* Book: Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made (1996 book)

In this book, Entertainment Weekly ranks the greatest movies … but not with one long ranking.  They first group the movies by genre and then compare movies within the same genre (more like comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges).  However, that makes it hard to use for our master list.  So what we decided to do was to take the BEST movie from each genre and count it as a TOP THREE movie and the second best in each category as a TOP 100 (filtered to be the first movie released up to 1960). Here is the resulting list (from the 1,050 movies listed in the book):

• Drama
  Citizen Kane (1941)
  Gone With The Wind (1939)
• Comedy
  Some Like It Hot (1959)
  Bringing Up Baby (1938)
• Action
  The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
  Tarzan, The Ape Man (1932)
• Westerns
  The Searchers (1956)
  Red River (1948)
• Mystery / Suspense
  Vertigo (1958)
  The Big Sleep (1946)
• Sci-Fi & More
  Psycho (1960)
  King Kong (1933)
• Music
  Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
  The Band Wagon (1953)
• Foreign
  The Earrings of Madam De… (1953)
  The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
• Kids Live Action
  The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  Little Women (1933)
• Kids Animation
  Pinochhio (1940)
  Dumbo (1941)

Note: the thing about “best of” lists is that often (almost always) we won’t agree with what ends up on the list.  That is particularly true with this book, at least for us.  While the book is extremely nice and dividing the movies into genres is a great way to go about it for a book, their top movies in each genre just seemed way out of line.  Psycho does not seem like a Sci-Fi movie to us, and neither does their #2 choice of Jaws.  Both seem like “Suspense” to us.  We also wondered about the top choice for Foreign movies.  After going through over 30 lists it is odd that their choice of the #1 foreign movie ever made through 1960 was not included in any other list’s top 10.

However, we also have another book by Entertainment Weekly that we think is much better:

The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time by Entertainment Weekly (1999)