Tom Dawson

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In compiling a 10 greatest films of all time list,I am conscious of all the outstanding filmmakers whose work i haven't been able to include: nothing from Coppola, Scorsese, Welles, Bergman, Ray (Nicholas and Satyajit), Sirk, Herzog, Antonioni and Tarkovsky to name but ten.

My selection is also heavily weighted towards work from Western Europe and America- only one title from Asia, and nothing from United Kingdom, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.

I have attempted in my choices to give a sense of cinema's manifold possibilities over a period stretching nearly 5 decades.Hence there is a a range of genres, including screwball comedy (Bringing up Baby), the war film (Paisa), the family drama (Tokyo Story), the revisionist Western (Once Upon a Time in the West), and the documentary (Shoah), whilst others such as the tragicomic The Rules of the Game, the picaresque historical melodrama The Marriage of Maria Braun and the freewheeling country-and Western epic Nashville seem to resist generic categorisation.

All those films selected here , as well as being personal favourites, display a cinematic mastery on the part of their creators and merit repeated viewings.