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Okay, it turns out that maybe I haven't seen all of the IMDb Top 100 after all. But I didn't realize this until I was halfway through writing this post, and I'm not going to stop now. You can wait for my impressions of the missing two when I do this for the complete Top 250.
Some stats:
Of the top 100, I own 23. I plan on owning another 10.
Of the remaining top 250, I haven't seen 56, own 17, and plan on owning another 8.
Links are to my original reviews on Melpomene, which usually aren't much longer.
1: Godfather, The (1972)
I have to admit I never really liked it. Good enough, I guess, just not very memorable. I know it is important as part of the 70s post-studio-system reinvention of film, but eh.
2: Shawshank Redemption, The (1994)
Very good, but not the kind of thing I'd ever remember to include in my own top-n list.
3: Godfather: Part II, The (1974)
See above, only more so.
4: Schindler's List (1993)
Saw it in the theater with my dad. I'm the only person he can take to possibly-disturbing war-type movies.
5: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)
Drool. I hate to be such a fanboy about FotR, and that might prevent me from putting in my top-10. But truth be told, I'm sure this really is one of the best movies ever made.
6: Citizen Kane (1941)
Confession type: I really don't like Citizen Kane. It's boring and depressing and pointless. And I had the 'rosebud' thing figured out halfway through.
7: Casablanca (1942)
I love Casablanca, but it feels like more of a quirky personal favorite than a really great film, like Grosse Point Blank or something. Except that it happens to be a quirky personal favorite of lots of people.
8: Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) (1954)
I swoon whenever I watch this. For some of the shots, Kurosawa had an expert archer actually shoot the actors, who were had little blocks off wood under their costumes. Kurosawa was one crazy motherfucker, that's all I can say. Okay, that and 'where can I find actors who will let me do that?' It was the first DVD I bought (along with Metropolis).
9: Star Wars (1977)
Hard to evaluate outside of its monstrous popculture influence. Probably not a very good movie. I'm in the 'Empire Strikes Back is the best, the less Lucas the better' camp. But I saw it in utero, which makes a kick-ass story.
10: Memento (2000)
More like a top 25-50 movie, but I did love it. I worry that too much of my love for it is just appreciation of a gimmick film that manages to also be a good film. (Unlike far too many others. Timecode, Russian Ark, Irreversible come to mind immediately.)
11: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Aw yeah. Gallows humor all the way.
12: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Too much of the stilted pacing/dialog that I associate with mid-career Kubrick.
13: Rear Window (1954)
Probably my favorite Hitchcock. I've never really gotten into him. Most of his films were so mainstream that they haven't held up very well over time. But, hey, a voyeuristic murder thriller! I'm there. And now that I think about it, The View From the Cherry Tree, a somewhat favorite children's book of mine, seems largely based on it.
14: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
That's better.
15: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh, nuh-nuh-nuuuuuh!
16: Usual Suspects, The (1995)
Strong, but not an important film.
17: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002)
I have... unfortunate reservations about TTT. I'm desperately hoping they are resolved in the extended DVD version. And positively feverishly praying that the trend doesn't continue into RotK.
18: Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le (Amelie) (2001)
The combination of light source material and Juenet's dark visual/comedic sense is a bit weird, but a wonderful kind of weird.
19: North by Northwest (1959)
Eh. Very thriller Hitchcock. I'd list Dr. No before I listed this.
20: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Lots of fun. One of the canonical movies that inspired far too many bad indie imitations, which is a kind of significant, I guess.
21: Psycho (1960)
I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it, but it ends up feeling a bit mechanical. Too many meaningful, overthought shots get heavy.
22: Silence of the Lambs, The (1991)
I hate to say it, but I like the book better. Still a great movie.
23: 12 Angry Men (1957)
We watched this in 10th grade english, after reading the play. I mostly remember that Juror Number 7 looked like a Nazi.
24: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Mmmmm. I got to see the re-release of this at Cinerama last year. Yummy. Though the casting Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal instead of, say, an actual arab makes it feel unfortunately dated. Nothing against Sir Guinness, but the makeup job was lame.
25: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Overwatched, maybe, but still good. And I've had a softspot for Jimmy Stewart ever since someone suggested he (the young he) play me in a movie adaptation of LambdaMOO.
