Updated top tier movies list

A long, long time ago, when this site was in its earliest days, I decided to spotlight some of my favorite people, organizations, and things. Alongside descriptions of individual creators and supporters in the local arts scenes and notifications of upcoming local shows, I presented an overly long list of movies deemed to be personal favorites, organized chronologically by decade. This, along with a ton of other early material, eventually got the axe years later, casualties of a major website redesign which deemed them irrelevant. But a while back, a conversation with a friend about old movies and which ones would make it onto our individual top ten lists got the gears turning in my mind. Which titles on my earlier list really deserved a spot, given my current tastes and the changes in my perspective that have taken place over the last decade? This reappraisal is what has resulted in the list presented below.

In 2008, I was extremely lenient in terms of how much I had like a film to justify its inclusion, and the final tally of titles was an absurd 503 entries. I've since adjusted my criteria and put together a collection of titles that more accurately reflects what I consider to be the "top tier" of everything I've seen over the years. While most of these are films I would rate 4.5 to 5 stars out of five, sprinkled in amongst them are some personal favorites that would rate lower but which nevertheless have strong appeal to me. This is not an exhaustive listing of every movie I think is good or at least entertaining. It's just a list of what I see as the cream of the crop.

1900-1919

The Cheat (1915)
Broken Blossoms (1919)

1920-1929

The Kid (1921)
Flesh and the Devil (1926)
My Best Girl (1927)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
The Kid Brother (1927)
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] (1928)
Our Dancing Daughters (1928)
Show People (1928)
The Crowd (1928)
The Last Command (1928)
The Wind (1928)

1930-1939

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Hell's Heroes (1930)
City Lights (1931)
Five Star Final (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Champ (1931)
Scarface, the Shame of the Nation (1932)
42nd Street (1933)
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
The Invisible Man (1933)
Modern Times (1936)
Show Boat (1936)
Pépé le Moko (1937)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Destry Rides Again (1939)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)

1940-1949

The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
Vredens dag [Day of Wrath] (1943)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Detour (1945)
Ladri di biciclette [The Bicycle Thief] (1948)
Xiao cheng zhi chun [Spring in a Small Town] (1948)
All the King's Men (1949)
White Heat (1949)

1950-1959

Sunset Boulevard (1950)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Fröken Julie [Miss Julie] (1951)
The African Queen (1951)
High Noon (1952)
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Shichinin no samurai [Seven Samurai] (1954)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
12 Angry Men (1957)
Det Sjunde inseglet [The Seventh Seal] (1957)
The Defiant Ones (1958)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
Les Quatre cents coups [The 400 Blows] (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)

1960-1969

Inherit the Wind (1960)
Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim] (1962)
The Miracle Worker (1962)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Persona (1966)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)

1970-1979

Viskningar och rop [Cries and Whispers] (1970)
Paper Moon (1973)
Rocky (1976)

1980-1989

Back to the Future (1985)
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Robocop (1987)
Beetlejuice (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

1990-1999

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)
Dances With Wolves (Director's Cut) (1990)
Terminator 2 (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Crying Game (1992)
Schindler's List (1993)
The Piano (1993)
Boogie Nights (1997)

2000-present

Spider-Man 2 (2004)