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100 Greatest Movies of all Time

March 06, 2017 , , , ,

It has always been a goal of mine to see all of the 100 greatest films of all time. Well, there's one very big and obvious problem: deciding on which 100 films are the "greatest." It turns out that film is pretty subjective (duh...) so everyone has a different idea of what the 100 greatest films even are. It's like wandering into a Oreo factory and trying to decide which Oreo is the best Oreo. Not which flavor (that would be deciding which genre you like best, also a subjective task) but which individual cookie. Good Luck.

 At first I spent time creating the most influential films of all time because I thought it would be a little less subjective since we can see traces of some films in others. I created that list but felt like I wouldn't really be living up to my goal. So I began looking for a reliable list of the greatest films of all time. I thought the American Film Institute's list of 100 movies would be the most reliable, but they don't include foreign films. So I looked at a few other lists, like IMDB, AMC, and Hollywood Reporter. Each had their advantages and drawbacks. The Hollywood Reporter's list asks producers and directors working in Hollywood to get their list, for example. In the end I decided to compile the lists. I won't explain the math here but I will put a section for math nerds down below to justify my list. Without further ado, here is the compiled list for the greatest 100 films of all time!
  1. The Godfather
  2. Casablanca
  3. Citizen Kane
  4. The Wizard of Oz
  5. Gone with the Wind
  6. Schindler's List
  7. Lawrence of Arabia
  8. The Godfather: Part II
  9. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
  10. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  11. Psycho
  12. It's a Wonderful Life
  13. The Shawshank Redemption
  14. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
  15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  16. Singin' in the Rain
  17. To Kill a Mockingbird
  18. Vertigo
  19. Chinatown
  20. Sunset Blvd.
  21. Raging Bull
  22. Apocalypse Now
  23. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
  24. Some Like It Hot
  25. On the Waterfront
  26. The Graduate
  27. Jaws
  28. The Bridge on the River Kwai
  29. West Side Story
  30. Annie Hall
  31. Back to the Future
  32. Pulp Fiction
  33. Rear Window
  34. The Sound of Music
  35. Taxi Driver
  36. North by Northwest
  37. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
  38. Bonnie and Clyde
  39. Forrest Gump
  40. All about Eve
  41. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
  42. The Searchers
  43. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  44. The Silence of the Lambs
  45. The Grapes of Wrath
  46. High Noon
  47. A Streetcar Named Desire
  48. The Best Years of Our Lives
  49. The Philadelphia Story
  50. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  51. City Lights
  52. Ben-Hur
  53. A Clockwork Orange
  54. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
  55. Saving Private Ryan
  56. Double Indemnity
  57. The Maltese Falcon
  58. It Happened One Night
  59. The Breakfast Club
  60. Titanic
  61. Amadeus
  62. All Quiet on the Western Front
  63. King Kong
  64. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
  65. Goodfellas
  66. Shane
  67. Rebecca
  68. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
  69. 12 Angry Men
  70. Doctor Zhivago
  71. The African Queen
  72. Blade Runner
  73. The Princess Bride
  74. Midnight Cowboy
  75. Rocky
  76. Fargo
  77. An American in Paris
  78. From Here to Eternity
  79. American Beauty
  80. The Third Man
  81. The Deer Hunter
  82. Wuthering Heights
  83. The General
  84. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  85. Rebel Without a Cause
  86. Stagecoach
  87. When Harry Met Sally
  88. Notorious
  89. Gladiator
  90. The Shining
  91. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  92. Unforgiven
  93. Nashville
  94. Fight Club
  95. Jurassic Park
  96. Alien
  97. Roman Holiday
  98. The Matrix
  99. Fantasia
  100. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King


Math Nerds:

To create this list I first compiled the rankings of each of these films (plus about 90 more) on this google sheet. This was a pretty good start so I averaged each of the films' rankings in the list. It occurred to me that this wasn't enough. I needed to account for films that appeared on multiple lists since more people have recognized the film as great. Therefore, I counted the number of lists that a film appeared on and multiplied the average by a constant * the number of lists it didn't appear on. This wouldn't eliminate films that only appear on 1 list (see Back to the Future) from making the final 100 but would give a major advantage to the films that multiple lists have nominated. That's why all of the top 30 appear in all 4 lists. Feel free to take a look at the data and look at the most influential films of all time which also is included in the above link and was calculated in a very similar way.

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