In the latest issue of Film Comment, writer/director/critic/scholar Paul Schrader discusses the making of a film canon. He appends his article with the following list, his choice for a canon. He notes that he only included one film per director, a fair restriction, I suppose.

GOLD
1. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
2. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)
3. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
4. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
5. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
6. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
7. Orphee (Jean Cocteau, 1950)
8. Masculin-Feminin (Jean-luc Godard, 1966)
9. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
10. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
11. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
12. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
13. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
14. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
15. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
16. The Godfather (Francis Coppola, 1972)
17. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
18. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
19. Performance (Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
20. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

SILVER
21. Mother and Son (Alexander Sokurov, 1997)
22. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
23. The Dead (John Huston, 1987)
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
25. last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
26. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer, 1928)
27. Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
28. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969
29. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
30. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952
31. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
32. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
33. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel, 1977)
34. An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)
35. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
36. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
37. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
38. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
39. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)
40. The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998)

BRONZE
41. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
42. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952)
43. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
44. The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
45. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
46. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002
47. Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
48. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls 1948)
49. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
50. Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962)
51. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)
52. Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956)
53. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer, 1970)
54. Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)
55. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1947)
56. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
57. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, 1953)
58. The Naked Spur (anthony Mann, 1953)
59. A Place in the Sun (George Stephens, 1950)
60. The General (Buster Keaton, 1927)

BTW, there may be typos. I scanned in the list and the OCR software isn't perfect. Neither am I.

I love it how he included a film that he wrote.

But who's gonna argue with him? Even if he didn't pick that one, but went with Raging Bull instead, it's still another movie he wrote.

Most of Schrader's picks for a director's best are good picks, but I think a couple are real head-scratchers. I mean, selecting The Dead for John Huston instead of The Maltese Falcon or Treasure of the Sierra Madre or even The Man Who Would Be King? And selecting High and Low for Akira Kurosawa instead of Seven Samurai or Rashomon or Throne of Blood or Ran? Of course, both The Dead and High and Low are good, but those directors did better work.

Sounds reasonable.

It's a good list, but if you've read the article it really isn't all that illuminating an exploration of cinema. The article is essentially the Introduction of what was to be an entire book on Film Canon. So he spends the entire article/Introduction discussing the history of canons, their origin as literary canons, talks briefly about canons in the classical arts, says almost nothing about film, and then includes this list. I like the list, but with no discussion of his choices (how they were made, how the choices he made reflect his views on canon as stated in the article, etc.) it becomes almost useless.

This is why I made only a passing reference to the article itself.