'Citizen Kane' (1941)
Five decades of being considered the best film in history justify this first place for Citizen Kane. The story is round, film noir, drama, and thriller are found in this film that masterfully portrays the journalism of the early twentieth century at the hands of a mystery.
But what the film hides is a voracious criticism of the figure of William Randolph Hearst, transferred to fiction through Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles, also a director and screenwriter of the film along with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
'2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
One of the greatest movies ever began with the meeting of two brilliant minds: Stanley Kubrick and science fiction seer Arthur C. Clarke. "I understand he's a nutcase living in a tree somewhere in India," Kubrick said when Clarke's name came up - along with those of Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury - as a possible writer for his projected film. science fiction epic. Clarke lived in Ceylon (not in India, not in a tree), but the two met, hit it off, and forged a tale of technological progress and disaster steeped in humanity, in all its brilliance, weakness, bravery, and mad ambition.
An audience captivated by its striking Star Gate sequence and groundbreaking visual effects embraced it as their favorite film. If not for them, 2001 might have been forgotten, but it's hard to imagine it would have stayed there. Kubrick's terrifying clinical vision of the future - artificial intelligence and all - still seems prescient more than 50 years later.
'The Godfather (1972)
From the smart-ass Goodfellas to The Sopranos, every crime dynasty that came after The Godfather is descended from the Corleones: Francis Ford Coppola's magnum opus is the ultimate patriarch of the gangster genre. A monumental opening line ("I believe in America") sets Mario Puzo's operatic adaptation in motion, before Coppola's epic morphs into a chilling dismantling of the American dream. Steeped in corruption, the story follows a powerful immigrant family grappling with the paradoxical values of kingship and religion;
Those moral contradictions crystallize in a legendary baptism sequence, superbly edited to parallel the murder of four rival mobsters. With countless iconic details - the severed head of a horse, the sibilant voice of Marlon Brando, the catchy waltz of Nino Rota - the authority of The Godfather lives on.
'Vertigo (Back From The Dead)' (1958)
One of the culminating works of the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was the only film capable of unseating, in 2012, Citizen Kane, considered for no less than 50 years as the best film in history. In Vertigo we meet an innocent protagonist and a mystery that awakens disturbing unknowns. These were the bases of one of the most surprising script twists in cinema.
The critics have not had too many doubts between the first two positions in seven decades although, curiously, in this 2022 the famous list of the magazine Sight & Sound has placed by surprise the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 trade quay, 1080 Bruxelles, from the Belgian Chantal Akerman, in the coveted first place.
