Having written that Crimes and Misdemeanors is my favourite film of all time, I thought I would try writing down my all time list of favourites. Here it is, which has a number of notable features, the first one being that I don’t think I have seen any of these more recently than 1999. And no matter how much I like a film, I never see them twice (although I did see Topsy-Turvy twice within the week so that I could bring my children to see it as well). We go to the films a lot, and see near everything, so either I have become jaded or they don’t make ’em like they used to. [OK, The Concert was from 2009]. I can also see that I don’t necessarily have the most sophisticated tastes. I also do not believe one ever learns anything by watching a movie although documentaries are different. Unlike with reading, you only take back out of the theatre what you first brought in. Movies are just for entertainment. No particular ordering here other than the order in which they occurred to me.

Crimes and Misdemeanors
The Graduate
The Terminator (the first one)
Star Wars (the first one again)
Planet of the Apes (and once again the first one)
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Casablanca
Ben Hur
The General
Barry MacKenzie (the second one)
The Gold Rush
Topsy-Turvy
Tom Jones
War and Peace (the Russian version)
The Godfather
Annie Hall
Singing in the Rain
Amadeus
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A Clockwork Orange
Fantasia
The Manchurian Candidate
From Russia with Love
The Concert
The Ten Commandments

I will stop with this now that I’ve reached 25. The thing about each of the films, and some I saw fifty years ago or more, is that I remember not just the film but where I saw it and who I was with.