After twenty years of meticulous logging, I have indexed over five thousand titles I have seen. Fortunately, as I age, I have become far more selective about where I waste my time. Most of the films I watch today are far from garbage. And still, I find myself increasingly tempted to rewatch the movies I already enjoyed immensely in the past. To make sense of this massive catalog, I prepared five distinct lists, each containing one hundred movies. They are divided into fluid categories to make them easier to compare. These lists represent the cinematic experiences that were truly worth my time.
In his writings on New Existentialism, Colin Wilson noted a fascinating paradox about this dynamic. He wrote that when we listen to a piece of exciting music, we are purely aware of its meaning and what it does to us emotionally. A musical scholar might simultaneously recognize exactly how the composer achieved that effect. Yet if we become too curious about the underlying mechanics, we risk losing that emotional connection. However, Wilson argued that a true phenomenologist studies these mechanics with one crucial difference: they realize that they themselves are the composer. This perfectly describes the active co-creation required from a cinematic audience. A true cineaste approaches a film in the exact same way, looking beyond the immediate emotional response to understand how that effect was engineered, asking what the so-called "production value" truly reveals about the resources put on screen.
Movies are always evolving, for better or worse. We can always complain that they are lacking the quality of the past; I have heard that complaint since I was a kid. However, even if no new productions were ever made again, I could spend the rest of my life rewatching these selected classics and still discover oldies I never had the chance to see earlier. Despite reading countless books on cinema history, there are still hidden treasures I uncover that I had never heard of before.
