man Roland belongs ...
The guests at an upper-class dinner party find themselves unable to leave.
In a strange chateau, a man insists to a woman that they have met before.
The life of a divorced television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.
A Western retelling the tale of the Shoot-out at the OK Corral.
Young Princess Sophia of Germany is taken to Russia to marry the half-wit Grand Duke Peter, son of the Empress. The domineering Empress hopes to improve the royal blood line. Sophia doesn't...
The sudden fortune won from a lottery fans such destructive greed that it ruins the lives of the three people involved.
A British wartime aviator who cheats death must argue for his life before a celestial court.
Dorothy Gale is swept away to a magical land in a tornado and embarks on a quest to see the Wizard who can help her return home.
Mary Shelley reveals the main characters of her novel survived: Dr. Frankenstein, goaded by an even madder scientist, builds his monster a mate.
While trying to secure a $1 million donation for his museum, a befuddled paleontologist is pursued by a flighty and often irritating heiress and her pet leopard, Baby.
In this allegorical story, a revolution led by pupil Mick Travis takes place at an old established private school in England.
A care-free girl is sold to a traveling entertainer, consequently enduring physical and emotional pain along the way.
A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to a sexual obsession which then came to a violent end.
In Africa during WWI, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship.
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.
The series (11 episodes) tells the story of the village Schabbach, on the Hunsrueck in Germany through the years 1919-1982. Central person is Maria, who we see growing from a 17 year old ...
The story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who successfully united and lead the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks.
A wounded German paratrooper named Stroszek is sent to the quiet island of Kos with his wife Nora, a Greek nurse, and two other soldiers recovering from minor wounds. Billeted in a decaying...
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.
In the year before the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, the four Smith daughters learn lessons of life and love, even as they prepare for a reluctant move to New York.
A suave but cynical man supports his family by marrying and murdering rich women for their money, but the job has some occupational hazards.
Meeting a stranger in a railway station, a woman is tempted to cheat on her husband.
A self-minded adventurer (Jeff Webster) locks horns with a crooked lawman (Mr. Gannon) while driving cattle to Dawson.
A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.
Moonfleet is set in Dorset, England. The Fleet refers to the land just west of Portland, Southern England.
A group of people hide from bloodthirsty zombies in a farmhouse.
A Phoenix secretary steals $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.
A self-conscious bride is tormented by the memory of her husband's dead first wife.
Catherine and Alexander, wealthy and sophisticated, drive to Naples to dispose of a deceased uncle's villa. There's a coolness in their relationship and aspects of Naples add to the strain....