Empire's 500 - The View from the Mainstream

Published in this month's Empire is their list of 500 Great Movies Of All Time, which makes for interesting reading. The list was compiled from votes from film makers - writers, directors, cinematographers, critics and fans. Of course lists of this kind are highly contentious but I just wanted to add a few random comments about the list. Before that, worth mentioning this issue's cover - Empire put out 100 different covers featuring films from the list. I went with the Eraserhead cover for this post, but my own copy is the Citizen Kane cover - the best choice that day at the newsagents with a rack filled with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Big Lebowski.

Favourite film lists are argued about as much for what's missing as opposed to what's included, but I expected to see Nashville, Easy Rider, The Devils, Deliverance and The Blair Witch Project, all of which were absent from a list that included the junk like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Transformers

I always assumed Suspiria was Argento's most well known, popular film but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (#272) sits some 40 places above Suspiria (#312). Cronenberg has just one entry - the overrated A History of Violence (#448), no sign of Videodrome or The Fly. Alejandro Jodorowsky's only film on the list is Santa Sangre (#476) - good to see it included but I would have assumed it would have been El Topo. Possibly the most disappointing ranking on the list is The Wicker Man which just crawls into the list at #485.

Only 3 Italian westerns figure on the list - Once Upon A Time In the West (#14), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (#25), and The Great Silence (#386).

It was perhaps inevitable that The Terminator (#308) and Alien (#33) would be outranked by their more inferior sequels, but the original Evil Dead figures nowhere on the list despite the presence of Evil Dead II (#49) and Army of Darkness (#372)

Here's the entire list