The Academy of the Overrated

Recently the editors at Premiere magazine made up a list of what they consider to be the 20 Most Overrated Films of All Time. Like many if not all such lists it's incredibly flawed, so I thought I would take a minute to point out how overrated this list is.

Here's the Premiere magazine list:

1) American Beauty
2) Chicago
3) Clerks
4) Fantasia
5) Field of Dreams
6) Chariots of Fire
7) Good Will Hunting
8) Forrest Gump
9) Jules and Jim
10) A Beautiful Mind
11) Monster’s Ball
12) Moonstruck
13) Mystic River
14) Nashville
15) The Wizard of Oz
16) An American in Paris
17) Easy Rider
18) The Red Shoes
19) 2001: A Space Odyssey
20) Gone With the Wind

There are two things you notice about this list: 1) It's incredibly bottom-heavy, relying on films made in the last quarter-century or so, and: 2) There is only one foreign film on the list.

Says a lot about the editors at Premiere, doesn't it?

Some of their choices are very apt, and some don't belong on the list at all. And then there are the ones that the editors at Premiere didn't have the cinematic erudition to remember.

These are the films that don't belong on the list:

1) Fantasia
2) Nashville
3) The Wizard of Oz
4) Gone With the Wind

And these are films that probably should be on the list:

1) Lawrence of Arabia
2) Shane
3) High Noon
4) Ben-Hur
5) It Happened One Night
6) Bringing Up Baby
7) A Clockwork Orange
8) Gandhi
9) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
10) Titanic

What are your choices for the most overrated films of all-time?

Tom Moran