26: Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) (1966)
Wah-wah-wah-waaah waaaah-waaaah-waaaaaaah! I don't have much to say about it. But the somewhat-sequel, A Fistfull of Dollars, is based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo. We didn't know this when we watched it, (we knew about Magnificent Seven, of course) so the first 10 minutes were oddly familiar.
27: American Beauty (1999)
I am convinced this is the most perfect movie ever made. Perfect script, perfect casting, perfect acting, perfect scoring, perfect cinematography. Not my favorite movie of all time (that honor goes to the flawed-but-powerful If....) but in the top 5.
28: Goodfellas (1990)
I... don't remember this very well. Not a big fan of mob movies.
29: Vertigo (1958)
Again, eh. But it was cool finding out what was playing in the movie theater in 12 Monkeys.
30: Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Yummy.
31: Apocalypse Now (1979)
Another awkward confession. I was a bit bored. I can't image watching the Redux version, good lord.
32: Some Like It Hot (1959)
Not nearly as annoying as I was expecting to be. Actually quite funny in places. But I still don't like Marilyn Monroe. Not even a little bit. People can point out how she was a sex symbol of reasonably realistic proportions all they like, which is great and all, but she was still an empty-headed waste of oxygen. That strikes me as far more important a failure of our sex symbol system than something as trivial as body shape.
33: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Um, crap, how did this get in here? Okay, I guess I haven't seen them all. But I want to read the book first, and my to-read queue is several feet tall at the moment.
34: Matrix, The (1999)
Aw yeah. Sure it isn't very deep, and has inspired far too many imitations, but it kicks ass. You just can't overstate that simple fact. The Matrix kicks serious ass. I just wish I had been 14 when it came out so I could have really gotten into it. I also wish they hadn't broken thermodynamics so ridiculously. Would it have been so hard to have the AIs using human brains for processing power? I hope this gets resolved in the new ones coming out. Morpheus could have been full of shit.
35: Taxi Driver (1976)
Another significant 70s movie that just doesn't do much for me. Maybe because I've been raised with movies that took what these started and really polished the concepts.
36: Third Man, The (1949)
Sexy, nitty-gritty, noirish, set in post-WWII europe. My kind of thing.
37: Paths of Glory (1957)
The chin! The chin! Kubrick before he got all stilted and weird.
38: Pianist, The (2002)
Very good. Just saw this yesterday. Fairly standard holocaust movie, really.
39: Boot, Das (1981)
Best damn submarine movie ever made. Period. I want to do a submarine movie set in space. The trick is, how to do one that isn't just a Das Boot remake.
40: Fight Club (1999)
1999 was an awesome year for movies. I can't justify my love for this movie beyond pure technical genius. (And there is plenty of technical genius in Fight Club, oh yes.) It's really a rather awful movie, with awful things happening to awful people coming to awful conclusions. Maybe it is the latent teen-rebel-anarchist-wannabe inside of me talking, but I just love it to death. Fuck society, yeah! Bring it down!
41: L.A. Confidential (1997)
Purrrrrr. Very sexy.
42: Requiem for a Dream (2000)
A bit pointless, but not as depressing as I feared. I like Pi better, though.
43: Double Indemnity (1944)
My favorite classic noir.
44: Chinatown (1974)
My favorite not-classic noir. Got me into Polanski.
45: Maltese Falcon, The (1941)
My favorite classic almost-noir. (I dunno why, I just can't classify it as pure noir.)
46: Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)
I love the sections in the labor camp. The extended jungle action sequences feel horribly 'punch-upped' and needless.
47: Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Fun.
48: Saving Private Ryan (1998)
I loved it -- except for the horrible bookends set in modern times. Good god, Spielberg, why? WHY?
49: M (1931)
It had a lot of cultural gap issues. But Peter Lorre!
50: All About Eve (1950)
More fun than I expected. A bit light.
51: Raging Bull (1980)
I'm not sure why anyone care about this.
52: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
It's easy to write this off. It is the most horribly over-quoted, over-referenced movie of all time. But that's because it's just amazingly funny. Scarily dense humor.
53: Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) (2000)
Not quite as kick ass as I was hoping. But it seems to have made subtitled movies acceptable for mainstream release in America, which is nothing short of a miracle.
