There are so many movies that I love intensely, but my ten choices here reflect those specimens that combine an uncommonly fine mastery of form with rich and enduring emotional content. Listed in chronological order:
Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (1932), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu's masterpiece, an alternately funny and sad story of the disillusionment of youth and the reconciliation to a compromised but still vital existence. A summit of film art.
Dekigokoro (1933), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. The most beautiful depiction of a father-son relationship I know of in cinema.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), directed by Vincente Minnelli. A perennially charming fantasy of an America that never existed. Endlessly watchable.
Ordet (1955), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Carnal love marries spiritual love, culminating in one of the most magnificent endings in film history.
Gertrud (1964), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Dreyer's testament, a story of the overriding importance of love in life.
Au hasard Balthazar (1966), directed by Robert Bresson. A strange parable of man's cruelty to animals and his fellow man. A work of rich, understated beauty, and one of the most important films ever made.
Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972), directed by Werner Schroeter. Ecstasy on film. Dreams haunted by the sights and sounds of love and loss.
The Scenic Route (1978), directed by Mark Rappaport. One of the finest depictions of complex adult relationships I have encountered in cinema, wedded to a fine and playful visual sensibility.
Tong nien wang shi (1985), directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou. Perhaps the single greatest film made anywhere in the 1980's. Impeccably nuanced and quietly beautiful portrait of a family's disentegration in an intractably troubled and contested corner of the world.
Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee. The transfiguring power of love found, lost, and remembered. The single most important film yet made.