Skip to footer

Film critics pick the 50 best movies of all time

From film critics Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza's new book 'The Greatest Movies Ever,' their picks for the 50 greatest films

49. '2001: A Space Odyssey'

  • By Molly Driscoll

"Kubrick's aim was always high," Kinn and Piazza write of the 1968 film by the director. "But this time he shot his arrow past the stars and into the heavens to explore his ideas about man's place in the universe, extraterrestrial life, and the lives and deaths of intelligence and the imagination."

According to Frederick I. Ordway, the scientific advisor and technical consultant for the movie, director of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight George Mueller called the office complex where Ordway and designer Harry Lange were researching "NASA East" because of the large amount of material on space they had with them.

In an interview with writer Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said of the sometimes ambiguous movie, "In a film like '2001,' where each viewer brings his own emotions and perceptions to bear on the subject matter, a certain degree of ambiguity is valuable, because it allows the audience to "fill in" the visual experience themselves." 

2 of 50
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.