It’s almost Oscar time again, and I’ve followed the Academy Awards for long enough now to know that they don’t always represent the quality and scope of the year’s best movies. Yet, there’s something about the award season’s glitziest bash that turns me into the film buff equivalent of a WWE fan, who knows deep down that the fighting isn’t actually real, but can’t help going mental when the contenders start hurling themselves from the top turnbuckle.

In anticipation of the 88th Academy Awards nominations, here’s a list of Oscar’s worst and weirdest oversights in the Best Picture category.

10 Films That Should’ve Won Best Picture

#10. Pan’s Labyrinth

Dark-hued, dangerous and melancholy, Guillermo del Toro’s visionary fairytale grows in stature year by year, already looking like one of the films of the young century. It is a deeply textured masterwork, creating a fully realised reality and alternative reality for its young heroine Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who seeks refuge from the horrors of post-civil war Spain in a fantasy world, only to find it as dark and violent as real life.

Evoking the primal, ancient morality tales of old rather than the sanitized hokum of Disney, it strikes a resonant chord in our deepest wishes and fears. It was probably a bit too obscure for voters—foreign language films rarely get much recognition in the Best Picture category, although lightweight fare such as Il Postino has made a showing in modern times. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed took Best Pic, and it had the misfortune to go up against the excellent The Lives of Others in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I’m sure time will separate Pan’s Labyrinth from both movies significantly.

#9. Pulp Fiction

Quentin Tarantino’s burst of pure cinema is arguably the most influential film of the past twenty-five years. It changed the way people made, wrote and thought about movies ever since. Two decades later, QT is an auteur who can make whatever he wants, please the critics (most of the time), and pack out theatres across the world. Hell, he could even adapt his grocery list for the screen and it would still be a hit.

Pulp Fiction was the perfect blend of attitude, style, music, dialogue, set pieces, dance moves, top shelf performances, and sheer, balls-out bravado. It was sensational, and struck at exactly the right time.

#8. Field of Dreams

The 62nd Awards were arguably the nadir for Oscar, with the twee Driving Miss Daisy beating a strong field including Born on the Forth of July, Dead Poet’s Society, My Left Foot, and my pick, Field of Dreams to Best Picture.

You don’t need to be a baseball fan to be enchanted by this tale of Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), compelled by ghostly voices to build a baseball diamond over his crops. Told straight and featuring Costner at his most disarming and sincere, it’s a wonderful piece of modern myth-making. It’s a film about nostalgia and regret, but also an optimistic, magic hour celebration of the dreamer in all of us.

#7. The Killing Fields

Losing to Milos Forman’s grandiose, gaudy and rather campy Amadeus, Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields is an impassioned yet sensitive depiction of the apocalyptic Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It’s centred on the relationship between two journalists, American Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson) and Cambodian Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S Ngor) caught amid the brutal regime change.

Working from a grown up screenplay by Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I), Joffe captures the chaos and turmoil of those years in great detail, with escalating panic as the US ditches its Cambodian allies. Schanberg is reluctantly forced to follow suit, leaving Pran to fend for himself in Year Zero. Ngor’s dignified, resolute performance is humbling—a first-time actor, he survived the ordeal in real life before making it to the States in 1980.

#6. Raging Bull / The Elephant Man

Take your pick, either film would have been a worthier winner than Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, which no one has seen since it took the Best Picture trophy at the 53rd awards. Both biopics shot in wondrous black and white, Scorsese and David Lynch’s films examine opposite ends of the human spectrum—Robert De Niro’s repugnant, self-destructive Middleweight Champ Jake La Motta, and John Hurt’s gentle and intelligent John Merrick, trapped inside a hideously deformed body.

Raging Bull is brutal and depressing, The Elephant Man ethereal and heartbreaking. Both have become modern masterpieces.

#5. The Exorcist

William Friedkin’s iconic horror has lost some of its shock value over the years, and I think it is all the better for it. Once you’re over all the head-spinning and spider-walking, you can concentrate on the story itself, and it always amazes me each time I see it how positive the film is. The Exorcist is a good movie in the purest sense of the word, and I think that you can draw encouragement from it no matter what your theological standpoint.

If you’re a person of faith, it makes great propaganda for the church, showing the Devil as crude and debased, while God’s humble servants selflessly lay down their lives to save a possessed little girl. If you’re agnostic, you can be buoyed by the sheer decency of the human characters in the film. If a bomb goes off in a public place, there are always people who run towards the explosion, disregarding their own safety in the hope of saving others.

That’s what the characters in The Exorcist are like, especially old and dispirited Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and young and doubting Father Karras (Jason Miller)—on blind faith they ride to the rescue with no evidence that God has their backs. Despite its diabolical reputation, I find The Exorcist such an incredibly uplifting film.

#4. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick didn’t get much love from the Academy—between them, they won a grand total of zero awards for Best Director. 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, but I’m listing Dr. Strangelove because I absolutely hate the film that beat it, George Cukor’s smug, shrieking My Fair Lady. (Interesting side note: Audrey Hepburn sported one of two dodgy Cockney accents in the Best Pic category that year, along with Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.)

Perhaps coming a little too soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Strangelove‘s acerbic satire has become synonymous with the insanity of war. Comedy madman Peter Seller’s three performances are rightly celebrated, but it is the supporting trio of Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens and George C Scott that really stick with you, ultra believable as crazed military men deliriously willing to push the world over the brink of mutually assured destruction to get one over on the Ruskies. Kubrick observes all this madness with a sardonic, deadpan gaze, and the film concludes with one of the most terrifyingly beautiful scenes of all time – the end of the world set to Dame Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.

#3. Vertigo

No popular filmmaker quite flaunted his kinks and fetishes on the screen quite as obsessively as the Portly Pervert (aka Master of Suspense) Alfred Hitchcock. Vertigo, his most personal vision, was met with a mixed reaction by critics and making little impact at the Oscars, only picking up a couple of technical awards.

