The 100 best movies of all time

Movies are now over 100 years old. This still makes it a young medium, at least in the years of art (how old is the novel? the theatre? painting?). But they're just old enough to make compiling the first-ever list of Variety's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once would have been. Think about it: you receive on average one film per year. A lot of heated discussion and debate has gone into creating this list. Our picks were selected from hundreds of titles submitted by over 30 reviewers, writers and variety editors. As we learned, finding the movies to include was the easy part. The hardest part was deciding which movies to leave out.

Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is also a publication old as cinema. (We coined box office reporting, in addition to the words "showbiz" and "horse opera.") And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the breathtakingly beautiful variety of the cinematic experience. We're not just talking about different genres; we're not just talking about highbrow and lowbrow (and everything else). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of dizzying eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that - to honor the films we love the most, no matter what categories they fall into.

Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. It's the nature of the beast - the nature of the kind of protective passion people feel for their favorite movies. We've invited leading filmmakers and actors to write essays about the films they care about, and that passion shines through in everything they've written. You will probably say: how could this film have been omitted from the list? Or this one? Or this one? Trust us: We've often asked this same question ourselves. But our hope is that by watching the movies we've chosen, you'll see a list that reflects the incredibly vast and ever-growing glory of what movies are all about.

We invite you to find out how many films from the list you have seen on this poll.< /p >

These screenwriters and movie critics made movie suggestions: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge , Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angélique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, ​​Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge , Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. Vary, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Woerner.

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