The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever

Filmmaker, critic, and author Scout Tafoya brings some of his “unloved” sensibilities, as demonstrated in his titular video essay series, to his selections for 1915, although a couple of his picks overlap with films that have come into view as undeniably impactful for this season.

Scout, in addition to directing numerous feature films, is the author of books on Tobe Hooper, John Ford, Anthony Mann, and Christophe Gans. His ongoing work can be supported on Patreon.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Mentioned media:

• Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) - Maurice Tourneur
• The Cheat (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Regeneration (1915) - Raoul Walsh
• Rapsodia Satanica (1915) - Nino Oxilia
• Trilby (1915) - Maurice Tourneur
• Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) - Christophe Gans
• The Devils (1971) - Ken Russell
• Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - Guillermo del Toro
• City of God (2002) - Fernando Meirelles
• Silent Hill (2006) - Christophe Gans
• Beauty and the Beast (2014) - Christophe Gans
• Return to Silent Hill (2026) - Christophe Gans
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) - Robert Wiene
• Dracula (1931) - Tod Browning
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• The Cameraman (1928) - Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
• Sherlock Jr. (1924) - Buster Keaton
• The General (1926) - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
• Cameo Kirby (1923) - John Ford
• Hell Bent (1918) - John Ford
• Safe Conduct (2002) - Bertrand Tavernier
• La Main du diable (1943) - Maurice Tourneur
• Appointment in Honduras (1953) - Jacques Tourneur
• The Blue Bird (1918) - Maurice Tourneur
• Svengali (1931) - Archie Mayo
• Nosferatu (1922) - F.W. Murnau
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• L’Inferno (1911) - Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe de Liguoro, and Adolfo Padovan
• The Man Who Laughs (1928) - Paul Leni
• Gangs of New York (2002) - Martin Scorsese
• There Are Not Thirty-six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse (2020) - Nicolás Zukerfeld
• The Big Country (1958) - William Wyler
• Track of the Cat (1954) - William A. Wellman
• Sunset Boulevard (1950) - Billy Wilder
• Ace in the Hole (1951) - Billy Wilder
• Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) - Billy Wilder
• Scarface (1932) - Howard Hawks
• Little Caesar (1931) - Mervyn LeRoy
• The Sign of the Cross (1932) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - David Lean
• An Actor’s Revenge (1963) - Kon Ichikawa
• The Hot Rock (1972) - Peter Yates
• Mrs. Soffel (1984) - Gillian Armstrong
• The Tutor (2023) - Jordan Ross
• Blackhat (2015) - Michael Mann
• The Public Enemy (1931) - William A. Wellman
• Manhattan Melodrama (1934) - W.S. Van Dyke
• The Last of the Mohicans (1920) - Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown
• The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)
• “Billy Wilder 1961-1981 (The Old Man is Still Alive, Part 9)” - You Must Remember This

Daisuke Miyao, Professor and the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. His ultimate selection factors greatly into that book, but also picks an international array of differing genres and forms.

Daisuke is also the author of Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy, Le Samouraï: BFI Film Classics, Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies, and The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema. He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema and the co-editor of The World of Benshi with Michael Emerich and Transnational Cinematography Studies with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Mentioned media:

• The Cheat (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• The Golem (1915) - Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen
• Assunta Spina (1915) - Gustavo Serena
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - David Lean
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Carmen (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• The Last Diva (1982) - Gianfranco Mingozzi
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) - Eleuterio Rodolfi
• The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) - Paul Wegener and Carl Boese
• The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) - Paul Wegener and Rochus Gliese
• King Kong (1933) - Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack
• Fantômas (1913) - Louis Feuillade
• Irma Vep (1996) - Olivier Assayas
• It’s Tough Being a Man (1969) - Yoji Yamada
• The Circus (1928) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Ten Commandments (1956) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Sunset Boulevard (1950) - Billy Wilder
• Temptation (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) - Robert Wiene
• A Page of Madness (1926) - Teinosuke Kinugasa
• Dragnet Girl (1933) - Yasujirō Ozu
• The Kumamoto Cat (1915) - unknown
• House (1977) - Nobuhiko Obayashi
• Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood - Robert S. Birchard

Filmmaker, musician, and writer Jeremy Mathews takes a couple tacks in his selections for 1915. In addition to a couple National Film Registry entries and another widely praised American drama, he selects an offbeat short comedy and a surreal, macabre, and underseen Russian horror, of a kind.

