The 75 best looking films ever made

The Top 5:
No 5.: The fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)
Directed by Karel Zeman
DoP.: Jirν Tarantνk



This is an astonishing film which deserves to be spoken about more. It’s a mixture of animation and live action and is a colourful fable based on an old book. Famously remade by terry Gilliam, the original is a far more daring, pioneering and beautiful.

Every scene has some jaw dropping animation or technique that makes the colours and action jump off the screen. It is scintillating.
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No 4.: ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
DoP.: Geoffrey Unsworth

So much has been written about this film. It almost needs no introduction. Years ahead of it’s time, so visually exciting that it spawned conspiracy theories about the moon landings. So amazingly shot and constructed. It still holds up today as one of the most awe inspiring films ever made, and could easily have been no.1.



The film has inspired countless others, but remains the daddy of Sci-Fi, and is one of the very rare films that we can say genuinely changed cinema.

Some comparisons. Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’ :


Duncan Jones’ ‘Moon’:


Even 2001’s special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull directed a sci fi film with many influences from Kubrick’s masterwork:



Kubrick calculated that it would take one person 13 years to hand draw and paint all the mattes needed to insert the assorted spacecraft into the starry backgrounds. Kubrick hired 12 other people, and did the job in one year. He worked for several months with effects technicians to come up with a convincing effect for the floating pen in the shuttle sequence. After trying many different techniques, without success, Kubrick decided to simply use a pen that was stuck with tape to a sheet of glass and suspended in front of the camera:



A true masterpiece.
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No 3.: ‘Persona’ (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
DoP.: Sven Nykvit

The greatest Bergman film of all. A film about existentialism, the duality of the self, sexuality, gender, family, loneliness or all or none of those things. An absolute masterpiece. You can feel Bergman and Nykvist bouncing off each other. How does a film set in just a few locations have such ingenious photography?



According to text on the film:

"In the spring of 1965 Bergman was admitted to the Sophia Hospital, Stockholm, for double pneumonia and acute penicillin poisoning. While hospitalized, he created the basic script of "Persona". Inspired by August Strindberg's one-act play "The Stronger", an existence which consisted of dead people, brick walls and some dreary park trees and conceived as a sonata for two instruments."

The film has had so much influence in cinema. From recent films like ‘The Handmaiden’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ to Lynch masterpieces such as ‘Mulholland Drive’ :



It will remain a visual masterpiece as new generations of filmmakers discover it.
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No 2.: ‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
DoP.: Jordan Cronenweth



Ridley Scott’s world building in Blade Runner is perhaps the most beautiful ever committed to film. The tech noir neon lit underworld is so pretty I’d probably watch hours of footage of it.



It’s one of the most inspiring films of the 20th century, and wasn’t received that well on release but is rightly revered across cinema these days.

The influence even spreads across to anime, here a comparison with Mamoru Oshii’s ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995):



It’s a magnificent film.
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There are 37,000 extras in this film and it was so expensive to make that it bankrupted the production company.

It has influenced everything from Star Wars...........


to films like 'Dark City':



The establishing shots of the city - with cars, planes and elevated trains moving about - were shot using stop-motion photography. The cars were modelled on the newest taxicabs driving the streets of Berlin. It took months to build the city model and several days to film the few short sequences. Then the lab ruined the first shots. The backgrounds in the shot had been dimly lit to create a greater sense of depth, but the head of the lab, who developed the film himself, decided that was a mistake and lightened the backgrounds, thereby destroying the sense of forced perspective.

It is a work of utter genius - And all things considered (the time / the techniques / what had come before / the equipment available), It is the greatest looking film ever made.

-The Small Town (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)


-Raise the Red Lantern (Y Zhimou)

-Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

-Corn Island (George Ovashvili)


-Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda)


-Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer)