My Top 100 Movies -- 50-46

50. Finding Nemo. One of several Pixar films in my top 100, this movie is a perfect cocktail of honest and affecting emotion, plenty of great humor, vivid characters brought to life through great voice acting and talented animation, and eye-popping underwater vistas that really stretched the boundaries of what computer animation could accomplish at the time.

49. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In my mind, this might just about be the last great "how did they do that?" movie. The rise of computer effects has now made it so easy to create seemingly impossible visuals that your eye and mind now just assume that "they did it in a computer somehow." But this movie had a never-ending array of on-set devices used to create the interactivity of animated characters with live actors, and a talented group of animators to then seal the deal. The movie is funny, adventurous, and even scary at times. The performances are great, from Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd on camera to Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner behind a microphone. Anyone who ever loved a classic Warner Brothers cartoon would love this movie. (And it's one of the few -- only? -- times that Disney and Warner characters appeared on screen together.)

48. Life as a House. I wrote about this film when I first saw it a few years ago. It's admittedly one of those movies that some people find overly and falsely sentimental, but that others (like me) find right on the mark. Kevin Kline and Mary Steenburgen are especially good in a strong cast. It's one of those movies that's uplifting even though it will wring you out at times.

47. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The work of the great Stephen Sondheim has rarely been translated to the screen, but it's done spectacularly here by director Tim Burton. The atmosphere is perfectly drab and macabre. The music and lyrics are both impossibly clever. Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman give fantastic performances. You can read me praise it more in my original review.

46. The Thing. John Carpenter's 1982 horror movie is loaded with practical, on-set effects that on the one hand don't hold up wonderfully today, but on the other hand still manage to convince you that's how more movies today should still be made. The fear and suspense in this movie are palpable. Kurt Russell manages to be both an heroic ass-kicker and wonderfully vulnerable -- sometimes in the same scene. This movie is so great that The X-Files basically ripped it off entirely for an early first season episode ("Ice"), and yet that was still one of the best of the season, and arguably a top 20 for the series. And that moody, pulsing theme from composer Ennio Morricone? The perfect accent to the proceedings.