Mark Cousins’s Top10

I saw these in my twenties, and loved their vulgarity, their escapism, and Pasolini’s belief that in former times, people were freer about their bodies and life was more fun. They are illicit travelogues, joyous and, probably, wrong.

Love, according to this film, is close to death. Theresa Russell is raw and beautiful, and the film is full of symbols, of heartaches, of obsessions—Harvey Keitel’s, Art Garfunkel’s. Like a Schiele painting, which is high praise.

Not Agnès Varda’s best-known film but her most visually beautiful one. Erotic, sunny, bleak, and bold.

What a troika of women Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss are! Willful, performing, fascinating, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s women are versions of himself, his languor and despair. Wow.

A film about pretending to be someone, so inventive that your head aches. Abbas Kiarostami is the Galileo of cinema; he rethinks it, repositions us within it.

Akira Kurosawa is best known for Seven Samurai, but this is more fun. Hitchcockian and full of dread and gorgeous widescreen imagery.

One of the glories of Criterion is that it has so many films by Shohei Imamura. I’ve long said that this is the best film ever made. Maybe one day I’ll stop saying it, or stop believing it, but until then it will, for me, show everything—the reason for living and the reason for making movies.

I saw this when I was a teenager, and was struck by the nudity and atmosphere. Then I met Haskell Wexler and watched his film again, and realized that it is Godard in America—fragmented, passionately political, inventive, and seductive.

Ritwik Ghatak was India’s Sam Peckinpah: drunk, bellicose, brilliant. He brought a Bengali sense of literature and sadness to his work. You’ll maybe only understand half this film at first (certainly the case for me), but its richness overwhelms.

My taste usually runs to loosely structured films, but this one is as taut as a drum. Kirk Douglas is as snappy as Edward G. Robinson, and the story—about the press exploiting tragedy—is Rupert Murdoch–ian. A film that seems to get younger as time goes on.