
Mark Cousins’s Top10
Mark Cousins is a critic and filmmaker based in Edinburgh. He is the writer and director of the fifteen-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011).
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1 (tie)
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Pier Paolo Pasolini
Arabian Nights
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.
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2
Nicolas Roeg
Bad Timing
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.
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3
Agnès Varda
Le bonheur
Not Agnès Varda’s best-known film but her most visually beautiful one. Erotic, sunny, bleak, and bold.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Veronika Voss
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.
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5
Abbas Kiarostami
Close-up
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.
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6
Akira Kurosawa
High and Low
Akira Kurosawa is best known for Seven Samurai, but this is more fun. Hitchcockian and full of dread and gorgeous widescreen imagery.
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7
Shohei Imamura
The Insect Woman
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.
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8
Haskell Wexler
Medium Cool
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.
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9
Ritwik Ghatak
A River Called Titas
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.
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10
Billy Wilder
Ace in the Hole
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.