We don’t just mean different genres we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out.
As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. But they’re just old enough to make compiling Variety’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). The movies are now more than 100 years old.
