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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.

#16: Sunset Boulevard

My admiration for Billy Wilder grows every time I watch one of his films. I've already covered Some Like It Hot for the AFInity project, and found it to be a terrific comedy, the kind of thing I could watch again and again. Two of the director's other films, Sabrina and The Apartment, are amongst my favorite movies ever. Sunset Boulevard is distinctly different from any of those three features, but it does contain that distinct quality and cohesiveness I've come to expect from Wilder. It's proof that the man is capable of working within many genres – though you might be surprised by my assertion that he covers at least four in Sunset Boulevard alone.

Indeed, during the one hour and 50 minutes of Sunset Boulevard's runtime, we see black comedy, noir, drama and even horror. Normally, movies that dabble in so many different themes and moods are scattershot and aimless, but Wilder deftly steers the story from one scene to the next, leading us to a climax and conclusion that we already know will happen, because we're made aware of the protagonist's eventual murder in the very first shot of the film.

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