Your 100 “Greatest of All Time” Movies
Select your GOAT
About five or six years ago now, I was challenged to create my own list of the 100 greatest movies, which I now call my GOAT list. I’ve been maintaining and fine-tuning it ever since, and I’m here in this essay to challenge you to do the same.
There are lots of lists out there that try to do this objectively. All the big self-important “movie people” have a list like this, from big-name critics to magazines and web channels to really hoity-toity joints like the American Film Institute or Sight and Sound magazine. That’s not this. This is YOUR list. The movies YOU think are the 100 greatest. You might be surprised at what ends up there, what you learn about yourself along the way, and what a great tool it is for connecting with people you meet.
Here’s how I did it, and therefore how I suggest you do it.
Step 1: Just start listing
Open a document (a Google doc is a great place to work on this, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a minute) and just start writing down any movie that pops into your head that you thought was good, fun, cool, taught you an important lesson, or is otherwise memorable to you. If somebody were to ask you “what’s a great movie I should watch tonight,” what do you think of? Just freewrite this; don’t organize or rank anything. Just make a list. You might not think you’ve even seen 100 movies. You’re probably wrong about that.
Resist the urge to drop anything at this stage. You will undoubtedly list a movie that is objectively bad. We’ve all got guilty pleasures. Those absolutely belong on your list. Remember, this is your list. You don’t have to answer to anybody for this list. These are the movies YOU like the most.
Likewise, resist the urge to add movies you aren’t super keen on but that you “know” are “good” movies that you “should” like because they should be on a “good movie” list. This isn’t a list of things you like for dinner where you make sure broccoli is on there because your mom might read the list and cluck disapprovingly at the lack of green vegetables. This isn’t a game where you try and pretend you’re cultured by filling your list with the same movies that are on the hoity-toity critics’ lists. This is a list of the movies you actually want to watch regularly. Citizen Kane is widely regarded in tweedy critic circles as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you happen to be a little tweedy too and want to have it on your list, you do you. But if you’re not into it, you don’t need to feel guilty about not having it on your list (it’s not on mine).
Step 2: Stop at 100
Once you get to 100, stop listing. From here, anything you add has to bump something else off. Again, don’t really worry about fine-tuning your rankings. This is about ruthlessly editing for length, not polishing for flow.
This is the place where you’re going to discover some things about yourself and about your tastes. On one hand, you may realize you don’t actually like certain “good” movies as much as you thought. It’s okay if you find yourself bumping Apocalypse Now in favor of Mean Girls. Or vice versa. This is your list, and the whole point here is figuring out what you actually like. Figuring that out is more important than you might think, so let’s take a brief tangent to talk about that for a minute.
About 10 or 15 years ago now, as my kids got into anime and eagerly described the enormous volume of shows from out of the east that were coming into wide availability, I had an epiphany that seems so simple now: I can’t watch everything. We live now in a world of effectively limitless viewing. Everything is streaming on demand from everywhere at all times. This has created fandom enclaves, where people adopt fandom as a group identity instead of having broad pop-culture literacy. And this can create a problem.
The problem is that people tend to think their thing is the best thing, and if you don’t like it you’re somehow missing out. Not only is there too much stuff to like, it is easy to fall into the paradoxical trap of needing to “like” it all. If you don’t, you’ll get derided online for being ignorant of some specific thing, probably by a complete stranger whose opinion of you really doesn’t matter anyway. But lots of things seem to matter online that really dont.
Making your own personal GOAT list is an exercise in realizing that other people don’t get to dictate your tastes. You can’t watch everything, so what do you REALLY want to watch?
There are a few things that may become clear as you think about that and your list grows and shifts, distilling into the top 100. You may find that you like a certain theme in movies, or certain kinds of plots. You might think you just like everything from a specific genre, but as you get into it, you will discover that’s not true. You may find, for instance, that you don’t like all horror movies, but you do tend to like horror movies that involve adult characters rather than teenagers, or you don’t much care for “exorcism” stuff but you kinda dig zombies. Once you drill into that, you might eventually find yourself weighing Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, deciding which one stays on your list, or even trying to decide which Dawn of the Dead version you like best. Or if 28 Weeks Later might actually be something you like more than its predecessor. But then you remember Warm Bodies, and how much you loved it in spite of yourself, and have to find a spot on the list for that one, too.
That last point is indicative of an interesting phenomenon I discovered in my list as it grew: movies that were objectively terrible (or at least not objectively “good”), but which came into my life at some specific moment and serve now as a sort of nostalgia mnemonic. My 1980s high school buddies and I had an objectively irrational but delightfully ironic appreciation for Steven Seagal. Marked for Death is still on my list. It’s a terrible movie by any measure, but it evokes a time in my life when things were simpler and possibilities were endless. So I keep it around; it’s currently #90. I’ve got a Seagal movie on my list, but nothing from Bruce Lee. Am I a bad person? No. I just like what I like, and even though I think Bruce Lee as a personality is awesome, given the choice between Marked for Death and Enter the Dragon, I know which one I’ll pick.
