Premiere Magazine compiled a list of the 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time in the July/August 2006 issue - the unranked list in chronological order represented a wide range of some of the best comedies ("the funniest stories ever told on film"), from "the Little Tramp to the Wedding Crashers". Descriptions are from the original source. See also this site's descriptive section on the Comedy Films genre, and illustrated listings of the Funniest Movie Moments and Scenes in the best comedy films in film history.

Comedy Films are "make 'em laugh" films designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are light-hearted dramas, crafted to amuse, entertain, and provoke enjoyment. The comedy genre humorously exaggerates the situation, the language, action, and characters. Comedies observe the deficiencies, foibles, and frustrations of life, providing merriment and a momentary escape from day-to-day life. They usually have happy endings, although the humor may have a serious or pessimistic side.

Funniest Movie Scenes: Although it would be impossible to compile a list of every single funny scene ever screened, this collection moves toward that goal. It should be obvious that a selection of funny movie moments and scenes is entirely subjective and can only scratch the surface.

The action/adventure film first became popular with weekly Saturday serials, running in installments that often had 'cliff-hanging' endings to entice viewers to return for the next show. Heroine Pearl White in the 20-episode The Perils of Pauline (1914) was the first major super-star of the silent serials. Besides Pearl White, there were other queens of the sound serials, including Kay Aldridge (as jungle Queen Nyoka in Nyoka and the Tigermen (1942)) and Linda Stirling (in the 12 part serial Zorro's Black Whip (1944) and as the "Tiger Woman" in another 12-episode serial, Perils of the Darkest Jungle (1944)).

In terms of genre categories, the following films (in chronological order) have consistently ranked high on various lists:

* Battleship Potemkin (1925) - has regularly appeared in the top 10 of every Sight & Sound polling, also voted the greatest film ever by a panel of experts at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair
* All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - Received Best Picture Oscar; Ranked # 54 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies polling in 1998, a list of the 100 greatest English-language movies Ranked # 33 in 2005 in the Channel 4 poll of the "100 Greatest War Films"

Melodrama Films are a sub-type of drama films, characterized by a plot to appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience. Melodrama, a combination of drama and melos (music), literally means "play with music." The themes of dramas, the oldest literary and stage art form, were exaggerated within melodramas, and the liberal use of music often enhanced their emotional plots. Often, film studies criticism used the term 'melodrama' pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine audiences.

There are many names for melodramatic films - 'women's pictures', 'weepies', tearjerkers, soap operas (or soapers), and more recently, 'chick flicks'. O Magazine compiled their 50 Greatest Chick Flicks in their July 2004 issue.). See Filmsite's own Memorable and Great "Chick Flicks." Pure melodramas reached their pinnacle in the films of the 50s by Douglas Sirk. See also this site's extensive, illustrated compilation: Greatest Tearjerker Films, Moments and Scenes. (Entertainment Weekly's November 28, 2003 issue listed their choices for the Top 50 Greatest Tearjerkers: each one "involves a terminally ill loved one, or an impossible love, or a giant robot that dies for our sins.") However, not all melodramas are tearjerkers, but more like heightened dramas.

Serial Films are some of the earliest forms of film during the silent era through to the 1950s, often episodic in form (usually with 12-15 parts) and simplistic in plot, that were shown over a period of weeks or years. The multi-part films consisted of episodes that could be anywhere between fifteen and twenty minutes in length. The segments were presented one chapter at a time in weekly installments over the course of time. Serials were usually included during the shorts projected in a neighborhood movie theatre, offered before the feature film, B-western, or Saturday afternoon 'kiddie' matinee. They were often scheduled along with lots of cartoons, newsreels, other two-reelers, and theatrical trailers/previews.

Thriller and Suspense Films: These are types of films known to promote intense excitement, suspense, a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, anxiety, and nerve-wracking tension. Thriller and suspense films are virtually synonymous and interchangeable categorizations, with similar characteristics and features.

Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Nino Frank in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theatres following the war, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Laura (1944). A wide range of films reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period, and counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs.

# Peter Medak's tense haunted house entry The Changeling (1980), with George C. Scott as a mourning widower who moved into a haunted Seattle historical mansion, which ultimately manifested a murder committed many years earlier in its attic
# Stanley Kubrick's stylish and overlong The Shining (1980), a loose adaptation of Stephen King's novel, with Jack Nicholson as an ex-alcoholic, failed writer who becomes the caretaker of a huge, wintry Colorado resort and turns psychotic toward his family as he resorts to the same behavior as the former caretaker who axe-murdered his family in the past