To celebrate our seventh anniversary, the ScreenAge Wasteland team is sharing individual lists of our 100 favorite films of all time. Explore the full collection here.
Of all the lists I’ve compiled over the years, this was the easiest and quickest one I’ve ever put together. The hardest part was cutting it down to only 100 movies—which, if you’re familiar with my lists, you know I still found a way to cheat to squeeze in more than 100.
I used a pretty straightforward set of criteria for creating and ranking this list that helped me narrow it down quickly and made the ranking much easier:
- Do I love this movie?
- Do I own it? (If I don’t own a physical copy, then I must not love it that much.)
- How many times have I rewatched it, and will I continue to rewatch it in the future?
- Personal discretion, of course.
I didn’t set any limits or restrictions, so when I stepped back and looked at the final list, I was surprised by the variety. Sly and Arnie dominated from an actor’s standpoint, but no director had more than two or three entries. In the end, I had around 85 different directors appear. It’s no surprise that the 80s dominate my favorites (nearly 50%), but it was fun to discover that 1987 is my overall favorite year in film, with nine movies from that year alone. I have zero movies from the 2020s on the list, although a few came close from my longlist. A couple almost cracked the top 100 and may move up over time.
My top two movies are really 1A and 1B, but I gave the number one spot to Grease simply because it’s the first movie I remember watching and falling in love with, watching it over and over again. It was one of the few films we’d watch together as a family, singing and dancing along. That later became a family tradition once I had kids of my own.
I know listing the entire Friday the 13th franchise as one entry is a big cheat, but anyone who knows me knows how much I love pretty much every F13 movie. Breaking them up would have taken 11 spots. I rewatch all of them (except Jason Goes to Hell, screw that movie) once a year, and I rarely let a Friday the 13th pass without watching at least one.
Anyway, enough rambling about the list. I could talk for hours about why I love each of these movies. I can attach a personal memory to almost everyone—whether it’s the first time I saw it, the first time I showed it to family or friends, or a fun anecdote connected to it. I have no guilty pleasures here. I genuinely love every movie on this list, and I’m not ashamed of any of them or of how much I love them.
I hope y’all enjoy this series and will share some of your favorite movies and why!
Let us know some of your favorites from Kane’s list! And complete the ListChallenges to tell us in the comments how many of his 100 you’ve seen!
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