Skip to main content

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 100 Favorite Films Across 100 Years




    Raise your hand if you honestly thought we'd ever get here.
  
   It's the truth: the number of posts from Films and Feelings has now reached the triple digits. The current tally stands at 41 essays, 41 reviews, 6 Professor's Picks (counting this one), 10 monthly reports of The Great Movie Conquest of 2022, and 2 Years in Review. This is the kind of threshold that generally merits some sort of celebration or commemoration, so why not do something special today? To celebrate one hundred posts, I've assembled a list of my favorite film for each year over the last one hundred years. 

    Let me alleviate some of your fears here and now: this will be mostly a visual experience. It far exceeds my writing prowess to be able to give 100 unique explanations for why specifically I enjoy each movie. And for many of these films, true expression of what it means to me escapes my ability anyhow. In cases where I have already written extensively about a given film, though, I'll link to the relevant essay. 

    Many film enthusiasts really care about the distinction between "best" and "favorite." I myself don't love to get too deep into this marsh. I've long felt that storytelling's fundamental purpose is to help reconcile the conflicts of the human heart, and so it doesn't feel sacrilegious for me to say that a large percentage of a film's success should be measured by whether its audience responds to it. The corollary is also true: if a film's artists take the time to do their job well, then the human heart will be naturally more receptive to the final product. 

    While there's a lot of overlap between how I designate either class, I'll say that for this list I leaned towards "film that I found most meaningful and/or enjoyable," as opposed to "film that I personally feel best pushes forth the boundaries of the film medium." For most of this list, though, those two don't really compete. 

   Yes, most years offer more than simply a single film worth celebrating (some especially competitive years include 1946, 1952, 1965, 1994, 2004, and 2015), but I quickly shot down the inclusion of an honorable mentions for each year. This list is already interminably long.

    Anyways, I hope you see some favorites on this list. I hope others surprise you. I hope you'll find a few films you haven't gotten around to yet, and maybe some you've never even heard of, and find the time to check them out. Here we go ... 

[Updated March 2026]
   


