Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100

I wanted to celebrate the American semiquincentennial in some way, but it was too hot to go out for fireworks, so I watched all twenty of my still-unseen movies on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1998 list of American movies, from his “List-o-Mania” response to the AFI 100 list. Rosenbaum’s lists and writings have been as important to my movie hobby as Cinema Scope has. Discovering this article online in 2000 or 2001 was especially eye-opening, realizing that you could just put Dead Man on a list of greatest films instead of Star Wars. Of course my reaction was to watch everything Rosenbaum says is good, and I’ve slowly chipped away at his top-1000 from the Essential Cinema book while also chipping away at a hundred lists from other sources, and catching up with films from favorite directors and stars and companies, trying to keep up with new releases and reissues, and so on. One of these days I’ll run out of good movies, but for now here’s my vaguely-tier-ranked roundup of Rosenbaum’s Alternate…