Jeremy’s film criticism has appeared in Eye for Film in the UK and Paste Magazine in the US. He fronts the indie band NSPS as singer, songwriter and guitarist, with upcoming projects including the new NSPS album, No Truth Left to Tell, and a short film called Seize the Initiative, which he directed and edited.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Mentioned media:

• The Italian (1915) - Reginald Barker
• After Death (1915) - Yevgeni Bauer
• Hypocrites (1915) - Lois Weber
• Regeneration (1915) - Raoul Walsh
• Fox Trot Finesse (1915) - Sidney Drew
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - F.W. Murnau
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• The Cheat (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Carmen (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Burlesque on Carmen (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• Suspense (1913) - Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) - D.W. Griffith
• Beauty and the Beast (1991) - Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
• Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino
• House of Gucci (2021) - Ridley Scott
• Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang
• Rosemary’s Baby (1968) - Roman Polanski
• The Last Laugh (1924) - F.W. Murnau
• Vampyr (1932) - Carl Theodor Dreyer
• The Crowd (1928) - King Vidor
• The Iron Horse (1924) - John Ford
• “The 100 Best Silent Films of All Time” - Jeremy Mathews
• The Silent Clowns - Walter Kerr
• My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration - Owen Kildare
• Perils of the New Land: Films of the Immigrant Experience (1910-1915)

Anthony Slide, prolific film historian, author, and archivist, personally knew a few people who acted in his selections of 1915. This secondhand view of their production is combined with his wide historical knowledge of their significance to bring valuable insight to the year and period.

Anthony is the author of numerous books since 1970 and has served as archivist at the American Film Historian and resident film historian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Perhaps his most relevant book to this conversation is American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon and his works can be found at his site.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Mentioned media:

• The Battle Cry of Peace (1915) - Wilfrid North and J. Stuart Blackton
• The Warrens of Virginia (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Hypocrites (1915) - Lois Weber
• The Vampire (1915) - Alice Guy-Blache
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Intolerance (1916) - D.W. Griffith
• A Fool There Was (1915) - Frank Powell
• Dracula (1931) - Tod Browning
• Nosferatu (1922) - F.W. Murnau
• The Struggle (1931) - D.W. Griffith
• Where Are My Children? (1916) - Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley
• The Squaw Man (1914) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Cheat (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Cheat (1931) - George Abbott
• Anna Christie (1923) - John Griffith Wray
• The Painted Lady (1912) - D.W. Griffith
• Gone with the Wind (1939) - Victor Fleming
• The Little American (1917) - Cecil B. DeMille and Joseph Levering
• Hearts of the World (1918) - D.W. Griffith
• The Italian (1915) - Reginald Barker
• Regeneration (1915) - Raoul Walsh
• Early American Cinema - Anthony Slide
• The Cinema and Ireland - Anthony Slide
• The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company - Anthony Slide
• Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers - Anthony Slide
• Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins - Anthony Slide
• "It's the Pictures That Got Small": Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age - Anthony Slide
• The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché - Anthony Slide
• Butter with My Bread - Olga Petrova
• Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History - Anthony Slide

To borrow a phrase from an upcoming guest of this season, Jeremy Mathews: 1915 has a white-hooded elephant in the room. D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation has to be mentioned when discussing film in this year, and although (spoiler) it was only selected by one guest, its shadow is cast somewhere into each of the conversations and diverse picks to come, addressing both its good and bad influence.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Media mentioned:

• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith

While the 1914 season introduction promised the omnipresence of “The Great War,” World War I, if still at least mentioned in every episode, didn’t dominate the conversations. Even still, its representation of sudden disruption, evolution, and modernity is still thematically connected to the aesthetic and industrial developments in film of the year.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to see the list of every submitted film!

Mentioned media:

• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) - Mack Sennett
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) - Winsor McCay
• Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) - Henry Lehrman
• Caught in the Rain (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• Making a Living (1914) - Henry Lehrman
• The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) - J. Farrell MacDonald

Whether he had a hand in their restoration or not, Bret Wood, filmmaker, author, and SVP and Producer of Archival Releases at Kino Lorber, selects five films that hold some personal connections for him. While they shift back and forth from epic drama and short comedy, these picks also highlight some representative traits of American film in 1914.

Among the many projects Bret has worked on at Kino are Pioneers of African-American Cinema and Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. His films include Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films and he is the author of Tod Browning: une vie avec les freaks.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1914!

