AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies

The most basic form of American heroism — the individual in lonely, dangerous situations, inspiring opposition to the oppressive, often deadly, system. All these guys are mad as he...

Crime may be the subject closest to the melodramatic heart of the movies. Filmmakers have always loved to show us how organized crime gets itself organized to corrupt society. They...

The family is our most treasured institution and our most vulnerable one. It is constantly threatened internally by generational fractiousness, externally by dislocating events. Wh...

Buried treasure, of course. But, more importantly, of states of grace — spiritual, secular, sexual. Quests are another essential movie form. They are often the occasion for mighty...

It's sweetly sentimental sometimes. But it is also snappy, scrappy, and sappy. Occasionally it's gender-bending; often it is touched by poignancy, not to mention tragedy. How do we...

Movies, we like to say, are the great art form of our time. But that ignores the claims of weaponry. In the age of mass destruction, war has inevitably been one of the movies' cen...

Exotic times and places. Unlikely lovers swept up, swept away by the tidal force of grand, desperate, sometimes tragic, sometimes — thank heaven — giddy passions. This is our tribu...

They are the outcasts. They make their own rules, they live outside the law, they have no need for our love, anybody's love. But we love them anyway — for the boldness of their tra...

This is our monster rally — sports of nature and mistakes of science in jostling juxtaposition with self-made ogres. But whether they were born, made or accidentally discovered, th...

Some are surreal — Chaplin trapped in the toils of a modern factory, the Marx Brothers in Freedonia. Some are completely unreal — Disney's animated creations. But most of the figur...