Revisiting the AFI's Top 100 Movies

What is the best film in the AFI's original Top 100 list? And, perhaps more interesting, what is the worst?

"I'd rather be doing something absent of politics, like continue to play Call of Duty". Masterfully done sir, 10/10

I think the sheer volume of movies is why i've become a little kinder to the canon. You gotta start somewhere, and these kinds of lists can be helpful. Just remember that it doesn't stop with the classics and good interesting films are always being added.

Trump: if I had been there I would have gotten Kong to come down from the empire state building. You see I knew Kong for many years, wonderful guy, and and and I could've gotten him to come down

Please consider making a video about the curation and importance of Criterion Collection!

This is why Turner Classic Movies Robert Osborne and other hosts are so important

I think some of the critics miss the point because they think of a canon as a list of the greatest films. A canon is a set of works that you need to be familiar with to participate in conversation about that form of art. Of course the AFI canon is going to be dominated by establishment films, and exclude obscure movies. That’s the common set that film buffs talk about, almost by definition. And as you pointed out, there are multiple canons, because there are multiple groups having different conversations. And canons change over time as old participants die and new ones are born.

Patiently waiting for AFI to update the list now that The Beekeeper is out and cinema has transformed

I was 17 when I first saw the AFI Top 100 in 2007 and I remember being completely humbled at my lack of film knowledge. Like seriously, this was where I first heard of Citizen Fucking Kane!!! It's one of the programmes I credit with turning me into the cinephile I am today.

The 1998 AFI Top 100 list (and subsequent other lists) was my also gateway to exploring a broader world of movies. I will always be grateful.

Growing into a cinephile in the age of YouTube has been really weird, especially in my teens. My main entry way to the film cannon was through film reviews online through a variety of creators, but I had 3 favorites: My favorite of them were definetly the reviews by Jeremy Jahns and Chris Stuckman. I always felt the need to group them together because they almost seemed like foils to each other. Chris was a film nerd from a super early age, and clearly knew like a bajillion things about the history of film and how they were made, but he never came across as stuck up or snobby about it. The guy just really really loved movies and wanted to share that enjoyment with people online. His A+ movies playlist was basically a blue print for my formative film-nerd years between the ages of 14-16 and a half. He would hold up these classic movies like Citizen Kane, the Dark Knight and Die Hard, yes, but he'd also introduce me to modern classics like Collateral, Brick, and Insomnia. And he'd also give A+s to then contemporary greats like Silence, the Nice Guys and the World's End. Jeremy Jahns was the opposite. He was super down to earth, even more so than Chris but he had a very frenetic and engaging editing style that Chris didn't. He would also break up his surface level comparisons with these out of nowhere incredibly insightful statements. And when the guy was in rant mode(either positively or negatively) he was everything a critic should be: articulating how you may have felt with a movie in a way you never thought to, and giving you a deeper understanding of why something may have sucked or worked well. If Chris was like your cool film teacher, Jeremy was like your smartest friend who was always hiding how smart he was. That's the good side of growing up on YouTube reviews. The bad side was completely encapsulated by my third big influence: Doug Walker. Doug Walker is not without his talents as a writer and a critic, but a lot of his trappings really represent everything wrong with early internet film criticism. For instance, he spoke about movies(both in his own voice and vicariously through his horrible skits in his nostalgia critic vids) with an authority thats a little annoying. He talked about movies like "this is bad" or "this blows" and not "I think this is bad or blows". And he'd also be so busy trying to write jokes about the movies he was critiquing that he would miss really basic shit. I can't think of specific examples off the top of my head besides the entirety of his review of The Wall the movie. That review, frankly, was fucking infuriating to watch as someone who did and still does love Pink Floyd, because of how many times Doug says something incredibly stupid that he wouldn't have if he knew ANYTHING about Roger Waters' life or Pink Floyd in general. He has a throw away joke in there about how the song "Us and Them" is about nothing and is just called that to sound cool, and that the guys who wrote it don't even know what it's about. Even though that song is about the "Us ve Them" mentality embodied by classiest, racist, and xenophobic systems of violence and oppression, something Waters would know a lot about since his dad died for stupid reasons during world war 2. He also just phrases objective observations as if they were problems somehow. I remember watching his Jurassic Park video, where he talks about the "you didn't stop to think if you should" scene, and pointed out all the shots backlit by bright ass projectors and said "wow, Steven Spielberg must have a spotlight fetish hardy har har". Like, yeah? So? It's a striking visual flair that keeps the scene interesting visually in spite of the fact that it's just a half dozen characters having a philosophical debate. He says this the same way that he'd point out continuity errors and plot holes, which actually are problems. The effect of this is that it made me paranoid about the movies I liked and made me go all cinemasins mode and pick apart things that weren't even problems. All that to say, YouTube was pretty much my(and I think a lot of people my ages) AFI, for better and for worse.

