I’m a member of Netflix and they have a nice feature where you can not only rate movies to get decent suggestions, but go back and review your ratings down the road. With that in mind, and given that I’m quite a film fan, here’s a list of some of my favorites:

Five star: Bowfinger, A Passage to India, Dr. Zhivago, X-Men, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove, Stargate, Gone with the Wind, Fail-Safe, The Manchurian Candidate, Thirteen Days, D.O.A. (original release), The Andromeda Strain, The Hunt for Red October, Rear Window, Enigma, Apollo 13, The Thomas Crown Affair, Blade Runner, Monsoon Wedding, Lawrence of Arabia, The Maltese Falcon, White Christmas, Rififi and Singin’ in the Rain. All wonderful cinema.

I have more favorite films, but this is a good list to start with, I think!

On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a dozen or so films that I thought were just miserable and not worth the time to watch, let alone the millions they spent on production: Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Pulp Fiction, What Lies Beneath, Stigmata, Sexy Beast, A Knight’s Tale, The Devil’s Advocate, Fight Club, American Beauty and Wild Wild West. Close runner up in the miserable trash category are Miss Congeniality, Bicentennial Man, Cats and Dogs, Mission to Mars, The Cell and Forrest Gump.

I’ve also recently watched Men In Black II (two stars, maybe. Cute, but missing the wonderment and astonishment factor of the first film) and XXX (four stars. Quite entertaining!), and have The Sum of All Fears and Windtalkers on the way…