Mirth of a Nation

76. WHERE'S POPPA? George Segal is a New York lawyer buckling under senile mama Ruth Gordon in this cult comedy. The ''tush'' scene was notorious back then, but it's when Trish van Devere tells Segal about a honeymoon faux pas that the bad-taste envelope gets pushed to uproarious extremes.

77. LIBELED LADY Tabloid editor Spencer Tracy is engaged to brassy Jean Harlow, see, but he marries her off to William Powell so Harlow can play the outraged wife when Powell romances snooty heiress Myrna Loy so Spence can get a scoop, but then...oh, never mind. Just rent it and laugh your butt off.

78. ALL OF ME Sobersided lawyer Steve Martin is invaded by the spirit of the rich, crabby, and deceased Lily Tomlin in a sidesplitting example of metaphysical share-a-ride. Martin's physical comedy revives the glory days of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin, offering a priceless example of having the feeling you want to go but also want to stay.

79. THE BIG PICTURE Spi¨al Tap vet Christopher Guest's film directorial debut offers a snide, if sentimental, insider's look at Hollywood — a town that corrupts talent and murders art in pursuit of the lowest common denominator. Nothing new, but Guest's jabs at overbaked student films and reptilian producers have real sting.

80. THE IN-LAWS Before he directed Honeymoon in Vegas, Andrew Bergman wrote this cult fave. CIA spook Peter Falk spins his usual line of seedy, paranoid B.S. to New York dentist and future in-law Alan Arkin. The gag is that it's all true. A loosey-goosey affair, as rumpled as Falk's face.

81. SMILE Michael Ritchie's satire of beauty pageants manages to be incisive and humane — no wonder it stiffed at the box office. It holds up terrifically, though, with sharp performances by Barbara Feldon as the pageant's mother hen and Annette O'Toole and Melanie Griffith as contestants.

82. BEVERLY HILLS COP Forget about the crummy sequel — this first film of the Eddie Murphy franchise jerks the action comedy into the '80s with superior smart-ass repartee and breathless movement; it even has a good banana gag. At the movie's center: an obvious fish-out-of-water tale. At its edges: the infectious, turbocharged charm of its star.

83. BEDAZZLED The Faust legend through a cheeky British blender. Satan (Peter Cook) sells Dudley Moore seven chances for love — one of which ends up with Moore in an order of trampolining nuns. Freeze-frame alert: Watch for Raquel Welch as ''Lilian Lust, the babe with the bust.''

84. LA CAGE AUX FOLLES A gay couple on the Riviera, one of them a drag queen, try to pass as straight, entering a mine field of mistakes. This breakneck farce-with-a-heart probably did more to change attitudes toward gays than any film before it. Bags of charm.

85. SILVER STREAK Someone had the genius to put Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in a train-station bathroom, with Pryor trying desperately to teach Wilder the gestalt of ''walking black.'' That scene sparks Streak to another level — one that the two actors have sought in vain since.

86. DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN Rosanna Arquette is an amnesiac sprite mistaken for downtown girl Madonna in director Susan Seidelman's funky Manhattan-based farce. A movie that earns many of its laughs from a parade of whacked-out characters — including Mark Blum's uptight suburban hubby and Steven Wright's frizzy dentist — it also offers the Blond One her best movie role to date.

87. SHE DONE HIM WRONG Mae West specialized not in laff-out-loud comedy but in the bawdy, hidden smile of subversive sex. Here she seduces missionary Cary Grant, sings ''I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone,'' and, as in everything she did, ends up on top.

88. THE WAR OF THE ROSES Some nasty notions here: Marriage can turn on a dime into corrosive loathing; the best way to hurt people is to destroy what they own. Director Danny DeVito's playful camera work and stars Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas are all that keep it from being a horror flick.

89. KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE The best of the '70s spate of spoofy anthologies, this delirious omnibus, written by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (and directed by Animal House's John Landis), has as its centerpiece a brilliant send-up of the chopsocky classic Enter the Dragon. Superior sexy and stoopid faux commercials, coming attractions, and courtroom dramas complete this maddening gumbo.

90. MOONSTRUCK A perfect cast meets an enormously entertaining, even profound, script by John Patrick Shanley in this sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a Brooklyn woman who falls for her suitor's younger brother. Star Cher has rarely been sexier, and as the older beau, Danny Aiello gives a performance that's a marvel of sympathetic comic bluster.

91. STRANGER THAN PARADISE Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white road movie, in which two dudheads from New York's East Village (John Lurie and Richard Edson) and a Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint) head for Cleveland and Florida, is so deadpan it seems barely alive in an endearing, kicky kind of way. With its long takes and blackouts between scenes, it's like a movie on drugs.

92. CITY SLICKERS Some people dumped on this dude-ranch lark for its soggy center, in which three buddies nearing middle age finally grow up. But Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, and Daniel Stern have a natural comic chemistry that comes only from real-life friendship. Besides, Kirby gets to tell the screen's funniest VCR joke.

93. TOP SECRET! The ZAZ boys apply their magic touch to the spy flick, positing an ersatz Elvis (Val Kilmer) in Germany, where he gets mixed up with Nazis. In perfectly cast supporting roles, old Britons Peter Cushing and Michael Gough appear to be having a great time sending up their usual character parts.

94. HOME ALONE John Hughes churns this stuff out like Pringles, and even he probably didn't expect it to become the biggest-grossing comedy in history. The plot's in the title, so what's the secret of its success? Simple: a 10-year-old star with a sleepy-duck face, acting like the kid he is.

95. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL The Python crew's second feature takes an irreverent knife to one of the most cherished myths of its native England: King Arthur and his Round Table. Creating a land populated by killer rabbits, shrubbery-seeking warriors, holy hand grenades, and vulgar Frenchmen, Cleese & Co.'s manic reworking of Shakespeare's sceptered isle raises silliness to high art.

96. BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS Critic Roger Ebert (and shameless schlockster Russ Meyer) wrote this three-thumbs-up parody of Jacqueline Susann's pill-popping soap opera about an all-woman rock band, all of the women amazonian and with, as comedian David Steinberg used to say, ''breasts as big as Ethiopia.''

97. ROGER & ME As a documentary, the film, with its juggled chronology, may be a little spurious, but there's no denying that Michael Moore's record of his attempts to talk to General Motors chairman Roger Smith makes for one of the funniest nonfiction movies ever. Peopled with characters too strange to be real — but they are — and imbued with a deep sadness for the plight of Moore's GM-forsaken Flint, Mich., this is social commentary at its most wittily enlightening.

98. ARSENIC AND OLD LACE Suck on these family values: Two sweet spinsters invite lonely men to tea, poison them, and stuff the bodies in the window seat. Their brother thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt and the stairs are San Juan Hill. Their nephew — Cary Grant at his most whinnyingly perplexed — just wants to get married. In Frank Capra's hands, it's as dainty as a barbed-wire doily.

99. PUTNEY SWOPE The parody-commercials created by African-American Putney Swope when he takes over an ad agency don't seem so outrageous after Saturday Night Live — but it's hard not to give some kind of credit to a movie that envisions the President of the United States as a midget pothead.

100. BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS The French classic and its Hollywood remake. In Jean Renoir's anarchic original, a shopkeeper takes home, and gets taken in by, scuzzy bum Michel Simon. Paul Mazursky's update has Nick Nolte, Richard Dreyfuss, and Bette Midler, but it wants to leave you feeling good, where Boudu wants you to feel. It's the difference between a great comedy and a great film.

— Reviews written by Ty Burr, Doug Brod, Nisid Hajari, and Lawrence O'Toole