These days we’re all amateur psychologists, so I think the modern audience is better positioned to appreciate Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It’s the eerie, twisted tale of a detective ruthlessly shaping a shop girl into the object of his obsessions, an icy blonde (what else in Hitchcock?) that he couldn’t prevent committing suicide because of his fear of heights. James Stewart is magnificent, tainting his good guy image to queasy effect.

#2. The Third Man

Orson Welles already had the greatest film of all time under his belt (Citizen Kane), and a few years later he gave us the greatest movie entrance of all time in Carol Reed’s funny, thrilling and fatalistic The Third Man. We follow Joseph Cotten’s gullible pulp novelist through the noirish, expressionistic underworld of post-war Vienna in search of his old best friend Harry Lime (Welles), wanted by the authorities for peddling dodgy penicillin. Anton Karas’s fabulous zither theme perfectly captures the tone of the film, managing to be jaunty and slightly sinister at the same time. A thing of joy.

#1. Citizen Kane

Although regarded as a cornerstone of modern cinema, Orson Welles’s masterpiece lost out on Outstanding Motion Picture to a film well-regarded but little-seen these days, How Green Was My Valley. Maybe it isn’t so difficult to see why – the Oscars have always been a popularity contest, and I think you need to be a bit of a cinephile to get the most out of Citizen Kane. The film is like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, a magnificent, chilly mausoleum to its creator’s limitless talent, ambition and vanity. A miraculous piece of film making, but there’s little warmth within.

Also worth mentioning is another losing Best Pic nominee at the 1942 ceremony, a tight, atmospheric detective thriller called The Maltese Falcon. While small in scope, it crystallised our notion of noir, and its influence can be seen in movies as diverse as Chinatown, Blade Runner and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. But what about movies? We’re huge fans of well-designed movie covers here at Way Too Indie, and while we wouldn’t say the design impacts our overall judgment of the film, we admit a good design may influence us to watch it in the first place. So we created a list of the 75 Greatest Movie Cover Designs of all-time, comprised of new and old titles, special edition releases, and from boutique distributors like the Criterion Collection (clearly our favorite, earning 34 spots on this list).

12 Angry Men (Criterion Collection)

Brilliant design with 12 hand-drawn portraits of the jury featured in this essential courtroom drama, each with red backgrounds except for the one in the middle, which represents Henry Fonda as the man who stands out from the group with his own opinion. [DJ]

127 Hours

It may not be immediately obvious, but the sides of the canyon form an hourglass timer and the setting sun looks like sand. Very fitting with the tagline of the film, “Every second counts.” [DJ]

A Clockwork Orange

Simply an iconic poster with minimal design that somehow makes the ’70s block font used on the title tolerable. [DJ]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an eerie, experimental film, so it’s only fitting that its home video release includes eerie, experimental cover art. [BH]

Adaptation

A funny little image that hints at the madness of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s hilarious and painful world. [RS]

Almost Famous (Special Edition)

Cameron Crowe’s magnum opus gets a fantastically ornate and fun cover for its Bootleg Cut. Have a magnifying glass handy. [NG]

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection)

The first of several Saul Bass designs on this list. This striking design is such a classic that Spike Lee essentially stole the design for his 1995 film Clockers. [DJ]

Artificial Intelligence

Using the kid from the film as the ‘i’ in Intelligence and then inversing him to form the ‘a’ in Artificial is a simple, yet clever design. [DJ]

As Above, So Below

The design fits the title of the film so perfectly. [DJ]

Being John Malkovich (Criterion Collection)

There’s more brilliance than meets the eye in this simple Criterion cover of Being John Malkovich, perfectly suiting the eccentric nuances of the film. [NG]

Bicycle Thieves (Arrow)

The shadow from the two main characters form a bicycle. Great use of…foreshadowing.[DJ]

Blade Runner (Steelbook)

The rainy spotlight shines on the origami in this gorgeous Blade Runner Blu-Ray steelbook, evoking the pulpy, mysterious mood of the classic sci-fi noir. [NG]

Blind Woman’s Curse (Arrow)

The original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Through beautiful design, Teruo Ishii’s exploitation classic practically jumps off the cover. [NG]

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Simple but gorgeous artwork which plays off the color from the film’s title. [DJ]

Boogie Nights

Simply a beautiful retro design on the special edition release of this masterpiece. [RS]

Boyhood

The contrast from the grass provides excellent contrast for the title. Plus, it wonderfully represents the dreamlike ideology of boyhood. [DJ]

Buried (Steelbook)

This cover explains the entire premise of the film; a man buried under ground and trapped inside a box. [DJ]

The Cabin in the Woods

The cabin pictured in the design looks almost like an Rubik’s cube, hinting at the puzzling plot found in the film. [DJ]

The Complete Jacques Tati (Criterion Collection)

Might be the best on the list because it doesn’t just come with one spectacular looking design cover, it’s a collection of several beautiful illustrated covers in one package. [DJ]

The Conjuring

At first glance it looks like an ordinary horror film cover, until you notice the shadow near the bottom. [DJ]

The Dark Knight Rises (Steelbook)

The broken mask and heavy rain combine for one dramatic looking design. [DJ]

The Devil’s Backbone (Criterion Collection)

There’s very little ambiguity in Criterion’s cover design for The Devil’s Backbone. A wartime horror film dealing with the paranormal receives artwork that seamlessly bridges the gap between those two subjects. It’s impressive, to say the least. [BH]

Day For Night (Criterion Collection)

Francois Truffaut’s masterpiece is a love letter to the beautifully chaotic nature of making a movie, and Criterion’s cover art for the film perfectly encapsulates the vibe of Day for Night. [BH]

Days of Heaven (Criterion Collection)

I love how sharply in focus and imposing the house is in relation to Gere’s fuzzy appearance in the foreground. [BB]

Dogtooth

A man staring at grass infront of a fence accurately sums up the absurd censorship portrayed in the film. And after you’ve seen the film the airplane makes a lot of sense too. [DJ]

Diabolique (Criterion Collection)

A dazzling illustration of a key scene in this French thriller. The rippling water effect on the typeface is a brilliant touch. [DJ]

Dressed To Kill (Criterion Collection)