54: Se7en (1995)
I should watch this again. I was busy getting some of the only high-school snuggles I ever did while watching it. The ending is a bit disappointingly obvious. I can think of several more surprising and more gruesome things that could have been in the box.
55: C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (1968)
Eh. It doesn't have the great musical theme from GoodBadUgly. A bit hard to follow, as well.
56: Wizard of Oz, The (1939)
Um... I think I was expected to love this once too many times as a kid.
57: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Hard to review. I do love the docking sequence, though.
58: Vita è bella, La (Life is Beautiful) (1997)
Roberto Benigni scares me. A lot. But who else could do a holocaust movie both genuinely funny and genuinely touching?
59: Sting, The (1973)
Just too cool.
60: American History X (1998)
Not what I was expecting. Really good, but maybe trying a bit too hard to be edgy and confrontational. And 'curbing' really, really squicks me.
61: Touch of Evil (1958)
Charleton Heston as a Mexican? Whatever. Otherwise pretty good.
62: Alien (1979)
I'm one of those heathens that really thinks Aliens is better. And the thong Sigorny Weaver is wearing is really quite silly. Not that she doesn't kick ass, of course. Don't get me wrong.
63: Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)
More of a cheap thriller than anything else. Disappointing.
64: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
I loved it. Filibusters rule! It even inspired this Camera Obscura comic.
65: Léon (1994)
Smart and oddly sexy.
66: Rashomon (1950)
Not my absolute favorite Kurosawa, but very good. And maybe a bit hard to judge the brilliance of the movie after so many imitators.
67: Annie Hall (1977)
I've never been able to decide if I like Woody Allen of if he annoys the fuck out of me.
68: Clockwork Orange, A (1971)
Wonderfully stylish. Slightly tedious storyline. Overrated.
69: Great Escape, The (1963)
One of my favorite WWII movies. It has aged very well, for something so close to a thriller.
70: Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (1948)
Fun, but nothing special.
71: Sixth Sense, The (1999)
Much better than I expected. And call me blind, but I didn't see the big surprise coming.
72: Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Masterful. And I'll probably never watch it ever again. Too powerful.
73: Jaws (1975)
Eh. Just another summer thriller, as far as I'm concerned.
74: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (2001)
Beautiful. Amazing. Everything Mononoke Hime should have been. I'm positively giddy waiting for his adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle.
75: Amadeus (1984)
I was forced to watch this in middle school at some point, probably for music class. I just can't get into it.
76: Braveheart (1995)
Droit de seigneur! What a wonderful plot device. Not bad for a largely fictional concept.
77: On the Waterfront (1954)
The audio is amazingly bad in places. But a great movie, one of the best finds from going through this list.
78: Ran (1985)
Epic epic epic! I want to be Kurosawa when I grow up. We went as characters from this for halloween a fews years back. There are probably pictures online somewhere.
79: Blade Runner (1982)
Very stylish. The number of different versions is rather intimidating, though. I would never dare to call myself a fan. The IMDb alternate versions page specifically mentions a showing that I was at, however. (1/15 - 1/21, Egyptian Theater.) That's pretty freaking cool.
80: Fargo (1996)
Fun. Not a top 100 movie. Not even the best Coen Bros. movie.
81: Apartment, The (1960)
Wacky fun, for the time. Kind of odd that anyone remembers it these days.
82: High Noon (1952)
Another surprising find from the list. Excellent. And now I know where the song that Holly-as-night-watchman is singing comes from in Red Dwarg - 205 - Queeg.
83: Toy Story 2 (1999)
Probably not a top-100 movie. But very clever in the way only very good kid's media can be.
84: Modern Times (1936)
I... really just don't like Chaplin. He isn't funny. At all.
85: Aliens (1986)
One of the best SF movies ever made. Great lines, great deliveries. As someone once said after we were watching it, if the worst thing you can find to nitpick is their UIs, it's a damn good SF movie. Iconic, even. And, of course, Sigorny Weaver kicking ass all over the place. The world needs more Sigorny Weavers.
86: Strangers on a Train (1951)
I liked it, though I'm now finding my memories of it and Infinite Jest are merging due to the shared tennis theme. This could get very odd in a few years.
87: Shining, The (1980)
More stilted Kubrick. Sure, it has some famous scenes, but that just isn't enough for me. Part of my problem is that I have trouble liking Jack Nicholson.
