CriterionCast

Time Magazine Unveils It’s Top Ten Favorites From Cannes Over The Years

With the Cannes Film Festival kicking off its 63rd annual run this past week, Time Magazine has done something quite interesting, and tasked film critic Richard Corliss with the task of taking a look at the festival’s legendary past.

The result; a top 10 list of the festival’s best films, and I must say, it’s a murderers row of brilliance:

  • The Third Man (1949)

  • The Wages of Fear (1953)

  • La Dolce Vita (1960)

  • Taxi Driver (1976)

  • Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

  • Sex, lies and videotape (1989)

  • Farewell My Concubine (1993)

  • Pulp Fiction (1994)

  • A Taste Of Cherry (1997)

  • 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

Personally, it’s hard to argue with this set of films. Three of them are currently available on the Criterion Collection (The Third Man, The Wages of Fear, and A Taste Of Cherry) and the bookends of that collective happen to be two of my all time favorite films. Throw in films like Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, and the shocking choice of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and you have ten films that you really cannot argue with. The majority of them come from the 90’s which may be a bit surprising, or at least it was to me, but when they are films of A Taste of Cherry’s quality, it’s hard to think of older films one would replace it with.

That leaves me to wonder, in ten years, what films from this festival, if any, will we be remembering? So far, the festival hasn’t had a show stopper of a premiere, with the closest thing to a critically beloved film being Mike Leigh’s new project, Another Year. However, the festival is far from over, so who knows at this point.
What films do you think missed the list?

Source: Time

Joshua Brunsting

Josh is a critic, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, a wrestling nerd, a hip-hop head, a father, a cinephile and a man looking to make his stamp on the world, one word at a time.