Top Ranked Films of Nicolas Roeg

Nicolas Roeg
4 titles, 90th in points with 9,472

Roeg is a cinematographer turned director with some imaginative, stunning results, especially from a visual sense. A veteran of British cinema for 23 years before directing, he once worked on the second unit for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia, one of my favorite films. Performance (1970) woke me up when I first saw it, with gangster James Fox taking refuge in the mansion of a jaded rock star, Mick Jagger, to escape being killed by unnamed enemies; Roeg shared directing credit on this one, as well as being the cinematographer.

His first solo effort soon followed, and for me, Walkabout was one of the most unexpected and beautiful films I’d ever seen at that point, and remains so today. For me, it sums up my idea of Australia perfectly, a garden of eden tainted by what we like to call the progress of civilization. Two white kids are stranded in the outback when their father drives them there then kills himself, and they are lost when rescued by an aborigine teen on his walkabout, his rite of manhood. Without his survival skills, the two would have soon perished, and the three make an odd nuclear unit taking on the outback without any adult supervision. This was an entralling, inspired story, at the level of great literature; Joseph Conrad readily comes to mind, it’s that good.

These are all the films of director British Nicolas Roeg that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.

1. Performance (1970) / w.Donald Cammell #326
2. Don't Look Now (1973) #342
3. Walkabout (1971) #608
4. Man Who Fell to Earth, The (1976) #694

Just out of the top 1000
5. Bad Timing (1980) #1261 Underrated, I found this murder mystery both unique and compelling, and one that demands a re-watch

I didn’t find Don’t Look Now as successful as the other two in the top 3 here (but obviously most others did), a little too derivative of Hitchcock perhaps, but it did at least have some pace. The Man Who Fell to Earth fell apart in that regard, being so slow that it failed to involve me much at all, and I usually love good science fiction. I grew up on sf novels and have read about 500 at this point, certainly every famous and award-winning one. This is not good science fiction, it’s main claim to fame being that it was David Bowie’s first attempt at acting, appropriately playing an alien humanoid who lands on earth, and blends in well enough except he has about triple the IQ of normal people. It just didn’t go anywhere, and became a mundane story almost as boring as reality itself.


See the full list of top ranked 100 directors here: Top Ranked 100 Directors, 2011 Edition

Top Ranked Films of Danny Boyle

Danny Boyle
3 titles, 85th in points with 9,917

Danny Boyle is constantly surprising people. After a string of well-made films that still didn’t make him a household name, like Shallow Grave (reminiscent of Hitchcock), Millions, and the better-known Trainspotting, which I think has achieved cult status, Boyle made Slumdog Millionaire. This surpising film seemingly combined inspiration from Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) with a popular tv game show in which someone could win a million dollars if they kept risking their current winnings to continue further in the game.

The film covered the lives of two orphaned brothers in Mumbai and a girl they grew up with, showing their lives as children, as teens, and as adults. All the actors were engaging at each level, and the film made overnight international stars of the two young adult leads, the ravishing Freida Pinto, and Dev Patel, who was the quiz show contestant. The highly successful film won 8 Oscars®, including best picture and best director of 2008.

Freida Pinto was 19 when cast in Slumdog Millionaire

A small bit of trivia: the film opens with a chase through the ghetto of Mumbai, and shows a rooster at one point; some orphan kids are being chased by police. Fernando Meirelles' classic from Brazil, City of God (2002), opens with a rooster being chased through the slums of Rio during the film's credits. To me, Boyle's opening seems like a direct visual homage to another classic slum film.

Boyle followed that up with the surprising film 127 Hours, a docudrama recreating the story of a wilderness guide and trekker who gets trapped in a canyon in Utah when he slips into a crevice, dislodging a small boulder that traps him by pinning his right arm between the boulder and a rock wall. If you don’t know the story, I won’t spoil it. If you watch the film, Boyle does a good job of not giving away too much, and maintaining both tension and interest throughout in what could have been a boring man-in-a-trap film.

These are all the films of British director Danny Boyle that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of theTop Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.

1. Trainspotting (1995) #170 This film is not for the squeamish, it deals directly with heroin addicts, needles, and toilets
2. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) #220
3. 127 Hours (2010) #786

Just out of the top 1000
4. 28 Days Later (2002) #1175

For my money, there are two more important Boyle films missing. They are more on the entertainment level than the ranked films, but as such, they succeed.

Shallow Grave (1994) - This Hitchcockian crime thriller follows three amateur robbers who make a big heist then hide the money in their attic, then try to remain friends. This is humorous as well as deadly serious crime and resulting paranoia, which is why I’m reminded of Hitch – in fact, this is as good as most of the humorous films of the master.

Millions (2004)  - Some poor kids are playing beside a railroad track in a cardboard playhouse, wishing for money, when a bag of stolen money tossed from the train literally lands on them. The story here is how the money changes a family in good and bad ways, and the tension is maintained by those who lost the money seeking the finders.