A wonderful composition equal parts suggestive and creepy, totally befitting De Palma as a master of erotic thrillers. [RS]

Drive (Steelbook)

This Steelbook cover has rad ’80s flair thanks to hot pink lettering and the neon sign looking design. [DJ]

Enemy

The Toronto skyline transposed over Jake Gyllenhaal’s head signifies the brain-teasing doppelganger story found in the film. [DJ]

Enter the Void

Bright neon colors. Overstimulated visuals. Odd angles. The cover design perfectly matches the film. [DJ]

Escape From Tomorrow

The easy to recognize drawing of a certain iconic Disney character covered in blood captures the frightening twist this film has of the “happiest place on earth”. [DJ]

Eyes Without A Face (Criterion Collection)

Those eyes!! Edith Scob’s piercing gaze is captured in haunting fashion by Criterion’s designers here, made all the more striking by its ingenious choice of white as facelessness. [NG]

Foreign Correspondent (Criterion Collection)

The vibrant Criterion cover, with its 3D-like rain and sea of murky umbrellas, elevates one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lesser-known films to must-own status. Watch the behind the curtains video for this particular design. [NG]

The Game (Criterion Collection)

A brilliant design for a film about a man brought to the edge by both temptation and the illusory structure of society finally forgets his weight and allows gravity to pull him downward. [EH]

Hard Candy

The bright red hoodie draws your focus in like a target, and the trap fits well with the cat and mouse theme in the film. [DJ]

High and Low (Criterion Collection)

Perfect use of the epicenter motif that couldn’t be paired with a better image from the film. [BB]

House (Criterion Collection)

Those eyes just don’t leave you. It’s a fiery and startling image that you can’t help but pause to take a second look at while browsing through the DVD racks. [BB]

The Human Condition (Criterion Collection)

A simple design but not one without the kind of quiet power that characterizes Kobayashi’s work. [BB]

Jaws

I was tempted to write nothing here, quite possibly the most iconic cover in all of film it pretty much speaks for itself. [RS]

Jurassic Park

The iconic logo (which is used all over in the film) helped make this design an instant classic. [DJ]

The Lobster

Technically, this is a poster design for a film that hasn’t been properly released yet, but we’re including it anyways. Fantastic use of negative space. [DJ]

Lord Of War

Nicolas Cage’s face made out of bullets is exactly what the world needs. [DJ]

Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion Collection)

Wonderfully represents two companions forced apart by circumstances out of their control, drifting gradually but surely down separate, melancholic paths. [EH]

Medium Cool (Criterion Collection)

A tremendously striking image from the juxtaposition of its colors to the image-within-an-image design. [BB]

Melancholia (Plain Archive)

Great contrast between the sepia tone still from the film and the turquoise script lettering of the title. [DJ]

Memento (Special Edition)

Nothing fancy here. Just pure, unfiltered, genius. Presenting Memento in the form Leonard’s case file will put an insta-smile on every fan, while enticing anyone who hasn’t seen the film to peek inside and get their minds blown. [NG]

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Criterion Collection)

A fittingly flamboyant explosion of color and a gorgeous application of the mirroring effect. [BB]

Moonrise Kingdom (Criterion Collection)

The latest Wes Anderson on Criterion is one of his very best films, aptly honored by one of Criterion’s most epic and intricate designs. [NG]

Network (Arrow)

A wonderful rendering of a rouge news anchor ‘telling it how it is’ on air, with the finger-pointing arm coming out of the TV set. [DJ]

Nymphomaniac (Vol. 1 and 2)

The whole marketing campagin behind the film was very on point, and so is this cover design featuring nine characters mid-orgasm. [DJ]

On The Waterfront (Criterion Collection)

This screen print looking design is splendid, especially with the inclusion of the birds, which are a major theme in the film. [DJ]

Onibaba (Eureka)

This formidable Masters Of Cinema cover, alluding to the dementia in Shindo’s classic ghost tale, does Criterion one better! [NG]

Quadrophenia (Criterion Collection)

The choice to color and arrange The Who lyrics in a way that replicates the band’s logo and circles the film’s main character is simply awesome. [BB]

The Raid (UK Steelbook)

One of the best-looking steelbook designs around, the picture on this cover of The Raid paints a thousand words of glorious violence. [NG]

Repo Man (Criterion Collection)

It makes perfect sense for a decidedly West Coast punk rock film to receive a punk rock artwork over a map of Los Angeles. It’s a bit surprising that Criterion is the distributor to make that happen, but they have done a fantastic job. [BH]

Repulsion (Criterion Collection)

This Criterion cover recalls the broken nerves and intense paranoia of Roman Polanski’s classic apartment horror in loud and disorienting whiteness. [NG]

Scanners (Criterion Collection)

Criterion’s cover design for one of Cronenberg’s most beloved films features a different kind of head explosion, but it’s extremely clever nonetheless. [BH]

Seconds (Criterion Collection)

A strange and interesting design that draws me in every time I come across it. [RS]

The Secret of the Grain (Criterion Collection)

Hands held high in the air but eyes facing the Earth and a disparity of light and darkness on either side: will the story end in glory or tragedy? [EH]

The Shining

Saul Bass designed equally amazing the yellow theatrical release poster, but the actual cover used for the home release of the film is great too. Very Kubrickian. [DJ]

Submarine

Using a white background allows the colorful text and images to really stand out. Great example of a clean design. [DJ]

The Sweet Smell of Success (Criterion Collection)

It’s rare for DVD art to double as something that could easily be hung on the wall and admired. This is one of those rarities. [BB]

Talk To Her

Like the film itself, shows a wonderful use of color and Pedro Almodovar’s great imagery. [RS]

The Thing

Never fails to capture my attention. I always end up watching the film if I stare at this cover too long, usually only takes a minute or so. [RS]

Three Colors Trilogy (Criterion Collection)

Criterion borrows one the most emblematic shots from Kieslowski’s indelible Trilogy for this spectacular mixture of red, white, and blue. [NG]

Trance

A chatoic arrangement of shapes, colors, and an image of a man screaming. As the title suggests, it puts you in a trance. [DJ]

