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. (Except for maybe 1976's selection. You'll see.)

   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 ... 
   


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 Arsenic & Old Lace - Frank Capra





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 Tiger Bay - J. Lee Thompson



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




1966 The Fortune Cookie - Billy Wilder





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 Little Big Man - Arthur Penn




1971 Walkabout - Nicolas Roeg




1972 Butterflies are Free - Milton Katselas





1973 The Last Detail - Hal Ashby




1974 Blazing Saddles - Mel Brooks




1975 Jaws - Steven Spielberg




1976 Grizzly - William Girdler 




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 Beautiful Girls - Ted Demme



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 Detachment - Tony Kaye




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


    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: The Fall Guy

     Someone show me another business as enthusiastic for its own self-deprecation as Hollywood.      From affectionate self-parodies like Singin' in the Rain to darker reflections of the movie business like Sunset Boulevard , Hollywood has kind of built its empire on ridicule of itself. And why wouldn't it? Who wouldn't want to pay admission to feel like they're in on the secret: that movie magic is just smoke and mirrors? That silver screen titans actually have the most fragile egos?       But these are not revelations, and I don't think they are intended to be. Hollywood doesn't really care about displaying its own pettiness and internal rot because it knows that all just makes for good entertainment.  A t some point, this all stops feeling like a joke that we, the audience, are in on. At some point, it all stops feeling less like a confession and more like gloating. At what point, then, does the joke turn on us, the enablers of this cesspool whose claim to
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding Nemo: The Thing About Film Criticism ...

       Film is a mysterious thing. It triggers emotional responses in the audience that are as surprising as they are all-encompassing. As a medium, film is capable of painting stunning vistas that feel like they could only come to life behind the silver screen, but many of the most arresting displays on film arise from scenes that are familiar, perhaps even mundanely so. It’s an artform built on rules and guidelines–young film students are probably familiar with principles like the rule of thirds or the Kuleshov effect–but someone tell me the rule that explains why a line like “We’ll always have Paris,” just levels you. There are parts of the film discussion that cannot be anticipated by a formula or a rulebook, and for that we should be grateful.         Arrival (2016)      But the thing about film–and especially film criticism–is that film critics are not soothsayers. Their means of divining the artistic merit of a movie are not unknowable. There are patterns and touchstones that
2 comments
Read more

REVIEW: All Together Now

The unceasing search for new acting talent to mine continues with Netflix's new film,  All Together Now, which premiered this week on the service. This film features Moana alum Auli'i Cravalho as Amber Appleton, a bright but underprivileged high schooler with high aspirations. Netflix's new film plays like a trial run for Cravalho to see if this Disney starlet can lead a live-action film outside the Disney umbrella. Cravalho would need to play against a slightly stronger narrative backbone for us to know for sure, but early signs are promising.  All Together Now follows Amber Appleton, a musically talented teen overflowing with love for her classmates, her coworkers, and her community. Amber reads like George Bailey reincarnated as a high school girl, throwing herself into any opportunity to better the world around her, like hosting her high school's annual for benefit Variety Show. But Amber's boundless optimism conceals an impoverished home life. She and her moth
1 comment
Read more

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Clash of the Titans

  Anyone else remember the year we spent wondering if we would ever again see a movie that wasn't coming out in 3D?      T hat surge in 3D films in the early months of 2010 led to a number of questionable executive decisions. We saw a lot of films envisioned as standard film experiences refitted into the 3D format at the eleventh hour. In the ten years since, 3D stopped being profitable because audiences quickly learned the difference between a film that was designed with the 3D experience in mind and the brazen imitators . Perhaps the most notorious victim of this trend was the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans .        Why am I suddenly so obsessed with the fallout of a film gone from the public consciousness ten years now? Maybe it's me recently finishing the first season of  Blood of Zeus  on Netflix and seeing so clearly what  Clash of the Titans  very nearly was. Maybe it's my  evolving thoughts on the Percy Jackson movies  and the forthcoming Disney+ series inevit
2 comments
Read more

