What’s the best way to learn about movies? By watching movies, of course.  A whole bunch of them.

To that end, I have this particular lovely box set, the Warner Brothers 50 Film Collection, and 50 films is very nearly 52 films, so clearly the best course of action is to watch one movie a week for the next year.  Since the year began on a Wednesday, the weekly schedule for these also starts on Wednesday. That is, the review for Grand Hotel will appear sometime in the week of January 1- January 7, the review for Mutiny on the Bounty will appear somewhere in January 8-January 14, etc.

My goals in this endeavor are two fold: first, I will fill in many very significant holes in my film knowledge (as of this writing, I’ve only seen 14 of the 50 films in the box), and secondly, I’m hoping it will give me a reasonably thorough mini-education on what it means to be Good Cinema. As an aspiring film nerd, I feel like I have  a ton to learn about all parts of movie-making. I suspect that watching 50 movies (and reading about them and why they are significant) that are proclaimed to be Definitely Worth Watching will go a long ways towards that particular aspiration.

Here is the complete list of Films in the Box, for those of you who want to play along at home or just want to know what’s coming in advance:

1. Grand Hotel* (1932)
2. Mutiny on the Bounty* (1935)
3. Wizard of Oz (1939)
4. Gone with The Wind* (1939)
5. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
6. Mrs. Miniver* (1942)
7. Casablanca* (1942)
8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
9. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
10. An American in Paris* (1951)
11. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
12. Gigi (1958)
13. North By Northwest (1959)
14. Ben-Hur* (1959)
15. How the West Was Won (1962)
16. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
17. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
18. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
19. Bullitt (1968)
20. Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)
21. Dirty Harry (1971)
22. A Clockwork Orange (1972)
23. The Exorcist (1973)
24. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest* (1975)
25. Superman, The Movie (1977)
26. The Shining (1980)
27. Chariots of Fire* (1981)
28. Risky Business (1983)
29. Amadeus* (1984)
30. The Color Purple (1985)
31. Lethal Weapon (1987)
32. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
33. Driving Miss Daisy* (1989)
34. Goodfellas (1990)
35. Unforgiven* (1992)
36. The Bodyguard (1992)
37. Natural Born Killers (Director’s Cut) (1994)
38. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
39. The Matrix (1999)
40. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)
41. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
42. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
43. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King* (2003)
44. Million Dollar Baby* (2005)
45. The Departed* (2006)
46. The Dark Knight (2008)
47. The Blind Side (2009)
48. The Hangover (2009)
49. Sherlock Holmes (2009)
50. Inception (2010)

* Indicates Best Picture Winner

Additionally, I have little recaps after every ten movies:

Films 1-10
Films 11-20