The BFI (The British Film Institute, [British Film Institute]) is a non-profit organisation created by the Royal Charter to encourage the development of television and film art throughout the UK, to promote its role in documenting life in the age, to educate television films and enhance their impact on society, to maximize access to and appreciation of films in the UK and around the world, to establish, Conservation and development of collections that reflect the history and traditions of British television and film.
Every ten years, the BFI conducts a poll of film critics around the world to decide which films are the greatest movies out there. The length of this survey means that it is widely considered to be the most trusted guide to film classics.
1 Ecstasy by Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock's timeless thriller tells the story of a former detective hired to track down a woman apparently possessed by a ghost from the past.
2 Citizen Kane, Orson Wells
Created for Orson Wells by Hollywood studio RKO, it is a modernist masterpiece and is often voted the best film of all time.
3 "Tokyo Story" Yasujiro Ozu
The final installment of Yasujiro Ozu's loosely linked "Noriko" trilogy tells the tragic story of an old man abandoned by a selfish family.
4 Rules of the Game Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir's satirical film of the upper middle class, made on the eve of World War II, was banned by the French government for 20 years after its release, citing demoralization.
5"Sunrise" F· W.Shigeru
German Expressionist director F. W. Maunau came to Hollywood under the direction of producer William Fox to create a silent film, one of the last and most brilliant masterpieces.
6 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick
Through this epic story of human exploration of knowledge, Stanley Kubrick takes science fiction cinema in a grand and intelligent new direction.
7 The Searcher, John Ford
John Ford created perhaps the greatest of all Westerns, telling the story of a Civil War veteran who tenaciously hunts down the Comanches who have kidnapped his niece.
8 "The Man with the Camera" by Gyga Vertov
The Man with the Camera is a microcosm of Soviet urban life and is the most famous film of the pioneer of experimental documentary Giga Vertov.
9 The Anacony of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodore Dreier
This masterpiece by Carl Theodore Dreyer is a simple but influential drama that presents a silent film with the highest expressiveness against the backdrop of the trial of Joan of Arc.
10 "Eight and a Half" Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini triumphantly freed himself from a bad creative bottleneck with this autobiographical masterpiece about a film director who experienced a creative bottleneck.
11 Battleship Potemkin Sergei Eisenstein
The film, directed by Sergey Eisenstein, about a naval mutiny of 1905, has been an important masterpiece almost since its premiere.
12 "Atlanta" Jean Viggo
The newlyweds started their lives on a working barge, the only feature film directed by Jean Vigo in this bright and poetic romantic film.
13 "Exhausted" Jean-Luc Godard
Godard's precocious debut is an influential jazz, black-based crime drama.
14 Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola moved the setting of Joseph Conrad's colonial-era novel Heart of Darkness to Vietnam to create a visually mesmerizing fantasy of war.
15.Kakushun, Yasujiro Ozu
Ozu Yasujiro's exploration of the relationship between widower and his unmarried adult daughter is often considered a perfect sublimation of his style. Starring Kasa Tomokazu and Setsuko Hara.
16 "Bartha the Donkey" Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson's unique minimalist style elicits extraordinary pathos from the devastating story of this abused donkey passing from one owner to another.
17 "Seven Samurai" Akira Kurosawa
In Akira Kurosawa's influential epic blockbuster, rice farmers hired a team of samurai to protect themselves from bandit robbers, which has since become a touchstone for action movies.
18 "Masquerade" Ingmar Bergman
A nurse (Bibby Anderson) and an actress who refuses to speak (Liv Uman) seem to blend in with Ingmar Bergman's identity as a disturbing, formal experimental psychodrama.
19 "Mirror" Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky created this personal, impressionist, unconventional film poem based on memories of his childhood in the countryside before World War II.
20 "Song in the Rain" Stanley Donan/Gene Kelly
Hollywood's difficult transition from silent to sound film in the late 1920s was perhaps the inspiration for the greatest cinematic musicals.
21 Adventures Michelangelo Antonioni
In Michelangelo Antonioni' groundbreaking and controversial artistic landmark, the mystery of a woman's disappearance from a Mediterranean island hangs in the air.
22 "Contempt" Jean-Luc Godard
With the largest budget to date, Jean-Luc Godard created a widescreen film about the breakdown of a marriage set in the pre-production phase of filming.
23 The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola
The first installment of Francis Ford Coppola's epic trilogy about the crimes of the Corleone family tells a disturbing story: a son is ruthlessly involved in his father's mafia affairs.
24 "Words" By Carl Theodore Dreyer
This is the penultimate film directed by Danish maestro Carl Theodore Dreyer and tells a fable about the power of faith that takes place in a remote religious community.
