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

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-Every film in the top 20, bar 1 is produced in the USA. Perhaps even the same city.
If you're measuring this by the mailing address of the big production studios, maybe. But a number of these films were produced in England, Fellowship in New Zealand, and many (Lawrence, Raiders) produced in multiple countries.


But, sure, this is primarily a list that would reflect the interests of a western English-speaking audience. I don't know what the breakdown of the mofo members would be, but it seems dominated by western English-speakers.



Come to think of it – is French cinema represented on the list at all?
This is one regret that I'll take some responsibility for, as when I finished my list and realized that I had missed every French director, I tried to find spots for Pickpocket, Weekend, Wages of Fear, Rules of the Game and failed.The best excuse I can muster is that at a certain point a definitive personal top 25 list is a ridiculous exercise that is only useful as a convenience for lists like these.



Go on. I’m ready. I can take it.
Space Cowboys over Unforgiven though?



Repo Man ... Impossible to recommend, but I do it anyway.
Eyes melt. Skin explodes. Everybody dead.





How many other cool people had already seen every film on the list before it dropped?
I don't like to brag.



I was hoping that this was going to be that Shaquille O'Neal film.



I only took about an hour and a half to catch up with the thread


2001 was my #1, and I do like to take into consideration the time in which a film was made. It's hard to imagine what a hydrogen explosion 2001 was on release. I'm too young to have been there, but a quick glance through that year's Oscar winners should be enough to gauge the gulf between what was typical 'prestige' Hollywood fare and what was 2001. I like that early Altman film, Countdown, released a the same time, which has Jimmy Caan just strolling on the moon like a surfer cruising for a beach. 2001 rightfully scared the hell out of everyone trying to be taken seriously at the time.


And thus. I have no hyperbolic fonts to offer. This has been fun, fellows, and a marvelous job by Yoda and Suspect. And, on behalf of the fugees, a gracious welcome. Thank you.







*waits patiently for whole list to be revealed*



Sorry y'all, MM has been MIA on the MF community during the big reveals of the last few films. So here are my belated comments on some of them...

I can't remember exactly when I first watched Pulp Fiction, but it was early in my cinematic pilgrimage. As far as I remember, I had already watched the first two Kill Bill flicks - which I liked but had yet to grow into loving - and watching this Tarantinos masterpiece for the first time certainly wasn't all that successful either. I liked it okay, but I respected it more than I loved it. It took me a couple of watches throughout the years, but now I really love it.

While it is great on many levels, it's undeniably about the way that QT took a u-turn with the crime genre and presented it in a different light than we were used to together with the signature Tarantino allspice we have come to love - though at the time it was something quite new and eye-opening (or ear-opening, for that matter). The movie has all the pieces to complete the QT-collection of which his films are build upon; great acting, great soundtrack, alive dialogue, dead people and so on. I understand it being this high because of what it meant to cinema and how it blasted Tarantinos career and name through the roof. It's not my favorite of his, but I think it's great.

Casablanca is one of my all-time favorite films. It's not many older movies that I connect with as well as I did with this one. The lovestory is timeless and one of the greatest romances of all time. The script is just... it's just... no matter what I write I won't do it justice. It's so well written, complete with iconic memorable quotes and truly well written characters and peformances. I can watch it day in and day out. And it was on my list of course.


I'll comment on the top three later



We've gone on holiday by mistake
1- American History X (1998)
2- The Shining (1980)
3- Se7en (1995)
4- V For Vendetta (2005)
5- Jaws (1975)
6- Sinister (2012)
7- A Clockwork Orange (1971)
8- Requiem For A Dream (2000)
9- The Raid 2 (2014)
10- Fight Club (1999)
11- Zodiac (2007)
12- Whiplash (2014)
13- The Dark Knight (2008)
14- Friday Night Lights (2004)
15- The Prestige (2006)
16- I Saw The Devil (2010)
17- Interstellar (2014)
18- The Fighter (2010)
19- The Green Mile (1999)
20- Warrior (2011)
21- One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
22- Halloween (1978)
23- Primal Fear (1996)
24- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
25- We Are Marshall (2006)

My whole list! Great countdown fellas big props
Whiplash is another that perhaps should have made it.

I believe only 2 movies made it from 2010-2019, with Tree of Life and Her, 2011 and 2014.

Repeating myself but I'm astonished so few recent films made it. At this rate we'll start top see a few appear on the 2040/2050 list
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Whiplash is another that perhaps should have made it.

I believe only 2 movies made it from 2010-2019, with Tree of Life and Her, 2011 and 2014.

Repeating myself but I'm astonished so few recent films made it. At this rate we'll start top see a few appear on the 2040/2050 list
As I said in an earlier comment, when it comes to the prestigious Sight & Sound poll as well as I believe the AFI all-time lists, a film is not even eligible until it is at least ten years old. We don't need to be that strict here at MoFo for our less formal exercises, but defacto that kinda happened. Each voter policed themselves and didn't include many recent greats. And it helps/hurts that there is not a consensus one or two titles for the most recent decade, yet. That develops over time.

It will be interesting to see how different a new, proper 2000-2009 list will be, replacing the Top 100 of the Millennium List which included titles from 2010 and 2011. The core titles won't change much of course except maybe in order, but will flicks like Juno, Traffic, King Kong, Spider-Man 2, Sunshine, and The Help seem like one of the top 25 movies of the entire decade on people's ballots now, so far removed from the initial impacts?

