Michael Atkinson is an American writer, poet and film critic. He has written widely on film and culture, in Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Film Comment, The Believer, In These Times, The Criterion Collection, Rolling Stone, The Progressive, Spin, Maxim, The Boston Phoenix, Details, Moving Image Source, IFC.com, TCM.com, Movieline, The Poetry Foundation, Chicago Reader, LA Weekly, The Stranger, The American Prospect, Baltimore City Paper, Modern Painters, and other publications. In 2006 Atkinson was one of 177 critics from around the world who picked their best 10 films from the 21st century for the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century (2016). Below are his picks in order of preference.
1. La commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)
4. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)
5. Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
6. Cache (Hidden) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
7. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
8. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
9. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz, 2010)
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
James Lewis Hoberman known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at The Village Voice in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper’s senior film critic from 1988 to 2012. Below are his top 10 choices for 2007.
1 I’m Not There
2 Eastern Promises
3 13 Lakes and Ten Skies
4 Southland Tales
5 There Will Be Blood
6 Offside
7 Day Night Day Night
8 Terror’s Advocate
9 Panoramas of the Moving Image
10 The Assassination of Jesse James
Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (Hardcover)
The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties (Paperback)
Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) Paperback
Film After Film: Or, What Became Of 21St Century Cinema? (Paperback)
The Magic Hour: Film At Fin De Siecle (Culture And The Moving Image) Paperback
The Village Voice newspaper asked over 50 distinguished film critics to select their ten best films of the 20th Century and the results were published in the January 4, 2000 edition of the paper. No surprises that Citizen Kaneleads the list although 2001 and The Godfather were left out of the top 10.
1. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
2. The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
3. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Searchers (1956, John Ford)
5. The Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
6. Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)
7. L’Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)
8. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
9. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson)
10. Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)
11. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
12. The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)
14. The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
16. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
18. Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith)
19. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
21. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
22. M (1931, Fritz Lang) Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)
24. Earrings of Madame De. (1953, Max Ophuls)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)
27. Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)
Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
30. The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
31. The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
32. The General (1927, Buster Keaton)
33. The Seventh Seal (1956, Ingmar Bergman) Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)
35. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
36. Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
37. The Bicycle Thief (1948, Vittorio DeSica)
City Lights (1931, Charles Chaplin)
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)
Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)
Vivre sa Vie (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
43. Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)
Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
46. Barry Lyndon (1975, Stanley Kubrick) The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)
Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928, Buster Keaton)
49. Contempt (Le Mépris) (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin)
North By Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
52. Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966, George Kuchar)
The Rise of Louis XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)
54. The Apu Trilogy (1955-59, Satyajit Ray) Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974, John Cassavetes)
57. The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
58. The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
The Palm Beach Story (1942, Preston Sturges)
60. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson)
62. An Actor’s Revenge (1963, Kon Ichikawa)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Close-Up (1990, Abbas Kiarostami)
Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
La Jetee (1961, Chris Marker)
Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin)
October (1927, Sergei Eisenstein)
The Young And The Damned (1950, Luis Bunuel)
Paisan (1946, Roberto Rossellini)
Performance (1970, Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell)
Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)
Umberto D (1952, Vittorio De Sica)
Les Vampires (1915-16, Louis Feuillade)
77. All About Eve (1950, Joseph H. Lewis)
