Almost six years ago I started this venture to write an article on every single movie in the AFI top 100 list. Whatever possessed me to do such foolishness, I knew in the back of my mind, if I could get past the halfway point, I could get through the full thing.…

There’s a wide variety of types of movies on this list and none are quite like this one. Oftentimes movies made in the 30’s and 40’s feel similar to movies made today; however this one.…

Many directors have become punchlines to jokes. Michael Bay, Dennis Duggan, and Greg Araki have all become known for making popular less than great movies.…

I’ve spend some time in past AFI articles talking about the genre movies that make it onto the list. Something just as interesting is the movies that aren’t a single genre.…

Like with Silence of the Lambs, sometimes something in the genre convention becomes much more than being just another genre movie and instead becomes an elevated piece of art.…

A byproduct of focusing on a list of the most critically acclaimed movies is that there’s something about critically acclaimed movies that feels like homework…

Not that long ago I looked at another musical, The Sound of Music. The one I’m looking at this week is from around the same time period…

A phenomena I’ve encountered while going through the films on the AFI list is encountering some movies I had watched at some earlier point in time, didn’t like, and had decided I would never see again…

One of the coolest things about movies about making movies is that they inevitably become meta. They comment on the world, while also, by necessity, living up to the same message that they’re spreading…

So many movies begin with the word “American,” from American Beauty to American Psycho to American Gun to American Hustle…

Part of Hitchcock’s greatness is that he’s both a artistically gifted filmmaker and a very entertaining one. He creates work with deep messages that also happens to be fun every minute along the way.…

When I had covered Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, it made me realize the value that silent films have to offer.

They work within a constraint (no spoken dialogue), and with that constraint, filmmakers have to pull off a very pure trick.…

The last film, The Grapes of Wrath, came from a novel that’s fame overshadows the movie, despite the movie still making the AFI list. This one, instead, led to a TV series that also overshadows the movie.…

Many of the movies on this AFI top 100 list are based off of books. Funny enough, some of them are much more remembered for the movie they inspired, like The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.…

Sometimes it’s easy to take for granted that certain genres of movies exist. We have seen so many mockumentaries, slasher films, Adam Sandler movies, that it’s easy to forget that they had to start from somewhere.…

I think it’s safe to say that we all have movie blind spots. In the last AFI article, I had talked about how I had watched The Apartment for the first time.…

Of course, for all of us, there’s fairly big movies that we haven’t seen because we had no interest in watching them. This is true for even the biggest movie buffs. Which is more rare.…

When AFI top 100 movies are mentioned, a lot of adjectives could come to mind: great, prestigious, accomplished, old, stuffy. Yet, one adjective.…

It’s amazing when a film is able to so accurately point towards a problem that it becomes even more meaningful and relevant 50 years after it’s made.…

Writing in-depth about the films on this AFI list, I’ve been avoiding one type. It’s not that I don’t like them, although I’ll admit it’s way easier to get bored, but because I’m a bit intimidated by them…

Four years before he made what’s commonly regarded as the best science fiction movie of all time and sixteen years before he made what’s commonly regarded as the best horror film of all time,…

This AFI list I’ve been covering is specifically looking at the greatest American films of all time. And because of that, many of the movies have been about America, either explicitly or at least thematically…

Lots of these movies are famous, but most are not as famous as this one…

Scorsese is so often associated with gangsters and gritty killing…

Movies might not necessarily have rules, but there’s a helluva lot of guidelines…

There’s films on the AFI top 100 list, featuring protagonists who commit horrific crimes…

The AFI top 100 list is sure as hell no popularity contest…

Being a sequel is tough. You’re almost expected to suck…

You could safely say that The Beatles are the greatest band of all time…

Vietnam gets a lot of representation on the AFI top 100 list…