Firstly - Thank you to all the respondents who gave us their opinion to complete our list of 100 DVDs to take to a 'Desert Island'.

 

The current 100 selections were culled from over 700 contributors choices of 10 or less each. An edition must have had at least 6 votes for consideration. DVD attributes such as image/audio transfer and supplements (especially commentaries) rank very highly - in some circumstances almost comparable to film value.  We allowed only individual feature film selections or shorter compilations (ex. By Brakhage and The Decalogue) - not DVD boxsets - although you could choose one film from a boxset even if it was not available individually at this time. Two, three or more disc special editions of one film are still viable.

 

For the curious: We also received multiple (at least 3 votes each) for the following DVDs:
Sony's The Passenger, Paramount's The Conformist, Criterion's Rushmore, Columbia Tri-Star's Punch Drunk Love, Paramount's The Godfather, Universal (CE) The Big Lebowski, Criterion's Brief Encounter, Beuna Vista's Cinema Paradiso, Koch Lorber's La Dolce Vita, FVD's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Paramount's The Godfather (Part 2), Criterion's Le Grand Illusion, Artificial Eye's L'Argent and MGM's Crimes and Misdemeanors.
We will be adding/deleting in the future and we all note the upcoming release of Godard's Histoire (s) du cinéma which will undoubtedly make the list.

The choices cover many genres and styles (westerns, film noir, silent films, musicals, drama, arthouse etc.), although not proportionately equally. We have shortage of comedies where we seem to spread a bit thin, chronologically speaking, between Chapin's City Light and Toy Story 2. Modern action extravaganza's are also not strongly supported being easily eclipsed by our balloters for more contemplative, narrative films. This is sometimes referred to as 'The DVDBeaver Effect'.

 

When completed this list should represent the most valuable 100 DVDs ever produced. We organized in alphabetical order (usual English title translation). With constant new releases and HD format upgrades this list will be in a state of flux - additions and deletion expected over time.

NOTE: As usual DVDBeaver does not discriminate against region code or standard.
 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (Otto e Mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.

François Truffaut’s first feature recreates the trials of the director's own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime.

 Initializing with the ascension of humankind and its recreation of the most important event in our history immediately informs the viewer of the immense grandeur of Stanley Kubrick's heralded masterpiece.

During the entire story’s meticulous development we’re slowly ensnared in a resolute depiction of one man. We become integrated with his intelligent and persistent manner, with his struggles and his hopes, and eventually, his escape attempt.

 John Cassavetes’ devastating drama details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself.

 

 

 

 

Mostly the picture is full of movement, some of it dashing in fine romantic costume style, some of it just sprightly it remains one of the most beautiful three stripe Technicolor films ever...

Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia’s greatest icon painter. Too experimental, too frightening, too violent, and too politically complicated to be released officially, Andrei Rublev has existed only in shortened, censored versions until this Criterion Collection edition.

As epic a film as the journey of its protagonist - operatic in style and bludgeoning in its depth. A shell-shocked captain treks up river to assassinate a renegade colonel - immortalized by Brando's enigmatic performance.

April Story is a simple and wonderful vision of unrequited love that leaves you aching for the continuation, yet content that you have seen enough.

A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema. Through Bresson’s unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this seemingly simple story becomes a moving parable of purity and transcendence.

 

 

 

 

   

A girl mysteriously disappears on a yachting trip. While her lover and her best friend search for her across Italy, they begin an affair. Antonioni’s penetrating study of the idle upper class offers stinging observations on spiritual isolation and the many meanings of love.

A make-or-break risk for MGM Studios that took six years to prepare before the first frame was shot. The epic film adaptation of a Biblical era classic becomes an emotionally exhausting masterpiece that eclipsed all other epics.

Gregg Toland's pure camerawork gives a clinic on the most effective use of deep focus and Wyler's masterwork is further defined by eliciting several unselfish, yet commanding, performances.

Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy - emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty.

All the elements of cinematic arts are perfectly fused in Powell and Pressburger’s fascinating study of the age-old conflict between the spirit and the flesh - astonishingly set against the grandeur of the snowcapped peaks of Kanchenjunga.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most visually influential science fiction films ever made, Blade Runner has a history as labyrinthine as any of its futuristic film noir sets. A fascinatingly contemplative detective story about a world-weary android-killer and his renegade prey, it has attracted a sizeable cult audience and retains a unique place in cinema.

Kieslowski's elliptical time-lapses in Blue support a sober examination of one devastated woman who chooses to create a new, anonymous and wholly independent life for herself.

Stan Brakhage challenges all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” with 26 masterworks shorts in By Brakhage - a selection taken from the nearly 400 films he made over the past half century.