The Tree of Life

Gorgeous snapshots of life are found throughout the film, so it’s fitting that the cover contains a bunch as well. [DJ]

Under the Skin

Scarlett Johansson’s colorful face blended in with outer space personifies her character in the film perfectly. [DJ]

The Vanishing (Criterion Collection)

Possibly the most brilliant cover I’ve ever seen, the simplistic design brilliantly reflects the painful frustration of the protagonist as the more you step away the clearer the image becomes. [RS]

Vertigo

The figures appear to be falling into the vortex of the geometrical downward spiral which symbolizes the meaning of the film’s title. And the imperfect hand lettering of Saul Bass. [DJ]

Videodrome (Criterion Collection)

Setting aside the disturbing central image, the color bars in the Criterion bar and the subtle horizontal lines running throughout make this an inspired design. [BB]

We Are Still Here

With We Are Still Here, writer-director Ted Geoghegan pays tribute to old-school Italian horror. Its brilliant cover design pays tribute to traditional haunted house films. It’s a damn-near-perfect artistic interpretation. [BH]

Wings of Desire (Criterion Collection)

An angel looks down at the world, a well-meaning voyeur, and his gaze shows a fusion of both inquisitiveness and sorrow. [EH]

World on a Wire (Criterion Collection)

An individual trapped in the center of a sideways cultural venn diagram, unsure of whether the environment surrounding him is the reality he’s used to, or merely a simulation brought forth by the incomprehensible Simulacron. [EH]

Y tu Mama Tambien (Criterion Collection)

A brilliant composition of blended images meant to look like an old photograph; slighly out of focus, large sun burst, and faded colors. A perfect summer road trip vibe. [DJ]

You’re Next

Even the pull quotes are aesthetically pleasing on the You’re Next home video cover, which is as aggressive and in-your-face as the home invasion masterpiece. [BH]

Zodiac (Director’s cut)

I’m a sucker for covers that double as pseudo-props from the movie like this Zodiac letter addressed to the San Francisco Chronicle. [RS]

Zazie dans le métro (Criterion Collection)

A clean, flat design which visually expresses the zany and cartoonish main character. [DJ]

Were he alive today, the Master of Suspense, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, would be 116. With over 50 films to his name spanning from silent films to talkies, black and white to colored, and in first Britain and then later America, Hitchcock was a true auteur. So many of the modern thriller and horror contraptions we’ve come to expect were devised by this brilliant man.  That frustrating mystery decoy, the MacGuffin, the hilarious—and rather meta—directorial cameo, and Hitch even discovered the appeal of the voyeuristic vantage point long before Bravo was shoving Real Housewives and Kardashians down our throats.

On his day of birth, we give thanks for a man who tapped into the very core of human nature, causing us to squeal, scream, gasp, jump, and “a-ha!” No one has raised hairs or provoked goosebumps as often or as well as the Master. And by way of thanks we’ve racked our brains and cast our votes to definitively rank the ten best films of Alfred Hitchcock. Whether you’re new to Hitch yourself or trying to decide how to introduce him best to your children, we say you start here. Just keep the lights on and prepare the edge of your seat, you’ll be sitting there a while.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s finest works is also one of his most spatially confined. The first in his oeuvre to be shot in color and most notable for its use of the one take illusion, Rope tells the story of two young intellectuals who strangle their friend to death and hide his body in a chest prior to hosting a dinner party in the very same room where the corpse lies. The act is deemed “an immaculate murder” by one of the men involved and the Master of Suspense stages the aftermath beautifully, setting the whole affair in one apartment unit. Every frame carries the tension of whether or not the conspirators will break and Arthur Laurents’ script playfully alludes to the increasingly apparent elephant in the room through dialogue that is both darkly comedic and slyly referential. The film is gripping in its “will they or won’t they be caught” premise, but Rope truly impresses with its nuanced navigation of homosexual subtext as well as the theme of theoretical principles being twisted into wicked, irreversible deeds. [Byron]

One of the few traditional horror movies in Hitchcock’s filmography, The Birds is the godfather of modern nature-run-amok films. Marred only by some now-dated special effects, the suspense sequences in The Birds hold up remarkably well, and the scene of the schoolchildren being attacked by the violent airborne creatures is especially unsettling. In the hands of anyone else, The Birds was bound to fail, but Hitchcock approached the subject matter with such seriousness that it manages to work almost in spite of itself. It may not be his best film, but it could very well be his most impressive. [Blair]

One of Hitchcock’s more twisted crime mysteries is in fact amazingly simplistic in its scope. A posh ex-tennis player, Tony, discovers his socialite wife, Margot, is having an affair with a writer, Mark, and plots to have her murdered. Using one of his signature techniques, the majority of the action takes place within Tony and Margot’s sitting room. Tony blackmails an old college acquaintance to do the murdering and in a hair-raising scene he sneaks into her house and attempts to strangle her. What none of them expect is that Margot has more fight in her than they imagined. As a filmed adaptation of a play, the stakes never feel all that high, but Hitch gets around this with his attention to detail. He lingers on objects and plays with our sentiments toward each character. It’s the perfect example of Hitchcock’s ability to carefully build a mystery and then piece by piece deconstruct it, and the process is a slow and simmering thrill to experience. [Ananda]

Notorious> is a film so pulsating with sexual tension, rich imagery, forbidden romance and drunken desire that it’s almost too much to handle; watch it in the right environment and you’re liable to burst. It’s one of Hitchcock’s finest works (his finest in my book), an international spy romance starring Ingrid Bergman in her greatest role alongside Casablanca. Matching her greatness is Cary Grant, a U.S. agent who recruits Bergman to infiltrate a spy ring in Rio de Janeiro and get intimate with its leader (Claude Rains). The love triangle that emerges is the best in movie history, full of innuendo and jealous glances, all framed by a plot so well constructed it rivals any of Hitchcock’s more popular classics (even Vertigo and Rear Window). Filmmaking doesn’t get more elegant than watching Grant and Bergman descend that grand staircase at the end of the film, and it doesn’t get steamier than watching them lock lips in what was, at the time, “the longest kiss in the history of movies.” [Bernard]

