Jamie Graham

Freelance film journalist, Editor-at-Large of Total Film magazine
UK

Voted for

FilmYearDirector
2001: A Space Odyssey1968Stanley Kubrick
Apocalypse Now1979Francis Ford Coppola
Citizen Kane1941Orson Welles
The Passion of Joan of Arc1927Carl Th. Dreyer
Persona1966Ingmar Bergman
Stand by Me1986Rob Reiner
Taxi Driver1976Martin Scorsese
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre1974Tobe Hooper
There Will Be Blood2007Paul Thomas Anderson
Tokyo Story1953Yasujirō Ozu

Comments

Seven of my selections are holdovers from my 2012 list, but choosing the three to join them was a maddening pleasure – I revisited 50-odd contenders to establish which titles most chimed with me, right here, right now. I wanted to include them all, of course, and many more besides, but on this particular pass it was especially agonising to lose Fellini’s 8½, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Bresson’s A Man Escaped. I am shocked that I could not find room for any Hitchcock or Powell on my list.