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Poll: Ebert's Ten Greatest Films of All Time (1991 version)

A poll by pere-25366.
In 1991, Roger Ebert made a list of his personal "Ten Greatest Films of All Time". These are films that moved him deeply in one way or another, with the films being listed alphabetically rather than by rank.

Among his picks, which would you say is most deserving of their place on his list?

After voting, you may discuss the poll here.

After voting, check out the "2012 version" poll here.

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Make Your Choice

  1. Vote!

    Casablanca (1942)

    "After seeing this film many times, I think I finally understand why I love it so much. It's not because of the romance, or the humor, or the intrigue, although those elements are masterful. It's because it makes me proud of the characters. These are not heroes -- not except for Paul Heinreid's resistance fighter, who in some ways is the most predictable character in the film. These are realists, pragmatists, survivors."
  2. Vote!

    Citizen Kane (1941)

    "I have just seen it again, a shot at a time, analyzing it frame-by-frame out at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We took 10 hours and really looked at this film, which is routinely named the best film of all time, almost by default, in list after list. Maybe it is. It's some movie. It tells of all the seasons of a man's life, shows his weaknesses and hurts, surrounds him with witnesses who remember him but do not know how to explain him."
  3. Vote!

    Floating Weeds (1959)

    "I do not expect many readers to have heard of this film, or of Yasujiro Ozu, who directed it, but this Japanese master, who lived from 1903 to 1963 and whose prolific career bridged the silent and sound eras, saw things through his films in a way that no one else saw. [...] Ozu fashioned his style by himself, and never changed it, and to see his films is to be inside a completely alternative cinematic language."
  4. Vote!

    Gates of Heaven (1978)

    "The people in this film really exist, and so does the pet cemetery. But Morris is not concerned with his apparent subject. He has made a film about life and death, pride and shame, deception and betrayal, and the stubborn quirkiness of human nature. [...] But he points it for hours on end, patiently until finally they use the language in ways that reveal their most hidden parts."
  5. Vote!

    La Dolce Vita (1960)

    "Fellini's 1960 film has grown passe in some circles, I'm afraid, but I love it more than ever. Forget about its message, about the "sweet life" along Rome's Via Veneto, or about the contrasts between the sacred and the profane. Simply look at Fellini's ballet of movement and sound, the graceful way he choreographs the camera, the way the actors move. He never made a more "Felliniesque" film, or a better one."
  6. Vote!

    Notorious (1946)

    "I do not have the secret of Alfred Hitchcock and neither, I am convinced, does anyone else. [...] "Notorious" is my favorite Hitchcock, a pairing of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, with Claude Rains the tragic third corner of the triangle. Because she loves Grant, she agrees to seduce Rains, a Nazi spy. Grant takes her act of pure love as a tawdry thing, proving she is a notorious woman."
  7. Vote!

    Raging Bull (1980)

    "Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" was on my list of the ten best films. I think "Raging Bull" addresses some of the same obsessions, and is a deeper and more confident film. Scorsese used the same actor, Robert De Niro, and the same screenwriter, Paul Schrader, for both films, and they have the same buried themes: A man's jealousy about a woman, made painful by his own impotence, and expressed through violence."
  8. Vote!

    The Third Man (1949)

    "This movie is on the altar of my love for the cinema. I saw it for the first time in a little fleabox of a theater on the Left Bank in Paris, in 1962, during my first $5 a day trip to Europe. It was so sad, so beautiful, so romantic, that it became at once a part of my own memories -- as if it had happened to me. There is infinite poignancy in the love that the failed writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) feels for the woman (Alida Valli) who loves the "dead" Harry Lime (Orson Welles)."
  9. Vote!

    28 Up (1984)

    "I have very particular reasons for including this film, which is the least familiar title on my list but one which I defy anyone to watch without fascination. No other film I have ever seen does a better job of illustrating the mysterious and haunting way in which the cinema bridges time. The movies themselves play with time, condensing days or years into minutes or hours. [...] The miracle of the film is that it shows us that the seeds of the man are indeed in the child."
  10. Vote!

    2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

    "Film can take us where we cannot go. It can also take our minds outside their shells, and this film by Stanley Kubrick is one of the great visionary experiences in the cinema. Yes, it was a landmark of special effects, so convincing that years later the astronauts, faced with the reality of outer space, compared it to "2001." But it was also a landmark of non-narrative, poetic filmmaking, in which the connections were made by images, not dialog or plot."

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