Ah, the top ten list - the favourite pastime of the lazy film critic. Here was my effort from 2005. Strange how much I still agree with it after all these years.

Desert Island Movies

Ah, the desert island – every film buff’s ultimate dream. You’re a castaway blown far from the shores of the NFT and Blockbuster Video with only ten movies for comfort. And on your small mound of yellow sand with its lone palm tree is a giant screen capable of doing justice to a gorgeous 70mm print with a sound system that would make George Lucas blush.

The best version of this story comes from David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. Here, he imagines a ship containing all the world’s cinematic treasures sinking beneath the waves. As he makes for land, he has time to rescue a film each from his ten favourite directors – not necessarily the most historically significant or important auteurs, just those who have impacted on his imagination and taste. But as he paddles on with his chosen booty, he recognises that he can’t live without the work of an 11^th director – in his case, Howard Hawks – who is something of a guilty obsession, a director who is not just good but special to him on a more personal level. So he snatches every film Hawks ever made!

In my own version of this fantasy, I’m washing up on the shore with one Hitchcock, one Ozu, one Dreyer, one Rossellini, one Powell, one Bergman, one Kiarostami, one Tarkovsky, one Antonioni, and one Feuillade to while away my time on the island. So, hopefully, I’m looking at spending eternity with:

Vertigo (1958)

Late Spring (1949)

Vampyr (1932)

Journey To Italy (1953)

Black Narcissus (1947)

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Close-Up (1990)

Stalker (1978)

L’Eclisse (1962)

Fantomas (1913)

Ten beautiful gems – they changed the way I look at movies, they changed the way I look at life. But wait – something’s missing. Hold the raft while I go back and grab Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Rabid, Fast Company, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M Butterfly, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider and History of Violence. Cronenberg – the director I became fixated on as a teenager, who investigates states of mind and body that no other filmmaker dare go near, who has dragged horror into the arthouse, whose every new release is an event I couldn’t dream of missing. Cronenberg is my 11^th director.

But there’s a problem with Thomson’s wish list. It encourages you to think of directors with a prolific and consistently successful output. It doesn’t allow for those filmmakers whose star burns half as long but so very, very brightly. And it doesn’t let the castaway unwind, to settle back with films that are familiar and comfortable like an old jumper, cult movies by forgotten or second-division characters that still exert a curious fascination.

So let me cheat and start my journey to the island all over again. And this time, I’m taking…

Blade Runner (1982) – Oh, come on, don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming from the quote above! Quite simply, the film that got me into movies, that made me understand that images and sound are as much a part of storytelling as the plot. And let’s not get bogged down in nerdy discussions over whether Deckard is a replicant and what it means to be human. The beauty of Blade Runner is that it’s a dark romance – a future noir that links back to Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950), not Sam Spade and Dashiell Hammett, that’s about lonely people in a lonely city trying to make a connection.

The Wild Bunch (1969) – Peckinpah’s hour of glory, again it’s a film that’s misunderstood. It’s not a macho gorefest, but a brutal, if often lyrical, examination of masculinity, and a gorgeous paean to a myth of the West that never existed. OK, I admit it, I love the opening and closing shoot-outs – the best action scenes in cinema history. But in context, they’re also frightening, excruciating, sad. And Peckinpah’s ability to combine a raw, physical sense of people and landscape with such tight editing control is unsurpassed anywhere.

The Wicker Man (1973) – Is it a horror film, an erotic comedy, a drama about the clash of faiths, a musical? Is it tacky nonsense or a bona fide classic? You know what, it’s all of these things. Which, in my eyes, makes it a genuine original, a one-off, that rare British film that dares to be ridiculous and, by doing so, comes out the other side with something fresh to offer its audience. The first time I saw it was at home with my parents when I was 11 years old – when Britt Eckland started slapping her arse, my mum delivered the immortal line, “I don’t think you should be watching this film, Michael.” A formative experience.

The Thing (1982) – Another film encountered at a tender age that’s burned itself into my memory. Funny thing is, I keep meeting people who say the same thing. Dismissed by critics and a flop at the cinema, its reputation has grown through the accumulated praise of those who have come across it almost by accident. But from the brilliant opening sequence in which a dog is chased across a glacier by two men in a helicopter, Carpenter’s best film is a model of genre storytelling – lean, economical, suspenseful. There’s an indulgence of gruesome special effects but so horrible are they that, for once, they have the desired effect of making the monster genuinely loathsome and frightening.