88: Duck Soup (1933)
I love the Marx Brothers. Very much my kind of humor. Horse Feathers is probably my favorite, but it is consigned to the Top 250.
89: Princess Bride, The (1987)
Another one hard to evaluate outside of my overexposure. I remember really liking it when I first saw it...
90: Donnie Darko (2001)
Good. I never quite understood the hype, however.
91: Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run) (1998)
I wish I had seen it in the theater when it first came out. But it sounded dumb. Gah. I'm glad there hasn't really been a tide of imitators, which could have happened. It's just that kind of movie.
92: City Lights (1931)
More freaking Chaplin. With all kinds of very odd homoerotic imagery, I swear.
93: General, The (1927)
Buster Keaton! Yay! I actually laugh watching Buster Keaton movies. I don't think I've ever laughed at Chaplin. And even if you don't like the humor, you can at least appreciate the complexity and precission of his gags. Some amazing stuff.
94: Searchers, The (1956)
Blech. BLECH! A hideous, offensive, boring, incomprehensible abortion of a movie.
95: Metropolis (1927)
SO. VERY. COOL. We saw this screened outside at gasworks park a few years ago, which was very cool. Except that the version they showed had the whole babel sub-story ripped out. For shame! 8000 bald guys! The first DVD I ever bought, along with Seven Samurai.
96: Full Metal Jacket (1987)
My favorite Kubrick. The lighting at the end is just phenomenal.
97: Notorious (1946)
Eh. But Nazis with uranium!
98: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Love the ending.
99: Manhattan (1979)
More whiny Woody Allen.
100: Big Sleep, The (1946)
Now that I look at it, I'm not sure I've seen this either. I suck a lot. Must have confused it with The Big Combo or something.
Some stats:
Of the top 100, I own 23. I plan on owning another 10.
Of the remaining top 250, I haven't seen 56, own 17, and plan on owning another 8.
Links are to my original reviews on Melpomene, which usually aren't much longer.
1: Godfather, The (1972)
I have to admit I never really liked it. Good enough, I guess, just not very memorable. I know it is important as part of the 70s post-studio-system reinvention of film, but eh.
2: Shawshank Redemption, The (1994)
Very good, but not the kind of thing I'd ever remember to include in my own top-n list.
3: Godfather: Part II, The (1974)
See above, only more so.
4: Schindler's List (1993)
Saw it in the theater with my dad. I'm the only person he can take to possibly-disturbing war-type movies.
5: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)
Drool. I hate to be such a fanboy about FotR, and that might prevent me from putting in my top-10. But truth be told, I'm sure this really is one of the best movies ever made.
6: Citizen Kane (1941)
Confession type: I really don't like Citizen Kane. It's boring and depressing and pointless. And I had the 'rosebud' thing figured out halfway through.
7: Casablanca (1942)
I love Casablanca, but it feels like more of a quirky personal favorite than a really great film, like Grosse Point Blank or something. Except that it happens to be a quirky personal favorite of lots of people.
8: Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) (1954)
I swoon whenever I watch this. For some of the shots, Kurosawa had an expert archer actually shoot the actors, who were had little blocks off wood under their costumes. Kurosawa was one crazy motherfucker, that's all I can say. Okay, that and 'where can I find actors who will let me do that?' It was the first DVD I bought (along with Metropolis).
9: Star Wars (1977)
Hard to evaluate outside of its monstrous popculture influence. Probably not a very good movie. I'm in the 'Empire Strikes Back is the best, the less Lucas the better' camp. But I saw it in utero, which makes a kick-ass story.
10: Memento (2000)
More like a top 25-50 movie, but I did love it. I worry that too much of my love for it is just appreciation of a gimmick film that manages to also be a good film. (Unlike far too many others. Timecode, Russian Ark, Irreversible come to mind immediately.)
11: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Aw yeah. Gallows humor all the way.
12: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Too much of the stilted pacing/dialog that I associate with mid-career Kubrick.
13: Rear Window (1954)
Probably my favorite Hitchcock. I've never really gotten into him. Most of his films were so mainstream that they haven't held up very well over time. But, hey, a voyeuristic murder thriller! I'm there. And now that I think about it, The View From the Cherry Tree, a somewhat favorite children's book of mine, seems largely based on it.
