The five don't change

The venerable Sight and Sound magazine is due to release its latest list of the best movies ever made. It only happens once a decade, so it will be interesting to see how the vast film critical hivemind changes, and whether Vetigo will hold onto that top spot again. And it's all pleasantly distracting enough, even if all of these lists are total bullshit.

Any list which purports to sort out the best movies ever made is rubbish, because the history of cinema is so big and complex now, and home to so many unique points of views and styles and voices, that they're impossible to compare.

Still, while I could never have the hubris to name the greatest films ever made, I can still always pick my favourites. The ones that speak to me, that get inside my fucking head, and help define the sort of person I am, and want to be.

The problem is: mine haven't changed in 25 years. My top five favourite films have always been O Lucky Man... ,Withnail and I, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original Dawn of the Dead and either Unforgiven or The Good the Bad and the Ugly, depending on my mood.

I saw most of those in that crucial time in the late teenage years, when you're really forming your tastes, deciding what you like .A decade earlier and it would have been just Star Wars, Star Wars and Star Wars, but when you're finding your place in the world, and you find strange voices, great action and intense existential experiences in the films you consume, of course you're going to latch onto them forever.

(I never saw any of them at a cinema first, although I did eventually see them all at a theatre.)

So they're the five I go to easily when people ask me my favourite films. A top 20 list is far more malleable, things fall in and out of there as time goes on, and there might even be films I first saw in the 21st century in there. (There's always Die Hard and some Tarantino and Lynch and Coens and sometimes there's Rocky Horror,)

I am open to new films and do want to see great films, and while they're just so unlikely to delight me as much as the films I saw when I was 20, there are new delights in my life. And I'm always listening out for those strange new voices.