Richard Corliss

Critic, Time magazine

US

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

Chungking Express	1994	Wong Kar Wai
Citizen Kane	1941	Orson Welles
Histoire(s) du cinéma		Jean-Luc Godard
Lady Eve, The	1941	Preston Sturges
Mouchette	1966	Robert Bresson
Psycho	1960	Alfred Hitchcock
Pyaasa	1957	Guru Dutt
Searchers, The	1956	John Ford
Seventh Seal, The	1957	Ingmar Bergman
WALL-E	2008	Andrew Stanton

Comments

Six of my ten selections were made between 1941 and 1967, though on three continents. These aren’t simply demonstrations of loyalty to movies I loved in my youth, but also an argument that most films of the last half-century have been variations on earlier models, whose surpassing audacity and craft they cannot match. The great example remains Citizen Kane, which, among its other triumphs, is a sealed masterpiece allowing no sequels or remakes.