1. Citizen Kane (directed by Orson Welles)

2. Eraserhead (David Lynch)

3. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero)

4. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)

5. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)

The full list featuring the top 100 can be found here.

Some of his duties will include the creation of artwork to serve as the official image of the 24th annual event, as well as the creation of a sidebar program composed of films that have influenced and inspired him. His film choices for the program will be released in October.

“I said yes to being the Guest Artistic Director of AFI FEST 2010 because I love the AFI,” Lynch said in a statement. “AFI can do for others what it did for me. AFI gave me an opportunity and money to make a short film, ‘The Grandmother’, and my first feature film, ‘Eraserhead.’ AFI put me on the map.”

Lynch was one of the first fellows of the famed AFI Conservatory (previously known as AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies).

“David Lynch is AFI,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI president and CEO. “He’s an artist who embodies the institute’s national mandate to both educate the next generation and to honor the masters. As a master himself, his leadership will catalyze a global conversation to bring attention to him and others who deserve a proper bow.”

The festival takes place Nov. 4-11 at Grauman’s Chinese, the Mann Chinese 6, the Egyptian Theater and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Fetish, Fear, & Folly! – all with an undercurrent of unsettled neurosis. These are the themes of the six-vignette feature “Neurotique”. This is New Silent Film at its most dubious.” [Official Synopsis]

Director Nara Denning’s daring six-vignette production, “Neurotique” is fittingly, an expressionistic exercise in erotic neurosis.  It’s German Expressionism roots, devious brand of eccentric-yet-relevant humor, and subversively surreal imagery combine to render this Neo-silent narrative compendium a wholly unique and stirringly imaginative artistic offering.

William Buck plays the central figure in each of the six shorts that comprise “Neurotique.”  His sexually repressed, tepid but reactionary characterization drive the episodes with a peculiar likability veiled in an oddly familiar air of mystery.  Whether a caricatured drunkard who petitions a back-alley genie for whiskey and a trio of dancing concubines, sexual prey as an unwilling sanatorium resident, the Frankenstein/Weird Science god of a mechanical sexpot robot, or a lurking safari photographer who encounters a giant jungle-goddess communing with her waterfall lover, Buck remains a charming performer capable of infusing his character(s) with depth and nuance that serves to enrich his adventures, considering even the likely interpretation that his character is intended to represent an archetype rather than a singular individual.

Denning’s measured direction, which aims to paint each frame as a freestanding work of art, combined with the wildly creative set design, classic minimalist effects, and a brilliant original score by Kevin Harp, Stoo Odom, Willy the Mailman, Marco Villalobos, and Seth Augustus recalls the innovative, unbridled imagination of silent-era French auteur, Georges Méliès, and the cryptic inevitability of David Lynch’s 1977 landmark, “Eraserhead.”

With “Neurotique” Denning artfully protests the prevailing attitudes of the tech-driven, meretriciousness of modern commercial filmmaking, and demonstrates, like Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece, “Raging Bull,” that the entirety of a film’s mise-en-scène, regardless of existing technologies or techniques, should be determined largely as an element of artistic discretion.

Denning wields that discretion confidently and comes away with a titillating and uncompromised exploration of the expansive and mysterious lacuna of sexual desire and the elusive nature of identity.

Visit the official Neurotique website