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The first character of the cinema was the mass: In La sortie des usines Lumière, credited as the first ever film, a crowd of factory workers leave a factory. While on repeated viewings you could begin to pick out the quirks and personalities of certain subjects, the real character was the group, the mass, the crowd. Early cinema, in particular in the work of the Lumière’s was emblematic of this style, the cities, the environment and the crowd itself were almost always the subject: the individual would come later. As cinema grew as an industry, it eventually morphed into a cinema of the individual. This seemed natural, as the capitalist nature of industry was one that favored individual accomplishment above all else. This remains core to our central understanding of narrative filmmaking to this day, and with few exceptions (perhaps most notably the Russian cinema of the 1920s) remains the status quo.

An important movie is hard to define, perhaps even impossible. There are so many variables and each movie is always going to be brought down to subjectivity. A movie can be deemed important for a number of reasons – it could have pioneered technological advancements, it could have broke new ground for the genre, it could have changed the conventions of cinema, it could have been important for race and religion or it could have just been so good it changed cinema forever.

There have been millions and millions of movies made since the format’s inception so to choose just 50 from cinema’s entire history is a difficult process as personal feelings have to be mostly swept aside in favour of objectivity. There are of course numerous brilliant movies missing from the list that there simply wasn’t room for and the importance of more recent movies is a lot...

Note: Hugo was screened at the New York Film Festival as a work-in-progress with color correction, sound mixing, titles, 3D and visual effects not fully complete. Check out my detailed impressions below, but look for a full review on the final film when it releases next month.

Being a film lover and director go hand in hand, but it is difficult to find a more passionate, well-educated cinema historian than Martin Scorsese. The director of classics such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull has a seemingly endless knowledge of the medium, frequently noting the influence that filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Italian neo-realist pieces such as The Bicycle Thieves have had on him. One can see the profound effect in his filmmaking, with such a firm control on and expertise in the medium coming through his frames. By presiding over a film preservation foundation, the auteur also hopes the profound...

1. Exiting The Factory (1895) Influential, how? Cinema arrives! Citizen Kane. Top Gun. The Hottie & The Nottie. The common thread? They’re all descendents of cine-pioneer Louis Lumière’s La Sortie Des Usines Lumière - no less than the first motion picture ever made. Fifty seconds long, it captures in real time workers spilling from the gates of Lyon’s Lumiere Factory. A precursor to everything, it particularly anticipates the work of George Lucas: there are three versions in... .

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