Perhaps Shadow Of A Doubt has become more famous for being Hitchcock’s personal favorite than for the sum of its parts, but that feels grossly unfair to what is, essentially, a masterpiece. When Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) announces a surprise visit to his family in the small town of Santa Rosa, his niece and namesake Charlotte “Charlie” (Teresa Wright) is ecstatic. However, it’s not long before she starts to suspect her uncle of being the “Merry Widow” serial killer, and the plot unravels in the kind of hair-raisingly suspenseful way that would later become synonymous with Alfred Hitchcock’s name. In a rare twist of classic Hollywood convention, the leading man in this picture ends up being one of Hitchcock’s most memorable villains. Boasting the most opulent cinematography of any Hitchcock film (by Joseph Valentine), ridiculously immersive characterization of a small family unit, and a supremely original male-female dynamic that inspired Cotten’s and Wright’s mesmerizing performances; it’s easy to see why Hitchcock loved it so much. That slow-burning close-up of Cotten describing widows as “wheezing animals” is everything. [Nik]

Hitchcock’s paranoia-fueled tale of a man trapped in his apartment with delusions of murderous neighbors is my all-time favorite of his works. Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photographer Jeff is the vehicle through which Hitchcock traps his audience into forced suspense. Through Jeff’s camera lens, we watch his various neighbors, and through his journalistic inquisitiveness and voyeuristic nature we start to see the same suspicious signs he does. His, at first, hairbrained schemes of murder by his neighbor across the way (played with perfect intensity by Raymond Burr) become more and more plausible the longer he (and we) watch from the darkened window of his apartment. With the bustling sounds of New York City providing a sort of humming background, Jeff’s neighbors live out their lives through their windows like a puppet show for his amusement, but as the truth of the danger he puts himself in by prying becomes clearer, it is Jeff who becomes the puppet, confined to his one room stage, and the denouement of Rear Window is by far among the most uncomfortably riveting of Hitchcock’s career. [Ananda]

Hitchcock’s timeless tale of exchanging murders poses a question that we’ve all asked ourselves, and in the process truly shows off the director’s mastery. Hitchcock constantly found ways to make even his most villainous characters empathetic, and that’s precisely what makes Strangers on a Train such an immensely engaging film. Despite being an abhorrent, sociopathic murderer, Bruno Anthony is strangely charming. Robert Walker approaches the role brilliantly, opposite the criminally underrated Farley Granger, who plays a perfect patsy in the form of Guy Haines. Over sixty years and countless viewings later, Strangers on a Train remains one of the most suspenseful movies of all time. [Blair]

Mistaken identity was part of Hitchcock’s arsenal as early as 1935’s The 39 Steps, but it reached iconic heights (literally and figuratively) in 1959’s North By Northwest. New York ad-man Roger Thornhill (Master of Swag, Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government agent by villainous spy Philip Vandamm (a perfect James Mason), and finds himself running for his life cross-country whilst falling hard for Eva Marie Saint’s mysterious blonde beauty Eve Kendall. The film is infamous for its action scenes, especially a bamboozled Grant barely escaping from an evil crop-duster in the middle of nowhere, so it’s easy to overlook the sly sense of humor on constant display and one of the greatest screenplays Hitchcock ever directed (written by the legendary Ernest Lehman). Without a single frame wasted, and a kind of cinematic rhythm that holds the answer to defeating time itself, there’s no mistaking North by Northwest as one of the master’s very best. [Nik]

When we think about Psycho, we think of its iconic scenes. The infamous shower sequence. The shocking twist. That unsettling final inner monologue in which the audience stares directly into the face of evil. As undeniably memorable as those moments are, though, Psycho is notable for more than its permeation of popular culture. Beginning as a tale of a woman absconding with a bag of money, the film deftly transitions into a very different kind of story, centering on a young man, his mother, a motel and a trail of disappearances. With his intelligent use of editing (cleverly obscuring grotesqueries while still managing to disturb), a discerning eye for darkly connotative imagery and a perfectly paced progression of terror, Hitchcock took B-movie material and made it into art. A watershed moment in horror cinema and a catalyst for the modern slasher movie, Psycho legitimized the genre and remains a vastly influential work 55 years on. [Byron]

In the darkest corners of Hitchcock’s mind hid his deepest, wildest obsessions and fears; with Vertigo, he digs them out, slaps them together and forms with his hands the purest expression of his true self he’s ever shared with the world. It’s a pretty, prickly thing that sends you into a state of paranoid euphoria, lusting after its beauty as you drown in cold sweats. As we become more and more immersed in the headspace of Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie as he chases the spectre of the quintessential icy blonde (embodied by Kim Novak) around San Francisco, we are stepping into Hitch’s very own shoes. As in most of his stories, his leading man is his proxy, and the dizzying fever dream that is Scottie’s pursuit is his way of saying, “This is me. All of me.” It’s all there: his debilitating fear of the police; his manipulative relationship with women; his resentment of the real world and its cruelty. Hitchcock much preferred the world of dreams. In his greatest shot, Novak walks slowly toward Stewart in a lonely hotel room, wading through an otherworldly neon green light. The image is paralyzing. Hitchcock is known for being less than kind to his icy blondes, but in this moment, he feels her pain. Good filmmakers take you on a leisurely stroll through the garden of the mind; great filmmakers drag you through the brambles. By this measure, Hitch was the greatest. [Bernard]

The Face of Love has a premise that would prove a challenging sell for any filmmaker. Annette Bening plays a widow named Nikki who, five years after the death of her husband Garrett (Ed Harris), sees a man who looks like him at a museum. Exactly like him, in fact. The sight of the handsome doppelgänger intoxicates her with both fear and ecstasy, and she feels compelled to stalk him around Los Angeles.

Now, this can either be read as the behavior of a mad woman, or the behavior of a woman tragically chasing the ghost of her lost love. Either way, it’s completely absurd, but a good filmmaker can make it work, make us suspend our disbelief and buy into Nikki’s dark fantasy. Director Arie Posin doesn’t make it work, but he comes close, mostly thanks to his leads, both great actors. Without their talents, the film–with its momentum-less, scrambled script and pedestrian camerawork–would shatter into a million pieces.

When Nikki finally tracks down Garrett’s double, a man named Tom (Harris again, obviously) who teaches painting at Occidental College, and talks to him face to face, she’s hit with a tidal wave of emotion that floors her. (Bening is wonderful in this moment, writhing in pain, disbelief, and joy, as if she’s standing inches from the sun.) Predictably, she finds herself gravitating toward him, and him to her, and they fall into a relationship, though Nikki mentions nothing of Tom’s uncanny resemblance to her dear Garrett.

Is this a morally compromising pairing? At least on Nikki’s end of things, it seems to be teetering on the edge. One can easily see why she’s fallen for Tom, and besides him looking like Garrett, he actually seems like a sweet, good-hearted man. But it’s a clearly indefensible decision to not tell him that he looks just like her dead husband. She even tells him that Garrett dumped her, for some reason. She starts bringing Tom to she and Garrett’s old haunts, an idiotic display that makes no sense. He’s going to find out, you silly lady! Sympathy wanes when we see her make mistakes as dumb as this.

The reveal the film ambles toward is too contrived to generate any real suspense. We can see it coming a mile away, and when it hits–at the site of Garrett’s death, an empty beach in Mexico–it’s underwhelming, and a little weird (Bening and Harris nearly drown in an ocean of melodrama). In an earlier, climactic scene, Nikki’s daughter (Jess Weixler) is floored when she sees Tom, and when she blows up in his face Nikki yells “I need him!”, an allusion to addiction that Bening delivers well, but again feels a bit irksome.

Despite the ridiculousness of the story, it brings up some compelling ideas. How would you react if you met a double of your dead lover? And on the other side of the situation, how would you react if you were Tom and discovered you were the spitting image of your girlfriend’s dead husband? The moral implications of the scenario are intriguing, but this kind of love story is incredibly hard to buy into. Hitchcock did it in Vertigo, which The Face of Love resembles in more ways than one, but Posin struggles here.

Robin Williams plays Nikki’s jealous neighbor, who’s been asking her out for years but keeps getting shoved back into the friend zone. He’s little more than a plot device, but he makes the most of it, just like the two leads. Though most of us would turn and run in his situation, Harris makes us believe that he’s truly falling for this woman, despite her erratic, suspicious behavior. Bening has some fantastic moments (mostly in the first half of the film, before all logic goes out the window), and her chemistry with Harris is expectedly dynamic.

The Face of Love has the ingredients of a good film: terrific actors, a thought-provoking premise, and a capable director at the helm. But what sours the pot is the film’s script, which tells the story in such a meandering, unfocused fashion that the film loses us as the character’s actions descend into nonsensicality. Still, it’s hard not to be at least a little invested when you’ve got such incredible actors playing off each other on screen.

In Arie Posin’s The Face of Love, we follow a widow named Nikki (Annette Bening) who meets a man named Tom (Ed Harris) who looks, impossibly, exactly like her dead husband. Memories of her husband come rushing back to her as she and Tom start a relationship. Is she falling in love with Tom, or falling in love with her husband all over again? The film also stars Robin Williams and Jess Weixler.

Director/co-writer Posin chatted with us about working with Bening and Harris, how the film is inspired by his mother, paying homage to Vertigo, making Los Angeles romantic again, and more.

The Face of Love opens this Friday in San Francisco and is playing now in select cities.

You have two incredible collaborators manning your lead roles. As a director and storyteller, what was it like having such seasoned talents at your disposal?

Arie: It was a gift, a joy. The summer that I spent editing this movie was the best summer I’ve had maybe ever. It was a season of pure joy. On set they’re just so true and authentic, take after take. I feel like my job on set is to be kind of a firs line lie detector. Do I believe what I’m seeing? Do I believe the emotions? In the editing room, you can see that there were 5, 6, 7 takes that are all true and identical in their believability, but they’re also all subtly different. [Annette and Ed] are able to shade things and give you dimensions. It gives me such freedom to shape the movie. But at the same time, the hardest thing to do was to edit, because there are so many wonderful takes.

The story of how the idea for this story came to light is pretty remarkable. It came from your mother, correct?

Arie: Yeah. Years ago, a few years after my dad had passed away, my mother would come over to see me. She said words that are pretty similar to what Annette’s character says in the movie. She said, “A funny thing happened to me today. I was by the museum, in a cross walk on Wilshire Boulevard. I looked up and I saw a man coming towards me who looked like a perfect double of your father.” I said, “What did you do?” and she said, “It shocked me. He had a big smile on his face…and it felt so nice. It felt like it used to.” That’s the story that stuck with me and that I began to obsess, dream, and eventually write about.

I imagine going through something like that, you must feel a little bit crazy inside. What do you think the relationship is between sanity and love?

Arie: I think it’s different for everyone. My thought on it for this movie was, in a sense, that kind of love you have…you know, she spent 30 years with her husband, and she had him ripped away from her violently, tragically, just when they were at this stage where they’re thinking, “What are the two of us going to do together for the rest of our lives?” Seeing someone again who wakes up those feelings would be almost like an addiction. You get a taste, and you want more, despite yourself and despite the fact that it’s a transgressive relationship. It’s a compulsion, an obsession.

In terms of sanity, that was one of the biggest questions for me in writing the script and even throughout production. Annette’s falling in love through the course of the story, but she’s also falling back in love with her late husband. The question is always, she’s on this journey towards madness, but where is she at? How do we chart that? Is she crazy here, not crazy here? And it went back to the story with my mom, which became a real touchstone for us. The truth in that situation is that my mom wasn’t crazy, you know? She wasn’t imagining it. She saw this guy that looked like my dad, and it shook her to her core. I thought it was important that Nikki be sane, but as long as we could bear it. Once she goes mad, the audience becomes an observer of that. But to really participate, I thought it was important for her to be sane, then spiraling eventually into madness, but being able to hold that off as long as possible.

There are obvious similarities between the plot of your film and Vertigo.