American Beauty is Bad for your Soul

  The 1990s was a relatively stable period of time in American history. We weren’t scared of the communists or the nuclear bomb, and social unrest for the most part took the decade off. The white-picket fence ideal was as accessible as it had ever been for most Americans. Domesticity was commonplace, mundane even, and we had time to think about things like the superficiality of modern living. It's in an environment like this that a movie like Sam Mendes' 1999 film American Beauty can not only be made but also find overwhelming success. In 1999 this film was praised for its bold and honest insight into American suburban life. The Detroit News Film Critic called this film “a rare and felicitous movie that brings together a writer, director and company perfectly matched in intelligence and sense of purpose” and Variety hailed it as “a real American original.” The film premiered to only a select number of screens, but upon its smashing success was upgraded to
1 comment
Read more

REVIEW: ONWARD

The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to guide its output. The film imagines a world where fantasy creatur
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: Belfast

     I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the world needs more black and white movies.      The latest to answer the call is Kenneth Branagh with his  semi-autobiographical film, Belfast . The film follows Buddy, the audience-insert character, as he grows up in the streets of Belfast, Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though Buddy and his family thrive on these familiar streets, communal turmoil leads to organized violence that throws Buddy's life into disarray. What's a family to do? On the one hand, the father recognizes that a warzone is no place for a family. But to the mother, even the turmoil of her community's civil war feels safer than the world out there. Memory feels safer than maturation.      As these films often go, the plot is drifting and episodic yet always manages to hold one's focus. Unbrushed authenticity is a hard thing to put to film, and a film aiming for just that always walks a fine line between avant-garde and just plain
1 comment
Read more

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - January

This fool's errand is the fruition of an idea I've wanted to try out for years now but have always talked myself out of. Watching a new movie a day for one full year is a bit of a challenge for a number of reasons, not in the least of which being that I'm the kind of guy who likes to revisit favorites. As a film lover, I'm prone to expanding my circle and watching films I haven't seen before, I've just never watched a new film every day for a year. So why am I going to attempt to pull that off at all, and why am I going to attempt it now? I've put off a yearlong commitment because it just felt like too much to bite off. One such time, actually, was right when I first premiered this blog. You know ... the start of 2020? The year where we had nothing to do but watch Netflix all day? Time makes fools of us all, I guess. I doubt it's ever going to be easier to pull off such a feat, so why not now?       Mostly, though, I really just want to help enliven my
2 comments
Read more

Nights of Cabiria: What IS Cinema?

  So here’s some light table talk … what is cinema? What is it for ?       On the one hand, film is the perfect medium to capture life as it really is. With the roll of the camera, you can do what painters and sculptors had been trying to do for centuries and record the sights and sounds of a place exactly as they are. On the other hand, film is the perfect medium for dreaming. Is there any other place besides the movies where the human heart is so unfettered, so open to fantasy? If you’ve studied film formally, this is probably one of the first discussions you had in your Intro to Film theory course, in a class that may have forced you to read about Dziga Vertov and his theory about film and the Kino-eye (another day, another day …)      In some ways, we could use basically any of thousands of cinematic works to jumpstart this discussion, but I have a particular film in mind. The lens I want to explore this idea through today is not only a strong example of strong cinematic cra
1 comment
Read more

Mamma Mia: Musicals Deserve Better

       Earlier this week, Variety ran a piece speculating on the future of musicals and the roles they may play in helping a post-corona theater business bounce back. After all, this year is impressively stacked with musicals. In addition to last month's fantastic "In the Heights," we've got a half dozen or so musicals slated for theatrical release. Musical master, Lin Manuel-Miranda expresses optimism about the future of musicals, declaring “[While it] hasn’t always been the case, the movie musical is now alive and well.”      I'm always hopeful for the return of the genre, but I don't know if I share Lin's confidence that the world is ready to take musicals seriously. Not when a triumph like "In the Heights" plays to such a small audience. (Curse thee, "FRIENDS Reunion," for making everyone renew their HBO Max subscription two weeks before In the Heights hits theaters.) The narrative of “stop overthinking it, it’s just a musical,”
1 comment
Read more