The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time

The movies are now over 100 years old. This still makes them a young medium, at least in the art form’s years (how old is a novel? Theatre? Painting?). But they are only old enough to do the assembly diverseA first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time is an even more daunting task than it used to be. Think about it: You get an average of one movie a year. A great deal of debate and spirited debate went into creating this list. Our picks have been drawn from hundreds of titles submitted by over 30 titles diverse Critics, writers and editors. As we learned, coming up with the movies to include was the easy part. The tricky part was deciding which movies to exclude.

diversewhich recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. (We invented box office reports, as well as the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the wonderful diversity of the movie-watching experience. We don’t just mean the different types; We don’t just mean high and low (and everything in between). The ethos of cinema is that it has long been a spine-tingling, eclectic spectacle, and we wanted our list to reflect that — honoring the movies we love the most, no matter what categories they fall into.

Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That’s the nature of the beast — the nature of the kind of protective emotion people have about their favorite movies. We’ve invited notable filmmakers and actors to contribute articles about films that interest them, and that passion shows in everything they’ve written. You will undoubtedly say: How could this movie have been excluded from the list? What’s this new secret? or that? Trust us: we’ve often asked ourselves the same question. But our hope is that by looking at the movies we’ve selected, you’ll see a list that reflects the impossible, ever-changing glory of what movies are.

We invite you to find out how many films from the list you have watched in this survey.

These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for films: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earle, Patrick Frater, Stephen Gaidos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Kislasie, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Lovely, Brent Lang, Joe Lydon, Jay Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordin, Naman Ramachandran, Manuri Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alyssa Simon, Jazz Tangkai, Sylvia Tan, Zack Scharf, Adam B. Farry, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Warner.