1923 - Safety Last - Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor 



1924 The Navigator - Donald Crisp, Buster Keaton




1925 His People - Edward Sloman



1926 3 Bad Men - John Ford



1927 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - F.W. Murnau 




1928 The Docks of New York - Josef von Sternberg




1929 Lucky Star - Frank Borzage




1930 City Girl - F.W. Murnau




1931 City Lights - Charlie Chaplin



1932 The Most Dangerous Game - Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack




1933 The Gold Diggers of 1933 - Mervyn Leroy




1934 It Happened One Night - Frank Capra




1935 Naughty Marietta - Robert Z. Leonard, W.S. Van Dyke 





1936 Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin





1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen 




1938 Le Quai des Brumes "Port of Shadows" - Marcel Carné 





1939 Gone with the Wind - Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood




1940 The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin 





1941 The Wolf Man - George Waggner 





1942 Casablanca - Michael Curtiz 




1943 The More the Merrier - George Stevens






1944 Meet Me in St. Louis - Vincente Minelli 





1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Elia Kazan 





1946 It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra




1947 It Happened on 5th Avenue - Roy Del Ruth 






1948 Romance on the High Seas - Michael Curtiz





1949 Jour de Fête - Jacques Tati





1950 Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder





1951 People Will Talk - Joseph L. Mankiewicz





1952 Singin' in the Rain - Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly




1953 From Here to Eternity - Fred Zinneman




1954 On the Waterfront - Elia Kazan




1955 The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton




1956 The Searchers - John Ford




1957 Le Notti di Cabiria "Nights of Cabiria" - Federico Fellini 





1958 Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock




1959 Les Quatre Cents Coups "The 400 Blows" - Francois Truffaut 






1960 The Apartment - Billy Wilder




1961 King of Kings - Nicholas Ray




1962 Pressure Point - Hubert Cornfield




1963 The Birds - Alfred Hitchcock





1964 Mary Poppins - Robert Stevenson





1965 A Patch of Blue - Guy Green


A Patch of Blue: Sidney Poitier, Representation, and The Virtue of Choice


1966 Ostre Sledované Vlaky "Closely Watched Trains" - Jiří Menzel






1967 The Jungle Book - Wolfgang Reitherman 





1968 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Robert Ellis Miller




1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - George Roy Hill




1970 Catch 22 - Mike Nichols





1971 Walkabout - Nicolas Roeg




1972 Butterflies are Free - Milton Katselas





1973 The Last Detail - Hal Ashby




1974 Sugarland Express- Steven Spielberg




1975 Jaws - Steven Spielberg


JAWS: The Father of All Blockbusters Turns 50




1976 La Última Cena "The Last Supper" -Tomás Gutiérrez Alea






1977 The Goodbye Girl - Herbert Ross





1978 Watership Down - Martin Rosen




1979 Kramer vs Kramer - Robert Benton




1980 Ordinary People - Robert Redford





1981 Clash of the Titans - Desmond Davis




1982 The Plague Dogs - Martin Rosen




1983 Tender Mercies - Bruce Beresford




1984 The Terminator - James Cameron 




1985 The Breakfast Club - John Hughes




1986 Stand By Me - Rob Reiner




1987 Broadcast News - James L. Brooks




1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit - Robert Zemeckis 





1989 The Little Mermaid - Ron Clements, John Musker




1990 Dances with Wolves - Kevin Costner




1991 Beauty and the Beast - Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale





1992 Scent of a Woman - Martin Brest




1993 Jurassic Park - Steven Spielberg




1994 Leon: The Professional - Luc Besson





1995 While You Were Sleeping - Jon Turteltaub




1996 Kolya - Jan Svěrák






1997 Titanic - James Cameron




1998 The Prince of Egypt - Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells




1999 The Iron Giant - Brad Bird




2000 Finding Forrester - Gus Van Sant 




2001 Moulin Rouge! - Baz Luhrmann 


Moulin Rouge!: Musicals Chasing Authenticity


2002 Minority Report - Steven Spielberg




2003 Finding Nemo - Andrew Stanton




2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Michel Gondry




2005 King Kong - Peter Jackson 




2006 El Laberinto del Fauno "Pan's Labyrinth" - Guillermo del Toro




2007 Ratatouille - Brad Bird




2008 Doubt - John Patrick Shanley




2009 Avatar - James Cameron


Avatar vs Pop Culture


2010 Tangled - Nathan Greno, Byron Howard




2011 The Descendants - Alexander Payne




2012 Silver Linings Playbook - David O. Russell 




2013 The Way, Way Back - Jim Rash, Nat Faxon




2014 Guardians of the Galaxy - James Gunn




2015 Bakemono no Ko "The Boy and the Beast" - Mamoru Hosada



2016 Passengers - Morten Tyldum 




2017 The Greatest Showman - Michael Gracey




2018 A Quiet Place - John Krasinski 


A Quiet Place: Scaredy-Cats Taking Back the Horror Movie



2019 Marriage Story - Noah Baumbach




2020 Onward - Dan Scanlon





2021 In the Heights - John M. Chu



2022 The Banshees of Inisherin - Martin McDonagh


The Banshees of Inisherin - The Death Knell of Male Friendship




--Added March 2026--

2023 The Holdovers - Alexander Payne





2024 A Real Pain - Jesse Eisenberg






2025 Wicked: For Good - Jon M. Chu





    Thanks as always for reading my work. 100 posts more would still not be nearly space enough for me to articulate all that film has given to me, and to us. I don't know for certain how far I'll take this thing, but I think there's more ink in the pen. 

                --The Professor







Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

REVIEW: HOPPERS

     In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers.     Let me back up ...      Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees  Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting.       Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...
Post a Comment
Read more

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case.  I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life support, and maybe one day we’ll get the  Wicked  movie Universal has been promising us for fifteen years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like  No Country for Old Men,  which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns  of old.  Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion.              Professors Susan Kord and El...
1 comment
Read more

The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Silver Linings Playbook: What are Happy Endings For Anyway?

            Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to pontificate in this same manner. But film ...
Post a Comment
Read more

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side.          Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland . Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it.  Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952)      Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us , “...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence.     In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so.  Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers .      A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...
1 comment
Read more

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

      I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture.      But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit.       And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole?  However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles  was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just abominable.      While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show (again)

     I have wondered if I was the only one who thought that "Sea of Monsters" was the weakest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, but I have seen my reading echoed by other book loyalists.      This second installment is perhaps penalized partially because it marks several major junctions in the larger series. This is, for example, the part of the series where the scope of the adventure really starts to enlarge. We know going in that there's an angry, deceased titan out to destroy Olympus, and that he's amassing an army, and so we need a sense that this threat is growing stronger. But this also marks a turning point in how series author, Rick Riordan, chooses to develop his main character. And so, season 2 of the Disney+ television adaptation faces similar crossroads.     Season 3 of this show is already filming as we speak, so its immediate future is already spoken for, as far as production goes. But stylistically, this second seas...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Dominion

     Film director and victorious fanboy Colin Trevorrow has justified Jurassic World: Dominion and his trilogy by saying it's not just a continuation but a culmination of all the "Jurassic" movies that came before. I suppose it's for each viewer to decide whether Trevorrow and the team he's assembled have pulled that off. We each come to the franchise bringing something personal to the conversation.  As for me though, come the series' twilight moments, I was moved by the way that it made somberness and hope sit next to each other so gracefully. If watching the brachiosaurus tromping across Jurassic Park makes me feel like a kid again, beholding the dinosaurs travailing across the savannah with such dignity took me to a more mature place.     Now that dinosaurs have proliferated across the globe, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have secluded themselves in their woodland cabin, where they keep their adopted daughter, Maisie, safe from a world that would jump...
Post a Comment
Read more