 Pitting the imagination of common man Sam Lowry (the brilliantly befuddled Jonathan Pryce) against the oppressive storm troopers of the Ministry of Information, Terry Gilliam's Brazil has come to be regarded as an anti-totalitarianism cautionary tale equal to the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr..

Set amid the tumult of the Second World War, yet with a rhythm as delicate as a lullaby, the film follows three modern-day incarnations of Chaucer’s pilgrims -building to a majestic climax that ranks as one of the filmmaking duo’s finest achievements

 

 

 

 

 

Enigmatic propagandist subtexts defined by a brooding faux anti-hero and his past Parisian flame. It all takes place in his jazz-soaked Moroccan gin-joint giving birth to an iconic film where nearly half the world recognizes the key dialogue.

Poetic realism reaches sublime heights in the ineffably witty tale of a woman loved by four able suitors. Deftly entwining theater, literature, music, and design, are resurrected 19th-century Paris

Occasionally life offers essential moments that you only reflect on in memory - unaware, at the time, there significance in your personal growth. Chungking Express is filled with these rare occasions, so crucial that they are recognized by us the viewer, if not by the characters acting out their own narrative.

Made when he was only 26, Welles masterpiece still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily.

Charles Chaplin’s City Lights is so much more than a simple slapstick roughhouse stitched together with melodramatic sentimentality, like the films that many of his silent-era contemporaries would produce. This is it folks.

 

 

 

 

 

Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. A brilliant study of marital breakdown, artistic compromise, and the cinematic process.

'Klaatu barada nikto'. Edmund H. North's intelligent script and Wise's smooth direction are serious without being solemn, while Bernard Herrmann's effectively alien-sounding score reinforces the atmosphere of strangeness and potential menace. A classic science fiction fable, its ambitious storyline conveying a surprising pacifist message.

Diagnosing moral ambiguities with simplistic and gripping realism is only scratching the surface of this probing and infinitely everlasting series of short films that bind themselves together on a ultimately fascinating premise of the scriptures and the tablets of Moses.

Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. With his fourth film, Robert Bresson began to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue and the music, exacting a purity of image and sound.

 In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

 

 

   

 

 

All at once cynical, sly, dark... a 'hard-boiled' suspense involving adulterous behavior, graft and murder. With Stanwyck as the comely femme fatale seductress, MacMurray as the duped sap and Edward G. Robinson as the street-wise superior with intuition...

Krzysztof Kieslowski's international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher.

In "Dream of Light" the celebrated director of "Spirit of the Beehive", Victor Erice, achieves the miraculous; a direct look into how an artist creates. Antonio Lopez Garcia is Spain's leading painter who, for several weeks one autumn, tries to paint the sun filtering through the leaves of a quince tree.

The conclusion of Antonioni’s informal trilogy on modern malaise. A story of alienation is told using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for a couple’s doomed affair.

Ingmar Bergman was quoted as saying Fanny and Alexander is “the sum total of my life as a film-maker”. From all of the reels of shooting Bergman created a 5-hour cut of the film to eventually be shown on television.

   

 

 

 

 

The General is perhaps Buster Keaton's finest film and shows the great comic of the silent era at the height of his powers. Keaton's talent lay in his slapstick ability and his famous stoney face expression which he gave at moments of great confusion. Currently much of his work is being re-appreciated at the true extent of his comic genius re-evalued.

From Russia with Love, along with its successor, Goldfinger, represents Bond at his best. Although the series has run for more than thirty years with seventeen "official" entries, it has yet to better, or even equal, what it achieved in 1963-1964 with the release of these two films. By combining solid storylines, tightly-paced action sequences, memorable villains, and Sean Connery in top form, Russia and Goldfinger mark the cinematic apex for Ian Fleming's 007.

Ermanno Olmi’s masterful feature is the tender story of two Milanese fiancés. His deep humanism charges this moving depiction of ordinary men and women, and the pitfalls of the human heart.

In Powell and  Pressburger's stunningly photographed comedy, Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong young woman stranded by stormy weather. She meets a handsome naval officer who threatens to thwart her carefully laid-out life plans to marry a rich lord.

 

  

 

 

 

Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, Ikiru presents the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of a man’s death - a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives.

At once delicately mannered and visually stunning, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments in time.

This great American fable is buoyed by its unwavering faith in the wealth of the human spirit. Capra wanted to make a film to help shake America out of a post-Second World War funk, but ironically, the movie has only gained true popularity in the more cynical modern era.

THE movie for many fans who greet it with just as much amazement and enjoyment as the multitude of initial viewers anticipating the original release way back in 1933. What it must have been like waiting in line over 70 years ago to get into a 'movie house' and watch the greatest spectacle of the sound era.

"Last Year at Marienbad" is infuriating for those who do not conform and accept its enigmatic, static beauty. Director Resnais' intentional confusion adds to the poetic mystery with stilted camera angles of emotionless, well-kempt opulence shown in soft, black and white, contrasting stills.