So I am a 16 yr old who only got into film last year and I used/am using the AFI list. It's helped me find some of my favorite movies (12 Angry Men, Do the Right Thing) but I would say that it does have a bias towards Hollywood productions. As an example I watched Eraserhead a few months ago and loved it, and after learning how much it influenced Stanley Kubrick and others I don't see a reason why it should not be considered a canonical American film. The only reason I can think that it is not on the list is that is considered too unconventional. So the list has been helpful to me and because of it I have watched some films that I would have never thought about watching otherwise, but I also am looking other places to find more unconventional (and foreign) films. Such as for example, your channel.

As a late Gen X I was just a little older than you were when you saw Manchurian candidate when the original AFI list came out in '98. I was also a bit of a film buff at the time, and the full court media press around the list can't be overstated. It's helpful to remember that 1998 was sort of the last days of the monoculture--the internet was a thing but just barely, and your comments about blockbuster being our only source of movies isn't all that overstated in most parts of the country. (My medium-ish childhood suburb had a blockbuster and a mom and pop place with a smattering of indies that provided cover for the porn stashed behind a curtain in the back of the store.) Yes the list was middlebrow even for its day, but I think there were at least 20 movies on that list I'd never heard of at the time. I think all in all the list was a force for good in the world of film appreciation, and has been a jumping off point for many people like you into more complex and specialized canons.

I had a similar life changing experience thanks to a movie on the list. The only reason I watched Doctor Zhivago was because of its inclusion. It sounded long and ungodly boring, but I was unprepared for its massive scope, which has always been something that draws me to my favorite movies, and while it didn't challenge much about what cinema can be, it was the death blow to judging movies based on what they're about and what genre they fall into before I watch them. I remember being appalled when I saw that it was the highest ranked movie removed in the remade 2007 list. While I know it's not a particularly highly acclaimed film these days, it's still a masterpiece in my opinion, and I'm glad that the AFI's flawed lists are still bringing it to people's attention.

Love Gone with the Wind. Infinitely rewatchable.

The idea of AFI doing a second 100 Greatest Movies List in 2008 seemed like a very forced one to me. Seemed as though they were trying to "correct" the complaints over the original 1998 list (replacing Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, taking out Fantasia and adding Toy Story, pushing Gone with the Wind behind Singin in the Rain in its top 10 which makes virtually no sense, replacing Guess Who with Do the Right Thing, moving the Searchers higher but not going so far as to crown another film #1 other than Citizen Kane so therefore what is even the point? etc.). Felt a little like AFI just bowing to the mob; where the newer list seemed like it was pandering to audiences the original list was pretty solid. These days doing a special like this would be nigh impossible because of all the salty fanbases AFI would wind up offending. Also, whoever the editing team was behind those specials should have won an Emmy because the transitions between the clips were just so fluid it really made it incredible interesting to watch (watch AFI's 100 Heroes & Villains or AFI's 100 Songs to see what I mean)

For Carpenter I think his late recognition is linked to VHS. Teenagers and young adults all over the world during the late 80's and the 90s rented a lot of horror and slasher films. Then there are the directors of the mid and late 90s who talked a lot about him.

Thanks for this retrospective. It was my intro to "real cinema" as a teenager too. I still have only seen maybe 2/3 of the movies listed there but it's a great starting point for accessible, but still critically regarded movies from the USA. Love your content!

This video is great. We're are basically the same age and had a similar experience with regards to discovering this list. I started exploring the films on AFI 100 around 13 years old and had already seen a few of the classics (Casablanca and Gone With the Wind) because of myl mother, so classic Hollywood cinema wasn't completely foreign to me, but this list opened my eyes to how great classic films truly were. I became a TCM addict after that and within a few years, I began my journey discovering foreign classics.

I'll defend the African Queen. When I watched it, the first thing I thought was how charming it was. It's still top tier in the most charming movies of all time.