James Schamus is the former CEO of Focus Features; the producer of, among other films, Ride with the Devil (1999) and Brokeback Mountain (2005); the screenwriter and producer of The Ice Storm (1997); and a professor of professional practice at Columbia University.



Top ten what?



The ten films from the Criterion catalog that, when packaged together in an annotated list, serve as a kind of advertisement for one’s broad but nuanced taste, representing one in the coolest possible light? (Why does “taste,” and cinematic taste, so often function as the locus for the production and promotion of ego ideals and ideal egos?)

Or is it the ten films from the catalog that may not be one’s all-time favorites but for which one has a particular cinephilic fervor about getting other people to see them? (Does anyone really need to be reminded that The Rules of the Game is a great film? Isn’t cinephilia at heart the love of the un- or barely seen, such that cinephilic passion increases to the measure of the rarity of the cine-object?)

Or, perhaps, the ten films in the catalog that in fact do measure up, according to a variety of standards that may not all be one’s own but that can still be acknowledged as rightly, if loosely, binding for us members of the community of film lovers, films that make up a canon of common touchstones? (In which case, yes, it’s perfectly right, if a bit boring, to be reminded that The Rules of the Game is, indeed, a great film.)

So which top ten shall it be today? Well, in no particular order: