Dracula Presents: The Top 100 Movies of All Time (2015 List)

Fuck it.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Year: 1968

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Writer(s): Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke

Based on: The short story "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke

Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and Douglas Rain

Studio: MGM

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 142 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.20:1
How exactly does one justify selecting a single movie over so many other great movies to be dubbed “the greatest movie ever made?” I’m not sure really, at its base my decision to declare Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as my number one choice largely came down to a gut instinct. Kubrick’s film is a bit of a contradiction in that its science fiction vision is almost certainly dated and yet the film still seems wildly ahead of its time and perhaps even ahead of our time. If nothing else the film seems pretty far removed from the various trends in filmmaking that existed in 1968. I suppose the film could sort of be compared with the other Cinemascope epics which shared the film’s scope and roadshow presentation, but are completely different in tone and structure. The film’s experimental edge and arguably psychedelic elements could be said to be something of a piece with the counter-culture cinema of the era, but its slow pace and heavy production values certainly distance it from something like Bonnie and Clyde. Even within Kubrick’s filmography the film is a bit of an aberration. It’s certainly got his perfectionist visual style, but it lacks the director’s usual aberrant sense of humor and is a little more oblique in its storytelling and symbolism.



That the film took science fiction seriously at all was definitely unusual in the late 60s. There were certainly distant historical precedents like Metropolis for serious science fiction but for the most part it had been the domain of cheesy B-movies and the occasional A-movie like The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Forbidden Planet which still sort of felt part and parcel with the pulpy Buck Rodgers tradition. To make a “hard” sci-fi film like this was really forward thinking and probably something they only got away with because the real life space program had started in earnest and people were starting to get a better idea of how slow and laborious real-life space travel was likely going to be. Even today the film is held up as a high water-mark for scientific accuracy in films by people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and is almost certainly responsible for pushing forward the look and feel of a number of other science fiction movies that would follow like Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Sunshine, Interstellar, Wall-E, and Moon but its influence certainly extends long past a single genre.



The film’s opening is audacious. Choosing to open a film about the future in the distant past certainly wasn’t the most intuitive choice to make but it almost instantly makes a pretty cool statement about human progress while also being pretty crucial to the film’s story and it provides for one of the greatest jump cuts in film history as we move straight from the moment where man’s ancestors learns to use tools for evil to the height of human achievement. From there we begin a stretch of the film that’s mostly dedicated to introducing the audience to the nature of this future while also setting up the mission that will take up much of the film’s second act. This section is probably the best showcase of the film’s special effects and serves a necessary purpose of easing the audience into the film’s story telling rhythms. That second act in which the crew must contend with the cold logic of the renegade A.I. HAL is the most conventionally entertaining section and serves as a necessary reminder of the darker side of technological advancement. Finally the film reaches its climax in which Dave encounters the mysterious entities which have been pushing forward human progress and is eventually re-born as the “star child” which will push forward human evolution once again. The movie has often been accused of being “cold” but I couldn’t disagree more, there’s nothing cold at all about the sense of grandeur and awe in this final scene and the questions it leaves unanswered are still being discussed to this day.



At the end of the day it’s kind of hard to really explain why this is my choice. I certainly don’t think the movie is perfect (the wormhole sequence is a bit too long and some of the acting in it is pretty dry) and it definitely isn’t a movie that’s easy to love. In fact the first time I saw the movie (at too young an age) I didn’t even like it. In fact I feel like most people don’t like it the first time they see it. It was only over time that I started to really understand the film even on a basic story level and to really appreciate the film’s unconventional pace and it’s incredible scale. Seeing a 70mm print of the film at one point probably helped a lot but really I think this is simply a movie that requires more out of an audience than what we’re normally used to. There’s just something about the film that stands out and feels bigger and more important than most movies, it isn’t content just to tell a story or provide entertainment, or deliver a pat message, or offer esoteric experimentation. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you astounded that any human being had the vision and the skill to make it.

Hell of a list, Dracula. Hell of a list. From my perspective, there isn't a bad movie throughout. Definitely a few choices I disagree with, but nothing that makes me role my eyes the way lesser choices in AFI's lists do. I've personally seen 96 of the films listed. I'll have to keep an eye out for The Crowd, Pandora's Box, the Three Colours Trilogy, and Walkabout.

Some other thoughts: -I like the notable presence of silent films, especially since the ones listed are clearly classics.

