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My list of the ten greatest films of all time is populated by films I consider ‘great’ for a variety of reasons. Some of the films listed significantly changed the landscape of international filmmaking due to technological or stylistic innovation: Citizen Kane, Man with a Movie Camera, Battleship Potemkin and Toy Story (an odd grouping, I know). Citizen Kane combined several technical innovations (eg deep focus, experimental editing techniques) with an entertaining and politically charged narrative that has continued to enthral viewers today. Man With a Movie Camera demonstrated the artistic power of editing in silent film just before sound came and ruined everything. It took at least another 40 years for Hollywood to catch up with Dziga’s experiments from the 1920s. Battleship Potemkin is the most widely watched example of Eisenstein’s dialectical montage films, which challenged the Hollywood style of constructing a film and instead demonstrated the potential for film to create new ideas from the juxtaposition of images. Toy Story may seem like an odd companion to these other two films, but I would argue that it represents as significant a technological leap forward for film. Lasseter’s experiment in computer animation could have remained simply a tech demo, but his passion for classic Disney animation and ability to imbue the simplest characters with emotion meant that he paved the way for CG animation to be the dominant form of animation today. Other films in my list are there simply because I believe their directors have had a monumental impact on film history, though I can only afford to nominate one of their movies each. Psycho, Blue Velvet and 2001 are in this category; I am torn between nominating them or Rear Window/Vertigo (Hitchcock), Elephant Man/Lost Highway (Lynch), and The Shining/A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick). I also decided to include Psycho, as I believe the horror film genre needs to be represented due to my own personal passion for horror films and their growing influence on mainstream cinema. While some horror purists may argue with whether Psycho classes as a thriller or a horror film, I believe its impact on both genres cannot be understated. And it still scares the willies out of me today! My list also includes the films that have had the greatest impact on me as a film viewer and on my research into the psychology of film. Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express had a huge impact on me when I watched it as a teen. I had never before seen a film so stylish, so immediate, so foreign and so intriguing. Kar-wai’s cool Asian sensibility has had a direct influence on Quentin Tarantino, whose work I also decided to represent with Pulp Fiction. While Reservoir Dogs was his initial shot-in-the-head to Hollywood, Pulp Fiction demonstrated a skill at narrative and characterisation that raised his craft beyond pure shock and into the realms of the great filmmakers. If only all his imitators could replicate Tarantino’s deft touch. Similar mastery of narrative has to be attributed to the Coen Brothers. I would love to include several of their films for their ability to tell funny, engrossing stories in stylish and technically innovative ways. As I can only include one, I chose The Big Lebowski because it is the perfect end-of-the-evening film and always makes me laugh so hard I squirt White Russian out of my nose.