The 40 Best 'Arthouse' Films of All Time

UK's The Guardian made an initial stab at this near-impossible task back in 2010 (full list is here), but as in all work done by consensus, it had serious omissions and head-scratching inclusions. For example, I do not consider any of these picks true 'arthouse' fare: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, The Graduate, There Will Be Blood (excellent movies though they are). Of all the Ingmar Bergman classics to chose from, they pick "Fanny & Alexander"? The arbitrary 'one director-one film' rule is pointless. And why did they limit themselves to a mere 25?

I have set-out to correct these errors as only I can: through one man's opinion! Thus, my list leans heavy on foreign-language films (I have six in English and five silents), and they are admittedly Euro-centric.  I have excluded all comedies (too subjective), documentaries (even though I have seen some classics in art-houses), and animation (not my thing). Sadly, I can only agree with two of the list's post-1986 films ("Breaking the Waves" and "Mulholland Drive") but they just missed my (equally arbitray) cut.

In deference to The Guardian, I have kept the 15 titles I have no argument with (see *). Rather than declare one winner, however (the Brits selected Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) -- no argument there), my list is Chronological. This is not a list of the greatest films of all time (or even the greatest directors: I had to leave off Hitchcock, Coppola & Scorsese!). Think of this list as essential art-house viewing.

1. NOSFERATU (Murnau, 1922)
2. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Eisenstein, 1925)*
3. METROPOLIS (Lang, 1927)
4. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Dreyer, 1928)*
5. Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel, 1929)
6. L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)*
7. The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)*
8. Bicycle Thieves (de Sica, 1948)
9. Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)
10. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)*
11. La Strada (Fellini, 1954)
12. The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
13. Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955)*
14. The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)
15. The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
16. Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959)
17. Breathless (Godard, 1960)
18. L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
19. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)*
20. The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960)
21. The Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
22. Contempt (Godard, 1963)
23. The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)
24. 8-1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
25. Band a part (Godard, 1964)
26. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964)*
27. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)*
28. Persona (Bergman, 1966)
29. Belle du Jour (Bunuel, 1967)
30. The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)*
31. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)*
32. Death In Venice (Visconti, 1971)*
33. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)*
34. Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)*
35. The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975)
36. Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)*
37. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980)
38. Night of the Shooting Stars (Tavianis, 1982)
39. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
40. The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986) -- true confession: this is the sole entry on my list that I haven't actually seen, but this was Tarkovsky's elegy. I reluctantly left-off his other two masterpieces, Stalker and Solaris, I must include this one!!


Put a gun to my head, and I would rank these as my TOP TEN:
1. Andrei Rublev
2. La Strada
3. The Seventh Seal
4. The Conformist
5. L'Avventura
6. Metropolis
7. 8-1/2
8. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
9. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
10. Blue Velvet