After a month of polling (and votes from 3,000 Kiwis) here it is - your 100 favourite films of all time. And a mighty list she is. Where else can you see The Notebook, Rear Window and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (ranked 47-49) mentioned in the same breath? Democracy in all its glory…
Here's a printable checklist of this top 100, see our breakdown of the results here, and see here for your 20 most despised films.
94
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick’s nightmarish satire captivates precisely because its outrageousness is grounded in reality. Capturing the lunacy of the Cold War, its potential for human extinction, and the stupidity inherent in Mutually Assured Destruction, Dr. Strangelove forever changed how nuclear war was viewed. To have such an impact while also boasting wonderfully unhinged performance(s) from Peter Sellers, the only other thing Kubrick could have pulled off was ending the Cold War itself (he didn’t).
75
Psycho
The black-and-white masterpiece from The Master of Suspense caught audiences completely off-guard with its infamous shower scene. Killing off your lead starlet halfway through your film was unheard of, and Alfred Hitchcock used that taboo to his advantage as the madness of hotelier Norman Bates slowly comes to light.
62
Se7en
“What’s in the booooox?” Brad Pitt demands to know in the closing scene of Se7en. By this stage we’ve been on a journey with him through six of the seven deadly sins in David Fincher’s troubling film, defining the visual aesthetic of 90s cinematography. Despite the clichéd jaded cop/idealistic cop pairing of Pitt and Morgan Freeman, the duo brought their A-game to proceedings, though the film belongs to the infernal tableaus of the mostly-unseen villain Kevin Spacey.