 

 

 

 

  

One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, Late Spring tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his only, beloved daughter. A story which remains as potent today as ever—almost by itself justifying Ozu’s inclusion in the pantheon of cinema’s greatest directors.

A stirring film biography of the eccentric British soldier who changed the course of World War 1 with his command of Middle Eastern Arabic tribes. "Lawrence of Arabia" is recognized as 'THE' war epic, with very little else of comparable proportions. An enduring classic of cinema.

A simple, haunting phrase whistled off-screen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who is the murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann… In his harrowing masterwork, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.

All the characters in Magnolia are enslaved, not by a Pharaoh (Exodus 8:2 - as obvious "8"s and "2"s are embedded throughout the film), but by their pasts, by circumstances, by loneliness, by resentment, by hatred, by shame, by guilt...

Fritz Lang's Metropolis is perhaps the most famous German film of all time, and certainly one of the most influential of all silent films. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and jawdropping production values, Metropolis stands today as a testament to Lang's ambitious vision of what cinema could be.

   

 

 

  

 

Looking at the youthful friends around me, I find that their cycle and rhythm of "birth, age, illness and death' are moving several times faster than those of my generation. This is particularly true of young girls: like flowers, they are fading almost immediately upon blooming.

Tarkovsky states "It is an autobiographical film." Infused with dense, personal references from memory and an inaccessible use of time, space and performances, this is considered the director most artistically bold work being steeped in layered constructions. In examining his entire body of work this tends to be a catalyst of his vision of transcendency.

Robert Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with Mouchette, one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film. Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. An essential work of French filmmaking, Bresson’s hugely empathetic drama elevates its trapped protagonist into one of the cinema’s great tragic figures.

Filmed on the virtually deserted Setonaikai archipelago in south-east Japan, The Naked Island was made — in the words of its director — "as a 'cinematic poem' to try and capture the life of human beings struggling like ants against the forces of nature". Using one-tenth of the average budget, Shindo took one last impassioned risk to make this film.

Fellini orchestrates his story in waves of simple, pure emotion, telegraphed with silent screen gusto by Giulietta Masina. With her Noh eyebrows and white bobby socks, Masina is the missing link between Charlie Chaplin and Shirley MacLaine.

 

 

 

  

 

Nightmare Alley uncovers both the dirt and romance of carnival life, and controversially — for those in the business — the tricks and scams of conmen and hustlers. After this picaresque and cathartic film, you will never again misuse the word "geek".

A key motif is make-believe and Hitchcock even creates somewhat of a parallelism between advertising and espionage, as “in advertising, there is no such thing as a lie”, which one might as well say about the world of espionage. Both worlds live by deceiving others, in fact their survival depends upon it.

The Sacrifice is like a compendium of all the ideas (faith, role of artist, power of nature, virtue of childhood) and images (love as levitation, a boy standing by a tree) from Tarkovsky's previous six films. As usual, there’s a baffling rush of philosophical debate, stitched together with some of the most astonishing shots in all cinema.

A farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter. Putting the lie to the term “organized religion,” Ordet (The Word)is a challenge to simple facts and dogmatic orthodoxy.

Sensationally modern, the film follows the downward spiral of the fiery, brash, yet innocent showgirl Lulu, whose sexual vivacity has a devastating effect on everyone she comes in contact with. Daring and stylish, Pandora's Box is one of silent cinema's great masterworks and a testament to Brooks' dazzling individuality.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Wenders' collaboration with writer Sam Shepard is a master-stroke, wholly beneficial to both talents; if Wenders' previous film, The State of Things, was on the very limits of possibility, this one, through its final scenes, pushes the frontier three steps forward into new and sublime territory.

With its stunning camerawork and striking compositions, Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc convinced the world that movies could be art. Renée Falconetti gives one of the greatest performances ever recorded on film, as the young maiden who died for God and France.

Robert Bresson’s masterful investigation of crime and redemption tells the story of the young, arrogant Michel (Martin LaSalle), who spends his days learning the art of picking pockets in the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. Tautly choreographed and stylistically rigorous, Pickpocket reveals Bresson at his enigmatic, virtuosic best.

Twenty years after it swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter Weir's stunning 1975 masterpiece remains as ineffable as the unanswerable mystery at its core. A lyrical, meditative film charged with suppressed longings.

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

 

 

 

 

 

With breathtaking accuracy, Raging Bull ventures still further into the territory Scorsese has mapped in all his films - men and male values; in this case through the story of 1949 middleweight champion Jake La Motta. This film does more than make you think about masculinity, it makes you see it - in a way that's relevant to all men, not just Bronx boxers.

