Two weeks ago, the Independent Online published a feature where seventeen prominent filmmakers — many of whom I admire as being my preferred directors of all time — listed their top ten favorite films.

I’ve always found it almost impossible to list my favorite films; there are just too many to include on the list. Yet, in an attempt to classify great films that have touched my life, I came up with an unordered list of my top fifteen: putting them in some kind of coherent order was much too difficult for today’s task.

So without further ado, my list of my fifteen favorite films as of July 13, 2005:

• Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, 1991)
• Baraka (Fricke, 1992)
• Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
• The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)
• Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
• Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
• Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990)
• Ten (Kiarostami, 2002)
• The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995)
• Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
• Garden State (Braff, 2004)
• The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, )
• Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)
• The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001)

Of course, I haven’t included any films by some of my favorite directors such as Mike Nichols (The Graduate), Robert Rodriguez (Desperado), David Fincher (Fight Club), Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Sidney Lumet (Serpico), Brad Bird (The Iron Giant), Clint Eastwood (Mystic River), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), Francois Ozon (Huit femmes), Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey). It was just too hard to narrow it all down. A top 50 might be a better project to take up next time.