OttoVonB's Must See Films

A strong contender for most entertaining film ever: the balance of character, story, pacing and action has a harmony I have seldom found since. Solid gold.

The funniest film ever made. No other summary can do it justice.

Orson Welles' masterful ode to Shakespeare is the pinnacle of a compromised career. A towering central performance.

Perhaps the most humanist film in existence, Tarkovsky's meditation on the depths of the human soul is like a bottomless well of riches.

Fear can be beautiful, and it has never been more bewitching and terrifying than here.

There are reasons - beyond the unparalleled 70mm photography - that this film endures. Its razor-sharp script, its towering performances, and a man named David Lean at the peak of his powers. See this on the biggest screen you can find!

The best thriller ever? Yes. And even after 80 years, it's by a long shot.

The Coens at their offbeat, quotable best, give you their most memorable characters. The Dude abides...

So fresh, so alive, so unique, Tim Burton and (almost more-so) Danny Elfmann's masterpiece will make you feel like a kid again.

It's Jean-Marc Barr's horrified idealist. It's the gorgeous photography. It's scenery-chewing from Eddie Constantine, Ernst-Hugo Järegård and the steamy Barbara Sukowa. It's the aura of doom... It's Lars Von Trier's Europa!

Of all George Lucas's magical saga, this episode remains the darkest, most mature and quite simply, the best!

Think Kim Jong Il's home movies, and you're not even halfway there. See it to believe it.

The best WWII film ever made, an endlessly rewarding masterclass in suspense and character.

Never has nature's indifference to our self-inflicted suffering been so heartbreaking and so mesmerizing. Even by putting the Big Bang itself on screen could Malick not top himself...

Ridley Scott defines mankind's vision of the future, invents techno-noir, and makes us wonder what makes us human, all in one film.

Not so much a narrative film as a spiritual ode, but with such poets at work - Scorsese, Glass, Deakins - you owe it to yourself to see this.

The most heartbreaking and honest love-story ever committed to celluloid.

Chris Marker at his warmest and cleverest. You'll know what that guy felt like at the end of 2001 when he went through the stargate, as future, past and present collide in this tour-de-force.

Of all the stunning and unique Herzog/Kinski canon, this has the most immediacy and brutal honesty.

A triumph of minimalism, both in dialogue and in Day Lewis's miraculous performance.

There's nothing else like it out there. Soviet cinematic art at its most delirious, baroque and intoxicating.

I have a soft spot for That Obscure Object of Desire, but in terms of pure irreverence of fun, it's hard to beat this little gem.

It's hard to choose from Fassbinder's magnificent body of work, but this stands proudly beyond even the grand shadow of Berlin Alexanderplatz as one of the most disarming stories ever put to film.

The noble, violent and wounded love-child of Seven Samurai and The Wild Bunch, an absorbing build-up to a whirlwind of violence, anchored by one of Japan's most legendary actors.

Scorsese's testament is the best the Greatest Story has ever been told.

A visual whirlwind like no other, passion, poetry, madness. A cinematic breath of fresh air.

It's about love, it's about contempt, it's about art, it's about business, it's about cinema, it's Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris.

Every Guillermo Del Toro film is in some way or other a fairytale, an ode to monsters and the fantastical, and this is without a doubt his masterpiece. So far.

A staggering achievement, calling it an essay - which, at heart, it is - is reductionist in the extreme. If it were just an essay, it would still be a monument. As things stand, this is so, so much more.

A beast caught between heaven and hell, this film is part Terrence Malick, part Werner Herzog. A gritty, almost ethnographic Medieval epic that needs to be seen to be believed.