Top 100 Movies (2017 Edition): The Index

As long-time followers of mine might remember, I used to make really complicated plans for unveiling my yearly revisions of my Top 100 Movies lists. Those kinda went out the window recently thanks to a very busy grad-student schedule. But I’m on a temporary (fingers crossed!) break from that for the moment and so I can take a little bit of time to do up something fun for this year’s list. I’ve made the list already, and for the first time ever, it’s longer than 100 films. When it came right down to it, I just couldn’t justify cutting any of the films to make it an even hundred. That’s kind of exciting!

This year I want to do a mix of things I’ve done in the past. Since this is one big list, I thought breaking it down into mini-lists would be a fun way of exploring a topic or director or technique that features in 5 films from my list. These Top 5 posts won’t be crossing over with each other and they’re totally arbitrary, but that’s part of the fun, I think. Anyways, since I won’t be spending a whole ton of my time on this project (I hope to do one list per week), I’m also including the full list here for your immediate perusal. It’s not super different from past lists in that you’ll see quite a few movies return, but the spots are all different.

Some people like to be mathematical in their calculations on lists like this but I think the best method is to embrace the arbitrary subjectivity of it all. So like, I really loved The Sound of Music when I revisited it two years ago, so much so that I rewatched the first half while reviewing student papers this past semester and avoided the second half which just isn’t as fun as those amazing first half scenes and songs. So this year it rocketed up to the third spot on my list. And I just watched Stalker a month ago but loved it so much that it’s now occupying the second spot on my list. It’s likely to move down in subsequent lists, but I’ll leave that to future-Alex to decide.

Ok, here’s the list in full. I’ll indicate new films with an asterisk (*) and put their previous position if they had one on last year’s list for comparison’s sake.