1998’s war epic, Saving Private Ryan, makes our list at #71. 1998 was not the greatest year for cinema in general, which makes it kind of laughable that Saving Private Ryan lost out in the Oscar race to the deeply mediocre film, Shakespeare in Love. It wasn’t the first or last time that the academy …
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#72 The Shawshank Redemption
1994 was a heck of a year for films. It featured three that made it onto the AFI list – Pulp Fiction (previously reviewed), Forrest Gump (previously reviewed) and The Shawshank Redemption. It also was the year that Quiz Show came out, which I feel likely also deserved a spot on the list, although it …
#73 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969’s Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) is the mostly-true-but-almost-certainly-embellished story of one of the west’s most notorious pair of outlaws. Set in the early 1900s, the film opens with a display of Sundance’s superior gun skills following an argument over a game of blackjack. We then see Butch, Sundance and …
#74 The Silence of the Lambs
1991’s psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs makes our list at #74. The movie follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) who is sent in ostensively to try to get a former psychiatrist and convicted cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) but really, unbeknownst to her, to get information from him on a …
#75 In the Heat of the Night
If you have never seen Sidney Poitier act, 1967’s small town southern whodunnit, In the Heat of the Night is the one to see. If you have seen Sidney Poitier act, it is still worth seeing the still-living legend (he is now 93 and retired) execute his craft masterfully. Set in the small town of …
#76 Forrest Gump
1994’s Forrest Gump is a film about which I have always had mixed emotions. In that year, I felt the innovative and clever Pulp Fiction was robbed out of the best picture award in favor of a safer, more mainstream film. As I rewatched the 142 Tom Hanks sort-of epic, sort-of love story many years …
#77 All the President’s Men
1976’s telling of The Washington Post reporting by Woodward and Bernstein that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, All the President’s Men makes the AFI list at #77. Robert Redford plays the ambitious young Bob Woodward, a reporter with only 9 months of experience with The Washington Post who gets assigned to a boring story about …
#78 Modern Times
It is sort of odd to watch a film that was made 84 years ago that is a commentary on “Modern Times” but that’s exactly how I spent the morning. 1936’s Charlie Chaplin (mostly) silent film about an economically struggling factory worker is an interesting mix of social commentary, slapstick comedy and outright weirdness. Chaplin …
#79 The Wild Bunch
1969’s The Wild Bunch is the first Western on the AFI list. If AFI has a bias against comedies, it would appear to have a bias in favor of Westerns, with 4 making the list. Maybe that’s appropriate – the Western genre, although it has receded in the past 25-30 years (despite occasional attempts at …
#80 The Apartment
The OTHER critically acclaimed film of 1960, The Apartment paints a sordid and complex view of life in white collar New York City. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon) is a low-level accounting clerk at fictional Consolidated Life in Manhattan and is a bit of a pushover. He once let a friend use his apartment for the …
The AFI Top 100 - Reviewed by Tony 