The Best of the Best of the Best movies

By the way, if you don’t want to read through all 138 movies on my consensus “Greatest Films List,” here’s a bit of summary.

Not surprisingly, there was no movie that was on every single list. However, three movies were on eight of nine:

  • 1931 City Lights
  • 1942 Casablanca
  • 1954 On The Waterfront

Nine movies were on exactly 7 of the nine lists:

  • 1934 It Happened One Night
  • 1941 Citizen Kane
  • 1944 Double Indemnity
  • 1946 It’s A Wonderful Life
  • 1952 Singin’ In The Rain
  • 1957 The Bridge On The River Kwai
  • 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying…
  • 1972 The Godfather
  • 1977 Annie Hall

There were 18 movies that appeared on exactly six lists. Among the six-listers were Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, Raging Bull, and Vertigo, movies that I personally consider superior to such 7-listers as Double Indemnity and “The Bridge on the River Kwai. Further proof, as if you needed it, that taste is subjective.

5 Responses to “The Best of the Best of the Best movies”

  1. Aaron Vehling

    It’s been 8 years since “Dark City” was released. Is there enough of a consensus to add it to a future, updated list?

  2. Jacob

    Interesting question, and difficult to answer. Of the lists I used, only Ebert’s, the IMDB Top 100, the Library of Congress Film Registry, and the Oscar-winners are regularly updated. And of those, only Ebert’s list includes Dark City. So it wouldn’t be on an updated list if I used the same sources. But perhaps if I used more recent sources it might.
    Or it might not. There is a fair amount of competition in the past decade. I think Dark City was a terrific and vastly underrated movie, but I’m not sure critical consensus will ever rank it above The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Magnolia, The Matrix, Syriana, or Brokeback Mountain.
    In short: answer cloudy. Ask again later.

  3. Teme

    I think Billy Wilder’s Ace In The Hole should be on the “best” lists, too, tho I’ve never seen it appear on them. Not sure why it’s so underrated. For more recent movies, I would vote for Napoleon Dynamite, Junebug, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Eternal Sunshine and The Station Agent. Which ones would you add?

  4. James

    The fact that there’s only one comedy from the last 40 years (“Tootsie”) has gotta mean something. That critics undervalue comedy, I suspect.
    Also, next time I see you, I’m gonna sock you in the jaw for writing “superior … to Double Indemnity.” Them’s fighting words.

  5. Eric

    Don’t you see what the next logical step is? It’s “Jacob’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time”. Now that you’ve seen them all you need to have your own authoratative ranking.