Personal Lists featuring...

The Gold Rush 1925

7

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), Danny Peary provides short reviews for over 1600 “Must See” films.

104 movies missing. Imported from external source.

284

This list is "an educational resource that offers guidance and encouragement as students seek to find points of orientation within the vast history of film and video." It is not a list of the best films of all time. Rather, it reflects a variety of criteria.

Source: https://ves.fas.harvard.edu/files/ves/files/fvs_suggested_viewing_2012.pdf

10

Top 10 Trakt Popular of all movies released before 1980 according to Trakt's Popular tab.
Tweet @DannyVFilms for any adjustments or corrections.

For movies released after 1980 see Top 10 Domestic Gross by Year:
https://trakt.tv/users/dannyvfilms/lists/top-10-domestic-gross-by-year-1980-present

240

Deciding that Londoners should have the opportunity to view a film masterpiece approximately every day during the course of the year, BFI film archivist David Meeker approached the board of directors at the BFI in 1982 with his idea of compiling a list of 360 of the world’s cinema masterpieces, collect brand new, state-of-the-art prints of each film and issue a companion book for each movie. This list of films, referred to as the 360 Classic Feature Films project, was published in Sight and Sound's June 1998 issue.

258

A personal introduction to 1000 movies by the provocative contemporary film critic and historian David Thomson.

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Have-You-Seen-Introduction-masterpieces/dp/014102075X

3

BBC Culture polled film critics from around the world to determine the best American movies ever made. The results are surprising – Gone With the Wind appears at 97.

1

I started off by gathering ratings from IMDB (User/Critic Average), Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer, Critic Average, Audience Score, User Average), Metacritic (Critic Average, User Average) and Letterboxd (User Average). I was then able to determine a rating (out of 10) for each individual rating and therefore come up with an average rating for each site. Each site’s average rating was then weighted fairly so that no site’s ratings were favored above the rest.

The next step was to make sure that each film was treated fairly. Other top movie list’s like IMDb’s Top 1000 removes films that have under a certain viewing number (25,000 I think), but rather than ruling out films that may have been overlooked by the general audience (especially older films), I opted to alter these films score by carefully deducting points depending on how many people have seen it, and therefore voted on it. I also thought it was needed to make sure that recent films (released within the past 36 months) were also not favored, as it usually takes 3 years for the average rating to settle down. So I also added a deduction to these films that fell under this rule.

Taken from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3hbiio/update_1001_greatest_movies_of_all_time_plus/

245

The top 100 most essential films of 78 French film directors, critics and industry executives. The list was compiled for and published in the French Cahiers du cinéma film magazine.

Source: https://www.cahiersducinema.com/produit/100-films/

41

Part of the AFI 100 Years… series, AFI's 100 Years…100 Laughs is a list of the top 100 funniest movies in American cinema. A wide variety of comedies were nominated for the distinction that included slapstick comedy, action comedy, screwball comedy, romantic comedy, satire, black comedy, musical comedy, comedy of manners and comedy of errors. The list was unveiled by the American Film Institute on June 13, 2000.

332

This list contains the 100 finest examples of 20th century filmmaking, according to Taschen. From horror to romance, noir to slapstick, adventure to tragedy, epic to musical, western to new wave, all genres are represented in this wide-ranging compendium.

Source: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/film/all/44902/facts.100_all_time_favorite_movies.htm

217

From Chapter 3 of A Dream is a Genius, 1999. Akira Kurosawa discusses his top 100 films with his daughter, Kazuo. Kurosawa limits his choices to one film per director.

225

So this year BBC Culture decided to get serious about comedy. We asked 253 film critics – 118 women and 135 men – from 52 countries and six continents a simple: “What do you think are the 10 best comedies of all time?” Films from any country made since cinema was invented were eligible, and BBC Culture did nothing to define in advance what a comedy is; we left that to each of the critics to decide. As always, we urged the experts to go with their heart and pick personal favorites, films that are part of their lives, not just the ones that meet some ideal of greatness.

