Consider the UNESCO language: “outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art, or science…outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological, or anthropological point of view.” That’s this site – and that’s how it differs from most “best of” lists.

Right now you’re reading the story of this gallery, or website, a story that doesn’t really begin when I started creating the site. Nor did this gallery begin when humanity dawned as in the famous scene from 2001. No, the story that this site tells began in the nineteenth century, after people like Niepce and Daguerre created photography and other people began to make those pictures move like the Chinese picture wheels that had existed for millennia.

In another very real sense, the 24 stories told by this site are each “about” 100 discreet stories (i.e. movies), and those 100 discreet motion pictures are each made out of hundreds of personal stories from the people who worked on the films, the thousands who have reviewed the films, and the millions who have enjoyed the films. The history of art is less of a procession of geniuses (as it is sometimes presented) and more of a conversation between artists and audiences. They hear stories, they modify them to tell us stories, we use their stories as part of new stories in and about our lives, and if we’re lucky, perhaps humanity progresses a little, or finds the comfort or release or jouissance to be able to progress a little. 

This site walks you through 24 different histories of the first century of feature-length cinema, with an emphasis on “best loved” cinema: most loved, highest ranked, and most influential. In a way, this is impossible; in another way, every museum does something similar. You visit a museum, you walk through the galleries, you see the art, you get an impression, and you leave. For some, it ends there. Others use their visits as a starting point to dig deeper into the stories that the art tells, the stories about making the art, the stories about the reception of the art, or more. This website means to serve both kinds of visitors. It serves visitors who want to just wander through and check out the posters and museum-appropriate placards (a few sentences about the film) and leave. But because we’re online and we can do it, every “stop” also includes what you see in the following description.

This story, this site, is about 2400 of the best-loved movies, but the links provide portals into more stories and more ways of looking at the same stories. When you travel, you inevitably meet someone who says “but wait have you been here?” And if you reroute to go there, you’ll meet a new person who says “so glad you came, now what about thisother thing?” We’ll never get to all of it, will we? Still, by providing surfeits of hyperlinks next to each film, we remain more conscious of the various ancestors and species and tributaries and geologic data that are near, if not always closely inspected, on our voyage through this Grand Canyon.

3) Short films are great but again, limits are often necessary; except for non-fiction and experimental films, these are galleries of information about feature films, defined here as at least an hour long

4) The AFI and Letterboxd, among others, group off films by counts of 100, and grouping off 100 motion pictures in 100 years feels right

5) Lists are (or can be) stories and stories are (or can be) lists

8) TV is great, but again, limits are helpful, and thus these galleries avoid films that were originally made for TV (with exceptions based loosely on international theatrical distribution)

9) “Great” isn’t the entire UNESCO criteria; “important” also means “influential,” and thus list/story readers should get used to a greatness-to-influence ratio of about 3-to-1

10) Worrying about film spoilers is silly; that said, the descriptions here try not to go beyond the film’s first 20 minutes, or what one might read on a Netflix description

As with the Louvre or Hermitage or Vatican Museums or any other large collection of smaller collections, this site has an implied order, here corresponding to the English alphabet, partly for the same reason that a movie screen is a rectangle and not some other parallelogram: it just looks and feels better. Visitors to Louvre-like museums are well aware that the suggested viewing order is not a mandate, and often chart their own paths. (Here you could skip A and start at W with Women’s Film Wonders!) 

That brings us to the name “best loved films” and the need for justification of “best” and “loved” and “best-loved.” Some anti-elitists will object that the films of the early lists, especially A through G or so, may have been ranked “best” but are hardly “loved.” Others, including some elitists, will object that films on the later lists, especially in galleries O, R, S, and T, may be “loved” but are hardly “best.” Well, can’t we all get along? I believe some of the fans who hate it when “movies” are called “films” overstate how much watching canonized “great” films is a chore akin to eating your spinach. “Movie fans” trying some Basic Story films may be surprised how much they like or even love them. I also believe that some of the more hoity-toity cinema snobs can be too quick to pooh-pooh certain popular or midnight-matinee sensations, and if they were to give some of those “cheesy” films a chance, they might actually revise what they, ahem, love best.

“Best loved films” also works as an escape clause when you tell me “but the entire site is meaningless because you forgot THIS film!” Ask yourself: is that film really “best loved”? You love it, yes, and so does a certain corner of the internet, but note where it did NOT get “best love.” The 2400 films here include everything from: Roger Ebert’s 370 Great Movies list, the most recent Sight and Sound Top 250, all the various AFI 100 lists, the IMDb Top 250 (before 2016), the many mainstay midnight matinees, the international Top 200 grossers of all time (adjusted for inflation), as well as every single movie (before 2016) with a “100” score from Rotten Tomatoes. (A “100” RT score means only that no one gave that film a bad review; that film may well be “worse” than one with a “90” score, simply because the “90” film was bold enough to risk mixed reactions.) 

This particular story ends here. Where it began. Where it begins 24 other stories. Which are each stories of 100 stories. Which are each part of millions of stories. Thank you for reading this story. Thank you for reading other stories. Thank you for making these stories part of your story. Thank you for best-loving cinema, and thank you, cinema, for best-loving us. You remind us again and again how much we have in common and how beautiful the world can be. And now, some more reminders.