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

Thawing Disney's Frozen Heart

  As a millennial Disney fan and film student in utero, I often thought about what it would have been like to be there when Aladdin or The Little Mermaid , or even “Snow White” or The Jungle Book , premiered to the culture. It’s one thing to grow up and realize you have a piece of film history with you here in your living room. It’s another to get to watch the culture transform as it engages for the first time with something  And I have this envy for a great many cinematic works. Like, what I would give to go back to 1946 and tell those losers who dismissed It's a Wonderful Life how they had no idea what they were sleeping on. But the Disney canon’s place within the culture is also specific. Their commitment to delivering hopeful stories to an audience that believes itself beyond such frailties as faith or kindness is unparalleled, and that makes their contributions worth studying and celebrating. And so I didn’t take it for granted during that period in late 2013/early ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: A Quiet Place - DAY ONE

I remember back when I reviewed A Quiet Place Part II , the thing that was on my mind a world crawling out of a global pandemic.  I now dive into Michael Sarnoski's newest take on the mythology with A Quiet Place: Day One having just this morning heard the news that a certain convicted felon is being granted immunity for his involvement in trying to overthrow democracy, and I am left wondering (not for the first time) what surviving in a world that already balances on borrowed time even means. This is more or less the mindset of the film's protagonist, Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who was already done with existing well before killer aliens started dropping out from the sky. The only things she cares about in the world are her "emotional support" cat, Frodo, and getting a taste of some proper New York pizza before this cancer takes her, alien invasion or not! While the rest of the city is running off to catch the last boat off Manhattan, she just digs deeper ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: The Wild Robot

     I think I must have known that Chris Sanders had another movie on deck, but I guess I had forgotten it was coming out so soon. For whatever reason, when I saw his name at the end of the credits for The Wild Robot , out this weekend, I was caught off guard ... and then realized that it actually explained a lot. The basic premise felt broadly reminiscent of Lilo & Stitch , and there was at least one sequence that definitely recalled How to Train Your Dragon , both of which Sanders co-directed with Dean Deblois (executive producer on this film). With his latest offering for Dreamworks, Sanders cements his position as a titan in the world of animation.     The movie sees ROZ, a shipwrecked robot stranded on an island completely untouched by humans. One would think that such an Eden would be bereft of the squabbles that humans seem so happy to create, but the animals of the island revile this new intruder and put up every fence they have. The only thin...
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

REVIEW: THE ODYSSEY

       I spent two-thirds of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey thinking I was watching Ridley Scott's Gladiator only to realize I was watching John Ford's The Searchers all the time. And it was largely this eleventh-hour realization that secured the film's favorable rating from me.     My slowness in catching onto this  may have been partially caused by me also looking beyond the mark in other ways. Even if it had been fairly telegraphed in the promotional material, I was kind of hoping that Nolan's vision for the mythological epic would unleash a proper monster parade. But Nolan doesn't appear to want to emulate Demond Davis' Clash of the Titans any more than he did with Tim Burton's Batman  in his "Dark Knight" trilogy.       Witches like Circe and Calypso would never be mistaken for anything adjacent to Michelle Pfieffer in Stardust . Even something like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Lord of the Rings" is further on the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: WICKED - For Good

      I'm conflicted about how to approach this review. I know everyone has their own yellow brick road to the myth of The Wizard of Oz as a whole and the specific Broadway adaptation that brought us all here.   I don't want to write this only for others who are familiar with the source material.       Even so, I can't help but review this from the perspective of a fan of the Broadway show--someone who has been tracking the potential for a film adaptation since before Jon M. Chu's participation was announced for the ambitious undertaking of translating one of Broadway's most electric shows onto film. I can't help but view this from the vantage point of someone who knew just how many opportunities this had to go wrong.     And it's from that vantage point that I now profess such profound relief that the gambit paid off. We truly have the " Lord of the Rings of musicals ."  What Jon M. Chu and his team have done here with these two...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: Spider-Man - Brand New Day

      Somewhere in the multiverse, there's an opening chord of a review where I celebrate Spiderman: Brand New Day as some kind of welcome "return to basics" for the MCU, but that's not more than partially true.       This movie is a lot more straightforward than cohesive than most Marvel pics from the early stretch of the decade. Feige finally feels confident that, yes, we know that there's a multiverse, and we don't need more reminders.     But this is also not a budget Marvel movie. The film still designs an elaborate fireworks show for Peter Parker to dance around. There is also definite signaling for future Marvel adventures. Sadie Sink's stealth role in this movie (a sizzling introduction into the MCU) teases the integration of a new family of superheroes set to join the ranks of The New Avengers.      But these sneak peeks feel like just that, and unlike sloppier Marvel pics, they aren't made to bear the weight of the e...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Criminal Father Surrogate: Masculinity in A Perfect World

     I've been wanting to tackle the subject of "masculinity" in film for quite some time now, but I hadn't quite known how best to do that. There's a certain buzzword, "toxic masculinity," that especially elicits a lot of strong feelings from a lot of different angles. While a post-#MeToo world has exposed some very disturbing truths about the way masculinity has historically performed, I'm not here to roast 50% of the world population. Actually, I really want to talk about a man's capacity for good. Ted Lasso (2020)      There’s certainly a lot of discussion to be had for newer media celebrating men for possessing attributes not historically coded as "manly." But what's even more fascinating to me are the attempts to bridge the gap between traditional masculinity and new age expectations--to reframe an older vision of manhood within our modern context.       Which brings me to Clint Eastwood’s 1993 film, A Perfect World.   ...
1 comment
Read more

Saying Goodbye to Stranger Things

     There's a quote from critic Mark Caro that I think about a lot. I shared it back when I did my critical survey of Pixar movies . Writing about Finding Nemo , Caro wrote in the  Chicago Tribune in 2003 , "Classic film eras tend to get recognized in retrospect while we take for granted timeless works passing before our eyes. So let's pause to appreciate what's been going on at Pixar Animation Studios."      I think that captures the aspirations of all active-minded media consumers. Or at least, it ought to. "This good thing won't last forever, so savor it before the sun goes down."  Modern Times (1936)      But this is also a very hard mindset to access in an online culture that is always seeking to stamp labels and scores on a thing before we shove it on the conveyor belt and move on to the next parcel.       It's something I have been thinking about for the last year or so as the completion of the Stranger ...
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 artis...
2 comments
Read more