14: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
That's better.
15: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh, nuh-nuh-nuuuuuh!
16: Usual Suspects, The (1995)
Strong, but not an important film.
17: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002)
I have... unfortunate reservations about TTT. I'm desperately hoping they are resolved in the extended DVD version. And positively feverishly praying that the trend doesn't continue into RotK.
18: Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le (Amelie) (2001)
The combination of light source material and Juenet's dark visual/comedic sense is a bit weird, but a wonderful kind of weird.
19: North by Northwest (1959)
Eh. Very thriller Hitchcock. I'd list Dr. No before I listed this.
20: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Lots of fun. One of the canonical movies that inspired far too many bad indie imitations, which is a kind of significant, I guess.
21: Psycho (1960)
I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it, but it ends up feeling a bit mechanical. Too many meaningful, overthought shots get heavy.
22: Silence of the Lambs, The (1991)
I hate to say it, but I like the book better. Still a great movie.
23: 12 Angry Men (1957)
We watched this in 10th grade english, after reading the play. I mostly remember that Juror Number 7 looked like a Nazi.
24: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Mmmmm. I got to see the re-release of this at Cinerama last year. Yummy. Though the casting Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal instead of, say, an actual arab makes it feel unfortunately dated. Nothing against Sir Guinness, but the makeup job was lame.
25: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Overwatched, maybe, but still good. And I've had a softspot for Jimmy Stewart ever since someone suggested he (the young he) play me in a movie adaptation of LambdaMOO.
26: Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) (1966)
Wah-wah-wah-waaah waaaah-waaaah-waaaaaaah! I don't have much to say about it. But the somewhat-sequel, A Fistfull of Dollars, is based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo. We didn't know this when we watched it, (we knew about Magnificent Seven, of course) so the first 10 minutes were oddly familiar.
27: American Beauty (1999)
I am convinced this is the most perfect movie ever made. Perfect script, perfect casting, perfect acting, perfect scoring, perfect cinematography. Not my favorite movie of all time (that honor goes to the flawed-but-powerful If....) but in the top 5.
28: Goodfellas (1990)
I... don't remember this very well. Not a big fan of mob movies.
29: Vertigo (1958)
Again, eh. But it was cool finding out what was playing in the movie theater in 12 Monkeys.
30: Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Yummy.
31: Apocalypse Now (1979)
Another awkward confession. I was a bit bored. I can't image watching the Redux version, good lord.
32: Some Like It Hot (1959)
Not nearly as annoying as I was expecting to be. Actually quite funny in places. But I still don't like Marilyn Monroe. Not even a little bit. People can point out how she was a sex symbol of reasonably realistic proportions all they like, which is great and all, but she was still an empty-headed waste of oxygen. That strikes me as far more important a failure of our sex symbol system than something as trivial as body shape.
33: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Um, crap, how did this get in here? Okay, I guess I haven't seen them all. But I want to read the book first, and my to-read queue is several feet tall at the moment.
34: Matrix, The (1999)
Aw yeah. Sure it isn't very deep, and has inspired far too many imitations, but it kicks ass. You just can't overstate that simple fact. The Matrix kicks serious ass. I just wish I had been 14 when it came out so I could have really gotten into it. I also wish they hadn't broken thermodynamics so ridiculously. Would it have been so hard to have the AIs using human brains for processing power? I hope this gets resolved in the new ones coming out. Morpheus could have been full of shit.
35: Taxi Driver (1976)
Another significant 70s movie that just doesn't do much for me. Maybe because I've been raised with movies that took what these started and really polished the concepts.
36: Third Man, The (1949)
Sexy, nitty-gritty, noirish, set in post-WWII europe. My kind of thing.
37: Paths of Glory (1957)
The chin! The chin! Kubrick before he got all stilted and weird.
38: Pianist, The (2002)
Very good. Just saw this yesterday. Fairly standard holocaust movie, really.
39: Boot, Das (1981)
Best damn submarine movie ever made. Period. I want to do a submarine movie set in space. The trick is, how to do one that isn't just a Das Boot remake.
40: Fight Club (1999)
1999 was an awesome year for movies. I can't justify my love for this movie beyond pure technical genius. (And there is plenty of technical genius in Fight Club, oh yes.) It's really a rather awful movie, with awful things happening to awful people coming to awful conclusions. Maybe it is the latent teen-rebel-anarchist-wannabe inside of me talking, but I just love it to death. Fuck society, yeah! Bring it down!
