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


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


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

Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape. It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar. The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out ...
Post a Comment
Read more

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Five Lessons Hollywood Ought to Learn from the Success of WICKED

    That which has teased studios since the freak success of La La Land and The Greatest Showman has finally come to pass: Hollywood has finally launched a successful musical. Or rather, they've launched two.     The musical is sort of like the golden idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark . It's valuable beyond imagination--but only if you know just how to retrieve it. There have been specific periods where the musical has yielded tremendous rewards for Hollywood, but for the greater part of the lifespan of feature-filmmaking, studios have been punished for reaching beyond their means.     Yet after ages of dormancy, t he years leading up to the Wicked movies were lined with musicals, more than we'd seen in the previous decade. A few of them were quite well crafted. Others were ... learning experiences. None really became what we'd call "mainstream."      But Wicked and Wicked: For Good have both seen rare success. I'm publishing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: AVATAR - Fire and Ash

     The "Avatar" chapters have generally renewed their interest to the masses based on which exciting new locale and each new culture whichever film opts to explore.      Following that dance,  "Fire and Ash" introduces yet another Na'Vi clan, this one hailing from the scorched plains under the shadow of an erupted volcano. But their biome is decidedly less spectacular than the lush jungles of the Omaticaya or the rich coral reefs where the Metkayina dive. Between the ashen grounds of the volcano clan and the metallic fortress of the humans, this is comfortably the most monochromatic of the three Avatar films. And yet, Avatar: Fire and Ash is no less gripping for it.      And this is where the internet really starts to reckon with what us fans of the franchise have always kind of known: that the many screensavers offered by the Avatar world ... they have been  nice . But these films would have never made the impact they have if the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Year in Review: 2025

     So, I guess I’ll start out by saying that … I wasn’t kidding last year when I said I was gonna do better with reviews, folks. This is the first time in three years that my review count landed in the double digits, and I reached that benchmark barely past the year’s halfway point. My total this year landed at 19. This breaks my previous record of 17 from 2021 and also outpaces the total haul from 2024 and 2023 combined.       Once again, " WICKED " pulled through as the biggest contributor this year, and I wouldn't have had that any other way. These last two years of active anticipation have been some of the most gratifying I've ever had as a person who feels investment in moving pictures. I'm even more excited, though, for this duology to be folded into film history: that thing I really love writing about.   I will always regret not reviewing The Holdovers (2023)      In the past, I have let myself get away with checki...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

    Welcome back, one and all, to my latest attempt to justify being enslaved to a million different streaming services. My efforts to watch one new movie a day all year haven't worn me out yet, but we're not even past the first quarter yet.           My first film of the month brought me to Baz Lurhmann's Australia , and it reminded me what a beautifully mysterious animal the feature film is. My writer's brain identified a small handful of technical issues with the film's plotting, but the emotional current of the film took me to a place that was epic, even spiritual. I don't know. When a film cuts straight to the core of your psyche, do setup and payoff even matter anymore? I think this film is fated for repeated viewings over the years as I untangle my response to this film.     One of my favorite films of all time is Billy Wilder's The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  You'd think, then, that learning that the t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

Loyal readers may remember last month when I talked about Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue and how I casually alluded to the larger framework of disability within film and promised to talk about it one day. Well, this isn’t like with my Disney Princess series where I teased the project for years before finally getting to it. I’m making good on that promise here today. You’re welcome.  Now, when I say “disability within film,” that’s a really large slice of the pie. The discussion of disability in Hollywood is a vast and complex field of study. There’s obviously overlap across the broader discussion, but people of different disabilities experience ableism differently, similar to how members of different ethnic identities experience racism differently, and it’s a machine that has to be dismantled on multiple fronts.  But with this piece, I’m not so interested in airing all the ways the industry has let down members of these communities. Today, I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wicked vs Maleficent

  “Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping.      Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser.  Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.   When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...
1 comment
Read more

The Notebook Has No Excuses

     The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him.  Nights of Cabiria (1957) Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore. So a fa...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on women on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, director of...
1 comment
Read more

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

          Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving.  From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality?       This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...
2 comments
Read more