My Fifty All-Time Favorite Motion Pictures

I love making lists, and one list I always wanted to make was a list of my all-time favorite films. I actually made such a list about 8 years ago, but for some stupid reason I divided the list by short films, animated films, comedies, dramas and silent films. This, plus the fact that my wife and I have watched about 500 motion pictures in the eight years since, has made me realize that I should make a new list.

So I did.

I didn’t show many people the list, because I was afraid of offending some people who may have a stricter conscience. But then I remembered, “the taking of offense is what rests in the bosom of the stupid ones” (Ecclesiastes 7:9). What strikes me as funny, anyways, is why someone who is – of feels they will be – offended would continue reading. So here’s the deal, if you are the kind of person who gets offended, then you are, by default, stupid. So stop reading this right now and go do whatever it is stupid people do.

I’m rather happy with my list. I have seen similar lists from other people and many of them seem skewed in a certain way; some lists have only major studio blockbusters, while other lists were are made by people who purposely exclude any popular motion picture. Some are heavily weighted towards drama, as if sci-fi and comedy are not worthy of being highly esteemed. Still other lists contain only movies from the last ten or twenty years.

In creating my list, I made sure not exclude anything simply because of its genre, age or length. Unfortunately, the list is still weighted towards films made during my lifetime, but I attribute that, not to a disdain for older films, but merely to the fact that I’ve seen newer films. I have every reason believe that if I were to see as many films from, say, the 1940s as I’ve seen from the 1990s, then there would be many more films from that decade on the list. As it is, there are multiple films from each decade since the 1940s.

To create the list, I sorted my list of feature length motion pictures I have seen by rank. I rank every motion picture I see on a scale of 0 – 10. On my list of over 1,100 motion pictures, there were only 22 that I assigned a perfect “10”. Those, of course, made the list. I then looked at the pictures I had assigned a “9”, and selected my favorites from those. I then looked at my list of short films I have seen, and selected my favorites from that list. This gave me a list of 63 pictures. I then had the difficult task of paring the list down to 50. The thirteen motion pictures that got chopped are (alphabetically): The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dumbo, Ed Wood, East of Eden, Falling Down, Gandhi, Monsters, Inc., The Ox-box Incident, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Roger and Me, The Shawshank Redemption, Superman (parts I and II), and Top Secret. Sorry, guys, you’re all excellent films in my opinion, but you just didn’t hold up against 50 others…

Oh – and one other thing, I took some liberties in lumping together series films. If my list contained multiple motion pictures from the same series, I listed them as one single entry. If I thought the series didn’t hold up well enough, then I just listed the film(s) from the series that were worthy. Thus, my list contains the X-Men trilogy as a single entry, but it contains only the original Back to the Future picture.

Over the next month or so, I’ll periodically make posts here discussing my fifty all-time favorite motion pictures. I’m gonna go in reverse order, starting at number fifty. I would love any comments regarding why you would or would not put these films on a similar (albeit hypothetical) list of your own.