Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns
Writer; film critic; programmer
UK
Voted in the critics poll
UK
Voted in the critics poll
Voted for:
| Birth of the Nation | 1973 | Klaus Wyborny |
| chien andalou, Un | 1928 | Luis Buñuel |
| Once Upon a Time in the West | 1968 | Sergio Leone |
| Scarlet Empress, The | 1934 | Josef von Sternberg |
| Scenes from a City Life (Dushi Fengguang) | Yuan Muzhi | |
| Spring in a Small Town | 1948 | Fei Mu |
| Straits of Love and Hate (Aien Kyo) | 1937 | Mizoguchi Kenji |
| Taipei Story | 1984 | Edward Yang |
| Textism | Hirabayashi Isamu | |
| Touch of Evil | 1958 | Orson Welles |
Comments
Not much change from 2002, so I’m obviously set in my ways. What the list reveals is an admiration for films that push an idea about cinema to its apparent limit, and do so with elegance and wit. The only recent film on the list, Hirabayashi’s brilliant Textism (2003), stands for a vein of iconoclastic avant gardism that stretches from Robert Florey to Kenneth Anger and Hollis Frampton.