All lists of the "greatest" movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese's favorites, or Herzog's? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines.That observation serves as the introduction to a column in which he reviews the result of another list:
The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors.At the link above, he then goes on to provide comments on the top 10 films...
1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton...from a larger group of the top 50, listed at The Spectator in the classically annoying style of one per page so you need to click through 50 pages so they get more pageviews. You can bypass that annoyance and see #26-50 by going to the "print page" layout, or just use the list at the bottom of Ebert's column. I've seen only 22 of these, so apparently I have lots to look forward to.
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
Via Kottke.