L’Atalante (1934) – And now for something completely different, a thinking person’s date movie, an early talkie – nearly denied us by unsympathetic distributors – that feels fresher, more romantic and more contemporary than any Hollywood rom-com. Focusing on a newly-married couple and their life together on a barge boat, its best moments come with the introduction of Michel Simon’s river tramp, his collection of curios and troupe of delightful cats. His is one of the great performances in cinema – honest, tender, yet unfailingly naturalistic. Which could also be said of the film itself – as Jonathan Rosenbaum put it, its greatness rests “on the simple gratitude it makes us feel for being alive.”

Spirit of the Beehive (1973) – A film so delicate, so gossamer light, it feels like it could just melt away. Luis Cuadrado’s half-light cinematography (captured when he was partially blind) and Luis de Pablo’s childlike score are genuinely haunting. Victor Erice – world cinema’s most underrated genius – sensitively captures the fragile awakening of a young girl in the twilight landscape of post-Civil War Spain. Both mournful and yet alive with the possibilities of youth, it deserves to become every cinephile’s favourite overlooked gem.

Play It Again, Sam (1972) – Now for a comedy – every castaway needs a laugh every now and again – and I can’t imagine living on my island home without a Woody Allen movie. Everyone knows his best work came with Annie Hall (1977) and the bittersweet romantic dramas that followed, but – damn it! – I want one of the early, funny ones. So let me indulge in the blind date sequence – with the Oscar Peterson record and the chopsticks – in the bit at the bar where he has to take the girl back to the orphanage and, most gloriously of all, in the plastic skunk. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you haven’t lived.

Listen To Britain (1942) – I’m going to get homesick on my desert island, so what better way to remember Blighty than Humphrey Jennings’ beautiful wartime documentary? In just over quarter of an hour, it manages to capture the essence of an entire nation through a handful of images and familiar sounds. And it’s all in the choices… Lorries and tanks pounding through a country town to the theme from Workers’ Playtime, the repeated shots of a greasy spoon menu – fish and chips, jam sponge – the inspired juxtaposition of Flanagan and Allen with a classical concert given for the Royal Family. It’s a film that lays Britain bare – that exposes its class divisions and the shared culture which crosses them – all ostensibly in a work of propaganda. As Lindsay Anderson put it, its aim is to show “what it was like…what we were like – the best of us.” Cue lump in the throat.

Sans Soleil (1983) – And while we’re at it, every castaway dreams of receiving a message in a bottle, so why can’t I have the cinematic equivalent? Chris Marker’s extraordinary essay takes the form of an extended letter written back to an unidentified narrator from the worlds of Japan, Africa and Iceland. Like Jennings, Marker uses carefully-selected images, this time to create a universal portrait of humanity. No film has as much to say about the clash of modernity and tradition, about life as lived and life as imagined. And if there was one single shot in cinema history that has affected me more than any other, it’s the freeze frame of a man holding Marker’s gaze in a downtown bar. His look is unapologetic, unashamed, unsullied by cynicism or affectation – a stab of truth in a work that shares all those qualities.

Sense and Sensibility (1995) – And finally, why do we go to the movies? In a paragraph from his book Durgnat on Film that should be quoted in full each time someone tries to answer that question, the British critic quotes Andrew Sarris who, in a loose moment, admitted that what “kept him coming to the cinema was its girls”. For Durgnat, “Here is the beginning of wisdom. Here, the old Adam peeps out from behind the pince-nez of culture.” And seeing as I have no need of culture, alone on my island, let me be wise and reserve a place for my very own screen goddess, Kate Winslet. It was a long-haul flight to Australia that did it – this film was playing, and being tired and bored, my defences were down. First, there was the lovely Elinor – a sensitive, intelligent performance from Emma Thompson – but even she was eclipsed by the impulsive Marianne. And so a crush was born. And I don’t really care if you share in my adulation or frown at the boldness of my “male gaze” – it’s my island, OK? You can get your own kicks.