Arie: Vertigo is one of my favorite movies. Hitchcock is unquestionably the master. There’s so much film grammar that we take for granted that was first proposed and best used by him. We all owe a lot to him. Having said that, when we wrote the first draft of the script, we set it in a museum because my mom’s story happened at the museum. The best cinematographers ask, “How few lights can I bring to a location in order to catch the naturalness of it?” That’s where the museum came out of. It didn’t come out of trying to do a take on a Vertigo type story. It all evolved from a very natural, organic place. But once we had the first draft and read it, it occurred to us: there’s a double in Vertigo, and there’s a double here. There’s a museum in both. A friend of mine saw the movie last week and said there was more than that. He said, “Well, she jumps into the bay in Vertigo, and she jumps into the ocean in your movie.” There are other movies that we love, and we had to check and make sure that if we were stealing, we we’d be stealing deliberately. (laughs) Another movie we talked about was The Double Life of Veronique. There’s a double there, as well, and it takes this metaphysical look at people who look alike. It’s been done many times.

Although this is a romantic movie, I wanted it to be infused with tension and suspense. The premise doesn’t naturally suggests suspense and tension, and yet I love so many of those movies in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s that were romantic but also had a bit of tension. And that’s certainly true of Vertigo.

San Francisco plays a big part in Vertigo, and Los Angeles plays a big part in yours.

Arie: That was something that I was very much inspired by Vertigo about. San Francisco is so much a character in that movie. I’ve fallen in love with Los Angeles, and I wanted it to become a backdrop. I live here, and I feel the romantic side of the city. It’s beautiful, but I haven’t seen it in movies in a long, long time. That was my hope. There was actually a moment when a financier offered to make the movie with us if we shot it in Baton Rouge. We turned it down with hopes of staying in LA and using the city as the backdrop for our story, a character in itself.

What scene are you most proud of?

Arie: One of the most challenging scenes in the movie is the scene where the daughter comes in and discovers that her mom has been in a relationship with a man that looks like her father. From the moment Nikki keeps this secret, the audience is savvy enough to know that the secret is going to come out. The question is how and when, and who’s going to find out. On one level, you want to fulfill that expectation, but on the other hand also make it surprising. In that scene, you have three people in a very hot, violent confrontation, and what I wanted to convey was the three points of view. They’re each coming at it with their own point of view, and I wanted the audience to identify with all three of them. As we bounce around the scene, you know why each person is reacting the way they are, and you can see the story from their perspective. That was a real challenge in the writing, shooting, and editing.

It’s a big scene to carry on your shoulders. I had a director friend of mine say, “It takes some nerve to take potentially the biggest scene in your movie and put it on the shoulders of the least experienced actor in the scene.” On top of that, he said, “If that scene didn’t work, the movie would fall apart.” It was a really critical scene, and Jess (Weixler, who plays the daugher) played it so brilliantly, against two of the best actors that we have.

If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, I highly recommend you check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which will host the “Hitchcock 9”, a series of films from Hitchcock’s early days as a director in the silent era. These classics have been beautifully restored and will be projected on the big screen with live music. Silent films play a vital role in the history of cinema, and festivals like this are guaranteed to make all your future movie-going experiences richer!

In our first feature honoring the Hitchcock 9, we looked at 9 of the Best “Talkie” scenes from Hitchcock. With this feature we’re going to count down Hitchcock’s 9 Best “Silent” scenes. We chose to include only films made after the Hitchcock 9 to take a look at how he exhibited the tools and principles he learned and retained from the silent era in his later works. Though some of these scenes do have some dialog in them, it’s largely disposable and the scenes work purely because of the imagery and score. Using his vast visual vocabulary and some of cinema’s most unforgettable scores, Hitchcock plays us like Beethoven played his piano.

9 Best “Silent” Scenes from Alfred Hitchcock

#9 — Sabotage (1936) — Bus Bomb

This classic scene got a nice little “cameo” in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. It’s an almost perfect example of Hitchcock doing what he does better than anybody—creating suspense. I say “almost” because, well…I’ll let the man explain for himself:

A boy is tasked with delivering a package which, unbeknownst to him, contains a bomb that will detonate within minutes. We’re aware of how much danger the boy is in (Hitchcock reminds us with cuts to various clocks), but he isn’t, which is a basic recipe for suspense. Other than the scene’s unsavory conclusion, it’s a classic example of Hitchcock pushing all the right buttons to get us to squirm in our seats.

Watch “Bus Bomb” scene:

#8 — Frenzy (1972) — Fingersnappin’

A serial killer has hidden one of his victims (a young woman) in a potato sack on a truck (Hitchcock was never big on practicality). Minutes later, he notices he’s missing his very distinctive (and incriminating) tie pin, which he realizes she must have snatched during the murder. He returns to the truck to search the mountain of sacks for the one containing the body, when the truck suddenly starts moving. Hilarity ensues! Hitchcock was a master at getting his audience to identify with his villains (see Strangers on a Train, Psycho) and this scene accomplishes this in the funniest fashion. The killer has difficulty wresting the pin from the corpse—he gets a cold dead foot in the face and even gets knocked on his ass a couple times. The body is stricken with rigor mortis, so the killer has to gruesomely break the poor girl’s fingers to pry his pin out of her cold dead hands. It’s like a morbid episode of Mr. Bean.

Watch “Fingersnappin” scene:

#7 — Rear Window (1954) — I See You, You See Me

The nightmare of a voyeur is for the person they’re snooping on to look straight back at them, and Hitchcock captures this vividly and thrillingly in Rear Window. James Stewart has been spying on his neighbors from his apartment window, and we peep along with him (an inventive use of Hitchcock’s patented “subjective” filmmaking). Grace Kelly invades the home of Raymond Burr, and we boil with helpless anxiety as Burr catches her in the act and gets violent. When Burr catches on to the plot and shoots an evil eye at Stewart (and us) it’s a terrifying shock. After countless shots of observing the neighbors from a god’s-eye-view, Burr’s stare feels like a knife in the gut. It’s a great Hitchcock moment.

