On July 13, 2009, Brett McKay published the Art of Manliness 100 must-see movies list on his two-year-old blog, under the long-form title “100 Must-See Movies: The Essential Men’s Movie Library.” Seventeen years to the day, that list still circulates. It now lives in a Letterboxd archive stamped 2014, an IMDb community poll that splits the roster by decade, and the AoM front page each time the site reruns its classic posts.
The piece travels because its curatorial spine was not the obvious one. McKay wrote that he wanted to avoid both “a bro-y list,” where films are picked for sex and violence, and a high-brow roster of art-house titles that no one actually watches. He wanted films that “have something to say about manliness,” drawn from across genres and decades. That refusal is what a reader in 2026 still meets on the page.
Where the List Started
Brett McKay founded The Art of Manliness in 2008, while a second-year law student at the University of Tulsa College of Law. The site began as a hobby project run from his Tulsa apartment. By the time he graduated, AoM had grown into a full-time job, sparing him the bar exam and any chance of practicing law.
The 100-movies essay was published on July 13, 2009 (the URL endpoint /2009/07/13/100-must-see-movies/ carries the date), co-written with a frequent AoM collaborator named Cameron Ming. The piece opens by noting that films rarely earn the cultural weight that books accrue over decades. It then pivots to the argument that movies “have produced archetypes of manliness that many men judge themselves against today.” The list itself, in the original 2009 essay on the list, is framed as a tour of those archetypes, not as a critic’s canon of essentials.
McKay stated his selection criteria up front. He did not want a swaggering action catalog where the films were sorted by body count. He did not want a highbrow roster of festival titles that no one watches at home. He wanted films that “have something to say about manliness.” That simple statement became the spine of the list, and the four buckets he named under it (portraits of what being a man looks like, examples of manliness in action, lessons in how not to be a man, and films that are simply virile entertainment) still organize the hundred titles seventeen years later.
Three Streams the Hundred Films Grouped Into
Read end to end, the hundred films fall into recognisable currents, even though the article itself does not name them. Three streams run longer than the rest: war, western, and character studies. Inside each stream, the same masculinity question gets asked through a different cinematic vocabulary.
The war stream is the longest. The Great Escape runs 172 minutes, which the original piece flags as the source of its pacing test, and it anchors a run that includes Das Boot, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Saving Private Ryan, Zulu, and The Longest Day. Das Boot drops the viewer inside a battered U-boat whose captain holds the crew together case by case. All Quiet on the Western Front uses German conscripts to ask what wars do to the young men doing the dying, while The Bridge on the River Kwai turns the same question inward, with a British officer whose stubborn obedience outlasts his own captivity.
The western and frontier stream is the one that has aged most unevenly, mostly because the genre is now widely read against itself. Shane and True Grit offer the cleanest frontier archetypes, then The Searchers lets John Wayne’s character carry a racism-soaked revenge quest on his shoulders for two hours. Unforgiven functions as the corrective, with Clint Eastwood returning to the saddle to dismantle the myth he helped build, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly closes the genre out as pure play.
The third stream, character studies and sport, is where the list lands closest to its stated aim. To Kill a Mockingbird is on the page as a portrait of a father and a lawyer who absorbs the cost of conscience for his town. Rudy and Hoosiers carry the underdog thread: small men, professional ceilings, teams that let them run past their own self-doubt. Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest map two different refusals to be broken by institutions, one through stubbornness, one through a charged warmth. The outlier in this third stream is A Streetcar Named Desire, where the list uses Stanley Kowalski as an explicit cautionary example of how a man should not treat a woman. A roundup of newer war films that share this curatorial appetite sits in a roundup of war films fans compare to Black Hawk Down.
| Stream | Representative films | What the original piece says about them |
|---|---|---|
| War, POW, and survival | The Great Escape, Das Boot, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Saving Private Ryan, Zulu, The Longest Day | Films that show “true manliness in action” |
| Western and frontier | Shane, The Searchers, Unforgiven, True Grit, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Gangs of New York | Films that work as “lessons in how not to be a man” and “just plain virile” entertainment |
| Character studies and sport | To Kill a Mockingbird, Rudy, Hoosiers, Rocky, Cool Hand Luke, The Shawshank Redemption, A Streetcar Named Desire | Films that “speak poignantly about what it means to be a man” |
Where the List Refused to Be a Bro Catalog
The 2009 piece does not pick films on body count. American Beauty sits on the list anyway, a suburban character study whose everyman protagonist ends up dead on his own dining-room floor. Stanley Kowalski is the cautionary centerpiece of A Streetcar Named Desire, which the piece uses as an example of how a man should not treat a woman. Citizen Kane, framed in the original essay as “a handy primer on how not to be a man,” stands as the heaviest counter-example. Fight Club closes the set, read in the piece not as a fists-and-blood romp but as “a vehicle to explore and critique the sad state of modern American masculinity.” Enough of the hundred carries that thread to argue the list treats moral ambiguity as part of the curriculum, not as a complication to be edited out.