All That Heaven Allows (1955, Douglas Sirk) Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
82. Fox and His Friends (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Melies)
Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow)
86. Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda)
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970, Russ Meyer)
The Golden Coach (1952, Jean Renoir)
Salo (1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
90. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette)
Masculine-Feminine (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)
Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau)
Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)
94. Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)
Jules and Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)
Landscape in the Mist (1988, Theo Angelopoulos)
Mean Streets (1973, Martin Scorsese)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock)
Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)
101 Grand Illusion
102 China Gate
Persona
Top Hat
105 The Wild Bunch
106 Blue Velvet
Breaking the Waves
Mauvais sang
The Mother and the Whore
Nashville
Poor Little Rich Girl
112 Andrei Rublev
The Art of Vision
An Autumn Afternoon
The Big Sleep
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Bonnie and Clyde
Bringing Up Baby
The Cameraman
Casablanca
Chelsea Girls
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise
Chimes at Midnight
A Clockwork Orange
The Crowd
D’est
Day of Wrath
Decalogue
The Deer Hunter
Diary of a Country Priest
Dr. Strangelove
La Dolce Vita
The Dybbuk
Early Autumn
8 1/2
Family Feud [with Richard Dawson]
Fear Eats the Soul
Fists in the Pocket
Gertrud
The Girl and Her Trust
Gunnar Hede’s Saga
Histoires du Cinema
How Green Was My Valley
I Was Born But…
The Idiot
Iliad
Imitation of Life
The Iron Crown
L’Argent
L’avventura
The Last Laugh
Late Spring
Le Tunnel sous le Manche
The Leopard
Lessons of Darkness
The Life of Oharu
Man on the Flying Trapeze
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Meshes of the Afternoon
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Monsieur Verdoux
Mouchette
Napoleon
The New Babylon
A Night at the Opera
Nights of Cabiria
Once Upon A Time in America
Othello
Out of the Past
Parade
The Passenger
Peeping Tom
Porky in Wackyland
Potomok Chingis-Khan
The Puppetmaster
Ran
Rebel Without a Cause
Roman Holiday
Rose Hobart
Safe
Safety Last
Satantango
Scenario For A Film Called “Passion”
Scenes From Under Childhood
Seven Chances (1925)
Shadows
The Shop Around the Corner
Solaris
Song Cycle
A Star is Born
Star Spangled to Death
Street Angel
Strike
Terra em transe
Text of Light
The 39 Steps
Tih Minh
A Time to Live and a Time to Die
Triumph of the Will
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Vampyr
Videodrome
Voyage in Italy
Way Down East
Wings of Desire
Within Our Gates
Xala
Young Mr. Lincoln
Zapruder film
Zorn’s Lemma
212 The Ascent
Fallen Angels
Ikiru
The Philadelphia Story
The Pornographers
Red Desert
Red River
Trash
220 Akira
Breathless
High and Low
His Girl Friday
Last Year at Marienbad
Letter From An Unknown Woman
A Matter of Life and Death
The Navigator
Scorpio Rising
229 Dog Star Man
El Paso Wrecking Company
Primary
Wild Strawberries
233 Aliens
The Terminator
235 Johnny Guitar
Picnic
Raging Bull
Vivre sa Vie
The Wrong Man
240 The Evil Dead 2
House of Games
It’s A Gift
Natural Born Killers
The Ten Commandments
Trog
246 Battleground
JFK
Kuhle Wampe
Last Tango in Paris
The Portrait of a Lady
Michael Atkinson is an American writer, poet and film critic. He has written widely on film and culture, in Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Film Comment, The Believer, In These Times, The Criterion Collection, Rolling Stone, The Progressive, Spin, Maxim, The Boston Phoenix, Details, Moving Image Source, IFC.com, TCM.com, Movieline, The Poetry Foundation, Chicago Reader, LA Weekly, The Stranger, The American Prospect, Baltimore City Paper, Modern Painters, and other publications. In 2006 Atkinson was one of 177 critics from around the world who picked their best 10 films from the 21st century for the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century (2016). Below are his picks in order of preference.
Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (Hardcover)
(1934, Jean Vigo)
(1966, Robert Bresson)
(1955, Satyajit Ray)
(1915, D.W. Griffith)
(1939, Victor Fleming)
(1946, Frank Capra)
(1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
(1916, D.W. Griffith)
(1975, Chantal Akerman)
(1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
(1974, Roman Polanski)
(1931, Fritz Lang)
(1953, Max Ophuls)
(1942, Orson Welles)
(1956, Robert Bresson)
(1919, D.W. Griffith)
(1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
(1949, Carol Reed)
(1927, Buster Keaton)
(1956, Ingmar Bergman)
(1955, Charles Laughton)
(1931, Charles Chaplin)
(1933, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)
(1927, Fritz Lang)
(1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
(1933, Leo McCarey)
(1950, Billy Wilder)
(1975, Stanley Kubrick)
(1928, Buster Keaton)
(1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
(1925, Charles Chaplin)
(1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
(1966, Roberto Rossellini)
(1955-59, Satyajit Ray)
(1974, John Cassavetes)
(1941, Preston Sturges)
(1942, Preston Sturges)
(1962, John Ford)
(1959, Robert Bresson)
(1963, Kon Ichikawa)
(1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
(1990, Abbas Kiarostami)
(1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
(1961, Chris Marker)
(1936, Charles Chaplin)
(1927, Sergei Eisenstein)
(1950, Luis Bunuel)
(1946, Roberto Rossellini)
(1970, Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell)
(1985, Claude Lanzmann)
(1966, Jean-Luc Godard)