Watch “I See You, You See Me” scene:

#6 — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) — Assassination at Royal Albert Hall

Man, this one’s a beauty. It’s also truly “silent”—there’s not a word spoken, only Bernard Herrmann’s gorgeous rendition of “Storm Clouds Cantata”, the lifeblood of the scene. Every shot—of the massive Royal Albert Hall, its grinning, opulent guests, the sea of white that is the choir, and our heroes, Doris Day and James Stewart)—is goddamn pretty. They’re masterfully composed, full of life, perfectly sequenced, and the colors are a revelation. Though it’s easy to get lost in the glorious eye candy, there’s real tension to this scene, which is sold brilliantly by Day. The shot of Reggie Nadler pointing his gun at the screen is as “3-D” as any “3-D” movie to come out in the past ten years.

Watch “Assassination at Royal Albert Hall” scene:

#5 — Dial M for Murder (1954) — Death by Scissors

No matter how many times I see it, the telephone murder scene in Dial M For Murder is always suspenseful, always nail-bitingly delicious. This is Hitchcock at his sharpest—every beat is orchestrated perfectly. The editing is immaculate—each shot adds a new layer of suspense and gives the scene momentum. When the camera semi-circles around from Grace Kelly’s front to her back, then cuts to her front again revealing Robert Cummings standing behind her in strangle mode, it’s truly terrifying (even though we know Cummings has been there all along). Dimitri Tiomkin’s score is as effective as Hitchcock’s visuals.

Watch “Death by Scissors” scene:

#4 — The Birds (1963) — A Murder of Crows

Tippi Hedren is leisurely smoking a cigarette on a bench outside an elementary school, waiting for the children inside to be dismissed. Crows begin to gather on a jungle gym behind her. At first, we see only a few of them, but then we glance away and look again to see several more have appeared without a sound, seemingly out of nothing. We look away and back again and gasp in terror as their numbers are now so great they resemble a demonic, jet-black cloud clinging to the children’s playground. There’s no telling when they’ll strike, but they surely will. The scene is so alarming because of the context the sound provides—the only sound is the faint sound of the children inside singing a youthful tune, reminding us of the stakes.

Watch “A Murder of Crows” scene:

#3 — Vertigo (1958) — The Green Ghost

By the time we reach this scene in Vertigo, James Stewart’s whirlwind of obsession is at its most turbulent. As Kim Novak floats into the room as Madeline, drenched in that uneasy green light, time stands still. We lose our breath, at once in awe and frozen with fear. Stewart’s face is full of desperation, yearning, elation, and pain, a face he only ever used once. Novak is a stirring vision, a guaranteed heart-stopper. Hitchcock was sometimes criticized for his stiff, immobile camerawork, but he circles his camera around Stewart and Novak to create a remarkable image. As we circle, the hotel room around them magically melts away and they’re transported to the stables where they’ve kissed before, then back to the room again, all in one sensuous effects shot. No other Hitchcock scene gets under the skin quite like this one.

Watch “The Green Ghost” scene:

#2 — North by Northwest (1959) — Nowhere to Hide

What I love most about Hitchcock was his defiant nature. He loved to challenge cinematic conventions. He noticed that in the early days of film (especially in German cinema, of which he was a student) chase scenes were claustrophobic, typically set at night in dark alleyways with armed mysterious men in trench coats lurking around every shadowy turn. So what did Hitch do? He set his chase scene in North by Northwest in broad daylight, in a wide-open field, with the pursuer being a dangerously low-flying crop duster. Hitchcock was breaking the rules, chuckling to himself the whole way. This is Hitchcock at his most precise and virtuosic, a symphony of masterstrokes that adds up to one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, only second to…

Watch “Nowhere to Hide” scene:

#1 — Psycho (1960) — Nothing Like a Hot Shower After a Long Hard AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

It’s hard to think of a scene more watched, more beloved, more dissected, more memorable than this one. Its mark on movies and pop culture is indelible. The bracing imagery and staccato cuts are taken to another world by Bernard Herrmann’s thrashing strings. The first people who saw the scene in Psycho had their whole world flipped upside-down when their heroine (the stunning Janet Leigh) was cut to pieces only 45 minutes into the film. They screamed, jumped, ran in the aisles, and collectively thought “What the hell happens now?” They were conditioned to expect movies to play out a certain way. Hitchcock exploited this with Psycho, and because of this scene he was now free to take them to places they’d never been. He pulled an epic swerve on them, the clever devil. As I write this I have the scene playing on repeat in the background. Moments ago I was sinking my nose into my laptop, absorbed in typing this blather, and the strings hit out of nowhere and scared the shit out of me! It’s a dreadful sound. Somewhere out there, Hitch is still chuckling.

Watch “Nothing Like a Hot Shower After a Long Hard AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!” scene:

Be sure to come out to the “Hitchcock 9” this weekend at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco!

For those who don’t know, Sight and Sound is one of the most well-respected film publications in the world. Since 1952, Sight and Sound have been asking critics and filmmakers to submit a list of the 10 greatest films of all time, and every decade since new lists are created and compiled into one big list. This year the rules around the list have gone under a few changes.

The biggest change would be the number of contributors, with “more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles” asked and over 800 lists submitted in time. The lists themselves could be made in any way, with some people picking titles out of a bowl as a way to make their own list. So, with all of the changes were there any big surprises?

It all depends on how you take the results really. The biggest piece of news from the list is that Citizen Kane no longer holds the top spot. The title of ‘Greatest Film of All Time’ now goes to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The list also has a new addition this time with Dziga Vertov’s documentary Man With a Movie Camera placing at #8. Sight and Sound has also compiled a list that was taken from over 350 submissions by directors which has a few differences from the main list. Yazujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story takes the top spot on the director’s list (it came in third on the main one) and includes more modern films like Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver. The youngest film on the critics’ list is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey which means nothing from the 1970s onward even cracked the top 10. You can see the two respective lists below.

The Greatest Films of All Time (The Critics)
Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

The Greatest Films of All Time (The Directors)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
(tie) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
(tie) Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
(tie) The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
(tie) Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)