‘Chinatown’ listed the greatest movie ever

SYDNEY - After 36 years of its release in 1974, ‘Chinatown’ has now been voted as the greatest film ever made.

The Chandleresque “neo-noir”, with an Oscar-winning script by Robert Towne and a superlative performance by Nicholson as detective JJ Gittes, was voted into first place by a panel of Guardian and Observer critics.

Chinatown beat six other films in a shortlist drawn from the recently published seven-part newspaper series on “The Greatest Films of All Time”.

Equal second were Alfred Hitchock’s ‘Psycho’ (from the horror section) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Andrei Rublev’ (leading film the arthouse section).

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw said Chinatown was “such a powerful piece of mythmaking, a brilliant evocation of Los Angeles as a spiritual desert,” reports Sydney Morning Herald.

The Observer’s Philip French considered it a movie of “near perfection”.

The seven best

1. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

4. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1976)

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

6. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

7. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) (ANI)