Media mentioned:

• Bill Joins the W.W.W.’s (1914) - Edward Dillon
• The Death Mask (1914) - Thomas Ince
• The Professional Scapegoat (1914) - Sidney Drew
• The Avenging Conscience (1914) - D.W. Griffith
• Judith of Bethulia (1914) - D.W. Griffith
• Queen Kelly (1929) - Erich von Stroheim
• The Great Train Robbery (1903) - Edwin S. Porter
• Home, Sweet Home (1914) - D.W. Griffith
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Intolerance (1916) - D.W. Griffith
• The King of Kings (1927) - Cecil B. DeMille
• A Corner in Wheat (1909) - D.W. Griffith
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) - D.W. Griffith
• L’Inferno (1911) - Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe de Liguoro, and Adolfo Padovan
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• Phantom of the Paradise (1974) - Brian De Palma
• Death’s Marathon (1913) - D.W. Griffith
• The Devil’s Needle (1916) - Chester Withey
• Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999-2024)
• Freaks (1932) - Tod Browning
• The Unholy Three (1925) - Tod Browning
• The Devil-Doll (1936) - Tod Browning
• Alien (1979) - Ridley Scott
• Animal House (1978) - John Landis
• Rodan (1956) - Ishirō Honda
• Star Wars (1977) - George Lucas
• The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) - John Emerson and Christy Cabanne
• Cinema’s First Nasty Women

The selections from Beja Margitházi, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University's Department of Film Studies, begin in Canada and move eastward. They also jump between genres and culminate in an early directorial effort from Michael Curtiz and a representation of the cinema of her native Hungary.

Beja is editor of the film theory and history journal Metropolis. She is also the author of The Cinema of the Face: Close-up and Film Style and co-editor of the anthology Visual Communication.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1914!

Media mentioned:

• The Undesirable (1914) - Michael Curtiz
• Blue Blood (1914) - Nino Oxilia
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) - Edward S. Curtis
• The Student of Prague (1913) - Stellan Rye
• Atlantis (1913) - August Blom
• Ingeborg Holm (1913) - Victor Sjöström
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• Nanook of the North (1922) - Robert J. Flaherty
• Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) - William K.L. Dickson
• The Kiss (1896) - William Heise
• Photographing a Female Crook (1904) - Wallace McCutcheon
• The Abyss (1910) - Urban Gad

Library professional Brian Darr once maintained a blog about the San Francisco Bay Area screening scene called Hell On Frisco Bay, an alias he still uses on Bluesky and Letterboxd. So some aspect of the theatrical experience, whether he caught a screening or not, comes into the conversation about each of his five picks (all from a different country!) in addition to their aesthetic recommendations.

Brian has written on media history for outlets like Senses of Cinema, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, SFGate, Screen Slate, the Independent Lens blog and The Maine Playweek. He's performed several audiovisual presentations at San Francisco's Other Cinema showcase and elsewhere on media history subjects from blacklisted directors to experimental music label Opus One.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1914!

Films and resources mentioned:

• The Masquerader (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• Child of the Big City (1914) - Yevgeni Bauer
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• L’Inferno (1911) - Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro
• Intolerance (1916) - D.W. Griffith
• Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang
• Maciste in Hell (1925) - Guido Brignone
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• Judex (1916) - Louis Feuillade
• Tih Minh (1918) - Louis Feuillade
• Fantômas (1920) - Edward Sedgwick
• The Cameraman (1928) - Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
• Spite Marriage (1929) - Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - Dziga Vertov
• Where the Winds Blow (1910) - Laurence Trimble
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• His Trysting Place (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Face on the Bar Room Floor (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger
• Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film - Jay Leyda
• “1,000 Favorites: A Personal Canon” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Elyse Singer, Lecturer in the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College, selects a wide range of forms and genres for her five picks of 1914, from short comedy to serial action to epic tales (one historically dramatic and the other perhaps the first feature comedy). At least two relate to her recent research in female madness in film and the agency of women in serials of the time.

Elyse has also taught at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at CUNY and NYU Tisch. Her work has been published in Cinematic Explorations of the Mind, The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science, Faces on Screen, Feminist Media Histories, and Domitor’s Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1914!

Films and resources mentioned:

• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) - Mack Sennett
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• The Perils of Pauline (1914) - Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• Trouble in Paradise (1932) - Ernst Lubitsch
• Photographing a Female Crook (1904) - Wallace McCutcheon
• Laughing Gas (1907) - Edwin S. Porter
• Black Panther (2018) - Ryan Coogler
• Woman Warrior White Rose (1929) - Zhang Huimin
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• The Violin (1908) - Louis Feuillade
• Tih Minh (1918) - Louis Feuillade
• Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang
• Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me - Lillian Gish
• Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes - Maggie Hennefeld
• “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film” - Tom Gunning