It's Always Fair Weather(Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen)
Rififi(Jules Dassin)
Richard III(Laurence Olivier)
Summertime(David Lean)
Killer's Kiss(Stanley Kubrick)
French Cancan(Jean Renoir)
To Catch a Thief(Alfred Hitchcock)
The Ladykillers(Alexander Mackendrick)
Bad Day at Black Rock(John Sturges)
Marty(Delbert Mann)
Guys and Dolls(Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
Pather Panchali(Satyajit Ray)
My Sister Eileen(Richard Quine)
La Pointe-Courte(Agnès Varda)
Lady and the Tramp(Hamilton Luske & Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson)
Kismet(Vincente Minnelli)
Violent Saturday(Richard Fleischer)
The Seven Year Itch(Billy Wilder)
The Phenix City Story(Phil Karlson)
Hill 24 Doesn't Answer(Thorold Dickinson)
Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple(Hiroshi Inagaki)
Man With the Gun(Richard Wilson)
Good Morning, Miss Dove(Henry Koster)
For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.
Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are
marked with if I
currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to
being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit
them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are
especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were
in many cases already pretty dusty.)
Seen but currently unrated (and not
presumptively among my top 10):Artists and Models
(Tashlin); I Live in Fear (Kurosawa); Killer's Kiss
(Kubrick); Lola Montès (Ophüls); Love Me or
Leave Me (Vidor); Mister Roberts (Ford/LeRoy); Picnic
(Logan); This Island Earth (Newman); The Trouble With Harry
(Hitchcock)
As yet unseen:The African Lion
(Algar); The Big Combo (Lewis); The Criminal Life of Archibaldo
de la Cruz (Buñuel); Run for Cover (N. Ray)
I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.