Brian Viner’s top 100 films (part 1). But do you agree with him?

EVERYONE loves a list, movie fans more than most. I wish I had a euro — or perhaps, in this current crisis, a loo roll — for every time someone asked me to name my five favourite films, albeit mainly so they could then tell me theirs.

Over the coming weeks, I will list my 100 favourite English-language films in reverse order, in the hope that you might be inspired to see those you haven’t watched for years, or maybe have never seen at all.

They are all available on streaming services, or to download, or to order online as DVDs. I’ll list my top 20 foreign-language films separately.

I hope, too, that my favourites will make you consider yours, and perhaps generate a bit of debate. Indignation, even, when you see what I’ve left out, or relegated to 77th when you think it should be in the top 10.

O WRITE to me c/o The Irish Daily Mail, Third Floor, Embassy House, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 or via email (filmclassics@dailymail.co.uk) or Twitter (@vinerbrian) if you agree with my choices, or better still, if you don’t.

100 Unforgiven (1992)

CLINT Eastwood’s gripping revisionist Western, deservedly anointed Best Picture at the Oscars. 99 Cool Hand Luke (1967)

PAUL Newman doing what he always did best, playing an anti-establishment hero. 98 Henry V (1944)

LAURENCE Olivier plays the hero of Agincourt, in a film considered so important as a wartime moralebooster that it was partly funded by the British government. 97 The Long Hot Summer (1958)

NEWMAN again (right), at his most smoulderingly sexy, as suspected barn-burner Ben Quick. It was the first film he and Joanne Woodward made together, in the year they got married. Their sexual chemistry crackles like a firework.

96 The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

LOOK out for a pre-fame Audrey Hepburn — and Valerie Singleton as a schoolgirl — but it’s the sublime Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway who drive Charles Crichton’s glorious Ealing Comedy. 95 All The President’s Men (1976)

THE ultimate political thriller, about Watergate, made only two or three years

after the events it depicted. 94 Hell Or High Water (2016)

CHRIS Pine and Ben Foster are fantastic as a pair of bankrobbing brothers, though it’s Jeff Bridges, as so often, who steals the show as a cranky old Texas Ranger on their tail. 93 Spartacus (1960)

STANLEY Kubrick’s epic tale, starring

Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, of Romans v revolting slaves. 92 Saving Private Ryan (1998)

STEVEN Spielberg’s cracking war film has arguably the most intense opening 27 minutes of any film ever made. 91 His Girl Friday (1940)

A DELIGHTFUL screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (above). Just about the perfect self-isolation movie.