"Rotten Tomatoes asks some of the biggest names in Hollywood: Name Your Five Favorite Films."

Links to the various lists are well-organized in this Metafilter post.

Which name did you impulsively click on first? I clicked on Werner Herzog, who likes "Freaks," "Intolerance," "Rashomon," "Nosferatu," and a movie I don't remember ever noticing before, "Where is the Friend's Home."

About "Rashomon" — which I once wrote an article about — he said:

It is probably the only film that I've ever seen which has something like a perfect balance, which does not occur in filmmaking very often. You sense it sometimes in great music, but I haven't experienced it in cinema, and it's mind boggling. I don't know how [Akira] Kurosawa did it. It's still a mystery to me. That's greatness.

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes." On this topic of disgust and shock (here, here, here, and here), let me share a passage from the obituary, written by Rick Lyman, for Akira Kurosawa, which is one of the most influential things I've read in my life. This is in the NYT archive from 1998, so I can't link it.

Though he often diverted the conversation when asked about his approach to filmmaking, Mr. Kurosawa frequently described his attitude toward art in similar terms. "To be an artist," he once said, "means never to avert one's eyes."

Mr. Kurosawa also once described a trip he made with his brother, Heigo, through the ruins of Tokyo after a massive earthquake in 1923. More than 140,000 people died in the fires that followed the quake. But as the pair moved through the ruins, Mr. Kurosawa said, his brother insisted that the young Akira look closely at the charred corpses.

"If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened," Akira remembered Heigo telling him. "If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of."