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Pantheon: The Greatest Films of All Time

Third Sunday of the Month

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Image: Playtime, at VIFF Centre

Every ten years since 1952, the distinguished British film magazine Sight & Sound has polled critics and scholars to nominate their “ten best” films. Over the decades, the pool of voters has gone from a few dozen to more than 1600, and the greatest film ever made has switched from Bicycle Thieves to Citizen Kane (across multiple polls), to Vertigo, and most recently to Jeanne Dielman, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Now in its third year, our Pantheon series draws from this list. Every third Sunday morning of the month we present one of the greats, preceded by a 20-minute introductory lecture by a local film scholar, and followed by an audience talkback.

Each film gets a repeat screening the following Tuesday evening.

Tickets include free tea or coffee.

Individual Tickets: $23

Series Pass: $170*

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*Series Pass only valid for 2025 screenings

Presented by

Guest Speakers

2024

2025

Films

Playtime

Dir. Jacques Tati
152 min

Jacques Tati was modernity's clown; technology his banana skin. Here his alter-ego Monsieur Hulot navigates a sterile Paris that seems designed to thwart his every wish.

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11:00 am
Sun Dec 15
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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5:50 pm
Tue Dec 17
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Parasite

Dir. Bong Joon-ho
132 min

South Korean master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho delivers an unpredictable comic suspense thriller with his Palme d'Or and Academy Award-winning film, Parasite -- which cracked the top 100 in Sight & Sound's Greatest Films list in 2022.

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11:00 am
Sun Jan 19
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:00 pm
Tue Jan 21
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)

Dir. Marcel Carné
190 min

The crowning glory of classical French cinema, this sumptuous melodrama brings to life the early 19th century Boulevard du Crime in Paris, where popular audiences for mime shows and carnival rub shoulders with wealthy patrons of classical theatre.

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11:00 am
Sun Feb 16
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Feb 18
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)

Dir. Sam Peckinpah
145 min

The Mexico/Texas borderlands, 1913: Pike (William Holden) leads his gang of aging outlaws on a foray south for one last hurrah. Peckinpah's masterpiece, a savage lament for men who believe in nothing but find respect by dying in vain.

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11:00 am
Sun Mar 16
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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7:30 pm
Tue Mar 18
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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The Ascent

Dir. Larisa Shepitko
109 min

During the darkest winter of WWII, two Soviet partisans venture through the backwoods of Belarus in search of food, always at risk of falling into enemy hands. In her masterpiece Larisa Shepitko zeroes in on profound spiritual and philosophical themes.

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11:00 am
Sun Apr 20
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Apr 22
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Bicycle Thieves

Dir. Vittorio De Sica
89 min

De Sica's film about a labourer desperate to track down the bike that has been stolen from him is a landmark in film history, the movie that cemented the impact of Italian neo-realism on world cinema.

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11:00 am
Sun May 18
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue May 20
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
93 min

RW Fassbinder's lop-sided love story (60 year old German widow and a Moroccan twenty years her junior) shines an unflattering light on social hypocrisies.

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11:00 am
Sun Jun 15
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Jun 17
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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The Cloud-Capped Star

Dir. Ritwak Ghatak
127 min

Ritwik Ghatak is the unsung genius of Bengali cinema. His best known film is a a brilliantly structured melodrama about the terrible demands of poverty and family on the prospects of a young woman.

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11:00 am
Sun Jul 20
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:20 pm
Tue Jul 22
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Dir. Céline Sciamma
120 min

Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.

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11:00 am
Sun Aug 17
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Aug 19
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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I Am Cuba

Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
141 min

Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba features some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed. A euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and revolutionary cinema.

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11:00 am
Sun Sep 21
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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7:30 pm
Tue Sep 23
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Woman in the Dunes (35mm)

Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
147 min

Teshigahara's collaboration with novelist Kōbō Abe's is vividly strange, erotic and unsettling allegory about an amateur entymologist who is himself ensnared in a trap he only dimly understands.

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11:00 am
Sun Oct 19
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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7:30 pm
Tue Oct 21
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black

Dir. Sergei Parajanov
101 min

This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.

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11:00 am
Sun Nov 16
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Nov 18
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Fantasia

126 min

Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.

Image: © Disney, 1940

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11:00 am
Sun Dec 14
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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6:30 pm
Tue Dec 16
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Dir. Chantal Akerman
201 min

In December 2022, Chantal Akerman's 1975 masterpiece was voted the Greatest Film of All Time by 1600+ critics, academics and curators in Sight & Sound's prestigious once-a-decade poll. It's a rigorous feminist work and a stunning temporal experience.