25 "Fancy Years" Wong Kar Wai
In this charming romance film directed by Wong Kar-wai, Maggie Cheung and Leung Chao-wai play a hong Kong couple in the 1960s who find comfort in each other's company.
26 "Rashomon" Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa's breakthrough film, which propelled Japanese cinema to audiences around the world, tells the story of a forest murder from four different perspectives.
27 Andrey Rublev, Andrey Tarkovsky
In Andrey Tarkovsky's epic musings on the status of art in turbulent times, the life of this iconic painter of the 15th century took center stage.
28 "Mulholland Drive" David Lynch
In David Lynch's intricate new film noir, Naomi Watts plays an aspiring naïve teenage girl who lives with a woman with amnesia just after arriving in Hollywood. The famous open-ended plot reflects the film's origins as a pilot episode of the TV series.
29 "Stalker" By Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalkers take illegal tourists through the overgrown labyrinth of this area, a place full of alien traps and treasures with a room where wishes can be fulfilled...
30 "Havoc" Claude Landsman
People who lived through the Holocaust tell the stories of epic witnesses to the Holocaust.
31 The Godfather 2
The Godfather 2 is a prequel and sequel to The Godfather that tells the story of two generations of the Corleone family fighting for the Supreme Court in a sinister world full of organized crime.
32 "Taxi Driver" Martin Scorsese
This scorching portrait depicts the city's paranoia, a man seeking redemption that ends in a violent showdown.
33 "The Bike Thief" Vittorio DeSica
In the impoverished streets of post-war Rome, bicycle theft became a catalyst for a father and son to peek into the world. A classic of Italian neorealism.
34 The General Buster Keaton/Clyde Brookman
Set during the American Civil War, Buster Keaton's most ambitious film combines spectacular action scenes and burlesque comedy to board the locomotive of escape.
35 Metropolis Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang's avant-garde science fiction depicts a dystopian future in which privileged elites rule the metropolis of the future until one day workers revolt from underground to their masters.
36 Horrors by Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock's low-budget film Horror was often paroded, but never surpassed, paving the way for modern horror cinema.
37 Jeanne Dillmann by Chantel Ackermann
Ackerman meticulously observes the daily life of a single mother in her apartment and what happens when things start to fall apart.
38 Satan Tango By Bella Tal
For up to 7 hours, Tal recounted life in a remote Hungarian village in a slow, contemplative way.
39 "Four Hundred Blows" François Truffaut
Drawing inspiration from his own bumpy childhood, Truffaut created this classic film about a troubled teenager finding his way out of an unfortunate life.
40 "La Dolce Vita" Federico Fellini
Marcello was a gossip journalist whose life was an endless hedonistic party and superficial connection as he searched for meaning in the crumbling grandeur of the once imperial city of Rome.
41 "Tour of Italy" Roberto Rossellini
Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a middle-aged British couple whose marriage breaks down while traveling in Italy. A pioneering work of modernism that links Italian Neorealism with the French New Wave.
42 Song of the Earth, Satyajit Rey
The first part of Satyajit Rey's critically acclaimed Arp trilogy is a lyrical, close-watching story about a peasant family in rural India in the 1920s.
43 "Passion on Fire" by Billy Wilder
In Billy Wilder's wildly popular comedy, in order to escape the Chicago mob, two musicians disguise themselves to join a women's jazz band led by Hugh Kane (Marilyn Monroe).
44 "Gechu" Carl Theodore Dreyer
A woman's conflict between her husband, her lover, and her young lover, and her failure to be happy with any of them.
45 Pierrot the Madman Jean-Luc Godard
In this classic film, Jean-Luc Godard brings the narrative innovation of the French New Wave to a near climax.
46 Playtime by Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati directed and starred in this fun film about a day in Jules, a clumsy one in Paris.
47 "Close-up" by Abbas Chiarostami
A feature documentary based on the true story of an unemployed film fan posing as famous film director Muhsin Mark Malbav tells the story of a woman he meets on a bus. He convinces fans that they will appear in his next film, and eventually, he is put in jail and his trial filmed by Chiarostami.
48 The Battle of Algiers by Gilot Pentakovo
This masterpiece by Giro Pentecov, from the perspective of guerrilla revolutionaries and the French authorities, tells the last years of the upheaval of French colonial rule in Algeria.
49 Histoire(s) du cinéma Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard took an intensive, scattered essay-style reflection on cinema and its relationship to 20th-century political history.
50 City Lights by Charlie Chaplin
In this comical yet heartbreaking comedy, the tramp wins the love of the blind flower girl (Virginia Cheryl). This comedy is one of Charlie Chaplin's unrivalled masterpieces.