I have enjoyed watching movies my whole life, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I had fallen in love with them. As a casual fan for so many years, I missed out on a lot of great movies. I have done an admirable job catching up on many of them over the last couple years, but I am still lacking in many areas. My biggest weakness is in the area of classics, particularly foreign classics. Outside of a handful of Kurosawa films, I haven’t seen too many older foreign titles. I am also still a novice to Film Noir, although I have greatly enjoyed every one I have seen.

In order to continue to push myself to see more great movies, I have compiled this list of 50 movies I must see before the end of the year. Fifty seems like a low number — and it probably is — but I thought it would be a fair amount to squeeze in amidst the summer madness, and there is no telling how busy I will be in the future. These are 50 movies from all eras, and I made sure to include some genres and directors that I want to familiarize myself with. Some are more important than others, but these are all films that I have heard quite a bit about and therefore would like to indulge in them.

With the help of friends and online folk alike, I cut a significantly longer list down to these 50 selections. This will be an ongoing project with my ultimate deadline being to have seen all of these by the end of the year.

UPDATE: The project is finished! I have included links to my posts for each movie, and I have begun ranking all of them. Be sure to check out part one, which includes #50-26!

UPDATE #2: Part two of my wrap-up is posted! Check out my rankings of #25-1.

The Final List:

City Lights [1931, Chaplin]
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1939, Capra]
The Maltese Falcon [1941, Huston]
Casablanca [1942, Curtiz]
Double Indemnity [1944, Wilder]
Rome, Open City [1945, Rossellini]
The Big Sleep [1946, Hawks]
It’s a Wonderful Life [1946, Capra]
The Bicycle Thief [1948, De Sica]
The Asphalt Jungle [1950, Huston]
Sunset Boulevard [1950, Wilder]
Tokyo Story [1953, Ozu]
The Night of the Hunter [1955, Laughton]
The Seventh Seal [1957, Bergman]
Wild Strawberries [1957, Bergman]
Vertigo [1958, Hitchcock]
The 400 Blows [1959, Truffaut]
Breathless [1960, Godard]
The Magnificent Seven [1960, Sturges]
Psycho [1960, Hitchcock]
The Hustler [1961, Rossen]
8 1/2 [1963, Fellini]
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964, Kubrick]
Cool Hand Luke [1967, Rosenberg]
The Graduate [1967, Nichols]
Night of the Living Dead [1968, Romero]
Once Upon a Time in the West [1968, Leone]
Last Tango in Paris [1972, Bertolucci]
The Exorcist [1973, Friedkin]
The Godfather: Part II [1974, Coppola]
Jaws [1975, Spielberg]
Annie Hall [1977, Allen]
Airplane! [1980, Abrahams & Zucker]
Blade Runner [1982, Scott]
Back to the Future [1985, Zemeckis]
Akira [1988, Ohtomo]
Grave of the Fireflies [1988, Takahata]
Army of Darkness [1992, Raimi]
Unforgiven [1992, Eastwood]
Schindler’s List [1993, Spielberg]
L.A. Confidential [1997, Hanson]
Dark City [1998, Proyas]
The Thin Red Line [1998, Malick]
Dancer in the Dark [2000, von Trier]
Mulholland Drive [2001, Lynch]
Hotel Rwanda [2004, George]
Million Dollar Baby [2004, Eastwood]
Crash [2005, Haggis]
The Prestige [2006, Nolan]
Zodiac [2007, Fincher]

Any thoughts? Comments? Concerns? While I likely won’t make any more changes to the list, I am always looking for new suggestions all the same.