Second Place with 300 pts is Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive – This 3-1/4 hour DVD celebrates the largest international collaboration in decades to preserve and present American films found abroad. It draws from an extraordinary cache of nitrate prints that had been safeguarded in New Zealand and virtually unseen in decades. Through a partnership between the New Zealand Film Archive and American film archives, the NFPF arranged for 176 films to be shipped to the United States for preservation to 35mm film. Treasures New Zealand brings some of these major discoveries to DVD. None of the films have been presented before on video; in fact, none were even thought to exist just four years ago. Treasures New Zealand not only resurrects lost works by major directors—John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Mabel Normand—but also samples the variety of American pictures exported abroad and saved through this project. Industrial films, news stories, cartoons, travelogues, serial episodes, previews, comedies—Treasures New Zealand samples them all.

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Third Place with 288 pts is Ikarie XB-1 – Jindrich Polák's pioneering and much-imitated feature is one of the cornerstones of contemporary sci-fi cinema. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem's 1955 novel The Magellanic Cloud, and predating Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek and Kubrick's 2001, Ikarie XB-1's influence can be seen on both - and on almost every other science-fiction vehicle that followed. "Remains one of the most original and exciting science fiction films ever made... the film is packed with sublime moments unlike those of any film preceding it. A game-changing film that profoundly influenced the genre and showed that science-fiction movies weren't only about special effects; they were also high art. Of the hardest and most admirable kind" - Alex Cox.

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Fourth Place with 246 pts is French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1928 – The five exciting features in this collection, each restored to excellent condition by the Cinematheque Francaise, are all U.S. home video premieres, accompanied by outstanding new music scores by Timothy Brock, Robert Israel, Neil Brand, Antonio Coppola and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Three of the films showcase the multi-faceted talents of Ivan Mosjoukine, who left a starring career in Russia for even greater glory in France. He wrote and directed The Burning Crucible (Le Brasier ardent, 1923) in which he also plays eleven parts. Of this film Jean Renoir said "I was ecstatic … I decided to abandon my trade, ceramics, to try to make films." Mosjoukine also collaborated on the script and plays the title role in Alexandre Volkoff's lavish Kean (1924), dramatizing the later life of Edmund Kean, the greatest Shakespearian of the early 19th century.

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Fifth Place with 185 pts is Masters of Cinema's The Complete (Existing) Films of Sadao Yamanaka – The brief but prodigious career of Japanese director Sadao Yamanaka resulted in a catalogue of work characterised by an elegant and unforced visual style, fluid editing, and a beautiful attention to naturalistic performances. Although he made 22 films over a six - year period (before dying of dysentery in a Japanese Imperial Army outpost in Manchuria at the age of 28), only three of them survive, collected here for the first time in the West.

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 In for Sixth Place with 31 points - Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) honed his craft in the early 1930s, a time when young Japanese directors were experimenting with cinematic conventions. This 2-disc set features three gangster-genre films (Walk Cheerfully - Hogaraka ni ayume, That Night's Wife - Sono yo no tsuma, and Dragnet Girl - Hijosen no onna) in which Ozu mixes a Hollywood-infused dynamism with elements of his later style.

7th Place with 132 pts is Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder: From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder (World on a Wire, Berlin Alexanderplatz) refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1971, were influenced by the work of the antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works; whether a self-conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind of a twentysomething man who would become one of cinema’s most madly prolific artists.

8th Place with 112 pts is Second Run's The Sun in a Net – Stefan Uher's exquisite, groundbreaking feature is consistently ranked among the greatest films in the history of Czechoslovak cinema and is cited as the film that kick-started the whole 'Czechoslovak New Wave' movement. Bringing to the screen a number of hitherto unacceptable social and political themes, The Sun in a Net is a complex interplay of sunlight and darkness, sound and silence, vision and blindness, truth and lies. We are delighted to bring this masterpiece of East European cinema to UK audiences for the very first time. "The Sun in a Net is still fresh and young, complex and rewarding. It has the vivacity and love of life that we found in the early films of Truffaut, for example. The only mystery is why has it been unknown outside Czechoslovakia for almost half a century?" - Senses of Cinema.