A 2014 hand-archived copy of the list captured the oddity most cleanly. The fan who copied all 100 titles wrote: “Not sure what the criteria is for the list as a few I wouldn’t consider to be ‘manly’ like American Beauty or Streetcar Named Desire. But overall, I’d say it’s a pretty great list.” That ambivalence is the piece of evidence that a bro catalog was not the editorial aim. The full archive lives on, in a 2014 archive of the full hundred, exactly as McKay’s essay framed it.
Replacing American Beauty with Top Gun, or Citizen Kane with Die Hard, would have produced a different kind of list, and several contemporary roundups have tried. Men’s Journal’s “50 Best Guy Movies of All-Time” roundup overlaps heavily with McKay’s hundred but quietly skips several of the rougher entries. The 2009 essay kept them in. Read together, the four buckets are doing a specific job: the portraits normalize the question, the action films dramatize it, the counter-examples teach by inversion, and the virile entertainments keep the whole list watchable. That mix is why an English major and a Saturday-night action fan could each find something to argue about on the same hundred-film roster.
- The published list runs to 100 titles.
- Originally published July 13, 2009, on The Art of Manliness.
- The Great Escape, at 172 minutes, anchors the war stream per the original piece.
- Spartacus (1960) runs 197 minutes.
- Casablanca (1942) runs 102 minutes.
Lines That Outran the Article
Each entry on the original list carries a “Best line:” chosen for the moral weight of the moment, not for the line that survived longest on its own. The 2009 editors are clearly reaching for scenes where a man makes a decision, or refuses to, and quoting the line that captures the turn. Several of those lines are still quoted on posters, in car commercials, and in college-application essays.
The list pulls from across decades with the 2009 editors’ pairings intact. ‘I’m going . . . out,’ The Great Escape tells its audience. Butch Cassidy answers with “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” Dirty Harry turns the question back: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” Field of Dreams, First Blood, and The Shawshank Redemption add “If you build it, he will come,” “They drew first blood, not me,” and “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
- The Great Escape: “I’m going . . . out.”
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”
- Dirty Harry: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
- Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come.”
- First Blood: “They drew first blood, not me.”
- The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
Three lines on the list have become part of the cultural baseline in ways the 2009 editors could not have predicted. Kubrick’s 1960 Kirk Douglas historical Spartacus sits in this group, and the piece singles out “I am Spartacus!” as the best line, a scene where a slave army’s solidarity becomes a line that travels far past the film itself. Bogart’s farewell to Bergman in 1942‘s Casablanca rounds out the romance archetype, with “Here’s looking at you, kid” as the in-film pick and “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” carrying the film out the door. The Karate Kid’s “Wax on, wax off” has outlived the film itself, and a generation of fathers and sons still uses it as practical wisdom.
Not every line on the list has aged as cleanly. A handful of the “best line” pulls are now genre in-jokes rather than life advice, and several are attached to films that contemporary criticism reads very differently than it did in 2009. The sheer density of quotables is part of why the list survived: it doubles as a quotation dictionary as much as a watchlist.
How a 17-Year-Old List Is Still Being Archived
The list is still findable in three different ways. The Art of Manliness URL still serves the 2009 essay, and the site now points newer readers back at it as a periodical classic. Down the same trail is a Letterboxd list dated July 21, 2014 and titled “The Essential Men’s Movie Library from The Art of Manliness,” which copied all 100 titles by hand onto a film-tracking service used by millions of cinephiles. On IMDb, page xG8NFlDtNW8 hosts a community poll that splits the hundred across multiple decades and asks readers to weigh in entry by entry. Walking the archives today, a 2026 reader meets the same film-by-film walkthroughs on both the 2014 Letterboxd archive and AoM’s own page, which is what keeps the hundred in circulation.
AoM grew out of that 2008 hobby into a large men’s interest publication by any standard measure. Per the page that publishes McKay’s biography, AoM is “the largest independent men’s interest magazine on the web,” anchored by articles, a podcast, and on-site programs. McKay started it as a second-year law student at the University of Tulsa, and the work grew fast enough to save him from taking the bar. Older essays stay in the rotation through periodic republishes to newer readers.
Seventeen years on, the AoM front page has never published a v2 of the hundred. Newer essays cover specific subgenres instead, broken out by topic: buddy movies, war films, westerns. The closest contemporary parallel is the Men’s Journal “50 Best Guy Movies of All-Time” list, which overlaps with AoM but skips several of its rougher entries, and that absence of a sequel is part of what keeps v1 in use.
