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Top 47 of All time

(not a multiple of 5 because
I keep adding & subtracting movies)

1.  Heart and Souls
2.  Forrest Gump
3.  The Shawshank Redemption
4.  Magnolia
5.  Kramer vs. Kramer
6.  Pleasantville
7.  The Truman Show

8.  Good Will Hunting
9.  American Beauty
10.  Shakespeare in Love
11.  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
12.  Adaptation
13.  Synecdoche, New York 
14.  Fargo
15.  The Paper
16.  C'mon C'mon 

17.  Lost in Translation
18.  Children of Men
19.  Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
20.  Donnie Darko
21.  Dark City
22.  Heat
23.  L.A. Confidential
24.  The Usual Suspects
25.  The Thin Red Line
26.  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
27.  Titanic
28.  The Abyss (Special Edition)
29.  Dancer in the Dark
30.  Dogville
31.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
32.  Moonlight
33.  Dunkirk
34.  A Simple Plan
35.  A Time to Kill
36.  Ghost
37.  Dead Poets Society
38.  Her
39.  Promising Young Woman
40.  Triangle of Sadness
41.  Life is Beautiful
42.  Brokeback Mountain
43.  Braveheart
44.  Anomalisa
45.  The Fall
46.  Arrival
47.  Parasite

 

TOP LIST EMERITUS:  The Hours, Big Fish, American Splendor
 

And almost every day, I think about adding a movie like Jerry Maguire, or Stand By Me, or Requiem for a Dream, or Juno, or even Tootsie.  But I don't.  Though Dead Poets Society was a relatively recent addition (even though I've loved it since I was a kid) - so you never know what may happen.

And every so often I take movies off that I find over time haven't stuck with me as much as the rest of these gems have.  Thus: the emeritus list above.

On any given day, the ordering feels like it wants to be something different - so I just don't think about it or look at this list too often, cuz that would just madden me, as it never feels quite right.  Our personal relationships to movies are ever-ebbing-and-flowing things that depend so much on any day's mood, memories, and unpredictable stimuli.  So more think of this as an unordered list of 46 amazing movies that I personally connect with in beautiful ways.  And I hope you do too.

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