I wonder when Martin Scorcese saw The Godfather and when he started filming Mean Streets. There are the obvious similarities. The films are both about Mafia families in New York navigating the complexities of a nation changing as the result of a distant war. Their characters are fraught with distorted…

We have finally done it team. We have hit the final Western on the list, and with it, the final John Wayne contribution to this journey. It’s fitting then, that we exit the genre with John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach, which feels like the most quintessential Western I have ever seen…

I was surprised to see that The Lion King, directed Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, had snuck into contention on the top 100 list. My surprise fell short of shock, but I raised my eyebrows a bit that this particular children’s movie was the one to make the cut. I…

I was looking forward to reaching Days of Heaven on this list as soon as I noticed Terrence Malick’s name. A young Richard Gere didn’t hurt either. I am most familiar with The Tree of Life, which I watched for the first time late at night with a group of…

It’s interesting that we’re nearing the end of this list, and the first time Fred Astaire popped up is in Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 show about a show The Band Wagon. I skimmed Astaire’s filmography and I’m pretty sure I have never actually seen one of his films, and yet his…

I’ll admit to having mixed feelings about finally finding a way to watch Crimes and Misdemeanors. The 1989 Woody Allen dramedy was shockingly difficult to procure. It wasn’t streaming anywhere I could find online, and DVDs on Amazon were reselling for literally hundreds of dollars. I eventually found an old…

Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Sirk, falls squarely into the subset of movies that I had never seen or heard of before starting this endeavor. Skeptical but optimistic, I was pleasantly surprised by how immediately I was swept up in the glossy technicolor dreamscape. The experience felt closer to…

Bringing Up Baby is a movie I had heard a lot about, but never seen. It sits firmly within the class of films that motivated me to start this project, movies that I thought were required viewing for a self taught film school curriculum. This is partially because it stars…

Do the Right Thing toys with the audience. Spike Lee steers the film like a bumper car, erratically and joyfully, plunging headlong into every collision, allowing the pressure to build so that the experience feels increasingly tenuous. Lee is a master puppeteer, unafraid to allow for a broad range of…