What a 2026 Reader Takes From the Hundred
The list is more useful in 2026 as a masculinity-vocabulary primer than as a watchlist. Seventeen years in, plenty of the films are freely available to stream, but the real handhold is the way the article’s four buckets group the hundred. Read as a primer, it offers a guided tour through a century of how American men have been asked to behave on screen. Read as a watchlist, it is simply too long to clear in one pass.
Some entries have aged into place. Rudy, Hoosiers, and To Kill a Mockingbird are the kind of films a parent or coach can still hand to a teenager without irony. Some entries have aged into complication: The Searchers now requires a reading guide, and Lawrence of Arabia is read very differently in 2026 than it was in 1962. A redraft of the list written today might swap in titles like Top Gun: Maverick or Ford v Ferrari for some of the 2009 originals, but those titles did not yet exist when McKay wrote. The reason the 2009 list still reads as timely is that its bucket logic still holds up better than any of the individual picks. A new list would have to defend the same curatorial line, and that line is the harder part.
The lasting move is the refusal to be a bro catalog. A 2009 reader who showed up wanting a count of how many action set-pieces Harrison Ford had survived got something else entirely: a guided tour of when masculinity is earned, when it is forged, when it is theatrical, and when it is destructive. A 2026 reader inherits that tour for free, the way the Letterboxd hand-archive has preserved it since 2014. The hundred films are not the point; the editorial lens is the point, and that editorial lens is still useful 17 years on.
- To Kill a Mockingbird: a father-model that has only grown in cultural weight.
- Citizen Kane: the canonical American film read against the grain as a how-not-to-be manual.
- Rudy and Hoosiers: the underdog thread that still holds up for teenage readers.
- A Streetcar Named Desire: the outlier, a film the list uses as a cautionary example.
- Spartacus: the long historical epic with a line that survives on television airings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is 100 Must-See Movies: The Essential Men’s Movie Library?
It is a 2009 essay by Brett McKay, founder of The Art of Manliness, that lists 100 films McKay thought a reader interested in cinematic masculinity should see. The article groups the films into portraits of what being a man looks like, examples of manliness in action, lessons in how not to be a man, and films that are simply entertaining and “just plain virile.” Co-written with Cameron Ming, the piece was published on July 13, 2009 and has since been rerun as a periodical classic on the AoM site. The list still circulates through Letterboxd archives, IMDb polls, and direct links from the brand’s current channels.
Who wrote and published the list?
Brett McKay wrote and published the list on The Art of Manliness, the men’s-interest website he founded in 2008 while a second-year law student at the University of Tulsa College of Law. The piece is credited to McKay and Cameron Ming, the latter described in the essay as the author’s “good friend.” Together they produced one of the longest film lists the site has ever published, and the AoM About page now describes McKay as the founder of what it calls the largest independent men’s-interest magazine on the web. The essay itself was published on July 13, 2009 at the URL endpoint /2009/07/13/100-must-see-movies/.
Why does the list keep resurfacing 17 years later?
Three forces keep the list alive: archival preservation, recurring reader demand, and the timelessness of its editorial lens. A Letterboxd archive dated July 21, 2014 copied all 100 titles by hand, and an IMDb community poll has split the hundred across multiple decades and asked readers to vote on which entry wins. AoM continues to rerun the essay on its “classic” rotation for new readers. The list’s refusal to read as a bro catalog is the part of the editorial line that has aged best, since 2009 readers arriving today meet the same question and the same film-by-film resistance to simple answers. Seventeen years on, the lens still works.
Did The Art of Manliness ever update or replace the list?
No published v2 of the hundred exists on AoM. Newer articles cover specific subgenres instead: the best buddy movies, the best war movies, and the best westerns. The 2009 essay remains the canonical entry point.
What makes the list different from a typical best guy movies roundup?
The 2009 piece deliberately resisted the swaggering exploitation list and the high-brow festival list. McKay wrote that he wanted films that “have something to say about manliness,” drawn from across decades and genres, and that meant including morally complicated films like American Beauty, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Citizen Kane. The piece uses Citizen Kane specifically as “a handy primer on how not to be a man,” framing it as a cautionary example. By comparison, the closest contemporary equivalent is Men’s Journal’s “50 Best Guy Movies of All-Time,” which overlaps heavily with AoM but quietly skips several of the rougher entries.
Can the films on the list still be streamed today?
Yes, the great majority remain accessible on streaming services, though availability shifts with the deals each platform negotiates. Major titles like Casablanca, Spartacus, The Great Escape, and The Shawshank Redemption are widely available across major services. Less mainstream picks like The Endless Summer and Hoosiers rotate between platforms and occasionally sit on free ad-supported services such as Tubi. A 2026 reader who works through the full hundred should expect some films to need a rental on a given week, particularly smaller international titles like Mar Adentro and Das Boot. The list is not curated as a streaming-collection exercise; it is curated as a long-form reading list that the reader can chip away at.