Tenth Place with 54 pts is Polish Cinema Classics Volume II – A second volume of our acclaimed series. Second Run DVD proudly presents three celebrated works of Polish Cinema, now fully restored and released for the first time ever in the UK. Andrzej Wajda PROMISED LAND (Ziemia obiecana, 1974) Voted the best film in the history of Polish cinema in the monthly Polish magazine FILM, Krzysztof Zanussi - ILLUMINATION (Iluminacja, 1973) Zanussi's philosophical/scientific exploration of man's place in the world. And Wojciech Marczewski - ESCAPE FROM 'LIBERTY' CINEMA (Ucieczka z kina 'Wolnosc', 1990) - an engaging anti-communist satire (with shades of Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo) is a darkly comic, complex, allusive and deeply-felt examination of the nature and effects of censorship...

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BLU-RAYs OF THE YEAR

Second Place with 594 pts is Criterion's 25 film boxset of Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman – The colossally popular Zatoichi films make up the longest-running action series in Japanese history and created one of the screen’s great heroes: an itinerant blind masseur who also happens to be a lightning-fast swordsman. As this iconic figure, the charismatic and earthy Shintaro Katsu became an instant superstar, lending a larger-than-life presence to the thrilling adventures of a man who lives staunchly by a code of honor and delivers justice in every town and village he enters. The films that feature him are variously pulse-pounding, hilarious, stirring, and completely off-the-wall. This deluxe set features the string of twenty-five Zatoichi films made between 1962 and 1973, collected in one package for the first time.

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Fourth Place with 408 pts is Shoah – Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

Sixth Place with  282 pts is Criterion's Blu-ray of Chaplin's City Lights – the most cherished film by Charlie Chaplin, is also his ultimate Little Tramp chronicle. The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical Virginia Cherrill) and mistakes him for a millionaire. Though this Depression-era smash was made after the advent of sound, Chaplin remained steadfast in his love for the expressive beauty of the pre-talkie form. The result was the epitome of his art and the crowning achievement of silent comedy.

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Eighth Place with 258 pts is the Masters of Cinema's Blu-ray of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu - An iconic film of the German expressionist cinema, and one of the most famous of all silent movies, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror continues to haunt — and, indeed, terrify — modern audiences with the unshakable power of its images. By teasing a host of occult atmospherics out of dilapidated set-pieces and innocuous real-world locations alike, Murnau captured on celluloid the deeply-rooted elements of a waking nightmare, and launched the signature “Murnau-style” that would change cinema history forever.

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Tenth Place with 160 pts is Criterion's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – it's almost impossible to define this 1943 masterpiece by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was ostensibly based on a cartoon series that satirized the British military class, yet its attitude toward the main character is one of affection, respect, and sometimes awe; it was intended as a propaganda film, yet Churchill wanted to suppress it; it has the romantic sweep of a grand love story, yet none of the romantic relationships it presents is truly fulfilled, and the film's most lasting bond is one between the British colonel (Roger Livesey) and his Prussian counterpart (Anton Walbrook).

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Omissions

Some appreciated Blu-rays that received mention but did not make the official Top 100. Presented here in alphabetical order:

3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957) Criterion
The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) Olive
Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith, 1915) Masters of Cinema
The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) Masters of Cinema
City That Never Sleeps (John H. Auer, 1953) Olive
Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) Fox  
The Devil Bat (Jean Yarbrough, 1940) Kino
The Duellists (Ridley Scott, 1977) Shout! Factory
The File on Thelma Jordan (Robert Siodmak, 1950) Olive
The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) 20th Century Fox
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) Kino

The Hunt aka Jagten (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012) Magnolia
Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindô, 1968) Masters of Cinema
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) Fox
Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, 1953) Kino
Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1962) Koch Media  
Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1963) Criterion
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) Criterion
The Medusa Touch (Jack Gold, 1978) Henstooth
The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950) Olive
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944) Criterion
The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindô, 1960) Masters of Cinema
Nanook Of The North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922) Flicker Alley
Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953) Fox Home Entertainment
Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) Wild Side
Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950) Fox Home Entertainment
The Red Pony (Lewis Milestone, 1948) Olive
Shane (George Stevens, 1953) Paramount
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) Cohen Media