Patrick Gamble

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How to condense over 100 years of cinema into a list of just 10 films? An impossible task; whatever I choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory years down the line. After agonising for some time about how to approach my own list, I opted to choose the films that made the biggest impact on me when I first saw them and have continued to do so ever since.

They might not be the ‘greatest’ films of all time (whatever that means) but they’re the ones that broadened my horizons and whose images are burned onto my retinas. As a result this list retains an ambiguous, hesitant air. Personal favourites like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive and Claire Denis’ Beau Travail are noticeable in their absence. As are key directors like Kubrick, Kurosawa and Bergman. It also pained me to exclude more recent films like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy and Shinya Isobel’s 13, but their time will come. Maybe ask me again in ten years.