I watch movies primarily for escapism, and fully agree with Sturgeon’s Revelation (“90% of everything is crud”) but after 5½ years and 501 reviews, it’s a little unnerving that I can’t even name 20 films which really moved the needle for me in a significant way. (And some of these picks are so recent or uneven that “significant” is a stretch.)

Looking at the results, I think I need to be a little more adventurous: I usually don’t watch films I think I might not like, but avoiding possible negative experiences doesn’t seem to be doing very much to enable positive ones.