Josephine Botting

Curator, BFI National Archive

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

2001: A Space Odyssey	1968	Stanley Kubrick
Artist, The	2011	Michel Hazanavicius
enfants du paradis, Les	1945	Marcel Carné
His Girl Friday	1939	Howard Hawks
Night to Remember, A	1958	Roy Ward Baker
Once Upon a Time in the West	1968	Sergio Leone
Passport to Pimlico	1949	Henry Cornelius
Rear Window	1954	Alfred Hitchcock
Seventh Seal, The	1957	Ingmar Bergman
Spirit of the Beehive, The	1973	Víctor Erice

Comments

While I find exercises such as this rather self-indulgent and just a little pretentious, it is nice to take a break from the diet of British movies that BFI curators generally consume. My list is a mixture of films that I watch repeatedly with affection and nostalgia and those I would describe as ‘great’, by which I mean emotionally compelling, exceptionally innovative or just spectacular.