Dave Kehr's Annual Top 10 Lists, Ranked
One of American auteurism's most rigorous voices: Dave Kehr's year-end lists ran from 1974 to 2006 across the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. Here is every film from Kehr's annual top 10s in our library, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
324 films from this list are in our library; the top 30 by composite score are shown — the ranking is ours, not the list's own order.
- 1Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 2Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino · United States · crime, drama, thriller5.76
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Empire 500 (2008) #9 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994
- 3The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · drama, crime, thriller5.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 4The Piano1993 · Jane Campion · France / Australia / New Zealand · drama, romance4.99
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50
- 5Spirited Away2001 · Hayao Miyazaki · Japan · fantasy, animation, drama4.98
Berlin Golden Bear winner 2002 · Japan Academy Prize winner 2002 · Kehr's annual top 10 2002 #1
- 6Unforgiven1992 · Clint Eastwood · United States · western, drama, crime4.96
Oscar Best Picture winner 1992 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1992 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1993 #1
- 7Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski · United States · film-noir, mystery, thriller4.33
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 8Taste of Cherry1997 · Abbas Kiarostami · Iran · drama4.03
Palme d'Or winner 1997 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #93 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243
- 9Titanic1997 · James Cameron · United States · drama, romance3.72
Oscar Best Picture winner 1997 · Kehr's annual top 10 1997 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1998 #4
- 10The Thin Red Line1998 · Terrence Malick · United States · war, drama3.46
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1999 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1999 #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1998
- 11Forrest Gump1994 · Robert Zemeckis · United States · comedy, drama, romance3.45
Oscar Best Picture winner 1994 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1995 #4 · AFI 100 (2007) #76
- 12The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring2001 · Peter Jackson · New Zealand / United States · fantasy, adventure, action3.35
BAFTA Best Film winner 2002 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2001 · AFI 100 (2007) #50
- 13Fanny and Alexander1982 · Ingmar Bergman · France / Germany / Sweden · drama3.30
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #129
- 14Shoah1985 · Claude Lanzmann · France · documentary3.18
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #27 · Hoberman's annual top 10 1985 #1 · Hoberman's annual top 10 1989 #1
- 15Underground1995 · Emir Kusturica · France / Germany / Bulgaria · comedy, drama, war3.13
Palme d'Or winner 1995 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1996 #3 · Kehr's annual top 10 1995 #2
- 16Blue Velvet1986 · David Lynch · United States · mystery, thriller, drama3.13
Hoberman's annual top 10 1986 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #85
- 17Vagabond1985 · Agnès Varda · France · drama3.12
Venice Golden Lion winner 1985 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #41 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #101
- 18Ran1985 · Akira Kurosawa · Japan / France · war, drama3.00
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1985 #2 · Kehr's annual top 10 1985 #1 · Siskel's annual top 10 1985 #1
- 19The Eel1997 · Shohei Imamura · Japan · drama3.00
Palme d'Or winner 1997 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1997 #1 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1997 #4
- 20Million Dollar Baby2004 · Clint Eastwood · United States · drama3.00
Oscar Best Picture winner 2004 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2005 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 2004 #1
- 21Barton Fink1991 · Joel Coen, Ethan Coen · United States / United Kingdom · film-noir, comedy, drama2.98
Palme d'Or winner 1991 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1991 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1992 #5
- 22Lost in Translation2003 · Sofia Coppola · United States / Japan · comedy, romance, drama2.95
Film Comment year-end poll 2003 #1 · Sarris's annual top 10 2003 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2003
- 23Atlantic City1980 · Louis Malle · Canada / United States / France · romance, drama, crime2.92
Venice Golden Lion winner 1980 · Sarris's annual top 10 1981 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1981
- 24The Child2005 · Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne · Belgium / France · drama2.89
Palme d'Or winner 2005 · Film Comment year-end poll 2006 #4 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2005 #4
- 25L'Argent1983 · Robert Bresson · France · drama, crime2.83
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1983 #1 · Kehr's annual top 10 1984 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 26Wings of Desire1987 · Wim Wenders · France / Germany · fantasy, drama2.83
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1987 #2 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1988 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185
- 27L.A. Confidential1997 · Curtis Hanson · United States · crime, film-noir, mystery2.82
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1998 #1 · Sarris's annual top 10 1997 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1997
- 28Love Streams1984 · John Cassavetes · United States · drama2.77
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1984 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1985 #5
- 29Breaking the Waves1996 · Lars von Trier · Denmark / Sweden / France · drama, romance2.69
Cannes Grand Prix winner 1996 · Kehr's annual top 10 1996 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1996 #2
- 30Hana-bi1997 · Takeshi Kitano · Japan · crime, drama2.68
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1997 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1998 #1 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1997
Dave Kehr belongs to the small company of American critics who wrote as if a film's form were its argument. Born in 1953, he built his reputation at the Chicago Reader from 1974, moved to the Chicago Tribune in 1986, then to the New York Daily News, and finally to The New York Times, where his weekly DVD column ran until 2013. Since then he has curated film at the Museum of Modern Art, promoted to full curator in 2017. Across all of it he stayed an auteurist of the strict kind — a reader of shot design and gesture rather than of themes and messages.
What the annual lists were
For more than thirty years Kehr closed each cinema year with a ten-title verdict, a habit that spanned the Reader, the Tribune and the Times. The lists were never a popularity poll; they were an argument about which films had used the medium most intelligently that season. Because he covered new American releases alongside the international festival circuit, a single year could set a Hollywood juggernaut beside a near-invisible European miniature — and Kehr would defend both on the same formal grounds. That range is the character of the source, and it survives the re-ranking below.
How to read our list
The order here is ours, not Kehr's. Every title earned its place by appearing in one of his year-end tens; where it lands on this page is set by our composite score, which weighs 20-plus lists, awards and polls together. So the sequence tells you nothing about how Kehr himself ranked these films — only about how much accumulated canonical weight each one now carries.
The spread is the interesting part. Our highest-scoring Kehr pick is Goodfellas (1990), at composite rank #6, with Pulp Fiction (1994) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) close behind — a run of hard, vernacular American cinema that suits his taste. Yet the same source list holds Titanic (1997) and Forrest Gump (1994), popular monuments a lesser formalist might have refused on principle, sitting a few dozen places below. Kehr took them seriously; so does the score.
Descend further and the auteurist bedrock shows. Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997), Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1983), Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) and John Cassavetes's Love Streams (1984) all clear the threshold — films whose reputations rest on rigor rather than reach. The distance between Unforgiven near the top and Cassavetes far down it is the distance between what the wider canon has ratified and what Kehr's eye caught early. Reading the list against that gap is the point.