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Vertigo

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
128 min

Runner up in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time (and #1 in 2012) this is Hitchcock's most personal and revealing film, a movie about male neurosis, fetishism and power, with James Stewart and Kim Novak.

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Beau Travail

Dir. Claire Denis
93 min

Inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claire Denis' transfixing Beau Travail is set in East Africa. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin).

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Singin' in the Rain

Dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
103 min

The greatest movie musical ever made, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's sublime Hollywood on Hollywood satire is dynamic, romantic, and very funny, with some of the most memorable dance numbers ever shot - including, of course, the legendary title number.

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Man with a Movie Camera

Dir. Dziga Vertov
67 min

Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.

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Tokyo Story

Dir. Yasujirō Ozu
136 min

Ozu's most celebrated film follows an aging couple as they come to the city and make the rounds of their now grown children. Busy with their own lives, the children have little time for their parents, who are quickly packed off to hot springs in Osaka.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

Dir. Stanley Kubrick
141 min

Based on Arthur C Clarke's short story The Sentinel, 2001 redefined the sci-fi genre. With its radical structure, scant dialogue and oblique narrative this was the first film to emulate the philosophical seriousness of writers like Clarke and Dick.

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8 1/2

Dir. Federico Fellini
138 min

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini's 8½ (Otto e mezzo) turns one man's artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.

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Mulholland Dr.

Dir. David Lynch
147 min

Brunette Rita (Laura Elena Harring) wanders Mulholland Drive, dazed and confused after an auto accident. She finds refuge with Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring blonde actress who has arrived from Deep River, Ontario, with her innocence intact.

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In the Mood for Love

Dir. Wong Kar-wai
98 min

Wong Kar-wai's most popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses.

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Close-Up

Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
89 min

In Abbas Kiarostami's self-reflexive non-fiction narrative feature, Sabzian, an illiterate film buff who passed himself off as the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf plays himself in reconstructions of his fraud.

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Citizen Kane

Dir. Orson Welles
119 min

Orson Welles's debut was the most sophisticated movie to come out of the Hollywood studio system to that time, and opened up the creative possibilities of the narrative feature film for generations. For nearly 50 years it was "the best ever made".

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Ran

Dir. Akira Kurosawa
162 min

Tackling King Lear in his seventies with the same gusto he brought to Macbeth 25 years earlier, Akira Kurosawa has a great warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai) blindly plunging the country into civil war when he divides his kingdom between his three sons.

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Persona

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
83 min

Liv Ullmann plays a famous actress, Elisabeth. Withdrawing from the world by refusing to speak, Elisabeth is placed under the care of a chatty nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) in a remote seaside cottage. Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece.

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Cléo from 5 to 7

Dir. Agnès Varda
89 min

Agnes Varda's second feature, Cléo from 5 to 7, is a marvelously charming real-time portrait of a young singer, Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) one evening in Paris as she nervously awaits the results from a biopsy.

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A Matter of Life and Death

Dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
104 min

In this splendid WWII fantasy, RAF pilot Peter (David Niven) cheats death when his plane is downed over the Channel. Washing up on an English beach, he must plead his case for a life extension in the highest court of them all...

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Daisies + Meshes of the Afternoon

Dir. Vera Chytilova
76 min

This program highlights two landmarks in feminist film: Maya Deren's surrealist short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and Vera Chytilova's subversive new wave farce, Daisies (1966), perhaps the most radical, confrontational film of the era.

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Sunrise

Dir. F.W. Murnau
94 min

The consummate director of the silent era, Murnau was schooled in German Expressionism and embraced the fluidity and dynamism of the moving camera. Invited to Hollywood he prefigured film noir with this tale of a married villager seduced by a city vamp.

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Pather Panchali

Dir. Satyajit Ray
125 min

Satyajit Ray's first film opened eyes in the West. It's a naturalistic portrait of the childhood of a Brahman child, Apu, growing up in a village far from twentieth century technology in West Bengal.

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The Night of the Hunter

Dir. Charles Laughton
92 min

One of the strangest and most beguiling movies you'll ever see, from a poetic, nightmarish novel by Davis Grubb, a fable about two children fleeing from a psychotic evangelical preacher (Robert Mitchum). Charles Laughton's only film as director.

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The Battle of Algiers

Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo
135 min

French Colonel Mathieu hunts for Algerian resistance leader Ali la Pointe in Pontecorvo's classic, which draws the battle lines between colonialists and Arab insurrectionists in a pulsating, "fly-on-the-wall" documentary style.

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