The list is for aspiring filmmakers, not necessarily just good movies. I can see why Rear Window made it to the list, because it's a script that is ideally made for the movie medium, for example.
Really? Rear Window always seemed like a script that would be ideally served as a play (i.e. not many scene changes) that Hitchcock had adapted well to a movie.
I'm not sure how you would adapt it as a play : how can you capture someone looking at many apartments at a glance in an act ? In a movie, you can just move the camera around in no time from one flat to another, and that effect is incredibly difficult to reproduce in about any other medium.
Exactly. This is why Citizen Kane should be there. It is not the most enjoyable movie to watch but it was brilliant and a huge paradigm shift.