Pages related to this topic:
Recent Best Films
200+ Great Films
Narrative Structures in Films: A Mindmap
Thomas Mann on film: Text from “The Magic Mountain”
Mistakes in Film Criticism
Aristotle’s Six Elements of Drama
RECOMMENDED FILMS
This set of lists makes it pretty easy to find a good film: if it’s on one of these lists, chances are you will enjoy the film.
Please Note: Although most of these titles in the table below have been checked for availability, some may be currently out of stock or may have been withdrawn from circulation by the studio.
MINDTOOLS RECOMMENDS
Movie Making/Hollywood: Melding Fact with Fiction: Cartesianism, Memory, and Film Noir: Underground Sci-Fi: Best Lina Wertmüller: Best Woody Allen: Foreign Films: Lesser-Known Classics from Hollywood’s Golden Era: Comedy: Films and Communism: * Limited Availability |
* AFI LIST OF 100 ALL-TIME BEST (1998)
1. Citizen Kane, 1941 |
* A NON-AFI LIST OF FILMS BETTER THAN The Graduate
Rebecca, 1940 |
* ABOUT THE AFI LIST: In an amusing and light-hearted book about film ( Ten Sure Signs a Movie Character is Doomed…), critic Richard Roeper suggested that the AFI list has many films that simply do not belong among the “top 100.” He asks: is The Graduate really the 7th best film of all time? Although there may be no truly bad films on the AFI list, from the standpoint of movie fans looking to broaden their horizons and by mining the rich history of film, the AFI list has many flaws. First of all, since the list is just of American films, it eliminates many of the world’s great classics. Second, the whole idea of ranking films in order is dubious at best; there is a class of excellent films, but individual rankings within that class are near pointless since each film is excellent in its own way. Third, some films (such as The Graduate and The Silence of the Lambs) appear to have been included because of the momentary impact they made in popular consciousness rather than for their importance to film history or their continued relevance. To be sure, the AFI list includes great masterpieces, such as Vertigo and Citizen Kane. But it can be argued that both Hitchcock and Welles are underrepresented on the list; there are many Welles or Hitchcock films not presently on the list that would surely be better choices than The Graduate! With these thoughts in mind, I endeavored to create a somewhat whimsical list of films better than The Graduate. I tried to follow these rules: (1) the films could not already be on the AFI list (lest I merely reorder the AFI list — an even more dubious exercise than the present one!); (2) some of the same directors and genres from the AFI list had to be included; (3) foreign films should be included; and (4) from a movie fan’s point of view the list had to have an entertainment or viewability quotient similar to that of films that did make the AFI list. Viewability is always a concern. After all, from the consumer’s point of view, the ultimate question is: do I want to spend money on this? The column at the right of the table is the result of this experiment in list building. -ab