Apu Trilogy, Nayakan in Time list of 100 great films

New York, May 23. (PTI): Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy which helped redefine Indian cinema in the 1950's, Guru Dutt's classic 'Pyasa' portraying the disillusionment of a poet with the material world and Mani Ratnam's 'Nayakan' based on the life of a Mumbai gangster are among a list of 100 all time great films compiled by the Time magazine.

Put together by Time magazine's critics, Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss, the unranked list of the 100 greatest films has a host of acclaimed movies like 'Lawrence of Arabia', 'Casablanca', 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy and 'Pulp Fiction'.

The list, which is posted on the magazine's website and would be published in today's issue of the magazine, also names the best film from each decade since Time began: Metropolis (1927), Dodsworth (1936), Citizen Kane (1941), Ikiru (1952), Persona (1966), Chinatown (1974), Decalogue (1988), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Talk to Her (2002).

Indian films in the list include the works of famed directors of the country.

Ray's Apu Trilogy - Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apu Sansar (1959) - trace the life of a Bengali family and their son Apu as he moves from childhood in a rural village through his youth in Varanasi, where the family later shifts, to manhood and marriage in Kolkata.

These films show that "Ray's filmmaking is direct in manner, simple in its means and profound in its impact," the critics says.

Pyasa

Describing Dutt's 'Pyasa' as a soulful romantic film, the Time critics says the writer-producer-director star paints a glamourous portrait of an artist's isolation through dappled imagery and the sensitive picturising of S D Burman's famous songs.

"Waheeda Rehman in her screen debut is sultry, radiant - a woman to bring out the poet in any man, on screen or in the audience," they say.

Mani Ratnam

The Kamal Hassan starrer 'Nayakan', which was Ratnam's second film, has been described by the Time critics as a defining work in his career.

"His movies, often dramatising social unrest and political terrorism, churn with narrative tension and camera energy that would be the envy of Hollywood directors, if they were to see them", they say.

Nayakan tells the Godfatherish tale of Velu, a boy who embraces a life of crime after his father is killed by the police.

"Velu (Kamal Hassan) has trouble juggling his family life with his life-and-death mob "family; Ratnam has no such difficulty blending melodrama and music, violence and comedy, realism and delirium, into a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration that, when a gangster's miseries are mounting, the most natural solution is to sing in the rain," the magazine's critics says.