41: L.A. Confidential (1997)
Purrrrrr. Very sexy.
42: Requiem for a Dream (2000)
A bit pointless, but not as depressing as I feared. I like Pi better, though.
43: Double Indemnity (1944)
My favorite classic noir.
44: Chinatown (1974)
My favorite not-classic noir. Got me into Polanski.
45: Maltese Falcon, The (1941)
My favorite classic almost-noir. (I dunno why, I just can't classify it as pure noir.)
46: Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)
I love the sections in the labor camp. The extended jungle action sequences feel horribly 'punch-upped' and needless.
47: Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Fun.
48: Saving Private Ryan (1998)
I loved it -- except for the horrible bookends set in modern times. Good god, Spielberg, why? WHY?
49: M (1931)
It had a lot of cultural gap issues. But Peter Lorre!
50: All About Eve (1950)
More fun than I expected. A bit light.
51: Raging Bull (1980)
I'm not sure why anyone care about this.
52: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
It's easy to write this off. It is the most horribly over-quoted, over-referenced movie of all time. But that's because it's just amazingly funny. Scarily dense humor.
53: Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) (2000)
Not quite as kick ass as I was hoping. But it seems to have made subtitled movies acceptable for mainstream release in America, which is nothing short of a miracle.
54: Se7en (1995)
I should watch this again. I was busy getting some of the only high-school snuggles I ever did while watching it. The ending is a bit disappointingly obvious. I can think of several more surprising and more gruesome things that could have been in the box.
55: C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (1968)
Eh. It doesn't have the great musical theme from GoodBadUgly. A bit hard to follow, as well.
56: Wizard of Oz, The (1939)
Um... I think I was expected to love this once too many times as a kid.
57: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Hard to review. I do love the docking sequence, though.
58: Vita è bella, La (Life is Beautiful) (1997)
Roberto Benigni scares me. A lot. But who else could do a holocaust movie both genuinely funny and genuinely touching?
59: Sting, The (1973)
Just too cool.
60: American History X (1998)
Not what I was expecting. Really good, but maybe trying a bit too hard to be edgy and confrontational. And 'curbing' really, really squicks me.
61: Touch of Evil (1958)
Charleton Heston as a Mexican? Whatever. Otherwise pretty good.
62: Alien (1979)
I'm one of those heathens that really thinks Aliens is better. And the thong Sigorny Weaver is wearing is really quite silly. Not that she doesn't kick ass, of course. Don't get me wrong.
63: Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)
More of a cheap thriller than anything else. Disappointing.
64: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
I loved it. Filibusters rule! It even inspired this Camera Obscura comic.
65: Léon (1994)
Smart and oddly sexy.
66: Rashomon (1950)
Not my absolute favorite Kurosawa, but very good. And maybe a bit hard to judge the brilliance of the movie after so many imitators.
67: Annie Hall (1977)
I've never been able to decide if I like Woody Allen of if he annoys the fuck out of me.
68: Clockwork Orange, A (1971)
Wonderfully stylish. Slightly tedious storyline. Overrated.
69: Great Escape, The (1963)
One of my favorite WWII movies. It has aged very well, for something so close to a thriller.
70: Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (1948)
Fun, but nothing special.
71: Sixth Sense, The (1999)
Much better than I expected. And call me blind, but I didn't see the big surprise coming.
72: Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Masterful. And I'll probably never watch it ever again. Too powerful.
73: Jaws (1975)
Eh. Just another summer thriller, as far as I'm concerned.
74: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (2001)
Beautiful. Amazing. Everything Mononoke Hime should have been. I'm positively giddy waiting for his adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle.
75: Amadeus (1984)
I was forced to watch this in middle school at some point, probably for music class. I just can't get into it.
76: Braveheart (1995)
Droit de seigneur! What a wonderful plot device. Not bad for a largely fictional concept.
77: On the Waterfront (1954)
The audio is amazingly bad in places. But a great movie, one of the best finds from going through this list.
78: Ran (1985)
Epic epic epic! I want to be Kurosawa when I grow up. We went as characters from this for halloween a fews years back. There are probably pictures online somewhere.