See the full list of top ranked 100 directors here: Top Ranked 100 Directors, 2011 Edition

Top Ranked Films of Carol Reed

Reed directing Mark Lester in Oliver!

Carol Reed
3 titles, 71st in points with 11,909

These are all the films of classic British director Carol Reed’s that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.

1. The Third man (1949) bw#23
2. Fallen Idol, The (1948) #490
3. Odd Man Out (1947) bw #634

Mostly noted for the noirish The Third Man (which I found spoiled by incessant zither music), I actually prefer Odd Man Out (featuring a young, intense James Mason) and his adaptation of Conrad’s novel Outcast of the Islands (1951), with Trevor Howard as a white man in a tropical island paradise (in Malaysia) who sells his soul for money. This film should be ranked, it’s the best adaptation, to me, of any of Joseph Conrad’s novels, who was Polish but learned to write in English as he considered it the language of literature. His resulting works are terrific, especially the shorter ones like this, Heart of Darkness, Almayer’s Folly (the prequel to this story, which also stars Robert Morley as Almayer, a British merchant in the same Malaysian islands), and The Nigger of the Narcissus.

Also missing is his musical adaptation of the stage musical based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Oliver! (1967)  [photo top] and which won the best picture Oscar® for that year.

See the full list of top ranked 100 directors here: Top Ranked 100 Directors, 2011 Edition

Top Ranked Films of David Lean

David Lean
28th w 20784 pts, 5 titles

British director David Lean excelled in the modern historical epic film. Few directors would go to the isolated locations to film his biggest stories, films that defied the scale of the screen itself, as landscapes dwarfed both humans and the art of the cinema itself. The desert in Lawrence and the frozen Russian wilderness in Zhivago have few rivals in cinema history for environment as character.
These are all the films of David Lean’s that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls, and all were in the top 500.

1. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) #24
2. Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957) #127
3. Brief Encounter (1945) #309
4. Great Expectations (1946) #481
5. Doctor Zhivago (1965) #499

These five are all top 1000 worthy, especially Lawrence of Arabia, one of the best historical films of all time and a primer on guerilla warfare.

The only other Lean film mentioned:
6. Ryan's Daughter (1970) #1836

Why does no one ever rank A Passage to India (1984)? It's much better than Ryan's Daughter, and on par with Doctor Zhivago and Great Expectations.

See the full list of top ranked 100 directors here: Top Ranked 100 Directors, 2011 Edition

Top Ranked Films of Michael Powell

Michael Powell
8 titles, tied for 11th with 5 others – 34th overall in points with 19,155, just behind Robert Altman and just ahead of Clint Eastwood

Michael Latham Powell (September 30, 1905 – February 19, 1990) was a renowned English film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, working together as "The Archers". Reputedly Powell basically directed and Pressburger basically wrote screenplays, but the two obviously felt it all to be a collaberative effort.

Powell got his start at an early Technicolor specialist on films, trained by that color studio. He gradually gravitated to directing, and eventually made some of the most visual and color-saturated films of that era, notably A Matter of Life and Death (1946, aka Stairway to Heaven in the U.S., which balked at a film with death in the title soon after WW2), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948). Black Narcissus in particular is one of the most visually stunning films ever made, and Powell recreated the look of a convent in the Himilayas all on a British sound stage with matte painting backgrounds. Ironically, he was vilified for his solo work Peeping Tom, which was really just a Hitchcockian murder thriller, a bit too unsubtle for my taste compared to his other films.

These are all the films of Powell’s (both with and without Pressburger) that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.

1. The Red Shoes (1948) #252
2. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) #350
3. Peeping Tom (1960) #360
4. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) #422
5. Black Narcissus (1947) #438
6. Thief of Bagdad, The (1940) #578
7. A Canterbury Tale (1944) bw #710
8. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) #799

I like all of Powell’s films. Red Shoes is probably the most intense, Black Narcissus the most visual, and A Matter of Life and Death (released in the U.S. as "Stairway to Heaven") the most cerebral, dealing as it does with the afterlife vs corporal reality, the connection between the two, and judgment as a man must argue to continue his life.

Martin Scorsese was so influenced by him that he flew to England to meet him after Powell’s retirement, and then brought him back to the U.S. to meet other directors affected by his work. Powell was apparently overwhelmed and assumed he had retired into relative obscurity, had no idea his work was so revered among other directors. I haven’t reviewed it but also liked I Know Where I’m Going, an early black-and-white film about stormy islands, and Edge of the World, another early bw film about people barely surviving in the outer Shetland Islands.

The stunningly shot Black

Narcissus is a good example

of Powell's visual work

See the full list of top ranked 100 directors here: Top Ranked 100 Directors, 2011 Edition