Created August 2017

5

AFI's 100 Funniest American Movies Of All Time

Regardless of genre, the films on this list possess a total comedic impact that creates an experience greater than the sum of the smiles. These movies provide laughs that echo across time, enriching America's film heritage and inspiring artists and audiences today.

A wide array of funny films — from slapstick comedy to romantic comedy; from satire and black comedy to musical comedy; from comedy of manners to comedy of errors — were nominated for this distinction.

AFI distributed a ballot with 500 nominated films to a jury of 1800 leaders from the film community, including film artists (directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, cinematographers, etc.), critics, historians and film executives. The jurors were asked to consider the following criteria while making their selections:

  • Feature-Length Fiction Film: The film must be in narrative format typically over 60 minutes in length;
  • American Film: The film must be in the English language with significant creative and/or financial production elements from the United States;
  • Funny: Regardless of genre, the total comedic impact of a film's elements that creates an experience greater than the sum of the smiles;
  • Legacy: Laughs that echo across time, enriching America's film heritage and inspiring artists and audiences today.

Source: http://www.afi.com/100Years/laughs.aspx

6

Soothing, Funny and Feel-Good Movies, TV Shows and Anime without much (or any) relatable conflict. Ideally to get away from everyday stress.

Have fun watching,
Sadwick

295

A list of the 100 20th century films as chosen by the film critic Leonard Maltin. This list appears in Maltin's book titled Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide 2000 (Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide).

Source: http://www.filmsite.org/maltin.html

274

All the comedies mentioned in the filmography of the book "Film Comedy" by Geoff King, published in 2002.

"From slapstick to satire and subtle innuendo. From the grotesque to the carefully mannered. From madcap anarchy to the darkly deadpan. Film comedy comes in a wide range of forms. For as long as film has existed as an entertainment medium, so has film comedy. ... Comedy was one of the most popular formats in the early years of cinema and has remained so ever since." (from the introduction to the book)

Missing: Edward Penishands (1991)

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Film-Comedy-Geoff-King/dp/1903364353/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402285691&sr=8-1&keywords=film+comedy

3

I well remember being taken to Blazing Saddles at the age of 10, when I was far too young to understand most of the jokes. At the same time, I could see how important Blazing Saddles was to my parents and their friends. They quoted from it for months—years—afterward.

As much as savoring a particular joke, I realize now, they were trying to reclaim that initial, joyful shock to the system. There’s not a film on the WGA’s 101 Funniest Screenplays that doesn’t produce such an unexpected jolt, if not a sustained quake, and for the same reasons Blazing Saddles did—by transgressing accepted norms.

One question that this list asks, however: Should a great comedy simply be gauged by the laughter it elicits? “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” George S. Kaufman famously quipped. A number of the comedies on this list went under-appreciated at the box office and by critics; years, if not decades, had to pass before the work began to receive its due. This was as true for Buster Keaton’s The General as it was nearly half a century later for Harold and Maude, and 30 years after that for Office Space.

The oldest movie on the list is Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), while the most recent is Bridesmaids, released in 2011. The latter also has the distinction of being written by two women—Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, working in slapstick, a genre historically dominated by men. Bridesmaids comes in at no. 16, immediately after When Harry Met Sally, written by the legendary Nora Ephron. Comedy screenwriting has long been a playground that women and writers of color have not had enough time in. The work of Richard Pryor on Blazing Saddles, Tina Fey on Mean Girls, Amy Heckerling on Clueless, and Hagar Wilde, co-writer of Bringing Up Baby, makes you wonder what a list would be if the playground had been more inclusive all along.

In the end, the variety of films on the list—as different as Being There is to Airplane! or Duck Soup is to Fargo—indicates how difficult it is to gauge a great comedy by any set of particular criteria. Better to say the best comedy writers and comedians are like astronauts, launching themselves beyond the ozone layer of the tasteful and the expected in order to find the forbidden or the outrageous or the merely uncomfortable. Whether that produces an outrageous comedy like Mrs. Doubtfire or a satire like Dr. Strangelove, the goal is still provocation. And truth.

Written by Paul Brownfield
2015-11-15

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