79: Blade Runner (1982)
Very stylish. The number of different versions is rather intimidating, though. I would never dare to call myself a fan. The IMDb alternate versions page specifically mentions a showing that I was at, however. (1/15 - 1/21, Egyptian Theater.) That's pretty freaking cool.
80: Fargo (1996)
Fun. Not a top 100 movie. Not even the best Coen Bros. movie.
81: Apartment, The (1960)
Wacky fun, for the time. Kind of odd that anyone remembers it these days.
82: High Noon (1952)
Another surprising find from the list. Excellent. And now I know where the song that Holly-as-night-watchman is singing comes from in Red Dwarg - 205 - Queeg.
83: Toy Story 2 (1999)
Probably not a top-100 movie. But very clever in the way only very good kid's media can be.
84: Modern Times (1936)
I... really just don't like Chaplin. He isn't funny. At all.
85: Aliens (1986)
One of the best SF movies ever made. Great lines, great deliveries. As someone once said after we were watching it, if the worst thing you can find to nitpick is their UIs, it's a damn good SF movie. Iconic, even. And, of course, Sigorny Weaver kicking ass all over the place. The world needs more Sigorny Weavers.
86: Strangers on a Train (1951)
I liked it, though I'm now finding my memories of it and Infinite Jest are merging due to the shared tennis theme. This could get very odd in a few years.
87: Shining, The (1980)
More stilted Kubrick. Sure, it has some famous scenes, but that just isn't enough for me. Part of my problem is that I have trouble liking Jack Nicholson.
88: Duck Soup (1933)
I love the Marx Brothers. Very much my kind of humor. Horse Feathers is probably my favorite, but it is consigned to the Top 250.
89: Princess Bride, The (1987)
Another one hard to evaluate outside of my overexposure. I remember really liking it when I first saw it...
90: Donnie Darko (2001)
Good. I never quite understood the hype, however.
91: Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run) (1998)
I wish I had seen it in the theater when it first came out. But it sounded dumb. Gah. I'm glad there hasn't really been a tide of imitators, which could have happened. It's just that kind of movie.
92: City Lights (1931)
More freaking Chaplin. With all kinds of very odd homoerotic imagery, I swear.
93: General, The (1927)
Buster Keaton! Yay! I actually laugh watching Buster Keaton movies. I don't think I've ever laughed at Chaplin. And even if you don't like the humor, you can at least appreciate the complexity and precission of his gags. Some amazing stuff.
94: Searchers, The (1956)
Blech. BLECH! A hideous, offensive, boring, incomprehensible abortion of a movie.
95: Metropolis (1927)
SO. VERY. COOL. We saw this screened outside at gasworks park a few years ago, which was very cool. Except that the version they showed had the whole babel sub-story ripped out. For shame! 8000 bald guys! The first DVD I ever bought, along with Seven Samurai.
96: Full Metal Jacket (1987)
My favorite Kubrick. The lighting at the end is just phenomenal.
97: Notorious (1946)
Eh. But Nazis with uranium!
98: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Love the ending.
99: Manhattan (1979)
More whiny Woody Allen.
100: Big Sleep, The (1946)
Now that I look at it, I'm not sure I've seen this either. I suck a lot. Must have confused it with The Big Combo or something.
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Can't wait for the 250 list.
random thoughts
Hitchcock -- my basic feeling on Hitchcock (although I like more of his movies than you do, I think), is that he was directing during times when directors were more prolific than now, when they could not really afford to be Tarantino or Scorsese and put out a movie only every few years. Like Altman does now, for different reasons, he wound up making more movies -- I think -- than he would if left entirely to his own devices. Normally, we'd forget the less-than-genius ones, but canonize the director, canonize the movies, so a lot of mediocre stuff is treated as masterpiece. (I think Rear Window and Rope are fantastic just visually, even if the stories were crap; I like Vertigo, but don't think it's his best work.)
I'm convinced Raging Bull gets canonized because of the weight DeNiro put on for the role (all things related to the "Method" get respect disproportionate to the result) and because, well, it's DeNiro before he started doing strange "did you really need to make that movie, Bob?" movies. I don't -hate- it, but I can't even seem to appreciate it in a "this isn't my thing, but I get why it works for people" way.
I don't get how anyone can not like Chaplin. But that's okay.