Just before Christmas is when the National Film Registry of America’s august Library of Congress announces which films will be saved for posterity having been considered worthy of classic status. This year, the good news arrived for Top Gun, L.A. Confidential, Being There and Ghostbusters, among others.
The list of films is always an eclectic assortment of groundbreaking films and newer titles, with this year’s group including Edison Kinetoscopic Record Of A Sneeze, which ranks as the oldest surviving copyrighted film, and which we want to believe Cahiers du Cinema would have called “enjoyably snotty”.
Others in the new batch? A 1931 Spanish-language version of Dracula, fantasy comedy short Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend and 1915’s silent box office sensation A Fool There Was, which helped launch Theda Bara into movie stardom. As for those which received a slightly more recent release? The Shawshank Redemption, 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds and 1950’s Winchester ’73. This brings the number of films in the registry to 675, and for the full list you can head here.