Eric's Movies Page

The List

I've been maintaining a list of movies I'd like to see. Rather than making the individual choices myself, I have combined numerous lists gleaned from the Internet: Ebert's Great Movies, 4-star movies, Ebertfest movies, and yearly top 10 movies, Oscar winners and nominees in the major categories, the AFI lists, the Criterion Collection, box office winners, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, etc.

As of Friday, December 8, 2023, I have now seen all the movies on the list! Well, there are four movies I deem unwatchable: three old silents that have been lost to posterity, plus the one Criterion title that consists of over 600 hours of Olympic coverage over the decades. I have marked those movies with an x in the Seen by Eric column, which means they don't count in the Scoreboard.

The final movies were watched at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which maintains an archive of rare films. I also watched rare movies at the archives of UCLA and the Academy in Los Angeles, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. My project is not complete, however, as the list of unwatched movies swells at the end of each year, with new additions to the dynamically-expanding categories. Thus the Scoreboard will show non-zero totals between the time that movies are added, and the time the movies become available and I chase them down.

I maintain the list as a Google Docs spreadsheet with the names of the 4400+ movies in each row, and the various sublists in each column. You can view the spreadsheet by clicking on "The List" above. You can sort the list by any of the sublists/categories, by hovering your mouse cursor over a column header until you see a little dropdown arrow, and clicking on that.

The Scoreboard

Every time I modify the list, I run a program that regenerates the counts of movies I've seen in each category. Click on the above link to see the latest tally, with a change-log entry for the latest modification to the list (which usually shows the name of the last movie I watched).