Last week, the BBC asked 62 film critics from around the world to each submit what they considered the ten greatest American movies of all time. The subsequent list is filled with canonical favorites, including Citizen Kane (which took the top spot), Singin’ in the Rain, and The Godfather, as well as a few surprise appearances—Groundhog Day checked in at number 71, and Steve McQueen’s recent 12 Years a Slave showed up at number 99. The online response was predictable—mostly of the “This list sucks” variety—and after some brief commotion, everyone went back to talking about Star Wars and Marvel movies.
- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943) This is my favorite Powell and Pressburger movie, so of course it’s one of my favorite British movies ever, a politically daring masterpiece. It’s a model of narrative cinema, so intricate in its plotting and storytelling that you’re likely to have a different experience with each revisit. And while the Technicolor cinematography perhaps isn’t as vivid and characteristically outlandish as it is in their other movies, this is still an expressive and colorful film, albeit it in different and more sublime ways.
