Ten years ago the American Film Institute (AFI) polled hundreds of directors, actors, writers and critics to compile a list of the top 100 America movies of all time. At the time this was billed as 100 years 100 movies in reference to the beginning of American film in the early 1900's. Its been of course ten years and AFI has released a new list which was updated to include newer films and also to include changing opinions.

A lot of the movies on the list were the same, but all but three of them had changed positions, most notably was that Citizen Kane still reigned supreme and was voted number one once again. This was a good choice, and fairly expected I would say, but there were some interesting additions and subtractions as well, and I couldn't be a lotr fanatic without mentioning where The Lord of the Rings fell on this newly created list.

When the first list came out, Lord of the Rings was just being storyborded by Peter Jackson, and was nowhere near even filming let alone making it to the silver screen. This list however, includes Lord of the Rings. It came in a respectable 50th on the top 100 list and was also the newest film to be honored. Not only was it the newest film honored but it was also the only film from this century to be mentioned. I think this is a great testament to the film making of Jackson that it would be mentioned in such great company and so high on a list that consisted of mostly older movies. Lord of the Rings was actually the second highest rank movie in the past two decades only to Schindler’s List which was a monumental film. So all in all I'm quite pleased with the respect lotr is getting from the film making community.

I could probably spend some time discussing some of the interesting geopolitical reasons for movement on the list, but the long story short is there were a lot of really great movies on the list. At the same time there were also a lot of films that you should stay quite far away from for various reasons, this is of course to be expected as well, but really before you watch anything its usually a good idea to check why a movie is given the rating that it has. You may find that that particular movie doesn't exactly hold up to your moral standards, and should be stayed away from. It is a good list though and if you can sift through the junk you might just find a great film that you never expected you'd like, I know I've done that before.