The Movie Forums Top 100 of All-Time Refresh: Countdown

I love Airplane!. It's one of the few comedies which nail stupid humor. It never feels like it tries too hard to make the audience laugh and it also knows when to stop its gags before they have a chance to overstay their welcome. There's also many quotable lines in it to boot.

As a comparison, I like Dumb and Dumber, but it sometimes feels like it tries too hard to make its audience laugh, with the occasional poop/pee jokes or some over-the-top scenes which lack the cleverness of those in Airplane!.

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OMG!!!
DONT CALL ME SHIRLEY!!?!!?!?!!?!






whew!! Half an obscene hour later...

All this Airplane hate? I thought this was a reputable site.

Maybe it was just all the years of dudes telling me how funny Airplane is, but I was incredibly underwhelmed by it when I finally got around to watching it a year or two ago.

I get that it has a gentle stupidity that would make it easy to revisit and I get that it has some quotable one-liners, but overall it felt more like a string of hit-or-miss gags.

I've liked every other Fellini film I've seen, and I adore La Strada, but I didn't know what to make of 8 1/2. Sounds like that's a common first occurrence, so hopefully a second viewing will be as rewarding for me as it was for some of the others in here.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of the most idiosyncratic westerns I've seen. A buddy cop cowboy flick with a legendary on-screen duo. It barely cracked my Westerns ballot earlier this year, so it didn't make my list here, but its odd mixture of comedy, romance, Burt Bacharach and playful banter always makes for a fun viewing . . . up until that iconic ending when our lovable outlaws encounter impossible odds and a still-undefeated freeze frame.

I'm not big on war films since they feature little to no replay value and most of them tend to blend together anyway, but when a skilled director like Spielberg tackles the genre, I'm almost always in awe of the scale and technical precision required to stage such enormous battle scenes. Saving Private Ryan is a tremendous technical achievement. It has my respect, not my love.

The Apartment was high on my list. IMO, it's the best dramedy ever made. I'd say more but someone's telling me to "shut up and deal."

I'm not sure how anyone could confidently cite a one-time watch as a top-25 favorite, especially when you consider how many films most of us have seen. For me, re-watchability is by far the most important criteria when determining favorites. There's been a ton of films I thought were great on a first watch and would've cited as potential favorites, only to re-watch them and discover that they'd already peaked with that initial viewing. (Most often that seems to happen with plot-heavy films that offer no surprises or hidden layers on re-watches.) Whereas a surprisingly high percentage of my biggest favorites are films that I didn't love on a first viewing, or felt underwhelmed by in some sense, only to find myself drawn back to them again and again, each new re-watch more enriching than the last.

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I totally agree that it doesn't make sense to instantly proclaim a film as a favorite, but I feel like that re-watchability criteria is biased against those plot-driven films, which shouldn't be evaluated using the same metrics we use for visually-driven ones. Also, I find that knowing the intricacies of the plot (e.g. Memento) helps me focus on HOW the director/writer told it and inserted subtle clues throughout the movie. It might not be as rewarding as understanding an obscure message/theme, but it's still enriching in the sense you defined.

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Definitely Citizen Kane... although wow, that seems awfully low on this list. But the "young man" and the "blooming" thing totally fit and seem to be the way Yoda would think!

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Ohhh, you can't have watched Airplane! for the first time a year or two ago and appreciate it fully. I saw it in the theater when it was new and have seen it many times since. And of course, anyone my age remembers the Airport movies it's parodying. The rapid-fire one-liners are still hilarious, and those original Airport movies were disastrous in more ways than one and deserved to be parodied.

I loved Airplane! and also all the Naked Gun movies... and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

How did so many people miss this opportunity?

My parents took us to the drive-in in our station wagon to see Blazing Saddles when I was 13. One of my fondest memories of my mom is her in the front seat of that station wagon, laughing so hard she was literally crying, pounding on the dashboard with her fist and kicking the dashboard with her foot up during the campfire scene.

Yes, @Yoda, that's your grandmother for ya!

Loved the film when it came out and still has a place in my memory bank. But it hasn't aged well.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was #2 on my Westerns list, and #13 on my 1960s list, but unfortunately it was one of the last few cuts from my list for this countdown. I had a hard time deciding what to do about this movie when I was narrowing down my list because I was trying to find reasons to cut movies off my list by finding something wrong with each movie, no matter how minor the reason, but I couldn't find a reason to cut this movie, and my list still had too many movies on it. I basically had to just go with a "feeling" to cut the last few movies, and this was one of those movies. On a different day, it might have made my list.


I've never seen 8 ½, and it's never been a movie that I've had any interest in seeing.

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OPEN FLOOR.

I caught the surely reference, used it myself once in my old review.

For me, there's like 10-15 films that I can confidently cite as a top-25 favorite. Everything else is there on a day-to-day basis, so having a one-time watch included doesn't make me lose my sleep any more than about half of my votes already do. I just don't like making lists, and I don't think I can, with any accuracy, say what's the 19th best movie of all time.

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That makes no sense. Why would one person citing a one time viewing as a top 25 be affected by what other people had watched?

None. I've seen most of the movies on my list too many times to count, but there's one movie on my list that I've only seen 3 times. (Once recently, and two other times over the last 15 to 20 years.)

Very bland opinion here but Fellini is probably the greatest of all time. 8 ½ is wonderful of course and deserves a spot but I don't think it's quite on the level of like Amarcord or Nights of Cabiria.

The two movies that came to mind from that hint, (or hints), are Inception (2010) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012).

I haven't seen Inception in years, but I remember there being some type of strange world building, so "blooming skyscrapers" immediately brought the image of the world building from the movie to mind.

It's been a while since I've seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower too, but it's a coming-of-age movie, and the title seemed to match up with "young man" and "blooming". (Although I'd be very surprised if this movie makes the countdown.)


But then again, part of the hint says "pretty place", so maybe it's something simple like New York, New York (1977), Chicago (2002), or Tokyo Story (1953), but other than the place and the skyscrapers, none of those seem to fit with the rest of the hint.

I was referring to ourselves, not other people.

I've seen over 5000 movies at this point. I'm sure you've seen even more than that. (You've reviewed over 1200 movies on here alone, and it's not like you've reviewed every movie you've ever seen . . . or have you?!?!?) It stands to reason that the more movies a person has seen, the lesser the chances that a solitary viewing makes a strong enough first impression to immediately catapult that movie into the person's top 25. However, if you've only seen 100 movies in your life, the chances are obviously much higher.

If you watched Gonorrhea 2: My Urine Burns Electric Boogaloo thirty-seven years ago and still consider it your 12th favorite movie of all-eternity despite never having watched it a second time, more power to you. I'm glad that it was such a memorable experience that you still treasure it to this day. Your favorites are your favorites and you can choose them by whatever criteria makes your penis trickle. I'm just a little surprised that people on a movie forum, who typically have seen far more movies than the average land-dweller, would have such a strong relationship with a movie they've only watched once in their lives to already consider it among the upper, upper echelon of their favorites. I would've assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that such relationships had been forged over multiple re-watches.

Not a big deal. Doesn't really matter. Nobody light their undies on fire.



Duh. Everybody knows that.

That's #19? That's not where I put it on my ballot