Yeah, the
Empire list is a waste of time and space. I think.
The
Time Out poll is OK. There's also a 2002
Sight & Sound poll (
Sight & Sound is the magazine of the British Film Institute) that included world directors making their picks. In addition to the American titles that I believe are all on the various AFI lists you also get some of the classics from the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini, Renoir, Bergman, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Antonioni, Dreyer, Truffaut, De Sica, Leone, Bresson, etc. They only have fifty movies listed, but it does add an international flavor.
That list can be found
HERE.
Sight & Sound also polled a bunch of prominent critics at the same time, and their list is
HERE. I think they had sixty films on their list, though obviously there is lots of crossover with the director-chosen list. I think if you took the ranking out of it and just alphabetically combined the two lists into one, you'd have a very good mix of truly world cinema to gage MoFo members viewing history.
The list of directors who participated in the poll is
HERE. It includes a very good cross section of auteurs, from Bernardo Bertolucci, Theo Angelopoulos, Sidney Lumet, Paul Schrader and Norman Jewison to Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, Cameron Crowe, Roger Corman and John Waters. If you click on each director's name you'll find their top ten picks (check out Joel Schumacher's eye for world cinema vs. the crap he makes on his own).
So...yeah.