These are sitting on my shelf.. Gimme a list of 10 I should watch before the top 100 deadline, and rank them.
Taking into account your tastes, placement on last year's Top 100, and hype for this year's Top 100, and my own tastes, I come up with the following:
0. Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
1. Pierrot Le Fou
2. Gimme Shelter
3. Down by Law
4. The Red Shoes
5. Playtime
6. The Wages of Fear
7. Leopard, The
8. Repulsion
9. Sanjuro
10. Les Diaboliques
You have to watch
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide so that you can start the hype train rolling early, giving enough other people (six?) time to see it by the deadline. A double bill with Shinoda's
Double Suicide would be tops.
Whether
8½ finishes in the Top 30 or the Top 20 doesn't make a huge difference to me, so I didn't bother to list it.
The Last Metro isn't Top 500 material, in my opinion.
I haven't
Down by Law myself, but I can totally picture it on your list, so I bumped it up pretty high.
I think you might really like
Walkabout as well, but I ran out of room.
pixote