Almost all of this superbly rendered tragedy takes place within the confines of the Master's vast estate, and Zhang Yimou uses a mostly stationary camera to frame the characters within careful compositions of doorways, portals, canopies and courtyards; the severe, rigid style effectively turns the sumptuous residence into a metaphorical prison compound.

Taken from the Masterpiece Collection. The movie’s overall narrative form of scanning past windows in a courtyard seems to anticipate channel surfing, but it reflects the way one turns a radio knob, tuning in and out of frequencies while the station indicator moves horizontally or vertically along the dial. The same pattern is apparent in the beautifully calibrated camera movements as well as the brilliantly mixed and nuanced sound recording.

“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Rebecca’s haunting opening line conjures the entirety of Hitchcock’s romantic, suspenseful, elegant film. A young woman (Joan Fontaine) believes her every dream has come true when her whirlwind romance with the dashing Maxim de Winter culminates in marriage. But she soon realizes that Rebecca, the late first Mrs. de Winter, haunts both the temperamental, brooding Maxim and the de Winter mansion, Manderley.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. Only in 1959 was the film fully reconstructed and embraced by audiences and critics who now see the film as a timeless representation of a vanishing way of life.

 

 

 

 

   

Rosetta is in the same, grim realist mould as the Dardennes' earlier La Promesse; it, too, offers a glimmer of hope through the prospect of friendship. The Dardennes never sentimentalise their heroine but respect the mysteries of her soul; the result is a film almost Bressonian in its rigour and power to touch the heart.

 In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool. While Sátántangó, due to it being in black and white, Hungarian and running 7 hours, on paper may sound like the ultimate joke about art-house cinema, it is nothing less than a mesmerizing life changing cinematic experience.

Nicholas Ray's epic 1959 film about Eskimo life was unfairly victimized on release, censored at the UK cinema, and neglected by both TV and home video for decades. The Savage Innocents continued Ray's fascination with alternative lifestyles — examining the life of Eskimos and their remoteness from "civilized" values. It represents Ray's first and most ambitious attempt to break free from Hollywood and forge his own route.

In “The Scent of Green Papaya” Tran floats his camera through windows and over walls. He also brushed vibrant green foliage in some extremely elegant and painstakingly thought-out choreographed scenes. This transparent fluidity served as a constant backdrop to, and effectively put its blessing upon, Tran's clever blend of gentle classical and soothing traditional Vietnamese music reflecting the naturalistic purity of the surrounding scenery.

   

 

 

 

 

It’s not what is said and done in John Ford’s The Searchers that makes it such an effective film. It is what is not said and done—the actions that are implied but never seen, and the dialogue that is thought but never spoken. It is about two men’s five-year search for a girl kidnapped by Comanche Indians, but it is more interested in why they are searching than who they are searching for.

One of the most beloved movie epics of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai features legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura and seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.

The plot is also somewhat of a historical expression for the film genre with the prevalent mention of the advent of talkies, how it was done and the technical bridges that were crossed in that era. An all-time family favorite and one of the most exhilarating musicals of all time.

 Sound of the Mountain draws on the concerns of Naruse’s earlier marriage films, including Repast (even the pairing of stars Hara and Uehara is reprised), to offer a profoundly moving account of the complex relationship that develops between an older man and a younger woman.

An audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, The Spirit of the Beehive is set in a rural 1940s Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret. Víctor Erice’s spellbinding masterpiece is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s.

 

 

 

 

  

Stalker sets a form of absolute linear simplicity. The wettest, grimmest trek ever seen on film leads to nihilistic impasse - huddled in dirt, the discovery of faith seems impossible; and without faith, life outside the Zone, impossible. But hang on in to the ending, where a plain declaration of love and a vision of pure magic at least point the way to redemption. As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's.

With La Strada, Fellini left behind the familiar signposts of Italian neorealism for a poetic fable of love and cruelty, evoking brilliant performances and winning the hearts of audiences and critics worldwide.

Summer at Grandpa's from the Hou Boxset. The warmest of Hou's films - he, like many other directors, have focused on children and the intricacies of becoming educated in the working ways of the world... and its inhabitants (us). A positive examination of the human condition - there is even a hint of melodrama. For this reason some my dismiss it but I will continue to embrace it as a favorite.

Conceived by Murnau and written by Carl Mayer while they were both still in Germany, Sunrise takes a simple situation — the marriage of a peasant couple (George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor) from a country hamlet, invaded by a seductress from the city (Margaret Livingston) — and elevates it to the realm of fable, stripped of melodrama yet brimming with poetic impulses.

Taxi Driver is the definitive cinematic portrait of loneliness and alienation manifested as violence. It is as if director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader had tapped into precisely the same source of psychological inspiration ("I just knew I had to make this film," Scorsese would later say), combined with a perfectly timed post-Watergate expression of personal, political, and societal anxiety.