-Surprised to see Z so high. I just saw it for the first time in the summer and thought it was excellent.

-Also surprised that Goodfellas is your highest ranked Scorsese film. Awesome film and definitely one of his three masterpieces, but I think Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are better. I also stand by that both films are too low.

-The Wild Bunch is the greatest western of all time, huh?

-I'm surprised you think Badlands is Malick's greatest film.

-Your list has a lot of great comedies.

-Andrei Rublev and The Double Life of Veronique are the films I most dislike in your list.

-Rushmore feels outclassed. It's a great film and I dig Wes Anderson, but when I think about all the amazing films released around the same time not in your list (Seven, Fight Club, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, L.A. Confidential, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Jackie Brown, etc.) I find it disappointing.

This is selfish but do you have a list of the movies on your list? Just so I don't have to click and scroll through each page?

That was a lot of fun, Dracula. Thanks.

I didn't truly love 2001 until about my 6th viewing a few years ago.

Some Statistics and Analysis

The most represented director on the list is Hitchcock, who had five films on the list.  Kurosawa, Kubrick, and Spielberg were on his heels with four films each.

36 of the films on the list are from foreign countries (including four from the UK). Note that a handful of the movie’s I’m conservatively counting as American were co-productions that could be viewed as foreign films.

Of the 36 foreign films on the list, Italy is the most represented with 9 films, France is close behind with 7. Germany has a respectable presence with five (thanks in no small part to the silent era) and Japan has 4 thanks entirely to Kurosawa. The UK has four, but there were a lot of UK/USA co-productions on the list that could be viewed as contributing to their tally if I counted differently. All told the whole list is pretty overwhelmingly USA/Euro-centric, not sure how to feel about that.

Goodfellas is the only movie in the top 50 to be made after 1980



No living director aside form Francis Ford Coppola is represented in the top 25



Only three of the movies on the list were made by directors with Twitter Accounts: The French Connection, JFK, and Do the Right Thing



The youngest director on the list is Paul Thomas Anderson, who was born in 1970. The oldest is probably Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) who was born in 1873.


Here's a breakdown of the list by decade.  Not much of a shock but it leans heavily towards the 50s, 60s, and 70s:



1968 is the year with the most movies on the list with 4 (2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary's Baby, Once Upon a Time in the West, Night of the Living Dead)

48 of the 100 movies on the list are in black and white. The oldest color movie on the list is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the newest black and white movie on the list is Night of the Living Dead (unless you want to count Raging Bull, which has a color sequence and whose opening credits are red)

58 of the movies have original screenplays while 42 were based on source material. Of the 42 adaptations 25 were based on novels, 8 were based on non-fiction works, 5 were played by short stories, and 4 were based on plays.

66 of the movies on the list can be attributed to one of the Hollywood studios. Warner Brothers, Paramount, and the now essentially defunct United Artists dominated among these.  

The graph below shows the breakdown of those 66 Hollywood made films, note that I've included subsidiary studios like Paramount Vantage, Miramax, and Touchstone under their mother studios but have not lumped together studios like RKO, United Artists, and New Line with the studios that would eventually buy them.




The films on the list have an average running time of 133.52 minutes, but that’s probably being inflated by some outliers like The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which is the longest movie on the list and comes in at a collective 558 minutes. The shortest movie on the list is the 68 minute Duck Soup. In general movies on the list seemed to trend toward being either very short or very long, surprisingly few of the movies hovered around the usual average length of 120 minutes.



The ten longest films on the list are LOTR (558 Minutes), The Godfather 1&2 (375 Minutes), Fanny and Alexander (312 Minutes), the Before trilogy (290 Minutes), the Three Colors trilogy (288 Minutes), Lawrence of Arabia (227 Minutes, easily the longest if you ignore trilogies, TV productions, and other such cheats), Seven Samurai (207 Minutes), JFK (206 Minutes), Andrei Rublev (205 Minutes), Barry Lyndon (187 Minutes), and The Leopard (185 Minutes)



The breakdown of the various films' aspect ratios is roughly (note, I've lumped the couple of 2.20:1 films with 2.35:1 but have opted to make 1.66:1 films a distinct category):



However, if you eliminate the films made pre-1953 (which really had no choice in what their ratio would be) it would be closer to:





14% of the movies on the list deal with World War II or its immediate aftermath

Having just rewatched Rushmore I rescind this comment.