My Favourite Movies

No, not my favourite movies. Veteran Australian film critic David Stratton’s book My Favourite Movies, published in 2021, lists his 111 favourites in chronological order.

Stratton’s “personal pantheon” is restricted to a single film per director. It’s an excellent list, with a few pleasant surprises (including The Awful Truth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Incredible Shrinking Man).

Stratton’s 111 favourite movies are as follows:

• Metropolis
• The General
• Wings
• The Last Command
• City Lights
• Love Me Tonight
• Trouble in Paradise
• It’s a Gift
• A Night at the Opera
• The Awful Truth
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• The Rules of the Game
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Public Enemy
• Citizen Kane
• The Lady Eve
• Casablance
• Went the Day Well?
• Meet Me in St. Louis
• Les enfants du paradis
• The Best Years of Our Lives
• The Big Sleep
• Duel in the Sun
• Great Expectations
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• A Matter of Life and Death
• The Big Clock
• Letter from an Unknown Woman
• Kind Hearts and Coronets
• All About Eve
• In a Lonely Place
• The African Queen
• Bend of the River
• The Man in the White Suit
• High Noon
• Shane
• Singin’ in the Rain
• M. Hulot’s Holiday
• I vitelloni
• Bad Day at Black Rock
• Les diaboliques
• On the Waterfront
• Seven Samurai
• A Star Is Born
• The Night of the Hunter
• Attack
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• The Brothers Rico
• The Incredible Shrinking Man
• 3:10 to Yuma
• Twelve Angry Men
• Wild Strawberries
• Breathless
• The 400 Blows
• North by Northwest
• The Apartment
• Cléo from 5 to 7
• The Day the Earth Caught Fire
• Viridiana
• Advise and Consent
• A Kind of Loving
• The Manchurian Candidate
• Dr. Strangelove
• The Leopard
• Charulata
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Andrei Rublev
• Accident
• The Unfaithful Wife
• Z
• Alice’s Restaurant
• The Wild Bunch
• The Conformist
• The Last Picture Show
• Taking Off
• W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
• Don’t Look Now
• Chinatown
• The Conversation
• Jaws
• Nashville
• Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Cría cuervos
• Kings of the Road
• Annie Hall
• The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
• Coming Home
• Newsfront
• Farewell My Concubine
• Alien
• Breaker Morant
• Manhunter
• High Tide
• Where Is the Friend’s House?
• Distant Voices, Still Lives
• Do the Right Thing
• Sweetie
• Lorenzo’s Oil
• The Age of Innocence
• Fargo
• Drifting Clouds
• Love Serenade
• Jackie Brown
• All About My Mother
• Lantana
• Million Dollar Baby
• Brokeback Mountain
• The Host
• Animal Kingdom
• Samson and Delilah
• Nebraska
• I, Daniel Blake
• Roma

Dateline Bangkok has covered every ‘greatest film’ list published in the last two decades. But the book that My Favourite Movies most resembles is Barry Norman’s 100 Best Films of the Century from 1993.