Michelle Carey

Artistic director, Melbourne International Film Festival

Australia

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

argent, L'	1928	Marcel L'Herbier
Celine and Julie Go Boating	1974	Jacques Rivette
Close-Up	1989	Abbas Kiarostami
Green Ray, The	1986	Eric Rohmer
Histoire(s) du cinéma		Jean-Luc Godard
In a Lonely Place	1950	Nicholas Ray
One and a Two, A	1999	Edward Yang
Sans Soleil	1982	Chris Marker
Sunrise	1927	F. W. Murnau
Tokyo Story	1953	Ozu Yasujirô

Comments

I am unable to avoid the usual disclaimers about what couldn’t make the list. Entire bodies of work (Fassbinder, Denis, Garrel, Weeresthakul, Lang) rate among the greatest cinema in my view, yet not one individual film features. I’m also finding myself increasingly drawn to comedy yet I struggle to select a single film of that genre. But there is something monumental in each of the films I list. The more I travel into my glorious love affair with the cinema, the more I realise what constitutes a masterpiece: an entire world, an entire sense of being, with all the weight it entails, all its mystery, represented in one film.