Step 3: Ranking and tiebreaking
Once you’ve got a comfortable 100, which is to say when you can’t think of any more movies that absolutely must be on your list, start moving them around. Start shifting titles into broad sections, asking yourself:
Is this in the top 50 or bottom 50?
Is this in the top 25 or bottom 25?
Is this in the top 10? (Don’t worry about the bottom 10–this will happen automatically as you go)
Once you’re dealing with 25 at a time, fine-tuning your rankings gets much easier. I suspect you’re going to be able to pick out a top 25 fairly easily. After 25, though, things can get squishy, and your decisions might get harder.
This brings us to the question of tiebreaking, putting one movie a step ahead of another. That can be hard, because these are all movies you like. This isn’t like the time Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump were both up for best picture (or the time Beauty and the Beast was nominated alongside Silence of the Lambs). The Oscars may have struggled with those choices, but you know you don’t. Your struggle is a little different. You may certainly find it easy to say that Pulp Fiction is superior to Forrest Gump. But is it superior to Inglourious Basterds or Kill Bill? WHICH Kill Bill?
It may feel like a self-betrayal to set one above another. But this is the most important part of the exercise, because it’s what will reveal to you what you truly enjoy.
A question I like to use for tiebreaking is “all things being equal, which of these two movies would I rather watch right now?” Be honest. Remember, this is your list. You only have to answer to yourself for this list. And everybody’s going to have a different one, so it’s not like you’re going to use this list to impress anybody (though more on this in a minute). You might also find that this keeps a movie falling down the rankings, maybe even falling off the ranking. That might surprise you, since you thought you really liked that movie. But if there are 100 movies you’d rather watch right now, well, there you go. It felt weird to me to let Dr. Strangelove go while stanning for Cutthroat Island (#98), but it is what it is.
Step 4: Keep it living
This is not a static forever list. The top 25, and maybe even the top 50, will eventually get pretty solid. But you might come across something that vaults right in there. Hotel Artemis (#64) slid into my already-complete list in 2018, and Knives Out (#70) scooted into the mix in 2019. I’m still trying to decide if Top Gun: Maverick should replace the original (at #56).
When considering a movie for your list, open your list and look at it. I came out of Godzilla vs Kong in 2021 really really thinking about putting it on my list. It might get there eventually. But opening my list in search of a movie to bump for it, I realized there are already 100 films ahead of it. So there you go.
Still, this means I’m actively fine-tuning my personal tastes, and reviewing it periodically. I’ve found that having a list to regularly consult, even with permission to update it, allows me to be more objective about the subjective (more honest about what I actually like) than I’ve ever been. It’s vogue right now to be aware of your biases. When it comes to movies, maintaining a list like this goes a long way toward making you aware of your cinema biases, too. And seeing how those biases may shift or sharpen over time is good for you.
Step 5: Compare notes
When you find another person who’s kind of into movies, get them to make their list too. Then compare! You might have, for example, a co-worker you don’t really know, but over time you get talking about movies while you’re on break or whatever. So you whip out your GOAT list to show to your co-worker (by which I mean share the viewing link to the Google doc where it lives), and encourage that co-worker to make a list, too. Then you compare, and realize you share some favorite movies. And just like that, common ground is found and you’re a step closer to being friends. It’s like magic.
It also, for lack of a better term right now, humanizes people you don’t otherwise have much in common with. The same old buddy who got me to make this list in the first place doesn’t talk to me anymore. I didn’t panic over COVID and he did; it is what it is. But we’ll always have The Blues Brothers (my #2, and his too, as I recall) and a whole bunch of movies we both love, many of which we saw together in our shared adolescence. I take peace from that, and it goes a long way toward keeping me from just dismissing him for having grown to be so much different than me.
I meet a lot of people with whom I disagree over a variety of things, and with whom I share little in common. But then we find out that we both dig Casablanca (#21), or Disney’s Hercules (#48). That common ground matters. Today’s world tries to cleave people completely apart, screaming at them that people who aren’t exactly like them are nothing like them. Movies have always been able to cut across that kind of agenda-driven hate. Making and sharing your GOAT list is a great way to keep you aware of that, which in turn keeps you seeing others’ humanity instead of their labels. That’s got value–value that isn’t subjective at all.
Oh, and I suppose this article would be incomplete if I didn’t link to my list, especially since I haven’t yet revealed my #1 pick, the GOAT of GOATs, yet. So here you go. Get in my comments to share your lists. I look forward to comparing!
“Marked for Death” is the one where Seagal is up against Jamaican yardies that look like Milli Vanilli, right?