We shall see.
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra



Man, you can already tell Sunshine is being forgotten. It's totally gonna be one of those films people just sort of stumble upon years from now and wonder why they haven't heard of it. And more than one person will probably write an article about how it's an earlier (and better) Interstellar.

Deserves to be a modern classic, but I think it's getting left behind a bit.



Welcome to the human race...
Regarding Sunshine, it always seems like people only ever talk about how a certain end-of-second-act plot development supposedly undermines the tone and by extension the entire film - if that's the main thing people mention about the movie, it's not surprising that it kind of slid into obscurity over the years even though it came from a director who a) won an Oscar the following year and b) made one of the best horrors of the 21st century. What really gets me is that Interstellar used the same development and nobody complained.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Welcome to the human race...
Yeah, for such an apparently visionary movie it's disappointing how easy it is to watch it and go "wait, isn't that from ____" (see also: the pen-through-paper bit from Event Horizon). Wild that IMDb rates it like 50 spots higher than 2001.



Man, you can already tell Sunshine is being forgotten. It's totally gonna be one of those films people just sort of stumble upon years from now and wonder why they haven't heard of it. And more than one person will probably write an article about how it's an earlier (and better) Interstellar.

Deserves to be a modern classic, but I think it's getting left behind a bit.
While I really like Sunshine and fully include the third act in that sentiment, I'm not sure it would make my own personal top 100. I put it in the category of something that people will continue to discover to their delight for many years to come. The cast, among other things, is fantastic.

As for the whole top 100 list, I am a bit disappointed-but-unsurprised at the lack of foreign films (especially French, Italian, and more contemporary Asian films). I don't want to bag on anyone's taste, so I'll just note that I was really pleased to see Harold and Maude, The Night of the Hunter, Come and See, Persona, Seven Samurai, and Stalker (even if it isn't my favorite Tarkovsky) make the list.



Sunshine was the film which got me into film. When I was in 9th grade or so, I had watched the film a couple dozen times as I was a massive fan of it. I wrote a paragraph long summary of it on Rotten Tomatoes (which I still have saved on my pc, though it's really poorly written), wrote a few reviews on a couple other films I liked, and kept going from there. Though I don't like it as much as I use to, I'm still a big fan of the film.

As for the final act, I completely understand the issues people have with it. I'm not going to disagree with them anytime soon, but I personally wasn't bothered by the final act.
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I thought Sunshine was amazing on my first watch. On a second watch I still liked it but not as much. I don't really have a desire to see it again though.

An excerpt from my old review.
...Besides the dangerous mission, Sunshine also presents a fascinating idea that maybe there's something spiritual within sunlight. The scenes in the sun observation room where a crew member opens the huge sun observation window, blasting himself with intense sunlight, were visually powerful. The film has a subtle metaphysical idea that within the deadly sunshine is a hidden truth. It's a truth so worth knowing that a person would risk their life by staring into the blasting sunshine, just to get a glimpse of that truth.

Sunshine has a sub plot twist which involves some graphic horror like scenes, though that's not what the film is about and it's a small part of the film in the third act. I'll rate the decision to include the horror elements a 0. But the rest of the film is amazing.



Adding my big thanks to Yoda and The Usual Suspects for doing all the hard work and making it happen. Thanks also to everyone for their lists--I'm especially enjoying seeing the full lists revealed, as they tend to say a lot about each person's tastes and thought process.

As mentioned before, The Godfather was not on my list, but I have a great deal of respect for it. On a succession of cold and sometimes snowy weekends in 2003 I saw both Godfathers and The Conversation at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens with my then ex-girlfriend but future wife (long story!). Beautiful prints--the Godfathers came from Paramount and The Conversation came from Coppola's personal collection. As I recall it, one of the films (I don't remember which) was in transit as we watched, so the second reel wasn't in the building when the movie started. It came off seamlessly, happily. So while I don't have a lot of affection for gangster films in general, I do have some fond memories around these in particular, and they are magnificent to watch on a big screen.

On the other hand, my memories of 2001 extend to childhood. My parents had the soundtrack album--on vinyl, so included pictures from the film that I would look at while listening to "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube." I don't really know when I first saw the film, certainly I have no idea when I saw the whole thing. I have vague memories of snippets of it, perhaps from a showing on television? I'm fairly certain I saw it again in college, and I know by the late '90s I had the DVD and I'm certain I watched it then. The Moving Image shows at least once every year or two, and I've seen it on the big screen there at least 2 or 3 times. My one regret is that when they've had a couple of screenings with Keir Dullea in attendance they've conflicted with coaching my son's soccer team. Such is the price of parenthood.

I think of the quote attributed to Andrei Tarkovsky when Goskino film officials criticized Stalker for not being faster and dynamic: "The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts." If you find that 2001 is too slow or too dull, then probably it is not for you. Which is fine! Nothing is for everyone, and your joys may lie elsewhere. I love the pace of 2001. I love how it feels like a slow dance. Kubrick is thought of as cold and technical, but I don't feel that at all when I watch this movie. I feel the vast expanse of the universe and what is possible for humans in it.

2001 was my #1.



The third act problems of Sunshine were not as egregious to me on a second watch. It’s a damn good looking movie too.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Are we all ready for the next countdown????
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