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We're a list society. From Casey Kasem and the American Top 40 to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die to BOP's very own Best Horror Films (one of our most popular features ever), people love to talk about lists. They love to debate the merits of the "winners" and bemoan the exclusions, and start the whole process again when a new list captures pop culture fancy.

Perhaps one of the best-known, most widely discussed lists is the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies. A non-profit organization known for its efforts at film restoration and screen education, the AFI list of the 100 best American movies was chosen by 1,500 leaders in the movie industry and announced in its first version in 1998. Since then, the 100 Years... 100 Movies list has proven to be so popular that the AFI came forth with a 10th anniversary edition in 2007, along with other series such as 100 Heroes and Villains, 100 Musicals, 100 Laughs and 100 Thrills.

In addition to talking about which films are deserving of being on the list and bitterly shaking our fists because a beloved film was left out, we also love to brag about the number of movies we've seen. As I was looking over the 100 Years... 100 Movies list recently, I realized that I've seen 47 - less than half. As a lover of film and writer/editor for a movie site, this seemed like a wrong that needed to remedied. And so an idea was born. I would watch all 100 movies on the 2007 10th Anniversary list - some of them for the first time in as much as 20 or more years - and ponder their relevance, worthiness and influence on today's film industry. With luck, I'll even discover a few new favorites along the way.

#17: The Graduate

Last week in this space, I wrote about Chinatown and its director Roman Polanski, a man whose notoriety for a long ago crime consistently overshadows the fact that he is a survivor of World War II Poland, where his mother perished in a concentration camp. The director of this week's subject, The Graduate, also fled from the Nazis, though it's unlikely he experienced the same horrors as Polanski as his family came to the United States earlier in Hitler's reign of terror. Even so, it's a bit of a fascinating study to see the disparate paths that Polanski and Mike Nichols took in their careers. While Polanski wrapped himself in the serious and weighty side of human frailty, Nichols has had a more genre-spanning filmography, from drama to black comedy, horror to a semi-musical.

I've only recently become aware of Nichols' directorial style, though I saw his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, many, many years ago, and Carnal Knowledge not long after that. No, it was the director's 2004 release, Closer, that made me sit up and take notice of the man's work. Initially, I watched the first half hour of the film and turned it off, thinking it wasn't my kind of thing. But then I couldn't stop thinking about it, and watched the entire movie. I'd count it as one of the finest films of the decade. And Nichols' follow-up, Charlie Wilson's War, is an outstanding piece of cinema in its own right.

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